Photos by Jeremy Daniel

 

By Ron Cohen

 

“You have so much information, you want to say everything, it’s very hard to stick to the point.” So says Aaron Port, the writer who is both the narrator and central character in Richard Greenberg’s play, The Babylon Line, just as he is about to wrap things up. And the observation pretty much sums up the problem in this new comedy drama by the playwright known for such works as Three Days of Rain, The Assembled Parties and the Tony Award-winning Take Me Out.

 

For most of The Babylon Line, Aaron is a struggling author, commuting in 1967 from Penn Station to Levittown, Long Island, an oft derided symbol of post-World War II middle-class suburban sprawl, to conduct an adult-education class in writing. It’s a very specific time and place, and Greenberg validates them with a lot of references to both the era and the location. However, it’s pretty clear that Greenberg and director Terry Kinney are going to be playing games with both time and reality, when Adam in his opening monologue tells us that he is eighty-six years old. “I look wonderful,” says Aaron, played with amusing and amiable agitation and not a hint of old-age makeup by Josh Radnor, who looks to be in his thirties, maybe early forties. (For those of you who must know, Radnor, who has made a name for himself on the popular television series “How I Met Your Mother,” was born in 1974.)

 

Josh Radnor and Elizabeth Reaser

 

Aaron – stating that “there’s a story I’ve been meaning to tell and I guess, avoiding for a long time” – then takes us back to 1967 and his creative writing class. His six students include three middle-aged Jewish housewives, taking the class because the other sessions they wanted – current affairs and French cooking – were already fully booked. The housewives are the somewhat smug Frieda Cohen (Randy Graff), the joyfully good-natured Midge Braverman (Julie Halston), and the hesitant and pleasant Anna Cantor (Maddie Corman). There are also Jack Hassenpflug (Frank Wood), a gruff World War II veteran, Marc Adams (Michael Oberholtzer), a young man psychologically impaired by drug overdose, and most importantly, in terms of Aaron’s story, Joan Dellamond (Elizabeth Reaser). Dellamond is almost a spectral-like creature, who we learn has not stepped out of her house during the past seven years. , .

 

As the weekly classes progress, the students – or most of them – get around to reading something they have written. The writings are all in the first person, generally a snippet about some incident in the writer’s life, and when other characters speak within them, the characters are portrayed without much ado by the other actors. Kinney’s staging, helped by evocative shifts in David Weiner’s lighting on Richard Hoover’s appropriately institutional -looking set, along with the acting skills of the generally fine cast, keep Greenberg’s multi-layered storytelling fairly clear as to what’s going on. Greenberg and the actors Graff, Halston and Corman are especially to be commended for overcoming the stereotypic shorthand used in creating the three housewives to eventually deliver nicely dimensional individuals.

 

 
Frank Wood and Randy Graff

 

Of all the stories being told by the students, Joan’s are the most compelling and strange, and the woman herself ignites some spark, perhaps libidinous as well as aesthetic, within Aaron. But it’s a spark that never catches fire, and the melancholy loss of the connection – as acted out in the play’s final scene -- seems to be the story Aaron himself want to tells his audience. But its impact is lost in all the snippets of information we’ve been receiving about the other folks in class, both through their writings and their sometimes lively conversations. And toward the play’s finish, Aaron expends a lot of energy detailing what happened to his students after class ended; some of this contradicts what we see. It all adds up, as Aaron himself notes, to a lot of information. Some of it is compelling, some of it genuinely funny or wryly amusing, but some of it also seems extraneous, even muddled.

 

In short, in this play about storytelling it’s hard to discern what story the playwright is trying to tell us.

 

Off-Broadway play

Playing at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater

150 West 65^th Street

lct.org

1 212 239 6200

Playing until January 22