Lobby Hero

It all happens with just four characters, across two nights in the lobby of a mid-level, rather shabby Manhattan apartment building and on the street just outside. 

Young Jeff (Charles Grounds) is the ‘security officer’ – and he insists on that title – on night shift.  He has a desk in Juliette Whitney’s expansive, clever set.  He has a uniform and a badge – a step-up from being kicked out of the navy and drowning in gambling debts.  Now he has his eye on a little apartment of his own and a half-formed ambition (in which we never believe) to ‘get into advertising’.  Jeff, the centre of this story – or stories - is a familiar Kenneth Lonergan character – a ‘loser’ thrust into demanding, compromising dilemmas that will test him and, if nothing else, reveal depths we – and maybe he - didn’t suspect.  Here Mr Grounds – never off-stage – delights with a jittery motor-mouth performance that has us laughing, irritated, touched, wincing and sad. 

William (Victory Ndukwe) is Jeff’s supervisor – his ‘Captain’ – although as Jeff points out, how can William be a captain when there are no other ranks?  William is a straight guy, family man, intent on doing it by the book and on promotion – tougher for an African-American.  Mr Ndukwe gets the solid, dull but decent man just right.  William is tough on feckless, wisecracking Jeff – but only for Jeff’s own good.  Then two cops swing by.  Bill (Ryan Murphy) is one of New York’s finest, a tough guy on the way up to Gold Badge’ – the mentor - and more - to rookie Dawn (Monique Fisher) who’s only three months out of the Academy, ambitious too, and in thrall to Bill.  When Bill tells her he’s visiting his friend Jim upstairs, she believes him – until Jeff, instantly smitten, says Bill is more likely upstairs with a hooker…  Very moral William is obliged to lie to protect his useless brother, but, worse, makes the mistake of telling Jeff – and Bill, demonstrating what a good guy he is, backs up William’s lie with the detective…  And Dawn, having challenged Bill, won’t be getting his support on an assault charge…

Director James Vinson’s casting decisions are visually as well as temperamentally right.  Particularly interesting is Mr Murphy as tough cop Bill.  Instead of a matinee idol (it was ‘Captain America’ Chris Evans) as in the New York production), we get a man who really looks like a tough cop – and that alters the dynamic between Bill and Dawn in an intriguing and more complex way.

These characters, their dilemmas, their bids for status, their moral twists and turns, their switches from nice to nasty are all totally engrossing – and all delivered in dialogue that sounds like real, living people.  Unlike some other local productions of plays set in New York, these characters sound like New Yorkers too – fast talking, quick on the uptake, aggressive as the best defence.  All four performances are layered as required and admirable in their virtuosity.  Director James Vinson is an award-winning short film and television series director, here making his live theatre debut and he does a fine job, sustaining pace and taking his cast with apparent ease through multiple transitions across the two hours and twenty minutes – no interval – running time.

On opening night, Connor Ross’s sound design was not perhaps making the contribution (Manhattan by night) that it could, and Albert Salt’s music is the kind you notice rather too much, distracting rather than enhancing.  Lachlan McLean’s lighting, however, rings subtle changes on the single, unchanging set.

The writer, Kenneth Lonergan, may be better known as a movie writer and director: he won an Oscar and a Bafta for Manchester by the Sea.  Some will remember his You Can Stand By Me and his long but gripping Margaret,  the last with another central character who blunder into a good deed – and, as we know, no good deed remains unpunished.

Lobby Hero, first produced in New York in 2001 and revived in 2018, has scarcely dated at all.  Possibly Dawn is underwritten and, in the light of #MeToo, shouldn’t be stuck with the choices she makes.  But do not be deterred by that two hours and twenty minutes length.  Some plays at that length are self-indulgent or repetitious as the playwright adds and adds, fumbling for truth.  Not with this play.  Lobby Hero has its contrivances, but they are very well hidden; it just on keeps developing as its plot strands interweave and complicate each other, and it holds up to the end.  You won’t be looking at your watch. 

Michael Brindley

Photographer: Isabella Ferrier