Game, Set, Standing Ovation

I have to admit it.  Every time I had a day off from high school or snuck a sick day, I’d tune in to the astoundingly annoying yet somehow alluring television mystery phenomenon, “Murder, She Wrote” at 11am.  Angela Lansbury is probably best known by her depiction of this snarky detective, but in my head Jessica Fletcher is far from the pinnacle of Lansbury’s career.  Personally I still marvel at Lansbury’s work as Mrs. Lovett in the original Broadway production of Sweeney Todd, and her skill in the original Manchurian Candidate.  It is such performances that compelled me to grab my mom and run to see Deuce while we had a chance to see the actor in…well, action.  I had low expectations for this metaphoric dramedy about retired tennis partners living their dreams for one last night together.  But with their natural poise coupled with an excellent script by Terrence McNally, Marian Seldes and Angela Lansbury blew any hint of my skepticism out of the water. (See the New York Times review) The duo skillfully avoided any hokiness, and refused to hit the audience over the head with metaphorical tennis rackets of times past and successes gone.  Instead, Lansbury and Seldes showed that they are far from shadows in the theatrical mind, and performed with such adroitness that one couldn’t tell them from the 30-year old stars they once were.

The staging of the play was very well done, as two levels of scrim with video footage of a crowd viewing a tennis match projected onto them surrounded the two actresses, emphasizing their separation from the rest of the viewers.  The two women seemed to visually “pop” out of the stage, and I very rarely found myself distracted by other elements of the set.  The sports announcers were spot-on, hitting the stride of the annoying, self-obsessed ex-pro as announcer (ahem, McEnroe) from the very beginning.  The play faultered when it came to the character of the male fan, who waxed poetic about the past greatness of tennis.  This part was the achilles heal of the show, as McNally succumbed for a moment to the preachy language of change that he so deftly avoided in the script between the two leads.  This resolved itself slightly when the man approached the two women halfway through the production, which allowed the audience to see a different side of the two women, as they interacted with someone outside of one another.

Overall, Deuce is- yes, I shall say it- a surprise smash.  It’s running for another month or so, and I implore you to check it out.  If you had a chance to see the Babe play for the Yankees one more time, you’d go.  So do the same for these two women- they, and every member of the theatre world, deserve it.