HAPPY TALK: The Three Faces of Susan Sarandon

If you are familiar with Jesse Eisenberg, it's most likely to be from his acting career, with notable performances in such films as The Social Network in which he played Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.  But Eisenberg has also established himself as a writer, with pieces published in The New Yorker magazine, a collection of short stories, an upcoming novel, and several plays to his credit.

He himself does not appear in his latest play, Happy Talk, but the kind of irritatingly self-important, damaged and damaging character that has become a trademark for him lies at its heart, as directed by Scott Elliott for The New Group at the Pershing Square Signature Center. 

The off-kilter character in this case is called Lorraine, played here by Susan Sarandon, someone who has a reputation for getting under people's skin herself through her outspoken and uncompromising political activism. Not unlike the woman portraying her, Lorraine comes off as self-defined, self-certain, and complicated.  

It seems at first glimpse as though we might be embarking on a sitcom filled with familiar types. Lorraine appears to be an egotistical suburban matron and community theater goddess, who turns every situation into a grand drama with her in the spotlight.  She is currently in rehearsals for the local Jewish Community Center production of South Pacific, in which she most absurdly will be playing the role of Bloody Mary.  If you've seen The Prom on Broadway, Lorraine may remind you of Beth Leavel's character.  

Her husband (Daniel Oreskes) seems to be a familiar type as well, a grumpy man who ensconces himself into his easy chair and occasionally grunts at his wife but mostly ignores her. There is also Lorraine's mother, a bedridden invalid whom we never meet and who is looked after by the play's other significant character, a chirpy and cheery Serbian illegal immigrant named Ljuba, marvelously played by Marin Ireland.

Marin Ireland and Susan Sarandon
Photo by Monique Carboni

Even though the play is written to be performed straight through its running time of 100 minutes, it does seem that it is divided into three separate acts. Anything I add by way of plot reveal here would be a spoiler, so I will simply say that in each of the acts, our sympathies are manipulated in a different way as we try to decide how we feel about Lorraine. It is all dependent on which side of her personality or piece of her life is shared with us at the time.  

This does make the play feel rather bumpy.  It's as if you were trying to climb down the side of a steep mountain and you keep coming to spots where you have to let yourself drop for some distance to the next ledge. The play has been criticized for these variations on Lorraine's personality, but I find in retrospect that it gives us a richer portrait of a messy, complex character than we might otherwise get.  

In the end, we may decide that Lorraine is "toxic," as her estranged daughter Jenny (Tedra Millan), who puts in a brief and unpleasant appearance, describes her. But we learn enough to at least begin to understand Lorraine, even if we would not want to have anything more to do with her than what she would actually want us to:  watching her play Bloody Mary onstage. That is the only place where she finds a sense of purpose and satisfaction and where she can escape her otherwise disappointing life.  

Admittedly, Happy Talk feels like it is a draft or two away from completion. But Susan Sarandon and Marin Ireland, as well as the rest of the cast (which includes Nico Santos as one of Lorraine's theater colleagues) make it well worth the visit.  

Daniel Oreskes, Susan Sarandon, and Nico Santos
Photo by Monique Carboni

___________________

Feel free to share this blog with your friends, and to offer up your own theater stories by posting a comment. I also invite you to check out the website Show-Score.Com, where you will find capsule reviews of current Broadway and Off Broadway plays from Yours Truly and many other New York critics. 

'Sticks And Bones': A Masterful and Disturbing Revival of A Major American Play

A thrum of unrelenting dread creeps in like an ineffable fog in the excellent, unsettling revival of David Rabe’s Vietnam War era play Sticks and Bones, now on view at the Pershing Square Signature Center in a production by The New Group, deftly directed by Scott Elliott and boasting powerful performances by a cast headed up by Bill Pullman as a man whose very sense of himself is pushed to the breaking point.    

Dread is a difficult mood to create and sustain in the theater. Examples abound of productions that are meant to grip an audience with a sense of anxiety and foreboding, yet which have been unable to pull it off. The current Broadway revival of Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance is one that comes to mind, but there are others such as recent revivals of Sarah Kane’s Blasted, and of another of David Rabe’s works, Streamers. 

All should make us feel a growing apprehension as the characters experience it, but each misses the mark in its own way.  The production of Albee’s Pulitzer Prize winning play suffers from an overabundance of “tell” without nearly enough “show,” although previous versions have found a way to unleash the fear that enters unexpectedly into the home of the wealthy middle-aged couple at its center. Likewise, the Off Broadway production of Blasted, with its graphic depictions of emotional and physical abuse, rape, and torture during a time of war, offered all of the shock but fell short in the dread department. And the Off Broadway production of Streamers (the original incarnation was a heart-stopper of disquietude) just fell flat altogether.  

Sticks and Bones, however, works on every level, and sadly its 43-year-old no-holds-barred object lessons about imbedded xenophobia, the throwaway lives of soldiers, and the impact of their post traumatic stress disorder on the families of these soldiers provide a cautionary tale for the here-and-now as we carry on a protracted war against terrorism in the Middle East and elsewhere. Substitute an Arab woman for the ghostly Vietnamese character of Zung (Nadia Gan) and you’ve got a play for our age.

Welcome to the world of Ozzie (Mr. Pullman) and Harriet (Holly Hunter), and their sons David (Ben Schnetzer) and Rick (Raviv Ullman). Certainly it is no coincidence that Rabe named his characters for those of the popular warm-and-fuzzy family sitcom (The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet ran on television from 1952 to 1966, many years longer than the original run of its more famous contemporary, I Love Lucy). 

Rabe’s Ozzie and Harriet do seem at first to be spoofs of their namesakes—innocent, insulated, and caught up in the day-to-day comings and goings of their sons. It is easy enough to fall into a trap of viewing them as objects of easy ridicule. 

Of all of the characters, Rick maintains the façade throughout most of the play (making a late change-about all the more disconcerting). The parents, however, start to disintegrate from the moment that David is brought home from the war by a no-nonsense sergeant major (Morocco Omari), tasked with distributing the “one-legged and no-legged” veterans to their various households from coast to coast. 

Both of David’s legs are intact, but he is physically blind and psychologically damaged beyond his folks’ ability to absorb him back into the fold. Mom can only think to offer up a glass of warm milk to ease his troubles and to invite Father Donald (played with a mix of noblesse oblige and self-certitude by Richard Chamberlain) to perform some churchly magic, which, when it fails to make a dent, sends the priest fleeing for the hills. Dad, on the other hand, has nothing to offer but his own sense of despair; his crumbling identity as a prototypical 1950s pater familias provides nothing for him to stand on, and he feels emotionally and physically threatened by the very presence of the stranger who was his son. 

As an audience, we are more likely to identify with Ozzie and Harriet than with David, whose mind is back in Vietnam, riddled with guilt, haunted by the Vietnamese woman he left behind, scornful of his parents’ naivité and casual racism,  and truly dangerous to himself and to those around him. The tension mounts and mounts and never really lets up through the play’s brutal climax.

Altogether, this is a masterful production of a major American play. There is no question that it is discomfiting to sit though, but the power it conveys about its subject matter has an immediacy that demands to be heard.  

Feel free to share this blog with your friends, and to share your own theater stories by posting a comment.  

Burning: Naked Folks Acting

Hunter Foster:  Musical Comedy Star Appears in Psycho-Sexual Play

It’s difficult to know what to make of Burning, a darkly comic psycho-sexual drama on view at Theatre Row's Acorn Theatre that is jam-packed with enough ideas about sexuality, identity, obsession, art, and politics to serve a half dozen projects, and enough nudity and flesh-on-flesh encounters to serve as a live version of a Google search on the word "porn."  

Regarding the latter, you pays your money and you takes your choice, sort of like being in the Times Square area in its former disreputable and sleazy days.  Ya got yer man/man sex, man/boy sex, hetero sex, brother/sister sex, oral sex, anal sex, sex with hermaphrodites, and prostitution (both the hustling kind and the legal kind), not to mention plenty of dorsal and full-frontal nudity. 

Amidst all of this is an actual play, made up of intersecting storylines about the lives of at least a dozen different characters, written by Thomas Bradshaw and directed by Scott Elliott, who has a penchant for bringing an edgy, in-your-face style to his work.  You may recall his star-studded, deliberately annoying version of The Threepenny Opera  that landed with a thud at Roundabout’s Studio 54 five years back. 

The New Group, for which Mr. Elliott serves as artistic director, has as its mission a “commitment to developing and producing powerful, contemporary theater.”  I’m not sure that Burning fills the bill; the “ick factor” does not necessary equate to “powerful,” and the play (stripped of its insistent nudity and sexual encounters) offers only the kinds of surprises that come from occasionally clever writing and unexpected turns.

Thematically, Bradshaw seems to have taken his cue from Tony Kushner, though with rather less artistic success.  Consider the questions he tries to juggle:  What does it mean to be a black artist?  To what extent is our world view shaped by our parents’ beliefs and values?  Where lies the line between self-control and self-indulgence?  What is the nature of exploitation? And where do forgiveness and redemption come into the picture?

Add to the mix references to the AIDS crisis, Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, racism, personal identify, and the business side of art and theater—all punctuated with periodic bits of show tunes and pop songs and sprinklings of quotes from that all-time great philosopher, the Marquis de Sade.   (For an alternate view by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, you’ll need to go see Venus in Fur five blocks north at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre.)

The cast, which includes Sutton Foster’s big brother Hunter (known mostly as a performer in musical comedies) is certainly game; I can only imagine the amount of trust they had to have developed with each other during rehearsals.  But all in all, this is a real head-scratcher.  

By the way, in preparing this blog entry, I thought of an appropriate song to accompany it.  Go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wCtvco1FRU&feature=fvsr

Feel free to tell your friends about this blog, and to share your own theater stories by posting a comment.