MRS. FARNSWORTH
At the Flea Theater, 41 White St. Through May 8. Call Theatermania, (212) 352-3101.
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JUST like the campaigns themselves, political play writing – even in a comic vein – has gotten nasty and personal.
Forget reverential portraits like those of FDR in a zillion plays and flicks; now we have the sharpened stiletto hidden within a comedy.
A.R. Gurney’s “Mrs. Farnsworth,” as energetically directed by Jim Simpson, was hastened into production to have maximum effect before the election.
It’s set in a writing class in a New York university, led by a youngish prof, spunkily played by Danny Burstein.
A woman from New Canaan, Mrs. Farnsworth, shows up in the class, a “rich Democrat” played with delightful exaggeration by Sigourney Weaver.
Weaver has a case of Locust Valley lockjaw, that nasal, vowel-emphasizing way of speaking from the rear of the mouth, which was once prominent among rich families.
Dressed with expensive but quiet elegance, she insists on reading to the class an excerpt of a fact-based novel she’s written – and announces she hates George W. Bush and hopes the novel will harm him.
In the novel, she calls herself Emily and recalls meeting at a ski resort years ago a dumb young Yalie she calls Miles.
She demurely refuses to admit Miles was George W., but she gets pregnant by Miles and is paid by his family to have an abortion.
The Bush-hating prof, smelling blood, urges Mrs. Farnsworth to leave her husband and move in with him to finish her novel.
Just then her husband, Forrest Farnsworth, appears – played by John Lithgow, who’s equipped with an even more severe case of Locust Valley lockjaw.
Though his own politics, revealed later, are quite surprising, Forrest does indeed disapprove of his wife’s manuscript, calling it a lie. But his real objection is that in writing it, she has become “a traitor to her class.”
Gurney, who is himself from WASP-y Connecticut, is out to show that George W. Bush is unworthy of his class, and to that end, he has tossed off this nastily subversive comedy.
But it is acted wittily by Weaver and Lithgow, who deliver immensely enjoyable, although monumentally exaggerated, caricatures of moneyed Connecticut WASPs.