It doesn’t matter how long a play is: sometimes 75 minutes can feel like 3 hours if the play is bad, while a three-hour play may first elicit an inner groan, then flow pleasurably by if the writing and performances are in well-oiled tandem.
Kenneth Lonergan’s Hold on to Me Darling (Lucille Lortel Theatre, to Dec. 22) belongs, mostly, to the latter category: it is long, and it feels long, but that’s OK; not gold-standard wow, but far more than pleasant. This is down to Lonergan’s engaging writing and a collection of differently distinctive, carefully drawn performances, led by Adam Driver as a famous country star called Strings (real name Clarence), wondering if he could/should give up all the trappings of fame for a simpler life after his mother’s death.
It is an off-Broadway treat to see Driver, most recently seen on the big screen as the star of Francis Ford Coppola’s polarizing epic Megalopolis, here bestriding—he is so tall, he is really bestriding—the compact Lucille Lortel stage. Theater fans last saw him on Broadway in Burn This, for which he was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play. He is renowned for playing powder-keg personas. With characters like Adam in Girls, Charlie in Marriage Story, and Pale in Burn This, the question, the bubbling menace, was when will Adam Driver go off? Those characters memorably combusted—thrashing, shouting, snarling and occupying spaces that could barely contain them—and Driver made it so that you recoiled from their crackling fury.
Driver’s Strings comes with more subtlety—the comedy Driver neatly leans into is in Strings knowing and behaving like a big star (a guitar is kicked to smithereens in the opening minutes), while retaining the humility of a smalltown boy, and the two qualities butting up against each other. Strings cannot deal with the real world in any way, yet wants to now exist in it.
The play opens with Strings stripping down to his underwear (just saying, Adam Driver fans), and getting a massage from Nancy (Heather Burns), the first of two women in the play who are more than a match for Strings’ contradictions and eccentric impenetrability.
If Driver accesses a rock star’s inner world of weird as it is exposed to the light of the everyday, Burns’ character possesses elements of the menace that Driver’s usually do. Nancy comes to want Strings, and his millions, all for herself—and this includes manipulating his grief-stricken mind, and calculatedly seeing off anyone who she sees as competition. However, she also shows us Nancy’s vulnerability and bedrock of damage from which her behavior springs.
An excellent Keith Nobbs as Jimmy, Strings’ chief assistant, is one of those interlopers Nancy cannot bear, utterly devoted to serving his master; Lonergan (This Is Our Youth, The Waverly Gallery, Lobby Hero) writes this as bordering on something more than 100% professional dedication (like a Smithers to Strings’ Mr. Burns), with long hugs and fervent looks.
It feels almost-homophobic in its imagining (as if we are being encouraged to think Jimmy does feel something more for Strings than diehard loyalty), which both actors sagely retreat from underlining. One of the best scenes in the play comes in a confrontation between Jimmy and Nancy, as Jimmy launches into a gleeful volley of truth-telling bitchiness.
Essie (Adelaide Clements) is another obstacle in Nancy’s eyes—a second cousin twice removed to Strings, and the polar opposite of Nancy. She speaks plainly, honestly, but her sweetness, and her conflicted feelings for Strings, conceal a vein of steel and guile, which Clemens builds into a winning and unexpected performance for a character who could be a far more grating simp.
Duke (CJ Wilson) supplies more welcome bluntness, in a lovely performance as Strings’ down-to-earth brother, frustrated—as we all become; he, like Essie, becomes a tribune of the audience—with Strings’ flakiness.
Walt Spangler’s simple design is a series of basic rotating sets—hotel bedroom, living room, funeral parlor, and finally feed store—and director Neil Pepe finds the perfect pace for the actors to marshal three ranging hours of text into a play that never drags or soars. It is whimsical rather than volcanic, especially with a final act twist that sends the play into other territory of the family-surprise kind, featuring another gently standout performance from Frank Wood.
This sequence first feels rushed, and a too-late story-changing add-on. However, like all the other things that should not work in a long play, this finds its smooth right spot in the adept hands of Pepe and his very good cast, led by Driver. The actor masters the art of quiet bafflement and existential muddle. His furrowed brow is broken only by one extended moment of menace; when that happens, primed for a Driver explosion of some kind, you anticipate, ultimately in vain, the inevitable detonation. Instead, Hold on to Me Darling retains its subtle mischief, gentle unspooling, and dry execution right to the end, scoring a true original in the process—in this role, Adam Driver doesn’t go off.
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