Theater: After the Night and the Music

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After the Night and the Music Theatre Schedule

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After the Night and the Music

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In their comfortable uptown apartment, Darryl and Mitzi rush around preparing to receive Ron and Gail, old friends they?ve invited over for a quiet night of dinner and fornicating. No wild youths, these four: They have grown kids, fancy jobs, easy chairs. (Mom didn?t take their weed away; the maid did.) When the time for libidinous escapades arrives, Darryl has just the thing to get everybody hot: Dionne Warwick songs.

Elaine May treats this fumbling foursome, and her other characters in After the Night and the Music, with affectionate ridicule. In her trio of one-acts at the Biltmore, she encourages us to laugh at and with her insecure, melancholy, status-anxious New Yorkers. This is not exactly a novel approach to comedy: May?s scenarios carry the scent of Woody Allen, Neil Simon, and, well, Elaine May, whose ingenious improvisations with Mike Nichols helped define the genre 40 years ago.

But this strain of fraught uptown romance hasn?t felt fresh, in anybody?s hands, for years. On television, the comedy of Manhattan anxiety reached a state of purity with Seinfeld, and then a state of deep impurity in Sex and the City?each series presenting its own quartet of urban neurotics and narcissists, each using a vocabulary that felt sharply contemporary. Since the heyday of those shows, neither May nor her peers have written a script that felt lively or vital. The old comic tension between pseudo-intellectuals and their carnal urges hasn?t yielded the same laughs; even if the style hadn?t been refined by Carrie and Jerry and George, repeated jokes are bound to lose their punch. It?s telling that, if reports from Cannes prove accurate, Allen may have regained his stride by adopting a new style, fleeing the city entirely and filming his latest in London.

Watching this show is like being taken back in time to the days when boulevard fare?what was known as mindless entertainment for the tired businessman?played on Broadway before finding extensive life in dinner and community theaters. And, taken under those conditions, the show is pleasant enough. Certainly the actors, especially Ms. Berlin (Ms. May?s daughter), Ms. Smith-Cameron and Mr. Korbich, invest their scattershot parts with patented comedic skill. And Daniel Sullivan, an overqualified director for this material, stages the proceedings with ease and finesse. But May?s one-acters?like the similarly stunted recent work of her contemporaries Woody Allen and Neil Simon?remain quaintly stuck in another era, despite her still-evident ability to build an occasional comic fire here and there. But who knows? Perhaps May gets the last laugh?there are probably plenty of theatergoers out there who are still aching to relive those bygone entertainment years of, say?.Yes! Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice.