Oscar Isaac in Inside Llewyn Davis.

In last month's New York Times story on the Coen brothers' first film since True Grit, Joel Coen said that Inside Llewyn Davis--their movie about a folk singer in the ’60s (Oscar Isaaac, Drive)--shares something with the Broadway-cum-cinematic hit Les Misérables. Sure, there will be singing (No "I Dreamed a Dream," though, fortunately), a love triangle and even a cretinous villain, but what does New York's burgeoning folk-rock scene have in common with the French Student Rebellion?

Perhaps the oddest thing about Inside Llewyn Davis isn't the two Ls in Llewyn, or the fact that Justin Timberlake is playing a banjo in one scene, but that the movie has been picked up for distribution by CBS Films, the company behind both Beastly and Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. Though as long as there isn't a Two and a Half Men cameo in the movie, we're good to go.

Shaud, Thomas and Emery in George is Dead.

After suffering through the fetid Relatively Speaking, my pain must have shown in the scowl on my face as I trudged toward the exit at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre. “To get it, you have to be Jewish,” said a woman ahead of me. What nonsense. Since when do you have to be gay to see the truth in The Boys in the Band, or black to be moved by the universal humanity of Lorraine Hansberry or August Wilson? My date was Jewish, and she didn’t laugh either. Well, she later admitted over a badly needed post-theater nightcap, she did laugh at a couple of lines. O.K., two laughs in a 2½ hour evening of three alleged one-act “comedies” is not what I call much of a success, and Relatively Speaking is a vulgar, poker-faced failure of dire proportions. You don’t have to be Jewish to know bad writing, hysterical overacting and lame direction when you see it, even if the guilty perpetrators include Elaine May and Woody Allen, two of my heroes, actors such as Marlo Thomas and Steve Guttenberg, and director John Turturro, who should stick to acting. All of them have triumphed on previous occasions. This is not one of them.

The thin membrane of a theme in this long and tedious evening that links three dismal playlets and two pesky intermissions is Jewish family dysfunction, hence the title Relatively Speaking. In the first, worst and shortest one, “Talking Cure,” by the overrated Ethan Coen, half of the peripatetic Coen brothers movie team, a burly postal worker locked in the cage of a mental institution is visited by a shrink who tries to extract a reason why the man went mad at the post office and assaulted a customer. The doctor applies what he calls a “talking cure” and proceeds to bore the audience to death in a stream of blather. The patient, played by an eye-rolling, scene-chewing Danny Hoch, blames everything on his mother, who yells, and his father, who drools, and asks is there such a thing as a “shut the fuck up cure?” It’s a question I adopted as a talisman for the rest of the play as the cage parted and revealed the parents in a flashback when the mother was pregnant with the future nut case, screaming humilities and insults while she engages in a long (and frankly shocking) hypothetical discussion of the home life of Mr. and Mrs. Adolf Hitler. No exchange of ideas, no development of character, and what is the point? It’s an unsalvageable excuse for playwriting, and a terrible way to open an evening of would-be comedy.

After an interval blackout during which the audience lit up the dark frantically texting, checking emails and playing video games, it was Ms. May’s turn. In a dirge called “George Is Dead,” an unhappy wife named Carla (Lisa Emery), whose disillusioned schoolteacher husband is on his way home after giving a speech on human rights violations at Amnesty International, is invaded in the middle of the night by an irritating, self-centered, whining neurotic named Doreen (a bottle blonde played by the hopelessly miscast and depressingly unrecognizable Marlo Thomas). About 40 years ago, Carla’s mother was Doreen’s nanny and now this obnoxious over-the-hill Jewish princess has arrived unannounced, looking for tea and sympathy and a fresh nightie. Her husband has just died in an avalanche in Aspen, but she’s a rich, spoiled incompetent who doesn’t even know how to arrange for the body to be shipped to Frank E. Campbell. She’s too busy demanding that her distraught hostess scrape the salt off the saltines and drag the TV set into the living room. As the ultra-self-deluded and downright scatterbrained nuisance Doreen, the brainy, pragmatic, hands-on Ms. Thomas struggles valiantly with a role that would have been better suited for Ms. May herself, but she does have the best lines: “Am I being too awful? I can never tell” and “I don’t have the depth to feel this bad.”

Carla’s mother and husband eventually arrive, too late to breathe any life into a play that is dead on arrival, but Doreen plunges on in a Faulknerian stream of consciousness that eventually lulls the audience to sleep. Incapable of feeling grief, remorse, sadness or compassion for anyone but herself, Doreen talks under and over everyone, but hears nothing (“I’m so sorry to break in on your argument. I know how I feel when waiters do it”). A little of this indulgence goes a long way. By the time the evening’s only insightful punch line is finally delivered (“America has become a reality show—and nobody will change the channel”) the audience is too bored to respond. The play deserves no attempt at evaluation because nothing of any impact ever happens. It doesn’t even have an ending. As a writer, Ms. May has had her ups and downs (Ishtar almost destroyed comedy as a viable movie genre, and I’m still reeling from her offensively shabby adaptation of La Cage aux Folles, flushed down the toilet of deprecating homophobia as The Birdcage). But as an actor, she is second to none. One of the funniest scenes ever committed to movie posterity was the inspired sequence in A New Leaf when she was trapped in that torturous wedding gown, reducing the audience to exhilarating hysterics. No humor of corresponding magnitude is ever on view here, and either there’s something wrong with Ms. May’s computer, or she wrote this nonplay with a few fingers missing.

“It’s all up to Woody Allen now,” groaned the man seated behind me, but after a 15-minute intermission, the final effort of the night was a labored idiot farce called “Honeymoon Motel” that could not have remotely been the work of the same man who wrote the sublime, imaginative and brilliant Midnight in Paris. This wretched and embarrassing mess piles on every Jewish stereotype and sitcom cliché ever invented. Into one of those “magnificently tacky” purple and fuchsia motel rooms you can imagine dotting the New Jersey turnpike, two newlyweds (Steve Guttenberg and Ari Graynor) enter the bridal suite, ready to leap into the pink satin sheets of a valentine-shape bed. He’s got a pitcher of martinis. She’s got shapely legs, heaving cleavage and a Victoria’s Secret nightgown, and she talks like Fran Drescher. A pepperoni pizza is on the way. There’s only one thing wrong. The bride ran out on her own wedding and the groom is the real groom’s father. A potentially amusing (though totally predictable) situation turns instantly cold when, one by one, the entire wedding party piles into the room shrieking and bumping into each other. The enraged wife (Caroline Aaron, who looks and sounds like Renee Taylor with laryngitis) attacks her philandering writer husband’s libido (“He couldn’t seduce a nymphomaniac!”) and talent (“His books are only read by people when they’ve run out of Ambien!”). The bride’s distraught father and catatonic mother (Marc-Linn Baker and Julie Kavner) collapse from post-traumatic shock syndrome. The illiterate mumbler who played the mental patient in the opening play shows up as a pizza delivery man with the same aggravating voice. The jilted groom is an effeminate mama’s boy. They are joined by the best man, the shrink and the bewildered rabbi. In performances so amateurish they would be kicked out of summer stock in the Catskills, the actors are so uniformly ghastly it would be a favor to avoid mentioning their names, but Richard Libertini, as the wisecracking rabbi, deserves special demerits for the worst acting I have seen in a professional theater in decades. In fairness, a lot of people found him amusing as he stalked from stage right to stage left, waving his arms and screeching “God may have attention deficit disorder!” This actor eats so much scenery he should have an immediate CAT scan to check for asbestos poisoning. Is this what they mean by “you have to be Jewish” to laugh at a line like “My parents were always fleeing a pogrom—they learned to make love while running”? If I was Jewish I would be outraged by all the vile jokes about schlongs, Moses, brisket and Zabar’s. This is Mr. Allen doodling between New York Times crossword puzzles.

It’s rare to see so much bad acting on a Broadway stage, odder still to witness anesthetic direction like Mr. Turturro’s, which lines up 10 actors on a stage and encourages them to out-shout each other. The result is atrocious agony. Even considerable talents should be allowed the luxury of failure, but even a masochist who will sit through anything with Woody Allen’s name attached to it deserves a funnier, more imaginative evening than Relatively Speaking. Pain is forgivable, but not on Broadway, and not at these prices.

rreed@observer.com

Tuesday: Marley & Me
Get out the Kleenex! With nearly $145 million in domestic grosses, it’s clear that moviegoers shed many tears thanks to this weepy, blonde-highlighted adaptation of John Grogan’s bestseller last Christmas. We’re not here to rain on that parade—after all the dogs are almost as cute as Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston—but rather to marvel at the fact that something so mainstream was co-written for the screen by Don Roos and Scott Frank, the men behind The Opposite of Sex and Out of Sight, respectively. We guess you have to pay the bills somehow, right fellas? [HBO, 9 p.m.]

Wednesday: Miller’s Crossing
The Coen Brothers’ Prohibition-era gangland epic doesn’t have the awards pedigree that Fargo or No Country for Old Men might (staggeringly, it garnered zero nominations back in 1990), but we’ll still go ahead and call Miller’s Crossing their best movie. From the rat-tat-tat script to the impeccable cast (career-best performances from Gabriel Byrne, Albert Finney, Marcia Gay Harden and John Turturro) to Carter Burwell’s hauntingly authentic score, Miller’s Crossing doesn’t let go until the finale. And it actually has a finale! Not that we’re still bitter about No Country for Old Men or anything… [Fox Movie Channel, 8 p.m.]

Thursday: 30 Rock
Does anyone remember laughter? Yes, actually. A funny thing happened in the time that 30 Rock has been off the air between seasons three and four: sitcoms got good again! From Community to Parks & Recreation to Modern Family (though we’re still not sure what everyone sees in this one [Editor's note: we see that it is awesome], it seems like the grasp that Tina Fey’s baby has on the title of “television’s funniest comedy” is under fire. Don’t be too concerned though. With—among other season premiere subplots—Jenna (Jane Krakowski) getting an “image makeover” and Kenneth (Jack McBrayer) leading a page strike, we’re sure 30 Rock will leave us lizzing. [NBC, 9:30 p.m.]

Friday: Ugly Betty
As if you needed more proof that Friday night is where television shows go to die, allow us to introduce you to Southland, which NBC canceled last week before it even aired. Ouch. With that said, we wouldn’t get too attached to Ugly Betty. The series, formerly a hit, switches to Friday nights this season and gives Betty a new look (no braces!). Moves like those are usually steps one and two in the path to cancelation, but maybe Betty will break the trend. Nah, probably not. [ABC, 8 p.m.]

Zombieland

What’s the story: Think Shaun of the Dead… but with Americans. Blessed with one of the strongest trailers we’ve seen in quite some time—Van Halen! Snooty British voice over!—Zombieland comes into this weekend with tremendous buzz, great reviews and even a little controversy; stay off the blogs unless you want the big celebrity cameo spoiled for you. Woody Harrelson and Jesse Eisenberg star as a pair of mismatched companions trying to survive through life in post-zombie America. Expect buckets of blood, lots of laughs and some major box office. Seriously, there’s no reason why this thing shouldn’t become a huge smash.

Who should see it: Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost.

Whip It

What’s the story: Be your own hero, indeed. We saw Drew Barrymore’s directorial debut last weekend and can happily report that it is as heavy on charm as it is on temporary tattoos. Whip It finds Ellen Page as the ridiculously named Bliss Cavendar, a Texas high school senior who becomes a roller derby sensation named Babe Ruthless. Along the way she falls in love, makes some friends (hey, Kristin Wiig!) and earns the respect of her domineering-but-well-meaning mother, played by Oscar-winner Marcia Gay Harden. There will certainly be better movies this year than Whip It, but we doubt many will be as much fun.

Who should see it: Diablo Cody.

The Invention of Lying

What’s the story: Another movie we’re dying to see! The Invention of Lying is Ricky Gervais’ latest attempt to become an American movie star—he tried and failed last fall with the wonderful-but-ignored Ghost Town—and this time he’s brought along some major star power in the forms of Jennifer Garner, Jonah Hill, Rob Lowe, Tina Fey and Jason Bateman. While Lying looks absolutely hilarious, what the trailers don’t tell you is that a large amount of the film deals with the existence—or lack thereof—of God. Leave it to Mr. Gervais to stick something so serious inside the workings of a studio comedy.

Who should see it: David Brent.

A Serious Man

What’s the story: Say hello to the first serious (pun!) Oscar contender to open this fall. A Serious Man, the new film from the Coen Brothers, can apparently be filed under comedy of the jet-black variety. A cast of no-names—the most recognizable face is Richard Kind; yep, that Richard Kind—help the Brothers loosely tell the story of Job, but transplanted into 1960s Minnesota. The reviews have been what you’d expect—stellar and reverent, though our Rex Reed was mixed—but we wonder if this film is too small for the Academy to really embrace.

Who should see it: The Dude.

Also opening this weekend: Disney releases Toy Story and Toy Story 2 in 3-D so your kids can see them all over again, while wearing glasses.

Growing up going to Hebrew school every day and synagogue every Saturday may not be a prerequisite to overcome the bleak confusion of A Serious Man, but my guess is that it sure would help. This is the new one from the quirky Coen brothers, Ethan and Joel, who shift from comedy to drama with uneven results, and work easily with big stars or nobodies. This time it’s the latter (not even a guest appearance by Brad Pitt), as they return to their hometown of Minneapolis in 1967 and the setting of Fargo to tell the depressingly sluggish story of a nebbishy Jew named Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), who goes through the perils of Job in the stressed-out weeks before his son’s bar mitzvah. It’s a farce like the dreadful The Big Lebowski, with a confusing and maddeningly unsatisfactory ending like No Country for Old Men. Not one of their best films, but because of its sincerity and the parsing away of sentiment and pretension, it is, in many ways, one of their most likable.

A Serious Man is also one of their most personal. The Coens have never struck me as religious people dedicated to the rudiments of liturgy. (Joel has been married since 1984 to Frances McDormand, who is about as Jewish as Donald O’Connor.) But they know the territory, and appear driven to cynicism about it when anyone mentions the words Talmud or Torah. A lengthy prologue that has nothing to do with the rest of the movie shows a gnarled, impoverished couple in a grim Slavic country that looks like a set from Fiddler on the Roof who open their door in a snowstorm to a neighbor feared to be a dybbuk. The wife stabs him and turns him back out into the cold, inviting a curse that threatens to plague them forever. Cut to the cookie-cutter suburbs of 1960s Minnesota and the endless travails of the Gopnik family.

Larry Gopnik is a math teacher nobody understands, struggling to become a mensch, and failing miserably. His students are bored; his wife divorces him for an aging, bloviated hippie; his pious campus associates pass him by for promotion; his son steals from his wallet and smokes pot in Hebrew school; his daughter can’t get into the only bathroom in the house because his unwelcome, unemployed brother—who is turning into a permanent house guest—always locks himself in to drain his disgusting cysts. Gopnik’s rabbi ignores him; his colleagues patronize him; the deer-hunting redneck next door encroaches on his property to build a boat shed; and the father of an Asian student who bribed him to get a better grade now sues him for defamation. The poor man is rendered homeless and forced to move to a motel. At times, the audience needs the patience of Job to endure the stream of humiliations and torments visited upon Gopnik. The Coens lodge their tongues firmly in their cheeks, addressing the clichés and rituals of Judaism with contemporary skepticism, and equating the complex tenets of the Jewish faith with the problems in Gopnik’s life. Gopnik consults a series of incompetent rabbis (one of them is so obsessed with Jefferson Airplane he substitutes their rock tunes for scripture) who do nothing but complicate his life and give him idiotic advice. Add mortage foreclosures, a wrecked car, footing the bill for his wife’s lover’s funeral and his brother’s arrest for sodomy, and Gopnik is at the end of his rope. Taking stock of what he’s got, he comes up with bubkes. You may need Leo Rosten’s The Joys of Yiddish to understand half of the dialogue, but patience pays off. I found the usual moral center in Coen brothers films missing in action, but while I related to practically none of the suffering personally (my Jewish friends call it “the story of my life”), I must admit I laughed out loud.

As Gopnik loses faith and questions the existence of God and the meaning of life, A Serious Man substitutes a comic sense of life’s absurdities for any ethical wisdom grounded in theology, and the movie turns both suicidally sobering and funny as hell, often at the same time. But eventually it falls into the universal Coen brothers abyss—a most unsatisfactory ending that leaves you bewildered and angry. Just when Gopnik’s life is back on the rails and there’s a brief sign of a happy finale, more life-altering calamities come raining down—a hurricane sweeps down on Minnesota and the cancer doctor calls and … but no more spoilers. Clearly the Gopniks are victims of preordained fate, descendants of the crones in the opening scene, and the dybbuk’s curse will go on forever. The Coens never know how to end their movies; remember how the final scene wrecked No Country for Old Men? They always leave you infuriated and dangling. Everyone is just as miserable in the finale as they were in the beginning. A Serious Man may be their most religious film yet, but there is nothing spiritual about it.

rreed@observer.com

Fittingly, he'll play the title role as Larry Gopnik, a professor in the Midwest whose wife leaves him and his socially awkward brother (played by another prime casting choice, Richard Kind) won't move out of his house. The story take place in 1967, according to Variety. Shooting begins next month in Minneapolis.

Best Picture

"Atonement"
"Juno"
"Michael Clayton"
"No Country for Old Men"
"There Will Be Blood"

Actor in a Leading Role

George Clooney, "Michael Clayton"
Daniel Day-Lewis, "There Will Be Blood"
Johnny Depp, "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street"
Viggo Mortensen, "Eastern Promises"
Tommy Lee Jones, "In the Valley of Elah"

Actress in a Leading Role

Cate Blanchett, "Elizabeth: The Golden Age"
Julie Christie, "Away From Her"
Marion Cotillard, "La Vie En Rose"
Laura Linney, "The Savages"
Ellen Page, "Juno"

Actor in a Supporting Role

Casey Affleck, "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford"
Javier Bardem, "No Country for Old Men"
Hal Holbrook, "Into the Wild"
Philip Seymour Hoffman, "Charlie Wilson's War"
Tom Wilkinson, "Michael Clayton"

Actress in a Supporting Role

Cate Blanchett, "I'm Not There"
Ruby Dee, "American Gangster"
Saoirse Ronan, "Atonement"
Amy Ryan, "Gone Baby Gone"
Tilda Swinton, "Michael Clayton"

Directing

Julian Schnabel, "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly"
Jason Reitman, "Juno"
Tony Gilroy, "Michael Clayton"
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, "No Country for Old Men"
Paul Thomas Anderson, "There Will Be Blood"

Writing (Original Screenplay)

Diablo Cody, "Juno"
Nancy Oliver, "Lars and the Real Girl"
Tony Gilroy, "Michael Clayton"
Brad Bird, Jan Pinkava, Jim Capobianco, "Ratatouille"
Tamara Jenkins, "The Savages"

Writing (Adapted Screenplay)

Christopher Hampton, "Atonement"
Sarah Polley, "Away From Her"
Ronald Harwood, "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly"
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, "No Country for Old Men"
Paul Thomas Anderson, "There Will Be Blood"

Best Foreign Language Film

"Beaufort"
"The Counterfeiters"
"Katyn"
"Mongol"
"12"

Best Documentary Feature

"No End in Sight"
"Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience"
"Sicko"
"Taxi to the Dark Side"
"War Dance"

Best Animated Feature Film

"Persepolis"
"Ratatouille"
"Surf's Up"

Art Direction

"American Gangster"
"Atonement"
"The Golden Compass"
"Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street"
"There Will Be Blood"

Cinematography

"The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford"
"Atonement"
"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly"
"No Country for Old Men"
"There Will Be Blood"

Costume Design

"Across the Universe"
"Atonement"
"Elizabeth: The Golden Age"
"La Vie en Rose"
"Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street"

Best Documentary Short Subject

"Freeheld"
"La Corona (The Crown)"
"Salim Baba"
"Sari's Mother"

Editing

"The Bourne Ultimatum"
"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly"
"Into the Wild"
"No Country for Old Men"
"There Will Be Blood"

Makeup

"La Vie en Rose"
"Norbit"
"Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End"

Music (Original Score)

"Atonement"
"The Kite Runner"
"Michael Clayton"
"Ratatouille"
"3:10 to Yuma"

Music (Original Song)

"Falling Slowly" from "Once"
"Happy Working Song" from "Enchanted"
"Raise It Up" from "August Rush"
"So Close" from "Enchanted"
"That's How You Know" from "Enchanted"

Animated Short Film

"I Met the Walrus"
"Madame Tutli-Putli"
"Meme les Pigeons Vont au Paradis (Even Pigeons Go To Heaven)"
"My Love (Moya Lyubov)"
"Peter & the Wolf"

Live Action Short Film

"At Night"
"Il Supplente (The Substitute)"
"Le Mozart des Pickpockets (The Mozart of Pickpockets)"
"Tanghi Argentini"
"The Tonto Woman"

Sound Editing

"The Bourne Ultimatum"
"No Country for Old Men"
"Ratatouille"
"There Will Be Blood"
"Transformers"

Sound Mixing

"The Bourne Ultimatum"
"No Country for Old Men"
"Ratatouille"
"3:10 to Yuma"
"Transformers"

Visual Effects

"The Golden Compass"
"Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End"
"Transformers"

More from Playbill and ticket information after the jump.

Although Mr. Abraham is best known for his 1984 Oscar-winning role as the vengeful Antonio Salieri in Amadeus, in Almost an Evening he plays a hollering, pissed-off God who calls his audience boobs for not following the Ten Commandments to his satisfaction. He also wars with the God of Love, played by Mark Linn-Baker (best known as Larry Appleton in Perfect Strangers). After they debate which god has the best approach for wielding their heavenly powers, they kick each other in the ass. (The plays also feature Jonathan Cake and Elizabeth Marvel.)Mr. Abraham was inspired by remembering a rehearsal for an Academy Awards ceremony in which Billy Wilder, John Huston and Japanese Samurai movie director Akira Kurosawa were all standing together onstage. “All I thought about was those three gods up there, and I’m sure each would be delighted to be kicking the other’s ass,” he said with a chuckle.

The was a gang member in El Paso, Texas, before a drama teacher turned him on to acting. After college in Austin, he moved to the city to study with the great New York actress Uta Hagen, who also taught Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. Although Mr. Abraham has a foreboding presence onstage, he’s really just a softie. He enjoys living close to his granddaughter downtown and walking her to school. “My granddaughter is turning 5 in five days,” he said. “I’ve become so fucking predictable.”

Almost an Evening is in previews at the Atlantic Theater Stage Two, 330 West 16th Street; it opens on January 22. Performances are Tuesday through Friday at 8 p.m.; Saturday at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m.; and Sunday at 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. For tickets, visit www.ticketcentral.com or call 212-279-4200.