Broadway these days is specializing in famous people played by even more famous people: Tom Hanks as the tabloid columnist Mike McAlary, Bette Midler as super-agent Sue Mengers and Holland Taylor as Texas Gov. Ann Richards.
Now off-Broadway’s getting into the act. But as its convoluted title indicates, Lucas Hnath’s “A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney” isn’t a straight-on biography.
Set designer Mimi Lien turned the tiny Soho Rep into a sterile conference room, all dark wood paneling, red carpeting and fluorescent lighting. The characters — Walt Disney, his older brother Roy, his son-in-law Ron and his unnamed daughter — sit on office chairs behind a table, facing us.
Walt (Larry Pine) explains they’re going to go through a screenplay he himself wrote. He leads the proceedings, reading out loud scene headings and directions such as, “The camera cuts back to, Interior, Walt’s office, night.”
He and Roy (the ever-reliable Frank Wood, late of “Clybourne Park”) trade sentence fragments rather than fully formed lines. Eventually, the herky-jerky flow eases up and the play — directed in an appropriately clinical style by Sarah Benson — settles into a groove.
The brothers often circle back to two topics: “White Wilderness,” a 1958 nature film propagating the myth that lemmings commit mass suicide, and Walt’s obsession with building his dream city in Florida.
Hnath depicts Walt as a tyrannical control freak with a God complex — including a wish for eternal life via cryogenics. He despises Ron (Brian Sgambati) but uses him to undermine Roy. His angry daughter (Amanda Quaid) tries to resist but ends up in a corner, defeated.
Pine makes a mesmerizing Walt, puffing on cigarettes and coughing up blood in handkerchiefs in between increasingly patchy thoughts. By the end, he sounds like a cross between Yoda and Gertrude Stein, railing against a Florida man who dared to get “in the way, of my liberty, what I want, not free to do, not like America, not right to change the plan, plans and change in plans.”
This aggressively stylized approach can make “Public Reading” too self-consciously arty. But in its roundabout way, the show’s a devastating portrait of a man for whom make-believe was more real than reality itself.