Pictured L to R: Matthew DeCapua, Lou Liberatore, Stephen Bradbury, Nick Plakias, Jenny Strassburg, David Marantz.  Photo credit: Carol Rosegg.

 

 

A Class Act

 

                                         R. Pikser

 

A Class Act shows the behind the scenes struggles within and between two groups of lawyers, one group in the employ of a chemical company, the other group intending to bring suit for a class, or legally defined group of people, harmed by the toxins the company has released into a community’s water supply. 

 

The play, which takes place mainly in New York lawyers’ offices between 2014 and 2015, brings Flint Michigan to mind and resonates over 40 years back to Love Canal , and 20 years back to Rochester , New York , and to a plethora of similar cases in the past and the present.  The underlying question is:  Who will win – those trying to defend the public good, or those who represent greed? 

 

A Class Act shows some of the back room strategizing, shenanigans, interpersonal conflicts, and even dirty tricks to which the lawyers are willing to stoop in order to win.  Part of the fun is the suspense as to how those lawye0rs subjected to what is essentially blackmail will deal with it.  Will they sell out?  Will they sacrifice themselves?  What is less clear is personal motivations driving their decisions.

 

Matthew DeCapua & Jenny Strassburg

 

Director Christopher Scott has staged the play simply, relying on a simple set and his actors to bring us back to the story-telling roots of theater.  Unaccountably, though, he often directed his actors to face upstage, so that, even in the small theater space, they periodically became unintelligible, which was not helpful when we were trying to follow legal talk and tactics.  Thankfully, though, we were not subjected to miking, always distracting, especially in an intimate space.

 

Because the play is about tactics, it tends to get a bit confusing, though author Norman Shabel makes generally successful efforts to restate the technical arguments in more comprehensible terms.  By the same token, since A Class Act is very much about words, it could do with a few more soliloquys so that the characters could broaden their motivations and deepen their characters for the audience and for themselves.  The good guys could have done with some warts written in, rather than left to plot twists, and the supposedly honorable lawyer working for the chemical company cried out for some explication.  Mr. Shabel has started in this direction.  Jenny Strassburg, the one woman in the cast, playing the hard-bitten ruthless bitch, has an emotional soliloquy at the end of the play. The speech would be even more moving if she were not directed to lapse into sorrow bur rather to find a more exalted emotion.  The successful use of the soliloquy is shown in the highpoint of the evening, the speech by the vice-president of the chemical company, played generally irascibly by David Marantz.  Suddenly, rather than defending his position, he offers a paean to the benefits of capitalism and progress, waxing so fervent that we can glimpse what might motivate someone like this man, repellant as he is.

 

 Overall, A Class Act provides an enjoyable and thought-provoking evening.

 

July 30^th, 2016

New World Stages

340 West 50^th Street

New York , NY

Tickets $45-$65