A stranger comes up to you at a bar or in a train station and starts to tell you a story. How long do you last? Five minutes? Could you tolerate him for ten minutes without looking at your watch? How about ninety?
Impossible. And yet seven times a week at Greenwich Village’s Barrow Street Theater, Campbell Scott accomplishes the feat of standing alone on a stage and absolutely captivating an audience. Scott, one of his generation’s very best (and yet, oddly, in an industry where the fortyish leading man is an endangered species, least famous) actors, plays Augustine Early in a play called The Atheist by the Irish playwright Ronan Noone. Early is a reporter for a newspaper in a small town in Kansas, and he brings to his job far more ambition than scruples. One night he rolls into bed with a pretty girl, and the next morning rolls out of it, and into his main chance. Scott is incredible as he discloses to his increasingly fascinated audience how he manipulates the subject of his investigation. He is, by turns, funny, appalling, sympathetic, repugnant, clever, nasty, deceitful and brutally honest. One of the evening’s best moments comes after the play ends and Scott takes his bows. After holding us in the palm of his hand for an hour and half, we expect him to say more, but Scott just looks at us, and then walks away.We have forgotten that Scott is an actor, and that Augustine Early is not real. How often does that happen any more?