It's rare enough to find a play about the difficulties of the moral life these days, but when that play is both utterly serious and deeply funny, it's a special occasion. The name of the play is Lobby Hero by Kenneth Lonergan, and anyone familiar with this author's best-known work — This Is Our Youth — won't be surprised to hear that the dialogue this time is often hilarious. But what an admirer of that earlier work won't have guessed is that Lonergan's a real thinker, that he's able to place his dizzy twentysomething characters into situations that are worthy of the most sober moral contemplation. I'm reluctant to guess at anyone's future in the American theater — there are too many wrong turns beckoning — but after seeing Lobby Hero, I have to believe that Lonergan's chances are better than most. He's got a terrific ear for colloquial dialogue, a real love of offbeat characters and their foibles, and, most important of all, a worldview, a philosophy. Lots of playwrights succeed, but few of them really matter. If Lobby Hero is any indication, Lonergan may turn out to be one of the few.
The plot of the play is deceptively simple, consisting of just two strands. First there's the perjury question: Jeff is a security guard working in the lobby of a Manhattan apartment house. His supervisor, William, tells him one day that his (William's) lowlife brother has just been arrested on suspicion of having participated in a murder. William's brother says he's innocent, but he was alone on the night of the crime, and therefore lacks a good alibi. So he wants William to tell the police that the two of them were together at the movies that night. William, a thoroughly honest man, is anguished at the thought of lying to the police, but he's also concerned that, if he tells the truth, his brother may be unjustly condemned. What choice will he make?
The second strand is a rather unusual love story. Jeff is infatuated with a rookie policewoman named Dawn. But Dawn is in love with married Bill, her partner, a formidable local hero who's up for detective. Bill and Dawn have slept with each other, but their romance is still young and full of ambiguities. Then one night, Bill and Dawn come to Jeff's apartment, and things get hairy. Bill asks Dawn to wait while he goes to see his friend "Jim" — but Jeff tells Dawn that Bill's actually gone to have sex with the high-class prostitute in 22J. Dawn is enraged, Bill's enraged too (at Jeff, and then at Dawn), and Jeff just wants a date for the Knicks game. When the fur stops flying, who, we wonder, will be hooking up with whom?
Now if these two strands (which intertwine from time to time) were all there was to Lobby Hero, it might come across as a suspenseful but mostly superficial play, something like This Is Our Youth. But author Lonergan's real intention here is to analyze moral agency, and it's this analysis that raises the play to another level.
Lonergan's strategies are as follows: He shows us a world that's so imperfect that righteous action doesn't always lead to righteous results, and he shows us human beings so conflicted and multi-motivated that one can never be sure why anyone makes any choice. So, just for example: William almost believes that, as an African-American with an already bad record, his brother will be convicted even if he really is innocent. Now the base temptation to perjure himself begins to appear as an exalted impulse to rescue his brother from a corrupt system. But what if his brother really did commit the murder? What does a lover of justice do in such a case? And on the subject of motivations: Is it honesty that leads Jeff to tell Dawn about Bill's assignation, or is it calculating jealousy? Has Bill helped Dawn so much in her rookie months because he wants to be a buddy or because he wants into her pants?
Again and again, characters' actions are subject to both selfish and altruistic interpretations, and there's simply no way to determine which has precedence. This muddle, Lonergan's saying, is our condition, our problem. Bill is a truly terrific cop — but he cheats on his wife and he frequents prostitutes. Dawn is a genuinely idealistic young policewoman — but she overreacts to a street fight and beats one drunk so violently it seems he'll lose an eye. In Lonergan's view, good and evil are so mixed that it would take a moral genius to separate them from each other.
I can't say that I fully agree with this evaluation; it seems to me that, more often than not, the moral choice is pretty obvious, sometimes more obvious than we would wish. But when you see how Lonergan has filled his play with his philosophy, you can't help but be impressed.
Impressive too are a couple of the performances in the Florida Studio Theatre production. Best of all is Jonathan Hammond, who, as police officer Bill, manages to show us so many sides that you need a scorecard to keep track. Then there's Tina Frantz, who, as rookie policewoman Dawn, is at various times dangerous, vulnerable, level-headed and hysterical. Sheffield Chastain plays Jeff as a nervous motor mouth with good intentions, but he never makes it clear why other characters treat him as a joker. And J. Bernard Calloway, as the good-hearted William, turns in an adequate performance (we really feel his distress as he contemplates perjury), but his acting lacks crispness, and he's sometimes hard to understand.
Director Kate Alexander does a solid job with her actors, and Tim Baumgartner's set, while not particularly attractive, is convincing enough as a Manhattan lobby. Though the demands on costumer Marcella Beckwith aren't great — two different types of uniform, one for the police officers, one for the security guards — as usual she meets them with perfect appropriateness.
But maybe one shouldn't use the word "perfect" when discussing Lobby Hero. Because, in Lonergan's world, it's imperfection that rules, that muddies our vision and confuses our behavior. Well, at least we're clear-sighted enough to know good drama when we come across it — and Lobby Hero is very much that. It's funny and profound and about as provocative as you could wish. Days after you see it, you'll still be thinking it through.
A play that turns us into moral philosophers.
Hey, maybe the American theater is on an upswing.
Performance Critic Mark E. Leib can be reached at mark.leib@weeklyplanet.com or 813-248-8888 ext. 305.
This article appears in Aug 14-20, 2003.