STAGE REVIEWS : ‘F.M.,’ ‘Downside’ Beat the Odds in Long Wharf Theatre Premieres

Colleague Albert Goldberg once noted that judging new music was largely a process of separating the chaff from the chaff. It’s the same with new plays. Finding one that works is rare enough.

The other Sunday, at New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre, I saw--I swear--two in a row. In the afternoon, Romulus Linney’s “F. M.” In the evening, Richard Dresser’s “The Downside.”

Linney’s play is the centerpiece in a triptych of one-acts collectively entitled “Laughing Stock.” The flanking pieces are well designed, but they feel designed. “F. M.” simply flows off the brush.

The scene is a creative writing class. Frances Sternhagen plays a novelist who has to teach for a living, but who tries not to take it out on her students. Be kind; be frank; listen to what they have to say.

Depressingly, only two people show up for the first class. The first is an older woman (Sloane Shelton) who thinks of flowers as people, the second is a younger woman (Kathleen Chalfant) who thinks of men as worms.

Their hidden agendas surface comically as they read from their current manuscripts, but this isn’t just a one-joke sketch about Sunday writers. Into the room stumbles the third member of the class (Thomas Kopache), a seedy creature with a bottle in his pocket.

He looks like a refugee from a gospel mission. When he starts to read from his book, entitled “F. M.,” his classmates find it so piggish and so horticulturally unsound that they want to string him up.

But the teacher realizes--and the audience realizes--that this bum is some kind of genius. As the play ends, the story is only beginning.

Linney has brought off a very difficult trick here. Almost every play about an artist founders when it comes time to exhibit his art. Either we don’t get to see it or we don’t see what’s so great about it.

But the novel-within-the-play here really does sound like the goods. Add Linney’s delicious observations of the power struggles that occur in adult-education classes, and you have an astute and entertaining little play.

(The only false note is the suggestion that the teacher and the bum may strike up a romantic relationship. And that could have been imposed by director David Esbjornson.)

Richard Dresser’s “The Downside” is also a satire. Sometimes it’s even a shaggy-dog story. This is not inappropriate, considering its subject: corporate life in the late 1980s.

Dresser may be stretching a point to show a divorced executive setting up housekeeping in his office and refusing to quit it after he’s fired. But some crazy things do go on in the executive suite after hours. Ask any janitor.

In some ways, “The Downside” is “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” updated. Again we see the lightweights in the office rising to power on the updraft of their chutzpah, while the good guys grimly keep turning out the product.

But Dresser isn’t as amused as the authors of “How to Succeed” were. The product here is a European antidepressant that is about to go on sale in the United States, and his characters have only a few weeks to find the right market strategy for it.

The office promptly rises to its maximum inefficiency. Memos grow ever more pompous, meetings grow ever more pointless, buddies start stabbing each other in the back, capable people are fired and nerds hired, and the splat hits the wall quite gorgeously at the end.

There’s quite a bit of hanky-panky too. The Long Wharf audience laughed a lot, particularly those with office training. But they were also given something to ponder about the way we get things done in America these days, or rather pretend to get things done. No wonder the Japanese are winning.

The first qualification to work in this office--actually the only qualification--is to “look good in a suit.” Director Kenneth Frankel’s actors all qualify, including J. Smith-Cameron as the company’s token female exec. (Lisa Pelikan is the secretary who knows where the bodies are buried, having dispatched one or two of them herself.)

Of the men, Bruce Davison is particularly funny as a take-charge guy who not only sees all the sides to a question, but is capable of embracing any of them at a moment’s notice. Like everyone in this play, he’s oddly likable. These people actually think they are taking care of business.

Dresser’s play has a future. South Coast Repertory’s audience would eat it up--the scene could easily be one of those all-glass offices on the 405. Broadway audiences might also enjoy “The Downside.” But New Haven saw it first.

Across town, the Yale Repertory Theatre is offering a new play by the author of “Elephant Man,” Bernard Pomerance.

“Melons” is its title. An old man with a bandanna round his head (Ken Jenkins) sits in a melon patch, remembering when his people were a nation. Now they are non-persons, except when the white man needs a favor.

The play is about white America’s need to banish the American Indian from its consciousness, once he was conquered. More broadly, it’s about the natural gap between man and man, and about how little language can do to bridge that gap, even when there’s a will to do so.

Unfortunately, there’s a parallel gap between the play and the listener. Too much of it seems deliberately anti-dramatic: announced rather than exemplified. Gitta Honneger’s production has nobility, and offers excellent performances by, among others, Tino Juarez as a young lawyer trying to interpret the red man to the white man and vice versa. But you can’t grow melons on a lecture platform.

Up in Hartford, Richard Thomas has just finished playing “Hamlet” for the Hartford Stage Company. I saw his last performance--his eighth of the week--and he wasn’t at all winded.

Left alone, Thomas’s Hamlet would have finished up his Ph.D. at Wittenburg and become Copenhagen’s leading drama critic. He’s most in his element when instructing the traveling players--a fairly moldy lot--how not to tear a passion to tatters.

When pressed into action, he responds adequately, but not exuberantly. This is a well-prepared and well-spoken Hamlet, but you never feel Thomas abandoning himself to the role--letting it take him high and low, letting it push him to the edge.

Mark Lamos’ staging has a post-modern look, with lots of mildly dissociating devices (buzzers, light flashes). Scrape this business away and it’s a sound account of a story that no one ever gets totally right or totally wrong.