On the Aisle: Addled lives

That’s more or less what’s happened to “Hurlyburly,” David Rabe’s insightful, bitter comedy which opened off-Broadway in 1984 with a star-studded cast and then moved to Broadway where it ran for a year, gathering, among other tributes, four Tony Award nominations.
The fine new production, which opened on 42nd Street’s Theatre Row in late January, has recently moved to the dazzling new performing complex named 37 Arts, at 450 West 37th St., where it will run through July 2, with an extension possible.
The roles played two decades ago by William Hurt, Christopher Walken, Harvey Keitel, Sigourney Weaver and Judith Ivey are now being filled, spectacularly, by Ethan Hawke, Josh Hamilton, Bobby Cannavale, Parker Posey and Catherine Kellner, with Hamilton, one of the best and most versatile members of the current crop of younger Irish-American actors, doing particularly strong, inventive work, as Mickey, the smarter, slicker member of the pair of low-level Hollywood casting directors in whose messy bungalow Rabe’s corrosive play is set.
Hamilton’s role originally belonged to Walken, and, good as that gifted, bizarre, slightly creepy actor was, his successor is better by miles.
The disorderly, druggy Eddie, Mickey’s housemate, was initially played by a vaguely miscast Hurt, and is now being done to a fare-thee-well by the astonishing Hawke, who, onstage for nearly all of the play’s playing time of slightly over three hours, is giving what is, quite simply stated, one of the finest, most galvanic performances seen on any New York sage in recent seasons.
But Hamilton’s Mickey, a role that might be compared to the truth-telling raisonneur found in classic French theater in works by Moliere and others is a character who, at least in his own mind, stands a little apart and a little above much of the action swirling around him.
As a play, “Hurlyburly” has always had the ability to alienate a considerable portion of its audience, individuals who find the lifestyle of Rabe’s characters repellent, with the startling volume of their intake of alcohol and drugs, not to mention the casual nature of their attitude toward sex, and, since the play is populated mainly by men, their dismissive, contemptuous view of women in general.
“Hurlyburly,” a term Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary defines as “uproar” or “tumult,” hasn’t much in the way of conventional plotting, nor has playwright Rabe supplied his seven characters with surnames or much in the way of backgrounding in what the trade tends to call “backstory.”
The play is nearly 100 percent behavior, but it’s enough to bind present-day audiences, particularly liberally-oriented, compassionate ones, to its goings on, despite its great length. The play’s odd power seems to have intensified over the years, and has certainly been developed to its fullest form by the New Group’s imposing production, so strikingly directed by Scott Elliott and brilliantly realized by his nearly flawless cast.
The “profession” in which both Eddie and Mickey are engaged doesn’t seem to be treating either of them very kindly. We meet only one of their clients, a hot-blooded loose cannon of an actor named Phil, a part initiated by Keitel and played here by the powerful Bobby Cannavale, who appears at times to be on the edge of vaporizing completely before the eyes of the audience and of his fellow cast members.
Once or twice in the long but swiftly-paced progress of “Hurlyburly,” either Mickey or Eddie takes a desultory glance of two at the actors’ photos and resumes stacked in their kitchen. That’s all we’re given of the “work” they do which keeps them supplied with drugs, alcohol and, when they’re up to it, sex.
As Darlene, who moves rather casually between the householding pair, Parker Posey seems giddier and slightly more mindless than Weaver, who originated the role. More or less the same thing could be said of Catherine Kellner, who’s now the show’s Bonnie, a part Ivey played earlier on, an unfortunate individual who suffers a particularly harsh awakening during the course of the action.
The two remaining roles in “Hurlyburly” are Artie, an aging and luckless would-be screenwriter, and Donna, an underage stray he finds in a hotel elevator and delivers to the boys as a kind of human housegift.
This time Artie, is a ludicrous hairpiece, is done by Wallace Shawn, who seems unable to come anywhere near what Jerry Stiller did with the character two decades ago.
Donna, in the original staging, marked one of Cynthia Nixon’s first stage appearances. Now the role belongs to Halley Wegryn Gross, who scores, but perhaps lacks the artificial jadedness which covered Nixon’s inherent innocence.
The production’s programme states that “a year passes between Act I and Act II,” and since there’s not much difference between the actions depicted in the first half and those contained by the second portion, Rabe’s point is probably that the life in that particular Los Angeles domicile is more or less unchanging in its own slatternly way. Eddie, Mickey and their associates will very probably still be drifting aimlessly and self-destructively should we check them out a year or two from now.
It’s tempting to think that of Rabe’s seven characters, only the sly and silken Mickey, played by the remarkable Hamilton as a sort of prince of perversion, might possibly get his act together and move on in the direction of a more productive life.
A canny and supremely intelligent actor, Hamilton brings an illuminating irony to his role, a quality which didn’t really seem to be there, at least not nearly as luminously, when Walken played the part.
Much of “Hurlyburly” belongs to Eddie, a part in which Hawke is glowingly, selflessly brilliant. Both his work and Hamilton’s are enriched by the fact that the two actors have often worked together in the past, most conspicuously when they were both founding members of the admirable but sadly short-lived company they called Malaparte.
Rabe’s play comes across now with slightly more wit and even compassion than was the case when it was originally produced. If the work’s characters seem slightly younger now, it may serve to make them seem less cynical, less lost, less doomed.
The “new” “Hurlyburly” is stronger, more surprising and more satisfying than the original was. It’s a striking success.