Good for Otto
Written by David Rabe
Directed by Scott Elliot
The New Group at the Pershing Square Signature Theatre
March 21, 2018
Production website
💉 out of 5.

As a MFA Playwright from Penn State – and now a high school teacher of playwriting, I always run into the same problem with beginning writers. When given the choice to write about what they want to write  about, young students seem to gravitate to setting their play in the psychiatrist’s office.  The reason is clear – rather then writing a story with some conflict – rather than SHOWING us the story – they would rather put a wild, kooky outragious character on a psychiatrist couch and just drill them with questions to get a monologue out of them.  It is cheap easy playwriting.  You don’t have to SHOW us you can just TELL us – and that is not what our art form is about.

Good for Ottto suffers this problem.  You set a play in a psychiatrist’s office – and one by one they come in and share their outlandish problems, histories and plans but it is all second hand.  It happened offstage.  They are merely here in the office to recount it.  Sure, Good for Otto tries to bring some CONFLICT into the room, but truly the interesting stuff is done offstage.  Seeing the aftermath of the problem is interesting for only so long.  I don’t want three hours of interviews.

The play also is a bit freely theatrical in having the cast sit on stage mixed in with the audience.  It has group singing.  Cast members come from the actual audience to enter the stage.  A pianist incessantly underscores the emotional moments making them more cheesy then poignant.  Interesting tricks for sure – but they do not cover the lack of an interesting story.

How is it that you have Ed Harris, Mark Linn-Baker, Rhea Perlman, and F. Murray Abraham in a play and get bored?  How does that happen?  Well, give them more than monologues – and cut the play down to less than 3 hours.  That would be a start!