Intellect and slapstick meet: with a dark undertone

The Huntington Theatre Company's production of Simon Gray's play Butley is not a one-man show -- but it comes close. Nathan Lane mesmerizes as Ben Butley, a narcissistic, darkly brilliant English professor at one of London's City Colleges.

Butley's world is turned upside down one day when both his wife and long-time lover leave him for other men. The play is a comedy -- almost. The script is genuinely funny and Lane is a gifted comedian, however beneath the humor it is clear that Butley is dangerously fragile man on the brink of destruction.

Butley is a perfect vehicle for Lane's talents: his physical and verbal energy are vibrant and believable. Butley is a professor who is intellectually gifted but not particularly concerned with tact.

He is both charming and infuriating. In the opening scene, using a banana, a briefcase, and a desk lamp, Lane enlivens his character's comically pathetic self-absorbtion perfectly before he even opens his mouth. Butley's wordy speeches are made completely natural. The character, as played by Lane, is hyperactive, almost childlike at times, but his performance is always controlled.

The other actors, playing assorted students, friends, colleagues, and lovers, give solid performances, but none were able to match Lane's interesting and engaging performance. I found myself wondering, when watching Butley's wife and lover on the stage, what had drawn Butley to either of them in the first place. The actors were good-looking and well spoken, yet they lacked the edginess and complexity that would seem necessary to attract a man like Ben Butley. He is a man who loves Eliot, but not Blake; who has a family, but lives with a lover nicknamed after a Beatrix Potter character. Butley is a man who is verbal, vulnerable, acerbic and ultimately abandoned.

At one point in the play, during an argument about one of his various tangled alliances, Butley apologizes for his obtuseness: "I'm sorry, I'm being literary." This captures concisely what is both the great strength and the great weakness of the play. Full of literary allusions, both subtle and overt, Gray's script is rich and literarily resonant. Butley's borderline mania recalls that of one of his great idols, the modernist poet T.S. Eliot. At the end of the play, as his world is falling apart, Butley riffs on Eliot's epic poem "The Wasteland," shouting, "This is not what I meant at all!"

However, other erudite literary jokes don't translate as well. Butley is strongly opinionated over what counts as worthwhile literature and what doesn't, holding no author sacred. For the average theatergoer, the prickly scholarly banter won't be as compelling as Butley and his relationships with the characters around him.

This elitism presents Butley as a piece of theatre with a dangerous situation: academia is central to the plot of the play, and Butley's life in its own right. The circumstances of his affairs are not, however, what makes Butley's story a worthwhile one. What is fascinating about the dying relationships portrayed in the play is Butley's frantically genuine reaction to their dissolution. Nathan Lane creates Butley's confusion at these broken ties skillfully and utterly believably.

Like the man himself, the Huntington's production of Butley is flawed, but emotionally rich, wildly witty, and well-worth spending the night.