Beginning this second act in my fifties, I have a well of experience and life lessons to draw from.
In this first act, look and sound stun eye and ear, but the tempo of Graham Eatough's direction is patterned by technology rather than the dynamics of character interactions; scenes drag.
Hnath is so good in this first act I was certain I was watching one of the best plays of the year, even though it's only February.
He sings "I've Got Beginner's Luck" and then dances with humor while wooing Lise in a department store (one of the show's best numbers, all of which take place in this first act).
Whether Newton can feel that love and -- even if he can feel that love -- whether he can express it, is the heart of the drama in this first act.
In fact, this fourth act is the high point of a mixed and slightly disappointing affair.
Even if the tension flags a bit in the second act, this remains an urgent play that has the courage to address big issues: above all, the need to retain our idealism in a world where ideology is suspect, religion tarnished and the free market wholly discredited.
This leads, in the second act, to a number of ill-assorted trysts, none more awkward than that of the hero, Pyotr, with a woman whom he thinks is the Ballerina but who, by dint of connivance between the Ballerina and Pyotr's wife, Zina, is actually Zina in disguise.
Most theatergoers will not be so willing to swallow this line of guff or the plot of this play, which in the second act involves Patsy's macabre quest to locate all her brother's body parts, her improbable attraction to Greg, the cop (somehow, when he kisses her, she manages to forget her brother was hacked to bits), and the solving of the murder by the police without any apparent arrests.
This is matched, in the second act climax, by what feels like the longest death scene of all time.
