For the third (and penultimate) show in my September Series
this year, my mother and I went downtown to the Logan Circle area of Washington
to catch a matinee of Amy Herzog’s next-to-latest play, Belleville, at the Studio Theatre on Sunday, 21 September. Performed without intermission in the Metheny
Theatre, a 200-seat thrust space, the hour-and-forty-five-minute Belleville opened under the direction of
Studio artistic director David Muse on 3 September and was scheduled to run
until 12 October.
Commissioned by the Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven,
Connecticut, Belleville had its
première there in 2011. (An earlier
version, called The Doctor’s Wife—which
the playwright discarded—was commissioned by Yale Rep in 2007.) Two years later, Belleville was staged at the New York Theatre Workshop in the East
Village, receiving a nomination in
2013 for the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play; later that year, Chicago’s
renowned Steppenwolf Theatre Company staged the play. (All three productions were directed by Anne
Kauffman.) The play was also a finalist
for the 2013 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for women playwrights who write in English. Belleville is Herzog’s third major production as a
playwright (and the second at the Studio Theatre, following 4000 Miles in March through May last
year).
A graduate of the Yale School of Drama (Master of Fine Arts,
2007), where she studied with playwrights Richard Nelson and John Guare, and
Jim Nicola, artistic director of the New York Theatre Workshop, Herzog was born
in New Jersey 35 years ago but lives in Brooklyn. (I have a report on ROT of Nelson’s That
Hopey Changey Thing, also at the Studio Theatre, posted on 15
December 2013.) She turned to playwriting after having trained as an
actor as a Yale undergrad, which may have influenced her writing. In Belleville,
the character of Abby says, “To be an actor you have to love to suffer, and I
only like to suffer”; this may reveal something of why Herzog made the switch to
writing. She began composing plays after
she graduated from Yale College (Class of ’00), starting with the 10-minute
script Granted (2001). Never having taken any writing courses
before, Herzog started taking a playwriting class at Columbia University later that same
year. “I always thought of myself as a
writer,” she’s said, “but not because I was actually writing.” While at Columbia, the budding dramatist
wrote In Translation (which she calls
“this horrible play that I hope no one ever sees”) that gained her entrance
into Yale Drama in 2003. Her previous
major works are After the Revolution, produced in 2010 by the Williamstown
Theater Festival in Williamstown, Massachusetts, in 2010, and 4000 Miles, a finalist for the 2013
Pulitzer Prize for Drama, was débuted
by Lincoln Center Theater at The Duke on 42nd Street in New York City in 2011. The dramatist’s fourth script, The Great God Pan, premièred at New
York’s Playwrights Horizons in 2012. Herzog
has taught playwriting at Bryn Mawr and Yale.
In her first two professional plays, Herzog mined her family
history for drama, exploring secrets uncovered and surprises long buried in
family lore. She explains: “I’m interested in those moments of
examination that, by necessity, come later. I really don’t know anyone who is present and
thoughtful going through their whole lives, and the things that we inherit from
our families are the things that we really question.” Of Herzog’s dramaturgy, review-writer and
journalist Alexis Soloski wrote in American
Theatre: “Her plays assiduously
balance autobiography and fiction; personal interests and political ones;
concealment and exposure.” In Belleville, however, the playwright
follows a parallel tack, but examines the misunderstandings and discoveries of a
couple unrelated to her. Studio
dramaturg Lauren Halvorsen advises that “Herzog remains captured by stories of
shifting understandings in our closest relationships, and the intersection of
intimacy and deception.” In his review
of the NYTW début of Belleville, Time theater reviewer Richard
Zoglin said: “Herzog . . . is a connoisseur of dislocation, a sympathetic
chronicler of the tenuous hold we have on our ordered lives and comforting
beliefs. No one currently writing for
the theater has a sharper grasp of character, or more sheer storytelling
technique.” He added of her treatment of
the story of a marriage: “Herzog doesn’t write jokes, and her vision, though
bleak, is neither cynical nor comforting.”
Zack (Jacob H Knoll) and Abby (Gillian Williams), a young
American couple—they’re both 28—are living the ex-pat life in the multiethnic, artsy
neighborhood of Belleville in the City of Love—or is it the City of Light?;
Abby isn’t sure which. (Belleville,
which means “beautiful town” in French, is a little like SoHo or Chelsea in
Manhattan or some neighborhoods in Brooklyn like Bushwick. Perhaps a more apt comparison is to the Logan
Circle neighborhood in Washington, the home of the Studio Theatre.) She’s teaching yoga and he’s working for
Doctors Without Borders to develop a cure for pediatric AIDS. What could be more romantic or more fun? But there are secrets just below the surface
and we can see almost immediately that this idyll isn’t quite what it ought to
be. It starts with an awkward moment
when Abby returns early from her yoga class—no one showed up—and after dropping
her shopping bags and yoga mat and shedding her jacket and such, enters the
bedroom (from which we hear some suspicious moans) and utters a scream. (Yes, we all know what Herzog wants us to think’s going on!) Zack’s home from work when he’s not supposed
to be and Abby catches him indulging in a little online porn and self-gratification. As the couple begins the delicate dance
of skirting the truth—not just about the afternoon surprise, but their whole
life together, starting from when Abby proposed to Zack in college—we learn
lots of secrets, not all of which are innocent or harmless. Also embroiled, however reluctantly, in the
deceptions and their repercussions are Zack and Abby’s landlord, Alioune (Maduka Steady), a Senegalese-born
Parisian, and his French-born wife, Amina (Joy Jones).
The playwright teases out the hidden truths in small
increments like a hermetically-sealed thriller—in fact, some of them are never
revealed. According to dramaturg
Halvorsen, Herzog watched suspense movies like Suspicion (1941, directed by Alfred Hitchcock) and Gaslight (1944, George Cukor) as
research to see “exactly how many times does something get mentioned, and when
is too much.” I won’t reveal the
details—the play only runs an hour-and-three-quarters; if I told you what
happens, there’d be nothing left to discover!—but suffice it to say that the
young lovers are co-dependents and co-enablers.
(The press packet given to publishing reviewers apparently contained a
note admonishing journalists not to disclose any of the reveals in Belleville.) It doesn’t end well, revealing, according to
the theater’s promo, “the terrifying, profound unknowability of our closest
relationships” (the theme, also, of Herzog’s family-history plays as well).
I’d never seen one of Herzog’s plays before Belleville, so I’ll backpedal a
bit. My initial response was that she
wasn’t going to be a favorite, a writer whose work I’d always make an effort to
see. The work on the production at the
Studio was as good as that theater’s high standards ever are, but I was not
overwhelmed with the play. (I’ll expand
on this shortly.) But since I haven’t
seen her family-based plays, which sound more intriguing because they’re
founded on characters, facts, and real events to which the playwright has a
visceral connection, I won’t make that a declaration. Oddly, some of my main objections are the
same as those I raised regarding Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love which I saw at Bethesda, Maryland’s, Round House
Theatre a few days before Belleville (see
my report posted on 6 October). (I’ll
get to this, too, though you can perhaps suss some of it out from what I’ve
said earlier.)
Now, as I said, the acting, directing, and production of
Studio’s Belleville were marvelous; I
can’t complain about any of these aspects of what I saw. Director Muse handled Herzog’s contrivances
with credibility and directness and in so far as the performances are concerned
didn’t let any of the seams rip apart.
The actors, especially Williams and Knoll as the young couple, committed
to what they were doing and saying (and not saying) as fully as I believe any
actors could. Steady and Jones as the
African apartment managers were equally persuasive. (Their dialect coach, by the way, was Gary
Logan—and I was convinced that Alioune was an immigrant from Dakar and Amina
was born in Paris. I assume both actors
have had some French because much of their dialogue is in that language,
including almost all of the final scene.
Readers of ROT may know that I
finished high school in Geneva and was pretty fluent in French—including acquiring
a near-native accent.) Steady’s
portrayal of a friend who wants to be loyal and supportive but has broader
obligations and Jones’s more leery partner (“We don’t know you,” she reminds
Zack several times) were both touching and understandable, making them the two
characters that rang the truest and most believable with respect to reality.
I’ve equivocated
concerning Williams’s Abby and Knoll’s Zack, not because of the actors’
work but because even the best acting would have left holes in the
characterizations that Herzog put there.
First, in reference to the problem parallel to that in Fool for Love to which I alluded, Herzog
has contrived a slew of secrets for Abby and Zack to conceal which they a)
can’t reveal until the play’s dramatic denouement and b) have to hint about
throughout the rest of the play. It’s
entirely artificial. In order to justify
that a married couple, two people who were purportedly in love with one another
as far back as college, would keep all these secrets, some of them momentous,
from one another, Herzog has to add more secrets. So she gives both Abby and Zack psychological
issues that essentially only begin to surface at the point the play opens. The hint-dropping is also artificial because
it’s for our benefit, not each other’s.
So, the actors have to contend with the artificiality of keeping secrets
that real people, especially (I’d hope) married people, wouldn’t really
keep—or, perhaps be able to keep for very long—and at the same time leave
obscure little clues around for an audience to glom onto so we remain
interested in what’s up. (I assume that
this can work differently in the plays that are based on real family secrets
that are uncovered decades later.
Somehow the dynamics of that seem different to me—but, then, I’m only
speculating.)
This is all a little hard to write about without revealing
any of the hidden facts on which the play’s conclusion (or, really, non-conclusion)
depends because I can’t give examples of how this all worked for me. And I also acknowledge that this kind of
playwriting (and screenwriting, too) is a personal bugaboo for me—I don’t like
it and it drives me up a wall, but others (obviously) don’t share my point of
view. I admit that. Doesn’t change anything, though! I feel what I feel. It’s why I’ve never been a fan of Pinter or
Shepard, and now I have my doubts about Herzog as well. (Okay, I’m not consistent: I like Hitchcock
and Stanley Donen—Charade, one of my
all-time favorite movies, and Arabesque. Maybe it’s just not the same at the
movies. Even Herzog observed, “It’s
different onstage than in film,” though she was talking about a slightly
different aspect of the suspense thriller.
Of course, Belleville isn’t
actually a thriller, despite the writer’s research.)
The hidden psychology is also a problem, but of a slightly dissimilar
variety. It doesn’t ring entirely
true. First of all, both Abby and Zack
treat some issues as much more impactful than they probably would be outside of
fiction. In other words, they overreact
to stimuli. Yes, Herzog has set up some
really big problems, but we don’t learn of them for quite a while, so the
smaller matters have to loom large or the burgeoning drama won’t germinate. Of course, we can write off this overreaction
to the characters’ mental problems—which might work on paper, but dramatically,
it’s circular. It also means that what
we’re watching isn’t really a play about a failing marriage built on lies and
deceptions, but a kind of latter-day David and Lisa—two crazy people feeding off one
another. I don’t believe that’s what
Herzog wants to write about.
Furthermore, the mental issues Herzog seems to have decreed for her main
characters don’t line up with reality, either.
My feeling about
this was confirmed with clinical expertise by one of my companions at the
performance. The subscription partner of
the friend of my mother’s who drove us downtown that afternoon had been a
psychiatric social worker, and she explained why I may have felt there was
something wrong with Abby’s and Zack’s behaviors. Abby, according to my informant, is a
psychotic, which is a serious psychological state that can turn perilous if the
patient stops taking meds—which Abby has done before the play starts. Zack, however, apparently shows symptoms of
neurosis, a far less dangerous condition (which Woody Allen, for one, has made
a career of as a source of comedy), yet it’s Zack who takes the most drastic
actions and harbors the most momentous secret. According to my source, his behavior is out of
line with his illness, which throws the whole play out of whack.
I confess to feeling a little defensive about this criticism
because back on 19 May 2012, I posted an article called “It’s Not Real – It’s Art” in which I took a couple of theatergoers to
task for complaining about two plays whose factual aspects didn’t measure up to
their experiences in the respective fields.
Here I seem to be doing the same thing for which I lambasted two other
critical spectators—so why shouldn’t sauce for the goose be sauce for the
gander? Maybe it was because I felt
something wasn’t right before I knew there was a factual basis for my
unease. Or that the problem is
fundamental to Herzog’s dramatic point, whereas the issues raised by the other
detractors weren’t central to those dramas.
Or, maybe more significant theatrically, that Belleville didn’t satisfy me thematically or dramatically so what
was to me inconsequential— dramatic license, say—in the other plays (both of
which I’d seen and liked tremendously) was more significant and damaging in
Herzog’s dramaturgy. Shakespeare made
lots of factual errors in his plays, some deliberate for poetic and dramatic
purposes and some predicated on the accepted knowledge of the Elizabethan era;
Ibsen, too, included erroneous facts in his scripts based on inaccurate science
of the 19th century. Few admirers of their
plays, however, raise the issue because they are such magnificent dramas that
the errors are piddling and unworthy of concern. I guess I can’t give Herzog a pass on that
rationale—at least not for Belleville.
The upshot of this
is that no director and actors can hope to overcome such fundamental writing
deficiencies. The cast can act up a
storm and still come up short because the playwright has supplied them with
faulty foundations. A house built on
sand will be uninhabitable; characters built the same way will be
unsustainable.
Let me reiterate,
however, that the Studio’s creative team put together a first-class production
irrespective of the drama’s ultimate success.
In addition to the acting and directing, the Belleville apartment
designed by Debra Booth was both funky and charming, evoking the mythical
vision of ex-pat Paris the way Herzog saw it, “the Paris of the American
imagination.” (I have some idea what
that’s like: my very first trip to Europe, when I was about to turn 16, was to
Paris. It was freezing cold that
December—the same time of year as Herzog’s setting—but everything about the
city, from our hotel room near the Étoile to the little bistro around the
corner where we ate the first night to the café where I celebrated my birthday,
was magical, exotic, and wonderful. I
later found other places more to my liking—I spent my next birthday in London
which became my favorite city in the world from then on—but when I returned to
my U.S. school after that vacation, one teacher stopped me and said there was something
different about me. She asked where I’d
been for the school break and when I told her, she smiled knowingly and said,
“That’s what it is.” The myth of Paris
can do that, whether you’re a 16-year-old like me or a 20-something like
Herzog.) Booth’s apartment, with its
skylights, the windows in the bathroom door, and the French windows (what
else?) out to the street below, but with perfectly ordinary furnishings and
precious little decoration, all warmed by Peter West’s atmospheric lighting,
caught that for me. Alex Jaeger’s
costumes were less evocative, but appropriate for the displaced American
twenty-somethings and their resident apartment managers.
Most published critics, both on paper and on line, seem to
have agreed with me. “All four actors are superb,” reported Rebecca J. Ritzel in Washington City Paper, then continued, “What’s problematic about
the play isn’t the plot itself, but Zack and Abby’s backstory.” In the beginning, Ritzel said, “we’ve been
willing to believe how these two people’s lives arrived at their present state,
and then suddenly, the exposition doesn’t make sense—from little things like
dates not adding up, to some rather preposterous final lies.” (Sounds like shorthand for what I’ve said,
doesn’t it?) In the Washington Post, Peter Marks opened by lamenting, “‘Belleville’ is the sort of atmospheric
thriller that comes to a delicate boil under a slender flame and leaves you,
after all is ominously said and done, a bit creeped out but less than
sufficiently gripped.” Marks added, “As
a genre piece, ‘Belleville’ remains a work of some interest, even if it’s not
among this playwright’s best.” He
complained that the play fails because “the unraveling of Zack and Abby’s bond falls
back on the conventions of suspense, in an effort to intensify the stakes” and of
the way it “veers uneasily from subtle to cheap theatrics.” The resolution is “too facile,” said the Post writer, and “Herzog resorts to a
rather pat formula to explain the escalating tensions.” In the end, Marks declared, “[Y]ou’re left
with the suspicion that on this occasion, this talented playwright could have
found a way to affect you more deeply.”
On MD Theatre Guide,
Roger Catlin offered the opinion that the sudio’s Belleville was a “strong production” but warns audiences that though
it’s “a play they might think is nuanced consideration about how much we know
about our closest relationships, . . . it is eventually a straight up thriller.” Riley Croghan succinctly summed up my own
feelings on dcist: “David Muse’s
direction strives to bring the uncomfortable story of a marriage falling apart
with unflinching (but often flinch-inducing) realism but doesn’t fully overcome
Herzog’s script, written with characters and circumstances that don’t ring
quite true.” Nonetheless, Croghan
concluded that Belleville is “a
suspenseful and wild emotional ride, and one well worth seeing.”
DC Theatre Scene’s Tim Treanor declared, “In Belleville, Herzog’s characters
face moron dilemmas, as in how to survive in the face of idiotic decisions,”
and even though “Studio Theatre plays the hell out of it . . ., there’s
no there there.” Treanor characterizes
the climactic act as “so staggeringly stupid that we lose respect not only for
the character who committed the act but to the character’s partner” and “we are
left with no greater understanding, no insight.” The Studio presentation, however, was “done
beautifully,” the DCTS reviewer wrote, praising even Herzog’s dialogue
as “absolutely authentic,” but finally determined that “the production would be
a joy to behold except that most of it is about something which isn’t all that
interesting and the rest is about somebody who isn’t all that bright.” Conversely, “The Studio Theatre’s riveting
production of Belleville gives us Amy Herzog’s writing at its
electrifying best,” announced John Stoltenberg, “a full-on fan and follower” of
Herzog, on DC Metro Theater Arts.
Herzog not only “tackles the psychological suspense-and-thriller genre,”
asserted Stoltenberg, but “she has made it her own.” The Studio production is advanced, in the
view of the DCMTA review-writer, by Muse’s “razor-sharp” direction and “the
eloquent precision of the performances.”
On Talkin’ Broadway
Regional News & Reviews, Susan
Berlin wrote that Herzog “gives . . . a fresh jolt” to the “eternal” question
of “How well can any two people really know each other?” The Studio production, “with a solid
four-member cast,” Berlin asserted, was “smoothly directed” by Muse, who “starts
naturalistically and moves by infinitesimal steps into darker territory.” “There’s
no shortage of drama with Studio Theatre’s season opener Belleville,” stated Broadway World: Washington, DC’s Benjamin Tomchik; it “may be a challenging play to sit through, but that
doesn’t stop Studio Theatre from staging an exceptionally solid production.” Herzog’s play is “a powerful piece with
characters that are terrifyingly real,” wrote Tomchik. “What’s frustrating,” the BWW reviewer continued, “is that Herzog
declines to answer one final question—why did we go on this journey.” Tomchik asked, “What, if anything, is the
ultimate lesson to be taken from their experience?” and then offered, “Despite
a well-crafted and well-acted production . . ., Belleville remains a
frustrating work” because we ultimately “question the rationale for why we’re
being brought in to watch.”
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