"Writer's Block" review

[Dr. Lilith Sternin]

Writer's Block
by Adam Feldman


From the opening instant of Woody Allen's Writer's Block, a pair of unassuming one-act trifles now playing at the Atlantic Theater, the audience knows just what to expect. As the lights go down, the title of the first play, "Riverside Drive," is projected onto the curtain in white letters on a black background, like the opening credits of a Woody Allen film. The curtain then rises on a set by Allen's longtime designer Santo Loquasto, and we discover Paul Reiser, playing a fretfully neurotic Jewish writer, sitting on a park bench on the West Side, backed by a view of New Jersey over the Hudson River. There is a faint fog in the background, a mixture of mist and drizzle that someone refers to as a "mizzle." The audience, at this point, can safely lean back in its seat. For people who have long feasted on Allen's cuisine of urban angst, Writer's Block is comfort food.

Reiser does not do a strict Woody impersonation in the mode of Kenneth Branagh in Allen's embarrassing film Celebrity, but the lineage is unmistakable. So too is the dryly absurdist tone of Writer's Block, which takes cards that Allen has already played and reshuffles them into something vaguely new. In "Riverside Drive," Reiser's character, a modestly successful screenwriter, nervously wait to meet his mistress (Kate Blumberg); he plans to break up with her, but she is running late. As he bides his time, he is approached by an aggressive homeless man--Allen's nostalgic parlance would surely call him a bum or a hobo--who reveals that he has been stalking the writer for weeks, and claims to have inspired one of his movies. Played with savory truculence by Skipp Sudduth, the bum happens to be a fallen intellectual. (He wrote his doctoral thesis on the "triangular tension between Goethe, Schopenhauer, and Schopenhauer's mother.") At first the writer is suspicious of the bum, who claims to receive messages broadcast via the Empire State Building. "You're a psychotic," he says. "And you're just neurotic," counters the bum, "So there's a lot I can teach you."

The mistress, when she finally arrives, is a shallow and venal creature, and as "Riverside Drive" progresses it turns out to have many central elements in common with Allen's 1994 hit Bullets Over Broadway: the pedestrian writer paired with the violently unorthodox visionary, the loathsome bimbo who must be dispatched, and so forth. Writer's Block's second piece, "Old Saybrook," also recalls previous visits to Allentown, most notably through Allen's short stories and his 1985 movie The Purple Rose of Cairo. The play's Pirandello-esque conceit, which I will not reveal in detail, involves six characters and an author, all assembled in a pleasant homestead in Connecticut. Ostensibly, the plot centers on the visit of a gangly accountant and his squeaky wife, played by Christopher Evan Welch and Clea Lewis, to a house they used to own. (The accountant has aspirations to creativity: "I have written several poems about the dangers of cholesterol. Sonnets!") Their visit thrusts the house's haut-bourgeois new owners (Bebe Neuwirth and Jay Thomas) into tangled revelations of adultery involving a second couple (Grant Shaud and Heather Burns).

Despite some funny moments from Welch and the ever-adorable Lewis (of TV's Ellen), "Old Saybrook" is barely a trifle. Neuwirth's comic talents are mostly wasted, and Allen's dialogue often seems like first-draft stuff, full of blank spots and clunky explication. There are ideas in this playlet, but not much else; the plot makes less sense the more you think about it, and all but disappears the instant you leave the theater. We have seen this material before from Allen, and it was better. Writer's Block is pleasant entertainment, and its clever one-liners alone should provide a fix for those who can't wait until Allen's next film is released. But even his most ardent fans will probably find the play's fizzle dampened by a pervasive mizzle of familiarity.

Writer's Block
Written and directed by Woody Allen
Atlantic Theater Company