Richard Greenberg’s Commute on “The Babylon Line” — Play Review

If your play is narrated by a “promising” author teaching fiction in night school, you might want to pepper the script with passages of sparkling prose. No worries there: The Babylon Line is by Richard Greenberg; barbed repartee, shiny epigrams, and baroque arias of loss and longing all come with the territory. There’s bad writing, as well: awkward attempts at literary self-expression by attendees of the class shakily run by Aaron Port. But those blunt, unlovely fragments mainly set off the flowering talent of Joan Dellamond, a poetic soul out of place in ticky-tacky suburban Long Island in 1967.

Aaron commutes once a week from Greenwich Village to grimly instruct a motley group of adults. His talent-challenged charges include three chatty Jewish housewives, a WWII vet who wakes up screaming, and a cheerfully blank young man. Joan is late to the first class and immediately fascinates Aaron, her Southern lilt and dreamy effect marking her as a romantic outsider. Soon he learns she’s trapped in a bad marriage, and Levittown anomie both stokes and stymies her creative impulses. As Joan self-diagnoses: “I’m suffering from Acute Repressed Graphomania!”

The play itself, for all its enviable eloquence, has problems. Greenberg’s first act—establishing Port as a fairly reliable narrator, his students as products of their time, and dangling the possibility of an affair with Joan—is a fun and satisfying stretch for Greenberg fans. It’s the plotting and momentum of the second in which things grow fuzzy and attenuated, as the playwright vacillates between a portrait of the frustrated artist and a semi-serious critique of postwar American conformism. The digressive wrapping up of narrative threads in the last few pages unfolds less like compelling drama and more like dutiful housekeeping. Still, when Greenberg's creations babble on, you can't help but lean in.