A barbed joke, easy but amusing, animates the opening scene of “Relevance,” JC Lee’s undercooked new play about two generations of feminism in conflict, which opened Sunday night at the Lucille Lortel Theater.
Theresa, a formidable middle-aged professor (played by Jayne Houdyshell, in daunting mode), is at an academic conference, holding forth with steamroller confidence on the oppression of marginal peoples.
She is so fixed in her megalithic presence, and so clearly used to being center stage, that she doesn’t let Msemaji (Pascale Armand), the young African-American writer with whom she’s supposedly having a dialogue, get more than a quickly gulped word in.
Now what was that Theresa was saying again about including “people who have been historically left out of the conversation?”
Yes, the irony is obvious, with its roaring subtext of “Socialist, socialize thyself.” But it’s a lively demonstration of self-deluding character in action, in which words and behavior contradict each other. What’s happening between these two women is both clear and charged with tension.
As such, it’s an eminently actable moment for pros like Houdyshell (a Tony winner for “The Humans’) and the vivid Armand (“Eclipsed” on Broadway). It is also, unfortunately, one of the last times this production holds and tickles your attention.
What follows is a discursive portrait of the divisions that exist between people seemingly on the same side in a great cause, especially in the shark-infested sea that is contemporary academia. From the get-go, you presume that Theresa is so smug in her perch that she’s destined to pull a Humpty Dumpty.
And given that this fall is going to be enacted by Houdyshell, a performer with a gift for finding original edges in familiar shapes, you can assume that you’re going to be emotionally shaken, if not stirred, by the end of this MCC Theater production, directed at a faltering pace by Liesl Tommy. But as Houdyshell’s Theresa starts to lose her confidence, so does the play itself.
The show is set in the meeting rooms, bars and bedrooms of a hotel where the fictional American Conference for Letters and Culture is convening to deliver papers and bestow awards and grants. (Clint Ramos did the appropriately sterile sets.)
The friction between Theresa, a self-made scholar out of rural North Dakota, and the much younger Msemaji, who claims to have grown up amid privation and abuse, will wreak havoc with the plans of the conference’s most visible organizer, the callow but ambitious Kelly (a gee-whiz Molly Camp). In like manner, Lee’s play descends into what feels like a clash of hastily assembled talking points that never jell into persuasive form.
Lee — whose credits as a television writer include “Looking,” “Girls” and “How to Get Away With Murder” — made an auspicious debut as a playwright several years ago with “Luce” at Lincoln Center Theater. Like that earlier work, about a white couple who adopt a son from a war-torn Congo, “Relevance” shows an admirable willingness to wrestle with uncomfortable subjects.
It also shares an honorable refusal to provide conclusive answers to the complicated questions it poses, or to tilt its sympathies heavily toward any one of its four prickly characters. (Richard Masur, sporting a man bun, is David, Theresa’s agent and former lover.) Unfortunately, it’s difficult to feel much interest in, let alone liking for, any of them.
“Relevance” might be seen as a latter-day variation on Ibsen’s “The Master Builder,” in which an aging architect becomes dangerously defensive (and destructive) when he hears the younger generation of his profession “knocking at my door.” Surely the same noise is echoing in Theresa’s head as she watches Msemaji hijack the conference and the attention.
So the determined older professor, who didn’t rise to the top by being gentle and giving, decides to wage war against Msemaji, and to do so on the younger woman’s unfamiliar turf. That would be the landscape of social media, where reputations can be made and dashed in the twinkling of a tweet.
Projected Twitter feeds and YouTube videos figure prominently in the play’s climactic faceoff. (Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew is the projection designer.) And Msemaji is unmasked as something of a charlatan, though she’s so wily in the ways of web culture that she just might be able turn even this to her advantage. Or something like that.
“Relevance” is filled with ideas, many of them promising. But they feel unanchored by anything other than prefab confrontations and mothy lines from a playwriting kit. The cast members still seem to be searching for their characters (and occasionally, their lines).
Exacting professionals like Theresa are surely accustomed to more thoroughly thought-through work than what is presented here. “Relevance” feels like an intriguing rough draft prematurely thrown into public view.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.