A Naked Girl on the Appian Way (2005 - 2005)

At his best (Three Days of Rain), Richard Greenberg milks poignant laughs from the creative and procreative urges of urban sophisticates. At his weakest, he simply congratulates the audience for its sophistication. Naked Girl on the Appian Way falls squarely into the latter category: A forcemeat farce about aging boomer überbeings (Jill Clayburgh and Richard Thomas) coping with the Rome-antics of their adopted multiethnic brood — globalism! capitalism! miscegenation as soft-sold imperialism! — the play is so strenuously now that it already feels like yesterday. No one is helped by the McMansion set, a rambling, overlit ant farm so vast, the actors appear stranded. The whole thing looks like a fever dream Martha Stewart had in prison.