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I know exactly where I was on the night of November 9, 2016.
There was an election-results viewing party at the Bell House in Gowanus.
It was crowded, people were drinking beer, the mood was upbeat and casual excited, even.
Then they called Pennsylvania.
The dread and despair had to go somewhere.
Jen SilvermansSpainmoved in similarly murky waters, and Jason Robert Brown has sethis new musicalin a magazines fact-checking department.
Its about the people.
What we do get feels more like a series of character studies.
The upside and its a big one is that theyre often audaciously funny.
Im gonna knock you down and curb-stomp your vampire wax face, you fucking bat-faced SHIT!
You fucking SLOVAKIAN FUCK!
SOULLESS, EMOTIONLESS, BLOODLESS, DICKLESS THUMB WITH A FACE DRAWN ON IT!
Steve bellows at Egor, who replies, tonelessly, Snowflake.
Thats someone having a good time at a keyboard.
Its when Gancher veers away from the brazenly funny that her play feels clumsiest.
Lahti has charisma and gravity (when has she ever not?
While Tresnjak gestures toward Ganchers genres, he doesnt swing for the fences.
(His American name is an affectation, Gancher winks at us in a script note.
and Paste this in your Broadway sung-through rap musical: The Enlightenment was the worst event in human history!
and, crucially, Am I even serious?
Maybe this whole homophobic racism thing isironicactually!
… Im not really racist, I faked it all.
Steve is the kind of role that can disintegrate in the slightest breeze of actor discomfort.
But Lavelle bounds across the stage like Nijinsky with plumbers butt.
Hes a mad, rapacious clown and as such, the shadow he casts is entirely too familiar.
he insists to his office mates.
Because human beings need stories, they crave them.
In terms of mankinds hierarchy of needs, stories are right between sleep and sex.
And if you tell a good enough story, it’s possible for you to change the world.
That feels easy again.
Gancher has slipped into the same quicksand as Silverman had inSpain, a sticky place thats half-awe and half-shame.
I might be really great at this job.
Though it reveres and fears a good story, it leaves us craving a more surprising one.
Russian Troll Farm: A Workplace Comedyis at the Vineyard Theatre through February 25.
