Will Eno’s The Realistic Joneses opened on Broadway last week, at the Lyceum.
I wrote two reviews of the play’s world premiere production at the Yale Repertory Theatre in May 2012:
for the New Haven Advocate (now CTNow) here,
and at the earlier location of New Haven Theater Jerk, here.
Since that time, I’ve seen Will Eno’s extraordinary Ibsen adaptation Gnit at the 2013 Humana Festival, and figured that a new level of appreciation for his deliciously distant dialogue and post-modernist mannerisms was imminent. It appears that The Realistic Joneses has become that rallying point. Go figure.
In his April 6 New York Times review, Christopher Isherwood calls The Realistic Joneses “easily [Eno’s] most accessible play. I think Gnit is, and I also think that there seem to be a lot of college productions of Middletown happening, so that’s apparently accessible too. (Locally, the Yale Dramat has done Middletown already and Yale Summer Cabaret is doing it this August.) Some would argue that The Open House, which just closed Off Broadway, was the a-word as well. That whole “accessible“ bugaboo (not to mention its converse, “not for everyone”) bothers me. It assumes a mainstream that doesn’t really exist, and places plays within in or outside it based on populist traditions that Broadway producers themselves would probably like to see fade away.
Isherwood’s whole review is colored by his opening contention that “Plays as funny and moving, as wonderful and weird as “The Realistic Joneses,” by Will Eno, do not appear often on Broadway.”
But I love Isherwood’s Times review of Joneses because he saw the play first at the Rep and thought to note that:
The actors slip into its herky-jerky tempos with no apparent effort. I saw the play at its premiere at Yale Repertory Theater, with a mostly different foursome (only Mr. Letts remains), and feared that the necessity of casting stars for a Broadway run would foul up the works. It has not, thanks in part to Mr. Gold, who has become a consummate director of adventurous new writing for the theater.
It’s flat-out great that Isherwood saw the Rep production and can use that experience to inform his Broadway review of the same play. It puts him leagues ahead of the other New York critics, who are still coming to terms with Eno’s singular linguistic abilities, a style which regional critics are now well familiar with.
Interestingly, when Isherwood reviewed The Realistic Joneses at the Rep, he didn’t couch his comments in any of that “accessible” or “Broadway’s not ready” nonsense.
What he said then is this:
The Realistic Joneses,” directed with grace by the busy Sam Gold, is dappled with the quirky non sequiturs and deadpan wordplay that are among Mr. Eno’s signature effects, along with a quiet insistence on the majesty and mystery of human existence. As delivered by an ideal cast — Johanna Day, Glenn Fitzgerald, Tracy Letts and Parker Posey all keenly attuned to Mr. Eno’s sensibility — his off-kilter dialogue comes to seem as natural, and lovely, as the chirping of crickets and the sound of bird song.
