Plugging Away at Living, Come What May
Charles IsherwoodApril 6, 2014: Plays as funny and moving, as wonderful and weird as The Realistic Joneses, by Will Eno, do not appear often on Broadway. Or ever, really. You’re as likely to see a tumbleweed lolloping across 42nd Street as you are to see something as daring as Mr. Eno’s meditation on the confounding business of being alive (or not) sprouting where only repurposed movies, plays by dead people and blaring musicals tend to thrive. Broadway has long been a place inhospitable to the truly active currents of contemporary theater, so the opening of Mr. Eno’s play at the Lyceum Theater on Sunday night, in a production insured against instantaneous death (one hopes) by the presence of a few name stars — Toni Collette, Michael C. Hall and Marisa Tomei, alongside the less famous but no less gifted Tracy Letts — is an occasion worth celebrating.
READ THE REVIEW