This new play by American writer Doug Wright comes to the Barbican from Broadway heralded by a 2023 Tony Award for star Sean Hayes (Will & Grace) and is about someone you’ve likely never heard of. Oscar Levant was a pianist – best known for playing George Gershwin’s music – and a humourist, who popped up in a handful of films including An American in Paris.
This play re-imagines the events surrounding his chaotic appearance as a guest on The Tonight Show in 1958. He arrives at the NBC studio, whose boss is already jittery because of Levant’s erratic past behaviour, from a mental institution. His wife, June (Rosalie Craig), has secured a release under false pretences. Talk-show host Jack Paar (Ben Rappaport) wants to capitalise on his penchant for making controversial jokes live on air. His accompanying nurse, Alvin (Daniel Adeosun), is trying to stop him from popping pills. And Levant himself is hallucinating Gershwin.
Focused so tightly on the early days of American TV, this could potentially sound niche for a British audience. But in Wright’s assured hands, the collision of Levant’s private and public life down the barrel of a camera lens becomes a play about the beginning of so many things we now recognise as staples of celebrity culture. He’s famous for all the reasons he doesn’t want to be – as a performer of someone else’s music rather than a composer. He’s wheeled onto chat shows for controversy by people for whom his mental health is something to be exploited. Rappaport’s well-pitched and era-appropriate jocular slickness as Paar deliberately pushes Levant’s every button is queasy.
The play touches on the still-fierce debate about the relationship between comedy and freedom of expression – who gets to say what about whom – and the currency of outrage. But as it transitions from the dressing room to the studio, this is really scaffolding for the damage wreaked by fame. Hayes is extraordinary as Levant, crumpling into himself even as he makes the one-liners prompted by Paar sing off the stage. His well-honed way with comedy is the play’s secret weapon. Our laughter is complicit in the implosion we know is happening. As his wife, June, Craig stretches thinner material a long way, conveying her character’s frustrated, weary love. Their relationship is sketchily drawn, but they give it weight.
Director Lisa Peterson’s production is sturdily reliably in the early expositional scenes, but really takes flight when the dividing line between reality and Levant’s worsening mental state begins to dissolve. There’s a grippingly feverish quality to how Rachel Huack’s dressing room and studio sets end up sharing stage space. Privacy no longer exists with cameras turned on couches. It's fragmentary and frantic – culminating in a truly virtuosic piano performance by a spotlit Hayes, who looks agonisingly at his own hands as if they belong to a stranger. It’s hauntingly powerful and the apex of this funny and devastating play.
