Griller
Now Bogosian has made this character and his credo of conspicuous consumption the basis of a two-act comedy-drama. Griller–presented in its world premiere this week at the Goodman–is the third full-length play for Bogosian, who’s best known as a monologuist. It takes place in the sprawling backyard of a suburban home in New Jersey, where Gussie, a wealthy travel agent, has become a local celebrity on the strength of his TV commercials. He’s celebrating both his 50th birthday and Independence Day in one big Fourth of July barbecue-and-fireworks blowout. “Take care of the luxuries, the necessities will take care of themselves,” Gussie brays as he shows off his new $3,000 gas grill. And to be sure the luxuries are well taken care of: besides the cooker (which comes complete with ice maker and intercom), Gussie presides over a huge fieldstone house with ivy-covered walls, an immaculately manicured lawn guarded by huge hedges, a series of Warhol lithos of himself and his wife, and a swimming pool that, in Derek McLane’s hyperrealistic set, splashes real water.
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The necessities, though, are in desperate disarray. When not flaunting his wealth, Gussie is prone to reminisce about the scruffy 60s, when he was a road manager for rock bands. Waxing nostalgic about bopping to Baez in the age of Woodstock and windowpane, Gussie is proud of his wild youth and happy to have survived it. “Things worked out,” he says with a rich man’s satisfaction. His troubled son Dylan disagrees. While his parents brag about their high quality of life–Gussie’s $3,000 grill is nothing compared to the materialistic Michelle’s $10,000 face-lift–Dylan and his older brother, Terence, are at the end of their ropes.
Beyond writing about the timeless theme of midlife crisis, Bogosian has turned his sights specifically on baby boomers–just as his 1994 SubUrbia (whose world premiere Falls directed at Lincoln Center) dealt with both youthful alienation in general and the slacker generation in particular. Certainly the gray-haired, ponytailed Gussie embodies what a New York Times review of the Rolling Stones this week called “affluent boomers nostalgic for a life none of them would go back to.” Griller’s sometimes sad, sometimes cynical take on the paradoxes of a once footloose generation now wielding power is all too appropriate in an era when a former Vietnam war protester has become the first president to be slammed with a lawsuit for sexual harassment.
