As with most Chris Bohjalian novels, the author’s world premiere play at New Brunswick’s George Street Playhouse, “The Club,” is a page-turner.
In a crisp, attention-grabbing 80 minutes, Bohjalian covers acres of ground that show that for all the significant changes and tangible societal progress wrought in recent decades, some attitudes, situations, and issues have not advanced much since the year in which “The Club” is set, 1968.
Race and acceptance of individuals based on character rather than pigment is the main crux of Bohjalian’s piece, but it also touches on friendships, relationships, marital and other, social status, trust, community, and commitment to personal values, admirable or not. Director David Saint and a surefire cast of seven keep things moving at a lively but comfortable cadence, so the George Street production provides a lot to take in while remaining entertaining throughout.
There’s suspense about how the play’s pivotal incident occurs. Interesting arguments, or rationalizations, are present on various subjects, usually involving some category of fidelity. Bohjalian, Saint, and company present a piece worth following and which gets its audience involved.
“The Club” is good, especially in Saint’s hands, but it falls short of being great or important because for all of its pluses, including the not-to-be-underestimated ability to entertain non-stop, it never goes far enough. The discussions characters have, the points they make, are the expected ones. Bohjalian writes good scenes, Saint and cast create drama, but no new ground is broken, no revelation or profound idea awaits. Bohjalian adeptly offers a tart and tension-fraught slice of suburban life — he writes some great lines — but for all the brisk byplay and snappy verbal dueling, “The Club” remains more pat than poignant. It presents interesting cases and takes a clever twist or two, but it illustrates a situation when it needs to come up with something you may have never considered unless you’d seen it.
I can see “The Club,” especially if it can replicate Saint’s staging and Ali Marsh’s lead performance, being a future darling of the regional circuit, which is not a bad outcome. I don’t see it making waves on Broadway or having a modest limited run off-Broadway.
Ironically, the play is not strongest when arguments are at their most heated and prejudice wars with common sense or loyalty with betrayal, but in the show’s denouement, when all Stürm, Drang, and hurt are over, and you learn the motive behind “The Club’s” most crucial event. To reveal that event would be too damaging a spoiler for even me, an unapologetically rampant spoiler, to divulge. I wonder, though, if sharing that moment with all the characters instead of keeping it within one character’s nuclear family would make a difference and provide empathy, rather than sympathy, that might move “The Club” to a next level.
Bohjalian may have undercut the power of his play by his choice to keep a potential difference-maker private instead of part of the main event. The same goes for the reading of a letter that gives the audience a perspective only two of the characters in “The Club” will ever have. And they have it separately.
By way of perspective, “The Club” is set in an affluent New Jersey bedroom community in 1968, when Vietnam protests crescendo, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy are assassinated, Lyndon Johnson decides not to run for re-election, and the Democratic presidential convention in Chicago is thrown into a riotous tizzy, all of which are depicted in projections designed by James Youmans and shown on screens that resemble ’60s televisions.
The community depicted lives up to the typical impression of well-to-do suburbs from the period. Every Saturday, another person’s house is littered with booze bottles, smirched with wine stains, and turned into a veritable trash heap as the couple whose turn is next entertains its neighbors. The central meeting place is the Country Club, which is private and has bylaws to which its committees strictly adhere. Denizens of the community meet to play golf or tennis and lunch in a setting much better kept than anything open to the general public. Amid the regulars at the weekend parties are a Black couple, Angela and Peter Kendricks, who want to play tennis and golf and swim and have lunch in the rarified setting of the club. I’m betting you can figure out what happens when Pete and Angela apply to join said club.
“The Club” starts out as a domestic comedy in a house where the latest Saturday shindig has been held. The husband (Frederick Weller) and wife (Ali Marsh) are having a post-party marital squabble while their more mature 12-year-old daughter eavesdrops and attempts to mediate, chagrined though she is that one of the merrymakers took her Jimi Hendrix album from her bedroom and eventually broke it in half.
Weller and Marsh set a comically contentious tone that sets the pace of the play and keeps it in the exact right place for its duration.
Even as Weller and Marsh’s characters fight, they let loose zingers the other appreciates, although not enough to forgive his or her irritating spouse. Weller is excellent throughout Saint’s production, showing a broad range as his character moves from defensive husband to someone making a stand in a way that could be construed as either noble or overprotective to the point of being patriarchal.
At both ends of a full spectrum, Weller makes the most of his scenes, going to combat at the top and dealing with what he thought was a good idea towards the end.
Bohjalian’s script repeatedly mentions the wife’s quick, unfiltered tongue, and Ali Marsh takes Bohjalian at his word making every cutting, sarcastic, acerbic remark sting with wit. You don’t care that the character is mean. She shows her fangs with Joan Rivers gusto, and Marsh never misses a vicious, or rational, beat. Her sharp tongue is matched by an impulsive act that sets up the meat of Bohjalian’s piece. Marsh handles that bit of comeuppance with the same sophisticated finesse she brings to all of her scenes.
Samaria Nixon-Fleming epitomizes class, intelligence, and justified outrage as a woman who arrives at a gathering of alleged friends to find she has been blackballed from their club. Grace Experience provides great contrast as a considerably younger woman who thinks all the fuss over boundaries and acceptance sad but a hoot. Experience shows her character’s independence and joy at being a bit of a rebel.
Brendan Ryan is so suited for his role as the chairman of the club’s membership committee, you’d think the real article walked in from a New Brunswick suburb. Seamless acting is the best acting, and Ryan aces his role. Ryan George, a stickout from a previous Bohjalian play, “Midwives,” also gets to display a variety of well-played moods as he appears first as a neighbor seeking a favor and has to deal with a matter he rightfully thought he and his wife had overcome. George makes you share his character’s pain at learning he may have been better off heeding some warnings than to face demoralizing disillusion.
Skyler Hensley shows clearly who the grownup is in this crowd. She also gives intensity to the scene in which she reads her father’s letter.
James Youman’s projections are the tip of the his design iceberg. Not only did Youmans design a gorgeous yet representative living room for a ’60s family, he decorated it with period lamps, ceramics, glass, and objects I couldn’t stop looking at throughout the play. Lisa Zinni’s costume flatter the characters and the period. Tyler Micoleau’s lighting gives texture to the production. Scott Killian’s music and sound design established the ’60s setting and was fun to listen to when original and fun to sing along with, in my head of course, when it included a ’60s hit.
The Club, George Street Playhouse, New Brunswick Performing Arts Center, 11 Livingston Avenue, New Brunswick. Through Sunday, March 17. 8 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday and 2 p.m. Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday. $45 to $90. A livestream of the March 15, 16, and 17 performances, $49. www.georgestreetplayhouse.org or 732-246-7717.
