Scene Partners Off-Broadway Reviews

There are certain actors worth catching in any project they take on, even if, to borrow a now quite dated cliché, it’s reading the phone book. Then there are times when such actors find roles that fit like perfectly tailored suits, and it’s nothing short of cause for celebration. Well, break out the champagne and the party favors, because a new match has been made in heaven, between a two-time Oscar-winning stage and screen veteran, Dianne Wiest, and a rising playwright, John J. Caswell, Jr.

This playwright is big on concept. Earlier this year, John J. Caswell Jr. gave us a play, “Wet Brain,” that took us inside the fevered mind of an alcoholic. In his new play, “Scene Partners,” a 75-year-old widow from the Midwest takes off for Hollywood to become a movie star even before her dead (and very hateful) husband has been buried. The big concept is her name, Meryl Kowalski.

If you tried to adapt an M. C. Escher painting for the stage, you might end up with something like John J. Caswell Jr.’s Scene Partners. Its reality is fragmented, tessellated, constantly re-creating itself — it’s a house of interlocking, perspective-defying staircases, a dream hallway where it’s impossible to tell which way is up. If you happen to be someone who takes notes during plays for a living, you might find yourself writing down helpful observations such as: Okay so none of it’s real. Then, ten minutes later: JK it IS all real. Five minutes after that: … wait is it? (Like I said: helpful.)

“Scene Partners,” which opened on Wednesday at the Vineyard Theater in a top-drawer production directed by Rachel Chavkin, is part of a genre you might call the absurd picaresque. Meryl is a hardheaded Candide, a sharp-eyed Don Quixote. When we meet her just after the long longed-for death of her abusive husband, she is leaving Wisconsin for California so fast she doesn’t bother burying him. “Within the year I will rise to fame and fortune as an international film star,” she says in farewell to her drug addict daughter. Sure enough, she soon acquires not just her agent and acting coach, but also a contract to write the movie of her life.

Caswell and all involved parties have created work of which they should be proud; it’s not often an audience is held in such puzzlement without resulting in exhaustion, animosity or, worse, derision. Scene Partners is far from perfect—if judged totally by its many aims, perhaps a failure—but creates in us what its title promises: a messy, vibrant thing against which we can toss back our own idiosyncrasies.

The stagecraft features the work of video producer Anne Troup and projection designer David Bengali dominating more scenes than is usual for a show in a relatively small Off-Broadway house. But the solid production can’t completely compensate for the elusiveness of the script. The playwright of “Scene Partners” is withholding, making his scene partners – which is to say, the actors and the audience — do too much of the work.

But the usually wonderful director Rachel Chavkin (“Hadestown”) hasn’t totally found her way into this material, robbing the show of some of its humor -- and injecting TV screens a la Ivo Van Hove isn’t really the answer. (The video and projection design by David Bengali isn’t to blame and set designer Riccardo Hernandez does what he can with a play that is inherently cinematic.)

Perhaps making sense of it all would be easier if the lead’s performance felt more grounded. Wiest is a legend, and there are glimmers of what makes her such, moments where the desperation to find a stable self amid the chaos feels real. But too often, she exhibits no strong persona for Scene Partners to destabilize. Tony Award-winning director Rachel Chavkin similarly cannot find an aesthetic throughline for the show, even with an overly generous helping of David Bengali’s projections.