Buzzer: Theater review by Adam Feldman
There is a profound mismatch in Tracey Scott Wilson’s Buzzer at the Public Theater. It’s not in the ostensibly happy but uncommunicative relationship between Jackson (Grantham Coleman), a black power lawyer, and Suzy (Tessa Ferrer), his white schoolteacher girlfriend. It’s not in the unlikely friendship between Jackson and his pal since prep school, Don (Michael Stahl-David), also white, a garrulous fuck-up who has been in and out of rehab for years. Nor is it even in the forced acquaintance of Suzy and Don, who hate each other, especially when Don—toting all of his belongings in a pair of garbage bags—moves into the palatial apartment that she and Jackson share in a bad Brooklyn neighborhood teetering on the edge of gentrification.
Tense though those relationships may be, the most serious disconnect in Buzzer is between the play and its production. As she has proved in shows like You Got Older, Belleville and God’s Ear, Anne Kauffman is one of the smartest directors in New York, but her choices here miss the mark widely. The play itself is not first-rate; touching lightly on buzzy questions of race, sex and class, it suggests a minor Neil LaBute psychodrama, minus the punchy language and effective twists. (Much of the text seems like a first draft to which the playwright never returned.) It might work at a base level, however, with a strong sense of three people grating on each other in an enclosed area, and an equally strong sense of the dangerous world just outside their door. Neither of those things comes through in Kauffman’s spare, chilly production, in which the action unfolds in a vast empty space. The staging leaves the play, not the characters, exposed.—Adam Feldman
Public Theater (Off Broadway). By Tracey Scott Wilson. Directed by Anne Kauffman. With Grantham Coleman, Tessa Ferrer, Michael Stahl-David. Running time: 1hr 20mins. No intermission.
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