Im Gonna Pray for You So Hard Review
In I'yard Gonna Pray for You So Hard, Halley Feiffer has written a correct curmudgeon of a fundamental role. David is a successful playwright, a Pulitzer Prize-winner who has no difficulty slotting himself directly into the bang-up American drama tradition. He'south also such a testy individual that even being in the same room as him for very long is an endurance.
This being theatre, it's a test we take elected to take, and the result has much of the fascination of an ongoing auto crash.
Adrian Lukis gives a compelling, bravura performance every bit a grapheme who is not easy to like, but whose flexing, energetic diatribe – you can practically feel its muscles rippling – is hard to plow away from. His partner in this two-hander, daughter Ella (Jill Winternitz), doesn't have that option. She'south clearly in awe of him, and the two of them are sitting up late at night in David's Upper West Side kitchen waiting for the opening night reviews of Ella'southward new show – a revolutionary Off Broadway Chekhov, in which Ella pointedly has not landed the lead – to come up in.
Information technology all provides rich material for monologue
I'm Gonna Pray for You So Difficult was itself a hit Off Broadway early in 2015, and its bones are steeped in theatre. David discovered the phase by bunking off school once a week to take in a evidence – he luxuriates in remembering how a top ticket in those days was only half dozen dollars (his wages from a side job in a cat food manufacturing plant). He estranged himself from his father in the procedure, but establish a substitute in the effigy of writer Milo Koplar, who clearly occupies a place in Broadway mythology close to real-life counterparts like O'Neill or Sondheim, references to whom pepper Feiffer's script. The play's title, appealingly for critics, riffs on how Koplar would respond to a bad review or (in a lovely chestnut here) to an player who had gone seriously off-script: rather than any furious invective, simply "I'm gonna pray for him". It'southward shorthand for laceration.
It all provides rich material for monologue, and it's one David has obviously been rehearsing over the years: when Ella inadvertently finishes a story she has clearly heard before, he's incensed (the reaction when she reminds him that his Oscar was actually just a nomination is no warmer). Winternitz's character has a sense of pronounced youth to her at first, as if she's barely out of college – "naïve" is the word her father uses, at times almost a taunt.
David, it seems, is very much intent on completing her education, creating her in his own paradigm. "Be transgressive, upsetting" is the gist of what he'southward instruction: avoid at all costs anything "safe", or worse withal the "hack", or false. It's not wholly original in itself, this doctrine that plays rather self-consciously on stereotypes of rebellion: no wonder that when David recalls his starting time meeting with his mentor Koplar, he comes up with the glorious phrase, "Ernest Hemingway meets Marlon Brando".
More than acutely, Feiffer'south earth is one in which each new generation tin found itself just on the bones of its predecessor, through rejection, past painfully moving on: this is no environment in which the luxury of tradition can accrue, the present edifice on the past. (Feiffer is herself an actress, and also the daughter of Jules Feiffer, the renowned cartoonist and playwright; much to muse on there.)
I'm Gonna Pray's chief activity – its audience with David, if you similar – runs for almost 75 minutes, earlier Feiffer closes with a quarter-hr coda which jumps frontwards an unspecified number of years, and turns the tables completely. Winternitz's Ella is unrecognisable, her open-faced innocence transformed into hard-nosed, cynical experience (David's metamorphosis is no less absolute). She may have absorbed her male parent'due south advice, just is at present enswathed in a new tartness that has absorbed all his erstwhile cynicism. Mind out in that endmost scene for some of the lines that Ella, now the accomplished performer in every sense, ponders over: lines, information technology seems, borrowed from an earlier generation, from another unreconciled rejection. Beneath it all, a terrifying fear of oblivion runs...
Just equally, beneath a surface that can sometimes seem a footling formulaic, I'k Gonna Pray hits home with a sense of primal instinct. Jake Smith's direction allows the performances to flow, in Adrian Lukis's case with virtuoso results. He practically chews the piece of furniture. Luckily for Anna Reid'due south prepare – it'southward the offset time I have seen the Finborough phase used in this alignment, and it works beautifully – non quite.
- I'm Gonna Pray for Yous And then Hard at the Finborough Theatre until 25 March
- Read more theatre reviews on theartsdesk
Source: https://theartsdesk.com/theatre/im-gonna-pray-you-so-hard-finborough-theatre
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