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Joely Richardson stars as a bi-polar wife whose next to normal behavior racks her marriage

BY MICHAEL SOMMERS

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

OFF BROADWAY REVIEW

Over the last 30 years, Michael Weller has written a number of absorbing dramas such as “Loose Ends,” “Spoils of War” and “Split,” which study eroding marriages in contemporary American society.

Weller’s latest drama, “Side Effects,” opened on Sunday at the Lucille Lortel Theatre under the auspices of MCC Theater and sadly turns out to be nowhere near his best work on this ever-interesting topic.

The new two-character play is a companion piece to Weller’s “Fifty Words,” which MCC Theater also produced in 2008. You may recall how Norbert Leo Butz and Elizabeth Marvel vividly battled away as an upscale Brooklyn couple whose marriage violently explodes one night when she discovers his infidelity.

Set entirely in a Midwestern living room, “Side Effects” concerns the other woman, Lindy, depicted not very well at all here by Joely Richardson (but let’s nip/tuck at that matter later). A smart, high-spirited mom of teen sons, Lindy is improbably married to Hugh (Cotter Smith), scion of a bike manufacturing business. No longer the free-wheeling fellow she wed, Hugh has turned conservative and is running for public office.

Unfortunately, Lindy is bi-polar, her meds don’t work, and Hugh finds out about her long-distance affair with the guy in Brooklyn. Then a crisis involving the boys causes Lindy to freak out. Presumably the conclusion is meant to be ironic as dour Hugh faces up to his hopeless attachment to Lindy.

Straightforwardly written in five scenes that span two years, the unrewarding play at times verges on parodying the hackneyed sit-dram of the uptight husband and the crazy wife.

More soap-opera-ish talk than action (“I’m sick of your lies, your secrets, of how you undermine all my efforts to get our life on track,” etc.), the 100-minute work seems to be edited down from a longer version, which may partly account for its melodramatic pile-up of plot turns and mood swings.

The artificial quality that pervades the piece is not helped by Richardson’s unsubtle performance as the headstrong Lindy. Tossing her hair this way and that, obviously semaphoring the character’s desperate instability, Richardson is even more unbelievable than Weller’s disappointingly trite play. Looking not a little like George W. Bush, Smith staunchly conveys Hugh’s frustration with his maddening wife.