We’re supposed to forgive our enemies, consume more vegetables and less alcohol, play fair, love but one person at a time, wear seat belts. When our friends succeed, we’re expected to be happy.
That is what is supposed to happen.
Of pain-free obedience are boring stories made. Itamar Moses’ 2008 two-man play “The Four of Us” is never dull, and given the picayune-ity of its stakes, that’s much, much more than the faint compliment it sounds like.
The narrative dissects a friendship among two boys-to-men over a 10-year period. We meet David and Benjamin in their mid-20s. One’s a playwright, the other a novelist who, as comes to light during an increasingly fraught after-dinner chat, has just had the nullifying prefix “aspiring” blasted off of his title in spectacular, quit-your-day-job fashion.
David is still struggling, and Benjamin’s sudden promotion to a more rarefied realm of the cultural stratosphere — and his insufferable aloofness about it, believably conjured by actor Dan Crane — is tough for him to take. He worries aloud if his pal has considered that his $2 million payday mightn’t be, “in some way, totally spiritually corrupting.” It really isn’t about the Benjamins for Benjamin, but try telling that to a guy who doesn’t have any.
As the action swings forward and back in time like a pendulum slowly coming to rest in the present, we come to grasp that Benjamin’s success hasn’t spoiled him so much as it’s changed David’s perception of him. A lengthy visit to the collegiate summer the pair spent in Prague at first feels like a scene from a Judd Apatow movie — and is every bit as funny — but lets us see how David has always needed smaller, more frequent doses of worldly approbation, while Benjamin’s been OK living for long stretches alone in his brain.
If David, whose every self-loathing twitch comes fully to life in Karl Miller’s squirmy performance, is at least initially the more appealing of the pair, well, that’s only partially because he isn’t the one spouting things like “All letters are love letters, after all.” As the layers of discarded metatexual skin pile up, so does the evidence that David is a stand-in for Moses.
When “The Four of Us” premiered in New York two years ago, a Vanity Fair piece alleged Benjamin was a little-disguised stand-in for Jonathan Safran Foer, the wunderkind whose 2002 debut novel, “Everything Is Illuminated,” won its then-25-year-old author universal acclaim and a seven-figure check. In 2005, Liev Schreiber adapted and directed its less successful film version. We get fictional parallels for all of this, albeit using an unnamed, unseen movie star. Foer denied having feuded with Moses, and the playwright has been coy about the whole thing.
If you go
‘The Four of Us’
Where: Theater J
When: Through Feb. 21
Info: Tickets available at theaterj.org; the play runs 1 hour, 50 minutes, and is performed without intermission
Backstage drama aside, director Daniel DeRaey has chiseled this into an engrossing, economical telling. Moments that rub as overwrought turn out to be that way for a reason. The coda overstays its welcome, but that dilutes the evening’s spell only a little. Tony Cisek’s scenic design is spare almost to the point of abstraction; seldom more than a table, a couple of chairs, or in the funniest scene, a horribly misappropriated teddy bear. The set seems to acknowledge that this is a small story. What’s the worst that can happen? David never gets famous? Benjamin isn’t his friend anymore? While you’re watching, it feels like the most important thing in the world.
