The PushOver Feels Off From The Start
Something about the entire evening felt off.
The Chain Theatre is a small Off-Broadway venue on 36th Street, tucked into a building where other theaters and rehearsal spaces have come and gone over the years. As I approached the address, it hit me. I once had a play produced in this very building.
I found myself wondering why the world premiere of a new play (The Pushover) by John Patrick Shanley was staged in such an intimate space. Shanley has a Tony Award and a Pulitzer Prize for Doubt: A Parable, which he also adapted and directed for the screen. He has an Academy Award as well. Doubt saw a Broadway revival in recent years, and his classic Danny and the Deep Blue Sea was recently revived at the Lucille Lortel Theatre. Theater is a difficult business, and even a playwright of Shanley’s stature is not guaranteed a Broadway run for every new work. Still, this felt unusual.
I wondered what might be hiding beneath the surface, and I soon found out. The play is described in the press release as “three bad-ass women who collide and collude at a spa in New Mexico and a bare-bones Asian restaurant in Queens. Dangerous and hungry, their weapons and their passions bleed into each other. They speak the language of the outcast, rough and sexual, and fight to survive, and to love.”
That description makes about as much sense as the play itself.
The three “bad-ass women” include Rebecca De Mornay, best known for her role in Risky Business. We are asked to believe she is a dangerous, self-made force who irresistibly draws the other two characters in. Instead, her Evelyn spends most of the play lounging and telling us how dangerous she is, delivering a performance that feels more like a high school actor leaning into the idea of being “edgy” than embodying it.
Coming in at full volume from what feels like an entirely different production is Christina Toth as Soochi, the ex-lover and business partner of Pearl. Soochi is volatile and erratic, a full-blown chaos agent who also happens to be an unscrupulous accountant. She steals for Evelyn, even as Evelyn remains in love with Pearl.
Some grounding arrives when the setting shifts to a restaurant owned by Pearl, played by Di Zhu. Her performance carries a sense of realism that the others lack. Pearl feels like someone you might actually encounter in life.
I will spare you the details of the plot and the increasingly contrived love triangle among three characters who have little chemistry and a shared comfort with casual violence and stolen money. As the action grew more intense and more absurd, something finally clicked.
This entire cast needs to go home and watch Moonstruck.
If you are unfamiliar, Moonstruck is Shanley’s Academy Award-winning screenplay, released in a year that also included The Untouchables, Wall Street, and The Last Emperor. That was when movies were The Movies.
That is the missing ingredient here. Shanley’s best work lives in a heightened reality where outrageous situations and bold, emotional dialogue feel completely natural because the characters believe every word they say. Think of Nicolas Cage declaring his love to Cher, only to be slapped twice and told to “snap out of it.” Or Olympia Dukakis calmly telling her husband at the breakfast table to end his affair, while he reacts physically but says nothing. Or the line, “You got a love bite on your neck. Your life’s going down the toilet.”
That is Shanley’s world, where everything is turned up to eleven and the balance between sincerity and absurdity creates something electric.
The script has taken its share of criticism, but once I viewed it through a Moonstruck lens, I could almost see the play Shanley intended. It is passionate, chaotic, and intentionally illogical. I only wish the cast and director had embraced that same tone.
The production has been extended through May 2, so clearly it is finding an audience.
See you at the movies.
