December Fools

In his new comedy/drama December Fools, Tony-nominated playwright Sherman Yellen (The Rothschilds) serves up a rather bland examination of a fictional composer's postmortem fame and its effects on his surviving family. Deceased ivory-tickler Alexander Temple has Irving Berlin-like renown among Broadway cliques, yet his iconic status still dictates life circumstances for the two people who were closest to him. Temple's widow, Gloria, spends her days in her Fifth Avenue penthouse working to preserve her husband's musical legacy; his daughter Marcie, meanwhile, seeks to escape Daddy's shadow through a mediocre art career in New Mexico. Trouble erupts when Marcie returns to New York for the holidays and stumbles upon a drawer full of un-mailed letters, written by Gloria only for the sake of personal venting, yet containing many juicy family secrets. Offended by her mother's concealment, Marcie acts in typical, spoiled-rich-girl fashion: she addresses the letters to their unintended recipients and mails them off.

Such a setup provides ample opportunity for both hilarious farce and scathing drama, but neither of these manifests in Yellen's script which lacks the cleverness to pull it off. As a whole, December Fools is full of missed opportunities. The character of Marcie, for instance, could've been an interesting one — a satirical take on the Julian Lennons and Jakob Dylans of the world whose famous names ruthlessly hinder their own artistic merits. Yellen has written Marcie with such scarce likeability that we find ourselves reveling in her lack of accomplishments.

The cast does manage to turn in some engaging moments. As Gloria, Elizabeth Shepherd adeptly reveals the unspoken frustrations of a woman who has no identity other than that of a legend's widow. Shepherd's flashback monologues are particularly compelling, yet she lacks chemistry with the other performers, especially Arleigh Richards, who plays Marcie. The discourse between these two is far too clumsy to be credible mother-daughter jostling.

There's a moment in December Fools where Gloria laments the passing of her husband's golden Broadway era. "Theater ain't what it used to be," she sighs. We sigh as well, but more at her than with her.