Review: The Minutes
Tracy Letts, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and Tony Award-winning actor, displays both his talents in his new play, The Minutes, now at Studio 54 on Broadway. Using just one set and one scene, The Minutes, describes a city council meeting during a stormy night in the small town of Big Cherry. A newcomer to the city council, Mr. Peel, played by Noah Reid (best known as David Schitt’s partner in Schitt’s Creek), comes to the meeting after missing the previous one, due to his mother’s death. In trying to catch up, he runs into a wall of obfuscation: why is another member apparently removed from the council, why are the minutes from the last meeting not available, and what else is going on in the town?
The political shenanigans aren’t as sinister as, say Chinatown, but they still offer dark commentary on human nature and our current society. Letts, a native of Oklahoma who blossomed as a member of Chicago’s famed Steppenwolf Theater, has drawn on both locales in his plays, three of which I’ve seen. The Minutes, set somewhere in the Midwest, doesn’t have the complex scale or drama of his Pulitzer Prize-winning play (and film) August: Osage County, but, like the Uptown Chicago neighborhood of Superior Donuts, it draws on a specific setting and has lots of humor.
In 90 minutes without intermission The Minutes is bifurcated between a hilarious first half and a very serious second half. The characters, identified only by their last names in parliamentary protocol, are certain kinds of stereotypes – such as the self-important Ms. Innes (Blair Brown), the doddering Mr. Oldfield (Austin Pendleton), the wishy-washy Mr. Blake (K. Todd Freeman), or the noncommittal city clerk (Jessie Mueller) – yet in the hands of consummate professionals they are totally believable, if dysfunctional.
Letts, who won a Tony as George in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and acclaim as a Senator in Homeland, is convincing as the mayor. He’s a canny politician playing his cards close to his vest and comfortable playing power games. He’ll invoke Roberts Rules of Order when necessary, yet humor the council members with their pet projects and their petty grievances. As Peel’s relentless questioning starts to upstage discussion of a statue in a fountain or a way to make money for the Big Cherry Heritage Festival (a steel cage “Lincoln Smackdown” – don’t ask), things take a darker turn.
“Democracy is messy,” the mayor tells Peel, but the true heritage of Big Cherry is deceiving. The high school mascot, the Savages, turns out to be a symbol of the town’s heritage in an unexpected way. As Peel leaves in disgust, the meeting devolves into a bizarre war dance, led by the mayor. What had seemed like an argument about cancel culture reveals a tribal unity in the end, and the lights intermittently flickering during the storm are a metaphor for the failure of democracy.
In an epigraph of the script, Letts quotes Black Elk: “And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud and was buried in the blizzard. A people's dream died there. It was a beautiful dream.”
Does the sheer entertainment of the first half outweigh the surreal, heavy-handed imagery at the end? Some folks might say no, but you might find the quality of Letts’s dialogue and the quality of the cast still make for an enjoyable, thought-provoking evening.