This World of Tomorrow Off-Broadway Reviews

The play’s futuristic framework notwithstanding, and despite the distinct “Groundhog Day” element to its conceit, connoisseurs of Nora Ephron’s movie “You’ve Got Mail” will detect several echoes of that classic here. Not because of any writerly pilfering but mainly because Hanks, who made his Broadway debut a dozen years ago in a posthumous production of Ephron’s “Lucky Guy,” is the one speaking the lines.

There are plenty of talented folks around Hanks who have been roped into making this, and plenty of people in the audience who might be paying a lot to see him, but they don’t factor into the equation. This thing is entirely about admiring its star. Hey, at least there are some fun hats.

The humor depends entirely on 20-20 hindsight. The scientist, the divorcee and her obnoxious niece (Kayli Carter, being obnoxious) visit a fair exhibition that predicts what the world will be in the year 1960. They all receive an “I Saw the Future” button. No surprise, the scientist knows what’s really going to happen, and his oblique but spot-on remarks about the future provoke mild giggles of recognition from the audience.

Director Kenny Leon, who has recently had a string of Broadway hits, pulls out all the stops to keep this time-traveling misfire in the right galaxy. Even with brisk pacing and seamless scenic and projection design by Derek McLane, the play spins out of orbit, unable to connect its multiverse themes with the intimate relationship at its core.

Does it really help to know what the future will bring? And if you do know, should you do what you can to change it? That turns out to be both a question on many people’s minds right now, for both political and practical reasons. It’s also the philosophical debate at the heart of Tom Hanks and James Grossman’s whimsical yet frustrating play “This World of Tomorrow,” now at The Shed under Kenny Leon’s solid direction.

Director Kenny Leon does what he can to tighten the pacing, but the script needs significant work to trim unnecessary scenes and sharpen the focus. Despite the sci-fi trappings, This World of Tomorrow is stuck in the dusty past, a time dripping in sentimentality and the possibility of a whirlwind romance with a person you only just met.

In his new play, The World of Tomorrow, his fondness for the “good old days” has led to the inevitable, a story about a man with a fondness for the “good old days” who actually gets to experience one of them for himself. It’s a loosely familiar tale of time travel, based on a short story written by Hanks that tries, and half-succeeds, to bring something new to a table we’ve sat at many times before.

And, as one always obsessed by the road not travelled, I enjoyed those themes, too. “This World of Tomorrow” clearly wants to avoid sentimentality but let’s be real. It trafficks in nostalgia, not least because there is so much now not to like.

I would feel churlish offering a lengthy catalogue of all the ways the play falls short as a work of contemporary theater; it seems largely beside the point. The production offers the rare thrill not only of watching this beloved movie star in person, but of seeing something of his that feels almost homespun.

Hanks, who starred in Nora Ephron’s play Lucky Guy on Broadway in 2013, is very comfortable onstage. Still, we can’t shake the feeling that This World of Tomorrow would be better off as a movie. (Groundhog Day, Time and Again—you get the drift.) Or as a book, where the characters could get more attention. That’s where it all started: Hanks and Glossman based the play on three short stories from Hanks’ 2017 collection Uncommon Type. We leave the show wanting more of Bert and Carmen’s story…where do they go from here?

It’s still fun to watch. How could it not be, with Hanks and O’Hara onstage? But the convoluted storyline — reminiscent of such time-travel stories as the film Somewhere in Time and the classic Star Trek episode The City on the Edge of Forever — never fully comes to life.

It’s not often that an Academy Award-winning actor takes to the stage — let alone co-writes a play to star in — but Tom Hanks does so with aplomb in This World of Tomorrow. Hanks lends his extraordinary storytelling talent to Bert Allenberry, a scientist from 2089 who travels back in time to the 1939 World’s Fair in Queens, New York.

A catatonic dullness and brace of stereotypical side characters further clog the pacing of This World of Tomorrow. Its repetitive script is partially lifted by three things: the consistently versatile and engaging O’Hara who brings a sage edge to Carmen, Derek McLane’s vertical-pillar projections that transport the audience back to 1939, and Dede Ayite’s lovely costuming.

First, let’s keep Hanks’s co-star Kelli O’Hara above this fray where she belongs. As a wounded but warm and plucky divorcée, she is the lone lighthouse in this sea of slop. It’s easy to see why a few minutes with her character, as she kicks off her uncomfortable heels at the 1939 World’s Fair, would make a time-traveling man crazy to see her again. In fact, O’Hara’s delicate radiance in the role — and the devotion it inspires — is the only part of the story that makes sense.