Shue, Nerd

If you’re interested in a summer night out, perhaps contributing to a worthy cause while seeing some friends and having some laughs, the North Coast Repertory Theatre production of The Nerd will probably satisfy. If your demands and desires are greater, maybe not so much.

 This comedy is set in Terre Haute, Indiana in the early 1980s where Willum, a young architect (played with steady likeability by Douglas Anderson), is trying to succeed in business without losing the soul of his creativity. He’s at an impasse in his relationship with his girlfriend, Tansy (newcomer Queena DeLany, also steady and likeable), who is about to make a career move to Washington, DC. Observing this is their witty friend, Axel, a theatre critic (played with genial sarcasm by David Moore).

Enter Rick Steadman, the man who saved Willum’s life in Vietnam (though they’ve never met). He is the title character and the fly in the ointment of normality, played by Dmitry Tokarsky with braying gusto.

 He disrupts a dinner party that includes Andrew Jordan as the gruff developer Willum is currently trying to please, Shelley Stewart as his sweetly repressed wife, and Alex Sutter as their hyperactive son. And the story goes on from there, to a “surprise” or two for the heartwarming ending.

 If this sounds like the premise of a sitcom episode, there is that feeling about the entire play. It could probably use a few long commercial breaks to dull the brain into not noticing the porous plot. It has a lot of jokes and sight gags — the NCRT audience I saw it with laughed at many of them, I laughed at some they didn’t, and nobody laughed at others.

First-time director Vicki Charlton kept the actors pleasantly flowing around a handsome living room set (which she created with Andrew Jordan and Shelley Stewart) that gives an unaccustomed sense of spaciousness to the NCRT stage.

 Lighting designer Suzanne Ross-Kohl, costume designer Tammy Tokarsky, sound designer Gabriel Groom and the set construction and properties teams served the play and the cast well.

 But as the play goes on, its flaws become disheartening, not helped by aspects of the production, at least that night: some poor enunciation and lackluster timing, forced pace and flagging energy. The well-handled mayhem of the first act dinner party wasn’t quite matched by inventiveness and verve in the second act. And the twists at the end don’t hold up past the first blush.

 The problems begin with the premise. Larry Shue, an actor who grew up in Eureka (well, the one in Kansas), wrote two comic plays in the early 1980s that are performed to an extent that is almost viral, especially by community and college theatres, and mostly in the summer. The second one, The Foreigner (which NCRT produced in 2005) is the better play, as I recall it (although I first saw it at a college summer theater production that was memorable mostly for the lead actor’s dead-on imitation of Pierce Brosnan, then the star of TV’s Remington Steele).

This one, written in 1981, prospered partly because the premise — the idea of “nerd”— was becoming fashionable. Although the concept of the clueless outcast — the doofus, the dork, etc. — is as old as time, or at least high school, the Nerd became the latest flavor in the 1980s, as reflected in the Revenge of the Nerds series of movies.

 One dictionary defines a nerd as “unstylish, unattractive, or socially inept person: especially: one slavishly devoted to intellectual or academic pursuits.” It was a quality of the Reagan years — that mean-spirited putdown of intelligence in favor of the beer-swilling idiot as ideal American male, which not really coincidentally defined a marketing niche for beer and other products by attaching them to this purposefully limiting male cliché.

 In the '80s, when the personal computer revolution was just beginning, the term was particularly applied to computer enthusiasts. There are two problems with this: First, it doesn’t apply to “the nerd” in the play, who inspects chalk for a living and can’t run a primitive answering machine. Second, in 2007 it’s obsolete.

 Though these days some of these qualities adhere to what’s called “a geek,” the nerd stereotype has been diluted and defeated by time. The last movie with “nerd” in the title was Triumph of the Nerd in 1996 — a documentary featuring Bill Gates, Paul Allen and Steve Jobs. Who wouldn’t want them at their dinner party?

Later Thoughts:

The Nerd has a lot of laughs in it, but for me the play's flaws turn them a bit sour in retrospect. The "surprise" I refer to but couldn't talk about in the review--CAUTION: SPOILERS AHEAD! --involve the revelation that the Nerd is not really the guy who saved Willum's life but the "friend" of Axel, the theatre critic, who played the part in some elaborate plot to get Willum and Tansy to realize they need to be together. When you realize that this involved the guy living full time on Willum's couch for weeks, totally apart from his own life, the credibility of the device starts to sink.

 Then there's the additional revelation that the job Willum thinks he's going to get in Alexandria (suburb to Washington, where Tansy is going to be a weather reporter) doesn't exist, nor does the man who offered it. Apparently Willum accepted the job and will move his life from Indiana to Washington because of a voice on his answering machine offering him a job: a funny commentary on life in the 80s when answering machines were new, but not very credible when you think about it for two more seconds.

Perhaps it's this lack of credibility, along with the humorous potential of the characters (author Larry Shue was primarily an actor) that encourages this play to be used as a showcase for comic actors--some famous ones in the U.S. and England, for example, have played it. If you have enough fun along the way, that the journey makes no sense becomes irrelevant.

 Much has been made in some previews and reviews that this is one of the few plays in which a theatre critic is a main character. That's not much of a distinction, and I doubt its accuracy: for example, not one but two theatre critics (actually three by the end, with a fourth who is never seen being a vital part of the plot ) are the major characters in Tom Stoppard's better and funnier play, The Real Inspector Hound. And as New York Times critic Frank Rich wrote of the theatre critic in The Nerd: -" a character, however welcome, who turns out to be as superfluous appearing in ''The Nerd'' as he would be attending it."