At a certain level of enduring fame, it becomes difficult for an actor to be taken seriously in a new artistic sphere. By the time someone is both a beloved global star and an avatar of the American good guy — yes, I do mean Tom Hanks — this rule has long since been in force.
That didn’t stop Hanks from publishing “Uncommon Type,” a book of his short stories, in 2017, and it hasn’t stopped him from his current project: starring in “This World of Tomorrow,” a new play that he and James Glossman adapted from some of those tales.
The prospect of the production, at the Shed, might understandably have been greeted with skepticism — even though the director, Kenny Leon, and Hanks’s co-headliner, Kelli O’Hara, are Tony Award-winning theater veterans, and the supporting cast looked strong. Was this going to be a case of good actors trapped in a bad play written by a boldface name?
It’s more of a comfort-food experience, actually: a time-travel romance that often feels like a period musical minus the songs. Hanks and Glossman aim to entertain while underlining some fundamental American values and the importance of building a better future. Aided by Leon’s smooth direction, they succeed at that.
At ease onstage, Hanks (in a distracting wig by J. Jared Janas) stays very much within his bailiwick here. He plays a wealthy tech entrepreneur from 2089 with an unlikely throwback name, Bert Allenberry, and a history nerd’s relish for the past. Time travel being, apparently, primitive, he opts repeatedly for one of the few date-time combinations available: June 8, 1939, in New York, where he always arrives in Room 1114 of the Hotel Lincoln in Manhattan, and where his attempts to follow the local customs are endearingly game.
Handing a dollar to a room service waiter, he hazards awkwardly: “And, ‘keep the change’? Is that what I am supposed to say now?”
Bert’s perennial destination is the World’s Fair in Corona, Queens. His first visit is a gift from one of his employees, Cyndee (Kerry Bishé), who, creepily, is also his girlfriend under an agreement called an Intimate Relations Contract. When he returns alone, he hopes to re-encounter a beautiful stranger, Carmen Perry (O’Hara).
A bookkeeper from the Bronx, Carmen lives with her butcher brother, Max (Jay O. Sanders, also in an unfortunate wig). Immensely appealing and deliciously dressed for her day out (costumes are by Dede Ayite), O’Hara gives Carmen the glamorous-yet-down-to-earth allure that makes Bert’s pursuit of the impossible feel natural.
Impossible because he cannot remain in 1939. Cinderella-style, his adventures there have a time cap — and if he overstays, dire physical consequences ensue. So he lives each fraction of a day there to the fullest, tagging along with Carmen and her brainily inquisitive, smart-mouthed schoolgirl niece, Virginia (Kayli Carter, an adult with perfect kid pitch). Carmen and Virginia marvel at exhibits about advances to come; Bert admires the era’s forward-looking optimism.
Returning to his own present, where he runs a company with his close friend and fellow tech genius, M-Dash (a terrific Ruben Santiago-Hudson), Bert discovers tragedy looming in the lives of Carmen and Virginia, and sets out to avert it.
All this could, of course, be a movie, but Leon gives the show some real theatrical grace notes, like a brief and lovely dance with a broom by a sweeper (Donald Webber Jr.) at the fair. Derek McLane’s clever set and exceptionally handsome projections engage the imagination, too.
The play’s futuristic framework notwithstanding, and despite the distinct “Groundhog Day” element to its conceit, connoisseurs of Nora Ephron’s movie “You’ve Got Mail” will detect several echoes of that classic here. Not because of any writerly pilfering but mainly because Hanks, who made his Broadway debut a dozen years ago in a posthumous production of Ephron’s “Lucky Guy,” is the one speaking the lines.
He tells Carmen: “If I could change my past, I’d live in the Bronx. I’d need a butcher, so I’d go to your brother’s shop and meet his sister. Who I hear has a head for numbers.” The gentle, persuasive way he says it, he could as easily be standing on a sidewalk on the Upper West Side with Meg Ryan, wishing their characters’ enmity away.
It’s a satisfying palimpsest. And in this play as in that film, the impossible may be more possible than it seems.
About the play’s bedrock beliefs, though: Bert is a huge admirer of freedom of religion, speech, assembly and the press. And the show, which keeps its eye on American history, has a staunch sense of who the bad guys were way back when (Nazis, xenophobes), who was wrongly shut out in the land of opportunity (Black Americans) and who was to be given help (new arrivals).
These are classic civic mores, and it is sometimes corny to state them aloud. But at the moment, it’s also reassuring to hear them from a solidly middle-of-the-road, A-list movie star.
This World of Tomorrow
Through Dec. 21 at the Shed, Manhattan; theshed.org. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes.
The post ‘This World of Tomorrow’ Review: Tom Hanks Is Back in Town appeared first on New York Times.
