NOT A DON DEAL
But Eisenberg’s Off-B’way play has a bigot
Actor and playwright Jesse Eisenberg knows audiences might take his current off-Broadway play as a commentary about Donald Trump’s America.
He just wishes they wouldn’t.
“I don’t like the idea of viewing the show through a kind of political lens,” Eisenberg said of “Happy Talk,” which runs at the Pershing Square Signature Center through June 16. “I feel like it then diminishes what I’m hoping to accomplish, which is to kind of tell the story of this strange psychology of this woman who is a bigot.”
The woman in question is played by Susan Sarandon, who brings star power to the production — so much so that Eisenberg, a familiar face to film audiences, doesn’t need to appear in the play.
People who know him only as an actor — perhaps most notably as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in “The Social Network” — might be surprised to find out that “Happy Talk” is the fourth play he’s written.
The 35-year-old said he sometimes finds he needs to exorcise something in himself through writing. “It’s a funny process,” he told the Daily News, because “you’re sitting there, alone, no one’s asking you to do it. And if you’re a sane person, you probably start questioning every major decision in your life that brought you to this moment of inactivity.” Eisenberg said each time he writes, he feels like he’s building something brand new. But when he looks back at his work, starting with his first Off-Broadway play, “Asuncion” (2011), he sees a single thematic thread: “This great disparity between people who are in real dire circumstances interacting with people who are privileged but are obsessed with themselves and view their problems as far worse.” In the end, there’s nothing particularly happy about “Happy Talk.” Set in suburban New Jersey, the play orbits around Lorraine, a xenophobic and clueless amateur actor, played by Sarandon, who keeps watch over her dying mother and her depressed husband. Marin Ireland adds zip to the play as Ljuba, an immigrant from Serbia who cares for Lorraine’s mother and smiles through the pain as she searches for a green card and misses her daughter back home.
Eisenberg said he senses viewers turning an eye to national politics, but he’s more interested in the psychology of his characters. “I much prefer doing my shows, which were about xenophobia, when it seemed like it was about individuals,” Eisenberg said, “rather than a kind of statement or part of a national conversation.”
But the national conversation rages on outside, and one character, Lorraine’s daughter, Jenny, would likely be one to take part. A recent college graduate and de facto runaway, Jenny, played by Tedra Millan, visits home for perhaps the play’s most explosive scene, dropping in to yell at her mom, inform her family she’s moving to Costa Rica and offer analysis of American overreaches in foreign policy.
“She’s a hypocrite,” Millan said, describing her character. “She’s bold, and she’s angry, and she’s judgmental, and she’s really smart.”
That’s just the type of character the actor-turned-playwright looks to create. “He finds a little story, and then it grows out. And it tells you what he’s thinking about the world — as dark as it may be,” Scott Elliott, the play’s director, said of Eisenberg.