september14–27, 2020| newyork 79
Clockwisefromupperleft:KaitlynDever, SarahPaulson,DanLevy,andIssaRae.
PHOTOGRAPHS: COURTESY OF HBO
It’s theatrical in its execution, too. The
filmmaker Jay Roach directed this micro-
anthology—five 15-or-so-minute speeches
delivered straight to camera—and you
would think at some point that the logic
(and magic) of TV would have dominated
the result. But no, HBO polish aside, a
monologue always smells of the stage. Ven-
ues large and small have been releasing tons
of this material, all of it made in quarantine.
Actors did this sort of webcam performance
for the Public’s own The Line; the 24 Hour
Plays folks have released more than 200
in their Viral Monologues series. It’s been
about six months of watching Zoom and
forcefully reminding yourself that all of us
are doing a lot with very little.
So why can’t I forgive Coastal Elites for
being not so good? I think it’s because the
show reminds me of things about the form
that I hope don’t come back, even though I
spend every day missing live performance.
Every medium has its own sins, and Coastal
Elite’s failures are ones that plague the the-
ater specifically. The way it panders to an
assumed New York audience? The arrogant
cracks about Nebraska? The hero’s journey
from doubt that theater can save the world
to joyful affirmation of the form’s total
moral domination? Ugh. TV would never.
There is a little burst of very good writ-
ing right at the start. (Rudnick has been a
deft comic playwright since at least 1991’s I
Hate Hamlet, which was—in a community-
theater production—my gateway drug.)
In that first, best monologue, Bette Midler
plays Miriam, a retired teacher and widow,
bereaved but fighting for the resistance,
mostly through social media. She’s a lib-
eral, a theater subscriber, a New York Times
devotee (“On the Census, when it says ‘reli-
gion,’ I don’t put ‘Jewish.’ I put ‘New York
Times’!”), a tote-bag toter. She’s a cliché, but
she knows it. Midler gives her a winning,
oh-shucks-you-know-I’m-kidding twinkle.
When we meet Miriam, she’s in a police
station explaining herself; we eventually
realize she’s giving her statement to a cop.
Fine, fine, she stole a guy’s maga hat and
ran all the way to the Public to escape him.
So sue her! She shakes a small fist at Hill-
ary’s unfair treatment, she rants against
Trump, she does some light boulevard rail-
lery. “You like the theater?” she asks, leaning
confidingly into the camera. Her eyebrows
arch. “You like Phantom? So that’s a no.”
Theatergoers, and I shamefacedly
include myself, are eager to believe that
theatergoing itself is inherently courageous;
Rudnick, an old pro, knows just how much
we like to be flattered. So Miriam, when
pushed to her limit, takes her stand in the
lobby of the Public, swearing, “Every ticket
is a weapon fighting that bastard!” If the
show had happened there, she would have
beenapplaudedwithsmugwhoopsand
hollers.Onscreen,obviously,she’s met with
silence.Inthat quiet,herseason-ticket
“defiance”revealsitselfasabsurdandnar-
cissistic.Rudnickseemstohavewritten
Miriamasessentiallyrighteous,butsim-
plybymovingheronscreen,heandRoach
showherasa womancharmedmainlyby
herself,lost ina terrifyingself-regard.Was
thatintentional?Rudnick’swry titleand
Midler’s knowingsmarmargueyes;therest
of the show argues no.
The other four monologues are all flat by
comparison. Dan Levy appears as an actor
auditioning to be a gay superhero, worried
that the producers want a kind of flamboy-
ant minstrelsy; Issa Rae is an insulted not-
quite high-school chum of Ivanka’s (“She’s
Dracula with a blowout!”); Sarah Paulson
plays a meditation guru who admits she
can’t om her way through a Trumpist fam-
ily gathering in the Midwest; and Kaitlyn
Dever is a nurse from Wyoming who has
come to help fight covid in New York.
Taken together, they reveal that Miriam’s
snobbishness is not just a character foi-
ble—it’s built into Rudnick’s work. In all the
monologues, the flyover states are a culture-
free hell from which to escape. Worse, the
nurse meets a patient who makes jokes
about a coronavirus test. “Well, let’s hope
it’s cancer,” the indomitable New Yorker
says. The nurse marvels, “People don’t say
shit like that in Wyoming,” with a tear in her
eye. Sorry, what? People don’t have gallows
humor in Wyoming? People don’t joke?
It didn’t have to be this enraging. At one
point while watching Coastal Elites, I tried
to imagine the same piece run on some
theater’sYouTubechannelrather than on
HBO,andI couldenvision adopting an
appreciativeattitudetothis kind of keep-
the-car-warmmaterial.I have seen some
adventurousproductionsin the shutdown,
gorgeousthingsmadeontabletops that
punchthroughthescreen.But much of the
monologue-basedworkneeds—and has
beenge tting—generosityfrom the viewer. It
needsanaudiencethatis happy to be sup-
portive.Goalpostshaven’tjust been moved;
they are in mothballs.
So the weird thing about HBO’s releasing
Coastal Elites is that it props the goalposts
back up and moves them farther away. It
adds the gloss of a well-resourced shoot:
We watch a starry and gorgeous cast, well
coiffed, sitting in actual, nonvirtual sets.
With those visual markers, we expect a script
that has also been polished and buffed. But
there hasn’t been time to work out the con-
version from in-person to onscreen, how to
write Rudnick-style comedy that doesn’t
rely on in-the-room responses. Anyone who
has seen a show in a too-big venue knows
that it can kill a play, that the arrangement
of seats or the sound-draining suck of a high
ceiling can take a jolly production and make
it seem lost and desperate. The HBO glow-
up does the same thing—it puts a little by-
us-for-us play in a setting that’s all wrong
for it. But on the bright side, it would have
been worse to experience it with an audi-
ence. Sitting among theatergoers all giving
themselves a pat on the back is a good way to
get an elbow in the eye. Imagine the fury you
would feel if that Wyoming line had gotten
even a single laugh. Insufferable! I’d rather
go to Phantom. ■
