The Nap

[edjames]

 

 

Another London import,The Nap is a very funny look at the world of snooker - the British version of pool. Dylan Spokes, a fast-rising young star arrives for a championship tournament only to be confronted by the authorities warning him of the repercussions of match fixing. Before he knows it, Dylan's forced into underhanded dealings with a cast of wildly colorful characters that include his ex-convict dad, saucy mum, quick-tongued manager and a renowned gangster, to boot. It's a fast-paced comedy thriller where, in an exciting twist, the tournament unfolds live on stage.

 

Worth seeing. Great cast. Funny play. Manhattan Theater Club. Opens Sep 27.

[edjames]

Good review from Ben B in the NYTimes...

 

Review: Great Pretenders Pocket Laughs in ‘The Nap’

 

When you’re feeling burned-out, fed-up and generally disgusted — like now, maybe? — there’s nothing more therapeutic than a tickling session at the theater. Relax, it involves no squirmy physical contact.

 

I mean the sort of tickling administered by a team of master farceurs who frisk you into a state of sustained laughter, as involuntary and contented as the purr of a kitten at play. It’s the noise being artfully coaxed from audiences by the British dramatist Richard Bean and a precision-tooled ensemble of great pretenders at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater.

 

That’s where Mr. Bean’s delicious new comedy “The Nap” opened on Thursday night, directed with an assured balance of blatancy and subtlety by Daniel Sullivan. While the name of this Manhattan Theater Club production might seem to promise a snooze, the title refers not to a siesta but to the baize surface of a snooker table — or specifically to the resistance it gives to the balls that skim across it.

 

Does that sound too esoteric? Don’t worry if you’re unacquainted with the arcana of this British cousin of billiards and pool. Not speaking snookerese is no disadvantage in experiencing Mr. Bean’s story of a young working-class phenom from Sheffield and the criminal friends and relations who love (and nearly destroy) him.

 

Besides, the dominant game of “The Nap” isn’t snooker. It’s farce. And like most sports, farce requires from its players hair-trigger timing and an intuitive grasp of the physics of bodies in motion. Its success is achieved not by sustained assault but by dexterity, and by always keeping the other guy (in this case, the audience) off guard.

 

The best examples of the genre on Broadway in recent years have originated in Britain. For the form at its most elemental, there’s the current demolition derby called “The Play That Goes Wrong.” But the sterling English-language farce of this century is Mr. Bean’s “One Man, Two Guvnors” (2012), the commedia dell’arte-style caper that made an American star of James Corden.

 

 

“The Nap” is less frenetically funny than “One Man,” and more modest in scale. But it shares with its predecessor a fondness for the subterfuges and archetypes of classic farce, which Mr. Bean translates fluently into modern-day terms.

 

Our idealistic hero, Dylan Spokes (Ben Schnetzer), is a blue-collar lad with the kind of back story that makes television producers drool. Dylan was brought up by his dad, Bobby (John Ellison Conlee), who selflessly sold recreational drugs to finance a snooker shed in the backyard, where the boy could hone his craft.

 

Dylan knows that without snooker, he’d probably be on the dole and grifting, like his dear old mom, Stella (Johanna Day as squalor incarnate). “Without snooker, what am I?” he asks. “I’m cooking meth, I’m on welfare, I’m getting me legs blown off in Afghan.”

 

But enough of the anthropology, except to say that it informs Dylan’s commitment to his sport. But as his star ascends — with the possibility of his reaching the world championship finals — temptations block his path.

 

First of all, there’s his sponsor, the expensively dressed, one-armed, transgender Waxy Bush (Alexandra Billings in a sensational Broadway debut), who, before her transition, dated Dylan’s mum. Waxy now wants her protégé to throw a frame (or round) in his next big match to appease some mysterious Philippine gamblers.

 

Word of possible foul play has already reached the ears of Mohammad Butt (a sublimely fatuous Bhavesh Patel), the Integrity Officer for International Sports Security, who shows up in the Sheffield legion hall where Dylan is practicing. (David Rockwell did the sociologically specific sets and Kaye Voyce the spot on, tacky costumes.) Mo is accompanied by a distractingly attractive police detective (and former pole dancer), Eleanor Lavery (Heather Lind).

 

Will the noble, vegetarian Dylan be able to withstand the onslaughts upon his integrity? After all, the hungry fellow refuses a shrimp sandwich, saying he eats nothing with a brain, causing Bobby to remark, “They’re shrimp. They’re not novelists.”

 

Cheering Dylan on, albeit in different directions, are Stella and her malodorous new boyfriend, Danny Killeen (Thomas Jay Ryan), and Dylan’s flashy agent, Tony DanLino (Max Gordon Moore, a riot of jittery, sincere phoniness), who of course would address Dylan as Dylzo.

 

As is customary in such plays, each character has some signal, off-center trait that is worn like an ID tag, which is embellished, with variations, ad infinitum.

 

Tony is the epithet-slinging fabulist. Stella keeps coming up with whiny “poor me” rationalizations for her criminal acts. And Waxy is the play’s resident Ms. Malaprop, who misquotes Shakespeare and refers to Dylan as a “child effigy.” Ms. Billings, a marvel of glamorous menace, delivers such mangling with a smooth, sinister confidence that keeps the others from laughing. Not us, though.

 

Ms. Lind — who has appeared as a docile Shakespearean heroine in Public Theater productions — shows a wicked comic wit here as a badge-toting femme fatale. And as the bewildered straight man to everybody else, Mr. Schnetzer more than holds his own, finding intriguing ambivalence within Dylan’s virtuous persona and also proving himself a dab hand at snooker.

 

The cast members shape their characters with just enough comic exaggeration to stay credible and also to suggest that not everyone is what she or he seems. For “The Nap” is also a comedy of deception, including self-deception, and the sort of willful, hilarious misunderstandings that have always been a basis for slapstick. (In this case, they include not one but two anarchic variations of movie-title guessing games.)

 

The play’s second, shorter act, in which all is revealed, isn’t as satisfying as the first, and it rushes its final moments into anticlimax. On the other hand, where else are you going to be able to watch a live snooker game (with video simulcast) in which you feel so personally invested?

 

That’s when Dylan faces off against two champions (both played by the real snooker ace Ahmed Aly Elsayed), in matches described by two unseen commentators. With their time-filling, vacuous babble, these voices will be familiar to anyone who follows sports on television. And just in case snooker still confuses you, these announcers keep explaining its rules, with priceless condescension, to unenlightened listeners.

 

They include those who might be “on the internet in Antarctica” or “on a canoe in Tahiti.” Those at the Friedman Theater, however, know that no matter how the match ends, this gratifyingly silly show has — now, what’s the term? — potted all its balls.

 

The play’s second, shorter act, in which all is revealed, isn’t as satisfying as the first, and it rushes its final moments into anticlimax. On the other hand, where else are you going to be able to watch a live snooker game (with video simulcast) in which you feel so personally invested?

 

That’s when Dylan faces off against two champions (both played by the real snooker ace Ahmed Aly Elsayed), in matches described by two unseen commentators. With their time-filling, vacuous babble, these voices will be familiar to anyone who follows sports on television. And just in case snooker still confuses you, these announcers keep explaining its rules, with priceless condescension, to unenlightened listeners.

 

They include those who might be “on the internet in Antarctica” or “on a canoe in Tahiti.” Those at the Friedman Theater, however, know that no matter how the match ends, this gratifyingly silly show has — now, what’s the term? — potted all its balls.

[+ beethoven]

A friend of mine saw it and liked it. Has anyone seen it?

[+ Cash4Trash]

I saw it and it did have some laughs but I don't recommend it. Missed about 1/3 because of accents. If you do choose to go get the hearing aid device - it would make the show easier to understand.

[foxy]

I saw the play today and liked it. I had the opposite reaction to the review in that I thought the second act much more fun than the first. You do have to listen hard with the accents but I had no problem. As an aside there’s a short scene where Ben Schnetzer who plays Dylan Spokes strips off his T shirt to reveal a very attractive torso. I saw the understudy Bianca Leigh stepping in for Alexandra Billings playing Waxy Bush. I though she was very good but her malapropsims didn’t always land. The scene with the snooker tournament were fun to see with the overhead cameras projecting the live action on a large screen. Have to give credit to the actors who were playing a live game for much of it and had to get those balls to hit on target. Of course Ahmed Aly Elsayed is indeed a champion snooker player in real life.