Review: Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune Shines a Light on the Vagaries of Love

The play depends especially on the strength of its leads, and here it has two eager thespians who make the most of its drama.

Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune
Photo: Deen van Meer

The only characters in Terence McNally’s Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune are two single fortysomethings who work menial jobs at the same Manhattan greasy spoon. Johnny, a line cook, lives in Brooklyn Heights. Frankie, a waitress, lives in Hell’s Kitchen. The show opens toward what should be the end of their first date: after a round of sex at Frankie’s place. It’s three in the morning and she wants him to go home, but he wants to stay until they’ve agreed that they will fall intensely in love, get married, and have kids.

In the end, Frankie and Johnny stay up all night, batting back and forth about whether they can make a conscious decision, based on convenience, to love each other, even if they’re not naturally, helplessly falling head over heels for one another. The play offers the possibility of an old world-style romance in modern New York City, where few have to tie the knot for any reason but true love. “What people see in one another!” Johnny says. “It’s a total mystery.”

The 1987 play’s investigation of this mystery can feel thin, as its characters at times suggest cats chasing each other’s tails around the same circles over more than two hours. But the Broadway revival, now playing at the Broadhurst Theatre on 44th Street near Eighth Avenue (about 4,500 feet from Frankie’s apartment on 53rd and 10th), is great fun anyway, and more than a little moving, thanks to Michael Shannon and Audra McDonald. The play depends especially on the strength of its leads, and here it has two eager thespians who make the most of its drama, which in lesser hands could easily just feel like an acting exercise.

Advertisement

Shannon’s inherent menacing weirdness is perfect for Johnny. The character’s intimidating dominance comes across not only in his propensity for talking too much, but also in Shannon’s hulking intensity. It’s in the way Johnny stares at Frankie or lords his body over hers too closely—a little drunk on beer but intoxicated by amour. Johnny’s hyper-romanticism becomes increasingly threatening throughout the play, a weaponized malevolence, but Shannon also laces his character’s overeager declamations or goat-gotten indignations with great humor. An early laughing fit, which we eventually learn arose from a memory of an ill-timed fart, is particularly infectious. McDonald is no less sharp as Shannon’s exasperated straight woman, tripping over her words and getting a lot of laughs as an audience surrogate, amazed at the sparring partner who won’t just put his clothes on and go.

Director Arin Arbus coaxes performances from McDonald and Shannon that are certainly naturalistic, especially when they’re au naturel. Especially early on, the actors appear naked from head to toe. The costuming—or lack of it—often reflects something about the characters: Though they may initially both appear vulnerable, Frankie quickly dons a robe, a sign of her need to erect emotional barriers, while Johnny, who’s like an open book, hardly ever puts on a shirt. All the while, the city looms over the set: the back wall is the pale image of an apartment building façade, filling the stage with a stony exterior, another suggestion of Frankie’s “walls.”

The production retains the original’s 1980s setting, and it abounds in period signifiers, such as an oblique reference to the AIDS crisis, which once loomed especially large over the casual hook-up, like the one between Frankie and Johnny. At one point, Frankie, impressed when Johnny says he owns a VCR, starts to wheel around a small television on a cart around her practically furnished but slightly messy bachelorette pad, and the two listen all night to classical music broadcast on the radio. Johnny calls the station to request “the most beautiful music ever written,” a score for their strange night of up-and-down courtship. The late-night jockey, who’s been playing light piano music that Frankie admiringly calls “chaste,” opts for something a little more frankly beautiful: Debussy’s “Clair de Lune,” which is French for moonlight, though the term suggests something literally like the clarity of the moon.

Advertisement

The music is clear, as well, especially at the end of act two, when the action stops as the characters listen to it play out at length. This is a gabby play, but the instrumental offers the characters a respite, a chance to listen to something else—something more lovely, honest, and pure—than their own squabbling, stumbling dialogues. It’s so gentle and graceful that it provides its own sentimentally clarifying light. Basking in it, the characters seem to recognize their desperate loneliness—and maybe the audience its own, as well.

Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune is now playing at the Broadhurst Theatre.

Henry Stewart

Henry Stewart is a journalist and historian. He's the deputy editor at Opera News magazine and the author of the books How Bay Ridge Became Bay Ridge, True Crime Bay Ridge, and More True Crime Bay Ridge.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.