A Real -- and Terrific -- "Fairy Tale"

If you haven’t made out to Watertown to see New Rep’s “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune,” get a move on! Time is running short and you don’t want to miss this wonderful production. The play opens (and stays) in a typical cramped New York apartment, as the playwright explores themes of isolation and connection in a world as gray as the walls of the set. McNally calls the play “a romantic fairytale,” and for most of the first act you can’t imagine what he means. We see this room and these two people as disarmingly “real;” we believe in them completely.

Anne Gottlieb and Robert Pemberton brilliantly inhabit the skins and the souls of these two middle-aged people who have fallen into bed at the end of a first date. Frankie is the more cynical of the two. She’s got a wisecrack or a smart answer to repel Johnny’s every attempt at emotional intimacy. Johnny is just as unhappy as she, but his basic exuberance has driven him past despair to a determination to start over, to make a good life, to find the happiness that has eluded them both. And he’s gonna do it tonight and Frankie is gonna be the One. The play consists of his struggle to persuade Frankie to join him in this quest.

But Frankie is done. She wants him out. She is, in turns, puzzled, intrigued, irritated, and frightened by his garrulous persistence. When she pulls mace from her purse, we’re sure many women in the audience were wondering what took her so long. But Johnny charms her, in the oldest sense of the word. He weaves a spell around her, with the aid of the moonlight they can just barely see between two buildings across the way, the music they hear on the radio – the classical DJ plays Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” for them – and the power of his vision. If his utter refusal to give up on Frankie were based only on his needs, he would never succeed, but he pulls her out from behind her own wall of cynicism and despair. He treats her with great gentleness, admiring her body extravagantly, tenderly wrapping a bandage around her cut finger, and affirming the dream she reluctantly reveals. In short, for all his gabbiness, Johnny is not just a narcissist. He “sees” Frankie as each of us wants to be seen, sees the intelligence, the sweetness, the tenderness, and the need hiding behind her wisecracks.

The audience is seduced, too. McNally, two fine actors, and superb direction persuade us to willingly suspend disbelief and choose – as Frankie must choose – to believe in this romantic fairytale that takes place in the light of the moon.

-- Johanna Ettin & Shauna Shames