Mama's Dead and I'm Feeling So Sad: Mark Ruffalo in Kenneth Lonergan's ‘Hold On to Me, Darling'

A COUNTRY STAR AND PEOPLE WHO KNOW HIM TOO WELL. Clockwise from top left, Mark Ruffalo, C.J. Wilson, Michael Cera and Gretchen Mol in “Hold On to Me, Darling.,” a benefit reading for the Stella Adler Academy.

Dear Press Nights readers: Clearly, this post — about a streaming benefit performance of Kenneth Lonergan’s “Hold On to Me, Darling” is haunted. We have written it, entered it and saved it twice — and it continues to disappear. We are trying again.

RIGHT AFTER I WATCHED “Hold On to Me, Darling” on Oct. 11 — it was a live-stream benefit for the Stella Adler Academy (stellaadler.la.com) — I started thinking about “A Face in the Crowd,”

That was a story by Budd Schulman that became a 1957 film directed by Elia Kazan. It starred Andy Griffith — before he was typecast as the nicest small-town sheriff who ever lived — as Lonesome Rhodes, a famous country singer who seems real, real nice onstage but is a master manipulator. Fame does funny things to people.

(And apparently “A Face in the Crowd” is going to be a stage musical soon. As soon as stage musicals exist again. Music and lyrics by Elvis Costello, book by Sarah Ruhl.)

The same charm-and-fame thing is at work in “Hold On to Me, Darling.”

SUCH A NICE GUY — NOT. Andy Griffith as Lonesome Rhodes, a country music star with no scruples, in the 1957 film “A Face in the Crowd.”

Strings McCrane (here played flawlessly by Mark Ruffalo), who is a major crossover countr -music star, is in a truly terrible mood (“I’m all tore up inside”). His mother has just died, and he’s in Tennessee for the funeral.

Not at the family home, of course. At a hotel, where he’s surrounded by the adoration and constant attention he’s accustomed to. Jimmy (Michael Cera), his longtime personal assistant, is there, and the hotel is sending up Nancy (Gretchen Mol), to exorcise his grief through a full-body massage.

OH, LOOK, A REAL PERSON! Adelaide Clemens plays Strings’s distant cousin, Essie, distant enough for romance. But she may have, as they say in the South, better sense.

Nancy is a Strings McCrane fan too, and before you know it she’s telling him about her unhappy marriage — and right after that, she’s exorcising his grief with her lips. She’s a real person, he thinks, living a real life — the kind he ought to be living, not a sham sow-business existence. Maybe he’ll fall in love with her.

This realization is complicated by the appearance of his beautiful cousin Essie (Adelaide Clemens) at the funeral. They’re not first cousins.

We see Strings with his half-brother, Duke (C.J. Wilson), whose normal life he also envies. Looking around Duke’s house, Strings says, “You got everything a man could want.” Duke looks around at his house too: “It’s an ashtray with furniture in it.”

So of course Strings decides to leave show business, move back home and buy a local business, Ernie’s Feed Store, which he’ll run. It will not surprise anyone to hear that this plan runs into complications.

Mr. Ruffalo’s tortured Strings is not as obvious or one-dimensional as Lonesome Rhodes, but he really can’t help himself. Although, as the review in The New York Times (the Off Broadway production was a Critic’s Pick) pointed out, all the characters are allowed “flashes of self-awareness,” the “holy sheen of celebrity” is just too much for them. The review concluded that the play becomes “a tragicomic commentary on a culture ruled by the religion of fame.”

A sixth character (played byJonathan Hogan) appears in the final scene, and it’s the saddest, most tension-filled part of the tale. The man is Strings’s father, whom he hasn’t seen in 31 years.

The evening ended with a talkback. (If you paid extra, you could be on camera and ask the stars questions “face to face.”) That’s Neil Pepe, the director (he also directed the Atlantic Theater production) at the far left of the top row, and Lonergan beside him..