SHOWS FOR DAYS: A Midsummer Night's Drone.

Memory play and coming of age story about the making of a writer as well as an affectionate look at community theater: Douglas Carter Beane's Shows For Days embraces all these genres - and, somehow, they all slip through his fingers.

Shows For Days, at the Vivian Beaumont, recalls the playwright's introduction to the stage at a community theater in Reading, PA when he was fourteen. Not coincidentally, it also concerns his first experience with either love or lust, we're not sure. Memory plays are irresistible to writers because it allows them to depict their young selves as either heroes, victims or some touching amalgam of both. Depicting themselves being the operative words. They are also usually done late in the writer's career when, can we talk, they have more memories than new ideas. All of which seems to be true here. There's usually no plot to this type of play, but that function is usually overtaken by a wealth of affectionately drawn, larger-than-life characters. Shows For Days has neither. A glaring absence considering the presence of Patti LuPone, someone who can play to the last row in a concert hall and still feel pinched.

In Mr. Beane's defense, he avoids the traps of nostalgia and sentimentality. Not that either is necessarily bad, but they can easily overwhelm a play like Shows For Days and the writers who are good with them are usually the ones who specialize in them. Beane, instead, is known for the sophisticated wit and social comment of As Bees In Honey Drown. Nothing like that here, either. The closest Douglas Carter Beane gets to ginning up some excitement is threatening the theater 
in which the story takes place with demolition. Yet, if the if the offstage sound of trees being chopped down in Chekhov's, The Cherry Orchard is up here, then the repeated offstage sound of a wrecking ball in Shows For Days is, well, down here.

Is Mr. Beane being overly faithful to events or too respectful of his old colleagues? Who can say? The result, however, is a show for dozing,
not days.