At the end of any prematurely ending life, one can only imagine the battle waging within between the angry cynic and the hopeless optimist.
A life can be a career or a marriage. It can be a mother’s time at home with her child, or with a dying parent. It can be the time we cling to chips, grudges and stereotypes.
Or a life can be a life. And they all end. How they end is up to us.
Rarely does one ever get to know a stage character as fully as we do Laurie Jameson, with all her complexities and contradictions intact. She’s the fully fleshed, frustrating and wholly understandable protagonist in “Third,” the final play by Wendy Wasserstein, who died of cancer last year at age 55.
In the Denver Center Theatre Company’s production, Laurie is brought to life in a comic, driven and brutally honest performance by Caitlin O’Connell that will be remembered as a lasting tribute to the Pulitzer-winning author of “The Heidi Chronicles.”
Laurie is a pioneering feminist who busted down the doors at this elite New England liberal-arts college 25 years before. But now it’s 2002, and while war is breaking out in Iraq, her war is over. She is the establishment. She has become the face of this failed liberal oasis that’s drifted so far left as to be lost in the Pacific Ocean.
She’s unsettled by George W. Bush, her dad’s Alzheimer’s, her best friend’s cancer, her daughter’s lack of suitable ambition, her own menopause.
The classroom is the one place where nothing can touch her. Nothing, that is, until a charming student named Winston Bull III (Billy Wheelan) challenges her hysterically feminist reading of “King Lear” – that daughters Regan and Goneril were right to bring down the patriarchal power system, and that good daughter Cordelia was “a masochistic simp.”
When Third (as he is known) writes a contrasting term paper even Laurie admits is worthy of publication, she accuses him of plagiarism. She’s can’t conceive that this rich, straight, privileged, preppy, jock wrestler – the kind of guy who will one day sprout into “the problem,” in her worldview – is capable of such complex analysis. She’s a woman looking for a fight, and she’s found one.
But there’s no more evidence that Third really is any of those things than that he stole his paper, and herein lies the play’s central conceit: In her opening lecture, Laurie exhorts her students to forget everything they have learned, to grapple (ironically, a wrestling term) with new ideas, to not be limited or reverential in their views.
Problem is, no one is more fixed or judgmental than Laurie. This is a blatant case of socioeconomic profiling – and isn’t that what all those blues are constantly accusing all those reds of doing? It’s not that Third may have cheated that bugs Laurie. It’s that he exists at all. He may as well be Lear himself.
“Third” is very much in league with hoity-toity hot- button academic dramas like Rebecca Gilman’s nasty “Spinning Into Butter” and David Mamet’s nastier “Oleanna” – only far gentler. This is more an emotional than a political tale.
And it’s full of endearing and natural support performances, including Philip Pleasants as Laurie’s deteriorating father (even more poignant if you saw his recent “King Lear”), Patricia Randell as her deteriorating friend Nancy, and Mattie Hawkinson as the daughter who feels she’s failed her mother for not being a lesbian like her sister. Her classic line: “I’ve never even known anyone who’s even slept with a Republican!”
In Laurie we see a vulnerable daughter, a hot-flashing, hypocritical mom, a bully of a teacher. And we still like her. If only Wasserstein were as fair to Bull, who, while wonderfully portrayed, is more a character type (the embodied reversal of Laurie’s expectations) than a fully fleshed being. There’s never any real possibility a subversive, cheating provocateur lurks underneath. You can’t help but recall Justin of Gina Gionfriddo’s “After Ashley” and wish Third felt as real.
The play is as obvious in its structure as it is moving in its execution. It ends with three consecutive scenes of apology and reconciliation you can see coming a mile away, but each is deeply affecting. This succession makes for a neat (perhaps too neat) end to a story that had been wonderfully messy.
In the end, you can’t watch “Third” without considering the private struggle Wasserstein waged while writing it. Clearly Laurie the cynic and Nancy the (ultimately) hopeful cancer-bearer are two sides of the writer as she struggled with her own end-of-life issues. And bless her: Her final message is one of hope and renewal.
Of all the play’s many tender moments, none is more lasting than Laurie telling her pal that this is not an optimistic time.
True, Nancy responds, “but it’s the only time we’ve got.”
Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-954-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com.
“Third”
DRAMEDY | Denver Center Theatre Company|Written by Wendy Wasserstein|Directed by Wendy C. Goldberg|Starring Caitlin O’Connell, Billy Wheelan | Space Theatre, Denver Performing Arts Complex| THROUGH OCT. 20 | Note new curtain times: 6:30 p.m. Mondays-Thursdays; 7:30 p.m. Fridays; 1:30 and 7:30 p.m. Saturdays | 2 hours | $36-$46 | 303-893-4100, 866-464-2626 (800-641-1222 outside Denver), all King Soopers or
