All About Ego, Showbiz and a Little Black Dress

Blondes don’t come any more toxic than Clea, the weapon of mass destruction accessorized with “it” bag and alpine heels who lays waste to a seemingly solid marriage in “The Scene,” Theresa Rebeck’s sharp-witted, sharp-elbowed comedy about the savage economies of sex and show business in contemporary Manhattan. The deceptively ditsy Clea is both thoroughly repellent and a glistening object of male fascination, a trophy wife waiting for her inevitable acquisition and inscription.

The hapless urban dweller whom Clea sends into a tailspin in “The Scene” is a chronically unemployed actor named Charlie. A recent refugee from Ohio, as she repeatedly and excitedly announces, Clea employs the language and syntax of a tween exchanging breathless gossip in the hallway at junior high, appending question marks and vocal crescendos to the most unprepossessing observations. (“I just got here, what, like, six months ago?”). But
her vacuities occasionally have the peculiar ring of profundities (“How can you know so much and so little at the same time?” Charlie will later observe of her), and the smirks that her nitwit effusions evoke on the faces of both men occasionally twist into leers.

The official opinion, later retailed to Charlie’s wife, Stella, over shots of tequila: Clea’s an idiot, a joke. (“She looks good in black and can’t speak the English language,” Stella retorts. “She’ll do just fine in Manhattan.”) But the restive libidinal impulses of men negotiating the encroaching (or settled) disappointments of middle age inspire Lewis, at least, to modify that assessment. Coining a vacuous profundity of his own, he says: “She wasn’t a moron. She’s pretty.”
That kernel of masculine (il)logic is emblematic of the wit and shrewdness of Ms. Rebeck’s comedy, which updates a film-noir, femme-fatale story for today’s Manhattan, where shadows and smoke have given way to the hard glare emitted by glass honeycombs of luxury condos. Ms. Rebeck’s dialogue bristles with biting observations about the obsessions of aspiring New Yorkers who continually rub up against more successful versions of themselves. 

An experienced playwright who has also toiled in the television industry, Ms. Rebeck has intimate knowledge of the pathologies bred in smart, seemingly well-adjusted men and women by the surreal polarities of success and failure in the entertainment industries. (The word “surreal,” as it happens, has its own viral role in the lexicon of the play.)
--Charles Isherwood, New York Times

Cast:

Will Carney Charlie
Pamela Donnelly  Stella
Nina Rausch Clea
Keong Sim Lewis

Directed by: Isabelle Mejias Fox