“Clever Little Lies” is a perfectly nice little play about a topic that never gets tired: infidelity. Even the supposedly monogamous birds engage in this unseemly behavior, so why shouldn’t writers—from the Greeks to our contemporaries—milk it endlessly?
Tony Award-winning playwright Joe DiPietro has done just that with this compact drawing-room dramedy staging through August 3 at Guild Hall in East Hampton. In this tautly written one act, the story never lags. A harassed new father, Bill Jr., who is having a torrid affair with a younger woman, tells all to his long-married father, Bill Sr., whose perceptive wife, Alice, soon gets the truth out of him and makes it her mission to fix this glitch in their son’s marriage with espresso and intervention.
“That’s what parents do, they help their children,” Alice insists. “That why we have them, to help them.”
Marlo Thomas amply fills the role of Alice with humor and grace, even when she is spouting a comedic treatise on the state of the (non) reading public today. “That Girl,” made famous by the 1960s television show of the same name, has matured into “That Woman,” around which “Clever Little Lies” revolves. Despite her age, 76-year-old Ms. Thomas elevates the entire production by enlivening Alice with her energy and verve in the first two thirds of the play—the comic part. But Ms. Thomas deftly turns an emotional corner when the drama shifts as quickly as the wind. Her somewhat-manic yenta morphs into a wise woman with a somber reveal of her own—perhaps infidelity is not such a laughing matter after all.
Before the breezy repartee dissolves, the dialogue between the characters—father and son, son and wife, mother and father—is clever enough, if not sidesplitting.
Mr. DiPietro picked up two Tony Awards for Broadway’s “Memphis” in 2010 and is also the writer and lyricist behind the long-running “I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change,” an off-Broadway play with a title alone that makes one smile. In “Clever Little Lies,” it is not as if the playwright has suddenly developed a dark streak, but when the plot twists in the last 15 minutes and turns somber, the play truly hits liftoff. Revealing more would spoil the fun.
Greg Mullavey as Alice’s husband, Bill Sr., is thoroughly convincing as the faithful husband and father who wears his marriage like a comfortable pair of old trousers. Jim Stanek is Bill Jr., the roving and feckless husband you never quite like, is too overwrought and nervous. One wishes he would calm down and stop shouting.
Kate Wetherhead as Jane is the worried wife who wants to save her marriage—thus, she plans a surprise trip to Hawaii for two. Her role is standard new-mommy stuff, and Ms. Wetherhead’s voice is light, her physique slight. But, despite this, she carries the room and is both believable and likeable. Since this is mostly a comedy, you know she will succeed. But you find yourself cheering for her, anyhow, when Bill is simply being an excitable ass.
The production at Guild Hall appears to have been carted intact from a previous incarnation and world premiere last fall at the George Street Playhouse in New Brunswick, New Jersey with the same actors, the same director—David Saint—and, seemingly, the exact same set, designed by Yoshi Tanokura.
This does not mean it is any less polished, for “Clever Little Lies” moves along briskly and with panache. The set of the living room, where most of the action unfolds, is pure suburban Connecticut, and the theatrical backdrops throughout are especially effective. In the scene where the young couple is driving to Bill Jr.’s parents’s home, the staging is ingenious.
Great theater overflowing with memorable lines it is not, but “Clever Little Lies” packs an entertaining and amusing punch in its fast-paced 90 minutes. The poignant ending will stick with you in the morning when you are having coffee with your beloved. But leave the kids at home.
“Clever Little Lies” stages on Tuesdays to Sundays, through August 3, with matinees on Sunday. Evening performances are at 8 p.m., matinees at 3 p.m. No 8 p.m. show on Friday, July 25, no matinee on Sunday, August 3. Tickets start at $40. For more information, call 324-0806 or visit guildhall.org.
on Jul 22, 2014