Pointed humor lets everyone in on 'Private Jokes'
WELLFLEET -- Elvis Costello once said, "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture -- it's a really stupid thing to want to do." Fortunately, writing about architecture turns out to be a much smarter thing to do, particularly if the writer is as talented as Oren Safdie and the company staging his play, "Private Jokes, Public Places," is as strong as the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater.
The production starts off like something of a forced march through the theater's backstage area, made up to look like an exhibit of architectural drawings. Three of the play's four characters -- a professor and two architects -- are expounding on the drawings in various degrees of pompousness. When the action moves into the theater, it turns out that the architects are jurors evaluating the theses of the professor's graduate students. Enter a nervous Asian-American woman who has designed a public swimming pool as her graduate project, and faster than you can say Le Corbusier, we're plunged into the wacky world of critical theory.
Safdie knows whereof he speaks. He is the son of noted architect Moshe Safdie and went to architectural school himself before deciding playwriting beat blueprinting. If "Private Jokes, Public Places" does not fit into any theatrical style, that's all to the good as far as the play is concerned. Safdie is profoundly skeptical of "isms," or schools of modern art and architecture, and turns that skepticism into a humorous and stinging indictment of how those schools have turned American cities into form-follows-dysfunction Towers of Babel.
The private jokes of the title refer to how public spaces often reflect aesthetic egomania while ignoring the human needs of the people who live or work in those spaces. That artiness is reflected here by the two architects/jurors, one a stuffy, bow-tied British academic and the other a bald, bored, I'm-too-sexy-for-my-shirt German who has a more than passing resemblance to Bruno from "Da Ali G Show."
Under Brendan Hughes's high-spirited direction, Stephen Russell has that worldweary, dressed-in-black European manner down perfectly here, and Dafydd Rees is equally intimidating as the bullying pedant. Marc Carver, as the Zenned-out professor, is quickly emerging as one of the area's most engaging leading men, and New York actor Ann Hu blooms along with her character, Margaret.
At the heart of the relatively short play is Margaret's attempt to break away from the model of designing eye-catching public buildings that don't fit the landscape or Frank Lloyd Wright-style housing for multimillionaires, balanced against the cynicism of the two professionals, one of whom proudly declares that he has no interest in the surrounding buildings when he goes to work.
Safdie doesn't let the inbred jargon used by the two architects become too arcane or the characters become too stereotyped. Much of "Private Jokes" went over my head, but Safdie provides enough information to let the general viewer know what's going on. (Naturally, the more one knows about architecture or critical theory, the better.)
And while Safdie makes the obnoxiousness of the two professionals and the professor very funny, they're more prototypes than stereotypes. They do know what they're talking about and you can't easily dismiss their arguments, even as you start to root for Margaret.
The subject matter of the play might seem off-putting and it isn't for everyone, certainly, although we are all affected by the issues talked about in the play. But you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, and you don't need to be an architect to enjoy the pointed humor of "Private Jokes, Public Places."
Ed Siegel can be reached at siegel@globe.com.
Private Jokes, Public Places Play by Oren Safdie
Directed by: Brendan Hughes. Set, Dan Joy. Lights, Christopher Ostrom. Costumes, Mary Jo Horner.
At: Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater, through Oct. 24. 508-349-6835.
