The beautiful crazy lady is the best part of Daniel Roberts’s “Monsterface.” Melanie (Sarah Grace Wilson), a New York actress, is young, delicate and prone to taking her clothes off in front of guests. She talks to an invisible turtle named Seymour. And the more bizarre her comments, the more she smiles like a perky cheerleader who has just been named homecoming queen.
There are other quirky personalities in this affable but disjointed drama at the Irish Arts Center, like a Pennsylvania innkeeper (Stuart Rudin) who often dresses like George Washington, and his simple-minded, virginal grandson (Jason Blaine), who helps out at the inn and at one point thinks he might have a chance with Melanie.
True concern builds in the story of Melanie and her sympathetic, affluent real-estate-dealing husband, Paul (Ted Schneider). He has whisked her out of the city and taken her to her charming hometown, New Hope, to recover from a nervous breakdown.
Way too much is going on here, however. Paul seems to be having an affair with his wife’s sister (Anna Wood). The women’s mother (Karen Lynn Gorney, who played the “nice girl” in “Saturday Night Fever”) is generally bitter. A development company is trying to tear down the historic inn. Paul is having a career crisis. There’s a suicide attempt, an institutionalization, an unseen therapist who may be a hallucination, charges of bribery at the local landmarks commission and Paul’s conflict about his humble beginnings, not to mention the elderly innkeeper’s ruminations about a lost love and a ubiquitous painting of Washington crossing the Delaware that ends up being symbolic. One scene turns into a pallid imitation of the torrid hostess-guest encounter in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
When the reason for Melanie’s breakdown is revealed, it is completely anticlimactic. Another revelation, the method she used to manifest her emotional turmoil, is disturbing and sounds a tad misogynistic.
Mr. Roberts and the director, Alex Lippard, eventually present a satisfactory, relevant moral to the story. But they need more time to build the texture of all these characters and their relationships. Barring that, they need to get rid of a few.
