68 THENEWYORKER,AUGUST19, 2019
Jake Gyllenhaal and Tom Sturridge present monologues about grief and fatherhood.
THETHEATRE
ENDGAME
“Sea Wall /A Life” on Broadway and “Coriolanus” at Shakespeare in the Park.
BY VINSON CUNNINGHAM
ILLUSTRATION BY RUTH GWILY
frivolous effects, until a huge and here-
tofore unseen safe drops from the sky
and lands not on Jerry but on Tom. So
much work for the wrong big finish.
The monologues that make up “Sea
Wa l l/A Life” (at the Hudson, directed
by Carrie Cracknell) are two such du-
biously useful contraptions. Both halves
of the show, not so much acted as pre-
sented by Tom Sturridge and Jake Gyl-
lenhaal, take pains—formal, metaphor-
ical, and, God knows, literal—to dredge
up feelings of grief and profundity in
the audience, and end up missing by
inches that feel like miles.
In “Sea Wall,” by Simon Stephens, a
youngish photographer named Alex
(Sturridge) talks adoringly about his
family—a wife too good to be deserved,
a beautiful little girl, and a father-in-law,
Arthur, an Army veteran and a former
math teacher. Alex and Arthur grow un-
commonly close and have gently antag-
onistic conversations about the existence
of God. Arthur believes; he thinks that
the centrality in mathematics of the num-
ber pi, that infinitely digited marvel, is
proof enough. Alex scoffs at that but
still loves the guy.
Stephens—with an eye, I’m sure, to
rhythm, but also pulling the strings of
portent—braids these sweetly remem-
bered talks with Alex’s meditations on
the nature and power of water: how not
to panic while swimming too far from
shore; the fierce, unfathomable drop be-
tween one underwater depth and an-
other; the time he went scuba diving.
We see the heavy ending coming from
a nautical mile away.
If a play, however short, is to be ex-
pressed as a monologue, it had better
be, on some level, about how the body
up there onstage is racked or soothed,
moved to dance or to retreat, by the
galvanizing organization of syntax, or
by syntax’s dissolution under the pres-
sures of thought. You need the charac-
ter’s presence and the words, gram-
mar—or its pointed absence—and some
soul. As Alex, Sturridge does a good
job of husking himself as the story goes
sour. He gets smaller and smaller be-
fore our eyes, and his movements go
janky. But, despite the shambling nat-
uralism of his twitches and his line de-
liveries, nobody really talks the way he
does, with painful hesitations acting,
surprise, as perfectly placed transitions.
“A Life,” by Nick Payne, with Gyl-
lenhaal as a man grieving for his father
as he expects his first child, is similarly,
if slightly more inventively, built. Payne
flits between the two cataclysms, first
with slow precision, and then, as the
cruxes approach, back and forth cine -
matically, the borders showing some slip-
page. That scene is nicely done—it has
some of the motion of good tennis—but
it doesn’t lead to much of a revelation.
The guy is sad, and so are we. Gyllen-
haal is as sensitive as ever, but to little
discernible end. Both of these pieces
probably want to be prose.
You might just shrug if the anvil
of these plays’ shared desire weren’t so
S
ome plays, proceeding carefully but
not all that deftly, exist only to dump
a helping of devastation onto the audi-
ence’s lap. These tearful noodges remind
me of the errant Rube Goldberg ma-
chine that cracked me up as a kid when
it appeared on the “Tom and Jerry” car-
toon on Saturday mornings. Tom the
cat, moonlighting as an engineer and
promising a “better mouse trap,” rigs up
some hyper-complicated doozy, held
together by the thinnest string, just out-
side Jerry’s hole, hoping finally to see
the mouse go kersplat. One tug of the
cheese sets an alarm clock ringing, then
a saw gnawing inanely at a log, churn-
ing on and on, a cascade of linked but
