In her new play, The Pain of My Belligerence, Halley Feiffer lays bare the chaotic tRump era. Taking place on three successive presidential election days (2012, 2016 and 2020), the bluntly-titled black comedy takes the measure of an emotionally abusive relationship between New Yorker writer Cat and the obnoxious, narcissistic Guy, who has a wife and two young daughters at home. This “charmer” makes tRump himself look angelic, and as Feiffer writes him and Hamish Linklater plays him, he’s a roguish bad boy with no redeeming features except an astonishingly self-confident arrogance. Of course—as we see in the first scene, which chronicles their first date—Cat doesn’t mind his physical pushiness, foulmouthed racist and sexist remarks and sexually charged innuendos: despite feigning disgust, she ends up hungrily falling into his arms.

The second scene is set four years later, and Cat is sick and bedridden, her toxic relationship with Guy and tRump’s candidacy physically and mentally affecting her. Guy shows up bearing groceries (or, as Linklater pronounces it, “grosh-eries”) and the two continue their mind games of nasty insults and self-pitying behavior, punctuated by bouts of oral sex and—after Cat turns on the TV to see that tRump will probably win the election—full-fledged intercourse.

Four years after that, the third scene chronicles Election Day, 2020. Guy’s wife, Yuki—whom Cat had interviewed years earlier, which led to that fateful first date—and one of their daughters greet Cat at their home. Cat is there to ostensibly interview Yuki again but actually to discover what happened to Guy after he stopped visiting her. It turns out that Yuki has also been damaged by her relationship with Guy; they have passed on their emotional and physical baggage to their two daughters. Yet, in an improbably happy (or at least bittersweet) ending, Cat and Yuki become friends of a sort, and there’s a glimmer of hope for the future—whether or not tRump is reelected.

Feiffer has (as she admits in her program note) taken on a lot to fit into her play’s 75-minute running time. Cat, like the playwright herself, has Lyme disease and awful experiences and relationships with men. But such autobiographical details don’t necessarily translate into thought-provoking theater. The characters’ one-note toxicity might be truthful, but Feiffer has been unable to balance that with any crucial insights into or observations about them: just having one or another of them say something belligerent followed by the exclamation “joking!” does not count.

The play ends up as an endurance test: if you can stomach these people and their self-destructive ways, then you might get more out of it. In the end, it works best as an actors’ exercise: the onrushing back-and-forth dialogue is especially intricately worked out by Feiffer and Linklater, as are the sexual acrobatics they engage in. You applaud the performers, but not what they’re performing.

Trip Cullum directs with his usual precision and the fearless Feiffer is unafraid to present herself naked emotionally and physically, both as playwright and performer. Too bad that doesn't make The Pain of My Belligerence any less desultory.

The Pain of My Belligerence

Playwrights Horizons, 416 West 42nd Street, New York, NY

playwrightshorizons.org

John Guare’s streak of playful absurdism makes even his lesser works enjoyable to watch unfold onstage. That’s the case with his latest, Nantucket Sleigh Ride, whose breezy title—a whaling phrase describing the wild ride a harpooned whale could dangerously take those hunting it down on—winks at its protagonist’s own journey. Edmund “Mundie” Gowery is a successful—read: ruthless—Wall Street trader who authored a single hit play, Internal Structure of Stars, some four decades ago: when we meet him, he’s giddy that he’s become a clue in the New York Times crossword puzzle. (57 Across: 1970s playwright. 6 Letters.) When two zombie-like adults, Poe and Lilac, enter his office, his memories of a long-ago summer flood back and we enter his past; or, at least, how he supposedly remembers it.

Gowery’s summer of ‘75 concerns a home in Nantucket his lawyer talks him into buying with the proceeds from his play: the police call with the news that his tenants are part of a child pornography ring and that he may be implicated since he’s the owner. Dropping everything in New York, he arrives in Nantucket and meets a whole cast of characters: 9-year-old Poe and his 7-year-old sister Lilac; their father, Schuyler; their mother’s (supposed) lover, McPhee; and a Nantucket police officer. The children’s mother and Schyuler’s wife, Elsie, is the catalyst for the entire plot: she staged a production of Mundie’s play and, when she called to let him know that, he nastily denigrated what he considered its amateurishness. Mundie believes that she may have designed an elaborate revenge scheme against him revolving around his shady tenants.

Guare delights in such farcical plotting, which variously includes Magritte, vengeance, adultery, suicide, pedophilia (Roman Polanski is mentioned in a subplot about Mundie’s next possible project) and possible murder; there are even pop-up appearances by the great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges and Walt Disney himself (!), as well as references to Jaws, both book and movie, which ruled that summer’s beach reading and box office. How does it all fit together? Guare really never answers that question, but his breathless journey through Mundie’s (and his own?) possible past is often exhilarating, at times reminiscent of the sleight-of-hand that distinguishes his best work, i.e., The House of Blue Leaves, Six Degrees of Separation, A Few Stout Individuals and Landscape of the Body.

A huge assist comes from Jerry Zaks, whose dizzyingly precise direction is always on Guare’s offbeat wavelength, sorting out the strangely compelling story strands and characters and sending them on their merry way. Paul Gallo’s arresting two-tiered set adroitly visualizes the fragmented states of Mundie’s memory, while the estimable supporting cast is led by Will Swenson’s amped-up McPhee, German Jaramillo’s amusingly deadpan Borges, and Clea Alsip and Tina Benko’s hilarious turns as women in Mundie’s messy life.

Standing front and center, John Laroquette plays Mundie with an infectious enthusiasm as he makes every utterance and inflection, however slight, drip with caustic meaning. A peerless guide frantically leading us through Mundie’s mind, Laroquette even gives Guare’s final bit of dialogue about self-recognition a weariness that’s quite touching, an unexpectedly emotional capstone to a bizarre but buoyant trip down memory lane.

Blu-rays of the Week 

(Criterion)

In Jan Němec’s dazzling 1964 debut feature, two young men escape a train heading to a Nazi concentration camp during a tense and seemingly endless night. A mere 67 minutes, Němec’s black-and-white classic is as taut and tight as a drum, and its inventiveness (marrying ultra-realism to surrealism) made it a spectacular addition to the then-burgeoning Czech New Wave.

Criterion’s hi-def transfer is luminous; extras include a 2009 Němec interview, documentary short about the director and his 1960 student thesis film A Loaf of Bread.

Columbus

(Oscilloscope)

In director Kogonada’s feature debut, the town of Columbus, Indiana—filled with architectural treasures designed by the likes of Eero Saarinen—is the star of a subdued but superficial exploration of two characters (a local architectural aficionado and the stranded son of an architectural scholar) who stumble into a connection.

Kogonada smartly lets his two fine actors, Haley Lu Richardson and John Cho, do the heavy lifting, which makes his minimalist aesthetic less enervating that it might otherwise be. There’s a superior hi-def transfer; extras include deleted scenes, actors’ commentary and Kogonada’s short Columbus Story.

Farinelli 

Gérard Corbiau’s 1994 costume drama isn’t much interested in history—it’s mainly fictional—as it tells the incredible-but-only-partly-true story about the celebrated 18th century Italian castrato whose remarkably high, rich voice made him famous and even feted by such an important composer as Handel.

Exquisite-looking, well-acted and impeccably staged, the film is best watched as a juicy, gossipy guilty pleasure with the added cache of a “serious” subject (i.e., opera). There’s an excellent hi-def transfer; extras include a making-of featurette and on-set interviews.

On Her Shoulders 

(Oscilloscope)

Director Alexandria Bombach’s affecting study follows Nadia Murad, a 23-year-old from Iraq forced into sex slavery by ISIS who since her escape has become a tireless activist, speaking about what happened to her and others at the U.N. and around the world.

Bombach’s documentary movingly shows how unexpected celebrity (becoming a U.N. ambassador and, following the filming of this, a Nobel Peace Prize) affects a young woman previously content to live her life in a small Iraqi village and records her inner strength as she takes on the scars, pain and hopes of countless others like her. There’s a crisp hi-def transfer; lone extra is a Bombach interview.

Replicas 

In this sub-Twilight Zone thriller, Keanu Reeves plays a neuroscientist who recklessly breaches the law and medical ethics when he creates clones of his wife and children after they are killed in a car accident.

A promising idea is given a thoroughly and disappointingly routine treatment by director Jeffrey Nachmanoff, despite a few impressive special effects sequences. The film looks fine on Blu; extras are commentary with Nachmanoff and executive producer James Dodson; featurette Imprint Complete: The Making of ‘Replicas’; and deleted scenes.

DVD of the Week

School of Life 

(Distrib US/Icarus)

The circle of life is the subject of this warmhearted drama about a young orphan boy whose arrival at a French country estate causes anger between and rifts among family members—and, eventually, understanding and healing.

Director Nicolas Vanier is not afraid to flirt with soap opera, but the sentiment is earned by a strong cast (Francois Cluzet, Valérie Karsenti, Eric Elmosnino and young Jean Scandel) that’s in top form and a loving visualization of how these people coexist with nature makes for an unusually satisfying two hours.

CD of the Week 

(Quartz)

German composer Paul Hindemith was prolific in genres ranging from operas and ballets to concertos and chamber music, the latter making up this superb recital disc by two Moscow-born musicians, violinist Roman Mints and pianist Alexander Korbin.

Playing Hindemith’s complete works for violin and piano—with the passionate “Kleine sonata” for viola d’amore and piano included as a bonus—the duo handles this expressive, at times knotty music with perfect precision. The four violin sonatas might be the most substantial works, but even 1936’s Trauermusik and 1938’s Meditation from the great Hindemith ballet score Nobilissima Visione throb with feeling and virtuosic technique.