The Realistic Joneses

That a play like The Realistic Joneses is on Broadway is something of a miracle, so although I wasn't totally satisfied with it I'd like to encourage more like this, just to break up the tedium of revivals and jukebox musicals. A surreal suburban comedy by Will Eno, with direction by Sam Gold, The Realistic Joneses is consistently funny--I just don't think it's as profound as it thinks it is.

That three of the four actors in this production are big names is surely one reason why it has had a nice run on Broadway. The fourth actor is a well-known playwright who also won a Tony last year for Best Actor. He is Tracy Letts, who plays Bob Jones. As the play opens, he and his wife Jennifer (Toni Collette), are enjoying a peaceful star-filled night in their backyard. When they here what sounds like raccoons coming through their garbage cans, it is instead new neighbors, also with the name Jones. They are John (Michael C. Hall), a king of non sequiturs, and Pony (Marisa Tomei) ditzy but sweet.

Of course, by naming all of his character Jones Eno is striking at the heart of the suburban milieu, going back to the phrase "Keeping up with the Joneses," which was once about the super-rich but now can be simply outdoing each other on the best weed-killer. The other key word in the title, realistic, also is ironic, as this play is not the slightest realistic, though it is at is surface level--two couples, one older and more set in their ways, the other exuberant and borderline rude.

The play has all four characters interact in various pairings, as each spouse forms an attraction to the opposite spouse. We learn that Bob, basically a grouch, has a degenerative disease and his reaction is to ignore all information about it. John also harbors secrets that I won't share here.

I laughed out loud at several lines of this play. Most of them are earned by Hall, such as when he says after Jennifer blurts something out, "That’s what separates us from the animal. You never hear animals blurting things out. Unless they’re being run over by a car or something.” There is also a master class in comic acting when Hall and Letts share a moment in the middle of the night, looking at the stars and dealing with a motion-activated light.

There is also something of a sense of doom, mostly through the sound design. At times, between scenes, it sounded like an alien ship was about to land. Because we don't see any other characters, it's almost like one of those Twilight Zone episodes where we later find out these are the only four characters in the world, or something like that. But the play never really goes anywhere, and ends on the banal agreement that mints are good.