In his new play, “Middletown,” Will Eno looks at a small American city whose most distinctive quality is that it has no distinctive qualities.
“There’s a meadow you could walk to,” a guide tells a couple of tourists. “Just nice grass and trees, nothing noticeably historical going on.”
Mrs. Swanson (Heather Burns), who recently moved there to start a family with her husband, is made to feel right at home by the locals. Chief among them are a sweet librarian (Georgia Engel, as delightfully daffy as on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show”) and a handyman named John Dodge (Linus Roache of “Law & Order”).
We could be in a more modern version of Grover’s Corners from “Our Town,” a place where strip malls are as alien as iPads, and where a mild eccentricity seems to be the norm.
Middletown may look like an old-fashioned version of homey, but Eno — whose “Thom Pain (based on nothing)” was a downtown hit in 2005 — makes that normalcy seem slightly odd. Avoiding the aw-shucks naturalism common to plays about Anytown, USA, he pulls us into something closer to David Lynch’s Americana — except less dark, more gentle. The mood is surreal, with extra-dry humor.
“I get these awful panic attacks,” John says earnestly. “They’re actually how I stay in shape.”
At regular intervals, the actors step out of character and address the audience, further increasing our emotional distance from the goings-on.
But sustaining this low-key, mild kookiness over two hours is hard. Under Ken Rus Schmoll’s direction, the actors, while generally appealing, tend to speak in mellow monotones. This works wonders with the humor in the first act, but becomes problematic in the more serious second, which shows how loneliness is wrecking the town, and even takes a turn toward the metaphysical.
Eno’s slender creation isn’t equipped to bear this extra narrative weight. By the end, it has collapsed under itself, leaving behind only baffled nothingness.
elisabeth.vincentelli
@nypost.com