Talking Therapy With David Kennedy

KATHLEEN MCNENNY AS CHARLOTTE AND STEPHEN WALLEM AS BOB IN CHRISTOPHER DURANG’S BEYOND THERAPY, AT WESTPORT COUNTRY PLAYHOUSE THROUGH MAY 14.

PHOTO BY T. CHARLES ERICKSON

“I really love this play,” Westport Country Playhouse associate artistic director David Kennedy shares. The play is Beyond Therapy, and our analysis begins promisingly.

“I’ve always liked Durang’s sensibility,” Kennedy continues. “I was exposed to him when I was fairly young. He’s very much a staple on college campuses. I’ve read him since I was 18. 19, but never even directed a scene of his.” That changed this month. Beyond Therapy is in previews now and opens Saturday at the WCP. Tickets and more info can be found here.

When John Rando, who’d been announced to direct Beyond Therapy as the opening show of Westport Country Playhouse’s 2011 season, had to bow out just weeks before rehearsals began, Kennedy took the opportunity to final direct a play by the daffily deep Durang, the Yale School of Drama alumni (from the same glorious era as Wendy Wasserstein, Meryl Streep and Sigourney Weaver) whose other works include Betty’s Summer Vacation (seen at Yale Rep in 2002), The Marriage of Bette and Boo, ‘dentity Crisis, The Actor’s Nightmare, Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You, The Idiots Karamazov, Christopher Durang and Dawn and dozens of others. (He’s done a lot of one-acts).

The Durangian comedy complex can be diagnosed as anywhere from absurd to insane, but Kennedy says it’s crucial to ground the craziness somewhere. “In rehearsal, we’ve been trying to monitor and be a touchstone for motivational behavior,” he says, in the manner of a therapist. “The throughline is this couple, Bruce and Prudence. You live vicariously through them. You form an attachment to them that grounds all the anarchic silliness.

“There’s not a lot of physical shtick. It’s not a real sight-gaggy play. The first scene is set in a restaurant, with people eating and talking. The more you work on it, the more the play seems in keeping with Oscar Wilde or Joe Orton—writers who wrote incredibly deep comedies.”

If you want to see how possible it is to do Beyond Therapy very badly, you need only rent the Robert Altman film adaptation, which moved the essential New York surroundings to Europe and revved up the slapstick to unreal proportions. According to Kennedy, “The film is very different. Durang says there’s no psychology in it. Just people acting crazy.”

These actors Kennedy cast for this production certainly aren’t of the garish-mugging knockabout variety. They include WCP veterans Jeremy Peter Johnson (who did the musical She Loves Me for the theater last year) and Nicole Lowrance (David Copperfield back in 2005) as Bruce and Prudence, Trent Dawson (from TV’s As the World Turns) and Kathleen McNenny (the Broadway regular known in Connecticut for her Candida at Yale Rep, her Rosalind at the Long Wharf, and her Gretal in The Good German at WCP) as their respective therapists Stuart and Charlotte,  Stephen Wallem as the bisexual Bruce’s lover/roommate Bob and Nick Gehlfuss as Andrew the waiter.

Durang consulted with Kennedy during the pre-production and rehearsal process. Kennedy’s previous production at Westport, Dinner With Friends, also found him getting advice from its playwright, Donald Margulies. “We’ve exchanged emails,” Kennedy clarifies regarding Durang’s involvement. When John Rando couldn’t get around his scheduling conflict, and I stepped in to do it, at that point David proved very helpful to me. He was open and accessible—not in the room or anything, but he definitely has been a presence.”

With Dinner With Friends, Kennedy was able to set his production in the present day with very few alterations to the 15-year-old script. Beyond Therapy, he decided, can’t be removed from the early ’80s neurotic New York City milieu in which it was written. “In my conversations with Donald Margulies, we realized it wasn’t long enough since the 1990s to make [Dinner With Friends] a period piece. But Durang, on his website, writes about why updating [Beyond Therapy] doesn’t make much sense. It’s of its time, and you can’t take it out of that time. There are too many pop culture references—you pull on that tread and the whole garment begins to unravel.” On the more universal side, Kennedy deems the play “a timeless take on an American romantic comedy formula that’s been around for years.”

David Kennedy has a second directing task at the Westport Country Playhouse this season, staging the work of another writer (this time a dead one) whom he’s long admired but never had a chance to direct: Tennessee Williams. In preparing for both Beyond Therapy and his August production of Suddenly Last Summer, has Kennedy come across Durang’s scathing one-act parody of Williams, “For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls”? “Well, it’s a loving parody. I don’t think you could write something like that without admiring Williams. But both Durang and Williams are larger than life, just… grand. It’s easy with both of them to go too far. I’m taking them both with the utmost seriousness. The important thing is to find that style.”