Trends and Entertainment

The Great Recession? That’s Entertainment

Are we all taking this recession just a little too seriously? In a series of short plays debuting at the Flea Theater in New York as “The Great Recession,” times are so tough that one may contemplate killing babies for money; you may end up living in squalor with others who’ve had their Tribeca lofts foreclosed on (subsisting on nothing but “tofu pops” and no cell phone or Internet); or, egads, have to come up with a Plan B when your dad is no longer able to fund your six-month vacation to wherever. Wow—get me off this train.

To hit their point home, one play features characters who’d probably be broke and a mess anyway blaming the recession. The fetish is understood.

If you are attractive and lucky, goes their message, being vapid may serve you in the Great Recession.

Except for a rocky start with an Adam Rapp vignette featuring face-painted absurdist soldiers of the new order, “The Great Recession” delivers pretty good entertainment and commentary on the recession. There’s the young couple who live together in “Fucked,” by Itamar Moses. The two are due to take a six-month vacation together, but hit a speed bump when the boyfriend decides he wants to go alone, clearly because he sees an opportunity to live large and unencumbered. So he dumps her. Only to be dumped himself moments later when his trip benefactor — his rich father — suddenly loses his money and can’t fund his son’s getaway. Lush times let us live whimsically, hard times do not. The recession leaves the couple “fucked,” as the title suggests, or, in their case, not so much.

The acting in Thomas Bradshaw’s “New York Living,” about a couple of bad actors, makes this point: Be attractive and lucky, and being vapid may even serve you in the Great Recession. It opens with the rehearsal of a love scene and spills into actual love, or probably lust and convenience (such characters aren’t capable of much more). The male lead kicks his girlfriend out of his fancy Time Warner Center apartment in Manhattan and reluctantly agrees to help her out of homelessness by foisting her on his director. She refuses, though, because the director lives in Crown Heights, a rough neighborhood in Brooklyn. All of it, including his obsession with kiddie porn and some sexual encounter with a horse, is pitch-perfect entitlement.

Aside from the Rapp opener, the weakest moment is probably Erin Courtney’s “Severed,” featuring a bunch of folks being interviewed as part of a documentary on unemployed twentysomethings. The dialogue is standard lost-my-job fare, and even the “inspirational” character, a Harvard MBA who’s starting his own business, is dreadfully typical.

The collection climaxes with a large cast of individuals left homeless and penniless, and, seemingly, witless, by the Great Recession, in “Recess,” a piece by Sheila Callaghan who weaves a good-enough post-apocalypse narrative through an ensemble of ten that almost makes you want to slit your wrists.

Finally, the last piece, “Unum,” by Will Eno, is the least interpretive, a collection of stereotypes such as the subprime mortgage lender, the broke couple who lose their house, the unwitting investor in a bad idea, the clueless bubble-era executive.

Taken together, “The Great Recession” can be seen as how screwed twentysomethings — because it seems to be only about twentysomethings — may be by the downturn. They’re likely to have the toughest time landing a job; they probably have the least amount of savings; and their inexperience leaves them ill-equipped to make decisions that could help them through the tough times.

But that’s not really the point of “The Great Recession.” It’s that twentysomethings are entitled, right? To the good life? Sure, why not.

“The Great Recession” runs through Dec. 30 at the Flea Theater in Manhattan.

Tags: recession, reviews, theater, twentysomethings