The Langhorne Players put on Warren Leight’s Tony Award-winning play.
By: Stuart Duncan
Warren Leight’s Side Man was the 1999 Tony Award winner for best new American play. Later, it was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. That may say much about the paucity of drama today, because, in truth, it is a badly flawed work. The piece is being given a strong production by the Langhorne Players at its theater in Tyler State Park near Newtown, Pa., under the direction of Elliot Simmons.
We follow the story as it shifts from year to year between 1953 and 1985, and from place to place in New York City. We are guided through the evening by Clifford Glimmer (nicely underplayed by Robin Carcione). It is the memory tale of his family life before and after his birth. His father (Ryan Listman) was a trumpeter and a "side man," the term used by musicians to describe men who sit in with various bands, mostly on club dates, to replace musicians unable to make the gig. It would be unfair to describe them as journeymen players, since some, apparently, were extremely talented. The breed is mostly gone now, relics from an age of big bands and nightclubs.
It is not a pleasant tale. In movie parlance, he "meets his wife cute." She is in a basement, practicing her flute; he begins to accompany her, improvising to underscore and enhance her playing. It is one of the flaws that we never see or hear about her flute after the first scene.
We are told his mother (Eileen Simmons) comes from a most religious family. Nevertheless, she swears like a sewer worker, using four-letter words (and the gerunds thereof) with loose abandon.
We also meet father’s three friends, musicians all, beautifully played by Tom Dinardo, Joe Mattern and David Rubinsohn with varying degrees of comic intensity.
But playwright Leight gives all of his conflicts equal focus, and we can easily become confused. How important is Jonesy’s (Mattern) bout with drugs? How seriously must we take Father’s apparent memory lapses, especially when it concerns Mom? How much attention should we pay to the flirtatious waitress Patsy (Linda Palmarozza) as she blissfully flits from bed to bed, without the benefit of clergy? How to interpret our narrator’s distress as he is forced to pick up the shattered pieces of a failed marriage?
One is tempted to believe playwright Leight is afflicted by the disease that hits many young writers the inability to write for the stage without resorting to movie techniques, and the reliance on a stage director and possibly the lighting designer to handle scene shifts and mood changes.
Midway through Act II, there is a long (more than five minutes) recording that is supposed to allow us insight into the lives of these people. Despite the combined efforts of Papa and his friends on stage, the moment becomes a symbol of what is not working: We have a play about jazzmen without live music, and we must travel back to another time and place without the proper instructions as to what we might do once there.
Side Man continues at Spring Garden Mill, Tyler State Park, Route 332, Newtown, Pa., through Oct. 13. Performances: Fri.-Sat. 8 p.m.; Sun. 7:30 p.m. Tickets cost $8-$10. For information, call (215) 860-0818.

