Stage: The Understudy

Laura Pels Theatre

New York

(212) 719-1300

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Playwright Theresa Rebeck’s latest is an “amusing riff on the theater-world pecking order,” said David Rooney in Variety. Harry is a failing actor who’s embittered by his latest gig—understudy to a half-talented Hollywood action star named Jake, who’s improbably playing the lead role in a Broadway run of a fictitious Kafka masterpiece. Meanwhile, Harry’s jilted former lover, Roxanne, is the production’s stage manager. Already a “hyper-agitated” mess, Roxanne flits about the stage trying not to unravel in Harry’s presence. Rebeck’s play has all the ingredients of a deliciously scathing satire, though the characters lack “any real depth.”

Fortunately, a star turn by Broadway veteran Julie White makes that lack of depth easy to overlook, said Dan Kois in New York. White is theater’s “most accomplished purveyor of barely restrained hysteria,” and watching her Roxanne fall apart and try to reassemble herself in front of her ex-beau turns out to be “the great pleasure” of The Understudy. One can’t help but be in awe of White’s talents, whether listening to her “loopy voice rise in panic and fall in sorrow” or seeing her retreat into her purple hoodie when Harry and Jake stop a rehearsal to trade barbs over the meaning of Kafka. She’s undoubtedly the best of the play’s three actors, though her co-stars—Justin Kirk and Mark Paul Gosselaar—excel at the difficult task of performing a play within a play.

The play really gets rolling when Kirk’s Harry and Gosselaar’s Jake settle into their “Kafka roles,” said Sandy MacDonald in Theatermania.com. As they play an “implacable prosecutor” and a “clueless detainee,” the lines between reality and acting become blurred. Director Scott Ellis wisely advised his actors to play the Kafka scenes sincerely, rather than as parody. Rebeck’s play is thin in spots, but she knows her Kafka. It’s “easy to see how a schlock star starved for substance and a lowly but skilled understudy might bond over Kafka’s work,” and that reason alone makes The Understudy worth seeing.