Joshua Harmon is the master of the rant. He earned that accolade with his last play, \u201cAdmissions,\u201d in which a white prep-school student delivers a lengthy screed on the injustice of his being rejected by Yale after his less worthy biracial friend has been accepted at the Ivy League school.<\/p>\n
Harmon is a master of the rant for two reasons: The student\u2019s very length speech in \u201cAdmissions\u201d is alternately funny, absurd, logical, glib and intensely heart-felt. The other reason is that Harmon repeats that success not once but several times in his new play, \u201cSkintight,\u201d which opened Thursday at Roundabout\u2019s Off Broadway Laura Pels Theatre.<\/p>\n
The unfairness he documents this time has nothing to do with race and everything to do with age. Young people are attractive (well, some of them are) and old people are not. As described by two of Harmon\u2019s characters, even the middle-aged have lost their sex appeal and grow hair in weird places.<\/p>\n
Since Jodi (Idina Menzel) is a fortysomething woman, she hasn\u2019t yet sprouted hair on her knuckles or in her ears. But her fiftysomething ex-husband has, and so it\u2019s humiliating that she\u2019s the one being dumped for a younger woman, a 24-year-old spinning instructor with breast implants.<\/p>\n
We learn all about this split and her ex\u2019s encroaching second wedding in the opening scene of \u201cSkintight.\u201d Jodi just flew across the country, she\u2019s tired and cranky and she made the trip more to escape her ex in Los Angeles than to see her very successful fashion-designer father, Elliot (Jack Wetherall), who would rather not have his daughter there to help celebrate his 70th birthday.<\/p>\n
The most tantalizing aspect of Harmon\u2019s new play \u2014 besides the fact that it\u2019s very funny and poignant and well-crafted \u2014 is that the playwright explores the unfairness of Jodi\u2019s predicament not by dramatizing her failed heterosexual relationship; instead, he lets us mull over the supposedly successful same-sex affair that Elliot is having with a 20-year-old man named Trey (Will Brittain), who is very buff and in one scene walks around in a jock strap \u2014 to the dismay of Jodi and the rapt attention of her own out 20-year-old son, Benjamin (the wonderfully nebbish Eli Gelb).<\/p>\n
And there\u2019s something else that Harmon stresses without ever having any of his characters talk, discuss or rant about it: Ageism is very much a guy thing, particularly an affluent guy thing, whether the perpetrators are gay or straight. Women are on the receiving end \u2014 and sometimes men are too: just ask Elliot\u2019s ex-lover turned manservant, Jeff (Stephen Carrasco), who doesn\u2019t get many lines but is expert at impersonating a slow-walking phantom to Wetherall\u2019s vampire of a man.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a scene at night where Elliot, standing on the upstairs railing of Lauren Helpern\u2019s well-appointed and extremely sterile living room set, calls to his \u201cpartner\u201d downstairs in order to get him back into bed and, more important, prevent a midnight tryst in front of the flickering TV set between the two 20-year-olds. Elliot\u2019s pointed request is as creepy as it is smart. Pat Collins\u2019 lighting sets the tone perfectly.<\/p>\n
The beauty of Daniel Aukin\u2019s direction is that he keeps us guessing about each and every character\u2019s real motives until the end, and even after the curtain has dropped.<\/p>\n
\u201cSkintight\u201d might be the first great post-gay gay play. Most of the characters are homosexual, and not just incidentally so. But here\u2019s the \u201cpost\u201d part: Not one of them sees himself as a victim, unless by victim you mean that they\u2019re trapped by a toxic brew of hormones and testosterone that force them to value beauty over substance, lust over love.<\/p>\n
Jodi definitely claims victim status, but she is far from guilt-free, at least not as portrayed by Menzel. It\u2019s weird to call hers a breakthrough performance when this actress already has a Tony Award to her credit, but the nuanced comic timing she brings to her distressed character is masterful. Menzel also softens Jodi\u2019s victimhood by making her pampered to the extreme. Just check out her total lack of respect for Trey, who gives twinks a good name \u2014 at least as portrayed by the talented Brittain.<\/p>\n
The word \u201cpampered\u201d is mentioned only once in \u201cAdmissions,\u201d yet it\u2019s that other sin at the heart of Harmon\u2019s plays. His characters don\u2019t have truly pressing problems. They\u2019re not hungry, homeless or about to be deported. What they do have is the luxury of thinking that tomorrow\u2019s Botox treatment will bring them happiness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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