Tuesday, October 25, 2005

third according to the NY TIMES

As Feminism Ages, Uncertainty Still Wins

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By BEN BRANTLEY
Published: October 25, 2005

An urgent bulletin for baby boomers who regard the work of Wendy Wasserstein as their own personal timeline: Heidi is having hot flashes.

O.K., so the name of the brow-mopping heroine of "Third," the thoughtful and imbalanced new comedy by Ms. Wasserstein that opened last night at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center, is not the same as the title character of "The Heidi Chronicles," Ms. Wasserstein's Pulitzer Prize winner from 1988. But it's easy to see Laurie Jameson, the lovably perplexed 54-year-old college professor portrayed by Dianne Wiest in "Third," as a reassuringly familiar cousin to Heidi, the lovably perplexed 40-ish college professor first played by Joan Allen 17 years ago.


Like Heidi, Laurie is a strong and vulnerable, independent and emotionally needy woman. She is, in other words, a feminine feminist of the stripe that has endeared Ms. Wasserstein to many theatergoers over the years, starting in 1977 with her "Uncommon Women and Others," a portrait of bright college chums contemplating their place in a world where fixed gender roles are coming unglued.

Since then Ms. Wasserstein has shepherded her fearful brave new women (who have usually been roughly the ages of their creator when she conceived them) through single motherhood (with "Heidi"), lonely peaks of success ("The Sisters Rosensweig") and the fishbowl of national politics ("An American Daughter"). Now this cozy alter ego to the generation of women who came of age amid the tumult of the late 1960's is hitting menopause. And she's still having problems figuring out who she is.

It's the certainty of uncertainty in life that makes "Third," directed by Daniel Sullivan, so affecting despite itself. Using the hot button of academic plagiarism to trigger the plot, "Third" suffers from problems common to Ms. Wasserstein's plays: an overly schematic structure, a sometimes artificial-feeling topicality and a reliance on famous names and titles as a shorthand for establishing character. Less typically, this play's central figure is its least believable, both as written and as acted by the wonderful but miscast Ms. Wiest.

Yet "Third" exhales a gentle breath of autumn, a rueful awareness of death and of seasons past, that makes it impossible to dismiss it as a quick-sketch comedy of political manners. A gracious air of both apology and forgiveness pervades its attitude to its characters, as Ms. Wasserstein, who has described herself as a typical "New York playwright liberal," dares to wonder if liberals now require a few lessons in tolerance.

Like "Heidi," "Third" begins with a teacher putting forward views with a corrective feminist slant. "Rest assured this classroom is a hegemonic-free zone," Laurie announces to her English literature class. In introducing "King Lear," she states that the play is less the tragedy of its title monarch ("the ultimate privileged paternal white male") than that of Goneril and Regan, the "girls with guts." Cordelia is just a girly wimp.

"Lear" hovers over "Third" the way Chekhov's "Three Sisters" haunted "The Sisters Rosensweig." Laurie has an aged, senile father, Jack (a bracingly humble Charles Durning), given to Lear-like rantings (including a scene set during a rainstorm). And since the role she plays to Jack's Lear is basically that of Cordelia, she would seem to suffer from a Lear-like lack of self-knowledge.

Shakespeare's bleakest tragedy is also the subject that jump-starts the play's pivotal confrontation - between Laurie and Woodson Bull III (Jason Ritter), nicknamed Third, a Groton graduate on a wrestling scholarship whom Laurie instantly classifies as a child of patrician privilege and a distasteful emblem of the age of George W. Bush.

As Third says, he is in her eyes "a living dead white man." He would seem to threaten every victory Laurie has won as a pioneering female professor at the small New England college she had joined three decades earlier. And when Third turns in a well-written, intelligently argued paper on "King Lear," Laurie is quick to accuse him of plagiarizing.

This face-off never gathers much dramatic tension. First of all, it taxes credibility that an academic standards committee would pursue such charges without evidence. More important, though, Ms. Wiest is simply too much of a sweetheart to convey the requisite hostility.

Hers is, by nature, a melting presence. (Think of her delicious studies in crinkly-eyed insecurity in Woody Allen's movies.) And she is truly touching in the scenes that show Laurie's inner anxieties about her place in a world in flux, especially in a bravura monologue on a psychiatrist's couch. But it is essential that the outer Laurie be a woman of steel and of a willful shallowness, evident in her exaggerated obsession with intellectual brand names. ("How could you have a problem with Rena? She's a Guggenheim poet.")

The supporting characters feel more convincingly drawn. Amy Aquino is terrific as Laurie's sardonic, cancer-plagued best friend and fellow academic, a finely gauged portrait of wryness as the best defense in the shadow of death. Mr. Durning movingly underplays geriatric dementia.

Ms. Wasserstein's younger characters also register with impressive restraint and credibility. Mr. Ritter's scenes with the disarmingly dry Gaby Hoffmann (as Laurie's younger daughter, a student at Swarthmore, natch) and Ms. Aquino are the play's sharpest and most subtle.

Indeed, such an appealing case is made from the beginning for Third's not being the "walking red state" Laurie mistakes him for that she seems grotesquely deluded. And while "Third" would seem to be striving for the he-said, she-said ambiguity of John Patrick Shanley's "Doubt," the easygoing direction of Mr. Sullivan, Ms. Wasserstein's frequent collaborator, lacks the tautness to sustain any suspense.

Yet "Third" ultimately registers as more than the fractured sum of flawed parts. And on one level, its defects - Ms. Wiest's palpable soft-heartedness, Mr. Sullivan's contemplative pace - work to its advantage. For Ms. Wasserstein is politely asking audiences who have grown older with her to acknowledge their fears, their limitations and the possibility that they might be wrong on subjects they were once sure about. In taking her uncommon women through the decades, she sweetly but shrewdly suggests that life is an unending identity crisis.

Third

By Wendy Wasserstein; directed by Daniel Sullivan; sets by Thomas Lynch; costumes by Jennifer von Mayrhauser; lighting by Pat Collins; original music by Robert Waldman; sound by Scott Stauffer; stage manager, Roy Harris; director of development, Hattie K. Jutagir; director of marketing, Linda Mason Ross; general manager, Adam Siegel; production manager, Jeff Hamlin. Presented by Lincoln Center Theater, under the direction of André Bishop and Bernard Gersten. At the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, 150 West 65th Street, Lincoln Center; (212) 239-6200. Through Dec. 11. Running time: 2 hours.

WITH: Dianne Wiest (Laurie Jameson), Jason Ritter (Woodson Bull III), Gaby Hoffmann (Emily Imbrie), Charles Durning (Jack Jameson) and Amy Aquino (Nancy Gordon).