Ode to Joy
Opening Night: February 12, 2014
Closing: March 30, 2014
Theater: Cherry Lane Theatre
Ode to Joy tells the story of love, heartbreak, addiction, and illness through the eyes of Adele, an audacious painter and her destructive relations with Mala and Bill, her two lovers.
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February 27, 2014
Ode to Joy, Craig Lucas’ new dramedy at the Cherry Lane Theatre, is frustrating. A sensitive work that depicts the effects of addiction on one’s romantic partners, the play is a return to form for the author, containing the same lyrical grace and bubbly quirkiness found in his Prelude to a Kiss and Reckless. But there’s one crucial imperfection that prevents the piece — which Lucas also directs for Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre — from fully attaining the same heights that those two aforementioned plays reach.
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February 27, 2014
Watching Craig Lucas’ new drama is like listening to the confessionals at a 12-step meeting: What’s deeply meaningful to the speakers may be tedious for everyone else. Lucas (Prelude to a Kiss) has been open about his past problems with addictions, and has clearly written this from the heart. But that doesn’t excuse the windiness of Ode to Joy, now receiving its world premiere by Rattlestick Playwrights Theater. The flaws in his writing are only magnified by his self-indulgent direction.
READ THE REVIEWFebruary 27, 2014
”This is the story of how the pain goes away,” is the first line of Craig Lucas’s newest play Ode to Joy, uttered as the painter Adele (Law & Order: Criminal Intent’s Kathryn Erbe) literally screams out in pain for a reason we will learn later on. Like earlier Lucas plays such as Prelude to a Kiss and The Dying Gaul, his newest — directed by Lucas himself and playing at Off Broadway’s Cherry Lane Theatre — focuses on deception in intimate relations and the searing effects of addiction. (This is a highly personal arena for Lucas, who recently opened up to the New York Times about his struggle with drug addiction.)
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February 27, 2014
The first vocal act in Ode to Joy, a fevered chronicle of addiction and recovery, is a yowl of pain. Painter Adele (Erbe) raises her arm to daub a canvas and screams in agony from some affliction. “This is the story of how the pain goes away,” she solemnly informs us. Settle in, folks; there will be plenty more howling before the night is over. Writer-director Craig Lucas tracks Adele over 14 years and two rocky affairs—one with a hard-partying surgeon (Howard), the other with an executive with a bad ticker (Hope). Each of her lovers has flaws, but Adele is the most damaged, with a drug and alcohol dependency we slowly discover during the course of the play.
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February 27, 2014
Something scary, and pretty much irresistible, happens in the first act of Ode to Joy, Craig Lucas’s eloquent mess of a play at the Cherry Lane Theater. What occurs is both beautiful and ugly, and ticklingly familiar if you’ve ever bonded with someone in the depths of a shared drunkenness. Or is it heights? Whatever’s going on, it’s intoxicating, in all senses of the word. What we have here is your basic boy-meets-girl-in-a-bar setup, in one of its more classically lurid variations. It is midafternoon, a time when most respectable grown-ups have yet to crack open a bottle, and our not so young lovers-to-be are hellbent on floating into the night on a great big tidal wave of vodka.
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