In The (Main)e Play by Chad Beckim, the most interesting characters, seven year-old Jay and his grandmother, are never seen, only referred to. That’s a shame, because as described, they would have breathed life into an otherwise lackluster play.
Shane (Alexander Alioto), an actor who has achieved some success in pop videos and commercials while living in New York City, has come home to Maine for Thanksgiving. His mother’s house now belongs to his brother Roy (Michael Gladis, of “Mad Men” fame), a working-class single father, and his (unseen) difficult son, Jay. Shane, upon arrival, finds the locks have been changed, so he calls his ex-girlfriend Jess (Susan Dahl) to help him. She breaks a window for him to get in, thus setting up Shane as an ineffectual man who can’t seem to get anything in his life right: not his relationship with his envious brother, not with his disgruntled ex, who is dating a loose cannon of a man named Rooster (Curran O’Connor), and not with his unsatisfying career.
With all this conflict to hand, one would hope for a riveting play. But Beckim insists on having his actors describe not only the most interesting characters offstage, but also most of the action. The scene in a restaurant where Rooster pulls out a chair because he suspects (rightly) that Shane and Jess have seen each other is told, not shown. Later on, a fight between Shane and Rooster happens offstage. And the prime place for great drama, the Thanksgiving Day dinner, where Shane behaves like a jackass, is described, not shown. This leaves the mostly excellent actors with lots of exposition, yet, not a lot to do. There is no central through-line of conflict: the characters are forced to settle old arguments and dredge up the past over and over in bits, fought out in a series of short spats.
Michael Gladis’s Roy, a big, blustery man, constantly holding a beer or a soda bottle, does what he can with a largely thankless role. Roy has no direct part in the conflicts; he can only comment on them and move on. His monologue about his relationship with his troubled son was very fine, and moving. Gladis comes across as an actor who could take a part and run with it, but he didn’t get a chance in this play. Alexander Alioto’s Shane convinced as a somewhat shallow and conflicted actor, but again, he described much of his actions to events that happened offstage and after the fact, and so was also hamstrung by the script. Susan Dahl’s Jess (sporting a broad accent that no New Englander would recognize) conveyed a recklessness that was refreshing, but her story is a little unbelievable: in no parallel universe would this strong-willed, ballsy woman ever wind up with the unstable Rooster, not even to get back at Shane (Roy would have been a more plausible choice.) If they had had at least one scene together to establish a relationship, that would have gone some way to explain the attraction. All we get is Rooster telling Shane that they are together. A few scenes later, Jess shows up at 3AM to see Shane, and they go to bed together, which left me wondering why Rooster was in the play at all. His part was so minimal (and Curran Connor ably stamped unpredictability all over the part) that Rooster is merely a foil for the other characters, with no story of his own. Allyson Morgan’s Girl Scout was a hilarious cameo, and I wished she had been onstage longer, at least to bring some levity to the proceedings. Most plays, no matter the set up, succeed or fail depending on the relationships of the characters to one another. The (Main)e Play just doesn’t allow those relationships to fester naturally, relying too much on offstage drama, with not enough on.
