Warning: Truth-telling can be dangerous to your family's
health!
Much of Joyce Carol Oates' new cartoon-like comedy, The Truth Teller, performing downtown at the Circle in the Square, dazzles. Not least of its virtues are the opportunities the author and director, Gloria Muzio, have given the actors to exercise their almost acrobatic skills in nailing down their characters' foibles.
Especially good was John Seitz, who plays the overbearing father. Kathleen Widdoes is wonderful as the empty-headed mother who is not afraid to be alone with her thoughts - as long as she doesn't know what they are. The elder daughter, played by Barbara Gulan, could be a knock-off of Laura Dern in Rambling Rose. And Lynn Hawley, who plays the younger daughter, has wonderful physical instincts.
Craig Bockhorn is brilliant as the son, a monumental nerd - but with a hilarious secret. And the mother's childhood beau, amusingly played by Richard Seff, adds to the list of audience surprises.
Ms. Oates would skewer the American family on a barbecue of psychobabble, the main gimmick of the play. When characters indulge in it they spout such phrases as "syllogistic oxymoron" or "exegesis of human culture."
The problem is that psychobabble turns into double-talk, and the actors struggle vainly. Andrew Polk, who plays a hero eager to strip away mendacious language, has the most difficult task. He just about makes the character believable.
Despite this central flaw, much of the play is technically marvelous. The lighting dazzles and always defines; the furniture explodes a hothouse of chintz. The costumes and props combine contemporary layered looks with red roses in someone's hat, or in a vase, disposing petals to reveal a passage of time. Cleverly designed flats become the walls of an expensive house, or of a cheap motel or a corridor or a yard. Music and sound effects excel realistically and Tony Bennett pleasantly serenades throughout.
As the play lurches forward, the characters too quickly dash headlong into a series of neat and tricky plot turns. When this nuclear family goes ballistic, it does so in ways that sweep from pathos to bathos in a food-fight of revelation, ultimately pitching us over cliffs of credibility.
Although The Truth Teller's heart thumps lively on the operating table, and under brilliant lights, it ultimately anaesthetizes the audience emotionally. Thus, I often had a smile on my face throughout the play, and you will have one too. But not too much sank into my heart.
The premise of the play is that telling truth is dangerous. But what is truth, when all the clever words the characters mouth in this piece congeal like flies in amber, beyond emotional reach?
Copyright 1999 Marshall Yaeger