'Golden Boy': No Knockout, Perhaps, But A Real Contender

Who knows what motivates any of us to want the things we want, to do the things we do?  And, in the end, does it really matter—or is it only the trajectory of our lives that is important?

These are real questions to ponder while watching the well-acted but not quite three-dimensional revival of Clifford Odets’s Golden Boy (first produced in 1937), now on view at the Belasco Theater. 

Odets is not a subtle playwright. He has big things to say about working class families, the transformative influences that shape first generation Americans, the pull of ambition, and the struggle to find one’s place in life. He paints with a broad brush, the theatrical equivalent of his art world contemporaries like Thomas Hart Benton or Diego Rivera.  As a playwright, Odets, a strong proponent of method acting, leaves it up to the director and the actors to breathe life into the characters—something that had not quite come to pass during the preview performance I attended.    

In Golden Boy, we are presented with two lost souls:  Joe Bonaparte (Seth Numrich) and Lorna Moon (Yvonne Strahovski), whose lives become entangled when Joe, a gifted young violinist, abandons his path—one that has been shaped by his immigrant father (Tony Shalhoub, giving the most grounded performance of the large and talented cast)—in order to pursue fame and fortune. 

One gets the sense that Joe might have gone in any number of directions to feed his itch of ambition and his desire to prove himself in a world where being a sensitive young violinist brands you as something of an outcast and less than a man.

As it happens, the particular escape hatch he has gone through leads him into the world of professional boxing, and we watch him transfer himself from his father’s loving hands into the less loving ones of the hard-scrabble boxing promoter Tom Moody (Danny Mastrogiorgio), the kind-hearted trainer Tokio (Danny Burstein), and the mobster Eddie Fuseli (Anthony Crivello), who buys a piece of the action and wants to own Joe outright.   

Joe’s counterpart, Lorna, works for and is the lover of Tom Moody. Lorna’s motivation is presented more clearly than Joe’s.  She has grown up in a terribly dysfunctional family—an abusive father and a mother who committed suicide. She has hooked up with Tom, who seemingly loves and needs her in a way that she finds hard to resist, so that she hardly considers her own feelings at all.

Joe is one of theater’s “angry young men,” triggered by something deep that neither he nor the playwright is able to name.  As his father—loving, supportive, yet helpless to prevent the oncoming train wreck—says of Joe, “he gotta wild wolf inside…eat him up!”  Lorna has a bit of that wolf inside of her as well, and it is inevitable that she and Joe are drawn toward one another, just as their lives inevitably spiral out of control. 

Odets liked to write big ensemble works, where he could set his central characters amidst family, friends, and acquaintances, whose comings and goings add richness to the larger themes.  In addition to Joe, Lorna, Tom, Tokio, Mr. Bonaparte, and Fuseli, there are Mr. Carp (Jonathan Hadary), Mr. Bonaparte’s Schaupenhauer-quoting neighbor; Anna (Dagmara Dominczyk) and Siggie (Michael Aronov), Joe’s sister and brother-in-law; Frank (Lucas Caleb Rooney), Joe’s union organizer brother (gotta have at least one of those in an Odets play!), plus more than a dozen others to round out the cast. 

All turn in solid performances, and director Bartlett Sher has done a masterful job of keeping things nicely paced, so that the nearly three hours of running time seldom make you want to look at your watch.  However, I do find the direction to be a bit fussy and occasionally excessive.  Sher makes frequent use of period music (to remind us over and over that this is taking place in the 1930s?), and stages several boxing gym scenes that fill the stage but are really a bit much.  Interestingly enough, however, he chooses to underplay elements of homoeroticism and homophobia that thread through the play.    

I don’t want to downplay the strengths of the production.  In his lifetime, Golden Boy was Odets’s most popular work, and it is not hard to understand why.  The characters, while perhaps not fully developed, are nonetheless engaging, and the current cast is very good throughout. I would imagine that over the next few weeks, more of the actors will deepen their performances, as Tony Shalhoub has already done.  As they say in the boxing world, Golden Boy is a real contender, well worth plunking down the price of a ringside seat.

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A Brilliant 'Blood And Gifts': Spy Vs. Spy in the Cold War Era

Whenever you go a play that is based on actual history, you run the risk of feeling as though you were attending a lecture as much as a theatrical event.  For instance, while I enjoyed last season's The Scottsboro Boys—and even the more melodramatic Irena’s Vow from the year before--it has occurred to me that the ideal audience for these shows would be a high school history class studying the Jim Crow era or the Holocaust. 

Occasionally, however, the history lesson is contextualized within a truly compelling narrative aimed at the grownups in the audience.  One example that comes to mind takes me back to 2003 and the  terrific I Am My Own Wife, whose star, Jefferson Mays, is back and giving yet another outstanding performance in the play that is the subject of this review. 

That would be Blood and Gifts, J. T. Rogers’ intelligent and highly engaging work now on view at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center, about how we so foolishly got ourselves entangled in the quagmire that is Afghanistan. 

Rogers gives us the history lesson we need in order to understand what is going on, but he does so in a way that is neither simplistic nor overwhelmingly dense as, say, Tom Stoppard’s Coast of Utopia and Rock ‘n’ Roll.  And he wraps it around a cynical, sharp, and frequently darkly funny story of espionage during the 1980s Cold War era, one that will leave you shaking your head at the stupidity of nations, and perhaps wondering if we truly learned nothing from Vietnam.

If you are concerned that you have not followed the timeline leading up to our current entanglement in Afghanistan, you can pick up what you need to know by reading the six-paragraph insert (by dramaturg Anne Cattaneo) that comes with the program.  Alternatively, you can prepare by watching the 2007 movie Charlie Wilson’s War, starring Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts, that touches on some of the same events as Blood and Gifts.

The play opens in 1981 and  joins CIA agent James Warnock (Jeremy Davidson, John Wayne-like in his self-assurance) as he begins an assignment in Pakistan aimed at driving the Soviet Union out of neighboring (and officially off-limits) Afghanistan. 

Before long, Warnock is working both with and against his espionage counterparts from the Soviet Union and Great Britain.  His task is a tricky one.  He needs to arm Afghan tribal freedom fighters against the Soviet army while maintaining “deniability” on behalf of the U. S. government, dancing around the KGB’s Dmitri Gromov (a funny, sardonic Michael Aronov) and keeping in tow his British MI6 ally, the burned-out Simon Craig (a brilliant performance by Mr. Mays).  


Meanwhile, their ostensible Pakistani host Colonel Afridi (Gabriel Ruiz), representing his own country’s intelligence agency, has other reasons for wanting to push the Soviets out of Afghanistan. 

The interplay is reminiscent of Antonio Prohias's Spy vs. Spy cartoons from Mad Magazine, or something from Graham Greene or John le Carré, yet the events are all too real, as we discover—contrary to the cliché— that the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend. 

Meanwhile, on a trip back to the States, Agent Warnock is torn between struggling to save his marriage and fighting to convince Congress to provide additional military aid for the Afghan fighters.  It is in this part of the play, that deals with the political maneuvering, conniving, deal-making, and in-fighting back home, that you will recognize the connection with the movie Charlie Wilson’s War.

It’s all very theater-of-the-absurd, except that the stakes are high indeed, both for the people of Afghanistan (some two million died during the anti-Soviet conflict and the period of civil war that followed) and for the people of the United States, who find themselves scratching their heads over why are at war in Afghanistan.

No bones about it, Blood and Gifts is a top-notch play, flawlessly directed by Bartlett Sher, who has brought out the best from a uniformly strong cast.  May it find great success along the lines of last year’s wonderfully grownup play, Other Desert Cities, that also began at the Mitzi E. Newhouse and is now happily ensconced on Broadway. 

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