A letdown. I'm baffled that the Huntington would produce this as their first play of the season, and the first play in the tenure of their new artistic director, Peter DuBois. A very long hour and forty minutes of theater!
For a generally (and inexplicably) upbeat view of the play, you can read Louise Kennedy's review in the Boston Globe.
The playwright Richard Nelson starts out with a great premise -- in the 1840s, a likable group of out-of-work New York actors in a tavern get the bug to go west and perform Shakespeare for gold miners. They'll find their own gold and fortunes out there. You can imagine the comic possibilities and are anxious for them to get going. We love Will LeBow, and the whole cast was fine.
What follows for the next hour is a tedious compilation of small barely connected story bits on their journey. The stories are abrupt, and the characters' personalities remain thin, never escaping the caricatures we meet in the beginning of the play. I kept thinking that the playwright was taking us somewhere and this was all going to take off any minute now...maybe he was, but I never saw it, despite the actors finally staggering into San Francisco. I could feel the writer struggling to mechanically fill out the scenes.
The last ten minutes -- in which the troupe puts on a hilarious production of Hamlet -- was where the play should have continued early on.
Should the Huntington put on a play that takes up less emotional space than an early episode of Bonanza?
What was the Huntington thinking?
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