Adam Driver knows how to make fun of himself. We know this. And now the star is proving it seven shows a week (and three hours a show) at the Lucille Lortel. I should rephrase: “Make fun of” and “star” are reductive. I agree with my colleague Matt Zoller Seitz that Driver’s fame is entirely merited, that he’s one of the rare cases in which a genuine weirdo (my highest praise) has been seen for his talent and his weirdness, has gotten to do bigger and bigger things, and has stayed both extremely talented and also weird. Seitz writes that Driver is becoming known for a certain kind of part — “colorful, difficult” characters in pieces “with very strong stylistic signatures,” edging close to camp, that could come off as “laughably florid” if attempted by plenty of other actors. Quite apart from his literal size, he isn’t afraid to go big. He takes a movie in hand as if it were an old carpet, shamelessly beating the dust out of it. When an actor like Driver drops in on the stage, it’s not tourism; it’s a homecoming.
So, it turns out, is the play he’s doing right now. Kenneth Lonergan’s Hold on to Me Darling, which had its premiere at the Atlantic Theater in 2016 (with Timothy Olyphant in the Driver part), tells the story of Strings McCrane, a megastar country singer who goes home to Tennessee — and straight off the rails — when his mother dies. Despite being, “the third-biggest crossover star in the history of country music” (and one who’s also busted into the movie industry, his current project being “this goddamn space movie” directed by someone hilariously named Werner), Strings has always felt like a disappointment to his gruff Appalachian ma. All he really wants, he sniffles to a fawning, starry-eyed masseuse named Nancy (the very funny Heather Burns), is to be “the person my mama always wanted me to be.” So begins possibly the most egocentric quest to humble oneself the stage has yet seen. “This ain’t about me,” Strings thunders at his assistant, Jimmy (Keith Nobbs), who’s loyal to the point of extreme social awkwardness — but not an idiot. “Seems like it is,” Jimmy ventures after a loaded pause.
Neil Pepe, who also directed the show’s first run at Atlantic, is smart to lean in to the comedy. Strings is a towering toddler in a ten-gallon and tight black jeans — his fits of temper, his relationships with women, his misty-eyed swerves into what he considers poetry (“It’s all red,” he croons to a woman he’s trying to seduce after he’s spilled coffee on her hand. “Red like a rose in the shape of a hand”) — they’re all monumentally absurd. Lonergan is dallying intentionally in territory that might be tough to stomach if a director or an actor took themselves too seriously. But part of why Strings fits Driver like custom couture is Driver’s gift for performing a kind of alchemy with silliness and seriousness. He can take the piss and play to the hilt at the same time, and he knows that the secret of being funny is for a character to want to be anything but. Want to make people laugh? Have a really bad day. Have the worst day of your life.
That’s pretty much what Strings is doing as he Hulk-smashes from one terrible decision to the next. His tragic flaw is going all in whenever something makes him feel a little bit good, so of course he takes up with Nancy — the hotel masseuse that Jimmy brought in just to de-stress his boss — because she coddled him and cooed over him and covered him with oil while telling him that his hit “Hold on to Me Darling” makes her “sob like a little girl.” I don’t know how the first act opened in 2016, but having Adam Driver strip to boxer briefs in the first ten minutes while another actor giggles and wheezes at the sight of his bulk — “Somebody sure has been payin’ his dues at the gym, honey,” squeals Nancy — is some well-calibrated satire. Burns is a hoot (even more so as Nancy’s freak starts to show), and Driver plays it all at the perfect pitch — with mumbled, thank-you-kindly-ma’am faux humility and a face as straight as a two-by-four.
The joke of Strings’s mammoth, self-sabotaging ego, however, can only be sustained for so long, even by very appealing actors. Though Hold on to Me Darling consistently hits the smaller laughs, it starts to lose large-scale steam soon after intermission. Three hours is a long time to spend watching a well-meaning narcissist keep digging his own grave, and Lonergan never quite finds the key to turn his play into more than an extended character study: See Strings get a massage. See Strings drink PBRs with his brother Duke (C.J. Wilson, in a biker mustache that really just takes me back to rural Virginia, is excellent in the part). See Strings at the funeral home developing a crush on his tender-hearted cousin Essie (Adelaide Clemens, also bang-on — and hey, she’s only his “second cousin twice removed”). See Strings blow up his whole life and buy a local feed and hardware store. See Strings never say no. See Strings run — from Nancy, from Essie, from Jimmy, from his lawyers, from most everything.
Each scene is well-crafted, and it feels like Lonergan was having fun in the writing (I personally enjoyed collecting all the ways Strings and Duke say Jesus Christ: “Jesus Christ in a downtown Memphis hair salon!” “Jesus Christ on the Tour de France!” “Jesus Christ in a hand-wove dashiki!”). But there’s something missing in the greater arc, especially as the play gets into its later movements — a sense of necessity, of more meaningful stakes beyond the possible redemption of a sad, spoiled celebrity who’s an emotional bull in every figurative china shop he enters. Frank Wood joins the proceedings at the 11th hour, playing Strings’s estranged father in a gentle, understated performance, and it’s clear that here is the hook where Lonergan hopes to hang the hat of his deeper ambitions — but the scene doesn’t rebalance the scales. For Hold on to Me Darling to cohere in a way that moves us beyond satirical laughter, the moment that Driver and Wood share needs to sit alone on one side of the seesaw while the rest of the play sits on the other side, and it needs to outweigh it all. Here, both actors are more than equal to the task at hand, but their climactic encounter feels, dramaturgically, like just another episode.
Pepe and Lonergan may in fact be caught in a catch-22. Play up the farce and potentially lose the opportunity to help the play find its sense of greater purpose. Go too serious and risk the immediate disdain of audiences who are all too ready to unsheathe their claws at everything Strings stands for. Nancy calls him “baby man” — a sugary endearment that’s also the truth — and when it comes to stories about baby men, it’s not exactly a seller’s market these days. What makes this one work as well as it does, when it does, is a top-notch company of actors, with an exceptional Driver behind the wheel.
