It’s tough to have it all, and pressure is mount ing in two yuppie London households. The women slide into frustration as they juggle personal and professional stress, the men look for relief in alcohol and work. Of course, there’s a gay friend on hand, ever ready with support and quips.
What’s the English equivalent of “yadda, yadda, yadda”?
Lucinda Coxon’s “Happy Now?” is frustrating because it’s just good enough to make you realize how much better it should be. Coxon hits a nice balance between comedy and drama, but her knives need to be a lot sharper to cut through the banality of her play’s premise and its central characters.
Harried, high-strung Kitty (Mary Bacon) is paired with a laid-back husband, Johnny (Kelly AuCoin). He keeps busy with important things, like planning grammar lessons for his elementary-school class or confronting the couple’s friends, Miles (Quentin Mare) and Bea (Kate Arrington), when they enroll their kid in a parochial institution.
Things aren’t rosy with Miles and Bea either, by the way: He drinks too much, and she’s so idle that she can afford to endlessly agonize about minute decorating decisions.
Stuck in the middle of this happy-go-lucky quartet is Carl (Brian Keane), whose relationship with the younger (and unseen) Antoniou may or may not go well — it’s hard to care because, despite Keane’s warm portrayal, Carl is your standard-issue gay confidant.
Coxon keeps things at a boil, and they never spill over. This may be fitting for a play about repressed dissatisfaction, but it doesn’t make watching it particularly compelling.
Under Liz Diamond’s direction, this Primary Stages production waffles between British-style naturalism and self-conscious touches that come across as affected. Chief among the last are the poetic projections during scene changes and Bacon’s highly mannered performance as Kitty. She’s fun enough to watch, all lopsided smiles, furrowed brow and bird-like twitches, but she stands out from the rest of the cast, which plays things closer to the vest.
At nearly 2½ hours, “Happy Now?” is like a party guest that goes on and on without getting anywhere. It’s occasionally funny, occasionally insightful, but once it’s gone, you don’t really miss it.
elisabeth.vincentelli
@nypost.com