'Linda Vista' Review: A Womanizer Who Devastates as He Charms

Played with immense, shaggy charm — and anger to match — by Ian Barford in a performance that reminds you of how brilliantly bruising Steppenwolf acting can be, this charismatic loser is named Wheeler. Actually, it’s Dick Wheeler, but he prefers to dispense with the first name, perhaps on the theory that it’s better not to provide too many clues to your essential nature.

When we first see Wheeler, he’s moving into new digs in San Diego, with the help of his best friend, Paul (Jim True-Frost), schlepping boxes and overstuffed bags with the sloppy casualness of college boys returning to campus. Never mind that Wheeler is 50.

Their conversation, too, has a sophomoric ring, as they debate the right word for big breasts, like the pair on one of Wheeler’s co-workers. And there’s a hilarious riff on their teenage crush on Ali MacGraw, who, Paul says, confessed to being a sex addict in her memoir.

Is this talk too sexist for comfort? Wheeler might argue that he and Paul are just goofing (sort of), that they’re also enlightened 21st-century men who understand that some kinds of behavior regarding the opposite sex are no longer cool. You can sense that kind of self-consciousness at work when he’s talking to women.

Anyway, Wheeler — a word snob who has a gift for stating home truths that nobody else dares utter — soon has the audience in the palm of his 11 1/2-sized hand. And when discussing a group of possible Trump voters, he declaims, “you cannot be friends with these people,” the theater bursts into applause.

Now cut to a scene early in the second act when Wheeler, on a date in a restaurant, ends a promising relationship with a brusque, simple sentence that lands like a lethal karate chop. This time, the audience gasps in something like horror. It won’t be the last time it does so.

This gasp-inducing moment was exactly when I decided that Letts’ latest play, directed with astutely varied pacing and room for rage by Dexter Bullard, was going to be a lot more interesting than I had thought. Up to that point, I had worried that the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “August: Osage County” was simply reanimating a tired literary formula.

By that, I mean the tale of the clever, existentially challenged womanizer staring down the second half of his life. Traditionally, he’s a man we can’t help enjoying no matter how badly he behaves because he wallows so eloquently in his own pain. And as he keeps racking up the sexual conquests, a part of us is meant to cheer him on.

My dad had shelves of novels about such men — written by Kingsley Amis, John Updike and Philip Roth. Similar types regularly stalked Broadway and the West End, in plays by dramatists as different as Simon Gray (“Butley,” “Otherwise Engaged”), Alan Ayckbourn (“The Norman Conquests”) and Neil Simon (“Jake’s Women”).

Letts, for the record, has already explored this much-tilled territory in his Pulitzer-shortlisted “Man From Nebraska,” seen here in 2017 (and, like “Linda Vista,” a Second Stage presentation.) That, though, was a lyrical and oblique work that heard the abyss of nonexistence roaring within long silences. “Linda Vista” is as packed with nasty zingers as an HBO sitcom. And in the production’s first half I worried that Letts might be hoping to fill the vacuum left by the death of Simon, the lucrative master of the breezy comedy of anxiety.

Before Letts swam into the mainstream with “August,” he was a master of pitch-dark comedies that measured the grisliest depths of human behavior (“Killer Joe,” “Bug”). I am happy to report that this side of him is alive and squirming in “Linda Vista.”

Here are the bare bones of its familiar-sounding plot: Wheeler, in the midst of a protracted divorce and estranged from (and seemingly uninterested in) his 13-year-old son, moves into his own place, an apartment complex (as squalidly sterile as such environments can be, in Todd Rosenthal’s set, lighted without mercy by Marcus Doshi).

Wheeler was once a photographer for a Chicago newspaper, but now repairs cameras in a storefront shop. He presents himself picturesquely as a born loser and is delighted when a young woman in a bar offers this quick-sketch character portrait: “Let me guess. You’re a deadbeat, work a dead-end job, married — no wait, divorced — hate your wife and kids, hate everybody, depressed, can’t get laid, your body’s breaking down, the only thing that still runs is your mouth.”

Pretty accurate. Except it turns out Wheeler can get laid. There are four female characters in “Linda Vista,” and you suspect that he has either bedded, or will bed, every one of them. And that despite his failing hip and fatuous flippancy during emotional crises, he’ll always find women who want him. And oh, the pity of it.

The women we meet in “Linda Vista” (and though that’s what Wheeler’s neighborhood is called, doesn’t it sound like the ultimate girlfriend?) are a diverse lot. And they are blessed with a self-preserving intelligence that always keeps them this side of social caricature.

They are beautifully portrayed by Sally Murphy (as Margaret, Paul’s wife); Cora Vander Broek (Jules, a professional life coach and Margaret’s good friend); Caroline Neff (Anita, who works in the shop with Wheeler); and Chantal Thuy (Minnie, a 20-something American-Vietnamese rockabilly chick). Two of them, I should warn you, appear with Barford in stark-naked, tragicomic sex scenes that elicit the awkwardness and loneliness of human erotic congress.

It feels fitting that the women outnumber the men here, who are rounded out by Wheeler’s boss, Michael (Troy West), who is so creepily sexist he makes Wheeler look saintly. And each female character, in her own way, has learned how to navigate an environment that has been polluted by misogyny.

Such an attitude is atmospheric in “Linda Vista,” and it manifests in an assortment of casual cultural references: to a true crime television show (about a sex slave in a basement); comic book superhero movies; humiliation porn; and that monumental work of navel gazing, “My Struggle” by Karl Ove Knausgaard.

Wheeler, it must be said, has plenty of acidic comments to make about such phenomena. Sure, he’s a perpetually randy man, but he gives great lip service to the more reasonable forms of political correctness. And though he can be lacerating to others, he’s hardest of all on himself.

How could you not fall for this self-flagellating, frustrated artist, who looks, as one woman puts, it “like a turtle who doesn’t know he’s lost his shell”? But don’t make the mistake of equating vulnerability with harmlessness.

The play, you see, memorably includes several gut-wrenching occasions when Barford’s Wheeler flips his appealingly grouchy persona to reveal a black hole of ugly, flailing, desperate narcissism. As it ends, he is making a passive-aggressive pitch to yet another woman, to whom he has acted as a sort of white knight. And even with us knowing what we know, he remains as charming as ever.

I asked the woman with whom I saw the play if she thought Wheeler would make a conquest of this last character. “Oh, absolutely,” she responded. She sounded angry.

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‘Linda Vista’: Through Nov. 10 at the Hayes Theater, Manhattan; 212-246-4422, 2st.com. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes.

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