In “This World of Tomorrow,” a nostalgic time-travel romance by Tom Hanks and James Glossman, now at the Shed, the Oscar-winning actor (and novice playwright) plays Bert Allenberry, a tech titan dissatisfied with life in 2089. You can’t blame him: even though his existence looks glossy and smooth, every scene set in the future takes place in an office of some kind—“working remotely” must not have survived the sixth extinction.
We actually meet Bert and his girlfriend, Cyndee (Kerry Bishé), in the past, as they amble around the 1939 World’s Fair, in Queens, which is represented by gliding L.E.D. columns showing pixelated images of, for example, the Lagoon of Nations. (Derek McLane designed both the set and the projections.) Bert’s a boss with vague crises on his hands—he’s worried about “Newtonian sequencing” and the “roadblock on our Vox-PAC.” To help him unwind, thoughtful Cyndee has bought them a quarter-billion-dollar getaway from a boutique firm that can send super-wealthy tourists to a narrow slice of the past: a few hours in New York on June 8, 1939.
On Bert’s first trip, he is transfixed by a gee-whiz sentence he hears on a ride: “The present is but an instant between an infinite past and a hurrying future.” When Bert and Cyndee return to work in 2089—Cyndee is also Bert’s top executive—he repeats the line to his business partner, M-Dash (Ruben Santiago-Hudson). A hurrying future. Bert loves that idea. Enchanted by the technologist optimism of the World’s Fair, Bert returns, several times, alone. On each visit, he meets a local, the beautiful, quietly melancholy Carmen (Kelli O’Hara), and Cyndee is soon forgotten.
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Since Bert observes the events of June 8th more than once, he learns exactly how to approach Carmen—by appealing to her precocious twelve-year-old niece (Kayli Carter). This behavior might seem creepy in a man without Hanks’s courtly charm. Hanks, easy onstage, maintains the kind, sorrowful, listening quality that makes him riveting onscreen, but there’s still something amiss in casting him as a lion of industry surprised by love. He and the exquisite O’Hara, who is twenty years younger and cool as three cucumbers, don’t have much in the way of chemistry. (Both actors are so unmodern and elegant that at least they help us remember couples—Bogie and Bacall! Grant and Kerr!—who did.)
Hanks and Glossman borrowed the “hurrying future” line from a real General Motors attraction at the 1964 World’s Fair; the playwright Edward Reveaux wrote it for the voice-over in the Futurama II ride, a sort of showcase of predicted technologies. In other ways, too, the production seems like it was found in an archive rather than made today—the director, Kenny Leon, uses cinematic, old-timey underscoring (Justin Ellington did the sound design); the gender politics can be a little retro (why is Cyndee always bringing Bert coffee?); and then there’s the anachronistic lead himself. The plot certainly has plenty of Hollywood precedents, from “Somewhere in Time” to various episodes of “Star Trek”; as a theatre piece, it recalls the boulevard romances of the nineteen-twenties. But “This World of Tomorrow” is not a classic—it’s a clunker. The futuro jargon (“I’m continuing a system over-lay on the Inner-Structurals with no conclusions”) forms the worst of it, though the direction and the structure, too, are fatally clumsy.
To write “Tomorrow,” Hanks and Glossman adapted several of Hanks’s own short stories, primarily “The Past Is Important to Us,” which he had long hoped might become a movie. Much of the trouble stems from confusion about how a stage text needs to differ from a screenplay—in the number of locations, the allocation of secondary characters, and so on. And, frankly, Bert just isn’t a good enough part for Hanks. Ever since my afternoon at the Shed, I’ve been mentally casting him elsewhere. We should see his Stage Manager in “Our Town.” Or his Willy Loman.
I do recommend that short story, though, which provides some insight into the odd disjunctions of “Tomorrow.” It makes clear that billionaire Bert is a billionaire cad and that he’s concealing the reason for his trips from Cyndee—in the story, she’s his wife, the “fourth and youngest.” Bert’s sudden interest in Carmen seems like an intoxication with a shiny new thing, mirrored by the way the World’s Fair actually operates as a pageant of commodities. In casting the palpably lovable and decent Hanks, the team had to pivot to a Bert who’s also lovable and decent, but a whiff of that selfish ur-Bert from the story remains. “Their Future then was better than our Present is right now,” Bert tells M-Dash, which is a heck of a thing to say about people in 1939. But Bert’s got a girl to woo, and so the world—this poor, poor world—will have to take care of itself.
There’s something almost Oedipal about the devotion that certain men have to women from the past. Is it notable that Bert is falling in love with a woman of a previous generation? What an undemanding fantasy Carmen is: an old-fashioned Greatest Generation stoic who’s also young and has never heard of women’s lib. What would Freud say about such a relationship? It’s a puzzle. How lucky, then, that we can consult the mother of all such May-December romances, now that this fall’s biggest transfer from the West End has arrived at Studio 54.
In Robert Icke’s crackling “Oedipus,” the director’s rewrite of Sophocles’ great tragedy, the bones remain the same: a prophecy tells Oedipus (Mark Strong), who seems to be a man of nearly boundless good fortune, that he has unknowingly killed his father and slept with his mother. In Icke’s modern version, Oedipus is a candidate on Election Night, on tenterhooks as promising results pour in. Throughout, Icke ramps up the erotic energy between Oedipus and his queen—here political wife—Jocasta (Lesley Manville), even a little past the point of the romance-killing revelation that she’s his mum. (You can buy merch in the lobby that says “Truth Is a Motherfucker,” in case you were worrying about spoilers.)