Cardinal

Written by Greg Pierce; directed by Kate Whoriskey

Performances through February 25, 2018

In Greg Pierce’s affably modest comedy Cardinal, Anna Chlumsky puts her years of batting snide comments back and forth on Veep to good use as Lydia Lensky, who returns to her upstate New York hometown with an idea she’s sure will make the sleepy hamlet the toast of travel agencies everywhere: literally paint the (down)town red—a color that gives the play its title—and sit back as hordes come to visit and help resuscitate not only the moribund business district but also anyone left in a burg that’s been shedding population for decades.

Lydia is a talker, buzzing through everyone with her incessant machine-gun delivery. The only plausible reason Pierce provides for why the red paint idea becomes popular is because it’s a new thing, but he also reveals that the town’s mayor Jeff has a crush on Lydia because she reminds him of her sister, who dumped him way back in high school. Although Lydia initially uses that to her advantage, things conspire against her in a way she hadn’t expected.

Some local business people—embodied by no-nonsense Nancy and her autistic son Nat, who run a local bakery/gift shop—are not happy everything has turned red, while Manhattan developer Li-Wei starts tours that bring in visitors while guides like his son Jason tell tales about the town made out of whole cloth. 

And there’s Jeff himself who, after sleeping with Lydia for awhile, realizes that her fast talk and charitable bedroom manner obscure what he really feels is right for the area, which is not a downtown painted red.

None of this is presented with any sense of urgency; in fact, its breeziness makes it resemble a direct-to-Netflix rom-com at times. And the play turns downright desperate toward the end, as a gun appears out of nowhere and ends up in Nat’s hands before being inadvertently fired by Jason. 

But Cardinal does mirror the tenor of our times, when there’s a con man in the Oval Office who has answers for everything but is unable to do anything, and where coats of paint only temporarily cover up crumbling infrastructure and a systematic inability to modernize left-behind towns.

Under Kate Whoriskey’s understated direction, Chlumsky’s Lydia is an appealing whirlwind, and Alan Pally’s Jeff makes an amusingly befuddled straight man. Too bad the rest of the cast—Becky Ann Baker (Nancy), Alex Hurt (Nat), Stephen Park (Li-Wei) and Eugene Young (Jason)—gets little chance to humanize the cardboard characters. Like its heroine, Cardinal handles a bright idea inelegantly.

Cardinal

Second Stage Theater, 305 West 43^rd Street, New York, NY