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A Low Blow For Company Men
by Linda Winer
Newsday
March 15, 1996
Below The Belt. By Richard Dresser. With Judd Hirsch, Robert Sean Leonard, Jude Ciccolella. Directed by Gloria Muzio. Set by Stephen Olson, costumes by Jess Goldstein, lights by Peter Kaczorowski. Tuesday, John Houseman Theater, 42nd Street east of 10th Avenue, Manhattan.
When you put Judd Hirsch and Robert Sean Leonard together in a new corporate power play, directed by Gloria Muzio - who got such juice out of "Other People's Money" - well, a person can be forgiven for hoping.
But "Below the Belt," the Richard Dresser self-described comedy that opened Off-Broadway at the John Houseman Theater last night, is a pretentious and derivative exercise, full of empty rat-a-tat Mamet guy-speak, warmed-over Pinter enigmas and self-conscious no-exit existentialisms. It is also, not incidentally, quite full of itself.
Hirsch, Leonard and Jude Ciccolella - all excellent - squeeze all there seems to be, and then some, from Dresser's play about company-man limbo "in an industrial compound in a distant land." Leonard, rapidly turning into one of the most exciting actors in New York, plays Dobbitt, a pale, eager young employee on his first "off-country assignment." He arrives in the desert outpost - a gray hut with army cots, a barren office, a metal catwalk and barbed-wire fences (by designer Stephen Olson) - and finds his roommate is a bad-tempered fellow named Hanrahan. Hirsch, in a rare Off-Broadway appearance, plays one of his mean-soft-mean onion-layered characters, a mumbling, growling menace with a complicated sentimental streak.
Ciccolella is equally fine as Merkin, their insecure mad-tyrant of a boss in the checking department, a power freak who considers a chair as a perk. These men are "checkers," ostracized overseers dressed in identical gray suits - echoes of the dehumanized machine literature of the '20s - who count "units" but don't know what the company makes. Dobbitt also doesn't know what to make of the wild animals surrounding their polluting compound, or, indeed, whether the guards are keeping the animals out or the men in. "This reminds me of home," says Dobbitt in one of the few vaguely affecting moments, "the terror you can't quite see."
There is the occasional exchange of clever wordplay - especially about the slippery nature of honesty - an ingeniously twisting mind game as emotional terrorism. More frequently, however, there are tedious mysteries about whether Hanrahan ever really knew Dobbit's wife, or, come to think of it, whether the title has any meaning at all.
Despite the bursts of original mind turns, the verbiage tends more along the lines of "You must be Hanrahan." "Who the hell are you to tell me who I must be?" Or "You will learn that Merkin's brain has a mind of its own." Or "Whether I'm gruntled or disgruntled has nothing to do with you." As Hanrahan notes, in a philosophical moment, "Amazing how fast the years hurtle by. It's the days that last an eternity." Also, some nights.
