Filmmaker's compassionate play mixes trenchant wit with a generous, forgiving perspective.
NEW YORK — "Warm and fuzzy" likely wouldn't be the first words to come to mind in describing the film oeuvre of the Coen brothers. And they wouldn't readily apply to the string of one-act plays that Ethan Coen, the sibling who also dabbles in theater, has unveiled in recent years.
Yet Coen's first full-length play, Women or Nothing (* * * ½ out of four), which opened off-Broadway Monday at the Atlantic Theater Company's Linda Gross Theater, is as strikingly compassionate as it is predictably unsentimental. Offering fewer of the smart-alecky tics that distinguished some of his earlier, shorter stage efforts, he delivers a nuanced, absorbing account that juggles mordant humor with a generous and forgiving view of humanity.
Gretchen and Laura are a lesbian couple in early middle age who are trying to have a child the old-fashioned way. Laura, who has volunteered her womb, would actually have preferred to seek out a sperm donor, but Gretchen doesn't trust a random guy to produce genes worthy of their progeny.
So Gretchen determines to set Laura up, sneakily, with a divorced colleague, Chuck, whom Gretchen has deemed biologically ideal after meeting his pretty, poised young daughter. Laura sees the plan, which would leave Chuck in the dark about his potential role in spawning another child, as an "assault on his dignity" but grudgingly agrees to it.
What follows includes a few contrivances — among them a plot twist involving Chuck's background — but is made convincing and compelling by Coen's witty, thoughtful writing, and by an excellent cast under the expert direction of David Cromer, a master at establishing intimacy and vibrant naturalism.
Those qualities are especially apparent in Susan Pourfar's portrayal of Laura, an accomplished classical pianist whose jaded, rigid manner belies a hungry and insecure heart. Pourfar invests the role, the juiciest in Women, with both canny comic timing and rigorous emotional truth.
In a pivotal scene with Chuck — a seemingly less complicated but not insubstantial guy played by Robert Beitzel with delicate wryness — Laura, after a few drinks, reveals the wrenching self-doubt she has kept hidden, possibly even from Gretchen. "I am a human being," she repeats four times.
The words are later tossed back at her, unknowingly, by the breezier, more assured Gretchen, whose differences from and genuine devotion to Laura are deftly illustrated in Halley Feiffer's fetching performance.
The reliable Deborah Rush appears as Laura's mom, Dorene, who chooses the most inconvenient moment possible to pop up and rattle on about various past lovers. But Dorene turns out to have her own sensitivity, and wisdom, of a sort. Like all the others here, she earns the playwright's sympathy, and ours.
"Life absorbs our mistakes and moves on," Dorene declares at one point, "so really there are no mistakes." That, in the end, may be Women or Nothing's surprisingly gentle message.
