Many stories about a get-together or reunion build up to a big, cathartic blow-up. Theresa Rebeck’s new play, “Poor Behavior,” opens with one.
And it’s all downhill from there for the show’s two couples, who were getting ready for a weekend of gourmet muffins and country-house loafing upstate.
The reason the getaway goes horribly wrong is simple: One of the four characters, Ian (Brian Avers), is a total sociopath. The Irishman starts off as your run-of-the-mill sort-of-charming rogue, the kind of guy who pretends not to know the difference between being opinionated and being rude.
We first see him in the middle of a heated argument with one of his hosts, Ella (Katie Kreisler), hurling insults at her and her countrymen — “You still coo about this idea of American exceptionalism,” Ian says among other niceties, “so yes that makes you a crazy f–king American.”
It’s not long before we realize this guy’s not a truth-teller, but a jerk.
In a normal world — that is, one where a playwright doesn’t need two hours’ worth of material — Ella and her husband, Peter (Jeff Biehl), would have gotten Ian’s number early enough and forcefully ejected his toxic ass.
But no, they endure not just Ian’s lies and mean-spirited snark, but also the paranoid, passive-aggressive manipulations of his wife, Maureen (Heidi Armbruster).
Despite its committed cast — Kreisler is especially funny as a woman who’s not as in control as she thinks — the show ends up going in circles. Rebeck has shown a certain knack for writing entertainingly antagonistic characters in the likes of “Seminar” and on TV’s “Smash,” but here she flounders, seemingly unsure of what she’s writing about. As a satire of contemporary upper-middle-class mores, “Poor Behavior” is pretty toothless. “It’s early for brunch, isn’t it?” Ella says, to which Peter replies, “We’ll just call it food then.”
Jokes about brunch, oh my!
More interesting is the way the screwed-up couple slowly contaminates the stable one. Ian and Maureen are lethal organisms, turning their appetite for destruction both onto themselves and onto others.
Yet Rebeck only flirts with her premise’s more troubling implication, forgetting that the deep end of the pool is more intriguing than the
shallow one. Next time, she should dive in.