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Bobbie Clearly by Alex Lubischer at Roundabout Theatre Company

I am not going to mince words here so I'll just say it: Bobbie Clearly shouldn't be on stage at a major non-profit theater. Yet.

I am sure Alex Lubischer is a very talented playwright but he's too young to have any kind of experience, theatrical, life, or otherwise. And that's evident with the script of Bobbie Clearly. I mean, I wrote plays when I was nineteen and twenty years old and I thought they were good but that doesn't mean they deserved big productions. And you know why? Because I was young. I didn't have the life experience to truly write a great play. Now, I don't begin to assume anything about Alex Lubischer but after seeing Bobbie Clearly, I can tell you that this play was not ready for a major off-Broadway production.

Bobbie Clearly revolves around the titular character and the heinous crime he committed in a small Midwestern town ten years before the action of the play. The play unfolds with townspeople (Bobbie's co-workers, the victim's family, a police officer) providing their insights into Bobbie and the crime, and it is framed that a documentary is being made about the event. While Lubischer probably thought this was clever, it's too sloppy. Everything is told through exposition; there are very few scenes where the characters actually interact with one another. He's just telling, telling, telling, with very little showing. It gets tedious after awhile. And it's never quite clear who the characters are talking to. At first it's clear it's the documentary crew but when the characters acknowledge and gesture towards the audience, it seems like they're acknowledge the actual audience. Are we supposed to be one person? Many people? I couldn't help but ask, "what is this supposed to be? Where are we?" I think it's lazy to write a play where characters are only speaking directly to the audience. It's doing most of the work for you. (And this is coming from a person who once wrote a Rashoman-esque play in monologues. But you know, I too was 19 or 20 and thought I was being clever.)

Tonally Bobbie Clearly doesn't quite work either. Lubischer can't quite decide if we're supposed to be okay with Bobbie leaving prison and attempting to be rehabilitated, or if we're supposed to agree with the townspeople who want to continue to shun him. The problem lies in the fact that we're only really told about Bobbie through other people's accounts. Bobbie doesn't have much of a physical presence in the play until the third act, and he never speaks for himself. As an audience member, I really don't know if I want to hear what Bobbie has to say because of the crime he committed. Does he deserve a voice? Does he deserve to have a side of the story? I am at loathe to credit Lubischer with instilling this feeling in me because I don't really know if the playwright himself has the answer. And the characters we do spend time with, the lone exception being Darla, the cop, aren't original or interesting enough to care about. With weak characters, this play just becomes a cliched story about how a small town was rocked by a terrible crime. Regardless of the attempts at absurdism and humor, Bobbie Clearly never really rises above cliche. It's a story we've heard thousands of times, puppet or no puppet.

And no, nobody wants to watch a character graphically gut a deer on stage.


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