Everythings Turning Into Beautiful’: Tunesmiths in Love
Carol Rosegg
Daphne Rubin-Vega and Malik Yoba play musical collaborators in “Everythings Turning Into Beautiful.”
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By BEN BRANTLEY
Published: August 4, 2006
A quick thrill of nostalgia for a nearly forgotten season ripples through the opening moments of “Everythings Turning Into Beautiful,” the generally thrill-free demi-musical that opened last night at the Acorn Theater at Theater Row. You have to understand that Seth Zvi Rosenfeld’s play, with songs by Jimmie James, is set in the wintertime. When first seen, its two characters are wearing things like sweaters, knitted caps and heavy jackets and appear to be really cold, even though they’re indoors. Golly, remember what it was like to be cold? Wasn’t it bliss?
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With temperatures that turn human flesh into salt water, this has been one of those embarrassing weeks when the weather dominates and warps thought and conversation. So forgive me if, at the beginning of that nasty stretch called August in Manhattan, I find disproportionate merit in a show’s being set in this city in December (on Christmas Eve to be exact). And having arrived at the Acorn in a limp and dingy state, I can’t help getting misty about the exquisite state of the air conditioning there.
Otherwise the strongest feeling aroused by this story of a pair of musical collaborators (played by Daphne Rubin-Vega and Malik Yoba), scared of and hungry for love, is perplexity over the lack of an apostrophe in the word “Everythings” in its title. (Note to attentive grammar trolls among Times readers: Neither I nor my editors had anything to do with this whim of punctuation.)
Is it meant as an example of the rule-breaking freedom of creative folk? Is there perhaps a secret cabbalistic or numerological reason? Or was there just a typo at some point of no return in the printing? The script offers no obvious clues to this mystery.
Directed by Carl Forsman, “Everythings Turning Into Beautiful” is obviously intended to progress from the chill of wintry loneliness to the heat of eroticism and confrontation, as its characters shed illusions, inhibitions and clothes. But it remains stolidly at that tepid level that cookbooks mean by room temperature.
The show’s suspense, such as it is, hinges on these questions: Will Brenda (Ms. Rubin-Vega) and Sam (Mr. Yoba) extend the boundaries of their hitherto strictly professional relationship? If they do, will they be able to avoid talking their love to death? Given to serenading each other with their own compositions, will they ever come up with one that doesn’t sound just like the one before?
The play is set in Brenda’s Chelsea apartment (a big-windowed, divided studio designed by Beowulf Boritt, and I want it), where Sam drops in unannounced at 2 a.m. They are both skirting that shadowy territory that used to be called middle age, before 40 became the new 30, and are eager and reluctant to admit and follow through on their mutual attraction. Sam has been married twice; Brenda, never, which leads to conversation heavy with words like intimacy, commitment, authenticity and accountability.
Sometimes Sam and Brenda banter competitively. Sometimes they do more poetic things like look earnestly into each other’s eyes and say what they see therein. “I see a gentle soul,” Brenda tells Sam. “I see an eagle. I see lost time.” Sam confesses, “I got this hole inside of me that I wake up with every morning.” Such lyricism cannot be contained by mere speech, and Sam and Brenda regularly bring out the guitar, or slip an instrumental track on the CD player, to segue into folky pop songs that further define how they feel.
“Beautiful” is a production of the New Group, a troupe that has done splendidly by revivals of late-2oth-century plays like Wallace Shawn’s “Aunt Dan and Lemon” and David Rabe’s “Hurlyburly” but has had less luck with original work. Mr. Rosenfeld’s meditation on romantic comedy inevitably invokes, to its disadvantage, comparisons to Terrence McNally’s “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune,” another play set during a single night about two lonesome souls running toward and away from love.
Within a framework of seemingly banal post-coital conversation, Mr. McNally managed to create affectingly real and distinctive portraits of ordinary people who have always seen themselves as losers. Though Mr. Rosenfeld clearly sets out the biographical differences between Sam and Brenda, much of what they say is interchangeable, in a pattern of emotional attack and retreat that has the rhythmic redundancy of a two-chord guitar riff. When stalemate looms, one will say to the other, “Wanna hear my new song?”
The songs aren’t bad, just kind of flat. (The best, by far, is the concluding version of the title number, a rap ballad that at least exudes some energy.) Mr. Yoba has an agreeably mellow voice that matches his calm, natural stage presence, which certainly has its virtues but is not the stuff of romantic fireworks. Ms. Rubin-Vega, the original Mimi of “Rent,” sings with appealing wistfulness, looks very sexy and is occasionally pretty funny, especially when Brenda recoils in explosive disgust on hearing the name of the last person Sam slept with.
But for all the talk about honesty and (sigh) authenticity in achieving (sigh) intimacy, what these characters say usually sounds as if it comes not from the heart, or even the head, but the well-oiled tongue. “Sometimes I just say things,” Sam admits. “They sound good.” It is one of the few confessions in the play that feels unconditionally true.
EVERYTHINGS TURNING INTO BEAUTIFUL
By Seth Zvi Rosenfeld; directed by Carl Forsman; songs by Jimmie James; sets by Beowulf Boritt; costumes by Theresa Squire; lighting by Josh Bradford; sound by Daniel Baker; production supervisor, Peter R. Feuchtwanger; production stage manager, Erin Grenier; props supervisor, Jay Duckworth; associate producer, Jill Bowman; associate artistic director, Ian Morgan; general manager, Amanda Brandes. Presented by the New Group, Scott Elliott, artistic director; Geoff Rich, executive director. At the New Group @ Theater Row, Acorn Theater, 410 West 42nd Street; (212) 279-4200. Through Sept. 2. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes.
WITH: Daphne Rubin-Vega (Brenda) and Malik Yoba (Sam).
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