Gideon Banner, left, and Michael Esper play friends who are struggling writers in Itamar Moses' 'The Four of Us,' directed by Pam MacKinnon.
A Manhattan Theater Club presentation of a play in one act by Itamar Moses. Directed by Pam MacKinnon.
Benjamin - Gideon Banner David - Michael Esper
Structural acrobat Itamar Moses, who never met a metanarrative he didn't like, has turned his gifts for wordplay and textual looping in on themselves and come up with "The Four of Us," a remarkably unirritating play about writing plays about playwriting. Moses is on well-trod ground: Writers from Chekhov to Charlie Kaufman have tried similar experiments, but with few notable successes. Even with its lapses into self-involvement, Moses' redeemingly silly play works because his formal gadgetry is secretly entertaining us about friendship and its surprising proximity to jealousy and loneliness.
Moses had his first New York production in 2005 with "Bach at Leipzig," an ambitious farce about competing organists, structured like one of its eponymous composer's fugues. With "The Four of Us," Moses exhibits the same mania for creative organization, right down to the title: There are only two actors in the play; there are also two people that the play seems to be about, who may also be a second set of characters played by the actors, but maybe not. Yes, it's a little confusing.
Friends for 10 years, both guys are struggling writers. Insecure, needy David (Michael Esper) writes plays; his more stoic buddy Ben (Gideon Banner), literary fiction. When we first meet them, they're at lunch in a nice Indian restaurant. Ben reluctantly reveals that his agent has gotten him, um, $2 million for his novel.
The spit-take that follows reminds us we're in good hands with Moses. Though "The Four of Us" is constantly in danger of vanishing up its own ars dramatica, its writer knows the value of a good gag. He has enough faith in his work to let the air out of it once in a while, notably with the extended molestation of a carnival-sized teddy bear.
He's also aided in getting his points across by David Zinn, who has dressed both the set and the accomplished actors perfectly: The play happens on a very blue stage with four doors on the back wall, only two of which are open at any given time. Both men usually wear two layers -- Ben's outer layer is always open; David's is always at least half-zipped or buttoned.
Pam MacKinnon directs David's and Ben's inverse career trajectories with an intense focus on the script's inherent theatricality (as she did with "Bach at Leipzig"), creating stage pictures that never for a moment look forced.
This clarity does the play a world of good, also allowing the subtler jokes to register. In an autobiographical play, Moses demonstrates the trouble with being smart enough to understand that you're not the smartest, and he does it with an impressive degree of humility.
That humility does take occasional vacations in "The Four of Us," particularly during David's spectacular implosion in which he blames everyone but himself for the failure of his unloved play. Formally, the scene fits perfectly: It parallels Ben's public reading, seen earlier, during which he answers a series of variations on the question "How did you get so awesome?" But David's corresponding Q&A feels like nonfiction, like Moses scolding us for not understanding him.
Interestingly, David's anger is also directed at Ben, whose novel has gone on to succeed in direct proportion to David's failure. (It's a barely kept secret that Moses was inspired by his friendship with "Everything Is Illuminated" author Jonathan Safran Foer.)
When Ben eventually faces down his friend over the jealousy that has festered during the time the two friends have spent apart, he does so outside of the play itself, giving David (or Moses, or whoever) a chance to hear the objections that some of the play's excesses have raised. More importantly, though, he also reconciles with his friend.
Whether or not David and the playwright are the same person, David's relationship with his buddy is flawed in ways that are deeply familiar, and made more so by the fact that the play is in structural 3-D. Moses is writing about being an immature writer with a remarkable depth of insight -- insight that, perversely, results in a sincere and mature depiction of a friendship that both suffers from and depends on the very same admiration that will rot into envy.
Ben murmurs that the final scene is "sort of contrived," as the two guys, back at age 17, perform the little play's sentimental coda in the woods at camp. Sure, it's contrived. But as Moses has pointed out so adroitly, contrivance can be part of the fun.
Set and costumes, David Zinn; lighting, Russell H. Champa; sound, Daniel Baker; production stage manager, Robyn Henry. Opened March 25, 2008. Reviewed March 23. Running time: 1 HOUR, 40 MIN.
Contact Sam Thielman at
sam.thielman@variety.com
Date in print: Mon., Mar. 31, 2008