The new Broadway anthology “Relatively Speaking” is subtitled “3 One-Act Comedies,” and there’s some truth to that: It is indeed made up of a trio of short plays — by heavy-hitters Woody Allen, Ethan Coen and Elaine May.
But “comedies” implies humor, wit and gags, and they’re in short supply in the show, flatly directed by John Turturro. Subpar at best, these efforts — I use the term loosely, because it looks as if nobody tried very hard — come nowhere near the authors’ best. This is an egregious case of selling your audience short.
Let’s deal with the worst first.
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When it comes to the movies, Coen and Allen have been doing well lately — the first with “True Grit,” the second with “Midnight in Paris.” But their pieces here, which bookend the show, are just lazy.
Coen’s opening trifle, “Talking Cure,” might have been dashed off between takes on a shoot. Larry (Danny Hoch), a burly inmate in a mental hospital, meets with his nebbish shrink (Jason Kravits).
“Somebody’s always the d – – k,” Larry says, explaining his philosophy of life — though the big lug also knows about semantics and astronomer Johannes Kepler. We then move on to a flashback of his expectant mother and her husband. They scream a lot, but this adds little.
Recalling his ghastly “humor” pieces for The New Yorker, Allen’s “Honeymoon Motel” plays as if it spent decades in a freezer. Rest assured, though, that ticket prices very much belong to 2011.
Like a Jewish version of “Benny Hill,” this would-be-bawdy farce follows a young bride (Ari Graynor) and her love (Steve Guttenberg) into a cheesy suite. Somehow their families — including Julie Kavner and Mark Linn-Baker — track them down, and hilarity ensues. Or it would, if this were funny.
So we have to not grin and bear Lorena Bobbitt jokes and musty zingers like Kavner’s “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but it’s the times it’s not that you have to fake a headache.”
The filling in this stale sandwich of horrors is May’s “George Is Dead,” and it is indeed somewhat meatier.
Marlo Thomas plays Doreen, a rich Hamptons housewife who suddenly finds herself a widow and reaches out to her old nanny’s daughter, Carla (Lisa Emery). No, it doesn’t make sense, but go with it: May is the only one who milks something out of her premise.
Narcissistic, demanding and manipulatively rude, Doreen knows she’s shallow, and she’s OK with that. “What will I do?” she muses, “I don’t have the depth to feel this bad.”
It’s fun to watch this aging pampered brat use wide-eyed helplessness to boss around the fragile Carla, who’s pushed into scraping the salt off Doreen’s Saltines.
Still, you wonder why Carla puts up with it. You may also wonder why theatergoers aren’t rioting for a refund.