Meet Jordan Berman. He's single. And he has a date with a co-worker to see a documentary about the Franco-Prussian war. At least, he thinks it's a date. Significant Other follows Jordan and his three closest friends as they navigate love, friendship and New York in the twenty-something years.
The Broadway debut of author Joshua Harmon will be complemented by the Broadway debut of rising young director Trip Cullman, who guided the play to its successful off-Broadway engagement.
Significant Other was a NY Times Critic's Pick when it premiered last summer at Roundabout Theatre Company. Charles Isherwood, writing in the New York Times, called it "an entirely delightful new play, as richly funny as it is ultimately heart-stirring."
Significant Other began at Roundabout Theatre Company following the professional debut and world premiere of Joshua Harmon's play Bad Jews at Roundabout Underground's Black Box in fall 2012.
Gay characters in mass culture often serve as supportive accessories in the marriage plots of others, but Harmon keeps Jordan in sharp, brutally revealing focus. Anyone whose heart has ever been broken can relate to his plight. Pushing 30, he has never been in a serious relationship, and his desperation to change that-sabotaged by his obsessiveness and awkwardness-only makes things worse. Glick delivers a star-making, gut-wrenching performance of deep sweetness and quicksilver mood shifts; a scene in which he considers sending an intense love email to a handsome coworker is a masterpiece of comic anxiety, and his climactic rant of pent-up resentment earns vigorous applause.
The four central performers chart their characters' fraying ties with a graceful, instinctive grasp of the hierarchies and role playing that occur within such relationships. They're at their most poignantly expressive when they're dancing together (in dwindling numbers) at one another's weddings. (Sam Pinkleton deserves credit as the choreographer.) Mark Wendland's multilevel set nicely evokes the sense of a city of myriad dwelling places, to which people retreat in insulated isolation, whether as pairs or singletons. And John Behlmann and Luke Smith drolly fulfill their purposes as the various men in the central characters' lives. But the play's structure, built around an and-then-there-was-one countdown of weddings, can start to feel like a sustained musical vamp with only slight variations. Though Mr. Glick is very good and, I think, rather brave in following Jordan's path from adorable to irritating, his company does start to pall after a certain point.
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