As Bees in Honey Drown
Grassroots Theatre Company
And now the Graces have conspired to bring us two plays by New York’s newest flash in the pan, Douglas Carter Beane, whose work displays the kind of shimmering fake seriousness that keeps so much contemporary playwriting on the brink of irrelevance. Best known for his screenplay To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar, Beane knows how to generate a buzz. Several years back he formed a New York theater troupe called the Drama Dept., stocking it with famous people like Sarah Jessica Parker, Peter Gallagher, Billy Crudup, and, yes, Nicky Silver. Before they’d produced a single play they were featured in New York and Vanity Fair, and their early staged readings were humble affairs with special guests like Liza Minnelli.
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Without a credible dramatic predicament to propel the action, Beane’s characters have to spend more and more time explaining anything and everything–essentially they have nothing else to do. In fact, once Alexa is revealed to be a con artist at the end of the first act, the second act is made up of one long explanation after another–of things we already know. First a movie producer once swindled by Alexa explains her tactics to Evan, all of which we’ve already seen. Still, to illustrate the producer’s argument, Alexa reappears and runs through highlights from the first act just in case our memory doesn’t exceed 45 minutes. Then Michael–Alexa’s first victim ever–explains through a long flashback how an eager nobody from Nowhere, Pennsylvania, transformed herself into the monstrous Alexa Vere de Vere. By the time Beane’s completed this dissertation on conning, he’s got about ten minutes to bring the play to a hasty conclusion, a conclusion peppered with many of the same flashbacks we’ve already seen. It’s as though Beane believed his audience to be as stupid as his protagonist.
While most of us emerge from the senior prom with some inkling of what love means–and an interest in learning more–Beane gives us a quartet of featureless adults who flee from the slightest romantic attachment like 11-year-olds running from a game of spin the bottle. And apparently he thinks this adolescent emotional disengagement is so compelling that he can dispense with pesky details like scenic structure, plot devices, and character development.
