Review of 'A Second Hand Memory'

This is what watching something by Woody Allen has come to: Sitting there and wondering how much time will pass before a homely middle-aged man professes his love for a sweet-faced gal young enough to be his daughter. She, naturally, adores him.

In Allen's new play A Second Hand Memory, it takes more than half an hour to reach that point, and I must admit I was temporarily fooled. The play is set in Brooklyn in the 1950s, and the first five characters to appear are an older couple, their daughter, son and daughter-in-law, so I thought (hoped?) we might be in for some Radio Days-type nostalgia. But I had forgotten that Woody Allen is no longer capable of writing a Radio Days-type story—or any story whose plot doesn't turn on an intergenerational extramarital affair. And by intermission, it also had become clear that A Second Hand Memory would fulfill the other requirement for membership in Allen's post-Soon Yi canon: Every female character is either an idealized ingénue, a tramp or a burdensome wife.

The men in A Second Hand Memory are miserable beasts too. Every one of them not only cheats on his wife but harangues her cruelly about how much he prefers the other woman. The wives are defined mostly by their bitterness and vindictiveness. I can't recall the last time I saw a play that left me so baffled as to which character was supposed to get our sympathy. Judging from the fondness and approbation with which the family's absentee daughter, Alma, narrates her brother Eddie's story, I guess it would be Eddie. Yes, poor Eddie, who gives up a promising career in Hollywood to help his ailing father and marries on the rebound after the love of his life abandons him for her older paramour. But his continued infatuation with her after she turns into a pretentious, name-dropping social climber upon marrying the old guy (who's a Hollywood agent) is moronic and illogical. Eddie even lambastes her for becoming a superficial, shallow phony whom he never wants to see again, whereupon she makes herself even more endearing by confessing that yeah, she loved Eddie but the older man had more money. So Eddie kisses her. How romantic.

Then, in the name of love, Eddie does something that would grievously hurt his parents and wife. Alma reminisces about it with great cheer. Thus, we've got an unlikable protagonist and an unlikable narrator. Alma was thrown out of her parents' home after she had an abortion, but she squanders our sympathy with her viciously spiteful and sardonic attitude toward her family. She's also a liar, boasting that after the split with her parents she "never went back and never looked back," although that's exactly what she's doing by narrating the play (it's called A Second Hand Memory because she was not present for the events she's recalling). No vulnerability is revealed in Alma's delivery of the "never looked back" line or anything else she says.

I had to remind myself while watching A Second Hand Memory that it was written by someone once considered America's greatest funnyman. The play is virtually laugh-free—not because Allen's jokes fall flat but because they're nonexistent. Some of his most memorable (and quotable) scenes in earlier works involved one-liner-infused badinage between children and overbearing parents, but there's no such humor in Memory. At the performance I attended, the audience laughed the most when a character proclaimed "We can't help who we love," recognizing it as a paraphrase of Allen's "the heart wants what it wants" defense of his real love life. Overall, the script is on par with a playwriting student's freshman effort. Among its faults: Consistency in characters' personalities is sacrificed to move the story along or create a conflict, as when Eddie's mother, Fay, a stickler about honoring one's responsibility to family, is unfazed by her brother's child bride (for whom he deserted a wife of 20 years) or when that philandering brother is enraged by another relative's infidelity.

While Allen has wasted his own talent, his reprehensible drama wastes the talent of several familiar and reliable performers. The cast includes Elizabeth Marvel, muse of classics-reinventor Ivo van Hove; Kate Blumberg, who admirably took over The Syringa Tree from its creator; Dominic Chianese, who'd been acting on U.S. stages for 30-plus years before he became famous as The Sopranos' Uncle Junior; Michael McKean, beloved by Christopher Guest junkies and late of Hairspray; and Beth Fowler, one of the most employed stage actresses of her generation. Stymied by shoddy character development, distasteful storylines and most of all their unpleasant characters, no one gives a performance worthy of their abilities or seems to connect with others on stage.

Through January 23 at Atlantic Theater Company, 336 W. 20th Street; 212-239-6200, www.atlantictheater.org for tickets & information.

Photo, from left: Erica Leerhsen, McKean, Fowler, Blumberg and Nicky Katt [photo by Carol Rosegg].