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    Adam Driver in ‘Hold On to Me Darling,’ a Satire of Sincerity

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    A country music star embodies the clichés of celebrity in an Off Broadway revival of Kenneth Lonergan’s 2016 comedy.Women fall hard and fast for Strings McCrane, the “third biggest crossover star in the history of country music.” He dates supermodels “at will.” Fangirls who flirt with him at night send him sex tapes in the morning. A hotel masseuse, kneading his sculptural glutes, exclaims: “I’ve had a crush on you since I was in trade school.”Playgoer, he marries her. But not before seducing a young relative at his mother’s funeral. Coming clean to the masseuse, he later owns his indiscretion. “I went to see Essie as a cousin,” he says. “But I stayed there with her as a man.”Did the clichés of country music make Strings (Adam Driver) such a melodramatic, self-justifying, emotional boomerang? Or are his pre-existing gifts in that department what made him a country music star in the first place?These are among the questions you may find yourself asking, in want of much else to do, while watching the baggy, overlong “Hold On to Me Darling,” a comedy by Kenneth Lonergan now being revived at the Lucille Lortel Theater. Well, not so much revived as — like Strings’s mother — embalmed.Other than a few cast changes, most notably Driver in the role first played by Timothy Olyphant, the show is pretty much what it was when it debuted at the Atlantic Theater Company in 2016. The physical production looks as if it had been preserved since then in mothballs, with the same cramped, slowly revolving set by Walt Spangler. The few tweaks to the script are almost invisible. Neither Lonergan nor the director, Neil Pepe, seems to have felt the need for refinement.And why should they have? Lonergan has proved himself a terrific dramatist many times over: “This Is Our Youth,” “The Waverly Gallery,” “Lobby Hero.” This play, too, was well received by most critics, if not by me. It is certainly funny in places, and droll in others; it is occasionally even stinging in its satire of show-business sincerity. We learn that Strings’s most recent celebrity fiancée, making “a statement of solidarity and sexual enlightenment on behalf of the women of Afghanistan,” wore a see-through mesh burqa on a junket there.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Adam Driver Is to Star Off Broadway as a Country-Western Singer

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      The actor will return to the stage this fall in a revival of Kenneth Lonergan’s “Hold On to Me Darling.”Adam Driver, a Broadway alumnus and prolific film and television actor best known for “Girls” and “Star Wars,” will return to the stage this fall to portray a narcissistic country-western singer in a limited-run Off Broadway comedy.The play, “Hold On to Me Darling,” was written by Kenneth Lonergan, an accomplished playwright (“The Waverly Gallery”), screenwriter and film director (he won an Oscar for the “Manchester by the Sea” screenplay).In “Hold On to Me Darling,” the main character decides to move home to Tennessee after his mother dies. The collision of a big star and a small town fuel the comedy of the play, which was first staged in 2016 at Atlantic Theater Company, an Off Broadway nonprofit.The new production, a commercial endeavor, is to begin previews Sept. 24 and open Oct. 16 at the Lucille Lortel Theater in the West Village. The run is scheduled to last just 13 weeks, although sometimes limited-run plays are extended.The production will be directed by Neil Pepe, who also directed the 2016 version. Pepe is the Atlantic’s artistic director.The producers of this fall’s run are Seaview, Sue Wagner, and John Johnson, who were among the producers of “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea,” which starred Aubrey Plaza and Christopher Abbott and had a run at the Lortel that began last fall. That show’s success helped draw the attention of producers to commercial Off Broadway, a sector of the theater business that had atrophied over time, but is now attracting more interest because the producing costs are far lower than on Broadway.Driver, 40, is no stranger to the stage. A graduate of Juilliard’s acting program, he has appeared on Broadway three times, most recently starring in a 2019 revival of “Burn This,” and he has also performed in several previous Off Broadway productions.Ben Brantley, then the Times’s chief theater critic, named “Hold On to Me Darling” among the best shows of 2016, and praised the play as “a tragicomic commentary on a culture ruled by the religion of fame.” More