Skyscraper
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David Auburn’s Skyscraper revolves around half a dozen people affected by the approaching demolition of a landmark building. Though Auburn’s math-inflected play Proof won a Pulitzer in 2001, the seams show in this 1997 work: it comes off as more schematic–even formulaic–than genuine, and as something of a filmic wannabe. For one thing Auburn inserts neat little meditations on randomness. By chance, a romantic bond forms between opponents in litigation over the building’s demolition, Jessica and Ray, while a second couple consists of Jessica’s best friend and Ray’s brother. There’s also a truckload of overdetermined opposites. Jessica, a photographer obsessed with documenting old buildings, has “no interest in the future,” and Louis, a 110-year-old man, has no memory of the past. He can’t remember; she can’t forget. Jessica is a sort of secular nun while her best friend, Jane, sleeps with 19 men between January and March. Ray is on top of the world, figuratively and almost literally when he stands on the roof of the building he plans to destroy, whereas his brother, Joseph, has just surfaced from the bottom of the sea after his tour of duty as a navy submariner. All five contemporary characters are struggling with how to live while a sixth–Vivian, a mysterious figure in Victorian dress–occupies herself with how to die.
Auburn’s apparent fascination with the movies extends beyond the structure of his play to a number of direct homages (or thefts): the couple’s lamp-lit discovery of a beautiful ruined room (The English Patient), the unpreventable female suicide that haunts the man forever (Vertigo), the sex-obsessed best friend picking up a sailor (On the Town). The preservationist saving the coldhearted developer actually predates its nearest film equivalent: the Sandra Bullock-Hugh Grant vehicle Two Weeks Notice, made in 2002. There’s also an unfortunate soliloquy about crashing a plane into the Empire State Building, which must have seemed a lot funnier before September 11.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Mark Wielding.
