A comedy by Aaron Ginsburg

Directed by Stephen Sunderlin

When does one become an adult? At what point is it time to find a job where you don’t have to wear an apron? Which aisle is the best for meeting women at the grocery store? What ever happened to the Lets Make a Deal donkey? STRAIGHT JACKET & TIE follows three young men in a world where immaturity is the religion and cold beer and pizza are the basic sustenance. Yet, while the characters are decidedly male, the questions the play asks are familiar to us all. The answers are simultaneously hilarious and heartbreaking as the characters flounder in their newfound freedom without the structure of college life. Together, they struggle with everything from picking up women to making rent. When James meets a girl, Scott gets a promotion and Russell sinks deeper into an alcoholic stupor, the three find themselves forced to decide if the time has finally come for them to grow up. This is a show for men to identify with and for women to commiserate about: a play that attempts to put the man back into roMANtic comedy.
Playwright AARON GINSBURG, was a core company member of Kitchen Dog Theater. While there, he directed NOT AS BAD AS THEY SEEM (Dallas Critic Forum Award for Best Direction), BELOW THE BELT (Leon Rabin Award Nomination for Best Set), THE TAMING OF THE SHREW (1998 Jimmy Award), and STRAIGHT JACKET & TIE (Dallas Critic Forum Award for Best New Play). Other plays include: REBOUND & GAGGED (premiered at Kitchen Dog Theatre), ARCHEOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE, NIGHT WORK, and CASUALTY OF MOMENTUM (premiered at Arts Alliance, Chicago, IL). He is currently a screenwriter in Los Angeles and Artistic Director of the Meadows Basement theater company. Before moving to LA, he worked with Craig Lucas and Joe Mantello at the Lincoln Center.

STRAIGHT JACKET & TIE was first produced at Kitchen Dog Theater in association with The McKinney Avenue Contemporary (MAC) in Dallas, "Straight Jacket & Tie" went on to win the Dallas Critic Forum Award for Best New Play and the writer-director, received the 1998 Jimmy Award for Excellence in Theater. It was also produced at the Meadows Basement Theatre in Los Angeles. The LA Play Review had this to say, “The Coming of Age was never so funny (or was it?)…Hilarious” “Very funny! Quick, witty…” The Beverly Hills Outlook. “Humorous and touching…” The Met. "Big laughs... eloquent...it ambushes your funny bone!" The Observer.

STEPHEN SUNDERLIN, Artistic Director of Vital Theatre Company, recently helmed Wedding Pictures by Judy Korotkin, the OOBR Award-winning Shakin' the Mess Outta Misery, Escape from Happiness, Five Women Wearing the Same Dress, To Forgive, Divine, The Philadelphia and Anything for You. Other credits include: Shirley Valentine for Millbrook Playhouse in Mill Hall, PA and Arsenic and Old Lace for the Pioneer Playhouse in Danville, KY.

Featured in the cast are MAYHILL FOWLER, ADAM GROVES, NORM ISAKSSON, JEFF MEACHAM and GEORGE L. SMITH. Sets and lights are by AARON SPIVEY, costumes are by SIDNEY J. SHANNON and sound design is by SIMONE SMITH.

VITAL THEATRE COMPANY celebrates its third anniversary in March of 2002. Since its inception, the company has mounted ten full-length main stage productions, fourteen children’s productions, four installments of Vital Signs (the company's semi-annual festival of new works) and three short-play series. In May of 2000, Vital Theatre Company received the Off Off Broadway Review's Award for Excellence for its production of Shakin' the Mess Outta Misery. For more information on Vital Theatre Company, please visit www.vitaltheatre.org.

“STRAIGHT JACKET & TIE” previews on Thursday, April 4th and opens on Monday, April 8. Performances continue Wednesdays through Saturdays @ 8:00 p.m. and Sundays @ 7:00 p.m. through Saturday, April 27th. Tickets are $15.00, TDF vouchers accepted. For reservations, please call (212) 592-0129 or visit www.vitaltheatre.org. Vital Theatre Company is located at 432 West 42nd Street, 3rd Floor, between 9th and 10th Avenues.

James, one of the three young men at the center of Aaron Ginsburg's smart, intimate comedy Straight Jacket & Tie, tells us that he's been called "sweet" by 5,284 women. Well, I hate to rub salt in his wound, but he is sweet, and so is this play: Straight Jacket & Tie, which is currently at the Vital Theatre, is a warmly comic and honest account of the often perilous road to adulthood. Beautifully directed by Stephen Sunderlin and superbly acted by a cast of five, this charmer will resonate with anyone who has had to come to terms with becoming a grown-up, which is to say almost all of us. It's also one of the best-written and best-produced of this season's crop of off-off-Broadway shows.

Straight Jacket & Tie tells the story of three young men, all a year or two out of college and all keenly aware that, while they are no longer kids, they don't quite seem to be adults yet, either. Russel is in denial: a failed romance and dissatisfaction with the job market have turned him into a despondent couch potato, brooding in front of the TV with the remote in one hand and a cigarette or a beer in the other. Scott has a decent job that he doesn't like, and lives to scam girls in bars or from behind the wheel of his car, his superficiality a mask for uncertainty and, maybe, fear. James, the sweet one, knows that his youthful idea of becoming a professional musician will never come to fruition. Now he spends his days underemployed as a clerk in a bagel shop, and the rest of his time wondering what to do next.

The wonderful thing about Straight Jacket & Tie is that playwright Ginsburg doesn't let his three protagonists linger in their post-adolescent limbo. Sure, he starts off with blackout bits about picking up girls and getting wasted and having pointless discussions like we all had in college (the one about the "empirical truth of Beatles songs" is priceless, by the way). But by the end of Act One, these young men have all pretty much convinced themselves that something is missing from their lives; and by the end of the play's second act, it's clear that each is on his way to finding it. Ginsburg never goes for the obvious or the fake; his characters' progression to maturity feels organic and authentic. And their fates are by no means certain; Straight Jacket & Tie is advertised as the first play in a trilogy, so hopefully we'll eventually find out what happens to these guys later on.

The good news being, as you've probably figured out, that we actually do care what happens. Russel, Scott, and James ring very, very true. Russel's ability to rationalize every move he makes; Scott's growing awareness that the stuff he loved when he was a kid—birthdays and the circus, for example—no longer mean the same thing to him; James's romantically naive search for the perfect woman or job to make his existence complete: this is what young people are really like. Ginsburg' characters breathe; their stories matter.

The play is cleverly built out of dozens of scenes and scene-lets, some so tiny that they contain just one line of dialogue. From these sketches the details of three lives are deftly filled in. Stephen Sunderlin keeps things moving speedily, making expert use of Aaron Spivey's simple unit set and other design elements so that we always instantly know where we are: a pair of stools, a couple of beer bottles, and some loud music cue a pick-up bar; two of those little plastic hand baskets tell us immediately that we're in a grocery store.

The cast does outstanding work. Adam Groves makes Russel believable and even sympathetic. Jeff Meacham navigates Scott's journey from clueless superficiality to something approaching responsible adulthood with intelligence and sensitivity. George L. Smith is enormously appealing as sweet, questing, unsettled James. Mayhill Fowler and Norm Isakkson provide fine support in a variety of smaller roles.

Straight Jacket & Tie, debuting in the busiest month of New York's busiest theatre season in recent memory, could wind up getting lost in the shuffle. It shouldn't: it's a terrific piece of work, and it's been given the production it deserves by the ever-reliable Vital Theatre. And with tickets priced at just $15, it's one of the best bargains in town. So my advice is, the next time you're in the Theatre District this month, bypass TKTS and head over to 432 West 42nd Street instead. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

Enjoy the Blunder Years
by Donald Lyons

April 26, 2002 - -EVERY now and again, a pearl can be spotted on the shores of off-off-Broadway.

There are two more chances - tonight and tomorrow night - to see one of them: "Straight Jacket and Tie" by Aaron Ginsburg.

At first blush, it seems awfully familiar: Three guys in their 20s slouch and moan and swig beer in their messy apartment.

But this is different; it's funny and it's smart.

By using pace and rhythm and quick-scene structure, Ginsburg builds an understanding of these dudes, who occasionally venture out of the apartment to hit the supermarket, a fast-food place and a bar.

In the main, "Straightjacket" is a comic investigation of the pathology of the pad - of talking about looking for women and careers and lives that amount to something.

This is a shrewd, subtle play that shows the patterns of a life can be set in these early years

Tie mostly maintains a breezy comic tone with plenty of day in the life schtick. Nonetheless, throughout his play, gratefully, Ginsburg resists making some of the more obvious choices practically encoded into the genre. Indeed, through surprisingly in-depth character development and some rather startling subtext, the playwright refreshingly sets his tale somewhat apart from the pack of comedies about bachelorhood.

Somewhat.

In Tie, Ginsburg's three bachelors, of course, share a sloppy apartment and a crowning obsession: women. Many predictable outcomes ensue from this scenario, sorry to say, but despite its own measure of predictability, Ginsburg's believable, and often witty characters, also compel you to identify with their struggles. It's indeed difficult not to identify, at least to some degree, with the trio's fear of commitment, fear of women as well as their sometimes churlish ambivalence regarding the expectations society has placed upon them. Stockpiling beer cans and pizza boxes, their apartment is a Custer's last stand against maturity and all it represents. Indeed, one of Ginsburg's bachelors, the chronically unemployed Russell, drinks himself into a stupor every night to perpetuate his own eternal summer. This is hardly the genre's happy drunken bachelor of countless plays past, resorting to pratfalls for laughs.

As for performances, Adam Groves as the surly and sullen Russell, not surprisingly, makes the greatest impression. Uncompromisingly unlikable, Groves' Russell is a disenchanted dark horse and humor, in his hands, is unmistakably a weapon. Through stark contrast to its other characters, Tie also effectively begs greater scrutiny of Russell's shiny, happy roommates, Scott and James. The handsome and personable Scott, this trio's undisputed success story, gets where he's going in life without even needing to chart a destination. Meachum, in response, deftly walks the line between self-assuredness and callousness. Rounding out the three, is George L. Smith who seems tailor-made for James, the resident dreamer, a musician who works at a bagel store and more or less waxes hopeful about not working in a bagel store though he's not sure why.

Stephen Sunderlin, artistic director at Vital, plays up the strengths in Ginsburg's play and turns its weaknesses into strengths when and where he can. For one thing, despite the fact that Tie is a comedy, Ginsburg's punchlines don't always cut it. Sunderlin quickens the pace the play's weaker jokes and likewise play up its stronger comic moments. But while Tie is less funny than it could and should have been, it has enough truth in it to engage and satisfy.

Tie loses its stride somewhat when it turns to women characters for laughs. As adept as Ginsburg is when it comes to making his male characters believable, he falls short when it comes to women. Though he doesn't necessarily resort to stereotypes, he gives them very little to do or say that is memorable. And precisely because Ginsburg is talented, this deficit seems all the more glaring.