The Unkindness of Strangers: The Wooster Group Does Tennessee Williams

Tennessee Williams

Vieux Carré is generally considered to be one of Tennessee Williams’ late works, since it was originally produced (and had a very short run) in 1977.  But the play has so much in common with the The Glass Menagerie (1944) that it could very well be a sequel to the more famous work.  Indeed, recent Williams scholarship has identified a working script dating to 1939, when the writer was living at the very street address where Vieux Carré takes place.

As in The Glass Menagerie, the central character is a writer—here referred to as “The Writer,” but most certainly he could be called “Tom.”  Imagine that Tom has fled his home in St. Louis and has found himself ensconced, at least temporarily, in a rundown boarding house on Rue Toulouse in the French Quarter of New Orleans.  It is here, among the poor, physically ill, and mentally and emotionally precarious denizens of the household, that Tom finds both his sexual identity and his voice as a writer.  

Now, you don’t go to a theatrical production by The Wooster Group expecting to see a straightforward interpretation of a play.  The SoHo-based company, with its roots in experimental, avant-garde performance art, loves to push the envelope in an effort to make the audience think about the content while feeling, perhaps, a tad uncomfortable with its deconstructed and reconstructed works.

The current effort, officially titled The Wooster Group’s Version of Tennessee Williams’ Vieux Carré, leaves the company’s reputation intact.  In this case, however, it is difficult to say which provides the most discomfort—the production itself or the physical space where the audience is seated in the Jerome Robbins’ Theater at the Baryshnikov Arts Center on West 37^th Street.  Surely someone unfamiliar with the human anatomy, or possibly with a large investment in a chiropractic treatment center, came up with the idea of steeply banked rows of thinly upholstered straight-backed pull-down benches, where the audience is crammed, two to a bench—and, in the case of Vieux Carré, at least—for two solid intermissionless hours yet.  Not good.

As for the Wooster Group, it has taken a relatively delicate piece of writing—which, unlike the leaden The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore from 1963 (currently on view at the Laura Pels Theatre), contains some of that lovely, ethereal language that Williams at his best was so very good at—and beats it to a pulp.

In order to connect with the play at all, we are forced to deal with annoying and distracting affections such as pointless video images and characters strutting around in leather thongs and protruding erect prosthetic phalluses that are about as sexually interesting as the character of the tubercular street artist who repeatedly attempts to seduce The Writer while coughing into an oversized bloody handkerchief.  What a turn-on!

It is only during those times when the actors are actually allowed to perform the play that we get any sense of Williams’ voice emerging from the noise, and the characters come into focus through generally good performances by the company. I especially liked Kate Valk in her dual roles of Jane Sparks (a down-on-her-luck character who bears a resemblance to Blanche DuBois) and Mrs. Wire, the brash and crazy landlady and would-be surrogate mother to The Writer, who, like Tom in The Glass Menagerie, has had quite enough of mothers, thank you.

Taken as a whole, The Wooster Group’s Version of Tennessee Williams’ Vieux Carré is rather an ordeal to sit through.  I’m not sorry I did sit through it as I had not previously seen a production of the play,  but I would love to see a straightforward production, possibly in rep with The Glass Menagerie.  If you are similarly motivated, then by all means head on out to the Baryshikov Arts Center--but you might want to bring your own cushion or stand in the back.

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The Merchant of Venice: Compelling Production of A Challenging Play

Lily Rabe and Al Pacino

Anyone planning a production of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice needs to wrestle with how to portray Shylock, the money-lending Jew who demands payment of a “pound of flesh” when the title character in the play defaults on a loan.

Should the rampant anti-Semitism of the age—not to mention Jew-baiting theatrical precursors to Shakespeare—hold sway?  Or should we view Shylock through more modern and sympathetic eyes?  Both are legitimate interpretations, as the text itself offers enough leeway to allow for either perspective to hold sway.

Whatever choice is made, the thing I ask for as a playgoer is that the portrayal be an honest one.   To give what I consider to be an egregious example, I was deeply offended by the inane and condescending production of Christopher Marlowe’s vicious-tongued The Jew of Malta, directed by David Herskovits a few years back with a twitchy wink-and-nod-we’re-only-joking sensibility that ruined the experience of watching the play.  I get that the 16^th century was not particularly kind to Jews.  Please don’t insult my intelligence, and don’t fear so much for my delicate sensibilities that you feel compelled to offer up such a cowardly production.

So I am both relieved and delighted to report that the current Broadway production of The Merchant of Venice is compelling, smart, and thoroughly honest.  Actor Al Pacino and director Daniel Sullivan offer us a Shylock who is both victimizer and victim, in acknowledgment of the truth that being on the receiving end of bigotry does not necessarily mean you are a kind and loving person deep down inside.

Pacino, in a measured performance that embodies the layers of meaning contained within every word he utters, gives us a Shylock who has spent his life being demeaned and scorned by his Christian countrymen and who has survived by his wit and intellect alone.  This Shylock has hardened himself to the cruelties of the world, and that has left precious little room for the softer emotions, including mercy (an important theme of the play) or the ability to show any tenderness toward his daughter Jessica.  This cold-heartedness, however self-protecting its origin, is the cause of his downfall and gives plausibility to his daughter’s abandonment of him and of her Jewish faith. 

Of course, The Merchant of Venice is not only about Shylock, whose story comes to its conclusion well before the end of the play. Playing off the tragedy of Shylock is the tale of Antonio, the merchant of the title, who finds himself before the court of law when he is unable to replay a loan of 3,000 ducats.  It is his pound of flesh that is to be given in forfeit, in accordance to the agreement he accepted when he took out the loan. 

Antonio is another complicated character.  We know he is a virulent anti-Semite, yet he willingly joins into a monetary arrangement with Shylock--and not out of any need of his own, but to provide funds to give to his friend Bassanio so that the latter may woo the lady Portia.  Why would Antonio do that?   Thanks to a strong and convincing performance by Byron Jennings, we see a psychological basis for his actions, for his general air of melancholy, and, later, for his willingness to sacrifice himself.  He is not just a plot device, but a complex human being who earns our sympathy despite his initial bigotry and arrogance.

The characters of Portia (Lily Rabe) and Bassanio (David Harbour) belong less to a Shakespearean tragedy than to one of his romances, but both actors serve their parts well.  Ms. Rabe, in particular, rolls that Elizabethan English off her tongue so well that it seems absolutely natural to her, and she gives full range to both the comic and the serious sides of her character. 

In truth, there is not a weak performance among the cast of 32, who work together as well as any ensemble I can recall seeing.  If I were compelled to single out a few more, Christopher Fitzgerald as Launcelot Gobbo, Heather Lind as Jessica, and Marsha Stephanie Blake at Portia’s lady-in-waiting give splendid performances in these smaller supporting roles.

I also want to hand it to director Daniel Sullivan.  Shakespeare is, after all, Shakespeare.  It takes a lot of work to make it accessible to a modern audience.   At the performance I attended, it was clear there were many there who were drawn by the star power of Mr. Pacino and who were unfamiliar with the play itself.  I heard gasps on more than one occasion as plot elements were revealed (e. g. Shylock’s forced conversion to Christianity).  It’s nice to know that the Bard still has the power to astonish. 

I also liked that, despite the seeming all’s-well ending, we can see there will be some troublesome days ahead,  especially for Jessica who has yet to work through her issues with both the father and the faith she has abandoned in a pique of rebellion.  It’s most intriguing that she is given the final moments onstage. 

Finally, a word about the scenic design by Mark Wendland, the costume design by Jess Goldstein, and the incidental music by Dan Moses Schreier.  That word would be “Brilliant.”

Bravo to all who were involved in giving us this splendid production!




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The Witch of Edmonton: Red Bull's Best Work Yet

Let me begin by acknowledging that 17th Century Jacobean drama is not everyone’s cup of tea.

But I am a huge admirer both of the form and of the gutsy job of performing it for today’s audiences that has been the hallmark of Red Bull Theater and its resident artistic director Jesse Berger.

One thing I have been waiting for, however, while attending Red Bull’s productions over the last several years, is for Mr. Berger to display more trust in the original creators of these (usually) tales of sexual obsession and vengeance among the high and the mighty of royal society.

The outpouring of stage blood and sometimes outlandish directorial choices (I’m pretty sure that John Webster did not interpolate a Rodgers and Hart song into The Duchess of Malfi when he wrote it in 1612) that have accompanied Red Bull productions to date have tended to make things rather more off-kilter than perhaps they have needed to be.

Still, what I have particularly appreciated about Red Bull is that it has continued to improve with each new production: better staging, better sets, better costumes, better casting, better performances, and, most significantly, a sharper eye toward revealing the sometimes hidden treasures that abide within these 400-year-old dramas.

Indeed, I get a sense that Mr. Berger has become a true student of Jacobean theater, worrying less about how to bring the play to the audience and more about how to bring the audience to the play.

And so I am quite pleased to say that the company’s current production of The Witch of Edmonton, at the Theater of St. Clement’s, is its best yet—hitting the mark in almost every area, fully embracing the play in a highly engaging production without resorting to the old bag of stage tricks aimed at appeasing an imagined antsy audience.

The Witch of Edmonton itself is a much different play than others from that age. While revenge is a theme, it is not the all-encompassing driver as it is in The Duchess of Malfi or Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy. For one thing, The Witch of Edmonton is not about the lusty lives of dukes and duchesses; rather it is what you might call a domestic drama, dealing with the foibles and follies of everyday foks—the good citizens of Edmonton.

The play itself, dating from 1621, near the end of the Jacobean era, is attributed to three collaborating authors, William Rowley, Thomas Dekker, and John Ford, who based the work on a fairly well-known contemporary pamphlet that reported the story of one Elizabeth Sawyer, said to be a witch.

The witch's story is one of three plot threads to the play, making it likely that the three writers worked individually on their parts before combining them for production on stage.  Elizabeth is a poor, elderly, and justifiably cantankerous woman who, for no apparent reason, is hounded and bullied by her neighbors.  She wishes so fervently to be avenged on her tormentors that the devil arrives (in the form of a talking shaggy dog named Tom), with a proposition to help her get even in exchange for her soul.

By being summoned into existence by Elizabeth, Tom is also free to pull his demonic tricks on others. One of these is Frank, who, without the devil’s help, has entangled himself into a case of bigamy, which ends rather badly for the second of his wives when Frank murders her.  Tom hovers over Frank when he commits the crime, but it is unclear whether the devil is acting as a goad or merely as an observer. 

The other plot thread is about a young, rather simple-minded fellow named Cuddy, who also befriends Tom—with a surprising result.

Devil or not, the characters in this play have a psychological complexity that leads us to ask serious questions about the extent to which humans are responsible for their own actions.

While The Witch of Edmonton has its share of bloodletting, these moments are handled with far more restraint than anything that Mr. Berger and Red Bull have shown previously, and the play itself ends on an unexpected and heartfelt note of forgiveness and redemption—hardly the usual stuff of Jacobean drama.

The quality of the performances is somewhat mixed, but the key players requite themselves well, with particularly strong work by Adam Green as Cuddy, Charlayne Woodward as Elizabeth, and, especially,  Derek Smith, who is mesmerizing as Tom the Dog, bringing both his dog-like and devilish qualities to full and disturbing life.

Also worthy of note are the costumes by Cait O’Connor, and the set by Anka Lupes, who has taken full advantage of the small workspace afforded at the theater.

By the way, tickets to The Witch of Edmonton start at $20, and are widely available at discounted prices through the usual sources (BroadwayBox.com, TheaterMania.com, and Playbill.com to name three). You may have noticed that Red Bull is offering some of its lower priced tickets for seats that it calls “onstage.” This is actually misleading, as the audience is simply seated on two sides of the set. Don’t fear to purchase one of the “onstage” seats; you will not be dragged into the action, and, actually, you may have a better view than those sitting on the other side of the theater.

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Speaking of discounts, while you are shaking your piggy bank and deciding whether you are willing to shell out the big bucks to see Robin Williams in Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo or Ben Stiller and Edie Falco in The House of Blue Leaves on Broadway, here are a couple of less expensive alternatives.

Danny and Sylvia: The Danny Kaye Musical has announced a cute promotion now through March 26th, 2011. If your name is either DANNY or SYLVIA, you can get two tickets for the price of one. Just bring your proof of ID to the St. Luke’s Box Office, 308 West 46th Street, at least 30 minutes prior to any performance beginning this Saturday, February 5th. (This offer is not valid for the February 12th performance.)

In addition, Playwrights Horizons is offering discounted tickets to its next production, the world premiere of a play called Kin, written by Bathsheba Doran and directed by Obie Award winner Sam Gold.

Playwrights Horizons describes the play thusly: Anna’s an Ivy League poetry scholar. Sean’s an Irish personal trainer. They hardly seem destined for one another. But as their web of disparate family and friends crosses great distances — both psychologically and geographically — an unlikely new family is forged. Bathsheba Doran’s play sheds a sharp light on the changing face of kinship in the expansive landscape of the modern world.

Purchase tickets by March 21 with code KINGR and you get a discount: $40 (reg. $70) for the first 16 performances  (Feb. 25 – March 10) or $55 (reg. $70) for all remaining performances March 11 – April 3. You can online at www.ticketcentral.com. Use code KINGR, or call Ticket Central at (212) 279-4200 (Noon-8pm daily), or present a printout of this blog post to the Ticket Central box office at 416 West 42nd Street (Noon-8pm daily). Do note that a limited number of $40 discounted tickets will be available for purchase. Subject to availability. Valid only in select rows.

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Attend the Tale of Sweeney

Brian Friel’s 1993 play Molly Sweeney, now in revival in a very well acted but purposefully distancing production at the Irish Rep, is a cautionary tale about the importance of being careful what you wish for—or, in this case, being pressured into believing that you want what others wish for you.

Think of Molly Sweeney as the flip side of A Small Fire, by Adam Bock (currently on view at Playwright’s Horizons), in which the life of a middle-aged woman is turned upside-down when she suffers the consequences of the loss of her senses. 

In Molly Sweeney, the life of a middle-aged woman is turned upside-down when she suffers the consequences of the regaining of her sense of sight after being unable to see since the age of 10 months.  

Friel, the highly regarded creator of such plays as Philadelphia Here I Come and Dancing at Lughnasa, is a terrific storyteller, something that is both a strength and a dramatic problem with Molly Sweeney. 

The play is presented not as a drama, but as a narrative in the form of alternating monologues by three characters:  Molly, her husband Frank, and Mr. Rice, the physician who partially restores Molly’s sight.  Through these monologues, Friel paints a rich portrait of each of the characters, but because there is no interaction among them, the play—despite the very touching story it relates—has a clinical feel to it, like reading one of those medical case study puzzlers in The New York Times Magazine. 

We learn that Molly has never had much interest in having her sight restored.  She has never felt herself to be deprived or particularly disabled.  She long ago learned to compensate through a heightened reliance on her other senses.  She is very independent, has lots of friends, holds down a successful job as a message therapist, and seems to be well adjusted and reasonably happy. 

It is Frank, her unemployed “tree hugger” of a husband, who convinces Molly to seek a medical solution to her blindness.  He has immersed himself in the medical literature and is convinced that, because Molly was not born blind, there is a good chance that her sight can be restored through surgery.  And if it doesn’t work, he asks rhetorically, what has she got to lose?

Into the scene steps the third character, Mr. Rice, the down-at-the-heels ophthalmologist who longs to return to the days when he was part of a small group of wunderkinds  in his field. He decides there’s no harm in giving it a shot.  After all, he asks rhetorically, what has she got to lose?

Inevitably, it turns out that Molly has much to lose, and it is that loss that gives the play its emotional resonance.  It is here that the monologues work best by saving us from any sentimentality or mawkishness that might otherwise intrude.  

The play, as performed on the bare bones postage-stamp of a stage at the Irish Rep, is blessed with strong performances by all three actors:  Geraldine Hughes as Molly, Jonathan Hogan as Mr. Rice, and the Rep’s multitalented managing director and actor Ciarán O'Reilly as Frank.  All of the actors, under the guidance of director Charlotte Moore, give us distinct and interesting characters to consider, but go understanding that as an audience member, you will have  only your sense of hearing  to inform you.  You will truly have to attend this tale of Sweeney in order to fully appreciate Brian’s Friel’s craftsmanship.

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Either Stop the Milk Train Forever, or Find Its Poetic Soul

Someday, someone may be able to bring out whatever poetry lies hidden in Tennessee Williams’s The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore.   But that’s unfortunately not true of those who have mounted the current production at the Roundabout’s Laura Pels Theatre.

Milk Train, which notably died in back-to-back short-lived productions on Broadway in the early 1960s, has stubbornly defied the best efforts of such skilled actresses as Hermione Baddeley, Tallulah Bankhead, and Elizabeth Ashley.

Now it has claimed its latest victim, Olympia Dukakis, who cannot tame the lead role of Flora “Sissy” Goforth despite a totally out-there performance that embodies the likes of Mae West, Norma Desmond, King Lear, and Kabuki drag queen. 

It’s hard to know where to begin, but let’s start with the play itself.   The general outline is this:  Mrs. Goforth, the wealthy, aging self-proclaimed “old swamp bitch from Georgia,” has holed up on a cliff-top villa along Italy’s Amalfi Coast in order to dictate her memoirs.  She has hired the recently widowed and much younger Frances Black, whom she dubs “Blackie,” to be at her beck and call 24/7—whenever she feels inspired to give a bit of rambling discourse about her life and loves.    

Into their lives comes Chris, a no-longer-young beach bum/artist/gigolo, who has picked up the nickname of “Angel of Death” for his reputation of latching onto dying rich widows. Although, if his intent is larcenous, he doesn’t seem to have prospered much through his efforts, and he enters the scene bedraggled, starving, and exhausted.

There is much that could be done with this combination of characters, a triangle involving some combination of love, lust, greed, and self-delusion--especially the latter.

Think of Norma Desmond, that most memorable of characters in Billy Wilder’s classic darkly comic film, Sunset Boulevard.  What makes the role of Norma so effective is the character’s absolute belief in herself.  That’s precisely what we should see in Mrs. Goforth and in Chris—two lost souls caught up on some gothic dreamscape of their own making.

But it just doesn’t work.  Williams’s gift as a writer was always in his poetic use of language and imagery.  Sadly, there is precious little of that gift to be found in this most prosaic of plays.  Every line is leaden and lands with a thud, and what should be ethereal is clunky and inane.

As to the production, only Maggie Lacey as Blackie comes off as appropriately cast and has a real handle on her role. 

If we are going to believe that Chris, even as a fading pretty boy, still holds some allure for young widows and women of a certain age—and, in this particular production, for flamboyant, bitchy gay men—then he should at least look like a fading pretty boy, and a very underfed one that that.  For example, Tab Hunter was well-cast to play against Tallulah Bankhead’s Mrs. Goforth in the play’s very brief run early in 1964.  Here Darren Pettie neither looks the part nor brings out any of the personality of a successful gigolo or beach boy or artist. 

As for Olympia Dukakis, while she certainly is a formidable actress, she loses the battle for any sort of believability every time she opens her mouth to speak.  Swamp bitch from Georgia? I don’t think so.  South Boston, maybe, but not Tennessee Williams’s South.  Wearing a Harpo Marx wig and channeling Mae West as Cho-Cho-San in drag doesn’t exactly help sell the image.   

Credit sound designer John Gromada, who has managed to give us a real sense of the sea tide and waves roughly smashing into the rocks at the base of the cliff.  Not sure of the intended imagery, but it gives the play the thrum of inevitability and the relentlessness of nature that is otherwise missing.  Despite the failures of the play itself, surely director Michael Wilson, who was not averse to changing the gender of one of the characters, could have done a little more bending in order to find a better balance between reality and delusion.

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Scratching My Head

One real advantage of living in New York is that I am able to indulge my affinity for the theater five to ten times a month. But even at that, I have no desire to see everything. I pick and choose shows that I believe I will find compelling and that will allow me to willingly suspend my disbelief for a period of time. With every performance I attend, I go in the hope of being caught up in some combination of the playwright’s way with words, the individual and collective performances of the actors, the vision of the director, the way the set design contributes to the overall production, and, of course, if it’s a musical, the music, lyrics, singing, choreography, and the interplay between the musicians and the singers and dancers.

Rarely does everything fall into place, but I am not a demanding perfectionist as a theatergoer. What I do expect is professionalism from a professional theater company; not to be condescended to as a member of the audience; and not to be treated to smoke and mirrors in lieu of a good script.

Since New Year’s Day is meant for reflection, I have decided to take this opportunity to look back over the first half of the 2010-2011 theater season and the two dozen shows I have seen on and off Broadway. I have to say that more than a few of these have left me scratching my head for one reason or another, so rather than a play-by-play overview, I thought I might share a few of my moments of puzzlement before we plunge into the second half of the season.

Let me start with the one show that left me puzzled not over its conception or execution, but over its failure to connect with a larger audience. That would be John Kander and Fred Ebb’s musical, The Scottsboro Boys. I am as confused by the early demise of this Tony-worthy show as I was about last year’s puzzling failure, the excellent revival of Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs, which, for reasons I cannot fathom, attracted no audience whatsoever.

The Scottsboro Boys provided originality, strong performances by a very talented and energetic cast, a top-notch score, and fine directing and choreography by Susan Stroman. The show aroused some controversy because of its use of the minstrel show format to tell the real-life story of a group of black teenagers falsely accused of raping two white women in deeply segregated Alabama in the early 1930s. I can understand the discomfort associated with the nature of the plot device, although anyone seeing the show would, I should hope, recognize its use as a means of satirizing and skewering racism and bigotry.

Previously, The Scottsboro Boys had done well at Off Broadway’s Vineyard Theatre and spent additional time polishing itself up in a production at Minneapolis’s Guthrie Theater before heading uptown, where it landed in fine form—or so I thought when I saw it. And yet it is gone, with just a small possibility of renewal through a drive to bring the show back to Broadway for at least another short run prior to the Tony Awards. For information and to participate in that effort, I direct you to the website http://scottsboromusical.com.

Now, however, let’s turn our attention to some different kinds of head-scratchers I encountered in the last several months. And I promise, not one word about Spider-Man.

A trio of esteemed veteran playwrights with long and successful careers and a not insubstantial pile of awards all came up short with new or newish plays that left me thinking of unhappy metaphors like that of wells running dry. I speak of Edward Albee, John Guare, and Peter Nichols, who gave us, respectively, Me, Myself, & I; A Free Man of Color; and Lingua Franca.

None of these plays was a total failure by any means, but none approached the level of expectations for work from such original and skilled playwrights. The first of these was an absurdist comedy at heart but came off as pretty inane; the second was a confusing mind-trip of a history pageant; the third harked back—perhaps intentionally, but not very interestingly—to the “angry young man” post World War II era of playwriting by the likes of John Osborne. I do have to wonder if any of these plays would have been produced had they not carried the by-lines of their well-respected authors.

Another puzzler was Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, which, despite some A-List casting and its well-regarded director, never seemed to jell. What Woman on the Verge needed most, in my view, was some serious editing, including the elimination of several roles and recasting of some of the others. The standouts were the set design and projections (by Michael Yeargan and Sven Ortel, respectively), and the ditzy comic performance of Laura Benanti. Therefore, despite the show’s weaknesses, I do expect to see a couple of Tony nominations.

Also on my list is Elling, an adaptation of a quirky movie of the same title and a trilogy of novels by the Norwegian writer Ingvar Ambjørnsen. The play, about two unlikely roommates trying to survive in the world upon being released from a mental institution, starred Denis O’Hare and Brandan Fraser, both of whom tried their utmost to create real characters out of these two oddball personalities. But Elling was a head-scratcher from the outset, and other than a couple of bright moments by the leads and a few seconds of inspired wackiness by a game Jennifer Coolidge, I can’t begin to guess why anyone thought this might work on Broadway.

There are other shows I could talk about, including the clunky and amateurish production of Dracula, now in previews at the Little Shubert Theatre, but I wanted to focus here on major Broadway and Off-Broadway productions, where the effort was made to present something original and different, and that represented work by well-established theater professionals. While I have found the shows I have discussed to be puzzling, none was a total artistic failure, and one, The Scottsboro Boys, met pretty much all of my criteria for a top-notch show.

It just goes to show, theater is like Forrest Gump’s proverbial box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get!

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

A Small Fire: A Lesson in Loss and Gain

Michele Pawk and Reed Birney

It’s unsettling to be a woman on Broadway these days.

No, I’m not referring to the announcement that Natalie Mendoza, a lead actress in Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, is leaving the show after suffering a concussion during the troubled musical’s first preview performance.

Rather, I am thinking of the spate of current shows, both on and off Broadway, depicting women suffering from any number of mental and physical illnesses. To name a few that come to mind, there’s treatment-resistant bipolar disorder in Next to Normal; post-coma trauma in A Kind of Alaska; Valium addiction and loss of self in Angels in America, and a lengthy stint in a mental institution in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.

Now we have a new play to add to the list—A Small Fire, written by Adam Bock, and directed by Trip Cullman, currently in previews at Playwrights Horizons.

Michele Pawk, a versatile musical and dramatic actress, gives a sharp-elbowed yet ultimately moving performance as Emily Bridges, a fiercely independent tough-as-nails building contractor who is stricken by a cascading series of physical losses that force her into what she considers to be a most humiliating position of having to depend on others.

The first sign of trouble occurs when Emily is unable to smell the smoke from a burning napkin that has caught fire after she has accidentally left the stove on. Emily’s long-suffering husband John (well-acted by the estimable Reed Birney) teases her about her absent-mindedness, until they both find out that Emily has a very real disease, of unknown origin or treatment, that quickly spreads from the loss of smell to a loss of taste, and later, of sight and of hearing.

The core of the plot focuses on Emily’s reaction to these losses, and the extent to which she is able or unable to accept them as her world closes in on her.

All of this would be merely an intellectual exercise if the playwright hadn’t been able to find the emotional core as well, and, compellingly and winningly, A Small Fire is as much about personal relationships as it is a medical mystery.

More specifically, it is about a marriage that has held together through many years, however mismatched the couple may seem to the outside world. Emily and John clearly have a history that binds them together, even if their daughter Jenny (played with just the right amount of twenty-something ego-centrism by Celia Keenan-Bolger) finds her mother to be difficult, rude, and distant, and frequently wonders aloud why her gentle father stays with Emily.

The cast is rounded out by Victor Williams as Billy, Emily’s right-hand man in her construction business. Emily and Billy share an ease of familiarity as well as their own history—strictly platonic, in case you were wondering—that she does not have with her own family. Their friendship, while perhaps a little shoehorned into the play as a whole, allows us to see another side of Emily.

All told, Adam Bock has shaped a solid play about a woman and a family in crisis. We do worry about Emily as she faces an inner struggle about her own future—a struggle that, to Mr. Bock’s credit and in keeping with Emily’s reticence, is never spoken of directly but which we nevertheless understand she is going through until the very end.

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

Spider-Man: Nobody Knows What You Are

Despite the fact that Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark does not officially open until February 7—the exact date being a moveable feast that should be written lightly in pencil on the calendar—the schadenfreude crowd has been circling Broadway’s Foxwoods Theater like a flock of ravenous vultures. The New York Post’s Michael Riedel has been especially vitriolic, predicting the show will be an “epic flop.”

Is it any good? Can it be saved? What about all of those delays, canceled performances, technical glitches, and injuries to cast members? And what on earth has Julie Taymor, the show’s co-writer and its director, done with the $65 million said to be the cost of mounting Spider-Man?

To judge by her interviews, Ms. Taymor appears to be quite unperturbed by the gathering of those eager to feast on the carcass of her show. She could be faking it and actually may be quite concerned about the possibility of Spider-Man’s sinking into oblivion under the weight of its own hubris. Or she may simply believe that she and her creative team will be able to make sufficient adjustments to the show so that when it finally has its formal opening, it will be quite ready for prime time.

But I would like to propose another explanation for Ms. Taymor’s sanguinity. Perhaps, as far as Spider-Man is concerned, success on Broadway is largely irrelevant.

I recently attended a performance. Here is my take on things.

Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark was never conceived as a Broadway show in the first place—at least not in the traditional sense of offering a compelling story, plot-related songs, and theatrical acting. It was always planned as an “arena show,” to be performed in the U. S. and abroad before audiences numbering in the thousands, a majority of whom would be sitting a great distance from the stage.

The script does a minimal job of retelling the familiar Spider-Man story and does so only in Act I. The dialog is perfunctory. The performances are “large” and loudly amplified so as to strip the sketchy characters of any humanity or intimacy. In short, Spider-Man has been designed from the outset with the purpose of showcasing the visual effects and the accompanying score by rock superstars Bono and The Edge of the band U2.

Much of the criticism to date has been aimed at Taymor's chutzpah for failing to work on Spider-Man out of town, so that it might arrive on Broadway in fairly good shape. But here’s a thought: what if Broadway itself is the tryout town, where Spider-Man is being readied as an event to take on the road? Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised if were announced that U2 will be performing the music live against the backdrop of Spider-Man as it travels the globe.

If you think of Spider-Man in these terms, the cursory stab at story-telling that eats up the overly long Act I is almost irrelevant, and the nightmarish imagery of Act II—which has been attacked by many as a confusing and disconnected mess—offers up a visual and auditory extravaganza that works just fine. Think of Spider-Man as being divided not into two acts, but two variations on a theme. Act I takes its inspiration from the well-known story of Peter Parker, the teenager who is transformed by the bite of a genetically altered spider; Act II is like a jazz riff on the theme of Spider-Man. If you need to find a theatrical logic to Act II, think of it is a fever dream brought on by the bite from a toxic arachnid.

The sets, by George Tsypin, are quite good, by the way. Act I has the appearance of a comic book; Act II, with its hallucinogenic quality, has the look of a graphic novel. There are also very compelling digital projections by Kyle Cooper, colorful costumes by Eiko Ishioka, and lots of aerial maneuvers, designed by Scott Rogers. All of these will serve nicely as Spider-Man hits the road.

As for being an “epic flop,” I don’t think it matters much what happens to the initial $65 million outlay. Spider-Man has a real shot at finding its financial success around the country and around the world—and the heck with Broadway.

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Hope Springs Eternal!

All right. So the fall theater season was rather on the tepid side.  Still, ever searching for a grand and glorious evening of theater-going, I am looking forward to seeing a number of promising new productions in the coming months.

Let’s begin, shall we, with the coming week and three new productions on my schedule.

First off, there’s Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, now in previews at the Foxwoods Theater.  What can I say? I cannot resist going to see what $65 million buys these days.  If there is no such thing as bad publicity, then Julie Taymor, Bono and The Edge, and the rest of the creative team should be thrilled by the buzz generated by stories of major technical difficulties, numerous injuries, questionable artistic choices, multiple delays, canceled performances, and predictions of financial doom that seem to have made Spider-Man a must-see.  If they can pull this off, it will be a major triumph of willpower and determination as much as anything.  For a cute spoof of the woes plaguing Spider-Man, you might wish to view Conan O’Brien’s skit at http://www.tbs.com/video/index.jsp?oid=237070.

The second show I will be seeing in the days ahead is one I hope will be a stylish and funny production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of being Earnest, presented by the Roundabout Theatre Company at the American Airlines Theater.  Certainly the cast is a strong one, including, among others, veterans Dana Ivey, Paxton Whitehead, and the indomitable Brian Bedford as the equally indomitable Lady Bracknell. Let’s see how Mr. Bedford compares with my thus-far-unchallenged memory of Dame Edith Evans when he utters one my favorite lines from any play:  “Rise, sir, from this semi-recumbent posture; it is most indecorous.”

I plan to wrap up my theater-going week by attending a preview of the world premiere of a new play by Adam Bock, who snagged an Obie Award in 2007 for The Thugs.  When it was reviewed The New York Times, critic Jason Zinoman called The Thugs (which I did not see) “chillingly realistic and pointedly absurd.”  Sounds like an intriguing mix, so I look forward to seeing Bock’s new play, which is launching previews at the Playwright’s Horizons.  It is called A Small Fire, and is described thusly: “When a tough-as-nails contractor finds her senses slipping on the brink of her daughter’s wedding, the impact on her family is nothing less than seismic.”   
Playwright’s Horizons is offering discounted tickets, information for which I am happy to pass along.

Order by December 31 with code SMGR and tickets are only: 

$40* (reg. $70) for all performances December 16-30, 2010 

$55 (reg. $70) for all performances January 1-23, 2011

HOW TO ORDER: 

Order online at www.playwrightshorizons.org. Use code SMGR. 

Or call Ticket Central at (212) 279-4200 (Noon-8pm daily) 

Or present a printout of this blog post to the Ticket Central box office at 416 W 42^nd Street (Noon-8pm daily).

*A limited number of $40 discounted tickets will be available for purchase. Subject to availability. Valid only in select rows.

Further along in the season, some I the shows for which I carry the torch of hope are War Horse, coming to Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater from across the Pond; The People in the Picture, a new musical starring Donna Murphy; the final two installments of Signature Theater Company’s season devoted to works by Tony Kushner (The Illusion, and The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures), and revivals of John Guare’s House of Blue Leaves, Lanford Wilson’s Talley’s Folly, and Neil LaBute’s Fat Pig.   

I see lots of potential in these upcoming shows, so let me just end by wishing us all—as my friend Bill would say—Happy New Season!

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The Coward: Like Gilbert and Sullivan, But Without the Songs

Apart from the blood and guts (literally) that spew across the stage of the Duke Theater, playwright Nick Jones has given us a clever, often laugh-out-loud romp of a tale in The Coward, now previewing as part of Lincoln Center’s LCT3 productions of new works by up-and-coming playwrights.

Part Monty Python, part W. S. Gilbert (i. e. Gilbert and Sullivan without Mr. Sullivan's music), part Saturday Night Live, The Coward tells the tale of one Lucidus Culling, the scaredy-cat scion of an 18^th century English nobleman whose sole aim in life is to see to it that the family’s honor is upheld through a never-ending round of duels—which explains why Lucidus is the family’s only-surviving son, a status he longs to preserve.

Picture Pee-wee Herman without his confident self-assuredness, or the Cowardly Lion as he quivers before the throne of the Wizard of Oz, and you will get a sense of how Lucidus (performed with great timid flair by Jeremy Strong) faces the world. 

Poor Lucidus.  All he wants is to be left alone to contemplate the beauty of butterflies or to join in tart-tasting picnics with his foppish friends Robert and Gavin (well acted by Steven Boyer and Stephen Ellis), who seem like he-men in comparison, or to pine over the distant but beautiful and wealthy Isabelle Dupree.   He also knows what he most definitely does not want, and that is to die in a duel.

That Lucidus is a disappointment to his father (a blustery Richard Poe) is an epic understatement.  So, with great reluctance, and in order to get into Daddy’s good graces, Lucidus agrees to fight a duel with the next person who manages to offend.  Not surprisingly, he targets a decrepit, blind old man—failing to understand that the rules of nobility allow for the old man to appoint his own strong and skilled son to stand in for him.

How Lucidus deals with this unexpected turn of events makes up the rest of Act I.  Suffice it to say, by Act II he has acquired a new reputation that has pleased his father to no end and has caught the amorous attention of Isabelle (played in grand Gilbert and Sullivan mode by Kristen Schaal).  

The play is aided to no small end by Gabriel Berry's dandified costumes, including some gloriously over-the-top hats.  Between Berry's work here, and the costumes created by Ann Hould-Ward for A Free Man of Color, theatrical closets are now bursting with 18th century fashion. 

If I were to make one suggestion, that would be to trim some of Act II, where the high comic style wanders into the world of too-much, including an abundance of blood, gore, and mean-spirited dialog.  The playwright seems to want to add some, in my view, unnecessary satiric bite to what had been a more subtle but still clear message underpinning the silliness. 

Still, Nick Jones is a smart and witty writer who has given us an original and clever play.  And mark The Coward as another feather in the cap of director Sam Gold, who is making quite a name for himself heading up such productions as last year’s Circle Mirror Transformation and The Aliens (both by Annie Baker), and the current sold-out production of Tigers Be Still (by Kim Rosenstock), and who has been appointed as the youngest associate artist of the Roundabout Theater Company.  Mr. Gold and the three playwrights mentioned here are in their 20s and 30s and represent a wave of wonderful young creative artists that are keeping the theater world moving gloriously into the future. 

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A Free Man of Color Brings Back Memories of the Psychedelic '60s

So…do you remember The Firesign Theater? Does the name ring a distant bell of recognition? If so, you’ll have a pretty good idea of how you might prepare yourself for a visit to the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center, where A Free Man of Color, a new play by John Guare, is now in previews.

For those of you who don’t know—or can’t quite recall—Firesign Theater was a comedy troupe that performed on radio during the height of the 1960s psychedelic era and produced record albums with such titles as Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers. The group’s modus operandi was surrealistic, stream-of-conscious wordplay, best appreciated in a state of heightened awareness induced by any number of medicinal herbs.

Or so I'm told.

In any event, A Free Man of Color, with its cast of 26 spinning under the whirlwind direction of George C. Wolfe, is an eyeful of something-or-other that is difficult to fathom in a state of cold sobriety.

Let me take a stab at explaining. Remember, though, that we are now entering the realm of speculation.

Act I takes place in the wild and woolly New Orleans of 1801. The lead performer is the title character, who goes by the name of Jacques Cornet, played with wild abandon by Jeffrey Wright. Cornet is a man of property who considers himself to be an influential member of the upper class, an intellectual, and an unparalleled womanizer. That he is the mulatto offspring of his white plantation owner father and his black slave mother is irrelevant—at least in his eyes.

Aided and abetted by his own slave, Murmur (played with great élan by Mos, the actor formerly known as Mos Def), Cornet offers up what I take to be a play he himself has written, in a style that co-opts William Wycherley’s Restoration comedy The Country Wife, along with odd bits of Moliere and Shakespeare—filtered through a manic New Orleans Mardi Gras sensibility. There is something very off-kilter, though, so that the only way I could make sense of it was to think of Cornet as pretty much unschooled as well as self-important and delusional–kin perhaps, to the bipolar young hustler who calls himself "Paul Poitier" in Guare's Six Degrees of Separation.

With Act II, reality starts to intrude, and Guare switches gears by providing us with a history lesson on the unfolding of the early phase of what would later be referred to as “Manifest Destiny,” the expansion of the United States from sea to shining sea. New Orleans has been swept up in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, and it is no longer a place of unbridled freedom.

The scenes flash by like an out-of-control carousel, featuring—among others--Thomas Jefferson (John McMartin, how nice it is to see ya), Meriwether Lewis (an enthusiastic Paul Dano), James Monroe (Arnie Burton), Walter Reed (Brian Reddy), and Napoleon Bonaparte (performed with scene-stealing hilarity by Triney Sandoval). It’s not for nothing that there are over two dozen performers, several of whom—like veteran actress Veanne Cox—play multiple roles.

In all of this mayhem, Cornet is caught up in the riptide of history.  When he is finally washed up on shore, he finds himself in a much different world than the one he inhabited just a few years earlier.

John Guare is definitely an important playwright, having given us such indelible works as the aforementioned Six Degrees of Separation and The House of Blue Leaves (set to be revived in the spring). Thus, I am loath to dismiss A Free Man of Color as merely a spaced-out opium pipe dream of a play.

So, I’ll just say that if you should go, do not expect to fully understand what is taking place before you. I’m not even certain that Mr. Guare or Mr. Wolfe fully understands what they have unleashed.

But both the director and the actors have leaped aboard in a great act of blind faith and are giving it their all. The same is true of Ann Hould-Ward, who has created an exploding rainbow of colorful costumes, and of David Rockwell, whose sets are both eye-catching and designed in such as way so that they fly on and off as quickly as the performances.

You may leave the theater scratching your head, but you may also be surprised to find that the visceral images linger. If so, you might just want to pull out your old copy of Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers and give it a whirl.

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