Linda Vista
Opening Night: October 10, 2019
Closing: November 10, 2019
Theater: Helen Hayes Theatre
Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winner Tracy Letts takes a brutally comedic look at Wheeler, a 50-year-old divorcee in the throes of a mid-life spiral. Just out of his ex-wife’s garage and into a place of his own, Wheeler starts on a path toward self-discovery — navigating blind dates, old friends, and new love. Full of opinions, yet short on self-examination, Wheeler must reconcile the man he has become with the man he wants to be.
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October 10, 2019
Dick Wheeler, the lead character – he’s hardly a “hero” – in Tracy Letts’ Linda Vista, a very funny new play about a very sad, not very likable man, is the type of determined, opinionated loser who has reached middle age with both a decided pride and worn-down boredom with his own contrariness, his mental library of trivia and hard-knock wisdom having left him with little more than a flabby gut, a failed marriage, a few sticks of cheap furniture and the confidence that he alone knows best which Ali MacGraw movie showed the actress at her sexiest (Convoy, in case you were wondering) and why Radiohead’s Thom Yorke is nothing but a “scrubby little poser”. Linda Vista, opening tonight at Broadway’s Helen Hayes Theater in a Second Stage presentation of the Steppenwolf production, opens with a scene that includes Wheeler’s easy conversation with his only friend – their bond goes back to college, one of Letts’ many insightful hints indicating just how long Wheeler, as he prefers to be known, has been coasting on his past – neatly encapsulates the intellectual self-assurance that’s equaled to, and at odds with, an obstinate cluelessness at reading other people and his lousy way with them.
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October 10, 2019
The everyday poison known as toxic masculinity becomes dangerously easy to swallow in “Linda Vista,” Tracy Letts’s inspired, ruthless take on the classic midlife-crisis comedy. In the sunny opening scenes of this very funny, equally unsettling Steppenwolf Theater production — which opened on Thursday at the Hayes Theater — you’ll probably feel like cozying up to that sheepish, disheveled big guy who rules the stage with his outspoken wit. Played with immense, shaggy charm — and anger to match — by Ian Barford in a performance that reminds you of how brilliantly bruising Steppenwolf acting can be, this charismatic loser is named Wheeler. Actually, it’s Dick Wheeler, but he prefers to dispense with the first name, perhaps on the theory that it’s better not to provide too many clues to your essential nature.
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October 10, 2019
Tracy Letts, the profusely gifted playwright who also happens to be a brilliant actor, or vice versa, is working in an elevated sitcom mode as well as a revealing personal vein in Linda Vista. The self-inflicted woes of a middle-aged white man, victim of his own inebriating cocktail of testosterone and narcissism, might seem a tone-deaf subject for character study in our current moment of masculinity vivisected and reconstructed. But don’t let the slick barrage of one-liners deceive you into thinking there’s no room here for bruising self-examination and perhaps even tentative growth.
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October 10, 2019
Wheeler (Ian Barford) is the kind of man who has declared a funeral for his future, and drags the rest of the world in his wake. He’s not just antiheroic, he’s anti-everything: a newly divorced 50-year-old blowhard who wears his snobbism proudly—“I do not like so many things and so many of them are things that a lot of people like”—in the knowledge that he has been among its victims. (A once-promising photographer, he has second-guessed himself into life as a vintage-camera repairman in San Diego.) Between his superiority and self-disgust, he doesn’t even realize how deeply he is falling into midlife-crisis cliché. In his loose but astute Linda Vista, Tracy Letts rips the blinders away.
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