New York Review: PRODIGAL SON

By Toby Zinman

For the Inquirer

When I interviewed John Patrick Shanley a couple of years ago, Outside Mullingar was his new play; he told me then—in his thick Bronx accent--that he had just finished a new play, and that the new one was quite unlike that delectable romantic comedy set in rural Ireland. The new play was, I'm guessing, the autobiographical Prodigal Son, currently premiering at the Manhattan Theatre Club in NYC, under the playwright's direction, and, thus, unsurprisingly, it's pure Shanley: big ideas embedded in lots of impassioned and sometimes funny dialogue spoken by characters you feel you know.

Prodigal Son has much in common with Doubt, Shanley's best-known work which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005: both take place in a Catholic boy's school where one of the issues turns out to be a seductive teacher. But this new play is from the boy's perspective, a "portrait of the artist as a young man" about Shanley's youthful struggles to understand himself and the world and to focus his talent with words into the career it became.

Shanley's  dedication to his 1984 play, Danny and the Deep Blue Sea reads like this: "This play is dedicated to everyone in he Bronx who punched me or kissed me and to everyone whom I punched or kissed."  I get the feeling that's a lot of people, and in Prodigal Son he has already started the punching if not the kissing; Jim Quinn is a troublesome, wildly talented student who is sent to a New Hampshire boarding school as a last ditch chance for him to get an education.

That education depends on the headmaster (Chris McGarry) and his wife (Annika Boras) who teaches the boys T.S. Eliot and provides tea and sympathy, and the English teacher (Robert Sean Leonard). Although it's the 1960s, these people seem to live in the eternal 1950s: good manners, restraint, gentility, repression.

In the central role of Jim, Timothee Chalamet is terrific—every tilt of his head and slump of his shoulders is perfectly calibrated to construct this character—a brilliant boy who reads intensely, greedy for ideas, desperate to grow up to be a hero, and tormented by adolescent angst.

No wonder the show begins on a set (designed by Santo Loquasto) with Chekhovian birch trees and a charming faraway manor house. Nostalgia without sentimentality: a nice combination.

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Manhattan Theatre Club at City Center - Stage I, 131 W. 55th St. NYC.