Tom Hanks in ‘This World of Tomorrow’

Whatever is happening at the Shed right now is not really a performance. This is a performance: actors put on costumes and wander around the stage for a couple of hours, repeating memorized words. But it would be more convenient for me to call the production This world of tomorrow – starring Tom Hanks, written by Hanks and co-writer James Glossman, directed by Kenny Leon, based on elements from Hanks's story collection, Unusual type – something like “flight of fancy”, “doodle on a napkin” or “student drama club project with the express purpose of making one person happy.” There are a lot of talented people around Hanks who were involved in making this, and a lot of people in the audience who may have paid a lot to see it, but they don't count in that equation. This piece is all about admiring its star. Hey, at least there are some funny hats.

This world of tomorrow is not malicious in intent. Tom Hanks, the morally agreeable mayor of Hollywood, is the closest thing in the movie industry to Jimmy Stewart, and I'm happy to believe that his forays into writing were born out of a genuine artistic interest in good-hearted America. (Inevitably the character speaks admiringly of typewriter.) Whether a theater company should devote its time and resources to developing and producing something he has written is another matter. (No.) This world of tomorrowIn the film, loosely based on Hanks' short story “The Past Matters to Us,” he plays Burt Allenberry, a wealthy tech giant circa 2100 who continues to take expensive day trips to the 1939 New York World's Fair through a company called Chronometric Adventures. He justifies the expense by telling his co-workers that he's fascinated by the way the past represented a better future than the one we got, but it quickly becomes clear that he's really doing it because he's infatuated with a charming divorcee named Carmen Perry (Kelly O'Hara, at home in any role where she wears gloves). Carmen visits the fair with her feisty niece Virginia (Kaylee Carter, groping for any texture to play with and settling on “loud”), and Hanks accidentally runs into her and then comes back for more. In each time loop, Carmen doesn't remember Bert, so he continues to seduce her, each time using a little more information, an unsettling dynamic that is a mixture between Groundhog Day, Midnight in Parisand maybe even crazy sci-fi drama Passengersall films that are not known for their sensitivity to female agency.

This is where you can expect the play to have some dramatic controversy, perhaps as a commentary on the dangers of nostalgia or the self-esteem of one extremely wealthy man. Any such turn could be the current, albeit obvious, direction for such a game. But one thing can be said about This world of tomorrow is that it doesn't do much of what you might expect. There is no tension anywhere or any significant attempt to undermine Burt's rosy view of the past. Hanks and Glossman wrote a few throwaway lines acknowledging the racism of the 1930s—the black members of the ensemble often have to roll their eyes at Burt's amusement about 1939—and in the play's announcement, Alex Poots, the Barn's artistic director, said New York Time that “there’s a reference to the rise of authoritarianism,” which I can translate as “there’s a line about how Burt should have used time travel to kill Hitler.”

I wouldn't say that This world of tomorrow also accepts Bert's nostalgia as it simply allows his search for Carmen to happen. The script is too uncontrollable to move towards any specific theme, and Leon, who became the main director raw, celebrity driven dramadidn't push its cast towards any specific idea. (According to a conversation on your program, Leon said the play is about “time and love”; one is a concept that an actor can't play, and the other is that no one plays convincingly.) Somehow, despite what must be a hefty budget, the set looks cheap. Derek McLane's design evokes a cybernetic wilderness, a spare set of moving columns that indicate new locations and settings through screens and projections. If Burt is so fascinated by the innovations of the World's Fair, shouldn't we see some of them recreated on stage? Why not show us famous robot or celebrity cow?

Instead, where it might allow wonder and enthusiasm to emerge, This world of tomorrow prone to over-explanation. The script is extremely heavy on technobabble and scenes of Hanks' future colleagues throwing around nonsense time-travel-related nouns while putting on clothes. Star Trek outfits. I'm less concerned about the acids that supposedly accumulate as you move back and forth in time. The script's most exciting moment is a series of scenes that occur in the second act when Bert and Carmen meet in the 1950s at a Greek diner run by the grumpy Jay O. Sanders. Sanders almost convinces you that you're watching a real play about a real man who commands the stage with a gruff bark and derives humor from his character's insistence on teaching everyone Greek vocabulary while he learns a little English. I'm not sure how his presence relates to the rest of the story or why Hanks felt the need to include it – perhaps his wife, a Greek-American actress and producer Rita Wilson listened to his opinion, but at least it's an interesting idiosyncratic gesture.

Yet audiences don't come to The Barn for idiosyncrasy. Hanks is the main and final achievement This world of tomorrowAnd of course, when you're sitting in the audience a few dozen yards away, it's hard to deny his fast-moving movie-star magnetism. It has something of the energy of a beloved and aging family dog ​​approaching you and placing its paws on your lap. It's hard to judge Hanks' strengths as a stage actor given that this script poses so few challenges for him, but when he makes a few jokes about Burt's discovery that there is real milk at the World's Fair – presumably an unspoken environmental collapse has wiped out dairy products – he's very charming. At these moments, the audience breathes a sigh of relief, as if saying: Ah yes, the celebrity we're here for is giving us the performance we wanted.. He plays his personality, not a character. We come to see many stage actors to try out their familiar forms, from Kristin Chenoweth To Laurie Metcalfbut perhaps putting a movie star on stage and asking him to act in a play is an additional hurdle that we don't need to ask him to overcome. Why not just go back to something more straightforward, more medieval and ecclesiastical? End with the scripts, with the directors, with the rest of the ensemble, with the pretense. Let them stand for two hours in the pristine, golden-lit silence at the center of the stage and enjoy the awe and admiration. Audiences could think of it as a pilgrimage to a holy relic or as their own act of sacramental theater. After all, he doesn't perform. You.

This world of tomorrow is in the Sarai until December 21st.