Two River Theater Company Opens A Thousand Clowns

The opened its new production, Herb Gardner’s, A Thousand Clowns Feb. 1.  The play, directed by Davis McCallum, is presented as a “classic comedy,” but it is important to modify that description with the word “bittersweet,” with the emphasis on bitter. 

True to the period and the style of the period that Gardner wrote the play in, the production is ably and dutifully performed and presented by the Bridge Avenue theater company, which means uproariousness and free-spiritedness is deliberate and ripe with angst. 

A Thousand Clowns centers on the relationship between an out-of-work television writer, Murray Burns, and his young nephew and ward, Nick. Burns is on the dole as a matter of choice, having abandoned the rat-race to pursue a life of non-pursuit.  Along with and for Nick, Burns creates an eccentric, free-spirited atmosphere that, while endearing, also challenges societal norms. When child services comes calling, Burns is forced to decide between his lifestyle and his life with his nephew.

The story unfolds predominantly in the one room apartment that Burns and Nick share. The play is a conversation piece, which means there is no “action” to speak of. It lives and dies on turn of phrase and the actor’s ability to give life to the playwright’s words and intent. And technically speaking, the six actors in the production were spot on fulfilling the roles down to their stereotypical roots.

Crystal Finn’s portrayal of Sandra Markowitz, the visiting social worker turned instant love interest to Murray Burns, was awkwardly funny and accurate to the part of the pretty, screwball ingenue with a heart-of-gold. 

The nephew pawn in the story, Nick, is described by his uncle as being a “middle-aged kid,” and Matthew Gumley, already a veteran of four Broadway productions, (Elf, The Addams Family, Mary Poppins and Beauty and the Beast), played his role with an over-flowing amount of precociousness, that indeed, tended more towards older man than gifted youngster. Even Gumley’s appearance and physicality on stage seemed more mature, in fact, than his guardian, a performance choice perhaps to establish that the junior is actually father to the man, the nephew is caretaker to the uncle.

Michael Nathanson plays the caretaker that the play revolves around. Make no mistake, though, the play is cloaked as a story about the relationship between the boy and his uncle, it is squarely about the uncle.  This is a personality examination in two acts. The situation, the conflict and the variable of the boy facilitates in full the looking-glass of a particular character in literature of the 20th century, the anti-hero. Nick seems at times to be an extension of his uncle, a confirmation and a contradiction to give the audience both a sense of his goodness and his wrong-sightedness.

Nathanson is fine in the role.  He struts with the correct amount of sloppy bravado.  He smirks at authority in the right measure. He reacts appropriately, not always engagingly, not always with a sense of depth that perhaps would have taken the play to another level, but in the way the play is written. The connection between Burns and Nick, Nathanson and Gumley, except in the clever eccentricities they share, isn’t necessarily present. 

When harsh words are barraged at his ward, Nathanson lacks much physical manifestation of distress or anger or anything, smirks and quirks fill in the blanks. You want to see the elder with some emotional shade other than irreverence, but Burns and the characterization is all centered on his boorish, self-righteous observations. And because he is so self-consumed and preservational with his ego through out, the abiding love he supposedly has for his nephew seems false. When the social worker indulges Burns in an implication of sex and affection, Nathanson’s Burns seems again disconnected. She seems more like a defrocked foil or convert than a loverto him. 

But this is the dichotomy of Gardner’s anti-hero. With all of his waxing about freedom and non-conformity, you want to like Murray Burns, but he is no hero and he is not particularly likable. You’d think that with the clarity of vision and idle time that Burns enjoys during his worklessness that he would do more than simply practice at what he preaches, but he is a paper tiger.  

Gardner’s play has similar overtones to Kaufman and Hart’s You Can’t Take It With You, and although that play was senior to Gardner’s by some thirty years and has a fair amount of over-the-moon 1930’s philosophy, the heroes of the older tale, the Vanderhofs and Sycamores are more inspiringly righteous revolutionaries than Murray Burns.  They are more likable, but they are also, perhaps not as complex or time-worn. 

And yet America and Americans, going through their own, new, desperate identity search, looking out for understanding of their place in their families and in the workforce rat-race, have transmuted even more since the days when Gardner penned A Thousand Clowns and created Murray Burns.  Burn’s brother Arnold, (played nicely by Lou Liberatore), one of the story’s square, conformist, “list-makers,” turns his quixotic brother’s lifestyle on its ear, when he defends working stiffs.  Gardner wrote it as the establishment’s right to a strong defense, but in a time when hard work, purpose and responsibility are necessary and hip again, brother Arnold comes off as the play’s accidental hero. 

The contemporary comedies of inspiring laid-off, out-of-work or part-time pioneers are being written today and therefore A Thousand Clowns deserves the reinspection that Two River Theater Company is giving it.  We’ve come a long way and yet love and freedom are still balancing the bittersweet comedies of our live.  

A Thousand Clowns runs until February 20th. Tickets are available from www.trtc.org, over the phone from 732-345-1400 or at the Two River Theater Box Office, 21 Bridge Avenue, Red Bank.