Howard Miller — Theater Critic

If playwright Tom Stoppard stays true to his word and Leopoldstadt turns out to be the last play he writes, it would be a fitting and worthy way to bookend a long and illustrious career dating back to the middle of the last century. As it happens, it is also an equally fitting tribute to Stoppard's Jewish roots, a personal history he only had a vague knowledge of until he was in his fifties and a cousin filled him in on what his mother barely ever spoke to him about, including the fact that all four of his grandparents and other family members had perished in Nazi concentration camps. Herein lies the impetus, if not the biographical specificity, for the play that opened tonight at the Longacre Theatre.

Something is amiss overall. Hangmen does not work the way it did at the Atlantic Theatre Company, and there is more to it than the transfer to a larger Broadway venue. The play requires taut and cohesive directing and a uniformity of style to hold it together. Here, it seems as though the actors have been left to their own devices to figure out their characters and how best to perform them. It takes a lot of work to pull things back together after a break of four years, and an ensemble work like this requires exquisite timing and consistency, elements that are, alas, in short supply.

I will just say that after a disconcerting but all-too-believable set of revelations that up the ante of satire into something far more cutting and unsettling, the play oversteps the edge and pushes everything beyond the pale into the realm of the otherworldly. Yet, while I cannot think of that tacked on 'tour de force' ending as anything other than an overreaching mistake, pretty much everything that comes before, including an 'historical reenactment,' carefully choreographed by the Ojibwe and Oneida performance artist Ty Defoe, makes The Minutes a thrill ride of dark, dark comedy and a highlight of the theater season.

Still, much of the play consists of a ticking off of biographical events. By necessity or by design, it is incumbent on members of the audience to find a personal connection to the ups and downs of Ernestine's life. Debra Messing generally has too little to work with, only coming into her own as Ernestine herself comes into her own. The rest of the cast, playing multiple roles, all do what they can with their parts, but mostly they are stuck with one-dimensional attributes, and neither they nor director Vivienne Benesch are able bring them fully to life.