“Third,” the final work of the late Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Wendy Wasserstein, debuted last Saturday at TheatreWorks under the nimble direction of Kirsten Brandt. It’s a daring offering, and satisfying thanks not so much to Wasserstein’s script, but to the local troupe’s efforts.
The story centers on a feminist professor coming into what she calls the third stage of her life — a time past childhood and the radical days of her younger self. Frustrated by the uncertain realities of modern politics, and devastated by the slow decline of her father, she finds herself at a moral crossroads when she baselessly accuses an earnest young man of a conservative stripe of plagiarizing.
It’s a promising foundation, compromised slightly by uneven construction: There is the comedy that “Third” surely is, on the one hand, and that is a raucous and witty success. But there is also the political critique that it tries to be, a running indictment of the polarized condition of national politics that, while occasionally provocative, is more often insubstantial.
This political critique is a veiled (and, at times, not so veiled) criticism of the American left by the left, and it often distills down to the notion that liberals can have the same rigidity and close-mindedness that they accuse conservatives of having.
“I’ve never met a Republican. I’ve never even met anyone who’s slept with a Republican,” exclaims the professor’s daughter in a moment of drunken confession, drawing ripples of laughter from the audience. It’s a funny moment, but what passes for dramatic insight in the subsequent scene is largely self-evident. Much of the play is like that, with comic subtleties and affecting emotional performances followed up by an obvious moral.
Meanwhile, the play’s production has an absorbing cinematic quality to it, with simple, elegant staging. The actors project themselves with a charisma easily suited for celluloid.
Elizabeth Norment, as the professor, is a great talent in a taxing role. Restrained, by nature and circumstance, in a way that runs against the grain of her feminist ideals, the professor is prone to irrational outbursts; moody, uncomfortable hot flashes; and bouts of self-reproach. She is at the beck and call of her deteriorating father, at odds with her absent husband, and unnerved by a precocious male student. As written, she might come off as a caricature of a woman in menopause.
But Norment, in her perfectly coiffed blond hair and heels, gives a strength and plausibility to the professor that turns one wallowing monologue on a shrink’s couch into a forceful lament against impotency. Her cruelty to her student seems then less a shrinking from her weakness than an exorcism of it, a subversive exercise of power against a boy who symbolizes (but never embodies) the power she has been denied.
INFORMATION:
What: TheatreWorks’ production of “Third,” a play by Wendy Wasserstein
Where: Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro St.
When: Tuesdays and Wednesdays at 7:30 p.m., Thursdays and Fridays at 8 p.m., Saturdays at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. (8 p.m. only Feb. 9), Sundays at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. (2 p.m. only Feb. 3 and 10), through Feb. 10
Cost: Tickets are $21-57 with savings for youth, students, seniors and members
Info: Call (650) 903-6000 or visit www.theatreworks.org
