THE HANGOVER REPORT – Jayne Houdyshell and Pascale Armand shine in an otherwise underwhelming RELEVANCE

Jayne Houdyshell and Pascale Armand in JC Lee's "Relevance" at MCC Theater.

Jayne Houdyshell and Pascale Armand in JC Lee’s “Relevance” at MCC Theater.

Last night, JC Lee’s Relevance opened at Off-Broadway’s Lucille Lortel Theatre. The production is courtesy of MCC Theater, which must be commended, first and foremost, for successfully bringing to the stage, over the years, disparate voices and points of view. Indeed, MCC was instrumental in bringing Robert Askins’s darkly comic Hand to God to Broadway, and its previous production, Jocelyn Bioh’s School Girls; or, the African Mean Girls Play, about high schoolers in a boarding school in Ghana, was a supremely entertaining, deserving hit for the theater company.

Unfortunately, Mr. Lee’s Relevance, despite being an interesting character study, suffers from a lack of dramatic tension and sufficient meat on its bones. The play depicts the rivalry between two academics in the area of feminist thought and theory – one, an older, established leader in the field; the other, a hungry, charismatic upstart with a questionable past. The two collide at an arts and culture conference, but instead of fireworks, the play just tepidly bumbles along, even using real time social media feeds as a crutch to mask any of the play’s inherent deficiencies (the popular musical Dear Evan Hansen explored this territory much more effectively).

Thankfully, the production is competently directed by Liesl Tommy (who directed Danai Gurira’s Eclipsed to great acclaim on Broadway). The staging also features two very good actresses in the roles of the dueling academics – Tony-winner (for The Humans) Jayne Houdyshell and Tony-nominee (for Eclipsed) Pascale Armand. Ms. Houdyshell, in my book one of the finest working stage actresses New York has to offer, was generally excellent in the role of the more established, somewhat self-delusional, arguably unsympathetic character, although she did reveal a few tentative moments during one of the final preview performances I attended. Ms. Armand, though, was a formidable presence throughout.

SOMEWHAT RECOMMENDED

 

RELEVANCE
Off-Broadway, Play
MCC Theater at The Lucille Lortel Theatre
1 hour, 40 minutes (without an intermission)
Through March 11

Categories: Off-Broadway, Theater

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