Part of his cleverness lies in this interplay of the actors’ outsize magnificence and his message about small-town city fathers. (The laugh-a-minute Pendleton was in the original production of Fiddler on the Roof, but sure, don’t let that intimidate you.) Letts has a rapid pinprick wit, and he inflicts real damage in the play’s early sections. Reid - already beloved from his role on Schitt’s Creek and new to Broadway - has the wide eyes of a rookie some of the drifting menace in the room is our vicarious sense of what it feels like to be a young actor with a thousand years of collected theatrical experience arrayed before him. There are a lot of Tony Awards on that stage. There’s overwhelming abundance in having a cast that includes so many heavy hitters, all contentedly kibitzing on the bench. “Language police” might describe Letts too: He has fun with infractions. Breeding, after saying ten offensive things in a row. “Oh, here we go, the language police,” grumbles Mr. Innes (Blair Brown) squabble in increasingly hilarious ways, and people bicker over points of order and word choice. Assalone’s name every time she calls the roll. He therefore finds much to be delighted by in meeting minutiae. Like Dickens, he’s a connoisseur of folly - he rolls human silliness against his palate as if he’s testing it for notes of stone fruit. This determinative nomenclature is a little nod to Dickens and a peep into Letts’s comic methods. Assalone (Jeff Still) is … look, I’m not going to spoil the plot for you. Breeding (Cliff Chamberlain), struts and preens like a gorilla in season. Oldfield is old Superba’s sidekick, the contemptuous Mr. Peel is the hero with thin skin Superba is top man. Having trouble remembering all those names? No problem, most of them are mnemonics. Still, the town’s old business - very, very old business - will not be denied. Oldfield (Austin Pendleton) wants a parking spot. Hanratty (the firework Danny McCarthy) hopes to make the civic fountain accessible Mr. Todd Freeman) proposes a cage-match attraction to raise money for the town’s festival Mr. There’s plenty of new business to distract him: Mr. Peel begs the clerk (Jessie Mueller), Mayor Superba (Letts himself), and the room at large for clarification - but everyone ducks his questions. Peel is back in their chamber, the other councilors are being weirdly cagey about whatever happened the previous week, and they refuse to distribute that meeting’s minutes. “You feel untethered,” says another man, as they gather. He’s a bit of a naïf, thrilled to show pictures of his infant daughter to his colleagues, wandering out of the rain still dazed from grief. ![]() Peel (Noah Reid), a novice assemblyman in a small town, has missed a closed session of the town council due to his mother’s funeral. Imagine Jonathan Swift having supply-chain issues - only to discover that the English had actually started eating babies before he could publish. ![]() Juvenalian satire requires that it be more extreme than reality. Events raced past Letts’s script, with death threats and violence interrupting school-board meetings and public health hearings. Every postponed production has had to account for lost time and changed context, but the gap posed a special challenge for The Minutes: The show deals with a city council meeting, and we’ve spent 700 days watching such conclaves accelerate beyond fractiousness into Kafka-esque terror. But then, of course, there were delays.īetween the parentheses of March 2020 and April 2022, actor Armie Hammer left the cast after his reputation combusted Trump befouled the transfer of power and the insurrectionists revealed the chaos at the heart of our democracy. Tracy Letts is the rare playwright whose own celebrity is enough to prompt a Broadway run ever since the runaway success of August: Osage County, he has had that green-light touch. When the civic comedy was announced for the 2020 Broadway season, it seemed like a prescient choice, full of up-to-the-moment thoughts about governance.
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