Ben
Brantley

December 6, 2016

Gary, a bearded bourgeois in his 60s who talks like a stoned surfer, has firm literary preferences. He likes “weird books,” he says, the kind that don’t grab your attention right away. “I mean you gotta have patience for these things, man,” he says. “They’re kinda like what I guess you’d call a slow burn?” Reading them, he continues, is akin to waiting and waiting in the ocean with your board for a big wave to come. That more or less describes the surprisingly pleasurable experience of the comedy in which Gary appears, Dan LeFranc’s sweet and scary, lackadaisical and hypnotic “Rancho Viejo,” which opened on Tuesday night at Playwrights Horizons.