"George is Dead" Review

Review of ATC’s Production of “George is Dead”

by Marc Hansen

“George is Dead,” the new stage comedy produced by the Arizona Theatre Company and currently playing at the Temple of Music and Art, sounded great on paper, but is, ultimately, an utter disappointment. It’s not that “George is Dead” was a great idea and just didn’t work out on stage, it’s that writer and director Elaine May (who also happens to be a comic legend and an Academy Award nominee) seemed to have no idea where she wanted to go with the idea in the first place. There are things it did quite well, but its faults bring it down to a seemingly endless, directionless, bore of a show.

I’m not even sure how to set up the plot, because there’s not much of one to start with, but it contains two couples who are the exact opposites of each other. Emmy winner Marlo Thomas stars as Doreen, the dim, socialite wife of the much older, richer, but very happy George (Don Murray). Michael and Carla, on the other hand, live in a crummy New York apartment because Michael, (nicely played by Reese Madigan) an angry liberal History teacher, can’t afford anything better (hey, he is a teacher) and Carla (Julia Brothers) is too busy being neurotic and trying to please everyone in her life. Halfway through the play, George suddenly dies while skiing, and Doreen depends on Carla to take care of her for the rest of the play.

May does write the characters well, I’ll give her that. They’re all cardboard cutout stereotypes, but at least they’re consistent, making it feel less like May wrote them as stereotypes and more like they’re real people, who just happen to fit those stereotypes. I mean, it worked magnificently in The Birdcage (which May also penned) and sometimes it can be a good technique, because it does make us feel like we personally know the characters.

The play’s also funny; not laugh out of your chair, slap your knee funny, but a ‘that was pretty clever’ chuckle kind of funny. Funny, nonetheless, right? I guess, I just felt like the humor was almost too tame. I admired it for its wit, but it wasn’t daring enough to truly make me laugh. I hate to say it, but I think the play’s sense of humor perfectly illustrates the vast differences in each generation, that is the play’s theme. While the older, more conservative character ‘George’ would probably enjoy this play, his 22-year-old cabbie and Michael’s students (who are constantly texting) are used to more severe, inappropriate, and ‘racy’ jokes that would go against a ‘George’s’ traditional values. Being a youngster myself, I’m not the target audience for this play, but if ‘George’ is just a metaphor for that older generation and, as the play’s title suggests that ‘George is Dead,’ then this play’s audience is dead, too. Instead of getting into how every passing generation gets more rebellious in its music, clothes, movies, and culture, I suggest May stop looking down on her cabbie and students and pick up the new memo.

But honestly, I’m not even entirely sure if that was the play’s theme. I hope it was, because it’s a good theme and that would be one of the few positives about the play, but the play seemed to slyly suggest that it might be, yet wouldn’t explore into this interesting concept enough to confirm that it was. Instead, the play preferred to spend more time having its characters engage in drawn out nonsense. May took a good premise and then did nothing with it. There wasn’t even tension to fuel the play, which was the play’s biggest downfall. Parts of some of the conversations are interesting, but for most of the time I was just wondering where they were going and what the point to them was. It’s as if May was a first time writer and was so enamored with hearing actors read her lines that she decided to insert her daily, uncut conversations instead of an actual story. Half the play was spent on the last stage where Doreen spends the night with Carla, and besides a fight Carla and Michael have near the end, not much else happens. It’s mostly just an opportunity for Marlo Thomas (of That Girl fame) to shine and show off her natural wit and comedic timing. She was, by far, the highlight of the entire show, but because I was spending most of the time pondering what May was trying to get at, it all felt meaningless. I don’t think May even knew what she wanted.

Sometimes it can be good to make your viewer confused, but the questions the viewer has have to be answered by the end, or at least left up to the viewer to decipher their meaning. With ‘George is Dead,’ I instead felt that I was confused throughout and after the play, but that I wasn’t supposed to be. The play did have nice lighting, convincing sound effects, and great sets-the apartment set looked like a real apartment-but its serious script flaws prevent it from becoming anything more than a disappointment. And ‘George is Dead’ is the worst kind of disappointment, because it had the real capacity to be great.

Overall Grade: C