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TheaterDecember 2009 The boy in the grey flannel suit On Good Bobby at 59e59, Willem Dafoe in The Idiot Savant, Oleanna & Proof. Something one notices about the audiences at Manhattan’s 59e59 theater, just off Park Avenue: They don’t look like they’ve come very far to get there. They embody elite comfort and complacency, a fact that actor Dan Lauria, playing Jimmy Hoffa in Good Bobby, puts to sharp comic effect: He enters through the audience, greeting “friends” and slapping backs, pointing out faces in the crowd—“Now there’s a working man!” —as the half-abashed theatergoers, who look like they have never been so much as downwind of a Teamster, smile nervously: They’re in on the joke, and they are the joke. (An earlier production at 59e59, A Lifetime Burning, merely sneered at the haute bourgeoisie from within a miniature Design Within Reach showroom, and was much less satisfactory.) Good Bobby is about the career and Oedipus complex of Robert F ... This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchaseSubscribe to TNC (Print and Online editions) Subscribe to TNC (Online only) This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 28 December 2009, on page 33 Copyright © 2012 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/The-boy-in-the-grey-flannel-suit-4340
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