4000 Miles

Oh, dear individual reader. I've treated you so badly for so long. No updates from me in weeks. How will I ever get to a hundred shows? Easy--I only have two weeks of vacation a year, and this lapse covered my days off until Christmas. Bring on the plays!

How did I choose to re-enter my theatergoing? With Amy Herzog's play 4000 Miles at the Duke Theater, part of Lincoln Center's LCT3 series of $20 shows. And how was it? Fucking fantastic.

The last Lincoln Center show I saw was War Horse, and I blogged about how I really didn't like it, but I posited that some of that may have had to do with the fact that I was crazy tired and under the weather when I saw it. But I hit 4000 Miles while in the throes of terrible jetlag, almost fell asleep before the show even started, and then was completely and totally riveted for the duration.

4000 Miles (I so badly want to add a comma to the number) is about an early 20something who arrives at his nonagenarian grandmother's apartment in New York having just biked across the country. Things we know: no one has known where he was for awhile, he has no desire to let his mother know where he is now, and his girlfriend is at Columbia U and turned him away. Hence his unexpected arrival on grandma Vera's doorstep.

What's so magical about the play is that it unfolds so realistically. We keep learning more and more about what has led the 21-year-old Leo to where is is right now, but none of the writing actually feels expository. Okay, almost none. There's a late-in-the-play monologue that lands with a deafening clunk not only because it's just a hunk of explanation awkwardly dropped in, but also because some of the information in it is laughably forced. It's a comically terrible monologue in a play that is otherwise fantastic. I'll forgive it.

Dropping by Vera's apartment over the course of the single act show are Leo's girlfriend Beck, the gorgeously honest and sincere Zoe Winters, and Greta Lee as potential one-night stand Amanda. Lee's character could be a cliched, one-note comic part, but the writing is so precisely observed, and Lee deftly blends the quirky and the sincere. It's a tour-de-force performance in one drunken scene.

But the heart of the play is Mary Louise Wilson's Vera. Frankly, it's a testament to the young cast that they even register on the stage with Wilson who is just unbelievably good. Vera is fiercely intelligent and understanding, but at 91, her faculties are diminishing. Her new limitations and her frustrations about them factor in significantly, but the play never gets mawkish about her aging. Because while she may be on her way out, we never lose sight of how sharp she is. And yet, at the same time, we're not asked to look at her as an old woman who knows it all just because she's survived a long time. She is prickly but warm, independent but loving. And while she's sharply critical...actually, no, she's just plain sharply critical, but that leads to some of the most amusing moments in the play.

The entire enterprise seems like the kind of show destined to drop into cliched observations, which makes it only the more impressive that it's so carefully calibrated and carefully constructed. There's a rumor that it's going to get a wider off-Broadway production later this year. I hope it's true. But man, Herzog really, really needs to rewrite that monologue.