I Need That Review: Buried by His Past

Is one man’s trash really another man’s treasure? That’s the ultimately undramatic question that undergirds Theresa Rebeck’s new play, I Need That, about a hoarder who can’t let go of piles of decades-old magazines, stacks of old suitcases, and more. Which is to say, he can’t let go of the past. Written for comedy legend Danny DeVito and his daughter, Lucy DeVito, I Need That is a vehicle built for two that mostly just spins its wheels.

While his collections of odds and ends do seem, at the very least, like a tripping hazard, the lonely Sam (Danny DeVito) does appear to have genuine meaningful stories about most of the items he’s saved—when he can find them within the mess, that is. Once we discover, early on, that all the books clumped beneath the window and the clothes covering the couch belonged to his late wife, it’s hard not to feel sympathy for Sam in the battle to declutter. There’s little suspense in the discovery that, yes, the junk does matter. (Spoiler: People matter more.)

Lucy DeVito plays Sam’s “high-strung” daughter, Amelia, who’s desperate for her father to clear out all his stuff before he’s evicted by the Department of Health. There’s strangely little specificity in Sam and Amelia’s relationship, and certainly not in Rebeck’s writing or even in the performances. Indeed, I Need That withholds a key piece of information about Amelia until the play’s final and best scene, and by making Amelia a woman who hides most of her struggles from both her father and the audience, Rebeck gives Lucy DeVito almost nothing to work with. Shared father-daughter reminiscences about childhood game nights playing Sorry feel like they could come from pretty much any play about a family. Whatever traditions Sam and Amelia may share besides fighting over piles of knick-knacks, they aren’t made apparent here.

Rebeck’s greatest misfire is the expectation that her premise is funny in and of itself. Maybe it’s Danny DeVito’s default melancholic hangdog mode, but it’s evident from the start that something is wrong with Sam. In suggesting we find amusement in the chaos of clutter—the chief symptom of Sam’s unprocessed grief—Rebeck seems to be searching in the wrong corner for laughs. At one point, Sam takes a dangerous fall scaling his overstuffed bookcase, and in such moments it’s unclear if the play is intended as physical farce or psychological drama.

Danny DeVito finds the greatest whimsy—and the most pathos—in the wordless transitions between scenes when Sam plays among his possessions. In one such sequence, he gleefully uses a badminton racket to wallop a stuffed animal across the stage and then thwack it like a golf ball. When it comes to digging humor out of dialogue, he obviously decided that his best bet was to chew into words for comic effect. He certainly makes a meal out of gagging disdainfully on consonants, as when Sam learns that friend has plans to move away and he yells, “Cleveland!?”

By the end of I Need That, however, it’s still not really clear who Sam is. Though the elder DeVito rides out the text, dutifully pivoting along with Rebeck from portraying the protagonist as a sullenly depressive loner or as a grouchily loveable curmudgeon, and sometimes within the same scene, the actor never quite manages to pull the disparate parts together.

As in Rebeck’s recent Dig, the machinations of the plot, here somewhat less twisty than in her recent works, seem to control the characters’ behavior at the expense of consistency or credibility. There’s something sweetly touching in Ray Anthony Thomas’s portrayal of Sam’s only friend (and the play’s third character), Foster, but his fine work is undermined by one of those unfortunate, unconvincing personality shifts when the tender Foster suddenly lashes out.

Moritz von Stuelpnagel, who previously directed Rebeck’s Bernhardt/Hamlet, doesn’t let the dust collect for long, orchestrating some impressive theatrical surprises on Alexander Dodge’s tricksy set. But if there’s real treasure to be dug out of the script of I Need That, neither von Stuelpnagel nor the DeVitos have shoveled deep enough to strike gold.

I Need That runs through December 30 at the Todd Haimes Theatre.