There’s a certain kind of numbness that sets in when you’re stuck in a theater and you realize that the characters up onstage are going to keep playing the same scene, over and over again, for the rest of the evening. The dialogue changes; the lights go down and come up; it’s morning, now it’s afternoon, now it’s the next day — but the scene hasn’t changed. Whatever was being argued over before is still being argued over. Character A wants this and Character B wants that (or, better still, just doesn’t want this), and the playwright has released them into an arena of simplistic, repetitive conflict as if they’re a pair of action figures, “fighting†because two kids are bashing them into each other. Eventually, someone decides, “Okay, it’s time to be done now,†and without ever having compellingly evolved, the conflict will clear itself up, and everyone can go eat.
In Theresa Rebeck’s I Need That — which makes its 100-minute run time feel as stretched out as the waistband of an old pair of sweatpants — Danny DeVito is Character B, or Sam. His daughter, Lucy DeVito, is also his daughter onstage, a.k.a. Character A, or Amelia. Sam, a big fan of old sweatpants, isn’t quite a hoarder, but he’s close. He doesn’t go outside, his house is bursting with heaps and heaps of “junk†(according to Amelia) or “treasure†(according to him), and it’s bad enough that the neighbors have called the authorities. “The fire department is coming,†says Amelia anxiously, as she says everything, “and they’re going to condemn the place and tell the health department to throw you out if you don’t do something.†A says, “Clean up!†B says, “No!†In the words of Mortal Kombat: “Fight.â€
And that — with the addition of a Character C, a kindly neighbor named Mr. Foster (Ray Anthony Thomas) — is about it. Foster exists to ease our sympathy back and forth between Sam and Amelia as she tries to persuade him to Marie Kondo his home — oh, and to help the play shoehorn in some half-baked race indignation. Sam has a story for every board game and bottle cap (a reason why He Needs That), and at one point he tells Amelia and Foster about an old guitar he inherited from a janitor he knew while working as a “glorified file clerk†at Fort Bragg. The janitor — “Seward Remington, Black guy,†says Sam — had won medals for heroism in Vietnam, but suffered from PTSD and, abandoned by the system, ended up committing suicide. It’s already a pretty heavy-handed story, but then poor Thomas has to launch into a teary tirade: “A white boy with medals would have been allowed to go home to his mama,†he storms at Sam. “You could have done more for that boy.â€
This blatant use of another Black man, Foster, to stuff a little relevant righteousness into the show — on a subject it has nothing to do with and nothing meaningful to say about — would verge on insulting, if it weren’t for the fact that all three of I Need That’s characters exist in, at most, two and a half dimensions. They don’t have full interior lives so much as things Rebeck wants them to say. Take Amelia, whose blazers and sensible heels tell us she’s a Serious Businesswoman Who Is Probably Less Together Than She Appears: Throughout the play, she’s hovering between jobs, and yet Rebeck can’t be bothered to flesh out what she actually does. “You got a job interview?†asks Foster. “Something wrong with the old job? You always said you liked that job.†“They restructured,†Amelia replies. Later, Foster to Sam: “Did she get that new job?†Sam: “Oh, I don’t think she knows yet.†Still later, Sam to Amelia: “Oh, you got that job?†Amelia: “I’m still at the old job for now.†The generality is flagrant enough to make you cringe.
That perfunctory quality — a feeling of being put together quickly out of easy parts — pervades I Need That. Cliché is rampant: Amelia avoiding carbs to lose weight; Sam announcing, “It’s Grand Central Station today†when the doorbell rings; characters opining, “Things don’t give your life meaning. People do†or, yes, “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.†It’s first-thought writing, and it not only causes Sam and Amelia’s A-versus-B arguments to slide promptly into tedium, it also erects the story’s moments of would-be profundity like silos jutting out a flat landscape. As the play lumbers up to them, we’ve already been staring at them from a distance for what feels like ages. Is it any wonder that Sam’s mountains of stuff will become a metaphor for privilege? (“Some months I’d be really strapped, and you just sitting here with this stuff, you don’t even know if you have it or not,†says Foster, again called up for token relevancy duty.) Or that his fear of letting go can be traced to various traumas involving his unloving family and his loving but dead wife? Or that the play will eventually, when it has nowhere else to go, turn sentimental?
There’s a cynicism at work when a show doesn’t do more than outline its characters, then dares you to notice or care by putting a total real-life character, like Danny DeVito, smack-dab in its center. It’s clear the audience is here to have a good time with a star who’s turned Zhlubby Eccentric Rascal into a personal art form. And, yes, DeVito is — true to that form — an appealingly weird-while-being-familiar presence as he grouses and whines and shuffles around in his boxer shorts, pulling faces and pronouncing “water†with approximately three syllables (“woo-aw-tuhâ€). But no actor can make a show work when a play is so set on phoning it in. When Sam is describing his time as a military file clerk, he sums it up succinctly enough: “boring but better than getting shot at.†Sometimes a play reviews itself.
I Need That is at Roundabout Theatre Company at the American Airlines Theatre.