From left: Jared Loftin, Jaela Cheeks-Lomax, RJ Vaillancourt, and Rachel B. Joyce are among the cast of The Panic of ‘29.
The Panic of ’29 isn’t deep. It hasn’t much on its mind, except camp silliness and an encyclopedic knowledge of old-movie tropes, mixed up and scrambled and spilled out on the modest 59e59 stage. Graham Techler’s loose comedy is a Less Than Rent production, which claims in the program that its mission is “examining the relationship we have to capital and the web of injustices that stem from an allegiance to profits over people.” We don’t get a whole lot of that, except in the broadest terms, but we do get some zingy one-liners and a lively troupe of players. The first half-hour or so of The Panic of ’29 is rather delightful. And then it just goes no-damn-where.
Will Turner’s smitten cop, and Julia Knitel’s smitten chantoosie. Photographs by Carol Rosegg.
Techler appears to have raided the whole Turner Classic Movies vault, skipping from genre to genre and taking his game cast with him. Mot of the action is set in the Wall Street office of Richard Whitney (Brian Morabito), the vice president of the New York Stock Exchange, who with his flunkies Gronton (Jared Loftin) and Oswald (RJ Vaillancourt) is trying to quash any rumors of an impending market disaster, triggered by the one that just ravaged London. Also present is Dot (Olivia Puckett), Whitney’s faithful $10-a-week secretary with greater ambitions. She’s fighting off the amorous advances of fast-talking crime-fiction hack Jimmy Armstrong (Will Roland, doing a fabulous Lee Tracy), who’s less talented than he thinks. It’s a self-contained Warner Brothers programmer from 1932, probably starring Warren William and Joan Blondell.
But wait, there’s also the speakeasy run by Eva (Joyelle Nicole Johnson). She’s assisted by her frail, movie-loving sister Ingrid (Jaela Cheeks-Lomas) and nightclub chantoosie Lady Generosity (Julia Knitel), who’s smitten with Officer Kent (Will Turner, splendid), who sports a Barry Fitzgerald brogue and insists he’s no poet, but can’t help lapsing into Dylan Thomas reveries. Then there’s Minnie (Rachel B. Joyce), a barfly who hasn’t much to do. Joyce also plays three contrasting girl reporters pelting Whitney with questions, and she is, in period-speak, aces.
If you love old movies, you’ll marvel at how deftly Techler evokes their rat-a-tat dialogue (with one important modification: he doesn’t stint on the profanity). He even invents the titles of the movies Ingrid loves, and they’re good: Five Times a Lady, Three Times a Dame. What he doesn’t do is spin out a compelling plot. Instead, he just keeps introducing new threads and shifting among movie genres, wandering from screwball comedy to musical (the able song pastiches are by Barrett Riggins) to cop flick to melodrama. As the market crashes, the proceedings grow violent, with numerous characters getting rubbed out, mainly so the actors can reappear in new roles. The narrative becomes both confusing and static.
Dot (Olivia Puckett) is involved in an uneasy courtship with Jimmy (Will Roland).
Act II is another movie altogether, set eight years later in a boardinghouse run by Dot, much like the one Stephen Bogardus ran in Girl from the North Country. Most of the previous characters are still around, but they’ve been joined by a Woody Guthrie–esque troubador (Turner) and three crooked Frenchmen (Vaillancourt, Loftin, and Joyce) spouting terrible accents. (Good joke here: “We surrender! It’s what we do best.”) Whitney jumped out of his Wall Street window after Black Tuesday, but fell through an open manhole and survived, and he largely propels what there is of a plot. This includes a daring cliffhanger rescue, cleverly staged by director/set designer Max Friedman, and more songs, thankfully this time to Turner’s live guitar accompaniment (the taped music in Act I, with excessive underscoring, becomes oppressive).
Techler knows his cinematic universe, and Friedman must have subjected his hardworking ensemble to weeks of forced TCM viewing—they have the rhythms and inflections down pat. So why does The Panic of ’29 lose so much steam? This sort of parody works well in Carol Burnett skit-size tidbits, but there’s no reason it has to stretch to nearly 2½ hours, much less end with a bizarre twist involving an atom bomb erupting near Niagara Falls. Was Techler spoofing the haphazard plotting of ’30s studio output, which in fact was mostly tightly scripted, or was he just unable to come up with a coherent throughline of his own? It’s hard to say, but the scattershot strands of plot add up to less and less, and The Panic of ’29 finally collapses from exhaustion. Still, next time Techler’s in town, I’ll want to see what he’s up to. He has an ear for dialogue, and if he can trim the verbal fat and learn cohesiveness, he might really have something.
The Less Than Rent production of The Panic of ’29 at 59E59 Theaters (59 E. 59th St., Manhattan) runs through Aug. 20. Evening performances are at 7:15 Tuesday through Saturday; matinees are at 2:15 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. For tickets, visit 59e59.org.
