Coming off the excellent comedy-drama "Native Gardens," which began the 2021-22 season for the Hamptons Theatre Company, HTC scores another bull's-eye with "Ripcord," which runs now through April 3 in Quogue.
The story begins with two elderly women, Abby Binder (played by Laurie Atlas) and Marilyn Dunne (played by Claire Parrella-Curran), who are to become roommates at an assisted living facility. To say it's a match made in hell would be both true and not entirely accurate. Abby -- cynical and irascible -- can't stand living with anyone and has been through countless candidates. No one visits her, no one likes her, and the idea that someone new is moving in sets her aggressive personality into overdrive.
Marilyn, on the other hand -- fun-loving and optimistic -- is determined to make a go with Abby, even as she is met with scorn. She actually wants this arrangement, for reasons that are at first hard to fathom. Yes, David Lindsay-Abaire, the playwright (who won a Pulitzer Prize for his 2006 play "Rabbit Hole"), is playing off Neil Simon's "Odd Couple," with maybe a little dash of "The Sunshine Boys" for good measure. But Abby and Marilyn have a dynamic all their own.
I'll guess that the two leads won't mind if I say they don't seem old enough for assisted living. Other than this, however, they are perfectly cast. With her surly, sandpaper voice, Ms. Atlas tears into the character of Abby, dragging out the bitterness and misanthropy that come from personal disappointment. She seems to genuinely enjoy chewing on Abby's four-letter words, but soon moves her character from what begins as an affable truculence into something quite wicked and meanspirited; she shows a daring willingness to take Abby to a place where she is genuinely unlikable.
This helped propel a scene in which Abby tries to get Marilyn to falsely believe she will get a visit from her children. When they actually show up, the audience let out a small cheer at Abby's comeuppance.
No less skilled is Ms. Parrella-Curran as she captures Marilyn's boundlessly positive, seize-the-day attitude. Her late husband, she declares, had a choleric personality similar to Abby's, and she seems almost determined to make a project out of her roommate. (Is she trying to fix what she could not with her husband, we wonder?) The actress keeps up an indefatigable energy in portraying an aging person who has decided to dance through the last act of her life, as opposed to the frumpy Abby, who is content to sit in a perennial slouch spewing invectives.
There is some very nifty stage design in this adaptation of "Ripcord," which introduces us to a suitably sterile assisted living apartment, then seamlessly turns the stage into a local funhouse, to which Marilyn has enticed Abby to accompany her. Somehow, with the help of a scary clown and an electric chair, they pull it off.
In another, hilarious scene, a drugged and groggy Abby suddenly finds herself on a plane wearing a parachute as she unwittingly prepares go skydiving with Marilyn. A drop-back screen cleverly simulates the pair floating down to earth and allows the play to deliver its ripcord metaphor.
"Ripcord," when it first appeared around 2015, was criticized for having the elements of a sitcom. This may have been partly because the playwright's prize-winning "Rabbit Hole" was so heart-wrenching, and thus the breezier "Ripcord" felt slight by comparison. (Also, with so many playwrights working in television, can we really say if the sitcom has influenced stage comedy, or whether it's the other way around, or both?)
As the play moves toward its conclusion, we learn more about the two women's pasts. And if there is not a wrenching Eugene O'Neill-esque epiphany, there is genuine poignancy.
A note of social observation. Introducing the play, the director, Andrew Botsford, specifically asked audience members to please, please double check their phones. Nevertheless, not 10 minutes into the performance, the symphony began -- muffled ringtones, one after the other, chiming around the theater (one person actually answered, "Hello? Who?"). Before Covid, theatergoers had almost come to expect the occasional cellphone incident. You'd roll your eyes and accept it. But when there are five separate disruptions before intermission (as during the performance I saw), you begin to worry that post-pandemic social norms have permanently warped from spending too much time alone.
It would take more than a little noise, however, to spoil the fun of this adaptation of "Ripcord." The lead performances and clever stage design make for a thoroughly enjoyable evening of theater and solidify HTC's command of social comedy.
