‘Wakey’ serves up long anticlimax
A middleaged white guy is the sole occupant of the grand proscenium stage. Lights out, quick cut, and now he’s in a wheelchair. Ah, you might think, this guy.
Western theater is totally obsessed with this guy. He’s going to rage against the dying of the light. There will be tearful confessions, painful realizations, hardwon lessons we can all learn from. He will talk about his dad.
That’s just what “Wakey, Wakey,” starring Tony Hale, wants you to assume, for it plans to serve not just the opposite, but a kind of antitheater.
You’ve seen metatheater before, theater that breaks out of its own constraints, that comments on itself, that breaks the fourth wall. Will Eno’s play, which opened Wednesday, Jan. 29, at ACT’s Geary Theater, goes further still. It seeks to take leave of itself. It wants to nudge you and say, “Hey, how ’bout we get out of here,” but then stare at you and stay exactly where it is. It wants you to then laugh uncomfortably, or not get the joke, or be angry
at it and yourself for not getting the joke.
Its mission is to be a nonevent while simultaneously maintaining the trappings of an event. But the trouble with a nonevent is that it keeps lasting — an anticlimax that’s able only to assert its lack of climax over and over.
As Hale’s character, billed as Guy, comments on projected slides or reads from index cards or leads the audience through basic visualization exercises, he likes to say things like, “Let’s look at this and see if there’s anything interesting about it,” or, “I thought we might try something,” or, “You know what else is great, by the way? Solid food.”
He’s maybe approaching some kind of major life moment — a cough gets worse and worse; breathing quickens and falters; anxiety mounts — hence his holding the floor, delivering some kind of address. But he’s not sure what to do with his time and audience. That’s it. That’s the whole play.
Even when someone else (Kathryn SmithMcGlynn) comes on, it’s the same. Even when insights emerge from the prattle — one breed of courage “just seems like kindness, even happiness, like a little kid eating ice cream. It’s very quiet, true bravery.” — they’re too paltry to be worth it.
“Wakey, Wakey” doesn’t ask Hale to display the same comic skills that made him a TV treasure as Buster in “Arrested Development” or Gary in “Veep.” There he was amped and antic; here he’s matteroffact, a straight man showing only a hint of his edge. The part needs an actor with the stage chops to sculpt something out of nothing, to make meandering feel like driving, to rally every tendon and nerve and charge them toward a single, crisply defined purpose. While Hale, directed by Anne Kauffman, might have those abilities in him, they don’t manifest in
“Wakey, Wakey.”
The evening begins with a curtain opener, “The Substitution,” which was written by Eno for ACT as a companion piece to “Wakey, Wakey.” In just a few minutes of stage time, in which a substitute teacher (SmithMcGlynn) takes the lectern at a community college class, Eno says more, makes more happen, stokes more meaning, than in his longer piece. He makes a mistake become a moment of truth. He makes a class exercise become something sacred and timeless.
“Wakey, Wakey” evidences a worthy effort by ACT to interrogate, ruthlessly, what theater is and can be, what forms it might take, the relationship it might forge with its audience. You could imagine the script being part of a college syllabus one day. But for those of us who must endure it in practice, not just ponder it in theory, it’s a closed book, not an open one, able only to negate or josh, and it’s hard to imagine that American theater would let anyone but a middleaged white man get away with a play like that.