Via Culturebot I found this great slapdown by David Cote in Time Out New York of mediocre, safe uptown theater. More reviews should be like this. Anthony Tommasini can be counted on to write similar, yet more polite, things about how bad classical music institutions are these days.
David Lindsay-Abaire's Rabbit Hole made me sick. During this competent dramedy about the mourning process, I experienced bizarre hallucinations, nausea, confusion and an irritability verging on dyspepsia. Upon learning my theater-going patterns, the doctor delivered a swift diagnosis of Biltmore Syndrome. It's a fairly common condition brought about by seeing too many middlebrow, bourgeois plays at New York's big nonprofit theaters. The disease gets its name, obviously, from MTC's Biltmore Theatre, which has been home to a steady stream of unimaginative comedies and dramas about middle-class angst since it opened in 2003.
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No doubt there's a thrilling play to be written about grief and recovery in suburbia, but this isn't it. And until Lindsay-Abaire and his supporters at MTC crack the code, you'll learn more from Oprah and Dr. Phil than from this pabulum. Personally, I'd rather see a ripping tale about Uzi-wielding hobos spreading grief around than brave homeowners suppressing it.
But then, I'm not an MTC subscriber or ticket buyer; I don't have to justify seeing money wasted on an expensive-looking set and the blandest stars that money can buy. John Lee Beatty's lavish Westchester interiors, spinning on hydraulic turntables, stand as smug, imagination-murdering monuments to MTC's wealth and, presumably, the well-appointed estates of some percentage of its subscribers. And, like its aesthetic clones, the Roundabout Theatre Company and Lincoln Center Theater, MTC attracts big names regardless of whether they possess real talent.
