‘The Minutes’ on Broadway Brilliantly Shows How Democracy Dies Under Strip Lighting
The Minutes is a brilliantly sugared, very bitter pill. At first playwright and star Tracy Letts, and his on-fire company of actors, seem to take us to comedic Parks and Recreation territory. The play, which opens on Broadway on Sunday night (Studio 54, booking to July 24), is centered around a council meeting in the small town of Big Cherry, with a gallery of the strange, eccentric, and clueless blowhards you might expect flexing their jaded, policy-shaping muscles.
Mr. Oldfield (Austin Pendleton, scene-stealing, comic genius) is particularly exercised over parking spaces. Mayor Superba (an avuncular-meets-menacing Letts) and his fellow council colleagues are exasperated with Oldfield’s interruptions and crotchety mischief-making. Ms. Innes (Blair Brown) has a statement to read out that is also a rap sheet of local scandals. The sharp secretary Ms. Johnson (Jessie Mueller) has no time for Mr. Peel (Schitt’s Creek star Noah Reid) trying to make small talk over kids. He’s a pediatric dentist, but not hustling for business, he says. She also mispronounces Mr. Assalone (Jeff Still) as that name sounds, rather than, as he eventually gives up insisting, “Mr. Assalon-ay.” Ms. Matz (Sally Murphy) just seems loopy.
But something really isn’t right. Thunder is cracking outside, accompanied by torrential rain. The lights keep going out. What has happened to the missing Mr. Carp (Ian Barford), and at last week’s council meeting? No one will give Mr. Peel a simple answer. How the answers are revealed, and very dark they are, give the play its title, in that everything lies in the mysteriously unready minutes of that meeting.