Kenny Leon and Tom Hanks team up to deliver a sentimental sci-fi adventure that bends the rules of time travel in the name of love. 

 

If New York Magazine is to be trusted, Kenny Leon has exactly zero chops as a director. After Home closed, he directed the star-studded revival of Our Town last October which featured Katie Holmes, Jim Parsons, and Zoey Deutch. New York was unimpressed by the Tony-nominated production, citing a “[lack of] fundamental drive”. Four months later, Leon’s direction of Othello with Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal was labeled “targetless and underpowered”. Sara Holdren derogated, “…while it’s true that a Venn diagram exists between celebrity-driven projects and compelling art — and that the center can be a thrilling place — Kenny Leon’s passionless new production is about as far from that overlap as it’s possible to get.” Yeesh. In both cases, the critique seemed rooted in Leon’s alleged inability to bring out the qualities people most wanted to see from the high profile actors with whom he was working. (Audiences and reviewers alike wanted more bite and fire from Denzel.) In This World of Tomorrow, which opened this evening at The Shed, Leon teams up with Tom Hanks, who co-wrote and stars to aim for Holdren’s ‘thrilling center’. 

 

Theatergoers who have come to see Tom Hanks up close will not be disappointed. It was uncanny to watch the same man I’ve seen go to space, get drafted, fall in love, emergency land a plane, and voice a pull-string cowboy with seams for knees move in real time on stage at the oldest I’ve ever seen him. (Hanks will turn 70 in July. Sometimes his hands appear to shake, but so do mine if I forget to eat lunch.) I can’t separate Hanks from these characters and it doesn’t seem like he wants me to either. The play he’s written features the most Hanksian characters I’ve ever seen. Leon and Hanks seem to have found their sweet spot by delivering on what people want to see: American icon Tom Hanks be a nice guy, a selfless hero, and a dedicated yearner.

 

 

This World of Tomorrow is set in 2089 and costumes by Dede Ayite (Purpose, The Brothers Size) predict a future of clean lines. Everyone is in angular Sergio Hudson-esque silhouettes freckled with jazzy, Schiaparelli-style buttons. Bert Allenberry (Tom Hanks) is an uber-rich tech CEO that we’re meant to find endearing. When he should be working or negotiating deals, he’s spending his endless money at Chronometric Adventures, a firm that provides boutique time travel experiences. One of their travel packages includes a day trip to the World’s Fair in New York City on June 8, 1939 and Allenberry can’t stay away. He’s fascinated by the hope and optimism of the pavilions at the fair and contemporary predictions about the year 1960. He enjoys paying for things in cash and telling people to keep the change, touching newspapers, and he’s inexplicably over the moon when offered milk. (“From a cow?!” he exclaims.) Apparently there are no cows or paper money in the future. On one of his trips to 1939, he meets a pessimistic woman named Carmen Perry (Kelli O’Hara) at the fair with her animated niece, Virginia (Kayli Carter). (All three of the characters come from Hanks’ Uncommon Type, a collection of short stories published in 2017.) Smitten, Mr. Allenberry returns the next day and the one after that to relive June 8. Carmen and Virginia have no clue they’re on a Groundhog Day-style merry-go-round and Bert has to concentrate to avoid confusing the women with mentions of “yesterday” or “last time”. Each time he visits, he spends more time in the past pushing the boundaries of time travel and racking up dangerous levels of trillic acid in his blood. Trillic acid is a health metric which is yet-to-be-discovered in 2025 and much of the dialogue set in the future seems intentionally designed to go right over our present day heads. 

 

 

If that summary sounds incomplete, it’s because there is no B plot. Leon, Hanks, and his co-writer Glossman declare that the show is about “time and love”. There is no larger existential conflict Mr. Allenberry is using time travel to fight, he’s not there to kill Hitler or promote world peace. The other characters, like his colleagues in the future, revolve around him and only appear on stage when he’s back in 2089. For it to be a love story, This World of Tomorrow is the most G-rated, non-sexual romance I’ve ever seen, but maybe I was slow on the uptake because of the age difference. Hanks is 20 years older than Kelli O’Hara, the actress who plays Carmen. I thought his immediate interest, decorated with manners and invitations to eat pie, was that of a father figure. Apparently, it’s not the first time Chronometric Adventures VIP Allenberry has been infatuated with a woman from another era, but it does seem to be the most compelling. He has only one day to spend with Carmen, the same day on loop, unless he can find a way to stay in the past permanently.      

 

It doesn’t shock me that Mr. Hanks, a man whose movie roles have whisked him to and fro across American history, would write and inhabit Bert Allenberry or pine for the blissful ignorance of simpler times. I, too, wish I could go back, though I’d prefer to dance with Prince in 1985 than step foot in ’39. The show lends a partial nod to the racial reality of the time period and “[tries] to make it clear that 1939 wasn’t any kind of ‘golden age’”. A Black taxi driver (Donald Webber Jr.) tells Mr. Allenberry not to miss the performance by Bill “Bojangles” Robinson; the same actor reappears as an elevator operator, a street sweeper, and a hotel bellhop. He’s Clarence, Percy, Cato, Amos, and Bud. This pointed nod is underdeveloped, but at least it’s not glossed over entirely. Black men were on stage or, more often, laboring in the background. White men, on the other hand, continue to be front and center though their once irrefutably sterling reputation is tarnishing in real time as our newsfeeds fill with ICE agents, convicted felon presidents, trafficking banker pedophiles, pickup artist grifters, and self-identified Nazis. It’s giving “low T”. White men need role models and Tom (big T!) Hanks is equipped to deliver a version of manhood that values benevolence, open-mindedness, and respect for women, even ones with their own romantic histories.

 

 

Our golden boy Bert breaks only one rule, but it’s a big one. He boldly flouts the universally-accepted rules of time travel laid out by Doc Brown in Back to the Future (1985!) and changes the past without triggering an alternate future. I won’t spoil it here, but the explanation of how he did it wasn’t convincing and I doubt it would pass muster with Marty McFly either. Another oddity: Carmen’s niece Virginia is a middle school student who blurts out her family’s personal business (“Aunt Carmen lives with us ever since her marriage ended!”) along with impetuous observations about strangers (“If you’re a VIP, how come you’re on the subway?”). The outbursts combined with her love of radios seem to indicate that the child, who is played by millennial actress Kayli Carter, is on the spectrum, but it isn’t fully explored. Both Carter and Hanks are to be believed as much younger people; clearly, age perception is not Tomorrow’s strong suit.  

 

The 1939 New York World’s Fair featured exhibitions hosted by companies and countries alike. General Motors’ Futurama arranged scale models of what neighborhoods, cities, farms and factories might look like by 1960. The Torch of Friendship was a highlight of the Japanese pavilion; Ambassador Kensuke Horinouchi said it marked the “[impressive record of] eighty-five years of continual peace between two great and growing nations“. The Japanese military would bomb Pearl Harbor, Hawaii two years later in 1941. When Allenberry’s business partner M-Dash (Ruben Santiago-Hudson) accuses him of spending too much time in the past and lying “prostrate at the throne of nostalgia”, Allenberry retorts that “their future then is better than our present now and it always will be”. To Mr. Leon’s credit, the scene is excellently paced with just time enough for doom to settle. In This World of Tomorrow, Hanks shows us how we might be taking the present for granted. Although it’s a morbid consideration, it’s possible that by 2089, 2025 won’t look so bad.

 

blacklove 🖤 and starlight 🌟 

 

This World of Tomorrow will run at The Shed in Hudson Yards until December 21, 2025. The play was written by Tom Hanks and James Glossman, directed by Kenny Leon, and features Tom Hanks and Kelli O’Hara. Tickets are $159 and up. ASL interpretation is available on December 6. I received a press ticket for this performance and offer my thanks to The Shed.