Starry Messenger has for its star Matthew Broderick, and, like a star, he is cold and remote. This is the story of an emotional- ly dead man who achieves resurrection through adultery—oh, boundless self-serving theme!—but this particular Lazarus never manages to shake off the dirt of the grave. They might well have titled this production Portrait of Ferris Bueller as a Very Sad Middle-Aged Man, except that Bueller did not, after all, grow up to be a fry cook on Venus, as prophesied, instead contenting himself with becoming a planetarium lecturer, his gaze falling not upon the stars themselves but upon facsimiles of them.
Mr. Broderick plays Mark Williams, a character you have met before. You have met him in novels written by adjunct professors of English, about adjunct professors of English, for adjunct professors of English. You have met slightly more ribald versions of him as Philip Roth’s protagonists and slightly less adventurous versions as Philip Roth’s minor characters. You undoubtedly have encountered him as a character in a Woody Allen film or in the audience of a Woody Allen film. Williams is an astronomer, but not, as he says, a “real astronomer.” He is not especially talented and he is not especially ambitious. He has a wife, who is required to be annoying so that the audience does not turn against Williams when he turns against her, and dutifully annoying she is. They squabble over minor parenting decisions and about sleeping arrangements for holiday