Joan Marcus
I Need That
Danny DeVito on Broadway: some welcome razzle-dazzle for the New York fall and winter, perhaps? Bluntly, sadly, no. In Theresa Rebeck’s play, I Need That (Roundabout Theatre Company/American Airlines Theatre, to Dec. 30), DeVito plays Sam, a widower who lives surrounded by clutter—his living room more a submarine of tottering piles of objects. Furniture is hidden, blanketed, and camouflaged under bric-a-brac.
The play, directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel, asks what will it take for Sam to reform his ways, and clean up—especially with the threat of having his home taken away from him. Can his friend Foster (Ray Anthony Thomas) and daughter Amelia (Lucy DeVito, DeVito’s own daughter) help shift Sam out of his hoarding-like road to nowhere?