Theater January 2012
Unhappy hours
On Happy Hour, Iphigenia in Tauris & Private Lives.
Happy Hour is the title of a new collection of three short plays written by the filmmaker Ethan Coen. It might have been titled Ethan Coen Attempts to Write a Play, and Doesn’t Quite. It isn’t that the works are of poor quality or that Mr. Coen lacks sufficient literary powers to construct a coherent work of drama—it is not skill that he lacks, but energy. His ability to create memorable characters shows no sign of having been diminished, and the producers have assembled a very good cast of actors to animate them. Mr. Coen simply has not put very much thought into giving them interesting things to do.
The first play—more of a playlet, an appetizer—is called End Days, and it is a collection of monologues given by Hoffman (Gordon MacDonald), a conversation-monopolizing drunk with eccentric eschatological interests: peak oil, resource depletion,...
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