Distracted

Cynthia Nixon of Sex and the City fame is starring in Distracted on Broadway right now. I saw it last week, the last show of my Roundabout subscription experiment. In the end, I’m glad I bought the subscription. It did what it was meant to do: it forced me to the theater. Unfortunately, though, I did feel forced. Attending the theater simply isn’t as much fun without a partner in crime who is as excited about the shows and cast members. Also, Roundabout’s season just wasn’t that great, which didn’t help matters.

I ended on a relative high note at least. Nixon plays the mother of a very rambunctious, energetic, foul-mouthed little boy. Is he simply excitable and testing limits as all boys do? Or is there something else afoot...something like ADHD? These questions, and the appropriate actions that stem from each answer, are the heart of the show. [Side note: Did you hear that they’re renaming ADHD? It’ll now be ADOS: Attention Deficit Ooh, Shiny!]

There is an odd tension between the humor in the script and secondary characters and the seriousness of struggling as a parent. I tend to embrace surprising juxtapositions, and had Nixon’s character been written as someone who dealt with the challenges of raising a difficult child with humor, I think it would have worked. Instead, the humor comes in the form of goofy and stereotypical supporting characters and the weird way the fourth wall is sometimes broken. All the while, Nixon’s character, and that of her husband, are very serious about their need to do right by their child. An argument could be made that as we all deal with very serious problems, the world continues around us in all its absurdity. Something about it still failed to work in the context of the show, though.

Across the board, though, the performances were excellent. I’ve long liked Nixon, and it was exciting to see her on stage. She and the rest of the cast did very well with a good but imperfect play.