The year 1992 is mentioned in Teresa Rebeck’s What We’re Up Against, now at the Women’s Project Theater. If you didn’t know the playwright wrote the staunchly feminist drama then, you would probably guess as much.
That it’s so heavy handed, starting with the aggressive title, is the giveaway. Surely, were she putting it together today, she’d attempt to be the least bit subtler. On the other hand, given Rebeck’s attitude towards her many often-overrated plays (not to mention her clunky Smash television series), maybe she hasn’t opted for the subtle route. She apparently has done some rewriting for this return. Then again, taking into account the abuse of women issues raised in the Harvey Weinstein case and now madly proliferating, perhaps blunt literary instruments are still called for.
The problem with her play is that the argument she wants to put forward is so clumsily and obviously handled that viewers who would be inclined to agree with her by the time she arrives at her closing line will have long since been put off. And what sentient woman or man wouldn’t want to be steadfastly on her side?
Anyway, here’s how What We’re Up Against (and what the audience is up against) goes: Young architect Eliza (Krysta Rodriguez) has been with her architectural firm for some months—at least one month longer than Weber (Skylar Astin). But he’s the one added to the mall designing team while she stews in her broom-closet-sized office with no assignments.
Why? You guessed it. She’s a woman, and though hired by (unseen) office boss David, she’s resented by Stu (Damien Young), the scotch imbibing David underling. He’d rather that toe-the-line Janice (Marg Helgenberger) plays on that team, along with Ben (Jim Parrack), who’s not only competent but also fair-minded.
Oh, by the way, Eliza is assumed to be sleeping with David, a fact never completely established. Whether she is or not isn’t her motive here. She’ motivated to cause the biggest stink she can because she knows she’s got the brains that others—i. e., Stu and Weber—don’t.
We all know this, because she has solved a duct puzzle that’s been holding up the mall work, but Stu—too constantly soused to recall what her ideas are—refuses to accept her solution. He prefers to keep Ben, Janice and Weber stressing over it, even though they’re getting nowhere.
Yes, Ben remains a fellow with his feet on the ground and head screwed on right, but Stu and Weber are so outrageously against women in the workplace that they’re too laughable to be more than one-dimensional—a drawback for sure in a profession that makes a big deal of three dimensions.
When Eliza blows off steam—her first word is an obscenity—the action is far more understandable. She’s got the brains and is only non-stop complaining practically out of frustration. She does go too far when she attacks Janice, leading to the latter’s asking the sad question, “Why is it still like this?”
With that remark, Rebeck does recognize what is so often true of oppressed populations: They resort to destroying, or almost destroying, each other. (See August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom for only one example of that regularly invoked axiom.)
All the volatile infighting takes place on Narelle Sissons’s clever two-level set, which, incidentally, contains no ducts. And their ensemble volatility is in no way modulated by director Adrienne Campbell-Holt, who for one thing might have toned Young down. What a hyperkinetic drunk he is. The others—including Helgenberger, back on stage in these parts after a long hiatus—do Rebeck proud.
There’s no question that Rebeck is using the architect’s office setting as a metaphor for what women are up against everywhere. (Was Sissons tempted to put a glass ceiling on her set? Stu’s desk is glass-topped. So maybe that’s her compromise.) Angry she should be, but there’s a way to temper it and thereby register her anger even more effectively.
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Normally—if anything normal can be applied here—Deadheads (as Grateful Dead fans are known, of course) just follow their fave raves to every venue for every concert and can identify each separate performance when hearing it played back.
Everyone associated with Red Roses Green Gold has taken a different approach. Bookwriter Michael Norman Mann and director-choreographer Rachel Klein have concocted a musical with songs by Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter and additional material by Phil Lesh, Mickey Hart, Bob Weir and Bill Kreutzmann. It’s about a family from a few decades before the rock advent) that plays Grateful Dead classics and thereby stays together. For the most part.
(Jeff Chimenti took care of the arrangements of “Truckin’,” et cetera—all much shorter than the typical Grateful Dead versions. Robert Andrew Kovach designed the barroom set, Asta Bennie Hostetter the costumes, Jamie Roderick the lights, Kim Carbone and Ben Scheff and the sound and Brad Petersen the projections.)
Those participating in the activity and definitely playing their own instruments on the the Minetta Lane stage include Michael McCoy Reilly, Brian Russell Carey, Maggie Hollenbeck, David Park, Natalie Storrs, Debbie Christine Tjong, Michael Viruet and Scott Wakefield.
There’s a passel of hootin’ and hollerin’ as the McElroy clan members fight internecine battles and outside interference—and eventually mourn the death of their patriarch. They impart a good deal of fun for the Deadheads in the audience, of course, but others not so caught up in the country-rock band’s mighty thrall will also be entertained.
Since the venerated originals don’t do much these many years on, here’s a more than acceptable fun substitute.