High

The opportunity to watch Kathleen Turner play a recovering alcoholic nun/therapist with a foul mouth? Yes, please! That was basically my entire decision making process for going to see the new play High which has made it to Broadway by way of a baffling decision making process. The playwright's last show tanked. This show got pretty bad reviews out of town. There are roughly ten million other new shows opening in the next month, so there's no reason to believe that there's a wide open audience ready to buy tickets to this. Yes, there are those out there (me) who assume that if the play was good that would be lovely, but if it was bad that would be even lovelier. Kathleen Turner as a recovering alcoholic nun, people!

This show's gonna tank. I think that's a pretty safe assumption. Sister Kathleen Turner is asked by her priest superior to counsel a super-addict gay teen hooker. She totally doesn't want to, but she does. Things go badly. Addiction is hard! Therapy is also hard! Writing a play, it seems, is harder yet.

High is just too poorly conceived and clunky to ever get off the ground. At times, I tried to figure out whether there were bad acting choices being made or whether there was simply no way for some lines to be rendered realistic. I suspect the latter. Which is especially unfortunate given that the author's bio included a thank you to his sponsor for "saving his life." When a recovering addict makes addiction and recovery look totally fake, you know you're in less than skilled writerly hands. People should start out by writing what they know, yes. But some people just shouldn't write.

In the end, there's enough camp about the show to make it relatively entertaining. The show is at least relatively quick moving and coherent, so there's a likeability there in spite of the larger ineptitude. So yeah...I'm glad I went. But I wouldn't recommend that anyone else should.