The dialogue is delivered with a similarly determined inattention to the artful simulation we associate with good acting.Ĭlearly, Mr. Attention to melody and proper pitch are strenuously avoided. Maxwell's winkingly formulaic pop-rock compositions, with sentimental-silly lyrics that mix parody and homage. Maxwell's plays, the characters regularly face forward to deliver one of Mr.
Hurley, an actor who has often collaborated with Mr. Allen, a sturdily built woman who is by profession not an actress but a nurse, and Mr. Maxwell has concocted a bittersweet, lower-middle-class love story recalling 1970's movies like "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore" or the fine-spun short stories religiously taught in fiction classes at liberal arts colleges. Mutual declarations of love follow, but the lure of his emotionally unencumbered past keeps dogging Kevin. A brusque bout of lovemaking, enacted with self-conscious stiffness by the performers, leads to a further deepening of the bond between them. Their relationship evolves in fits and starts. They are playing characters named Rosemary and Kevin, another bit of nose-thumbing in the direction of theatrical artifice. Maxwell's everyday dialogue is made to sound arch and strange by the strident, rhythmically eccentric or deadpan delivery of his actors, Rosemary Allen and Kevin Hurley. Recreated so precisely in a theatrical context, a depressingly prosaic space takes on a poetic sheen. Stephanie Nelson's set, for example, with its water-stained ceiling, cinderblock walls and cheap, bruised furnishings, is so meticulously authentic that it is transformed into a commentary on literal authenticity. Ann's in Brooklyn, are carefully subverted. Maxwell's New York City Players and Arts at St. The realistic elements in "Good Samaritans," a co-production of Mr. Maxwell is a gifted naturalist who is at war with naturalism, which in the theater he sees as deeply artificial. The dialogue is generally straightforward, too, revealing his exceptional ear for the ragged nature of everyday speech: the false starts, the repetitions, the non sequiturs and unfinished phrases that other playwrights tend to elide.īut Mr. In its plain, deftly structured story of a troubled love affair between the proprietor of a shelter for recovering addicts and one of her more recalcitrant charges, "Good Samaritans" is, in terms of narrative, more traditional than much of Mr.
Maxwell's mastery of his aesthetic continues to mature, his fans and his foes may find that in stretching the muscles of the mind, he is tugging more insistently at the heartstrings, too. His plays probably puzzle as many people as they please. He radically distorts traditional theatrical mechanics to keep us attuned to the relationship between content and form, between the art and the audience. The pleasures of this idiosyncratic writer-director's plays are indeed usually more intellectual than emotional. Maxwell's affect-free portraits in contemporary anomie may now be confidently stowing the handkerchiefs and putting on the sardonic smiles.
"Good Samaritans" could be subtitled "A Richard Maxwell Love Story." Admirers of Mr.
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