‘Hold On To Me Darling’ Review: Adam Driver Has The Country Blues In Off Broadway Revival
Not far into Kenneth Lonergan’s fame-is-hell-but-what-isn’t fable Hold On To Me Darling, Adam Driver, playing a country music crossover megastar about to begin filming his latest blockbuster, pledges in an accent so thick it could dent Johnny Cash’s belt buckle that he’s going to turn his famous life around “just as soon as I get done with this goddamn space movie.”
The line, coming from Kylo Ren himself, gets a laugh, a slow build sort of thing that picks up steam as the audience makes the connection between the Driver on stage and the Driver of real life. The actor doesn’t wink, and in fact tosses off the line without much ado, but with a play as unwieldy as this one, best to accept a laugh where you can.
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It’s not that Hold On To Me Darling – opening tonight Off Broadway at the Lucille Lortel Theatre – is bad (it isn’t, though there are moments that do their best to convince otherwise). Confounding might be a more accurate description, starting with this: In the eight years since its last Off Broadway production, directed, like this one, by Neil Pepe, how could the supremely gifted Lonergan (This Is Our Youth, The Waverly Gallery, Lobby Hero) not come to some decision about what, exactly, this shaggy dog is supposed to be about?
Cartoon? Satire? Tearjerker? Low-key smart or intentionally dimwitted? Hold On To Me Darling offers previous few clues as to its intentions, so best just to pay attention to its surface: Driver plays Strings McCrane, the rare country superstar who has crossed over into major Hollywood success. At 39, he’s been an icon for so long that he can barely recall a time when the world hasn’t been full of silver plates and the women who bring them.
But as the play begins, Strings has just learned that his mother has died, and he’s thrown for a major loop. We gradually learn that she was a monster who belittled and withheld love to the point that even Strings, her favorite, is left with little by way of memories but insults and disappointments.
It’s all perfect ingredients for an existential midlife crisis, which Strings commences somewhere between the Kansas City hotel near his latest movie shoot and the Tennessee backwater where Ma McCrane’s funeral is to be held. Soon enough, String decides he’s going to dump the psycho starlet with whom he’s been making tabloid headlines, marry the starry-eyed, butter-wouldn’t-melt hotel masseuse he’s just met, and quit all the star-making-machinery in favor of the small-town Tennessee life he long ago fled. Life, he thinks, will be easier.
Fat chance. That masseuse (the wonderful Heather Burns, running off with the show hand in hand with Driver) has ideas of her own (not to mention a husband and two “evil twin” daughters). Strings’ professional Plan B – a feed store he’ll purchase and operate with his no-luck half-brother Duke (CJ Wilson) – is the kind of crummy job only someone as pampered as Strings could romanticize, and walking away from contracts and Hollywood commitments is a prospect only a team of lawyers could love.
Along the way, Strings does lots of talking – lots and lots of talking, loquacious and hambone. Lonergan is aces in presenting characters who love to hear themselves talk, even if he’s much (much) more convincing when the characters doing the yapping are of the urbane, citified variety that fuel his New York-set masterpieces This Is Our Youth and The Waverly Gallery. The worst of Darling‘s Southern-fried disquisitions could shame Maggie The Cat and Big Daddy on their best days. “There’s a wind blowin’, Nancy,” Strings laments. “I wish I could say it was a warm wind. But it ain’t. It’s a cold, bitter wind and it’s cuttin’ right through me, cuttin’ right inside me, churning up my insides like somebody stuck a — a — stuck some kind of very sharp implement inside my guts and started yankin’ it around, just twistin’ it all around inside my viscera, my innards.”
Played out on Walt Spangler’s crackerjack rotating set – a hotel room one scene, and feed store another, a deer-headed man cave one moment, a funeral parlor the next – Darling has plenty of fine moments, even fine scenes, though it doesn’t stick with even its best ideas for very long. By the time Burns’ deliciously conniving masseuse Nancy finally shows her true colors, leaving behind the passive-aggressive toadying that Strings encounters on a near-constant basis, we know better than to get too attached.
And all that is well before the unearned sentimentality of the ending – which Driver comes damn close to pulling off on sheer will alone. Even if we wish the play had followed Burns’ Nancy to wherever it is she went, it’s all but impossible not to get taken in by that vulnerable-combustible persona that made Driver’s breakthrough on Girls so memorable.
Still, not even Driver, with all his intensity, can compensate for the condescension that underscores so much of Darling. Do Tennesseans really go around calling each other Cousin This and Cousin That? Do exclamations like “Jesus Christ at the Tennessee State Fair!” and “Jesus Christ in a barbecue pit!” and “Jesus Christ in a downtown Memphis hair salon!” come tripping off their tongues? And if they do, can “Kiss Mah Grits” be far behind?
After all the Appalachian bons mot have been tossed and repetitive arguments laid to rest, we might be happy that Strings seems about to find some sort of healing but mostly we’re just left wondering how something with so much hit potential can wind up as forgettable as any old B side.
Title: Hold On To Me Darling
Venue: Off Broadway’s Lucille Lortel Theatre
Written By: Kenneth Lonergan
Directed By: Neil Pepe
Cast: Adam Driver, Heather Burns, Adelaide Clemens, Keith Nobbs, CJ Wilson, Frank Wood
Running time: 2 hr 40 min (including intermission)
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