The only thing anyone wonders, wants to read, or even needs to know
about a pretentious, elliptical and utterly worthless load of
tongue-tied gibberish imported from England by the Roundabout Theatre
Co. called If There Is I Haven’t Found It Yet is the answer to a single
question: How is Jake Gyllenhaal? In his New York stage debut, I am
pleased to inform you, he acts the impossible role of a human zero in a
profoundly professional manner. He has energy, presence and a theatrical
dynamic—qualities as affecting onstage as they appear onscreen. He
would be a whole lot better if we could actually hear what he’s saying,
however. Since his most recent screen appearance as a bald L.A. ghetto
cop in End of Watch, he’s grown a head full of what looks like dirty
orange mattress ticking and knocked himself out perfecting a cockney
accent, which he spits and mumbles incoherently through a scruffy beard
like a face on a box of Smith Brothers cough drops. Of course, this
might be a blessing in disguise. The play is so stupendously abysmal it
doesn’t make any sense anyway.
The first thing you see upon
entering the Laura Pels Theatre is the water. In the last performance I
saw on that stage—a grim revival of John Osborne’s Look Back in
Anger—they covered the proscenium with rotting food and garbage. This
time they drown it in water. The rain comes down in buckets from the
ceiling and splashes into a water tank the width of the stage, into
which the four-member cast tosses props, furniture, used appliances and
old shoes. If you are foolish enough to pay real money to suffer through
95 minutes of this stuff without intermission, do not sit in the first
row without an umbrella. The water tank acts as a moat-like protection
that separates the audience from the squalid flat of an ecology
professor named George (played by the always-excellent Brían F. O’Byrne,
of Doubt), his wife Fiona (Michelle Gomez) and their obese daughter
Anna (Annie Funke). While George spouts academic babble from the new
book he’s writing about the survival of mankind in an age of global
disaster called How Green Are Your Tomatoes? and Annie sulks about
reliving the abuse she gets at school from bullying classmates, the
gloom is relieved temporarily by George’s brother Terry (Mr.
Gyllenhaal), whose welcome presence offers hope that the play might be
heading somewhere—that is, until he speaks. Then what comes out is a
torrent of four-letter words that makes David Mamet seem like a model of
grace, finesse and literary sophistication.
It is never clear
what Terry does or where he’s been. He’s been abroad. Postcards have
been received. Now he’s popped in for a visit, covered with tattoos and
driving everyone nuts in a Faulknerian stream of jabberwocky punctuated
with more F-words than any attempt to quote dialogue will allow.
Clutching his overstretched, misshapen T-shirt, shifting on his feet and
dancing around like a whirling dervish, he smokes a joint, climbs on
top of the fridge for no reason and scratches himself in every body
crevice. It’s a wild, exhausting performance that for all of its judo is
not always convincing. Encouraged by the kind of loopy direction (by
Michael Longhurst) that can only be described as spastic, Mr.
Gyllenhaal’s fearless vitality is admirable, but he so completely throws
himself into a repulsive character that it overwhelms him. The father
rants on ad infinitum about polar ice caps, evolution and global
warming. Fat Anna strips off her clothes (not a pretty sight), climbs
into an overflowing bathtub, slashes her wrists and floods what’s left
of the set in a tidal wave. Mr. Gyllenhall takes over the kitchen and
tries his hand at making pastry. The direction is simplicity itself.
Every scene ends by knocking another piece of the set into the water.
Eventually the cast sloshes through the debris with water above their
ankles and takes their curtain calls sopping wet.
The writer of
this ludicrous trash is Nick Payne, a critical Flavor of the Avant-Garde
Moment in London, praised by the London press for thumbing his nose at
tradition as a rule-breaking revolutionary Turk, who encourages healthy
wrath from theatergoers who still care about the kind of coherent,
well-written plays Britain is famous for. If he has any talent beyond
inciting protest, it is not the ability to hold an audience’s attention
beyond a central conceit. One can only wonder why Roundabout chose to
plague the undeserving New York audience with so much obtuse and
juvenile irrelevance, or why, indeed, a movie star of Jake Gyllenhaal’s
stature and popularity would choose to appear in it. He’s powerful
enough to raise the backing for any play he chooses, and financially
independent enough to wait until the right one comes along. What on
earth, I kept asking myself, could have attracted him to this rubbish?
Then I knew. During the final third of If There Is I Haven’t Found It
Yet, he disappears from the watery stage and doesn’t appear again until
the water washes it away. Some actors have all the luck.
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