Is Everybody Happy?
May08, theater May 18th, 2008
By Shamrock McShane, May 2008
McShane reviews local play The Pursuit of Happiness, which is playing at the Hippodrome State Theatre.
As Goethe said, “Nothing is harder to bear than a succession of fair days.”
Yet Spinoza considered, “The more joy you have, the more nearly perfect you are.”
Here’s the premise, as the hype would have it: “The Pursuit of Happiness, a twisted new comedy, is a very funny dissection of a family whose pursuit of happiness is radically counter-productive. The daughter, a bright high school senior, angrily rejects the idea of college in her college application essay. This throws her mother into a stop-at-nothing tizzy, which eventually unhinges the girl’s stoic wage-slave father as well.”
The story of a petulant teenager who rejects college, with the precious notion that knowledge and wisdom probably aren’t all they’re cracked up to be – it’s a comedy, get it!
The Pursuit of Happiness, now playing at the Hippodrome, is a sitcom that has come untwisted from the TV.
There’s a lot of talk about happiness, but you don’t actually see anyone happy. Sex is implied, but there is none of the usual T&A cuteness, no skin perk to accompany the libations you are encouraged to imbibe. Always a dubious proposition: If I’m going to have a few drinks, what do I need a play for?
In our Orwellian world of doublespeak, where No Child Left Behind means No One Can Read Ahead, and a War on Terror turns defense into conquest, I suppose The Pursuit of Happiness is “Hysterical!” and “Triumphant!” as our good friends at KBAQ Radio would have it.
To ourselves, of course, we don’t seem hysterical, not to mention triumphant. Yet this is our world. Make no mistake, The Pursuit of Happiness is the latest “Laughfest…100 percent entertaining, 5 stars out of 5” theatrical commodity plucked from the New Release shelf.
As a collective dream, the play is, in Freudian terms, revealing. Here’s the psychical problem with the pursuit of happiness.
“Happiness,” Freud surmised, “is the subsequent fulfillment of a prehistoric wish. That is why wealth brings so little: money was not a wish in childhood. Unhappiness is much less difficult to experience. We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution, and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations to other men.”
And these are all things you can think about, which are marginally connected to the play.
The Pursuit of Happiness is noteworthy for its performances, if not its script by Richard Dresser, which has more than whiff of Flavor of the Month about it.
Watch the skillful teamwork of Nell Page and Kevin Rainsberger, who is back from his decades-long Adventures with Indiana Jones at Universal Studio in Orlando. Listen to their dialogues as if they were duets, noting the rhythm in their readings and phrasings and how they top each other. Rainsberger literally has not missed a beat in the time he’s been gone.
In a comedy by Moliere, say, it keeps getting better the more you think about it. In a situation comedy, it usually gets worse.
Sitcom characters obviate the process that Stanislavsky called Creating a Role, because it is the situation that carries the comedy and it won’t accommodate the weight of human beings, who would load the plane down with the empathy they engender. That’s why, say, an episode of The Family Guy is funnier than a play like this – because those are cartoon characters, light as a feather.
How this cipher labeled “the rebellious teenager” ever came up with a cogent theory of the pursuit of happiness is anybody’s guess. The set contains a scattering of books on a shelf really meant to display a baby-boomer indicating lava lamp, but nothing like a library. So what led to an independent discovery of ideas that might emerge from a reading Marx and Proust can only be labeled fortuitous, which you may recognize from your own college career as code for bullshit.
Libby Arnold does her best to infuse the rebellious youth with a manic energy, if not a mania for truth and justice. But you can’t squeeze blood out of a turnip.
What the hell happened to dad is a good question. He flashes his Woodstock credentials early on, and keeps a garden in good hippie fashion, but then he mysteriously warps into a storm trooper. The best David Sitler can do to portray the inexplicable is mug. Too bad, because his performance begins so well, when he is given the chance to play a human being.
The only truly funny performance of the evening is turned in by Cameron Francis, who uses the monkey wrench of physical comedy to jimmy this widget of a play into place momentarily and it whirrs, and then goes fffft.
Mary Hausch’s direction spirits the action around the Hipp’s thrust stage with admirable alacrity.
The Pursuit of Happiness runs at the Hippodrome State Theatre through May 11.
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Is Everybody Happy?
May08, theater May 18th, 2008
By Shamrock McShane, May 2008
McShane reviews local play The Pursuit of Happiness, which is playing at the Hippodrome State Theatre.
As Goethe said, “Nothing is harder to bear than a succession of fair days.”
Yet Spinoza considered, “The more joy you have, the more nearly perfect you are.”
Here’s the premise, as the hype would have it: “The Pursuit of Happiness, a twisted new comedy, is a very funny dissection of a family whose pursuit of happiness is radically counter-productive. The daughter, a bright high school senior, angrily rejects the idea of college in her college application essay. This throws her mother into a stop-at-nothing tizzy, which eventually unhinges the girl’s stoic wage-slave father as well.”
The story of a petulant teenager who rejects college, with the precious notion that knowledge and wisdom probably aren’t all they’re cracked up to be – it’s a comedy, get it!
The Pursuit of Happiness, now playing at the Hippodrome, is a sitcom that has come untwisted from the TV.
There’s a lot of talk about happiness, but you don’t actually see anyone happy. Sex is implied, but there is none of the usual T&A cuteness, no skin perk to accompany the libations you are encouraged to imbibe. Always a dubious proposition: If I’m going to have a few drinks, what do I need a play for?
In our Orwellian world of doublespeak, where No Child Left Behind means No One Can Read Ahead, and a War on Terror turns defense into conquest, I suppose The Pursuit of Happiness is “Hysterical!” and “Triumphant!” as our good friends at KBAQ Radio would have it.
To ourselves, of course, we don’t seem hysterical, not to mention triumphant. Yet this is our world. Make no mistake, The Pursuit of Happiness is the latest “Laughfest…100 percent entertaining, 5 stars out of 5” theatrical commodity plucked from the New Release shelf.
As a collective dream, the play is, in Freudian terms, revealing. Here’s the psychical problem with the pursuit of happiness.
“Happiness,” Freud surmised, “is the subsequent fulfillment of a prehistoric wish. That is why wealth brings so little: money was not a wish in childhood. Unhappiness is much less difficult to experience. We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution, and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations to other men.”
And these are all things you can think about, which are marginally connected to the play.
The Pursuit of Happiness is noteworthy for its performances, if not its script by Richard Dresser, which has more than whiff of Flavor of the Month about it.
Watch the skillful teamwork of Nell Page and Kevin Rainsberger, who is back from his decades-long Adventures with Indiana Jones at Universal Studio in Orlando. Listen to their dialogues as if they were duets, noting the rhythm in their readings and phrasings and how they top each other. Rainsberger literally has not missed a beat in the time he’s been gone.
In a comedy by Moliere, say, it keeps getting better the more you think about it. In a situation comedy, it usually gets worse.
Sitcom characters obviate the process that Stanislavsky called Creating a Role, because it is the situation that carries the comedy and it won’t accommodate the weight of human beings, who would load the plane down with the empathy they engender. That’s why, say, an episode of The Family Guy is funnier than a play like this – because those are cartoon characters, light as a feather.
How this cipher labeled “the rebellious teenager” ever came up with a cogent theory of the pursuit of happiness is anybody’s guess. The set contains a scattering of books on a shelf really meant to display a baby-boomer indicating lava lamp, but nothing like a library. So what led to an independent discovery of ideas that might emerge from a reading Marx and Proust can only be labeled fortuitous, which you may recognize from your own college career as code for bullshit.
Libby Arnold does her best to infuse the rebellious youth with a manic energy, if not a mania for truth and justice. But you can’t squeeze blood out of a turnip.
What the hell happened to dad is a good question. He flashes his Woodstock credentials early on, and keeps a garden in good hippie fashion, but then he mysteriously warps into a storm trooper. The best David Sitler can do to portray the inexplicable is mug. Too bad, because his performance begins so well, when he is given the chance to play a human being.
The only truly funny performance of the evening is turned in by Cameron Francis, who uses the monkey wrench of physical comedy to jimmy this widget of a play into place momentarily and it whirrs, and then goes fffft.
Mary Hausch’s direction spirits the action around the Hipp’s thrust stage with admirable alacrity.
The Pursuit of Happiness runs at the Hippodrome State Theatre through May 11.
