Acutely drawn personalities, snappy dialogue, and plenty of humor have reliably characterized the stage work of John Patrick Shanley (Doubt, Moonstruck) over time. That’s what makes the strained and confused The Pushover, his new full-length one-act, so disappointing. A zany story of three women entangled in an erotic web of business, crime, and relationship chaos, it might conceivably have worked if it had gone all the way into absurdity. But played straight, this script and these characters with all their yelling just don’t make sense.
That forces the cast, which includes Rebecca De Mornay of ’80s and ’90s movie fame, to have to work too hard – to act too hard – trying to manifest depth and pathos that simply aren’t there. The Pushover did mostly hold my attention, but mostly because I kept expecting the story to click somehow, for logic or at least sense to emerge.
De Mornay plays Evelyn, a manipulative, cruel and possibly sociopathic woman who has escaped a marriage to an apparently equally awful man into a series of relationships with women. Though she has no empathy for others, we do come to see Evelyn’s own vulnerability and a long-hidden key to her personality eventually. But the play and De Mornay’s fiery yet somehow static performance don’t give us reason to care.
Christina Toth (Shawn Salley Photography)
First, though, me meet Pearl (hotly embodied by Di Zhu), an ex of Evelyn’s who remains under the older woman’s sway. To a therapist (played woodenly by Christopher Sutton) she unpeels some of her psyche: She’s a chef and entrepreneur, religious and volatile.
Then we’re at Evelyn’s residential spa where Evelyn has summoned Soochi (Christina Toth), an ex-lover and business partner of Pearl’s who has fleeced Pearl out of all her money. Toth’s performance is satisfyingly dangerous for a while, making the story come to life briefly and haltingly, but as the tale grows more unlikely, we start to realize that all that acting is signifying nothing much. Pearl especially is a figure I found myself really wanting to like, but her stubbornness and inability to see what was right in front of her grew impossible to believe after a while – the character isn’t given adequate realistic depth.
The story ultimately tries to draw a dichotomy between “good” and “bad” people. The mystery is whether Soochi is truly a manipulative schemer, like Evelyn, or whether she has a heart, or a “soul” in the play’s parlance, that’s merely been subsumed by desperate circumstances. Pearl, for her part, refuses to believe that either of the other women is a truly bad person, even in a climactic scene where violence breaks out. And what about Pearl herself? Her hands aren’t exactly clean in all the mishigas. But none of it makes character-sense any more than the play makes story-sense.
The laughs are few and of the cheapest insult-comedy kind. We wait and wait for something to solidify. In the end it’s not Soochi who lacks a soul, nor Evelyn. It’s The Pushover.
The Pushover is at the Chain Theatre through April 26.