Farnsworth's Back at the Flea. Click.

The average off-off-Broadway theatergoer might think he is
open-minded. The double prefix confers an anti-establishment
credibility on its constituents, an implicit assurance that
uncomplicated emotions and stereotypes remain quarantined among the
Middle American attractions of Times Square. Playwright A.R. Gurney
knows better. His intricately structured play Mrs.
Farnsworth, in a return engagement at the Flea Theater in
TriBeCa, reveals its audience’s emotions and stereotypes to
be at least as easily manipulated as those of an audience watching
synchronized dancing 60 blocks to the north.

The setting for this continually surprising drama is a night
school creative writing course taught by Gordon (Danny Burstein).
The newest student is Mrs. Farnsworth (the lustrous Sigourney
Weaver), who wants help with a novel she’s writing.
“It’s political,” she announces, and then
proceeds to read her first paragraph and give a brief plot summary.
Her novel is about a patrician girl from Vassar named Emily, a bad
boy from Yale named Miles, their rendezvous on the ski slopes of
Vermont in the 1960s, and Emily’s resulting pregnancy.

It soon becomes clear that the novel is a roman à clef
about Mrs. Farnsworth’s own college affair with George W.
Bush. “You realize the boy is the scion of a distinguished
Republican family,” she says. One can almost hear the
audience’s prejudices switching on. “He’s not
that bright,” she says. Click, goes the Bush-is-stupid
switch. “The boy has a slight alcohol problem,” she
says. Click, goes the Bush-is-a-drunk switch. Then things get
juicier. Emily is visited by Miles’ lawyer, who gives her
$10,000 and a round-trip ticket to an abortionist in British
Honduras. Click. Miles forgets Emily, and goes on to run an
unsuccessful oil company with help from his father’s friends.
Click.

There are plenty of stereotypes Mrs. Farnsworth plays into as
well, and Gurney, the dean of theatrical WASP studies, is an expert
creator of them. “My grandmother said there’s too much
first-naming,” she declares when asked to give her first
name. “Never let people call you by your first name if they
work for you, or if you’ve known them for less than three
years, or if you’ve never kissed them,” she says.
Click, goes the cold-uptight-WASP switch. Remarking that
Fishers’ Island is “a final fortress for WASPs,”
she adds carelessly, “You know, just like the Jews and
Masada.” Click.

Gurney’s overt contribution to this stereotyping is
skillfully supported by director Jim Simpson, set designer Kyle
Chepulls, and lighting designer Brian Aldous. The entire theater is
transformed into a classroom, with bright overhead lights hanging
even over the audience, and the staggered platform seating for the
audience forming college-style auditorium seating. Three actors
playing students (Kate Benson, Fernando Gambaroni, and Tarajla
Morrell) are seated among the audience, occasionally interjecting
with comments or asking questions of Mrs. Farnsworth or Gordon. The
proverbial “fourth wall” is almost completely
eliminated—indeed, it was difficult to tell if a group of
ladies-who-lunch types who arrived five minutes into the
performance on a recent evening were more actors or just late
arrivals—with the result that forming stereotypes seems
justified because the audience is participating in the events and
interacting with the people it judges.

All of these factors make the second part of the play, in which
those stereotypes are blown apart, even more surprising. The break
is made by the arrival of Mrs. Farnsworth’s wealthy,
Republican husband Forrest (she had told him she was in Manhattan
to see Hairspray with a friend).

Allowing others to experience and enjoy the surprising ways in
which Gurney deconstructs those stereotypes precludes their
revelation, but suffice it to say that the deconstruction is
breathtaking. The prejudices against callous frat boy Bush,
charming but aloof Mrs. Farnsworth, and domineering Forrest
Farnsworth (he burnt the first draft of his wife’s novel), so
carefully constructed during the previous hour, are shattered by
Forrest’s cool, logical monologue.

Gerry Bamman gives a masterful performance as Forrest, mixing
patrician elegance with hard-nosed pragmatism. His character is the
play’s most complex, and if you’ve only seen Bamman
play a high-powered defense lawyer on Law and Order, then you must
see Mrs. Farnsworth just to watch this talented actor demonstrate
the full range of his artistry.

Sigourney Weaver is the perfect complement to Bamman. Her skills
as both a physical comedian and a dramatic actress lay the
groundwork for Forrest’s revelations with almost invisible
subtlety, and the portrait of her marriage to Bamman is the true
soul of the play, heartrending and heartwarming. Incidentally,
Michael Kors, who provided her ensemble for Mrs. Farnsworth, has
yet to find a more attractive or more elegant model than
Weaver—she belongs on a glossy Houston Street billboard.

Mrs. Farnsworth is being marketed as a political play,
which certainly helps to make the second part of the drama more
surprising. “These days it’s hard to write anything
that’s not political,” Gordon remarks, but Gurney
confounds audience expectations so cleverly and with such wit that
the phrase “political play” seems to be just one more
shattered stereotype.