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Brains, Fading and Sharpened: The Notebook and The Effect
A musical adaptation that’s generic to the point of inanity, and a play that asks and examines real questions about what a person is.
The set, by David Zinn and Brett J. Banakis, attempts to locate us metaphorically inside the big, rambling old house that young Noah (a sweet John Cardoza) longs to live in one day with Allie (played in her youngest form by an appealingly spunky Jordan Tyson), but the way in which the directors and designers have envisioned this dream home makes it feel more subterranean than celestial. Prebble, a seriously sharp writer who’s recently been knocking it out of the park in TV land ( I Hate Suzie, Succession), wrote The Effect more than a decade ago, but in Jamie Lloyd’s slick new production, in from the National Theatre in London, the play feels unaged — muscular, troubling, full of the driving, anxious desire to know, and, in its own way, deeply romantic. His Broadway-bound Sunset Boulevard revival promises similar fuck-you austerity (I think of him as the bad-boy chef of directors), and The Effect —which unfolds on a dark, raised catwalk-style stage designed by his frequent collaborator Soutra Gilmour, with audience banks on either side and many dollars worth of moving LEDs above—is no exception in the Lloydiverse.
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