Dark Comedy

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Life is surprising as it happens but remarkably predictable in retrospect. Once time has conferred its brand of wisdom, even the least perceptive person can look back and recognize how one misstep of fate led to another. Thus a hallmark of growing older is the increasing impact of memory, simultaneously spurring regret and reconciliation. Those conflicting impulses are at the heart of Michael Frayn's Benefactors. Its four characters, addressing the audience from the perspective of middle age, watch themselves in flashback as exuberantly misguided young adults. And although the play's nominal topics include high-rise architecture, neighborhood preservation, the sins of journalism and the legacy of imperialism, its real substance is the lonely way these people come to terms with their recollections.

A 1984 hit in London, Benefactors has been staged on Broadway by the same director, Michael Blakemore, with a new and mostly American cast. It builds slowly into a brilliant exposition of the troubled relationship between the elite and the masses, both in the broad public arena and in the narrow but fierce politics of the hearth. Sam Waterston portrays a young London architect who gets his big break, a commission to design public housing. Mindful that semidetached cottages are what blue-collar Britons prefer, he nonetheless opts for massive towers as the only practicable response to the vagaries of the redevelopment site. Glenn Close plays his wife, gradually torn between loyalty to him and belief that the community should decide its own fate. Mary Beth Hurt and Simon Jones are their intrusive, dependent neighbors: a humbly born and mousy former nurse and her snide, sadistic husband, a failed member of the gentry who was a university pal of the architect's.

The play opens and closes almost musically, with overlapping scenes and monologues that voice interlocking themes. Each element of the complex structure echoes its content. In the first act the narrators are the women, and the action is the entwining of their friendship. In the second act the main narrators are the men, and the action is aggressive: once the architect has proposed his project, his envious friend undertakes to derail it. In the public as well as the private combat, the question is the same. Do people really want freedom, or do they simply want to want it? Do they have visions of what they seek, or do they secretly and ashamedly long for someone just to tell them what to do?

Frayn is not so pretentious as to offer answers, but he strongly hints at a disaffected liberal's belief in the strength of the darker side of human nature. Benefactors is foremost a comedy, albeit a disillusioned one, and it makes its statements with jokes. In the shrewdest of them, the nurse, the one character who is not a university graduate, recognizes the architect's walled-in housing proposal as a variation of a college, turning its back on the rest of the world. Hurt's performance in the role, tinged equally with self-pity and pluck, is the production's strongest. Close impeccably portrays a woman whose compassion leads her into ruinous contradictions. Waterston disappoints a bit, wobbling in his accent and never quite finding the passion, only the hysteria, of his man. Jones' smirky hauteur is chilling as his destructive tactics succeed. Both the architect and his nemesis contend that nothing ever changes, and Frayn finds lyric beauty and an odd moral equality in the one's dream, the other's nihilism. --By William A. Henry III