The Kramer
By Jack Helbig
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In The Kramer the admissions director for a small secretarial school, Bart Kramer, becomes obsessed with improving the lives of his rumpled male secretary, Art, and Judy, one of his more repressed and unsuccessful students. The Homage That Follows features dueling meddlers, a formerly self-righteous teacher, Katherine Samuels, and a highly intelligent but low-achieving mathematician turned ranch hand, Archie. (To be fair, Katherine’s meddling days are over by the time the play starts, but Medoff hints that the strident 60s-style radicalism she preached in her classroom lives on in her beautiful, famous, morally confused, chemically-dependent TV-actress daughter, Lucy.)
That the same basic character type would appear again and again in the work of a writer as prolific but essentially uninspired as Medoff is hardly surprising. What’s surprising is how much more skillfully written and fully realized a play The Homage That Follows is than Medoff’s other, earlier works.
The real revelation in this American Blues Theatre production, however, is Patrick McNulty. His subtly graded performance as the mad meddler Archie–one minute charming and seductive, the next certifiable–adds the touch of chaos Medoff’s play needs to be truly compelling. He makes you believe that Archie yearns for Lucy–so much that he’d do anything for her, even kill her. Most terrifying of all, McNulty convinces us that Archie sincerely believes he was right to shoot her down in cold blood.
