Tynan's Anger

As Inventing Avi was winding down, I found myself wondering: is this a prank? Have I been punk'd? Would the playwrights suddenly come on stage saying it's all true? Would the actors reveal themselves as the real playwrights? Would there be some trick to justify what I had just seen? And even so, would it make me despise this play any less?

Inventing Avi is a cynical, deceptive play within a cynical, deceptive play about a cynical deceptive play. It maintains a dedication to a poorly defined structural premise over any of the  the smorgasbord of themes the play addresses (including mocking theater, mocking Jewish stereotypes, the relationship between art and artist, and the dynamic between class, ethnicity, and nationality.) As a result, nothing works. The play provides a couple of infrequent laughs at best, but nothing close to resembling catharsis, plot, or characterization. It's more cartoonish than any cartoon could be, and wholly more unenjoyable.

Robert Cary and Benjamin Feldman, who both have had a hand in the kind of flops they mock in Inventing Abbi, aren't really mocking anyone, not even themselves.They're essentially a pair of hipster grifters pretending to be open snake oil salesman. The kind of cynicism they are selling is the kind of mockery of the theater that we saw at the beginning of the decade with The Producers. What they are actually producing is a carefully manufactured plot to draw in audiences who know nothing other than borscht-belt Jewish humor, or perhaps adolescent understanding of deconstructionism.

Cary and Feldman have stacked the self-referential deck by vaguely alluding to autobiographical elements in their own life, casting the play with actors who also fit the moment, and listing one of the benefactors as "Avi Aviv, LLC" (the fake name of the titular fake playwright of in Inventing Avi)and Do Alix Korey Emily Zacharias enjoy playing stereotypes of a washed up Jewish theater veterans (neither is exactly Gloria Swanson). Is director Mark Waldrip in on the play? Or what about the design team, who essentially use the same studio trickery as a reality show to make something seem a lot more important than it actually is? How far down does the trickery go, and how many people with this production who know that they're being duped as they dupe audiences?

The difference between a play like Inventing Avi and one like The Producers is that the latter was fueled by love of the theater and had the chance, as a Broadway show, to extend that love of theater to the largest audience in America. Inventing Avi is an off-off Broadway production without any compassion whatsoever, written by two individuals less bent on promoting theater than on promoting themselves. I have a hard time believing that any struggling playwright who was passed over for this play would feel anything but utter despair.

Even if the play was about the downtrodden realities of producing theater (or even marketing a show), a more intelligent play could have been written. By that, I mean a play that had a semblance of a logical plot, genuine characters with a clear voice (and this is a play that stretches Jewish stereotypes up to and beyond their limits), or any larger message. The play's cobbled-together ending is a poorly rendered version of one of the oldest theatrical cliches (conventions?) in the book. It's the only part of the play that can't pretend to be intelligent or entertaining.

Everything in this play has been done better (be it by Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, or Goebbels), and there is nothing redeemable or even necessary for it to exist, let alone be produced. The only outcome I see would be utter contempt from those who care about theater, or, as one audience member described it, "cute," those who bankroll theater.

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Inventing Avi runs through November 1 at the Abingdon Theater Company. Photo by Kim T. Sharp