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[Theater reviews]

Morality play
The Lyric salutes Lobby Hero

BY CAROLYN CLAY

Lobby Hero
By Kenneth Lonergan. Directed by Scott Edmiston. Set design by Sarah Sullivan. Costumes by Gail Astrid Buckley. Lighting by Karen Perlow. With Jason Schuchman, Ricardo Engermann, Cortney Keim, and Robert Pemberton. At the Lyric Stage Company of Boston through November 24.

In Sarah Sullivan’s impressive set design for the Lyric Stage Company of Boston production of Lobby Hero, the floor of a Manhattan high-rise apartment-building foyer is laid out in large, neat squares. But Kenneth Lonergan’s recent Off Broadway hit actually takes place on a moral shifting ground, its four characters up to their uniform-pant cuffs in sand that won’t lie still. Over the course of four successive late-night shifts, two security guards and two New York City police officers jockey for power and pratfall over conscience in a workaday world where neither is a frequent flier. Waiting for Godot meets American Buffalo meets Law and Order as a hapless lobby watchman named Jeff, whether hearing the siren call of sex or that of civic duty, stumbles into making a stand.

This small, deft, disarmingly comic play is by the author of This Is Our Youth and The Waverly Gallery (Lonergan is also the Oscar-nominated screenwriter/director of the film You Can Count on Me). Nominated for several awards when it debuted last year at New York’s Playwrights Horizons, the piece makes of its anonymous-looking lobby a crackling little microcosm where issues of race, sex, domination, and integrity and the inevitable bleeding of black and white are kicked around in the wee hours. Seen here in its Boston premiere, under the well-calibrated direction of Scott Edmiston, the play isn’t perfect; it isn’t even always believable (as when private conversations that could easily be taken outside are not). But the characters, well played across the board, ring wincingly true, as do the struggles of some of them to cut a path between humiliation and the high road.

Jeff, the bottom rung of the play’s power ladder, is an affable screw-up; discharged from the Navy for smoking pot, he lives with relatives while endeavoring to pay off a gambling debt and trying to keep his nose clean and the rest of himself awake as he guards the lobby. William is his hectoring but at-heart decent supervisor, a straitlaced African-American man whose stolid commitment to the straight-and-narrow wobbles when his brother is arrested for a serious crime and seeks to use him as an alibi. The Pozzo and Lucky of the piece are veteran policeman Bill, whose ego is bigger than his nightstick, and his rookie partner, Dawn, of whom Jeff (who has some dubious fantasies involving female officers of the law) is enamored. Dawn, for her part, has had an ill-advised tumble with Bill, who, contradicting the image of cops and doughnuts, spends his breaks with a cookie who lives above the lobby where the play takes place.

The ways in which these four flex their muscles at one another while at the same time taking their licks is comic, painful, and, as in the plays of David Mamet, metaphorically apt. Lonergan’s language only occasionally echoes Mamet’s stylized vernacular ( " You’ll drive around, you’ll shoot some perpetrators, you’ll feel better, " Jeff tells a bereft Dawn, who has just found out about Bill and the woman upstairs). And there are instances when his blue-collar characters overleap their linguistic bounds (using words like " ossified, " for example). But for the most part, the playwright travels smoothly from the affluent Upper West Side turf of his autobiographical works to the graveyard shift, where money figures less in the pecking order than phalliphernalia. As William informs the Dawn-smitten Jeff, who wields only keys, a girl with a gun will make him feel " outranked and outclassed. " Indeed, the cops look down on the security police as " doormen. "

For a work that’s not long on plot, Lobby Hero is a lot less terse than a Mamet play. Its four scenes run almost two and a half hours. But in the Lyric production, even the more trivial exchanges are underscored with agitation, conversations escalate into verbal machine-gun fire, and tensions can be hilariously diffused by candid, unexpected punch lines. As the engagingly open if tactless Jeff, Jason Schuchman is a convincing loser who trips into being a mensch. Ricardo Engermann brings a stiff upper lip and a shaking hand to uptight William, saluting the flag of his value system even as it unravels. Robert Pemberton complicates the preening, macho Bill by making him a guy who believes his own hype. Dawn may be the play’s most interesting character, undone by her femininity when she isn’t making wily use of it, and Cortney Keim, standing stiffly at ease when she’s not, uses her expressive face like a short fuse on a loose cannon.

Issue Date: November 1-8, 2001