The World Beyond BetterMost > The Culture Tent
Nick Payne's IF THERE IS I HAVEN’T FOUND IT YET with Jake Gyllenhaal
Aloysius J. Gleek:
http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117948384
Off Broadway
If There Is
I Haven't Found It Yet
By Marilyn Stasio
Posted: Thu., Sep. 20, 2012, 7:32pm PT
Anna Funke and Jake Gyllenhaal in
"If There Is I Haven't Found It Yet."
The raw pain of a teenage girl is not an easy thing to witness, and scribe Nick Payne makes no attempt to sugarcoat the anguish in his blistering domestic drama, "If There Is I Haven't Found It Yet." But a compassionate production from ardent director Michael Longhurst -- one with committed perfs from selfless thesps Jake Gyllenhaal, Brian F. O'Byrne, and Michelle Gomez and a brave turn from young Annie Funke -- can provide the dubious comfort of a bloodletting.
British wunderkind Nick Payne (whose award-winning "Constellations" is about to transfer to the West End) can't claim originality for penning yet another dysfunctional family drama about yet another set of self-absorbed parents with their heads so far up their butts they're oblivious to the misery of their own suffering offspring. But passion counts for plenty, and there's plenty to go around in this bitter little narrative about a grossly overweight (not so gross by American standards, but hey) girl named Anna, played by baby Yank thesp Funke with a badly bruised soul and a killer of a British accent, who has become the punching bag of the bullies at her school.
Anna is not only physically fat and mentally sluggish, but sullen and emotionally withdrawn -- not the most endearing qualities in a kid so desperately in need of parental affection and concern. For all the character's neediness, Funke asks for nothing, expects nothing, and takes it all on the chin in a performance that would have a less committed thesp gasping for a breath of air.
And where, pray tell, are Anna's parents in all this? They're pathologically distracted by the detritus of their lives -- a huge pile of junk that is picked off, one bulky piece at a time, after each scene, to be tossed into a deep watery trough that stretches across the full length of the stage. The symbolism is more than a bit obvious in director Longhurst's production, but effective for all that.
Big daddy George, in a drop-dead-brilliant turn by O'Byrne, is the character with the most baggage, a fanatical environmentalist consumed by the book he's writing about the deadly impact of the human-generated garbage choking the natural environment. It's an astonishing perf, and absolutely terrifying for the distance it puts between this stupid man and his neglected child.
Anna's mother, Fiona, in an equally breathless perf from English stage stalwart Michelle Gomez, is no less oblivious. A teacher who had Anna transferred to her own school, presumably to keep the girl under her wing, this self-absorbed mother has the temerity to question the authenticity of the child's experiences.
The only person with the slightest inkling of what it feels like to be an outcast like Anna is George's younger brother, Terry, a jumped-up, juiced-up, totally screwed-up good-for-nothing with the good sense to know that he's good for nothing. Terry has a keen and incredibly snide sense of humor as far as his brother is concerned. "How about weed?" he asks, when George delivers one of his endlessly boring lectures about the environmental impact of petrol and cheeseburgers and lattes and everything else under the sun. "What's the carbon footprint of a joint?"
No wonder Anna loves her bad-boy uncle, as do we all. They speak the same language because they feel the same pain. In Gyllenhaal's wonderfully manic, crazy-like-a-fox perf, it's fairly obvious that Terry, no less than Anna, is one of those endangered species being pushed off the edge of the planet. Unless, of course, they manage to spit out the indigestible garbage that people like George keep trying to shove down their throats.
Laura Pels Theater; 408 seats; $100 top
George - Brian F. O'Byrne
Fiona - Michelle Gomez
Anna - Annie Funke
Terry - Jake Gyllenhaal
Sets, Beowulf Boritt; costumes, Susan Hilferty; lighting, Natasha Katz; original music & sound, Obadiah Eaves; dialect coach, Ben Furey; production stage manager, J. Philip Bassett. Opened Sept. 20, 2012. Reviewed Sept. 14. Running time: 1 HOUR, 35 MIN.
Aloysius J. Gleek:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/theater_dance/review-bullying-and-climate-change-entwine-in-clever-if-there-is-i-havent-found-it-yet/2012/09/20/154bd592-0387-11e2-9132-f2750cd65f97_story.html
Review:
Bullying and climate change entwine in clever
If There Is
I Haven’t Found It Yet
By Associated Press
Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Gomez, Annie Funke, and Brian F. O’Byrne in a scene from Nick
Payne’s “If There Is I Haven’t Found It Yet,” performing off-Broadway at Roundabout at
Laura Pels Theatre in New York.
NEW YORK — What if you’re drowning in misery and nobody seems to care? The despair of being bullied is one theme of Nick Payne’s clever, edgy domestic drama, “If There Is I Haven’t Found It Yet,” about a British family that knows it’s falling apart but can’t seem to take action to stop it.
Payne’s other concern is whether people can care enough about global climate change to actually change their ways and work to prevent it. He deftly interweaves these concepts as his characters ricochet from humor to heartbreak, in the engaging, layered and thoughtfully-observed production that opened Thursday night off-Broadway at the Roundabout Theatre Company’s Laura Pels Theatre.
Without leaking too many details, wonderfully unexpected things happen with water and props in director Michael Longhurst’s exciting, inventive staging. A delicate waterfall and a pool provide dramatic metaphors for the overwhelming unhappiness building within the central character, an overweight and bullied teenage girl named Anna whose family seems remarkably unable to figure out how to help her.
Payne writes dialogue the way real people talk, often in awkward fragments, with sentences left dangling and important words unsaid. Anna’s academic father George stammers and repeats himself, while George’s uneducated brother Terry barks staccato sentences laden with curses. The f-word is hurled more than 150 times, but after a while, you won’t even notice it.
Annie Funke is vulnerable and appealing as 15-year-old Anna, who can’t believe she gets suspended from school for lashing back at her tormentors. Funke stomps around in perfect imitation of an angry teenage girl, sensitively calibrating her performance between moods of infatuation, disappointment, eager hope and sullen anguish.
Brian F. O’Byrne gives an aloof, slightly goofy air to George, an environmental scientist obsessed with global warming. He’s preoccupied with writing a book that he hopes will change the world, about the carbon emissions attached to everyday objects. But knowing that a single latte a day is attached to as much CO2 as a “60-mile drive in the average car” could potentially render people as inert as Anna’s helpless parents.
Anna’s uncle Terry is played with zeal by Jake Gyllenhaal, extremely effective in his New York stage debut. George’s charming but aimless younger brother bursts in on the family after a few years away. Gyllenhaal crackles with self-loathing and anger, as Terry hopes to mend a romance he destroyed. Terry takes a kindly interest in Anna and their friendship blossoms, but then he gets bogged down in typical poor decision-making, leaving Anna more despondent than before.
Michelle Gomez plays Anna’s mother, Fiona, as sensible but a bit remote. Preoccupied with running the school musical, she’s tried to stop the bullying by moving Anna to the school where she teaches, but that only makes things worse.
The combined inability of these three adults to understand and act upon the depth of Anna’s growing misery sparks a cataclysmic situation, much like CO2 piling up in our atmosphere.
Kudos to Beowulf Boritt for set design, and to the whole production crew for creating major watery magic. Whether this family can pull themselves out of their troubled waters is another matter, but they’re worth rooting for in this complex, compelling drama.
___
Online:
http://www.roundabouttheatre.org
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Aloysius J. Gleek:
http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20364394_20631002,00.html
Stage Review
EW's GRADE
B
If There Is
I Haven't Found It Yet
Reviewed by Thom Geier
Originally posted Sep 20, 2012
Annie Funke and Jake Gyllenhaal
Just about everything in British playwright Nick Payne's If There Is I Haven't Found It Yet is topical: There's a bullied plus-size 15-year-old named Anna (Annie Funke). Her clueless dad, George (Mildred Pierce 's Brían F. O'Byrne), is a global-warming obsessive writing a book about the carbon footprint of everyday living. Her teacher mother, Fiona (Michelle Gomez), is distracted by her own mom's descent into Alzheimer's. And then there's Anna's ne'er-do-well uncle [Terry], whose chief claim to our attention may be the fact that he's played by Jake Gyllenhaal (in his New York stage debut). It's a suitably recessive role for the young movie star, who nails the slackerly aloofness (and British accent), if not the undercurrents of anger that would lead him to trash a romantic rival's car.
Director Michael Longhurst works overtime to make Payne's symbolism as literal as possible. There's a vast pool of water at the front edge of the stage at the Roundabout's Off Broadway Laura Pels Theatre into which the actors toss furniture and props as the play progresses, detritus meant to evoke the rising tides from melting polar ice caps. The climax offers a striking bit of stagecraft, but one that threatens to overwhelm the slender banks of Payne's story and the modest trajectories of his characters, so blinkered by their private fixations that they often fail to see the big picture. B
Details
Opening Date: Sep 20, 2012;
Lead Performances: Annie Funke, Michelle Gomez, Jake Gyllenhaal and Brian F. O'Byrne;
Director: Michael Longhurst;
Genre: Drama
(Tickets: roundabouttheatre.org)
Aloysius J. Gleek:
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/theatre/2012/10/01/121001crth_theatre_lahr
The Theatre
Ties that Blind
by John Lahr
“If There Is I Haven’t Found It Yet.”
Illustration by http://paulthurlby.com/
(....)
When they are both called to account, the indictment comes from George's deadhead younger brother, Terry (Jake Gyllenhaal), who returns from a year and a half of wanderlust to crash at their house, and forms a friendship with Anna. "That girl has been criminally fucking neglected!" Terry shouts.
As Gyllenhall superbly plays him, Terry is a bearded, feral soul, who sidles into view in a gray knit cap and a yellow T-shirt, at once heartbroken and hapless. "I, I. I fuck things up. And it makes me mad," he says. He's full of good intentions and bad advice. (He suggests to Anna that she tells her school tormentor "that if she gives you any more grief, I'll be taking shit on her doorstep for the next month and a half.") He can't mobilize thought; he is cluless--a state that is betrayed by his syntax. His sentences, like his life, have no direction or resolution. "Prb'ly shoulda rung or something, but," he says when he sees Anna (whom he addresses as "Hannah") for the first time. "Phone was fucked and I thought, by the time I've arsed around getting change for the fucking. You know the phone, and that, thought I might as well just."
(....)
Gyllenhaal parses every piquant note of Terry's paradoxical nature, keeping his danger and his decency in balance. In his unboundaried moments, Terry offers Anna beer, condoms, and a joint, and lets her slip out on a date, At other times, he seems to have a more adult purchase on reality. "What's y'daughter's favorite subject, George?" he asks his brother. "What's her favorite meal? Favorite film, favorite band. Any of it. Stab in the dark, George. Need to think about what y'doing."
Meryl:
Nice caricature of Jake. 8)
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version