Does "Deuce" double-fault? Advantage Lansbury.

I don't know any of Terrence McNally's prior work, but I'd been hearing bad things about Some Men, his play currently at 2nd Stage and Deuce, the new star vehicle for Marian Seldes and for Angela Lansbury's long-awaited return to Broadway. I'd heard such negative things about Deuce's first week in previews, that I was afraid I would be totally unsatisfied with seeing the play, which I had so wanted to be good from the moment I heard the cast announced and the subject matter - women's doubles tennis, which I'm quite fond of. The play is in previews, so what I saw was a work in progress, but I think it's too late to solve some of the play's problems.

The play concerns a women's doubles team, Midge Barker (Seldes) and Leona Mullen (Lansbury), who have reunited in the stands of the U.S. Open to be honored for their record-breaking careers. Accompanied by the distracting pops of tennis balls and the constant snapping of heads in order to follow the game, the two partners begin to speak about the past. Leona is reluctant; the past is behind her. But somehow the two can't help themselves, and soon enough it's as good as if they were back in the clubhouse 30 years ago. The two recall their marriages and their careers, which stopped just short of a Grand Slam title when Leona double-faulted at the Australian Open. Regret and remembrance are the themes of the evening. This is set out clearly to start with and carried throughout.

And when the two women are left to bandy their dialogue back and forth on their lackluster tennis court set, the play is fulfilling. There's nothing too noteworthy about McNally's dialogue, but watching Lansbury and Seldes go head-to-head transcends what they're given to say. They discuss how tennis used to be, before corporate sponsorship and the homogenization of the game. They discuss lesbianism in tennis and the great trailblazers for women in the sport. Sometimes things become a little too sentimental, but the audience is watching a play starring the legendary Angela Lansbury, who is back on Broadway for the first time in twenty years and may (who knows) never return again, so sentimentalism seems appropriate.

By the end of the play, Angela Lansbury, I realized, had made me believe her character. In the penultimate moments of the play, Lansbury calls out to one of the young players not to let her mistakes become her lifelong regrets, and, as I felt a few tears accumulate in my eyes, I realized I was crying for Angela Lansbury's character, not the actress, as I had feared.

Where the play fails is in introducing too many superfluous secondary characters. The play is about the doubles partners and no one else. McNally brings in two sports commentators, Ryan and Kelly, whose names I hadn't come to know well enough to recall them off-hand. They delivered stock tennis commentary in order to show the contrast between the new ways of tennis and the old. Boring. Also introduced is "An Admirer," played by the likable Michael Mulheren. He's amiable enough, but his purpose is simply to be the fan who comments on how there will never be anyone quite like these two women. Unless cast members are unexpectedly fired before opening night, there's no way to fix the problem of these set piece characters. Their diversion of attention wasn't enough to ruin the play for me, just a nuisance, but the play would be much tighter without an interruption to the build in the relationship between Midge and Leona. Their histories are strong enough and the topics discussed are pertinent enough that we don't need outside characters to tell us what we should be thinking. We're already thinking it.

As the lights dimmed on the play, the final line of dialogue is delivered by the character of the admirer, and it's a line specifically written to plumb the founts of audience tears, and it works, or at least it did for me and for the woman behind me. This time around, I felt I had been slightly cheated as an audience member, ribbed along by an easy sentimental punch in the kisser, but I was happy enough that the play had even gone so far as to move me that much - once genuinely and once contrivedly - that it didn't bother me too much.

I have to say, despite some flaws in the writing, Deuce was still a fulfilling night at the theatre. With lesser actresses, the play would most likely be a dud, but it has some important things to say about aging and how we treat older people in our society that should not be overlooked. These subjects could have been plumbed immeasurably more, but what we get as an audience is still thought-provoking. In the end, it's a chance to see Angela Lansbury back where she belongs on Broadway. And in that department, Deuce doesn't double-fault.

I got the chance to meet the lovely Ms. Lansbury after the show, and she was just as charming as you'd imagine. She looked quite spritely and was dressed in a fetching tweed jacket. I joked that we should have brought tennis balls for her to sign (a reference to a line in the play), and she came back with, "Don't think I would've signed it." Made me laugh. She's a class act.

On another note, I went to see the "Friends of Roundabout" reading of Christopher Durang's play The Marriage of Bette and Boo at the Laura Pels Theatre on Monday. The reading starred Sigourney Weaver, Tyne Daly, T.R. Knight, Jame Naughton, Dick Latessa, and others, all talented. I have to say it was one of the funniest plays I've experienced in a while, and the audience seemed pretty uniformly to be loving it. The acting was great all around, with particular merit to be given to Heather Goldenhersh's quirky performance and Broadway legend Dick Latessa's side-splitting impersonation of a strip of bacon a frying pan. The cast was uniformly excellent, and I'd be surprised not to see this gem of a play on one of Roundabout's upcoming season rosters.