Watching Craig Lucas’ new drama is like listening to the confessionals at a 12-step meeting: What’s deeply meaningful to the speakers may be tedious for everyone else.
Lucas (“Prelude to a Kiss”) has been open about his past problems with addictions, and has clearly written this from the heart. But that doesn’t excuse the windiness of “Ode to Joy,” now receiving its world premiere by Rattlestick Playwrights Theater. The flaws in his writing are only magnified by his self-indulgent direction.
It starts in a bar, with the meeting of struggling artist Adele (Kathryn Erbe) and cardiac surgeon Bill (Arliss Howard), whose wife committed suicide years earlier. After a lengthy conversation that includes references to both Kierkegaard and Plato, they’re soon engaged in a drunken hookup. To say that it doesn’t go well is an understatement: She vomits into his open mouth, and both end up bleeding after a glass breaks.
As we shift back and forth in the play’s 15-year timeline, we also see the troubled relationship between Adele and her other lover, Mala (Roxanna Hope), a pharmaceutical executive who, upon their first meeting, hardly warms to Adele’s large-scale, thematically dark paintings.
“Do you have something without dread?” she asks. “Something that would make me want to suppress the suicidal impulse?”
The same question may well be asked by theatergoers forced to suffer through this clearly cathartic exercise.
By the time its characters have suffered through cancer, heart disease, addiction and divorce, you may want a stiff drink yourself.