Kenneth Lonergan returns with 'The Starry Messenger'
Ignore, please, the alarming postponement, the dire reports of Kenneth Lonergan's unwieldy script and of Matthew Broderick's inability to remember his lines.
"The Starry Messenger" is a quietly marvelous play - rambling, perhaps, but engrossing, thoughtful and richly believable. Lonergan - a Pulitzer finalist for "The Waverly Gallery" and an Oscar nominee for "You Can Count on Me" - returns to the theater after eight movie years with a sprawling, mature, leisurely profound serious comedy about everyday desperation and cosmic mysteries.
Broderick gives an exquisitely detailed portrayal of yet another of his passive characters, a disappointed middle-aged astronomer named Mark who has almost disappeared inside the discomfort in his own skin. Instead of doing "real" astronomy, he teaches the beginning adult-education course at the Hayden Planetarium - the old building, about to be replaced by the modern one in 1995.
At least five seemingly mundane, overlapping stories are presented in brief, acutely written and wonderfully performed scenes that Lonergan, who also directs, contrasts with the awe-inspiring domed sky (designed by Derek McLane).
In "This Is Our Youth" and "Lobby Hero," Lonergan proved himself the master of the lost boy, usually an overeducated, underachieving New Yorker. In Mark, we go to the next step, the lost man, who - much to his astonishment - is shaken by that old cliche, a younger woman (played with delicate strength by Catalina Sandino Moreno of "Maria Full of Grace"). She is studying to be a nurse, which leads to scenes in a cancer hospital where Lonergan has the wise old lefty atheist (the terrific Merwin Goldsmith) and his frayed daughter (Missy Yager) face unpleasant realities with unusual layers of honesty.
J. Smith-Cameron, as Mark's wife, extends a harrowing lifetime of mixed emotions beyond the usual betrayals. Grant Shaud provides a useful comic foil as Mark's successful colleague, while Mark's bored, alienating students (the irresistibly quick-witted Kieran Culkin and the deadpan Stephanie Cannon) have the agonizing hilarity of truth. In a time dominated by soaps and self-congratulatory irony, "Starry Messenger" is a pleasure and a relief. Lonergan looks with clear-eyed humanity at the small problems and the big questions, and there isn't a glib moment in any of it.
WHAT "The Starry Messenger"
WHERE The New Group, 410 W. 42nd St.
INFO $60; 212-279-4200; thenewgroup.org
BOTTOM LINE A rich and engrossing new play.
