Ben
Brantley

February 9, 2016

John Patrick Shanley has invited you to spend a season with him in what he calls “a special, beautiful room in hell.” As you might expect of this creator of memorably volatile plays (“Danny and the Deep Blue Sea,” “Dirty Story”) and film scripts (“Moonstruck”), it is not the sort of place you feel like sitting back and relaxing. Not that fire, brimstone or any of the usual instruments of infernal torture are deployed in his “Prodigal Son,” which opened on Tuesday night in a Manhattan Theater Club production at City Center directed by Mr. Shanley. What awaits you is far more painful: the sound of a raw adolescent ego screaming for attention. Or as the ego in question, Jim Quinn (played by the gifted Timothée Chalamet), puts it in his opening and closing remarks to the audience, “Do you remember 15?” It could be argued that Mr. Shanley recalls that age so vividly that he hasn’t just written about it; he has also rendered it as if, in his mid-60s, he were still writhing in the stinging throes of his midteens.