You can’t blame Hamish Linklater for playing it safe with “The Vandal”: This is the actor’s playwriting debut, after all. Don’t want to go crazy and take a big public spill.
So for his dramedy, Linklater (“Seminar,” “The Merchant of Venice,” “The School for Lies”) opted for just three characters on a basic set. The show lasts a slim 70 minutes, and is staged in an intimate TriBeCa theater. As for the story, it’s simple enough: Strangers meet on a wintry, cold night, and proceed to discover things about each other.
All well and good, and Linklater sets up dryly funny exchanges in the first half.
Eventually, though, you start to wonder why he bothered. There’s no urge to tell a story here — the show feels like a glorified writing-class assignment.
It takes a little while for that realization to sink in because director Jim Simpson assembled an overqualified cast that makes the material sound a lot better than it is.
When “The Vandal” was first announced last year, Holly Hunter was slated to play the key role of Margaret. Now it’s impossible to imagine that unflappable, acerbic woman as anybody but Deirdre O’Connell (“Magic/Bird,” “In the Wake”).
Margaret is waiting at an upstate New York bus stop, where she’s approached by gangly teenager Robert (Noah Robbins, “The Twenty-Seventh Man”).
O’Connell and Robbins are in total sync playing off the contrast between the guarded Margaret and the overly chatty Robert.
And anything can set the kid off: At one point he launches into an extended riff on the metaphysics of Budweiser and Cool Ranch Doritos. This type of funny but ultimately meaningless writing betrays Linklater’s rookie status.
Margaret is more evenly matched with the gruff owner of the liquor store near the bus stop (Zach Grenier, best known as family lawyer David Lee on “The Good Wife”), where she agrees to buy beer for the underage Robert.
Like so many shows by contemporary young playwrights, “The Vandal” is about trying to make connections. We’ve been there a lot lately, so Linklater throws a final twist that lands halfway between O. Henry and M. Night Shyamalan. It’s meant to make you reconsider everything that preceded, but the show — likable but flimsy — doesn’t bear overly close scrutiny.