Endgame

“Sea Wall /A Life” on Broadway and “Coriolanus” at Shakespeare in the Park.

- Vinson Cunningham

Some plays, proceeding carefully but not all that deftly, exist only to dump a helping of devastation onto the audience’s lap. These tearful noodges remind me of the errant Rube Goldberg machine that cracked me up as a kid when it appeared on the “Tom and Jerry” cartoon on Saturday mornings. Tom the cat, moonlighting as an engineer and promising a “better mousetrap,” rigs up some hyper-complicated doozy, held together by the thinnest string, just outside Jerry’s hole, hoping finally to see the mouse go kersplat. One tug of the cheese sets an alarm clock ringing, then a saw gnawing inanely at a log, churning on and on, a cascade of linked but frivolous effects, until a huge and heretofore unseen safe drop from the sky and lands not on Jerry but on Tom. So much work for the wrong big finish.

The monologues that makeup “Sea Wall /A Life” (at the Hudson, directed by Carrie Cracknell) are two such dubiously useful contraptions. Both halves of the show, not so much acted as presented by Tom Sturridge and Jake Gyllenhaal, take pains—formal, metaphorical, and, God knows, literal—to dredge up feelings of grief and profundity in the audience, and end up missing by inches that feel like miles.

In “Sea Wall,” by Simon Stephens, a youngish photographer named Alex (Sturridge) talks adoringly about his family—a wife too good to be deserved, a beautiful little girl, and a father-in-law, Arthur, an Army veteran and a former math teacher. Alex and Arthur grow uncommonly close and have gently antagonistic conversations about the existence of God. Arthur believes; he thinks that the centrality in mathematics of the number pi, that infinitely digited marvel, is proof enough. Alex scoffs at that but still loves the guy.