Dianne Wiest has been a screen and stage treasure for more than four decades now, giving indelible performances in several Woody Allen films—notably her Oscar-winning appearances in Hannah and Her Sisters and Bullets Over Broadway—along with many theater appearances including Christopher Durang’s Beyond Therapy, Steve Tesich’s Square One and, more recently, Arthur Miller’s All My Sons on Broadway.

 

In Scene Partners, 75-year-old Wiest plays Meryl Kowalski, a 75-year-old widow who, following her bastard of a husband’s death, decides to leave her boring midwestern life and go to Hollywood to become a movie star—which she does, improbably but determinedly. The year is 1985, when Wiest’s screen career was starting to take off thanks to her memorable supporting turn in Woody’s The Purple Rose of Cairo. Maybe playwright John J. Caswell Jr. is using Wiest’s own career to create Meryl Kowalski, but he’s thrown so much into the pot—absurdism, melodrama, parody, tragedy, even karaoke—that it’s hard to discern any point to it all. 

 

The Hollywood that Meryl arrives in is a clichéd place, populated with mindless agents, acting teachers and actors. The doctor Meryl visits—her sister Charlize, a failed actor Meryl stays with, takes her to him—is named Noah Drake, coincidentally the name of the doctor played by heartthrob Rick Springfield on the soap General Hospital. It’s all silly, but are we supposed to be laughing at Meryl or with her? Is this woman in a wrinkled trench coat a real find as a septuagenarian star, or is she merely delusional?

 

Even naming Wiest’s character Meryl Kowalski is a double-barreled cheap laugh, name-checking the Oscar-winning Streep and Tennessee Williams’ Stanley in Streetcar. The sophomoric humor extends to the dialogue: when Wiest fires off her first F bomb, a few audience members the night I saw the play practically fell out of their seats with laughter, though it’s not particularly funny as a rule to hear a star say “motherfucker.”

 

Director Rachel Chavkin has trouble making the bizarre, seemingly random tonal shifts cohere. Her pacing is also slack, as if she’s unsure what to do when, say, Meryl gets on the train to leave Wisconsin for California and it’s populated by Russians, one of whom flirts with her while they sing the Talking Heads’ “Road to Nowhere” (which, to be nitpicky, wasn’t released until a year later) or when Meryl secures a top agent by threatening him with a gun after they discuss the World Series going on between the Cards and Royals.

 

Screen Partners opens with Wiest onscreen introducing her character in closeup; filmed sequences and other projections dominate the production, and one pivotal scene of Meryl and Charlize being interviewed is shown entirely onscreen, although it would work better onstage, especially in a small theater like the Vineyard. That it’s filmed robs it of immediacy and poignance; its visual punch line—hinting that the entire play might be in Meryl’s head—could have been achieved more cleverly onstage.

 

Although she at times isn’t even the focus with so much busyness going on, Wiest retains her effortless charm, even singing Corey Hart’s “Never Surrender” with gusto in a goofy karaoke scene. Johanna Day is unfortunately wasted as Charlize; the rest of the cast does yeoman duty in multiple roles, but only Josh Hamilton, as a stereotypically smarmy agent and stereotypically annoying acting coach, is hilarious without being obnoxious, which is quite an achievement in this context.