Lobby Hero
Opening Night: March 26, 2018
Closing: April 29, 2018
Theater: Helen Hayes Theatre
Michael Cera, Chris Evans, Brian Tyree Henry and Bel Powley star in Kenneth Lonergan’s Lobby Hero. What happens when emotions come in conflict with principles, and how do choices under pressure define who we really are? The lobby of a Manhattan apartment building is much more than a waiting area for four New Yorkers involved in a murder investigation. It’s a testing ground for what happens when personal and professional personas find themselves at odds. A young security guard with big ambitions clashes with his stern boss, an intense rookie cop and her unpredictable partner in a play from the 2017 Oscar-winning writer of Manchester by the Sea.
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March 26, 2018
Shut up. Keep talking.
Those clashing orders whisper side-by-side in your mind as you watch the meticulously acted revival of Kenneth Lonergan’s “Lobby Hero,” which opened on Monday night at the renovated Helen Hayes Theater, the new Broadway home for Second Stage Theater.
That’s because you will probably come to — if not like — then feel personally invested in the four self-sabotaging New Yorkers so completely embodied here by Michael Cera, Chris Evans, Brian Tyree Henry and Bel Powley. And none of them can participate in the simplest exchanges of words without doing serious damage.
Sure, the talk at first seems merely casual as these four characters pair off to shoot the breeze in and around an apartment building lobby where it always feels like 3 a.m. But lives as well as livelihoods are possibly at stake in what’s being said, and everyday conversation becomes a minefield. Whenever someone starts talking again after a long silence, you feel an “Ouch!” coming on.
READ THE REVIEWMarch 26, 2018
March 26, 2018
Chris Evans trades a Captain America shield for an NYPD badge in his Broadway debut in Kenneth Lonergan’s drama “Lobby Hero.” Evans’s deft performance is one of the pluses of this fine-tuned show, which marks Second Stage’s inaugural Broadway production at the renovated Hayes Theater. Seen Off-Broadway in 2001, the funny-sad play presents a group portrait of four nighthawks who collide in the foyer of a Manhattan high-rise. The elevator is prominent in the revolving set for a reason: Everybody’s trying to ascend. But gender, race and personalities get in the way.
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March 26, 2018
Let’s get the obvious question out of the way up front: Does Chris Evans cut it in his leap from the superhero universe to the naturalistic comedy-drama of Kenneth Lonergan’s Lobby Hero? Absolutely. Evans fully inhabits his character of a vain but well-liked New York City career cop on track to make detective, who is quite comfortable rationalizing to himself abuses of power large and small in a profession where gender inequality and toxic masculinity come with the badge. The actor best known as Captain America brings plenty of cocky swagger, his thumbs hooked into his utility belt like an Old West cowboy with a bushy mustache to match, but his assured performance never aims to be a star turn. Rather, it’s an integral part of an evenly balanced, four-person ensemble piece. Nor is Lonergan’s play, first produced in 2001, strictly a hot-button work ahead of the curve in exploring imbalances of power that have become such a pressing part of the national conversation in the era of #MeToo, Time’s Up and Black Lives Matter. As we’ve come to expect from this thoughtful, compassionate writer — an Oscar winner last year for his screenplay for the symphonic domestic drama Manchester by the Sea — Lobby Hero is a textured consideration of more or less honest characters dealing with sticky moral questions, its dramatic pulse and its needling humor underscored by a rich vein of melancholy.
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