Close Up Space
Opening Night: December 19, 2011
Closing: January 29, 2012
Theater: MTC - Stage I
Tony Award® and 4-time Emmy Award® winner David Hyde Pierce brings his signature wit back to the MTC stage in the World Premiere of Close Up Space by Molly Smith Metzler. Pierce stars as Paul Barrow, an obsessive book editor on a major deadline. With an assistant (Chernus) who’s been camping in the office, a famous author (Perez) threatening to bail on him and an intern (DiGiovanni) who is no help at all, Paul’s just about had it! But when his fiery daughter (Minifie) shows up and lambasts him in Russian, Paul faces a glaring personal error that can’t be corrected with red ink. Leigh Silverman (Well, From Up Here, Chinglish) returns to MTC to direct this funny and poignant new play about how hard it can be to communicate… in any language.
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December 19, 2011
The clunker title isn’t the only nonworking part in “Close Up Space,” a new play by Molly Smith Metzler that opened Monday night at City Center. Aside from the appealing work of a cast led by David Hyde Pierce, playing a more dour variation on the dithery persona he perfected in his years as a star of the sitcom “Frasier,” this wan comedy about (yawn) the troubled relationship between a book editor and his daughter has little to recommend it. Unfortunately it is the second dud in a row from Manhattan Theater Club at its Off Broadway space, after Zoe Kazan’s similarly undercooked “We Live Here.”
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December 19, 2011
David Hyde Pierce and Rosie Perez star in Molly Smith Metzler’s Off Broadway premiere, which starts out promisingly but gets hijacked by a misjudged pivotal character who crushes both the comedy and the pathos.
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December 19, 2011
he evening starts out with a bang: David Hyde Pierce is a ruthless book editor ripping apart a series of letters from his misbehaving daughter’s headmaster. No one is better at playing sharply intelligent characters flummoxed by their pesky feelings. Remember all those marvelous moments on "Frasier" when Pierce’s Niles was unable to use his keen wit to manage a situation involving emotions and hilariously lost his hard-won composure?
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December 19, 2011
"Close Up Space" is a conventional generational play about a rebellious teenager taking revenge on her tyrannical father. Scribe Molly Smith Metzler has given the material an absurdist comic veneer, and helmer Leigh Silverman has shrewdly cast against type, so there’s an edge of irony to the caricatured roles. Curiously, the coup casting of David Hyde Pierce flips the play’s hate message on its back. With the thesp channeling Bob Newhart, nasty dad comes off as long-suffering saint, the hapless victim of his daughter from hell.
READ THE REVIEWDecember 19, 2011
When a distant relationship between a father and daughter involves her hurling snowballs at him from a cooler, the imagery is funny but the symbolism seems heavy-handed.
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