Maura wins an Ewwy

from EW.com

Honours the very best shows and actors snubbed in Emmy’s 10 major categories drew hundreds of thousands of votes from EW.com readers. Here’s a look at your winners!

BEST ACTRESS IN A DRAMA
Maura Tierney, ER
It’s been seven years since Emmy voters rewarded Maura Tierney’s performance as ER‘s Abby Lockhart with so much as a nomination (she’s never actually won), but EW readers remedied the situation by giving the actress the EWwy in what proved to be a contentious category. Tierney nabbed 30 percent of the vote, followed closely by Battlestar Galactica‘s Mary McDonnell (25 percent), Friday Night Lights‘ Connie Britton (20 percent),Grey’s Anatomy‘s Ellen Pompeo (19 percent), and Terminator‘s Lena Headey (7 percent).

http://www.ew.com/ew/gallery/0,,20045108_20045120_20227779,00.html

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“Three Changes” – Variety

By DAVID ROONEY

It’s no secret that New York’s leading nonprofit theaters need to nurture their relationships with playwrights. But couldn’t those companies just take the writers out to cocktails and dinner rather than subject their poor subscribers to inferior work? Playwrights Horizons does no one any favors — least of all the capable cast assembled — by producing Nicky Silver’s dyspeptic sitcom “Three Changes.” As pointless as it is thankless, this self-consciously warped reflection on the “connective tissue” of family is rarely troubled by a moment of truth.

Neil Patel’s typically sleek set depicts an expensive apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side that bespeaks the kind of anonymously tasteful statement only an unimaginative decorator can make. The living room sits on an elevated platform lit from beneath, leaving a downstage playing space for Silver’s frequent direct-address interludes but also suggesting a world of apparent comfort and well-being, precariously built on hollowness.

At the center of that joyless world are affable Laurel (Maura Tierney) and her complacent husband Nate (Dylan McDermott), a VP at Morgan Stanley having a clandestine affair with crass Clinique counter salesgirl Steffi (Aya Cash). The married couple’s semblance of contentment is ruptured by the arrival of Nate’s brother Hal (Scott Cohen), a formerly successful trash TV writer who squandered his earnings on drugs and hustlers, hit rock bottom and then found Jesus in rehab. Or so he says.

Hal settles in on the sofa-bed, acquires a laptop to start working on his novel, and promptly installs opportunistic 19-year-old rentboy Gordon (Brian J. Smith). To sway his hosts toward hospitality, Hal weaves a tragic past for Gordon as a homeless teenage runaway, which Laurel appears to buy despite clear evidence the kid has spent the past five years in a gym.

There’s a poor man’s Pinter scenario in play here as Silver corners quietly mopey Laurel and prickly, insecure Nate into accommodating the insidious intruders into their lives. Hal is manipulative and controlling, and Gordon (sucking on a lollipop in case we missed that he’s a male Lolita) is flat-out obnoxious. So we never understand why nobody points them to the door, and we’re never clued in as to the dark power Hal seems to hold over younger sibling Nate.

For too much of the play’s duration, there’s no sense of where it’s going or of why we should be interested in these abrasive people (even the relatively sweet Laurel talks way too much and wears thin).

Hal’s career burnout suggests early on there may be some familiar commentary on the artistic bankruptcy of media jobs. Later, the fixation of both Gordon and Nate on how they are portrayed in Hal’s book indicates that questions of self-image vs. public perception may be considered. But neither of these strands acquires substance.

Hints are scattered about Laurel’s feelings of incompleteness and the hole in her life after multiple miscarriages (she drinks, of course). So it’s no surprise that Nate remains hostile to the change in the status quo while Laurel embraces it as a means of filling the void. But when Nate loses his job and sinks into depression, machiavellian Hal turns the instability to his advantage.

Given that the real world is suddenly awash with former Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers staffers desultorily mailing out resumes in a gasping economic sector, it shouldn’t be hard to empathize with disenfranchised Nate as his cushy life crumbles around him. But Silver’s take on all the whiny characters is so condescending and superficial that despite some genuine pain in McDermott’s performance, Nate’s tragedy is merely a stepping stone toward the final scene’s unsatisfying and somewhat offensive twist.

Director Wilson Milam, so good with the crazed rat-tat-tat profanity of Martin McDonagh’s “The Lieutenant of Inishmore,” imposes a stilted delivery here on the overlapping, repetition-laden dialogue that heightens its chiseled artificiality and keeps the characters remote. That’s not remote enough, however, in the case of Gordon and Steffi, with Smith and Cash locked into apparent competition to see who can be louder, shriller and more irritating.

But even the softer approach of Tierney’s Laurel doesn’t make her any more flesh-and-blood. The actress communicates Laurel’s loss, loneliness and crushing sense of worthlessness more effectively in silence than in words, yet Silver sticks her with a superfluous monologue in which she spells out every nuance of her depression.

Quite possibly, the actors and director are powerless to carve real feeling out of this vapid attempt to breathe dramatic texture, suspense and subversiveness into standard-issue middle-class anxieties. Relationship inertia, desire for family stability, career dissatisfaction, lack of personal fulfillment, sibling envy, self-worth — these are all staples of contemporary life in which most audiences will find some echo of their own experience. However, Silver has managed to funnel these issues into a play that precludes emotional involvement.

The title of one of the playwright’s earlier works, “The Agony & the Agony,” would be a better fit here.

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“Three Changes” – Talkin Broadway

Theatre Review by Matthew Murray 

Today’s theatre trivia question: How long does it take two men to change from gay lovers to father and son? Answer: If it’s happening within Nicky Silver’s new play at Playwrights Horizons, Three Changes, two hours and fifteen minutes. 

Please note that this is not an isolated incredulity – it’s merely the crowning example in an evening that thrives on them. It is also not technically a spoiler, but rather an inevitability in the school of “You’ve had this date with me from the beginning”: Once you’ve identified as your subject the creation of one family unit within the corruption of another, there are really only so many places to go.

Silver doesn’t miss a trick in tracking the dissolution of one man and the ascension of another. The former is a financier named Nate (Dylan McDermott), while the latter is his older brother, Hal (Scott Cohen), an actor and writer on the skids who’s hoping that Nate will welcome him back into the familial fold after a 20-year separation. And, over the course of a frantic few months in New York City, that’s exactly what happens, if not quite in the way either expects.

The impudence of religion, the importance of children, and the impotence of non-visionaries in an increasingly competitive world are among the paths Silver toes. At first, at any rate. Before long, he’s discarded them in favor of a more standardized exploration, a contemporary urban retrofit of Sam Shepard’s True West demonstrating how blurred the lines already are between the born-again Hal, who’s seen the highest highs and lowest lows of living, and Nate, who takes his blessings for granted.

Silver addresses the men’s contrasting evolutions in a series of breezy, vignette-styled scenes, which the characters frequently interrupt with time-skipping monologues directed to the audience. This keeps the running time reasonable for a mini epic, and helps Silver arrive at his final destination with a minimum of fuss.

But what’s the point in writing a play with a minimum of fuss? Supporting details are typically at least as interesting as the story they elucidate. But the broad strokes Silver employs never connect into a recognizable depiction of personal or fraternal disharmony in an already volatile existence; in fact, they never connect into anything more than the impression that Silver wanted to reap the rewards of Big Ideas while risking as little – and challenging as few people – as possible along the way.

So what you get instead are a series of loose variations on an already floppy theme. Many of these revolve around Nate’s yearning wife Laurel (Maura Tierney), who’s never recovered emotionally from her three miscarriages, and has lost whatever tenuous grip she might have once had on the meaning of her marriage and waking up in the morning. But only outsiders can complete the picture of the brothers’ breakdown and build-up, and they’re represented by Nate’s young bit on the side, a cosmetics salesgirl named Steffi (Aya Cash), and Hal’s 19-year-old runaway boyfriend Gordon (Brian J. Smith).

The indecipherable siblings, the slut, the boy-toy, and the good woman caught in the middle… Yes, they’re all here. And none of them offers a fresh insight into, well, anything, despite director Wilson Milam’s heroic efforts to focus the show as a memory play in the making. But with so many foregone conclusions, most of which climax in Hal’s changing from Gordon’s daddy into Gordon’s daddy, the overall effect is one of deconstructing a memory you never experienced in the first place.

Only Tierney finds an appropriately modulated sense of reality, coming across as the most rational person onstage (as well it should be, since she’s the only tasked with playing nonsymbolic emotions), and giving you a strong sense of how Laurel is drifting blindly through her life. Cash is highly amusing in the short snatches of time she earns as the straw about to break Nate’s back, but her role is so extractable that her fluency with sensual wisecracks radiates strictly as an immense lost opportunity. Smith is awful as the spoiled, smug thug, so determined to show how Gordon subsists as all things to all people that he never establishes the necessary baseline for normalcy.

McDermott and Cohen are tacitly believable as brothers, but spend more time negotiating the obligatory twists of plot than they do establishing them as human beings. McDermott’s stonily successful Ned is too overstuffed to be destined for anything other than a calculated takedown, and Cohen accentuates Hal’s cruelty at the expense of the compassion Silver is desperate to prove rests just beneath his surface.

That notion, like so many here, would be more convincing if it didn’t feel like yet another ploy for eliciting generic revelations about both the dark underbelly and the beating heart of the American non-nuclear family. Silver’s lesson seems to be that knowing whom to trust, whether blood relatives or perfect strangers, is one of the greatest challenges we face. But harder still is figuring out why we should trust that Silver has our, or anyone’s, best interests in mind with a play that, like its central figures, is still searching for its own true identity.

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“Three Changes” – The Courant

Plotting Of Ironic ‘Three Changes’ Weakens In Second Act

By MALCOLM JOHNSON | Special to The Courant, September 17, 2008

NEW YORK – Nicky Silver’s “Three Changes” begins tantalizingly as an older brother from Hollywood arrives at the Upper West Side apartment of a happy New York couple. Unfortunately, the plotting slips and skids in the second act.

The play, which opened Tuesday night at Playwrights Horizons, begins with a few words about the importance of family from Laurel, smartly played by Maura Tierney. She is talking to the audience, overheard by her husband, Nate, a Morgan Stanley vice president, endowed with wry humor by Dylan McDermott. The scene is an airy one-bedroom, with transparent panels showing the upstage rooms.

Both Laurel and Nate crack wise, perhaps to entertain Nate’s brother, Scott Cohen’s sophisticated Hal, who is coming off a hit TV series about “a single mother, six kids. And a bounty hunter by night.” That is Laurel’s description, to which she adds, “Brilliant!”

Hal expresses surprise that the West Siders watched the show.

“You weren’t really our target. We were aimed at teenage boys. You know, 12, 13, raging hormones. That’s why she never wore a bra.”

But it soon becomes clear that Nate and Laurel were only pretending they watched the show.

At the outset, “Three Changes” plays like a traditional New York drawing-room comedy, as breezily directed by Wilson Milam. But before long, the changes begin. Things become serious when the question of children comes up. “We miscarried,” Nate tells his brother. Clearly intimidated by his more famous older brother, he is drinking and asks Hal what tragedy he has suffered.

“I wanted to write … to be an artist…” “I end up with ‘Eleanor the Bounty Hunter’.” In his first long speech, he describes his meltdown. He ends with a shocker, ” I got out of rehab two weeks ago. There’s nothing left. No home. No money. Nothing. So I called you. Did I do the wrong thing?”

By the second scene, Hal decides he is going to write again, a novel. Meanwhile, it turns out Nate is having an affair with Steffi, who works at the Clinique counter at Bloomingdales. She is out of sorts because Nate has kept her waiting. As acted by Aya Cash, she is chic but defensive.

Back in the apartment, Laurel rises from her bed and asks Hal about the subject of his novel. It turns out he is basing his main characters on Nate and Laurel. Laurel is surprised, and jealous too, as her job entails catalog layout for L.L. Bean. Laurel drinks. The lights come up on Steffi and Nate. She is in a robe, and he is knotting his tie. The rest of the scene cuts back and forth between Hal and Laurel and Steffi, who addresses the audience, speculating on whether Hal and Laurel made love.

Another character arrives at the apartment. Gordon is 19, homeless and shabby, though obviously from a good family. Brian J. Smith makes the boy seem like a pathetic, if charming hustler with a heroin problem. He asks Hal to have sex, but it is time for Laurel to come home. She takes Gordon for a burglar. But Hal has supplied the kid with a sob story so he can move in.

As Act I ends, Nate quarrels with Gordon over a necktie the boy has borrowed. He seems to be breaking down. Then, as Act II begins, Nate comes home soaking wet and blurts out that he has been fired. The rest of the play traces his disintegration, which McDermott charges with pain, even as Hal completes his novel and deepens his relationship with Laurel.

For much of Act II, Steffi never appears. At last she pops up and claims to have worked as Nate’s assistant when she meets Laurel. Later, as Nate nears his doom in the subway, Steffi tells of her marriage to an Israeli who owns a shoe store. And Laurel and Hal are happy, too. “We’re lucky. We’re lucky people. God smiled on us,” Hal says.

The absence of Steffi for a long period of time, and Laurel’s reference to Hal as Gordon’s father, weakens Act II until McDermott’s searing final tour de force, however predictable. Somehow, it seems, Silver has lost control of this bitter and ironic play about family.’

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“Three Changes” – Backstage

September 16, 2008 
By Leonard Jacobs
The title of Nicky Silver’s new play is Three Changes, about which one thinks, Gee, only three? If there had been more changes in the writing process, might this seriocomic misfire have worked?

As in the best of Silver’s work, Three Changes benefits from the playwright’s topical, often mordant humor. It’s also consistent with his interest in anatomizing families, including one emotionally quiescent female character. Staged with dispatch by Wilson Milam, the play is nonetheless thematically diffuse.

Looking dapper initially in costume designer Theresa Squire’s tailored business suit, Dylan McDermott plays Nate, an unflappable investment banker. The lovely Maura Tierney plays his wife, Laurel, who by day oversees catalog layouts for L.L. Bean. Into this childless couple’s impressive apartment — conveyed by Neil Patel’s tony but chilly set — enters Nate’s older brother Hal, a once rich, now downtrodden TV producer played by Scott Cohen with hair just stringy enough to connote artistic flair and menace. Nate once idolized Hal, but when Hal abandoned the family, bitterness set in. Thus, as Three Changesbegins, Laurel must reconcile the brothers, getting them past awkward smiles and Rashomon-like memories and convincing Nate that Hal — who says that he’s born again, drug-free, and broke — should live on their couch for a time. Nate and Laurel even buy Hal a laptop; he begins to write a novel.

Things turn ominous as Hal learns more about Nate and Laurel’s life, as he asserts emotional and, finally, physical control over his surroundings. He kisses Laurel, knowing she and Nate have been unable to conceive and have a sexless marriage. He brings home Gordon (Brian J. Smith), a Central Park hustler. When Nate questions Hal’s actions, Hal wrestles Nate to the ground, nearly strangling him. Unbeknownst to all, Nate has been seeing Steffi (Aya Cash), a saucy Bloomingdale’s salesgirl, but that figures into the tale later on.

Three Changes follows the painful unraveling of Nate’s life, something accelerated by Hal’s sadistic attitude toward his brother. The problem is that Hal’s motivation is left unexplained — until the final scene of the play, which recalls a certain season of Dallas that found Patrick Duffy in the shower. Still, there’s no more moving a moment than when Nate, crumbling in tears, falls into Hal’s arms — the sight of a grown man practically on his knees, begging his older brother for validation. And then Hal betrays him. Why, though, remains unclear.
While Smith delivers Silver’s most pungent lines, he never explores the soul of a young, handsome kid who feels he must flee his wealthy Connecticut home. Instead, the actor overemphasizes every line, every ounce of Milam’s staging, hoping we’ll consider that acting. There’s less mugging in Central Park. Cash does a better job, despite so much direct address to slog through.

Meanwhile, McDermott’s work is remarkable. This is because Silver builds the play around Hal catalyzing Nate’s descent into darkness, culminating in a nervous breakdown. We may not know why Nate is rather like Silver’s version of Job, but McDermott is giving a deeply honest, almost underplayed performance. It must be frustrating, therefore, for Tierney, given that Laurel’s arc is so narrow: She’s as emotionally distant at the end, more or less, as she was in the beginning. There does come a moment when Silver gives us a glimpse into Laurel’s core, but it’s terribly fleeting.

Perhaps this is because Tierney knows that last scene is coming. Was everything in the novel that Hal was writing? Could be. Only more than Three Changes would tell us for sure.

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