Review: In ‘Linda Vista,’ one man’s spiral creates a tornado

A sad romantic comedy sounds like a contradiction in terms, but it’s an apt-enough description of “Linda Vista,” a slight but funny and quietly affecting play from Tracy Letts, which has opened on Broadway at the Helen Hayes Theater in a superbly acted co-production from Second Stage and Chicago’s Steppenwolf.  The protagonist — he’s hardly a hero, or even an anti-hero — is Wheeler, played with mordant glumness by the longtime Steppenwolf member Ian Barford. Wheeler is a man with both an emotional and a physical paunch. He’s 50 and going through an unpleasant divorce. An ex-photojournalist now reduced to…