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NEW YORK \u2014 If you could time travel after seeing \u201cThis World of Tomorrow,\u201d you would probably rewind to the moment before you bought a ticket.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut I love Tom Hanks!\u201d Let me stop you right there. If you would like to preserve your affection for Hollywood\u2019s most beloved leading man \u2014 one who arguably helped ensure we would even have a world of tomorrow by putting a famous face to the pandemic<\/a> \u2014 save yourself now.<\/p>\n In a hundred years, scientists could study how his new play, a befuddling sci-fi rom-com playing off-Broadway at the Shed, became one of the more inane star vehicles of our time. To save them the trouble, because they\u2019ll no doubt be busy rescuing humanity from far worse, here\u2019s a breakdown of the evidence.<\/p>\n First, let\u2019s keep Hanks\u2019s co-star Kelli O\u2019Hara above this fray where she belongs. As a wounded but warm and plucky divorc\u00e9e, she is the lone lighthouse in this sea of slop. It\u2019s easy to see why a few minutes with her character, as she kicks off her uncomfortable heels at the 1939 World\u2019s Fair, would make a time-traveling man crazy to see her again. In fact, O\u2019Hara\u2019s delicate radiance in the role \u2014 and the devotion it inspires \u2014 is the only part of the story that makes sense.<\/p>\n Why does the boss (played by Hanks) at a futuristic company making futuristic things sometime in the future choose to travel back to the 1939 World\u2019s Fair? Well, it was \u2026 a $225 million birthday gift from a colleague (Kerry Bish\u00e9), who has a skeevy-sounding agreement called an \u201cIntimate Relations Contract\u201d with her boss<\/i>. (The skeevy-ness goes unexplained.)<\/p>\n And how does this man travel to the past? A company called Chronometric Adventures transports uber-rich clients to select periods in history for fixed windows of time determined by echoes in the space-time continuum. Or something. Naturally, the portal is a Manhattan hotel room. (Here you might be hoping for a rebuke of the billionaire class and their extreme pursuit of pleasure and adventure. You poor thing.)<\/p>\n The beep-boop-bop of how it\u2019s supposed to work is somewhere in the stilted dialogue, which could be satirizing science fiction if it weren\u2019t so earnestly trying to sound like legitimate science fiction. Fans of that genre know how rich the themes of time travel can be, with any array of insights and provocations about the past, present and future. Here, it\u2019s merely a device that grows tiresome the more you realize it has none of those things.<\/p>\n The script is co-written by Hanks and James Glossman, a theater maker and lecturer at Johns Hopkins University, who collaborated on a previous iteration titled \u201cSafe Home,\u201d which had its world premiere in Upstate New York in 2022. It stitches together three short stories, Frankenstein-style, from the actor\u2019s 2017 collection \u201cUncommon Type.\u201d<\/a> That may help explain its many oddities and loose ends, unified (such as they are) by an overall vibe of nostalgia, New York-iness and the sheen of an expensive production without a clear creative hook beyond the presence of its star.<\/p>\n