Forest Whitaker Spins Tall Tales Of Sex And Money In Broadway’s ‘Hughie’ Revival

The very fine actor Frank Wood is already onstage when we take our seats at the Booth Theatre for Hughie, perched nearly motionless behind the front desk of a New York hotel whose glory days are beyond memory. Predawn light suffuses the spooky lobby of Christopher Oram’s ornate, monumental set with a grim pallor, even as the lurid green of a neon HOTEL sign is visible through a begrimed window. Finally Erie Smith enters, incongruously jovial, eager to make the acquaintance of Wood’s Night Clerk, Charlie Hughes, new to the premises. I’ve been on a weeklong drunk, Erie explains, following the funeral of his best friend, confidant and, not coincidentally, the previous Night Clerk, Hughie. Forest Whitaker plays Erie, whose ensuing near-monologue takes up most of Eugene O’Neill’s brief one-act drama of a man whose fragile delusions crack and turn to dust under the stolid gaze of an indifferent stranger. It’s a brave, if odd, choice for a Broadway debut, this meager work that reads better than it plays and which more appropriately belongs in a display case next to the manuscript for “The Iceman Cometh” or “A Moon For The Misbegotten,” the way artists’ sketches can shed light on their greater works.