Welcome to the most boring midlife crisis of the year. No matter what happens to Harper Regan, the title character of Simon Stephens’ new drama, it’s hard to care.
Her supervisor snottily denies her time off to visit her ailing father: We don’t care.
She discovers her dad has died: don’t care.
She goes AWOL from her husband and daughter: still nothing.
The most emotion this show creates is the joy of finally being able to leave the theater after two hours and 20 minutes of mind-numbing soul-searching.
Stephens is from the UK and made his local debut last year with “Bluebird,” also for the Atlantic Theater Company and also directed by Gaye Taylor Upchurch.
“Bluebird” — in which Simon Russell Beale drove a cab — was a tepid show, but it feels like a white-knuckle ride compared to the perfect storm that is “Harper Regan”: a mediocre play given a mediocre production.
As written, the 41-year-old Harper is a cypher, and the performance by Atlantic co-founder and stalwart Mary McCann fails to flesh her out.
Among the few things we learn is that Harper likes bands such as the Smiths and the Slits. Bigger issues having to do with her loyalty to her troubled husband, Seth (Gareth Saxe), are pushed aside.
Fine, so Harper’s an enigma — we still need to be invested in what happens to her, otherwise there’s no show.
Yet as we follow her through a series of more or less preposterous encounters — with a handsome high school boy, a kind nurse, a drunken journalist, a one-night fling — she continues to act like a wet blanket, which may be the least interesting type of character ever invented.
Helping us pass the time are some worthy supporting turns.
Christopher Innvar is cautiously warm as Harper’s hookup, and Stephen Tyrone Williams confirms the good impression he made in “My Children! My Africa!” with his quietly sexy teenager.
And then there’s Mary Beth Peil — last seen in “Follies,” and a semi-regular on TV’s “The Good Wife” — as Harper’s mother, Alison. In just a few minutes, Peil fills the stage with life and makes us feel a real person has finally entered the show.
Alison manages to keep her cool when Harper accusingly tells her, “I just wanted you to love me without condition.” At this point, Mum should tell her sad-sack daughter to grow a backbone and get a life, but sadly, the play’s too polite for that.