Third: The Serpent's Tooth is Sharper

Shakespeare's King Lear hovers omnipresent over Wendy Wasserstein's Third, sometimes a shadow or a faint echo,  sometimes an anvil. The generation gap and hubris that propel that classic drama infuse the Pulitzer winner's latest comic-drama with plenty of conflict, but little urgency.

In a Small Unnamed New England College, a professor is forced to reassess her life and her life's work when a student turns in a paper that she believes he could not have written. As a passionate liberal with roots planted firmly in the '60's, Laurie Jameson (please note the similarity in the names Laurie and Lear, in case you missed it) is a champion of everything counter-culture, and cannot accept that someone so utterly average and mainstream as Woodson Bull III (called Third for short) could write an exceptional paper disputing her theories on King Lear. Third snubs Laurie's idealism and revisionist literary beliefs, and worse, has strong evidence to support his own ideas. Determined to justify her leftist leanings, Laurie accuses Third of plagiarizing his essay, setting in motion an emotional spiral of intellectual and political one-upmanship.

The main conflict of the story is not the plagiarism itself but everything it represents. Set just before the invasion of Iraq, Laurie is rapidly realizing that her youthful dream of a peaceful, accepting, and integrated world will never come to pass. Peace and love have given way to paranoia and war, and Generation X dismisses the Flower Generation accomplishments as a pipe dream. Just as frustrating, Laurie's home life is changing, too: her father is suffering from dementia, and depends on her like a mother, while her college-age daughter has become too independent to want her help or advice. In a violently changing and unsteady world, not unlike a storm on a heath, Laurie must reevaluate her place and position, and either bend in the wind– or break.

It certainly sounds dramatic and thought-provoking, and should be. Sadly, Wasserstein misses the mark in too many ways for the play to be truly effective. She seems determined to make this potentially bitter pill easier to swallow, and gives up far too many intense opportunities in exchange for an easy laugh. Laurie's hot flashes become a frequent joke that don't merely relieve the tension (like a well-timed quip from Lear's Fool might), but trivialize it. Even more frustrating is the underlying tone of apology that runs throughout the play. While Laurie criticizes the current socio-political problems with all the self-righteous anger of an old-school Democrat, she is as prejudiced against conservatives as conservatives are against liberals. "See," the play seems to say, "liberals can be just as bigoted as conservatives are! We're all guilty!" While this may be true, it feels dramatically weak and unnecessary. Conservatives have already launched enough darts at liberals; a strong drama would have liberals refuting the many accusations lodged against them, not adding to the list. Were a conservative playwright to so condemn liberals, the accused would be up in arms. When the creator of Uncommon Women and Others makes the same accusations, however, they are dismissed with chuckles.

Dianne Wiest makes Laurie as pitiable and sympathetic as Lear on the heath, but plays the role so uncertainly that her statements of determination ring somewhat false. Had she started Laurie out stronger and let her doubts emerge gradually, Wiest's transformation would be much more dramatic. Charles Durning is heartbreaking as the increasingly confused and tragic father, turning in a performance so layered and nuanced that one could easily wish for Wasserstein to write a second play just about his character. His two scenes are lamentably insufficient for such an impressive actor in such a meaty role. Amy Aquino is quietly intense as Laurie's best friend, a fellow English professor struggling with cancer. Jason Ritter is appropriately enigmatic as the titular youth who embodies everything a throwback to the '60's would despise, and Gaby Hoffman doesn't do an awful lot as Laurie's intellectual/quasi-slacker daughter, but makes the most of her underwritten role. Thomas Lynch's set is excellent, flowing effortlessly between many locations with a minimum of actual scenery. Daniel Sullivan's direction is largely effective, especially in the quieter moments between Mr. Durning and Ms. Wiest. Those scenes, easily the strongest in the play, focus not on the conflicts that force generations apart, but on the love and sympathy that can bring them together.