Lobby Hero (2018)

By Matt Windman
amNewYork Theater Critic
Updated March 26, 2018 7:00 PM

‘Lobby Hero’ runs at the Hayes Theater through May 13. 240 W. 44th St., 2st.com.

High professional standards, personal integrity and good intentions run hand in hand with compromising situations, deceit and negligence in Kenneth Lonergan’s 2001 comedic drama “Lobby Hero,” which is now making its Broadway premiere with film actors Michael Cera (“Superbad”) and Chris Evans (“Captain America”).

The solid production (directed by Trip Cullman, “Significant Other”) marks the kickoff of Second Stage Theater’s long-delayed takeover of Broadway’s intimate Helen Hayes Theater, which has been meticulously refurbished for the occasion.

Second Stage is now the fourth nonprofit company operating both Broadway and Off-Broadway facilities (in addition to Lincoln Center Theater, Roundabout and Manhattan Theatre Club), lending it more presence and prestige.

“Lobby Hero” centers on the well-meaning but passive and socially awkward Jeff (Cera, using his characteristically nebbish persona), a slacker in his late 20s who is currently working as a graveyard-shift security guard at a Manhattan residential building after getting kicked out of the Navy for smoking pot.

William (Brian Tyree Henry, aggressive in tone), his direct supervisor, has taken Jeff under his wing and offered him advice, but that has not stopped Jeff from shamelessly sleeping on the job. “They feel safe. They don’t know I’m sleeping,” Jeff insists.

They are paid occasional visits by the cocky and macho police officer Bill (Evans, in an excellent performance) and his trainee partner Dawn (Bel Powley, evoking insecurity), who is struggling to assert herself on the job.

Despite a slow start and an abrupt ending, the play takes on an absorbing quality with the news that William’s brother has been accused of participating in a brutal murder, which brings out the complexities in the four uniformed characters. It also contains many funny moments and themes (harassment, crisis management, social mobility) that are relevant to working professionals.

Future programming at the Hayes will include Young Jean Lee’s “Straight White Men” and a remount of the recent Off-Broadway revival of Harvey Fierstein’s “Torch Song.” Considering that the theater was recently serving as a place for long-running shows like “Rock of Ages” and “The 39 Steps” to quietly downsize, the Second Stage acquisition should be welcomed by New York theatergoers — and “Lobby Hero” is a fine way to inaugurate it.

The New York Times: Review: Chris Evans and Michael Cera Tell Lies to Live by in ‘Lobby Hero’

• NYT Critic’s Pick
• Broadway, Play, Comedy/Drama
• 2 hrs. and 25 min.
• Closing Date: May 13, 2018
• Helen Hayes Theater, 240 W. 44th St.
• 212-246-4422



By BEN BRANTLEY

MARCH 26, 2018

Those clashing orders whisper side-by-side in your mind as you watch the meticulously acted revival of Kenneth Lonergan’s “Lobby Hero,” which opened on Monday night at the renovated Helen Hayes Theater, the new Broadway home for Second Stage Theater.

That’s because you will probably come to — if not like — then feel personally invested in the four self-sabotaging New Yorkers so completely embodied here by Michael Cera, Chris Evans, Brian Tyree Henry and Bel Powley. And none of them can participate in the simplest exchanges of words without doing serious damage.
Sure, the talk at first seems merely casual as these four characters pair off to shoot the breeze in and around an apartment building lobby where it always feels like 3 a.m. But lives as well as livelihoods are possibly at stake in what’s being said, and everyday conversation becomes a minefield. Whenever someone starts talking again after a long silence, you feel an “Ouch!” coming on.

At the same time, you can’t wait to hear what’s about to emerge from the mouths of Jeff (Mr. Cera), a newbie security guard (don’t call him “doorman”) and his exacting boss, William (Mr. Henry); and the Mutt-and-Jeff police partners who drop by. They are the swaggering Bill (Mr. Evans, in a terrific Broadway debut) and his rookie partner, Dawn (Ms. Powley).

For one thing, much of what they have to say is both achingly funny and so pathetic it verges on tragic. For another, the combined wit and non-wisdom of these fallible (i.e. human) beings offers a fascinating reflection on those shaky internal compasses we call moral instincts.

As to the ethical quandaries and quagmires in which these people are mired, they feel even more pointedly and sadly relevant than they did when “Lobby Hero” was first performed at Playwrights Horizons 17 years ago. References to sexual harassment, abuses of power in the workplace and racial profiling scarcely seemed to raise an eyebrow when I first saw the show in 2001; they evoke audible, anxious murmurs in the audience of 2018.

In the age of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, Americans may be newly receptive to “Lobby Hero.” But don’t imagine that this work, directed with savvy restraint by Trip Cullman, is an agenda-driven debate.

Mr. Lonergan, you see, doesn’t work in bold blacks and whites, but in compelling shades of gray. He understands that purity of thought and deed is pretty much impossible in this muddy world. As a creator of plays (“This Is Our Youth,” “Hold On to Me Darling”) and films (“You Can Count on Me,” “Manchester by the Sea”), he specializes in screw-ups, compromised souls who would like to do the right thing, if only they had the backbone for it, or if they could figure out what it is.

His dialogue is fueled by vacillation, equivocation and contradiction, with sentences that seem to eat their own words. Few actors are as qualified to deliver such precisely indefinite speech as Mr. Cera, a veteran of the ace 2014 Broadway revival of “This Is Our Youth.” Mr. Cera’s Jeff is a quintessential Lonergan loser, an uneasy 27-year-old who was thrown out of the Navy for smoking pot and has vowed to become a real adult.

So now he works the night shift in a residential lobby that reeks of urban loneliness. (David Rockwell is the set designer.) It’s a job that’s hard to take seriously. But Jeff’s disciplined supervisor, played with bone-tired alertness by Mr. Henry, has a strict list of rules and regulations. He, at least, seems to be someone who knows what’s what.

So, at first glance, does Mr. Evans’s Bill. He’s a cocky, friendly guy who oozes self-assurance and is known around his precinct as Super Cop. (And, yes, this is the same Mr. Evans who played the superhero Captain America onscreen.) Bill is just the person for someone like the eager, dewy Dawn, fresh out of the Police Academy, to have as a protective mentor, right?

And there you have the tidy setup for a play that operates on a system of moving parallels. Jeff’s admiration for his boss is tested after William learns that his older brother has been arrested in connection with the murder of a nurse and William is asked to provide an alibi. William, who is African-American, knows how easy it would be for his brother to get lost in the legal system.

Dawn’s hero worship of Bill is complicated by their having slept together. Disenchantment will set in fully when she learns why her partner is paying such regular visits to the building where Jeff works.

These characters wind up unwisely confiding in one another; they can’t help themselves. And by the play’s end everyone will have betrayed or been betrayed — in most cases, both.

The first time I saw “Lobby Hero,” it felt a bit too openly schematic. It still does occasionally, especially during a protracted stretch of secret sharing in the second act.

But the performances here all so grounded that you never doubt their characters’ authenticity or (pardon the word) sincerity. And because each portrait is so completely and ingeniously physicalized (watch how they each inhabit a uniform), we soon learn their “tells”; we know when they’re deceiving themselves.

Mr. Evans is a marvel of smooth calculation and bluster. His Bill is the most blatantly manipulative of the characters, which means the most likely to succeed.

Ms. Powley’s avid, impulsive and dangerously green Dawn is the perfect sidekick to this handsome sleaze. Mr. Henry (FX’s “Atlanta”) offers a deeply moving study of resignation and rebellion, courage and compromise in uneasy counterpoint.

Mr. Cera’s perfectly uneasy Jeff gives full weight to both the hopeful decency and bad faith that lurk in all Lonergan characters. It makes sense when others say they can’t tell when Jeff is joking; he doesn’t always know himself.

There’s a reason that Mr. Rockwell’s set revolves between scenes, forcing us to adjust our angles of observation. Like morality, identity is relative in “Lobby Hero.” Few playwrights match Mr. Lonergan in making confident art out of such constantly shifting uncertainty.