Christopher Lane as Neil, and MaryBeth Wise as Jennifer in 'In the Mood.' Photo by Stan Barouh, courtesy of Olney Theatre Center. In the Mood
By Irene Wurtzel
Directed by Jim Petosa
Olney Theatre Center
Through September 24
By Alexander C. Kafka
The D.C. artist Jennifer Workman’s career is taking off. The Phillips is going to feature her work in a show of “Contemporary Women Artists” and interview her in an accompanying symposium. She’s afraid, though, to revel too much in what should be a delicious moment because her husband, Neil, has a way of losing control during delicious moments. Jennifer, he chides, is becoming increasingly like her Aunt Julia, who used to dampen every celebratory occasion with a wary, superstitious two spits. And it’s true, Jennifer fears “too much happiness.” “There is,” says Neil, chilling the champagne, “no such thing.”
Yet, of course, there is, and that is the subject of Irene Wurtzel’s insightful and stirring new play, In the Mood, in its world premiere at Olney Theatre Center's Mulitz-Gudelsky Theatre Lab. Neil has had bouts with too much happiness for years. A charismatic undersecretary of state for democracy, his visionary euphoria can be constructively contagious when drafting his brilliant and exhaustive briefing papers and cajoling egotistical statesmen into delicate and time-sensitive negotiations. It can also explode into near-messianic grandiosity, with all its accompanying intellectual distortions and horrid insensitivities. His situation has a name: bipolar disorder. And Wurtzel’s drama is at its best when tracing the fine line between the fickle power of mania and the Beltway’s equally fickle mania of power. Also clever is the way the playwright reverses the stereotype of the crazy artist coddled by the sensible, worldly mainstays in her life. After all, Washington's full of unhinged visionaries, and few of them are represented by galleries.
As the booster rockets ignite on Jennifer’s career, Neil is coming off the high of a visit to an unnamed African nation shaking off the bonds of tyranny, a visit that he decides to extend by two weeks incommunicado from his boss Charles, a paternally indulgent but increasingly worried secretary of state who has brought Neil into the corridors of power from Neil’s less glamorous but stable and productive teaching position at the University of Michigan. Neil, we gather from their chats, counterbalances the older Charles’s careful diplomacy with his youthful, idealistic energy and big-picture worldview. But in manic mode, Neil crosses a line, insulting what he sees as his boss’s insufficiently lofty ambitions for his term in office.
Effectively grounded by Charles, who takes understandable umbrage but, more important, can’t trust his loose-cannon right hand to keep national priorities and policies in focus, Neil spins to the other pole of his bipolarity. He hunkers down at home, repeatedly views a football game with its resurrection of a sacked running back, resumes his smoking habit, and is unable to get himself to leave the house to accompany his wife to an important opening. “Neil, you’re slipping away from me,” she says, “…and it’s scaring the hell out of me.” Aggravating the situation is a visit from Neil's mother from L.A., Clara, who's ready for some quality time with the apple of her eye and his wife, on whom she also dotes. Instead, she finds him distant, muted, and rude, asking unenthusiastically how long she plans to stay. Leaving her to her own devices, he says dispiritedly, “Enjoy Washington, Mother. There are those who do.”
Jennifer prods her husband into seeing a shrink, who prescribes meds that keep him from the despondent depths and the orbital heights of an illness Neil is still loathe to admit he has. The pills are supposed to keep him, in the doctor’s words, “blissful and ordinary.” But to Neil, bliss and ordinariness are a despondent depth all their own, never mind the side effects—sexual dysfunction, frequent urination, insomnia. He’s become a zombie and hints unsubtly of offing himself with sleeping pills. His diplomatic skills are intact enough to persuade Jennifer to let him go off the meds. “I love you,” he tells her. “You are the only thing that is right in my life.” She confesses that she too, “wanted him to be alive and alert and a little manic.” After all, this was the man who gave her the courage to quit a job teaching math and to make art more than a weekend undertaking. She lets him abandon the medication, under the condition that they use that date, January 5, as a code for her to signal to him if he’s losing control.
He quickly returns to his old best self, confident, competent, and masterful as an executive and as a husband—if, that is, you don’t make too much of that third glass of champagne he’s slurping down, his quickly accelerating speech, and that sort of thing. Charles finds that he has a heart ailment that requires immediate surgery and gradual recovery, and sounds out Neil and Jennifer on Neil’s fitness to represent Charles at a Mideast summit. Jennifer, though worried, vouches for her husband. It is, she confides to us, “a simple choice between the good of the country and my marriage”—the kind of statement that might sound more melodramatic if you didn’t live in Washington, where such personal forks in the road are encountered by one hapless couple or another just about hourly.
The summit goes well—suspiciously well, both benefiting from and spurring a meltdown on Neil’s part. As he tries to follow up on the progress stateside, Jennifer prepares for a key show in New York. Suffice to say that worlds will collide, and finances, marriage, generational ties, and more are at risk. Whatever an undersecretary is supposed to look like, it’s probably not stalking around his wife’s studio, wielding a hammer and spitting out predictions like “You and I shall probably have a conversation about enlightened sexual behavior.”
Christopher Lane is excellent as Neil, coming off his manic Norwegian energy as Stockmann in Olney’s recent Enemy of the People into his preppier present-day manic incarnation. Lane’s talents are well-suited to Neil’s changes not just from mania to depression, but to those within the manic channels of domestic Casanova, office superhero, condescendingly bullying father, dismissive son, and manipulative whip-cracking boss. And he’s handsome enough, in a smart way, to be plausible as a rising political star and sometime squash partner to the president.
MaryBeth Wise recently excelled in another intelligent and emotionally demanding persona in Round House’s Midwives. Here again she wows us with her wise and wrenching depiction of Jenny, as Neil, Charles, Clara, and Jenny herself all look to her to save a man on the edge of abyss, while also protecting her family and the integrity of her own artistic career.
Leo Erickson is wonderful in the key role of Charles, whose urbanity, humanity, and classic political skills we must believe in for his character to work as the fulcrum between Neil’s personal and professional prospects. We must feel what’s at stake as he gambles that Neil can keep himself in check, and we do indeed believe in his belief in his protégé, even as we squirm at the prospective downside.
Halo Wines excels in the poignant role of Clara, who at first appears a somewhat nebishy stage mom to her darling Washington star Neil, but quickly unfolds as a complex, loving, and long-suffering strongwoman of a sort seen all too often in the families of the mentally ill. Her oblivious denial of her son’s condition—and of her late husband’s—is both tragic and a little heroic. Wines and Tim Spears, as Neil and Jennifer’s college son, Josh, have a sweet connection in their scenes together. And Wurtzel’s dialogue here, as so often throughout the script, is admirably nuanced in the way it alternately targets and swerves around the difficult topics at hand. Spears also holds his own, within the dramatic context and against the practiced dynamism of Lane as an actor, in their confrontational father-son scenes. Therese Barbato makes the most of her small role as Neil’s assistant, embodying the ubiquitous attractive D.C. gatekeeper who can, in the same instant, flatter you and shut you out.
Milagros Ponce de Leon has created a fabulous set—a brick-walled studio with metal balconies and circle-within-circle high windows that resonate visually and psychologically as third-world town square, D.C. jail, and Jennifer's prison of bittersweet memory. Director Jim Petosa, who helped Wurtzel develop the script, has a great feel for its optimum pacing, its prickly pauses, its stops for bewildered breath. With the help of lighting designer Donald Edmund Thomas, unfolding event, flashback, and aside are almost always quickly distinguishable.
As I head to the polls Tuesday, In the Mood will come with me, making me wonder what scenarios are hidden behind the campaign placards and photo-op smiles. I’ll be thinking, admiringly, of Doug Duncan’s candor and wisdom in looking to his health. I’ll be remembering the disheartening headlines about Vince Foster, Sol Wachtler, and about so many other brave, struggling, strong and fragile people in our public and private capital lives.
Along with the appropriate perspective and, if necessary, pills, a night at the theater might be therapeutic for so many stressed out Washingtonians. Perhaps they'll then pause and ponder multiple meanings if their loved ones one day tell them, a little too enthusiastically, “Everything is breaking our way.”
By Irene Wurtzel
Directed by Jim Petosa
Olney Theatre Center
Through September 24
By Alexander C. Kafka
The D.C. artist Jennifer Workman’s career is taking off. The Phillips is going to feature her work in a show of “Contemporary Women Artists” and interview her in an accompanying symposium. She’s afraid, though, to revel too much in what should be a delicious moment because her husband, Neil, has a way of losing control during delicious moments. Jennifer, he chides, is becoming increasingly like her Aunt Julia, who used to dampen every celebratory occasion with a wary, superstitious two spits. And it’s true, Jennifer fears “too much happiness.” “There is,” says Neil, chilling the champagne, “no such thing.”
Yet, of course, there is, and that is the subject of Irene Wurtzel’s insightful and stirring new play, In the Mood, in its world premiere at Olney Theatre Center's Mulitz-Gudelsky Theatre Lab. Neil has had bouts with too much happiness for years. A charismatic undersecretary of state for democracy, his visionary euphoria can be constructively contagious when drafting his brilliant and exhaustive briefing papers and cajoling egotistical statesmen into delicate and time-sensitive negotiations. It can also explode into near-messianic grandiosity, with all its accompanying intellectual distortions and horrid insensitivities. His situation has a name: bipolar disorder. And Wurtzel’s drama is at its best when tracing the fine line between the fickle power of mania and the Beltway’s equally fickle mania of power. Also clever is the way the playwright reverses the stereotype of the crazy artist coddled by the sensible, worldly mainstays in her life. After all, Washington's full of unhinged visionaries, and few of them are represented by galleries.
As the booster rockets ignite on Jennifer’s career, Neil is coming off the high of a visit to an unnamed African nation shaking off the bonds of tyranny, a visit that he decides to extend by two weeks incommunicado from his boss Charles, a paternally indulgent but increasingly worried secretary of state who has brought Neil into the corridors of power from Neil’s less glamorous but stable and productive teaching position at the University of Michigan. Neil, we gather from their chats, counterbalances the older Charles’s careful diplomacy with his youthful, idealistic energy and big-picture worldview. But in manic mode, Neil crosses a line, insulting what he sees as his boss’s insufficiently lofty ambitions for his term in office.
Effectively grounded by Charles, who takes understandable umbrage but, more important, can’t trust his loose-cannon right hand to keep national priorities and policies in focus, Neil spins to the other pole of his bipolarity. He hunkers down at home, repeatedly views a football game with its resurrection of a sacked running back, resumes his smoking habit, and is unable to get himself to leave the house to accompany his wife to an important opening. “Neil, you’re slipping away from me,” she says, “…and it’s scaring the hell out of me.” Aggravating the situation is a visit from Neil's mother from L.A., Clara, who's ready for some quality time with the apple of her eye and his wife, on whom she also dotes. Instead, she finds him distant, muted, and rude, asking unenthusiastically how long she plans to stay. Leaving her to her own devices, he says dispiritedly, “Enjoy Washington, Mother. There are those who do.”
Jennifer prods her husband into seeing a shrink, who prescribes meds that keep him from the despondent depths and the orbital heights of an illness Neil is still loathe to admit he has. The pills are supposed to keep him, in the doctor’s words, “blissful and ordinary.” But to Neil, bliss and ordinariness are a despondent depth all their own, never mind the side effects—sexual dysfunction, frequent urination, insomnia. He’s become a zombie and hints unsubtly of offing himself with sleeping pills. His diplomatic skills are intact enough to persuade Jennifer to let him go off the meds. “I love you,” he tells her. “You are the only thing that is right in my life.” She confesses that she too, “wanted him to be alive and alert and a little manic.” After all, this was the man who gave her the courage to quit a job teaching math and to make art more than a weekend undertaking. She lets him abandon the medication, under the condition that they use that date, January 5, as a code for her to signal to him if he’s losing control.
He quickly returns to his old best self, confident, competent, and masterful as an executive and as a husband—if, that is, you don’t make too much of that third glass of champagne he’s slurping down, his quickly accelerating speech, and that sort of thing. Charles finds that he has a heart ailment that requires immediate surgery and gradual recovery, and sounds out Neil and Jennifer on Neil’s fitness to represent Charles at a Mideast summit. Jennifer, though worried, vouches for her husband. It is, she confides to us, “a simple choice between the good of the country and my marriage”—the kind of statement that might sound more melodramatic if you didn’t live in Washington, where such personal forks in the road are encountered by one hapless couple or another just about hourly.
The summit goes well—suspiciously well, both benefiting from and spurring a meltdown on Neil’s part. As he tries to follow up on the progress stateside, Jennifer prepares for a key show in New York. Suffice to say that worlds will collide, and finances, marriage, generational ties, and more are at risk. Whatever an undersecretary is supposed to look like, it’s probably not stalking around his wife’s studio, wielding a hammer and spitting out predictions like “You and I shall probably have a conversation about enlightened sexual behavior.”
Christopher Lane is excellent as Neil, coming off his manic Norwegian energy as Stockmann in Olney’s recent Enemy of the People into his preppier present-day manic incarnation. Lane’s talents are well-suited to Neil’s changes not just from mania to depression, but to those within the manic channels of domestic Casanova, office superhero, condescendingly bullying father, dismissive son, and manipulative whip-cracking boss. And he’s handsome enough, in a smart way, to be plausible as a rising political star and sometime squash partner to the president.
MaryBeth Wise recently excelled in another intelligent and emotionally demanding persona in Round House’s Midwives. Here again she wows us with her wise and wrenching depiction of Jenny, as Neil, Charles, Clara, and Jenny herself all look to her to save a man on the edge of abyss, while also protecting her family and the integrity of her own artistic career.
Leo Erickson is wonderful in the key role of Charles, whose urbanity, humanity, and classic political skills we must believe in for his character to work as the fulcrum between Neil’s personal and professional prospects. We must feel what’s at stake as he gambles that Neil can keep himself in check, and we do indeed believe in his belief in his protégé, even as we squirm at the prospective downside.
Halo Wines excels in the poignant role of Clara, who at first appears a somewhat nebishy stage mom to her darling Washington star Neil, but quickly unfolds as a complex, loving, and long-suffering strongwoman of a sort seen all too often in the families of the mentally ill. Her oblivious denial of her son’s condition—and of her late husband’s—is both tragic and a little heroic. Wines and Tim Spears, as Neil and Jennifer’s college son, Josh, have a sweet connection in their scenes together. And Wurtzel’s dialogue here, as so often throughout the script, is admirably nuanced in the way it alternately targets and swerves around the difficult topics at hand. Spears also holds his own, within the dramatic context and against the practiced dynamism of Lane as an actor, in their confrontational father-son scenes. Therese Barbato makes the most of her small role as Neil’s assistant, embodying the ubiquitous attractive D.C. gatekeeper who can, in the same instant, flatter you and shut you out.
Milagros Ponce de Leon has created a fabulous set—a brick-walled studio with metal balconies and circle-within-circle high windows that resonate visually and psychologically as third-world town square, D.C. jail, and Jennifer's prison of bittersweet memory. Director Jim Petosa, who helped Wurtzel develop the script, has a great feel for its optimum pacing, its prickly pauses, its stops for bewildered breath. With the help of lighting designer Donald Edmund Thomas, unfolding event, flashback, and aside are almost always quickly distinguishable.
As I head to the polls Tuesday, In the Mood will come with me, making me wonder what scenarios are hidden behind the campaign placards and photo-op smiles. I’ll be thinking, admiringly, of Doug Duncan’s candor and wisdom in looking to his health. I’ll be remembering the disheartening headlines about Vince Foster, Sol Wachtler, and about so many other brave, struggling, strong and fragile people in our public and private capital lives.
Along with the appropriate perspective and, if necessary, pills, a night at the theater might be therapeutic for so many stressed out Washingtonians. Perhaps they'll then pause and ponder multiple meanings if their loved ones one day tell them, a little too enthusiastically, “Everything is breaking our way.”
