Professor Ben Butley, the tragicomic antihero of Simon Gray’s ‘Butley,’ has all the elements that make a killer of a showcase for an actor as long as he can make the character’s undoing both funny and gut-wrenching. Nathan Lane, who stars in director Nicholas Martin’s production, which runs through Nov. 30 at the Huntington Theatre, really only nails the former.
Lane’s Butley is the head of the English department at a university in London, and though the whole of the action plays out in his cluttered academic office, he’s clearly more interested in booze and boys than in teaching (‘You know how it exhausts me to teach books I haven’t read,’ he snaps.)
As conceived by Gray, Butley is a sharply drawn sketch of jaded middle-aged apathy. He shares an office with Joey Keyston (Benedick Bates), who we learn has also supplanted the role of Butley’s estranged wife in Butley’s home life. But Joey is seeing someone else – a fact Butley pretends doesn’t bother him, just as he bottles up his anguish over being separated from his wife and baby daughter.
‘Butley’ was originally produced in 1971 (with Alan Bates in the title role) and Martin’s production obscures the time period, although a couple of characters mention having been drafted in their youth and one student is clearly identified as a hippie. Surprisingly, the 30-year-old treatment of fluid sexual preference doesn’t seem a bit dated. Gray never feels the need to explain why Butley sleeps with men but is married to a woman. ‘I am a one-woman man,’ Butley says, ‘and now I’ve had mine.’
Much of the pleasure of ‘Butley,’ at least in the first act, derives from the fact that much of the dialogue is that sharp. Lane relishes playing the wittiest character on the stage, delivering devastating bon mots that, instead of hurting those around him, ultimately spotlight his own loneliness. Gray also utilizes quotations from Wordsworth, Blake, Eliot and others to smartly comment on the characters’ lives.
At the end of the first act, Lane’s wife Anne (Pamela J. Gray) visits with the news that she’s remarrying. It’s difficult to imagine how they were ever married in the first place, which softens the impact of Anne’s news. Gray’s modest presence and somewhat weak voice allow Lane’s bravado to steamroll right over her. The appealing Bates (son of Alan), meets the same fate, but Joey, as written, is a fairly passive character, content to be the object of a tug of war between two forces.
Lane meets his acting match in Act Two when Jake Weber shows up as Reg, Joey’s new lover. He has an even worse bit of news for Butley, and the encounter between the two characters is the show’s highlight. Weber’s Reg sports a working-class accent and a background in military service. He is tall, handsome, confident and quietly intelligent, and his security foregrounds Butley’s own spinelessness and desperation. The contrast between the two characters is poignant and hilarious: on their first and only other meeting, Joey reveals, Butley threw up all over Reg’s shoes. Butley tosses verbal darts at Reg that fail to stick. Weber (he was Brad Pitt’s rival in Meet Joe Black and co-starred on HBO’s The Mind of the Married Man) summons a quiet force that is juxtaposed beautifully by Lane’s acid-tongued unraveling.
By the end, when Butley has lost everyone, there is the sense that Lane, who has taken charge throughout the show with his poisonous delivery and expertly antic physical presence (a recurring bit involving an uncooperative desk lamp is priceless), has ultimately missed the mark. Butley ends the play as not much more of a mess than he was at the beginning. We miss the catharsis of an abandoned man hitting rock bottom. In the end, Lane’s Butley isn’t terribly more poignant than his Albert in The Birdcage.