Theater review: 'Wrecks' at Geffen Playhouse's Audrey Skirball Kenis Theater

Ed Harris has excelled for so long as a Hollywood everyman with a gripping steely-eyed intensity that he doesn’t always get enough praise for the finesse of his acting. His performance in Neil LaBute’s solo monologue play, “Wrecks,” which opened Sunday at the Geffen Playhouse’s Audrey Skirball Kenis Theater, provides an opportunity to correct this oversight and extol the delicate command of his character work.

Harris stands before us at a Midwestern funeral parlor (conjured with stuffy precision by set designer Sibyl Wickersheimer) in the person of Edward Carr, whose wife Mary Josephine has recently succumbed to cancer. She was the love of his life. In fact, their bond utterly transformed him, from a hollow shell of a man raised in the foster care system to a successful entrepreneur who owns a string of classic auto rental stores.

Smoking one cigarette after the next in a slim gray suit, Edward, whose own health is in steep decline (not that he seems to care a whit), shares his inner thoughts and musings in a seductive, almost conspiratorial manner. Although the audience always experiences the character on his own, Edward explains that he’s actually greeting fellow mourners. We’re privy to the volatile flow of feelings he’s learned to keep hidden from everyone else, the covert truth lurking behind the smiling facade.

Overhearing himself use the word “indeed” after someone describes Mary Josephine as “a lovely woman,” he can’t resist mocking his polite phoniness. This kind of talk makes Edward seem like a straight shooter, yet the gulf between himself and society is dauntingly wide.
 
It’s not just that he’s a consummate outsider -- he’s as split off from parts of himself as he is from other people. His only connection seems to have been with his wife, and it’s not long before this fanatical, exclusive passion, recounted in the numbed initial tone of grief, begins to set off alarm bells.
 
LaBute, who has made a specialty of tracking the more insidious varieties of male psychopathology in such films as “In the Company of Men” and plays such as “Fat Pig” and “Some Girl(s),” presents us with an unusual case study in “Wrecks.” The drama -- which had its world premiere in Ireland in 2005 with Harris originating the role he later reprised at New York’s Public Theater -- lays bare the psyche of a guy whose entire being has been warped by a colossal secret.

This seismic revelation, which comes only at the very end of this 75-minute tale, is of such a magnitude that Calendar readers would have reason to call for a public flogging were I to even hint at its nature. Don’t worry: I plan to keep a wide berth. Yet allow me to offer some theatrical context.

When I first saw the piece in 2007 at a special benefit performance at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, I was impressed more with Harris’ acting than I was with LaBute’s playwriting. The tumble of confessional words leading to a whiplash-inducing final disclosure left me feeling, as I often do at superbly enacted solo shows, as though I had just watched a champion racquetball player firing away on a court without walls.

But “Wrecks” deepened for me the second time around. Classical tragedy from Sophocles to Shakespeare has been drawn to characters dangerously deficient in some crucial area of self-knowledge. LaBute tests out a new version of this theatrical formula. Rather than representing a protagonist ambushed by catastrophic yet indispensable  insight, he depicts one who is devoted to concealing what seems to be a guilty necessity.

Edward’s history may be narrated, but LaBute directly dramatizes just how the character juggles his precarious psychological reality. These furtive interior conflicts of Edward’s require an actor who can suspend moral judgment while not missing a revelatory quirk.

Harris is ideal in this regard, sympathetically registering the craters in Edward’s mental moonscape. And the lonely figure that emerges is one whose identity is made whole and bearable only through an attachment that is every bit as addictive as the cigarettes he’s sucking down. 

It helps to have a performer as charismatic as Harris to lead us down this shadowy road. His charm holds out the promise of normality, even as it hints at something darker. This sly paradox serves Edward Carr’s strange story extraordinarily well, and LaBute’s faultless staging makes the most of the sinister synergy.

-- Charles McNulty

Follow me on Twitter @charlesmcnulty

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Ed Harris makes a daring return to the stage in Neil LaBute's 'Wrecks'

"Wrecks," Geffen Playhouse's Audrey Skirball Kenis Theater, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood. 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays, 3 p.m. and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays. Ends March 7. $69 to $74. (310) 208-5454. Running time, 1 hour 15 minutes.

Photos: Ed Harris in "Wrecks." Credit: Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times

Comments

[Haydee Rodriguez]

Dear Mr. McNulty,

I really enjoyed reading your review of Wrecks. I find your writing thoughtful and insightful - a delight to read. HR

[Sandra Fitzgerald]

I am all the way up in Spokane, Washington but I so wish that I could see this production. It sounds like a unique opportunity to experience some of the best work by two masters of their crafts: Mr. Harris and Mr. LaBute.

[melanie chartoff]

Curious as to how female reviewers might respond to another of LaBute's sick Jerry Springer style travesties of American cruelty. We three theater-supporting women were soiled by sympathizing with such a masterful actor as Harris, manipulated into liking what seemed like true love coming from this deviant playwright. For an eighty dollar evening for a one character monologue in a very small, no spectacle production, our trust felt raped, incested and violated by the Geffen.

[Adele Scheele]

Yes, Ed Harris is superb. Many in the audience rose to cheer his acting, but some of us did not. Should an audience take on another role besides the pleased to be there group? As participants, can't we boo the playwright for his misanthropic message? He wrote, after all, a boastful story of Oedipus, a bum who beams "Mom" as he reveals his hidden secret at the end, all the while recounting years of ecstatic sex with a woman who gets to be raped thrice: by a visiting uncle when she is a teen, by her son whom she had to give away now bent on finding and marrying her, and by the playwright who manipulated producers into thinking this was art. It isn't.

[synapse]

Shame on those theatergoers who saw the play and, ignoring the restraint of this reviewer, reveal the twist of LaBute's play. For goodness sakes, the point wasn't to judge Ed Carr (as played by Ed Harris). It was to examine your own judgments of others.

[Jane Curtin]

Melanie:

I hope the show isn't as bad as you say. The last time I felt like you described (raped and violated) was when we wasted time and money seeing Ricky Jay at the Geffen. And we wonder why the Pasadena Playhouse closed.

[TB]

Jane,

Raped and violated by the Ricky Jay show? I'm completely at a loss as to how you could arrive at that. Nor do I see the connection between what you're talking about here and the closing of the Pasadena Playhouse. Could you please elaborate?

[Silverlakejim]

Rape is serious and violent crime that can negatively effect its violated victims for life.

I am incensed that people are using this word to describe an experience of watching a play. Can we now stop using "rape" as a word to describe a negative experience artistic performance.

It is irresponsible and grossly insensitive to speak of being "raped and violated" by a piece of theater. I am sure that if Adele and Jane were actually brutally attacked and sexually violated they would find rape a very different experience then sitting in a comfortable theater and passively watching a play.

[neil labute]

melanie and adele:

thanks for coming to the show--sorry you didn't like it more than you did--hate that you feel the need to reveal the plot to get your 'power' back--if you'd like the price of your tickets refunded i suggest you take to the streets (around sunset and highland should do nicely)--come find me at the geffen afterward and i'll give you each the $75. you still require to bring your total to $80.--next time go see a musical (the old kind, where nobody gets manipulated).