At some very early point in the exhausting three hour marathon entitled Good For Otto, a young girl began crying. Apparently inconsolable, she was taken out of the theater by her mother. Why was she at a David Rabe play? I’ve only previously seen two of his plays, Hurlyburly and Sticks and Bones, one of the trilogy of Vietnam plays from the 1970s. I enjoyed them both but neither are in the elementary school curriculum for Intro to Dramatic Theater.
Good For Otto concerns itself with mental illness. Two therapists (Ed Harris and Amy Madigan) work in a mental health center near the Berkshires and do their heroic best to help their patients. A who’s who of calamities are thrust upon us: dead mothers, cutting, suicide, child abuse, hoarding, gay acceptance and hamster love, namely the Otto of the title. Therapy sessions happen around and around, and back and forth, bizarrely interrupted by musical interludes of old songs. These group character sing-a-longs are played at the piano by the hoarder when his story ended abruptly and for no apparent reason. Music as healing power, bluntly and repeatedly themed, both in words and song.
About thirty minutes in, frankly, I was hating this play. Then I started enjoying some sections. Then super boredom set it. Plus eye-rolling. Then internal groaning as this play churned on and on, consuming the audience with its simplistic preachiness. The director, Scott Elliott, made a critically bad decision to seat audience members on the stage. During the second, less attended act, a man sitting center stage was holding up his head up while balancing his elbow on his knee, slumped over and visibly suffering. Was this intentional or unintentional meta?
The cast was filled with veteran talents including F. Murray Abraham and, perhaps my favorite performer here, Mark-Linn Baker. Overacting was the chosen route which admittedly made some of this watchable. Long, insufferably overbaked storylines, particularly Mr. Abraham’s, were so very dull. When this play finally ended a woman next to me said, “I need a pencil for editing.” Kind words indeed as I’m not sure the interminable, unnecessary length is even the biggest problem.
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