Review - Secrets of The Trade: Mama, A Rainbow

I was forty-five years old when a theatre professional I greatly admired first took me out to lunch to discuss his lifetime of experience and my fledgling career as a critic. If my mother were alive to see it, I'm sure she would find nothing creepy about the scene. But in his frequently clever coming-of-age-in-the-theatre story, Secrets of The Trade, playwright Jonathan Tolins teases the audience with moments of potential creepiness in drawing out the relationship between an 18-year-old aspiring Broadway Baby and the decades-older Tony-collecting writer/director he idolizes.

Tops among the charms of Primary Stages' thoroughly engaging production, helmed by Matt Shakman, is the knockout performance of Noah Robbins, whose precociously self-effacing Woody Allen-ish delivery was put to fine use last season in the pitifully short-lived Broadway revival of Brighton Beach Memoirs. Robbins begins the play as 16-year-old Andy Lipman, obsessed with theatre (more to the point; artistically middle-brow, commercial Broadway musicals) since taken to see the latest hit by Martin Kerner (John Glover) at the age of seven. With the encouragement of his eagerly supportive dad (Mark Nelson), the kid from Long Island writes a letter to his hero (in a very funny, effusive monologue that will soon be grabbed by adolescent auditioners everywhere); serving up globs of praise before asking for any menial summer job he may have available.

That was 1980 and it isn't until two years later (when the boy turns legal, eventually notes his suspicious mother, Joanne) that the letter is answered and he is invited to lunch at the kind of theatre hang-out where diners are anxious to find out who the young lad is that's sitting with one of the most powerful men on Broadway. Though the relationship that develops between the pair is not the warmest - with the ambitious Andy continually bugging Martin for quick opportunities to climb up the ladder and the attention-hungry Martin given to fits of anger and cruel criticism - it's enough to stir up mixed emotions in Joanne (an outstanding Amy Aquino), an ex-dancer who left the business to become a teacher, who is both proud of her son's accomplishments and jealous of the opportunity he has that she never received. She has no objection when Andy comes to realize that he's gay, but with Martin being the same, she sees her place in his artistic growth being replaced by what she imagines as an exclusive society of homosexual men who pass on the secrets of success in the theatre from one generation to another.

Giving some degree of credence to Joanne's suspicions is that Glover is able to give Martin a very natural aura of sensuality, which, either accurately or not, can be interpreted as predatory toward the young hero-worshiper who, at 18, is still innocent enough to see him as a real-life Willie Wonka. The vulnerability he eventually reveals to his protégé, as well the genuine affection he offers is touchingly played, though Tolins finds ways to make these tender moments teeter between sweet and inappropriate. Andy may grow from a Harvard student to a 26-year-old entertainment professional by the play's end (and Robbins does a terrific job of making that growth believable) but the playwright manages to keep us seeing him as sheltered, privileged youth.

The evening does have a few stumbling points, particularly a peek at Andy's experimental student drama played out as a tired spoof of I-hate-my-parents theatre. In fact, though Andy may be the most fully-realized character in the piece, we never get a real sense of him as an artist, leaving the audience to wonder what talent his mentor saw that was worth developing. (And please, can we have a moratorium on jokes about knowing a kid would grow up to be gay because he loved musicals?) Bill Brochtrup does a fine job in the small role of Martin's smarmy assistant, but the late-hour revelation about his character is predictable from the start.

Still, Tolins' pithy dialogue and clever stagecraft keeps the evening entertaining as his plot intrigues.

Photos by James Leynse: Top: Noah Robbins and John Glover; Bottom: Noah Robbins (L), Mark Nelson and Amy Aquino.

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