Linda Vista
Five Things To Love About Linda Vista
Tracy Letts
Tracy Letts is an extraordinary actor. He won the Tony for his performance in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf? in 2013, and in the opinion of The Enthusiast he is far and away the finest George of his generation. It is however insufferably coy of me to define him in this way, natch, given that a) he alas does not appear in this play, and b) he is far better known as a playwright. His most heralded work, August: Osage County (unanimous winner of the Worst Title of a Play in The Whole History of Ever award) includes a monologue for a character named Beverly Weston (ineffably performed on Broadway by Mr. Letts’s father, Dennis) so enthralling that many people – including the Tony and Pulitzer judges – convinced themselves that the play that surrounds it must be excellent, too. Linda Vista is Mr. Lett’s latest play. It has no monologues.
The Streak
If you’re the sort of person who feels that nudity onstage is natural and beautiful and honest and brave, well, this is the natural, beautiful, honest, brave play for you. The Enthusiast, to be honest, has yet to see a play where nudity was any of those things, but Linda Vista did its level best to challenge that preference for actors who keep their knickers on with long stretches of full frontal nudity from three of the leads. One of those three is, it has to be said, particularly callipygian. Identifying that performer shall be left as an exercise to the viewer.
Cora Vander Broek
Vander Broek delivers the play’s strongest performance, including a delightfully shambolic stab at Lisa Loeb’s Stay (I Missed You) while on a blind date at a karaoke bar. Like playing drunk, doing a good job of singing poorly is harder than it looks.
Scene Study
One of the joys of watching a new straight play is wondering whether it might offer some good fodder for up-and-coming actors. Letts’s most scene-study worthy exchange here is a rollicking stretch of dialogue between Wheeler (Ian Barford) and his friend Paul (Jim True-Frost) after a squash match. (Racquet sports are all the rage on Broadway right now, by the way; squash is mentioned more than once in Betrayal as well). Wheeler asks Paul for advice about a romantic entanglement, and Paul tells Wheeler that ‘you’re going to do what you’re going to do’. The banter that follows as Paul reiterates that tautologic truth easily merits anthologizing.
Steely Dan
In the opening scene of Linda Vista, Paul cautions Wheeler that he’s living like a character from a Steely Dan song. That immediately set The Enthusiast to wracking his brain, trying to think of a Steely Dan song about a glib, preening, self-impressed, utterly unlikeable narcissist; some jazzy B-side from the 70’s, doubtless. But Linda Vista thereafter includes a number of Steely Dan snippets, for which this reviewer was duly grateful. Deacon Blues plays as the audience files out. The notion of drinking scotch whisky all night long and dying behind the wheel has seldom sounded more appealing.