Adam Driver hits all the right notes

Celebrities, they’re just like us! At least they want to be just like us. Or at least they think they want to be just like us. Which brings us to Strings McCrane, the country music superstar at the center of Kenneth Lonergan’s Hold on to Me Darling, now playing at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in New York City.

When we meet Strings (played by Adam Driver), he is having an existential crisis after the death of his mother and is considering giving up all the fame and fortune to life a simple salt of the earth life. In this case, that also means finding a simple, non-celebrity girlfriend (a hotel massage therapist or second cousin twice removed will do) and a simple job (working at the local feed store sounds good).

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But while Strings’ motives at least appear pure, it soon becomes clear that the world-famous singer and actor still acts like number one on the call sheet of life, treating everyone in his orbit as collateral damage to his wildly impulsive whims, whether it be his personal assistant Jimmy (Keith Nobbs), who listens intently to every Strings melodrama… yet is quickly cut off when he attempts to add his own personal story; the masseuse Nancy (Heather Burns), who leaves her husband and daughters to fly to the funeral… yet is then left alone in a hotel room; or cousin Essie (Adelaide Clemens), who asks not to be drawn in and discarded by the mercurial Strings… and then is anyway.

Lonergan’s play was originally staged in 2016 in another intimate off-Broadway house, at the Atlantic Theater Company’s Linda Gross Theater. That version shared the same director (Neil Pepe), the same rotating sets by Walt Spangler, and even half of the same cast, with Nobbs, Clemens, and CJ Wilson as Strings’ Pabst Blue Ribbon-crushing brother Duke all pulling double-duty. The biggest difference between the two productions is Strings himself. The protagonist was originally played by Timothy Olyphant. Already well established by that point as something of a cowboy character thanks to roles on Deadwood and Justified, Olyphant portrayed Strings as a more easy, breezy character who used his laidback charm offensive as a stealth weapon to get others to go along with his myriad romantic and professional schemes.

Driver, on the other hand, brings a more up-tempo charismatic intensity that will be unsurprising to anyone that has seen his onscreen work in everything from Girls to Star Wars. Even McCrane’s head-to-toe black attire (including the black boxer briefs he dons for the massage) can’t help but give Strings a bit of a country western Kylo Ren vibe — another character, it should be noted, who struggled through inner turmoil over his proper place in the galaxy. (Watching Driver as Strings lament being ordered by the studio to get back to set for work on that “goddamn space movie” certainly hits on more than one level for the audience.)

Not only is Driver completely convincing as a celebrity in crisis completely unaware of how his actions and impulses impact those around him, but the Emmy nominee for his hosting work on Saturday Night Live is also master of comedic inflection and timing — knowing just how long to hold a pause and what decibel to deliver a laugh-inducing reply, and there are plenty in Hold on to Me Darling.

The rest of the cast matches Driver’s game. Clemens especially shines as the weary-yet-lonely cousin Essie, a woman who has also suffered a recent tragic loss (two of them, actually) and is fighting against her own impulse to trust Strings and all his idyllic promises. The biggest emotional gut punch comes not from anything that happens to Strings, but when Essie is predictably cast aside as yet another pawn in the crooner’s game of high-minded self-absorption.

Of course, that’s a problem too. The entire structure of the story makes it difficult to care too deeply for the main character, which is why a tender and well-performed final scene between Strings and a person named Mitch (the always engaging Frank Wood, in a role we won’t spoil here) does not land the poignant climax it was clearly designed to deliver. For a play that lasts over three hours — don’t believe the advertised two-hour-and-40-minute runtime — that lack of depth is certainly an issue, but is also perhaps appropriate in terms of mirroring the lack of depth when it comes to the man himself. Like Jimmy, Nancy, Essie, and Duke, you too as an audience member may find yourself sucked into Strings’ orbit, and then left wanting a bit at the end. Grade: B+