Katie Kreisler and Brian Avers (photo: James Leynse)
In a recent interview with the Huffington Post, playwright Theresa Rebeck said that her play Poor Behavior was inspired by a "really disastrous week" that she and her husband spent with friends at their country home. She certainly isn't the first or will she be the last playwright to use autobiographical memory to expand into a fictional plot. Like the havoc-filled weekend that Noel Coward acknowledged as his inspiration for Hay Fever, Rebeck has taken the potential for increasing unpleasantness and the possibility of disaster among two couples/long-time friends to its limits in her verbose but witty and darkly funny Poor Behavior.
The play's avalanche of words extends well beyond the opening's protracted philosophical argument about "goodness" that quickly tests our investment in two of the play's four characters. If it's hard not to feel that Rebeck's characters are suspiciously close to being metaphorical ciphers, we can credit her for making sure that their actions and their anxieties are as engaging as they are designated to be unsettling. To read the entire review please go to http://curtainup.com/poorbehaviorny14.html
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