Clever Big Hit

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Actually, the lies told in Clever Little Lies are neither clever nor little. But, oh, the comedy in which playwright Joe DiPietro has placed them is unquestionably clever – not to mention funny and pretty convincing.

Whether the walls of the Westside Theatre/Upstairs will be able to contain all the laughter is the real question. The playhouse has been in business for 41 years, but it’s never experienced such powerful explosions of guffaws for any of the 51 shows that have played there.

DiPietro might not find that compliment 100% to his liking. After all, The Westside Theatre/Upstairs is where his I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change ran for 12 years and received many big laughs.

But that was a musical, where laughs in lines and lyrics must pause for music. Clever Little Lies has nothing but dialogue; that allows for many more opportunities for set-ups and punchlines, which DiPietro has given in grand abundance. Audiences will feel that they’ve just had a visit from Neil Simon in his prime.

(Aside from the fact that DiPietro’s play has more profanity than all of the 35 of Simon’s productions that New York has seen.)

Bill, Sr., who’s approaching senior-citizenship, and his thirtysomething son Billy have a nice you-can-tell-me-anything relationship. So Billy does, albeit reluctantly and guiltily: despite his being the father of a newborn, which should ideally cement a marriage, he’s been having an affair with Jasmine, his 23-year-old trainer. “She’s not like my wife,” Billy says, referring to Jane. “Jasmine likes to have fun.”

Some of that fun involves sexual activities that Jane apparently refuses to do. Senior is pretty shocked by the implications of these acts, which is the play’s one flaw – for today’s senior citizens are yesterday’s Baby Boomers who had plenty of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll in their prime; there isn’t much in the way of sexually-explicit talk that would shock them.

Senior isn’t convinced when Billy says that Jasmine is “the person I’m supposed to be with” and that “she has a window to my soul.” That Billy can’t name one bad thing about the woman is proof positive to Senior “that you really don’t know her.”

DiPietro has made Jane a most haimish woman. (Is that why he chose such a retro name, one rarely given to someone born in the ‘80s?) As is the case in so many marriages, Jane has suddenly become much more centered on being a mother than a wife.

Alice, Senior’s wife, certainly knows her husband, and in no time flat, she easily pries out of him the secret he swore to Billy that he would keep. Alice will now make it her mission to keep the marriage together. “This is why we have children: to help them,” she tells Senior. Whether or not Alice will or can makes up the crux of the play and most of the 90 intermissionless minutes.

Matters could devolve into “old situations, old complications.” But DiPietro has a clever little – no, big, actually — solution. Don’t forget that his play The Art of Murder won an Edgar Award – the equivalent of a Tony that’s bestowed annually by the Mystery Writers of America. That more than suggests that DiPietro knows how to build suspense and keep an audience guessing. At least one character will find that the chickens have finally come home to roost – and that that information will lay quite an egg.

Despite the slam-bang nature of the enterprise, DiPietro exhibits a skill for subtlety and metaphor. When Jane offers Billy a piece of cheesecake, he turns it down in such a way to suggest that he’s turning her down, too. The playwright also avails himself of the help that technology can give him. While dramatists of a century ago were thrilled to have this new gizmo called a telephone to handily deliver exposition, DiPietro must be grateful to the person(s) who invented the Baby Monitor; once Jane hears it, she zooms out of the living room to see what’s happening with her child. That allows Alice private time with Billy when she can grill him for every detail.

David Saint has directed in bright and breezy fashion. He could have asked for more subtlety when the four are together and Alice speaks to Billy. Marlo Thomas uses such clipped tones that Jane would infer that her mother-in-law is telling her son “This is the honorable thing you should do.” At the very least, she’d sense trouble.

Thomas does superbly by the role. After she delivers a funny perception (such as “Young people can be total optimists because they don’t know any better”), she displays perfect timing in punctuating the line by drolly bringing her drink to her lips.

Greg Mullavey and George Merrick, respective playing Senior and Junior, give get-the-job-done performances. Kate Wetherhead allows us to care for Jane, especially when she staunchly takes responsibility for what’s been recently lacking in the marriage. (We do dislike her, though, when she crosses the line and steps into Billy’s professional life.) Nevertheless, this mixture of worth-and-flaws makes her true- to-life. You can understand why Billy thought she’d be a good wife – and why he’s tired of her, too. (All right, that brings up the play’s other problem: considering what Jane found among Billy’s Internet searches – it’s not what you think – she should become more suspicious.)

DiPietro avoids the trap of making the old people clueless and the young ones wise. We see that parents can help if given both latitude and the chance. Still, Clever Little Lies is not the play to see if your own marriage is in trouble.

And yet, from all the laughter greeting the comedy, we see a big shift here from Neil Simon’s day, when even this comic genius wrote heartbreakingly about an affair in Plaza Suite. Yes, a half-century ago, out-and-out adultery made for hard drama or at least melodrama, but not comedy.

That’s the most fascinating aspect of Clever Little Lies: Westside theatergoers weren’t sobered by the possibility that a man would leave his wife and infant for another woman; they continued laughing because they knew that even if Billy and Jane did split, she’d get over it in time and move on.

Haven’t many of us by now seen either by first- or second-hand experience that divorce isn’t the end of the world, as was once thought? DiPietro does have Senior admit that “There are victims and consequences and someone gets hurt,” but the playwright also shows us that attitudes about adultery and divorce have greatly changed. That is a 21st century clever little truth.