Theater Online - New York Theater Reviews

Brooke Berman’s “A Perfect Couple,” directed by Maria Mileaf and now playing at the DR2 theatre, is a slight, bittersweet bonbon of a play. Amy (Dana Eskelson) and her partner Isaac (James Waterston) entertain their longtime friend Emma (Annie McNamara) for a weekend of wedding planning at his inherited country home. Amy, a type-A personality, is the driver of her relationship: she is 40, has been with Isaac for 15 years, and wants to get married and have a child. When Emma questions this decision with the observation, “But you can’t stand each other,” Isaac, laid back and malleable, says, “We’re 40. It’s time.”

Emma, the “artistic” one of the three (she takes photographs of weddings for a living and garbage for herself) has no “real” man in her life: at 39, she hasn’t been in a relationship for ten years. She has much younger men for trysts, and unavailable men who will not “receive her.” For the first hour of the play, she is alternately chided and berated for not being in a relationship, by both Amy and Isaac. Why“ Could it be she is waiting for…Isaac? Thrown into the mix is a cute twenty-something neighbor Josh (Elan Moss-Bachrach) as the youthful representation of what the other three characters no longer have; namely, a whole life of possibilities ahead of him.

On the whole, the play seems more cinematic than theatrical: there are subtitles between each scene, some of which are quite short, and would jar without the subtitled segue. It is intimate and the DR2 is a perfect fit (the ingenious chocolate box of a set is by Neil Patel). The cast is estimable; not a week link among the four. But while Berman has a great ear for dialogue, she seems only to skim the surface, rather than plumb the depths of friendship and relationships. Amy is driven to marry because she is 40, and has pushed Isaac every step of the way towards what she wants: why? Why him and not someone more suitable? She has also given up her job, something she takes obvious pride in (“I always had a real job. I always did.”), with no explanation. And for Isaac, why Amy for fifteen years? She must be good for him somehow, and yet all he can say to young Josh, is “Don’t get married.” This is unfortunate, because both characters have such possibilities. Amy does go through a dramatic change, but by the time she gets there, the audience doesn’t feel for her, because she has been reduced to a nagging, pushy, deluded shrew. The adorable Josh comes across as the most clear-headed of the lot, with his ruminations on commitment: “I mean, if you get on a bus and like, you think it’s headed for New York City but then you realize the bus is actually going upstate to like, Albany, you know, you wouldn’t stay on the bus. You’d get off the bus and try to get on the one going to where you’re going. Right? So, I think it should be like that. You commit and Man, you try, you know, you stay faithful to it and all – but if it starts going to Albany -- you can’t go to Albany, it’s fucking awful there.” Emma is the least clearly drawn character, and what we know of her centers mainly on her relationships with men. Her friendship with Amy is hard to fathom: Amy comes close to bulldozing denigration, so when Emma asks, at the end of the play, “Will we still be friends?” really, the one who should be asking that question is Amy. A lot of the landscape here feels familiar, and this ground has been trod many times before: marriage, the biological clock, having or not having children, settling for less, or not settling at all. But the real crisis comes an hour into the play, which seems a long time to wait for what really is a surface gloss over topics that beg for deeper examination.