{"id":3713,"date":"2014-10-18T07:10:51","date_gmt":"2014-10-18T11:10:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=3713"},"modified":"2015-01-03T07:12:02","modified_gmt":"2015-01-03T12:12:02","slug":"the-understudy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=3713","title":{"rendered":"The Understudy"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"JD<\/a>

JD Taylor & Adam Green in The Understudy (photo: McCarter Theatre)<\/p><\/div>\n

An exciting opening night at McCarter Theatre on Friday, with the audience anticipating Theresa Rebeck\u2019s knowing backstage comedy, The Understudy<\/em><\/a>, and area fans awaiting the directorial debut of up-and-coming Adam Immerwahr, McCarter\u2019s Associate Artistic Director. Adam\u2019s fine work has been on stage at Trenton’s Passage Theatre, but this was the Big Time, on the big McCarter main stage. He pulled it off beautifully, in a production whose complexity, pre-show gossip said, required three tech rehearsals.<\/p>\n

The conceit of the play is that a new Franz Kafka play has been discovered and is being produced on Broadway with two Hollywood action stars in lead roles (shades of the first season of Slings and Arrows<\/em>, the hilarious Canadian series). The play opens with a literal bang, when unemployed but high-minded actor Harry (Adam Green) rushes on stage for a rehearsal, as he\u2019s been cast as the understudy to the lesser of the Hollywood lights. Harry\u2019s opening monologue\u2014interspersed with bits from the Kafka play\u2014shows all his disdain (\u201cOK, I\u2019m bitter\u201d) for the star, his acting ability, and the film vehicle he just appeared in, for which he was paid more than $2 million. Harry fixates on this impossibly large sum with a shimmering mix of envy and pop-culture loathing.<\/p>\n

The stage manager Roxanne (Danielle Skraastad) is a woman Harry was once engaged to but ran out on two weeks before the wedding\u2014the wedding dress \u201cstill hangs in my closet. Like a wound.\u201d The third character, the pretty-boy and somewhat dim star, Jake (JD Taylor), valiantly tries to explain Kafka and the deep significance of this new play. The cast is strong, with Green (who played Figaro last year) having a genius comic touch. The humor in Skraastad\u2019s lines is limited to sarcasm, which she wields expertly. Taylor, too, plays his deceptively complex role so that the audience goes from laughing at his selfies and sense of entitlement to appreciating his vulnerabilities. We never see the stoner manning the light, sound, and set cues, who gets every one of them wrong, creating constant onstage turmoil (and requiring those three rehearsals).<\/p>\n

The name of the fake Kafka is \u201cThe Man Who Disappeared.\u201d It applies to both of the male characters, and is the one fact about Harry that is never out of Roxanne\u2019s main line of sight. Harry describes a casting call experience where an assistant tells him, \u201cNo one will see you, you don\u2019t exist.\u201d Very Kafka, and very apt for all of them at one point or another. What the play shows is how they can exist for each other, at least for a few moments. Rebeck\u2019s intimate knowledge of the theatre and its dilemmas is absolutely convincing, but the problem of \u201cbeing seen\u201d and heard applies to creative artists in general, to people in general, to all of us who\u2019ve had the dream of going to an important meeting and . . . you . . . just . . . can\u2019t . . . get . . . there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An exciting opening night at McCarter Theatre on Friday, with the audience anticipating Theresa Rebeck\u2019s knowing backstage comedy, The Understudy, and area fans awaiting the directorial debut of up-and-coming Adam Immerwahr, McCarter\u2019s Associate Artistic Director. Adam\u2019s fine work has been … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"The Understudy","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[269,272,104,147],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3713","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-actor","category-comedy","category-the-morgue","category-theater"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-XT","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3713","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3713"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3713\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3715,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3713\/revisions\/3715"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}