My Variety Review: Off-Broadway's 'The Perplexed'
There’s a lot of tsuris in Richard Greenberg’s witty and quite wonderful “The Perplexed,” — at least for the older generation of characters on this 10-actor cast. In this new play now making its bow at Manhattan Theatre Club, they’re struggling madly with changing times they can’t fathom, family wounds that won’t heal and a posh wedding that no one particularly wants — except perhaps for the off-stage, wicked, ancient billionaire whose palatial home is the setting for the event.
That’s why so many of this extended family and their friends are retreating to the many cozy alcoves of the mansion’s “adequately tasteful” library (nicely realized by Santo Loquasto). Here they hide, they strategize, they confront, but most of all they ponder the lives they have led — and the time they still have left. Of course, they all have a way with words — a Greenberg (“Take Me Out,” “The Assembled Parties”) specialty that’s on dazzling display here, sometimes beguiling in its effortless wordplay, sometimes cutting, both unintentionally and not, like little daggers.
But don’t be fooled that you’ve entered a typical drawing room comedy, or even one of A.R. Gurney’s exploration of class (though there’s that, too). Here Greenberg is using the comedy set-up of impending nuptials to reveal something closer to contemporary existential angst — at least as demonstrated by the seeming adults in the room.
Leading the fraught celebration is Joseph (Frank Wood, expertly balancing heartbreak and humor), the billionaire’s disinherited son, a beaten man who is in a state of permanent anguish as a result of the bullying man he can barely call father.
Trying to hold her husband, her family and the evening together with professional aplomb is his wife Evy (Margaret Colin, charming and unruffled, even as the troubled waters rise). As a woman who has found a sliver of control in her life as a councilwomen, she is a whiz at managing, fixing and dealing until she realizes that there are things — in her family and well beyond — that are out of her control.