Women fall hard and fast for Strings McCrane, the “third biggest crossover star in the history of country music.” He dates supermodels “at will.” Fangirls who flirt with him at night send him sex tapes in the morning. A hotel masseuse, kneading his sculptural glutes, exclaims: “I’ve had a crush on you since I was in trade school.”
Playgoer, he marries her. But not before seducing a young relative at his mother’s funeral. Coming clean to the masseuse, he later owns his indiscretion. “I went to see Essie as a cousin,” he says. “But I stayed there with her as a man.”
Did the clichés of country music make Strings (Adam Driver) such a melodramatic, self-justifying, emotional boomerang? Or are his pre-existing gifts in that department what made him a country music star in the first place?
These are among the questions you may find yourself asking, in want of much else to do, while watching the baggy, overlong “Hold On to Me Darling,” a comedy by Kenneth Lonergan now being revived at the Lucille Lortel Theater. Well, not so much revived as — like Strings’s mother — embalmed.
Other than a few cast changes, most notably Driver in the role first played by Timothy Olyphant, the show is pretty much what it was when it debuted at the Atlantic Theater Company in 2016. The physical production looks as if it had been preserved since then in mothballs, with the same cramped, slowly revolving set by Walt Spangler. The few tweaks to the script are almost invisible. Neither Lonergan nor the director, Neil Pepe, seems to have felt the need for refinement.
And why should they have? Lonergan has proved himself a terrific dramatist many times over: “This Is Our Youth,” “The Waverly Gallery,” “Lobby Hero.” This play, too, was well received by most critics, if not by me. It is certainly funny in places, and droll in others; it is occasionally even stinging in its satire of show-business sincerity. We learn that Strings’s most recent celebrity fiancée, making “a statement of solidarity and sexual enlightenment on behalf of the women of Afghanistan,” wore a see-through mesh burqa on a junket there.
Besotted with the chaos of his own emotions, Strings is less calculating but just as ridiculous. In response to grief over his mother, he drops out of a “space movie” mid-shoot and cancels his upcoming “No Time for Tears” tour, inciting ruinous lawsuits. As soon as he wins the pity and affection of the masseuse (Heather Burns), who just as quickly drops her inconvenient husband and twin “angels,” he sets his wolfish sad-face on sunshiny Essie (Adelaide Clemens). Swearing to give up Hollywood and Nashville for honorable small-town life, he inveigles his embittered brother (CJ Wilson) into a hopeless scheme to take over their local feed store.
In outline, that’s silly enough to work. But if the frame of the story is serviceable, the upholstery is both threadbare and overstuffed. We have certainly seen the parable of the prodigal son before. Lampoons of celebrity narcissism and its enabling underlings — Strings has a doozy of a sycophantic assistant in Jimmy (Keith Nobbs) — are not made new by a few new jokes, no matter how good they are. (Mostly they are throwaways here, a sign of their irrelevance.) And Lonergan has not solved the problem, or perhaps he means to express it by example, of the creeping dullness of compulsive personalities. Strings’s rut is inevitably the audience’s.
Driver compounds the problem by being too good. Always a commanding, magnetic actor, he can’t help but pull focus here; his outsize emotional and physical scale make everything and everyone else look small. Worse, his heartfelt commitment to Strings’s ludicrousness releases antibodies to the satire, garbling the tone. With the main story thus neutralized, then run into the ground by repetition, the play descends into “Hee Haw” territory, making familiar jokes at the expense of what it relentlessly presents as unsophisticated, uneducated, incest-adjacent hicks.
On it goes in that slumming way until the last scene, when a new character arrives. I won’t describe who he is except to say that he is a wholly original creation and, as played by that local treasure Frank Wood, fully able to engage Driver at his fiercest. Their confrontation finally makes a richly playable scene, one that’s painful for real reasons and worthy of Lonergan’s gift for empathy that’s enhanced, not defaced, by wry comedy.
But then it’s lights out. After three hours, the play ends suddenly, without resolution, like an argument an angry couple is too tired to finish. (Pepe could have helped us see the final gesture as a point of closure but does not.) Still, the last scene reveals what “Hold On to Me Darling” might have been if it weren’t so much like its main character: flighty, unserious and stuck on repeat.
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