‘Act One’: A Play About Rescuing A Play Needs Some Rescuing Itself

Tony Shalhoub and Santino Fontana in 'Act One'
Photo by Joan Marcus

There are many lessons to be learned from watching Act One, James Lapine’s affectionate if overindulgent adaptation of playwright Moss Hart’s classic autobiography of the same title, which opened last night at the Vivian Beaumont Theater. 

Lesson One:  Bio-plays are nearly impossible to pull off.

When they work on stage, it is because the person whose life is being portrayed and the performance by the actor at the center are so thoroughly compelling that the inherent flaws become significantly less important. The current Lady Day At Emerson’s Bar And Grill starring Audra McDonald as Billie Holiday is one example where this necessary requirement is amply met.   

On the other hand, there is a high risk of being narrative-heavy, pedantic, superficial, and undramatic. Unfortunately, these adjectives describe Act One, despite solid (though not extraordinary) acting by the entire company. 

Lesson Two:  Factual truth and dramatic truth need not fully coincide.

No one’s autobiography represents unvarnished truth. Rather it represents some variation, filtered through the author’s perceptions, including a certain degree of factual rearrangement, self-justification, and aggrandizement.  Memoirs are not encyclopedia entries. 

A play, no matter the subject matter, need not be a slave to its source material. Act One might have been better served by presenting itself as having been “suggested by” Mr. Hart’s autobiography. Some dramatic license might have made the straightforward narrative a bit more interesting for an audience. As it is, there is almost no dramatic tension, and the character of Moss Hart comes off as someone who breezed his way into a highly successful career in the theater:  “I tried it.  It worked.  Life is good.” 

Lesson Three:  Broadway is no place to do the equivalent of an out-of-town tryout. 

The early preview performance of Act One that I attended ran over three hours. It certainly needed cutting then, and it seemed to me there were several self-contained scenes that could have been removed without impacting the rest of the play at all. Indeed, as I glanced at my watch with greater frequency as the night wore on, I speculated that Mr. Lapine had deliberately included alternative scenes, with the intent of pulling some of them based on how well they played to an audience. (There obviously has been some snipping because they play now clocks in at two hours and forty-five minutes.) 

Lesson Four:  Less is more. 

First, there is Beowulf Boritt’s ungainly tri-level revolving set.  Yes, it is hard to figure out how best to use the Vivian Beaumont’s humongous stage, but director Bartlett Sher and set designer Michael Yeargan managed to subdue it quite spendidly a few years back with the glowing revival of South Pacific, as did director Jack O’Brien and his set designer Scott Pask for the more recent production of Macbeth.  

Second, do Tony Shalhoub and Andrea Martin (both truly excellent actors) really have to play three roles apiece? For instance, why couldn’t the equally talented Santino Fontana serve as the sole narrator instead of sharing the responsibilities with Mr. Shalhoub, who has quite enough to do (and he does do a fine job) as Hart’s father and as George S. Kaufman, Moss Hart’s talented, successful, and neurotic writing partner? 

Ms. Martin—always a joy on stage (including here)—is well occupied as Moss’s Aunt Kate and his theatrical agent Frieda Fishbein. Does she also need to appear as Kaufman’s wife Beatrice, a seemingly lovely person, but whose presence does not add a whit to the play?

Lesson Five:  Show, don’t tell.

Act One is partly a rags-to-riches tale in which a poor boy from the Bronx, son of struggling Jewish immigrant parents, makes it to the big time on the Great White Way. But the core of the play is about the process of developing a successful theatrical work, in this case Hart’s breakthrough hit (with Kaufman), the 1930 comedy Once In A Lifetime. We see a lot of fuss and bother as the pair struggles to save their play from poorly received out-of-town tryouts, but most of what we learn is through “tell” rather than “show.” Perhaps less of the family drama and more showing of the various stages of development of Once In A Lifetime (with actual scenes showing its evolution) would have made for a more compelling play. 

Finally, there is Lesson Six: Never ever ever direct a play that you have written. 

A director has to look at a play through an entirely different set of eyes than those of the writer. Yet Mr. Lapine has chosen to direct Act One himself. See Lessons One through Five for reasons why this was not such a good idea. 

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'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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