FAR AND WIDE
by Arthur Schnitzler
adapted by Jonathan
Bank
Mint Theater Company
13 February 2003
I saw an adaptation of Das Weite Land, a 1911 play by Austrian dramatist Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931), Tuesday night, 11 February [2003]. The Mint Theater calls this version Far and Wide, but in 1979, British playwright Tom Stoppard (b. 1937) did a version he called Undiscovered Country. I never saw the Stoppard (it was done at Hartford Stage, but was never staged in New York City), but I have to believe it was at least more amusing in its use of language than Jonathan Banks’s rendition.
The Mint’s adaptation, which cuts the play from four hours (it was recently performed in its original version in Salzburg, Austria) to 2½ and from 29+ characters to 11, is talky and entirely undramatic. (I have some real problems with the set and costume designs—they make no sense in any context I can figure out—but these are inconsequential considering the problems with the text.)
Even with the missing 18+ characters, there are several that serve no dramatic purpose, and barely a plot function. Two, in fact—left over from the one scene in which most of the extra characters appear—have no purpose at all. (They’re clearly meant to be comic, and may have been part of the “local color” of the scene, a sort Grand Hotel setting, but they’re not funny here and add nothing useful to the play.)
Other extraneous characters are required for the plot—though they’re not important—and mostly clutter the production. I had trouble keeping some of them straight—there are lots of domestic relationships in this play: spouses, ex-spouses, children, lovers, ex-lovers, friends, and so on.
Worst of all, the play’s point—or the point director/adapter Bank thinks it makes—is entirely obscure to me. Hell, the dramatic focus doesn’t even show up until the end of the fourth act, and then takes place off stage in the fifth. (Yes, that’s right: it’s a five-act play.)
Bank includes a note in the program about his “adaptation” and at the end, he says he hopes that his shortening and trimming of the play will cause other theaters to be interested in producing it. I can’t see any reason for this hope. [Indeed, after 17 years, no one in New York’s picked it up.] Short or long, Far and Wide’s an enervating experience and I can’t imagine any other director wanting to stage the play.
(Actually, I had a thought Diana, my usual theater partner, thought might work: turn the play into a PBS-type TV miniseries. It’s a five-act play—the first “part,” three of the acts, is 90 minutes!—and if you “open” it up and put in all the atmosphere of 1911 Vienna—two of the characters, for instance, are military officers; I can just picture the uniforms!—and add some kind of climax for each act, it could make a five-part series, each act being a one-hour segment.
(The third act—the Grand Hotel scene—takes place at a mountain hotel in the Tyrol where the guests go cliff-climbing up a mountain where a friend of the main character had fallen to his death some years earlier; the last act centers on a duel in which the main character fatally shoots a young officer who had been his wife’s lover. Both these incidents take place off stage in the play, but on TV, I can see them played out, cutting back to the people waiting for the outcome.)
By the way, that young officer is designated an ensign in the marines. (The other was a lieutenant of some kind, probably in the army—so two different pre-WWI, that is, elaborate and colorful, uniforms.) Now, both Austria and Hungary are land-locked countries; they have no coast, and, as far as I know, never had a navy. (Although, one ruler of post-WWI Hungary was an Admiral Horty! My dad always thought that was silly—what was he an admiral of?) I’m sure Schnitzler wasn’t in error over this detail, but it’s curious: What service was he in? Where did they sail?
(Irrelevant side note: In the musical The Sound of Music—and in the real-life story on which its based—the paterfamilias of the singing von Trapp family is a retired Austrian naval captain. Now, Austria does have part of Lake Constance—the Bodensee in German—but I don’t think there are any naval installations on its shores. Where did he serve?)
I’ve never seen a Mint Theatre show before, but I’ve seen its name around and I believe it has a good reputation I’m not sure it’s entirely deserved, and I’ve always had the impression that it’s a kind of vanity operation. [I’ve gone on to see several more productions at the Mint, and I came to the opinion that I wasn’t going to be a fan. Diana is, to a degree—she likes old-fashioned plays, the Mint’s stock-in-trade—so I’ve accompanied her a few more times in recent seasons. I have not changed my opinion.]
The Mint’s been around since around ’92, apparently—I’ve seen reviews and I’m on the mailing list somehow so I get their flyers. Bank took over in ’94, and like I said, it seems to be his operation now. He not only adapted this script (he’s done that before, too) and directed the production, but he’s also the artistic director of the company.
The list of past
productions is dominated by those he has directed himself (though there are
occasionally other directors), and since there’s no literary manager mentioned
in the program’s staff list, I assume he selects the plays Mint produces on his
own. I have no proof of this; it’s just a feeling I’ve had with the
reports of this company’s work. (The company’s turf is revivals of old
plays they feel have been neglected or forgotten. The company recently
published a book of some of the plays it staged in recent years. Bank is
the book’s editor.)
Diana and I chose to go to a preview because we were just curious about this unfamiliar old play but didn’t want to pay full fare. The production opens on 17 February and I’m curious to see what the reviews will be—if it gets reviewed. (Mint does get reviews, but if it’s a non-commercial production, papers don’t always publish if they don’t think a show’s worth writing up. I can certainly conceive of the Times, say, deciding this isn’t worth covering; I don’t know about other papers.)
_____
Addenda (written after the report above): There wasn’t a review in the Times on Tuesday, 18 February, but that doesn’t surprise me. As a matter of fact, I’m surprised that the New York Post covered it. The two tabs don’t usually devote as much space to theater as the Times (which really only started making a point of covering Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway ten years ago or so) and I wouldn’t have thought they’d have bothered.
As for the Post’s take on Far and Wide on Tuesday, reviewer Donald Lyons must have seen a different production. Maybe the Mint did some heavy fixing in the time since I saw the preview—though I can’t guess what they could have done.
“Imagine Chekhov as an Austrian,” suggests Lyons. “Such is the work of Arthur Schnitzler . . . .” All I can tell you is that that this doesn’t line up with what I saw. The Mint’s Far and Wide sure didn’t seem Chekhovian to me—and I just saw a Chekhov (Uncle Vanya from London’s Donmar Warehouse at BAM in January).
The Daily News’s review (say that five times fast—sounds like a Danny Kaye routine!) on 19 February is a little closer to my version of the truth—though Robert Dominguez seems kinder to the play than I would have been. “Soap opera” is a milder put-down than I think the script deserves. He also captures Hans Tester’s performance as the husband, but gives him an out at the end. The man never stopped waving his arms about. (Maybe he was sending semaphore and that’s what the New York Post critic got that I didn’t see.)
I’m just surprised that both tabs have covered this show within days of its snowy opening night, and the Times hasn’t said a word. Today’s Times even has one of its occasional omnibus theater review columns. I wonder if Newsday is reviewing it, too. In any case, they all seem to be being very kind to Schnitzler and the Mint, though I can’t see why.
Clive Barnes used to be queer for anything British—he still might be, for all I know—but I don’t know why any critic would have a special bias for either Schnitzler or the Mint Theater, if that’s what’s going on here. (Neither review really said very much about either the play or the performance; they were both very general and unspecific—and short.)
By the way, the headline for the News review—”Round & ‘Ronde’ They Go”—is awful! (It’s a punny ref to Schnitzler’s best-known play, La Ronde.) The paper ought to fire that headline writer. Yeccch.
Looks like I guessed wrong about the Times’ reviewing Far and Wide. I thought they’d let so much time go by because they weren’t going to bother running a review, but they had a small one by Wilborn Hampton in today’s paper (4 March). It was cool, but not entirely negative. It was actually somewhat complimentary about the play itself. Odd that three dailies seemed to see so much more value in that script than I can. (Not one reviewer mentioned how long the damn thing was for so little reward. I think that’s material.)
* *
* *
TRYING
by
Joanna McClelland Glass
Victory
Gardens Theater (Chicago)
Promenade
Theatre (New York)
1 November 2004
On 29 October [2004], I saw the Off-Broadway production of Trying by Joanna McClelland Glass (b. 1936) with Fritz Weaver [1926-2016] at the Promenade Theatre on the Upper West Side. It got a very cool review in the Times on 14 October—the writer (Charles Isherwood) praised Weaver’s performance but didn’t think much of the play or the actress opposite Weaver, Kati Brazda. (It’s a two-character play.) The review was exactly right, in my opinion.
Dubbing Trying “a slight and sentimental new play . . . that is given a measure of ballast by Fritz Weaver’s gracious, subtly turned performance,” Isherwood characterized it as “both touching and comic.” Weaver “gives a wonderfully conscientious performance,” affirmed the reviewer. Brazda, he lamented, “recites her lines with admirable articulation but brings little emotional depth or variety to her portrayal.”
Except for the Times review, there doesn’t seem to have been much press on the play in New York. It’s an autobiographical melodrama about the author’s stint as the secretary to Francis Biddle (1886-1968), a retired judge (the Nuremberg tribunal) and Attorney General (under Franklin Roosevelt) just before his death at 82 in 1968.
It’s sort of Magnificent Yankee-lite—Biddle’s a stuck-in-his-ways curmudgeon, the secretary is a plucky, determined Canadian mid-westerner. Except that he dies in the end (actually between the last two scenes), nothing happens. It’s about the least dramatic play I’ve seen in many years.
I have always insisted that I want theater to do more than just tell a story and this doesn’t come near making the cut. Weaver’s performance is good, even excellent—he’s almost 79 (next January—I just looked it up); the character’s about to be 82, as he often reminds us—but he has nothing to play off of: the secretary (Brazda) is nothing more than a cue-provider. (At one point, she brings in a Dictaphone. It provides as much for Weaver to play against as the living actress did.)
I don’t think this is entirely Brazda’s fault—the part isn’t written with anything to give—but she was hardly a stage presence at all. Since we pretty much know Biddle’s going to die—he even tells us several times that that’s what he’s waiting for, just in case we don’t see it coming—the ending isn’t even remotely dramatic. (That’s beside the fact that he dies off stage between scenes. The final scene is the definition of anti-climax.)
The script’s nothing more than a compilation of scenes of nostalgic reminiscence—like looking through old snapshots of someone else’s youth. For 2½ hours, by the way.
The play was originally produced by Victory Gardens Theatre in Chicago, and Glass, who’s apparently also Canadian-born (she became a U.S. citizen in 1962)—she didn’t change that factoid for the play—has had a few other plays produced, though none whose title I recognized from anywhere. (Brazda also has some credits, but again, I didn’t recognize any of them. She apparently originated the role in Chicago, as did Weaver)
For my money, there doesn’t seem to have been any reason to write this play or, then, to have produced it—much less to have moved it to New York City. [Trying ran 11 weeks in New York, plus 2 weeks of previews.]
One odd note: for a very small play—two actors; one set; no special effects, live music, elaborate costumes or props; and so on—the roster of producers is immense. Then there are a half dozen listed “associate producers”—whatever they are.
All those people piled onto this mediocre effort, but August Wilson was having trouble keeping his investors for Gem of the Ocean, the ninth in his decology of plays about the black experience in 20th-century America—and he may be our preeminent living playwright for serious drama. Somethin’ ain’t right here.
There was one interesting thing at the performance. As you might guess from the fact that Biddle was a Roosevelt Attorney General, he was a Democrat. But, true to his patrician family roots (the Biddles are an old, old Pennsylvania family who in colonial days owned large chunks of what is now New Jersey), he had been a Republican until the coal miners’ strike of the 1930’s.
Every time Weaver’s Biddle said something about the switch and the reasons for it, most of the audience applauded uproariously. It happened two or three times in the middle of the play. The only plausible reason for this response that I could see, given that the play itself isn’t all that inspiring, was the current George W. Bush-John Kerry presidential campaign.
New York City is a Democratic town—and the Upper West Side (where the Promenade Theatre is) is a liberal stronghold within a blue city. [The day after I wrote this report, 75% of us in the city voted for Kerry; slightly fewer in the state.]
* * * *
LANDSCAPE OF THE BODY
by
John Guare
Signature
Theatre Company (New York City)
Peter
Norton Space
9
May 2006
I saw the revival of John Guare’s 1977 Landscape of the Body at the Signature Theatre Company here back last month, and I never got around to writing up my response. Landscape was, to put it simplistically, a disappointment. Ben Brantley gave it a rave (a “terrific revival . . . directed with equal measures of sensationalism and sensitivity”) in the Times a day before I saw it on 18 April [2006], especially singling out the two female leads.
I went into the show expecting to like it, even wanting to, if you know what I mean. I’ve had serious problems with Brantley’s criticism since he became the Times’ main theater reviewer, and I have mostly come to discount his judgment and just read him for description and whatever objective information he provides. [Brantley, who retired from the Times’ theater desk in October 2020, started reviewing for the Gray Lady in 1993.]
We’ve differed so often, in both directions, that I’ve concluded he and I don’t see the same shows. (I may have once explained that I think Brantley, who doesn’t associate with anyone in the New York theater scene, experiences things, including plays, in his own imagination, not in the same reality in which the rest of us experience things. [See “The Art of Writing Reviews by Kirk Woodward,” Part 2, posted on Rick On Theater on 8 November 2009.])
Nevertheless, because Landscape isn’t a new play but a “known quantity,” if you will, and because I generally like Guare, I was prepared to like the play despite the dichotomy of my responses with Brantley’s. Even a stopped clock, as a friend used to like to say, is right twice a day. I shoulda gone with my instincts.
I wanted to like Landscape so much, it took several scenes before I realized that it’s a confused, and possibly self-indulgent, mess. I tried at first to see if the production was to blame, but it wasn’t. Brantley had praised the stagework heavily, comparing it favorably to the previous Signature show, the wonderful revival of Horton Foote’s Trip to Bountiful [see my report on ROT on 25 May 2013].
He asserted that that was the definitive revival of the Foote play—an opinion I actually won’t argue with (except to caution that “definitive” in live theater is a dubious claim, no matter how good something is)—and that this staging of Landscape will do for Guare’s 1977 play what the earlier one did for Foote’s 1957 masterpiece. Uh-uh—no way.
It’s not that the acting or directing is lacking, but that the play just isn’t for Guare what Bountiful is for Foote [1916-2009]. The Foote’s a wonderful evocation of a world which the playwright created and populated, then revisited—with us along for the rides—on many subsequent occasions. His characters are lovingly created human beings with personalities, foibles, quirks, failings, and strengths. They ebb and flow, just like those in real people (except to more dramatic consequence, of course).
The plays seem slight—because the slice of the Foote world he lets us see each time is small, but not inconsequential—but they’re not. None of this is in evidence in Landscape.
Allowing that Guare doesn’t deal in the realities that Foote does, it’s not entirely fair to compare the two in all aspects, but when Guare goes off into his Dadaistic world, like in House of Blue Leaves or the one-act Day for Surprises, you go along with him, accepting the absurdities and non sequiturs as parts of that world.
Landscape is just incredible—in the sense of ‘not credible.’ The coincidences are too silly to be world-shaking, the characters are all too eccentric to be anything but that—eccentric (as opposed to somehow following the dictates of a parallel reality). There are too many of them thrown into the situation, as if Guare had all these queer folk left over from past scripts and decided to use them all up in one fell swoop.
And too many of the main quirks assigned to each character seemed irrelevant, as if they were just selected to make us ask, ‘What’s going on here?’ but without ever answering the question. The (male) travel agent boss, Raulito (Bernard White), wears a gold lamé evening gown . . . because when he was growing up in Cuba, he thought that’s how all rich Americans dressed (ooookaaaay). But what’s the dramatic point of that? So he can get shot in an apparent bank robbery wearing the dress? Why?
The nutsy southern (and why does he have to be southern—because they’re all nutsy somehow?) suitor, Durwood Peach (Jonathan Fried), is allowed to leave the protection of his clinic and grand estate back home to come up to woo Betty, with the blessing of both his mother and . . . his wife. Why? Because the only way to get Betty out of his system is to let him make the trip—alone, with thousands of bucks in cash.
And of course, Betty (Lili Taylor) goes back south with him. Why? Just so she can leave her 14-year-old son, Bert (Stephen Scott Scarpulla—and what’s with all these three-part names nowadays, anyway?), home alone so the plot can happen the way Guare wants it to.
That’s basically all it amounts to—a way to get the plot on track. All the craziness of the suitor doesn’t accomplish much else, except provide some hoops for the actor to jump through (rather well, I must say, in this case).
The big theatrical coup of Landscape is that the characters sing. It’s not a musical in the conventional sense, but the main characters all come down front several times and sing. Rosalie (Sherie Rene Scott), the dead sister (yeah, that’s right) was a nightclub chanteuse wannabe, so she hovers around in a white satin gown, à la Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blonds, and sings her torch songs; Betty contributes several ballads; and Bert does a big rock number that Brantley thought was the bomb. (Poor Scarpulla, his raspy voice, obviously still in the throes of the change, was almost too painful to listen to. I wanted to reach for a cough drop just out of sympathy.)
Guare wrote the lyrics and music, and I guess that’s an accomplishment in itself, but I never felt the singing really did anything for the play either theatrically or dramatically. It was a gimmick, as far as I was concerned. (Everybody’s gotta have one, you know.) Reminded me of the bit about the dog who reads the newspaper: It’s not a matter of how well he does it, but the fact that he does it at all. So, it didn’t matter how effective the songs are, but that Guare wrote them and inserted them into his play. Harrumph!
I never really figured out what Guare was on about in Landscape. I was a little embarrassed when a small group of spectators seated next to my friend Diana and me—Diana having gone off to the convenience—turned to me after discussing their confusion among themselves and asked what I thought the play was about. I couldn’t answer.
(I actually thought briefly of lying and making up an answer. I’d been a grad student in theater, for Pete’s sake—I could certainly come up with some bullshit or other. I decided on a sheepish grimace of shared confusion and left it at that. Brave soul that I am.)
Brantley says things like “‘Landscape’ identifies the human condition as an almost unbearable wistfulness,” that it “locat[es] the loneliness in the celebrity-besotted American culture of the late 20th century” and “identifies the unbearable wistfulness of being.” What does any of that MEAN?
As directed by Michael Greif, according to Brantley, Guare is illustrating the “obsession with fabulous fame and conspicuous wealth, qualities perceived as infinitely desirable and equally unobtainable” in America, “a lyrical and sordid world where tabloid prurience has become a religion.”
Okay, maybe he is—but that seems a slight and well-worn
point that can’t really bear up under the weight of so much contrivance, I don’t
think. I didn’t see the play in ’77, but I remember when it played at the
Joseph Papp Public Theater and I remember feeling that it wasn’t anything I
wanted to see. I probably should have remembered that feeling.
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