Laurie Metcalf, still best-known as the sister in “Rosanne” but currently mesmerizing audiences every night in “The Other Place,” is the latest of a surprising number of faces familiar from television –Tyne Daley (Cagney and Lacey), Linda Lavin (Alice), Valerie Harper (Rhoda) – who have turned into extraordinary stage actresses.
Metcalf is now a regular in New York theater, most recently Off-Broadway in
the revival of Sam Shepard’s “A Lie of the Mind” and on Broadway (for a week) in the revival of Neil Simon’s “Brighton Beach Memoirs.” Now, until the end of the month, she appears in the debut of Sharr White’s original drama, “The Other Place,” a play that is more difficult to describe than it is to experience.
At first, we think that Metcalf is Juliana, a scientist turned pharmaceutical businesswoman who is divorcing her husband for having had an affair, and is estranged from her daughter for having eloped with Juliana’s research assistant. Juliana is in St. Thomas, to give a lecture and promote what may wind up being a cure for a specific disease, when she notices that the only other woman in the room is somebody who clearly doesn’t fit in. She is wearing a yellow bikini. Is she a prostitute?
The disease is not explicitly identified as far as I could tell (not the first time this season a playwright has decided to keep vague a medical condition that is central to the story– see A Small Fire.) But in any case, things are not what they seem, as we learn more and more, scene by scene. I won’t give it away, except to say: Virtually none of what we are at first told turns out to be true. We never explicitly learn who the woman in the yellow bikini is, but a video projection at the end offers a strong clue.
Other details do become clear, and little surprises, reminiscent of “Next to Normal,” offer us a theatrical tour through a diseased mind, helped along by Eugene Lee’s scenic design, an abstract kind of wooden hive that suggests the inner workings of the brain. “The Other Place” would be more confusing – especially since two of the four cast members play multiple roles – and the authorial manipulation of one or two too-convenient coincidences would be harder to accept, were it not for the emotional truth in Metcalf’s performance. The expression of her anger, sorry, frustration, regrets, make the details of the tricky story less important.
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The Other Place
Lucille Lortel Theater
By Sharr White; directed by Joe Mantello; sets by Eugene Lee; costumes by Dane Laffrey; lighting by Justin Townsend; sound by Fitz Patton; projections and video by William Cusick; At the Cast: Dennis Boutsikaris (Ian), Aya Cash (the Woman), Laurie Metcalf (Juliana) and John Schiappa (the Man).
Running time: one hour 20 minutes without an intermission
Ticket prices: $20 to $95
“The Other Place” is scheduled to run through April 30.
Jonathan Mandell
Jonathan Mandell, who tweets as New York Theater, is a native New Yorker and third-generation journalist with diverse experience on newspapers, magazines and websites.He has ...
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