Prodigal Son

Playwright and director John Patrick Shanley ("Doubt," "Outside Mullingar") takes his childhood to the stage in his semi-autobiographical new play "Prodigal Son," now playing at Manhattan Theatre Club's New York City Center Stage I.

The play takes as its hero Jim Quinn (Timoth�e Chalamet), a brilliant but troubled teenager from the Bronx who gets the opportunity to enroll in the prestigious Thomas More Preparatory School in New Hampshire. English professor Alan Hoffman (Robert Sean Leonard) serves as a mentor to Quinn while headmaster Carl Schmitt (Chris McGarry) questions the boy's place in the school as he relentlessly drinks, does drugs, steals, lies and challenges the beliefs spouted by those in the school. Despite Quinn's misbehavior and the grief he causes his fellow students and administration, Hoffman, Schmitt and others remain intrigued by the boy's intellect and views.

The staging of the production -- the set design and lighting in particular -- at New York City Center Stage I is beautiful: bare, skeletal trees frame the stage, while polished hardwood and paneled windows abound, giving every scene the quaint, domestic feel of a New England home. A stately mansion, serving as a visual for Thomas More Preparatory School, stands in the background on an elevated portion of the stage, perpetually in the distance, with a few lights shining through its windows. The music, too -- slow, folky, guitar-driven numbers composed by none other by Paul Simon -- falls in perfectly with the plaintive nostalgia of the show.

The play, though its premise is not exactly original (a young man, smart but troubled, from a working class background finds himself in upper class surroundings and educators vie for his soul), appeals to the intellect of its audience. Quinn spouts poetry by William Ernest Henley and Walt Whitman while questioning the Catholic beliefs in original sin and free will. He sees and speaks in metaphor, taking the typical adolescent worries about identity and self-worth and complicating them with broader existential questions that still manage to feel natural to the scenes, despite their philosophical weight.

Unfortunately, these themes, tackled more in breadth than in depth, tend to complicate the play in a way that, at times, does it a disservice; the play seems to want to invest itself in the story of its protagonist at this point in his life, which, presumably, is a nexus of change, or at least a point in time that provides the opportunity for change, but it's so preoccupied in exhibiting Quinn's uniqueness and brilliance that it becomes distracted by the large philosophical questions it uses to demonstrate that. By the end of the play, what are we to make of these discussions about free will and identity? Not enough to make those discussions feel like much more than a means to an end.

The play's singular focus on Quinn also makes the other characters pale in comparison. In several instances during the show, the interior depths of a character is told rather than shown -- and even "depths" is a bit inaccurate, as in the case of Hoffman, Schmitt and his wife, we are told exactly one detail about the characters meant to illuminate the nature of their interaction with Quinn.

There is nothing to them outside of what applies to Quinn. Of course, this may also be a function of the play being navigated by Quinn's memories. After all, the play comes from the limited perspective that comes with any true account of a person's life, and Shanley is aware of this limitation. He makes himself very present in the telling of his story; he shows his hand in the final scene, attempting a Prospero-esque, self-reflexive speech from the future -- from a self outside of the play, as the playwright, as the one who can manipulate time and characters. But the scene ends up feeling like a summation, a last-ditch effort to provide a peek into the future for these characters, whose resolutions haven't been earned.

Time, too, is problematic in this play for that reason. Quinn directs the movement from one period of time to another, announcing a new year as he enters the scene. In this way, Shanley tries to encompass three years within the play, but there is not always a true sense of time having passed. We are simply told when time has passed and when relationships evolve, as in the descriptions of the mentorship and support Hoffman has shown for Quinn -- though the actual scenes in which we see Hoffman and Quinn interact are minimal.

While Chalamet, Leonard, and McGarry ably represent their respective characters, there is the occasional disconnect on the stage, when the individuals don't easily or comfortably engage with each other in the scenes. By the end, however, particularly in a fiery scene between Schmitt and Quinn, the actors seemed to have invested more in the scenes with each other.

"Prodigal Son" is engaging in its themes, but unfortunately, parts of it, like that same thematic discourse, suffer from being too much, while other parts, like character exposition, are not enough.

"Prodigal Son" runs through March 20 at New York City Center Stage I, 131 W. 55th St., New York. For information or tickets, call 212-581-1212 or visit nycitycenter.org.