Theater Review: Thirty-Years Later, in a Bizarro Political Landscape, This “American Daughter” Revival Is Strangely Nostalgic; A Footballer Play Needs Less Banter and More “Pass”-ing; Cat Cohen’s “Broad Strokes” Has Funny Thoughts, As Almost-Death Becomes Her

An American Daughter (c) Joan Marcus

Theater: An American Daughter 
At The Pershing Square Signature Center 

The downside of having a QR Code instead of a Playbill is that essential information is now not readily accessible to theatergoers. For the first New York revival of Wendy Wasserstein’s An American Daughter, which premiered on Broadway in the 1997 with the great Kate Nelligan in the title role, I was wondering if director Sarna Lapine would update the play to modern day MAGA or keep it in the 90s where the biggest scandal was Nannygate, in which President Bill Clinton had to withdraw two female nominees for attorney general because one didn’t pay social security tax for her nanny and the other had hired an illegal alien for hers. Even though set designer Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams’ upscale Georgetown living room is gorgeous, its timeless design doesn’t give us any clues. The first clue actually comes from the radio that’s playing Ringo Starr’s version of “You’re Sixteen,” a now looked down-upon song about a man professing his love for an underaged girl, with Lyssa Dent Hughes (Jean Lichty) unironically singing along. We are definitely in 1997. Lyssa is the current nominee for surgeon general, where she hopes to promote women-specific health care. The two solid rocks in her life are her shaggy dog of a husband Walter (Robert Sean Leonard) and her best friend Judith (Montego Glover), who is not only a doctor, but one of the few black Jew at her synagogue. Then there are the young whippersnappers (who today would be political vlogger influencers) with typical Wasserstein Charles Dickens-type names: Quincy Quince (Carmen Zilles), a feminist essayist with aspirations of grandeur, and Timber Tucker (Chris Ghaffari), a political reporter doing a piece on Lyssa. They all end up at a brunch where the most unbelievable character of a play, Walter’s friend named (sigh!) Morrow McCarthy (Ryan Spahn), a conservative, pro-life, gay newspaper columnist willingly and with seeming malice, accuses Lyssa that she, using her busy upper-class life as an alibi, willingly ignored a jury summons. And what was just a throwaway conversation bon mot becomes the current news cycle’s hot gotcha moment that threatens to derail her nomination.