Ever felt trapped at a party listening to a windbag telling an endless story with no apparent point? Such is the experience of watching “Are You There, McPhee?”
John Guare’s new play, receiving its world premiere at Princeton’s McCarter Theater, reveals far more imagination than needed discipline.
Much like his recent “A Free Man of Color,” this absurdist tale proves that the years have done little to diminish Guare’s eagerness to take stylistic risks. But despite some amusing moments, they fail to pay off .
The play is structured as an extended flashback related by Edmund “Mundie” Gowry (Paul Gross), a not-too-successful playwright. It concerns his ill-fated 1975 trip to Nantucket when the tenants of his home there were arrested for running a child pornography ring.
Through plot machinations too torturous to explain, he winds up trapped in a house with a couple of unruly children who have been left there by their au pairs, named Peter and Wendy. The Peter Pan reference is left hanging.
The overlong two hour and 45 minute play features a stream of other cultural name-drops, including Roman Polanski, Walt Disney, Jorge Luis Borges, and — not surprisingly considering the setting — “Jaws.” Some of them, including Robert Redford and Jane Fonda, the proposed stars of a remake of Hitchcock’s “Suspicion” for which Gowry is writing the screenplay, are represented by lavish puppets.
“I hate magical realism,” complains one of Gowry’s listeners, as if Guare was anticipating the inevitable criticism. It’s certainly nearly impossible to follow his convoluted narrative, in which an 11-pound lobster also figures prominently. That would be fine if the writing displayed more wit. But despite such occasionally funny gags as Gowry sprinkling Ritalin on the children’s pizza, the humor is mostly laborious.
Director Sam Buntrock, who also staged the recent Broadway revival of “Sunday in the Park With George,” has provided an admirably slick staging. And Gross (TV’s “Due South” ) is drolly funny as the beleaguered playwright.
But it’s hard not to wish that Guare, whose most successful play remains the relatively grounded “Six Degrees of Separation,” would stop trying so hard to dazzle.