US theater This article is more than 5 years oldReviewGood for Otto review – Ed Harris offers simplistic therapy in David Rabe's drama
This article is more than 5 years oldPershing Square Signature Center, New York
The actor stars in an intimately staged yet strangely old-fashioned rendition of the Tony award-winning writer’s play
Good for Otto, David Rabe’s bittersweet play ministers to the sad, the anxious, the lost and anyone who arrives at the theater without coats or bags. As staged by Scott Elliott at the Pershing Square Signature Center, onstage actors sit thigh to thigh with a dozen or so audience members on a set that resembles a group therapy room.
That room occupies the Northwood mental health center, a facility in rural Massachusetts presided over by the caring and avuncular Dr Michaels (Ed Harris, in wounded saint mode). Together with another counselor, Evangeline (Amy Madigan), Dr Michaels sees “a great many people in the community, but others who could benefit refuse to come by, or don’t know we exist”.
Well, the stage is crowded enough as is. The script introduces us to six patients, three family members, two ghosts, a secretary and a blazingly unsympathetic insurance company case member. The titular Otto, a hamster, does not appear. The characters suffer from depression, delusions, social anxieties and in the case of one young patient, Frannie (Riley McDonald, in a more or less unplayable role), psychosis. Dr Michaels has his own troubles, embodied by the figure of his mother (Charlotte Hope). She killed herself half a century ago, but she can still lay down a guilt trip.
Some of Good for Otto’s scenes take place during sessions, others unspool in Dr Michaels’s wistful imagination. He’s someone who nurtures the soft-hearted fantasy of all of his patients getting together to sing a few restorative verses of Glow Worm or Let Me Call You Sweetheart. In some gently surreal sequences, they do, accompanied by cabaret star Kenny Mellman, who also plays a hoarder.
The New Group tends toward star casting and in addition to Harris and Madigan, both excellent, there’s F Murray Abraham as a man who won’t get out of bed, Mark Linn-Baker as Otto’s socially awkward owner and Rhea Perlman, a late replacement for Rosie O’Donnell, as a woman who wants to adopt the troubled Frannie. Michael Rabe, the playwright’s son, plays the other ghost. The roles are well played and sometimes there’s a symphonic richness to the ways in which characters and themes appear and fade. Elliott’s staging, with its melding of actors and audience suggests that we all experience pain and that we would all benefit by coming together to discuss it.
And that’s laudable. But it also suggests Good for Otto’s unwieldy ambition – there’s enough material here for several plays – and it’s everybody hurts facileness. The play, inspired by Richard O’Connor’s Undoing Depression, resolves too few of these cases to seem entirely satisfying and too many of them to seem entirely believable. Despite the billowy structure, there’s a tidiness to Rabe’s approach and to his assumptions about mental health. In Good for Otto, every symptom has its source, usually some childhood trauma. And given enough time and care and non-interference by venal insurance companies, everyone can heal or at least learn the tools to cope with the worst of depression and anxiety.
There’s something strangely old-fashioned about the play’s absolute belief in Dr Michaels. Yes, his mother haunts him, but her spite never prevents him from discharging his duties with wisdom and care. Rabe (Sticks and Bones, Hurlyburly) used to be a playwright more comfortable with uncertainty, with cruelty, with wounds that don’t heal. But this play insists that with a little talk, a little compassion, maybe a little Paxil our suffering will be eased.
- Good for Otto will be at the Pershing Square Signature Center until 8 April
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