THENEWYORKER,APRIL11, 2022 69
It’s striking to see Parker, who
starred in “Sex and the City,” in a role
like this. Her face, with its humorous
eyes and big, bright teeth, is everlast-
ingly associated with New York as a
canvas for raucous fun and romantic
adventure. But, of course, that show
is now almost a quarter century old,
and the hot spots for which it served
as a de-facto tourist guide have mostly
faded. (The reboot, “And Just Like
That.. .,” seems to agree.) To watch
Parker play a middle-aged woman—
Karen could be forty-seven or forty-
eight; she’s got a counting problem—
f lailing to summon the older New
York she fell in love with is to med-
itate on the belatedness of our ideas
about the city. It feels done, washed
up—the fun is in the past.
Something similar, if slightly
stranger, is happening with Broder-
ick’s performance. No matter how old
the actor gets, he retains the air of
boyish mischief that he became fa-
mous for in 1986, when he played Fer-
ris Bueller. Here, he often comes off
as an only slightly older Bueller, dressed
up in order to mock the oafish adult
men he hopes never to become. The
hairpieces and eyebrows and other fol-
licular adjustments made to Broder-
ick’s face by the wig honcho Tom Wat-
son—the wig-and-makeup director at
the Metropolitan Opera, that stub-
born repository of New York glam-
our—are punch lines in themselves,
sly digs at passing male fashions and
monstrous vanities.
Broderick plays Sam as a bland ass-
hole having a textbook midlife crisis.
He obsesses over his weight, is mag-
netized to his own image in the ho-
tel-suite mirrors, and is unrelentingly
mean and condescending to his wife.
“Plaza Suite” débuted in 1968, and some
ambient attitudes of that era, partic-
ularly where women are concerned,
cling to this production. It’s hard to
parse, in places, whether Sam’s exas-
peration toward Karen is meant to
point to his poor temper or to be an
appropriate response to her clichéd
dottiness. Parker’s innate wit pulls
against, and nicely complicates, sev-
eral moments that have the whiff of
casual misogyny, but the pattern of
hapless and vaguely annoying women
in all three sketches is hard to miss.I
n the second one-act, Parker and
Broderick play Muriel and Jesse.
They were high-school boyfriend and
girlfriend in the suburb of Tenafly, New
Jersey—a town whose mere mention
gets a big laugh. Now Jesse’s a famous
Hollywood producer who lives in
Humphrey Bogart’s old house, and
Muriel’s a P.T.A. member whose claim
to fame is an appearance in the Tena-
fly newspaper after winning the mother-
and-daughter potato race. Jesse’s at the
Plaza on business, and it’s clear that
Muriel, increasingly buzzed on vodka
Stingers, is overawed less by Jesse than
by the exalted, faraway existence that
he represents. They’re talking past each
other: she wants a celebrity fantasy,
and he, after a pair of bad show-biz
marriages, wants to idealize his pro-
vincial childhood.
It’s the funniest and most purely
enjoyable of the pieces, a sweet but
tart confection, containing all the fun
highs and the awkward lows of the
show. Broderick, wearing a big, shinybrown wig and a dark turtleneck, seems
to be performing Mike Myers-inspired
sketch comedy, and Parker shows off
her chops as a physical comedian, doing
her best Lucille Ball. The two some-
times seem to be in different plays,
but, man, are they having fun. Simon’s
tennis-volley dialogue, densely witty,
captures perfectly how hopelessly stuck
in the past each of them is. The play
has some ironies in the present, too:
there’s a funny riff on the Los Ange-
les Rams, who, having skipped town
in 1995 and headed to St. Louis, have
lately returned to Southern Califor-
nia, where they won the Super Bowl
earlier this year. Everything old comes
rumbling back.
The director, Hickey, is also an actor;
I last saw him in the playlike TV drama
“In Treatment,” as a full-blown narcis-
sist facing off with his court-ordered
therapist. He knows two-handers, and
he navigates Simon’s dialogue grace-
fully, choreographing Broderick and
Parker’s movements to grab a few ex-
tratextual laughs from the crowd.
Mostly, though, it’s just a good time
seeing Parker dressed up in tacky
clothes and Broderick with big whis-
kers for eyebrows. In the final one-act,
“Visitor from Forest Hills,” they play
crestfallen parents of the bride. Parker
is in vivid pastels, looking like an even
more smudged version of Monet’s
water lilies. Broderick’s in a horrible
morning suit. Both actors use the thin
drama—their daughter won’t leave the
bathroom and get married—as an ex-
cuse to play to the back of the balcony,
to mug and grin and do gags, daring
you not to crack a smile amid the flaws.
Sometimes that’s enough. THE NEW YORKER IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF ADVANCE MAGAZINE PUBLISHERS INC. COPYRIGHT ©2022 CONDÉ NAST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
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