Monday, January 21, 2008

"Third" at the Huntington -- when characters are too nice

I keep expecting to dislike Wendy Wasserstein's plays: the characters are always appropriate and stereotypical emblems of their types -- the brassy domineering mother with a heart of gold, the self-assured publishing academic who still has an air of dittziness about her, the successful lawyer who knows all the lawyer jokes and tells them before anybody else can. Yet, I always enjoy her plays always laugh my way through them. They don't disappoint.

I enjoyed this play. Wonderful performances. Funny lines. Lovable characters...in fact, that's the hole in the play for me. Laurie Jameson, the professor, is such a likable woman, so composed and self-assured, so articulate, so dynamic, and full of warmth (she obviously loves her ailing friend, and puts up with her aging, difficult father) that when she accuses the supposedly right-wing student, Woodie, of plagiarism, and then doesn't relent -- what can we think other than that the playwright has not finished working on this play? We don't see the hot resentment in her that would make her do such a thing.

And Woodie. He is supposed to be a firebrand politically conservative right winger, a kind of lonely outcast in this rural liberal arts college in New Hampshire (or maybe it's Vermont). He is no such thing. He's nice. He is the boy next door. He practically idolizes professor Jameson and would gladly have an affair with her. And she likewise.

It doesn't make sense.