More Off-Broadway Plays from the Archive

 

THE CHERRY ORCHARD
by Anton Chekhov
adapted by Tom Donaghy
Atlantic Theater Company
Linda Gross Theater
29 June 2005 

I saw the Atlantic Theater Company’s Cherry Orchard, which Charles Isherwood reviewed poorly back on 16 June [2005] (“ineffective production”; “it fails more or less equally at eliciting laughter and tears”), on Tuesday night, the 28th, and I think Isherwood nailed it, if a bit generously to the company. 

First, Tom Donaghy’s adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s text: I found it more than just “blunt” and “unobjectionable,” as Isherwood put it.  There are numerous expressions and turns of phrase that stuck out as way too contemporary.  In one instance, for example, young Anya says of Ranevskaya, “Mama doesn’t get it.”  Now, maybe teenagers in 1904 said that about their parents, but somehow I doubt it. 

I find that I can’t remember lines from this production—which may be a comment on the text, or the acting (more about which later)—so I can’t cite any of the other anachronistic lines even though there are several.  You’ll just have to take my word for it, I guess.  Sorry.  (My companion, Diana, remarked on the use of “stuff”—as in “and stuff”—but I confess that I didn’t catch that.  I might have gotten inured to the anachronistic speech by then.)

(By the way, when I went to check some things in the script, I first referred to my copy of Jean-Claude van Itallie’s translation.  The program doesn’t say so, but it looks to me as if Donaghy used—or borrowed liberally from—van Itallie’s text for his adaptation.  I looked for some of those apparent anachronisms and they’re not in van Itallie’s version—the line above is rendered “Mama doesn’t realize”—but a lot of the other language seems to be.  Hmmmm!)

Next, the set: As we all know, this is a family with no money even to pay the mortgage—it’s in the lines—and most of the family has been away, except Ranevskaya’s ineffectual brother, Gayev (Larry Bryggman), and her adopted daughter, Varya (Diana Ruppe), who have been in the house with one flibberty-gibbet maid and the ancient Firs—so how have they been keeping the place up? 

The answer should be that they haven’t been: with no money for upkeep and servants incapable of doing the work anyway, it should be like Tara during the privations of the Civil War in the middle of Gone With The Wind—seedy, stitched together, patched up here and there, and so on—showing evidence of deferred maintenance, a little forlorn and neglected. 

The Atlantic’s set, designed by Scott Pask and Orit [sic] Jacoby Carroll (names I don’t recognize at all—though Pask lists several Broadway sets in his bio, including a Tony nomination for Pillowman and a Drama Desk nomination for Sweet Charity), is pristine in its pastel-green walls with white trim (it looked a lot like a giant piece of Wedgewood!), colors that ought to show grime very clearly! 

I’ll also accept that the house and its furnishings date back before the time of the play, maybe even a century or more, but this set looks positively 18th-century—like Liaisons Dangereuses is going to be performed, say—and you know that this family didn’t just redecorate their country estate in the style of Peter the Great or something.  So the decor is either antiques, which ought to show signs of aging for the obvious reasons I already mentioned, or the set’s an anachronism on top of anything else. 

(Even the children’s furniture in the nursery in the first act is like new—and the “children” who used it are now in their 50’s: Gayev says so.  Furniture used by children—and then their children—gets pretty damn worn, especially when there’s no money for repairs and maintenance.  Replacement isn’t a solution: Ranevskaya (Brooke Adams) reminisces about several of the pieces.  Didn’t the designers ever hear of distressing?)

The program doesn’t date the setting (just the times of the year for each act—”May,” “Summer,” and so on), but I saw (or heard) no evidence that the production was moved to a different time, so, along with the questions about the set, I have problems with the costumes, too.  Many are clearly late-19th- or early-20th-century clothes, but others look like stuff from the 1930s and ’50s. 

Yasha (Erin Gann), the butler who was with Ranevskaya in Paris, arrives in a suit and tie (which looks pretty modern to me) and a little straw fedora that prompted me to lean over to Diana and remark, “Yasha must have met Sinatra in Paris . . . and stolen his hat!”  (Later, Lopakhin [Isiah Whitlock, Jr.] arrives wearing a similar-style hat.) 

When Anya (Laura Breckenridge) is awakened and comes onto the set from her “bedroom,” she’s wearing a satin nightgown and robe that looks like something Lauren Bacall might have worn in one of her old flicks.  (Additionally, the robe is opened and the neckline of the nightgown is just above her bust—not very period-appropriate as far as I can tell.  Anya’s only 17, by the way.) 

Now, if the costume designer (Theresa Squire, another artist whose work I don’t know—though I saw some of the shows in her bio) intended this blending of periods to make some kind of meaningful point, I didn’t get it; the symbolism went past me.  What it all looks like to me, though I doubt this is actually the case, is that the cast was just let loose in the costume closet and pulled out whatever looked good and fit them.  (I won’t even go into how clean, undamaged, and brightly-colored all the clothes are.  See my remarks about the set and think of Scarlet O’Hara and her dress made from curtains!)

There are two other small, obviously directorial, choices that troubled me—one more significantly than the other.  The former is a casting decision: Brooke Adams as Ranevskaya.  She just looks too young for the role.  Maybe too fresh is the way to put it—after all, Anya, her daughter, is only 17.  I don’t know how old Adams is—she’s not an ingénue anymore, certainly [she was 56]—but somehow Ranevskaya seems older, maybe worn down.  Of course, what may really bother me and make me consider this was Adams’s acting, which is of a piece with the rest of the company—which I’ll try to describe below. 

(There’s another casting thing, which Isherwood also mentioned, that’s troublesome: casting a black actor as Lopakhin, the son of a former serf who ends up owning the estate.  It just invokes historical American parallels that are irrelevant to the play.  Whether Scott Zigler, the director did this deliberately, or because he thought he could finesse it, I have no idea.  It certainly isn’t because the actor, Isiah Whitlock, Jr., is just so terrific that no one else can do the part; Whitlock, a member of the Atlantic, is just as wan as the rest of the company, bar one.  Unfortunate choice.)

The other little matter, which only someone like me would probably even notice, is the coffee scene in the middle of Act I.  (I wondered if the family was actually supposed to be drinking coffee—Russia’s a tea culture, not a coffee one—though, of course, Ranevskaya had just been living in Paris, and France is a coffee culture.  Anyway, I checked the Russian text—yes, I have one—and they do drink coffee.) 

So, Dunyasha (Pepper Binkley), the maid, brings in the coffee on a tray. (She carries the tray peculiarly, as if to make it more awkward for the performance: both her arms are underneath the tray, her hands grasping it from below on the side away from her body.  Needless to say, she has trouble walking this way, and even more difficulty putting the tray down without dumping it.  What for?  She carries it out the same way, and watching the actress pick it up that way—sliding her arms under the tray when it’s on a chest—is a sight to behold.  It’s an actor’s—or director’s—choice, not a character’s.) 

The thing is, the coffee’s in a samovar, with a small pot (hot water, apparently) sitting on top of it.  First of all, samovars are for tea, not coffee or any other drink.  They’re not a Russian equivalent to a hot-drink urn.  Second—and this is the error most people make if they don’t know about samovars—the “urn” isn’t for the tea—it’s filled with hot water.  The little pot on top holds tea essence (essentially very, very strong tea), kept hot by the water in the samovar. 

The drinkers pour a small amount of the tea essence into a cup—actually, most often a glass; Russians drink their tea (and their coffee often, too) from glasses—then add hot water from the samovar to dilute it to their taste.  What this cast does is run coffee out of the samovar—as if it’s a coffee urn—and then add water from the little pot.  I’ve never heard of anyone putting water in coffee—tea, yes, if it’s too strong, but not coffee. 

Now, I looked at this in the original, too, to see if the stage directions had called for Dunyasha to bring in a samovar—but the text says she brings in a kofeinik, a coffee pot.  Someone was being a smarty-pants!  So, maybe no one else would have noticed this—or cared—but to me it shrieked, “These people don’t know what they’re doing!”  (Hey, it’s a Russian play—Russians use samovars!  We should use one.)       

Okay, maybe all these cavils about the technical production are picayune—though I think they’re emblematic—but then you have the acting and directing.  Now, nothing is actually bad or embarrassing, but few of the actors seem to have a real idea what the characters are going through—or even saying. 

As Isherwood pointed out, Alvin Epstein [1925-2018] as Firs is terrific—a complete character creation that’s consistent and interesting and alive (barely, considering the character’s like 150 or something).  But Firs is mostly off in his own world anyway, so the actor can safely create his character pretty much independent of everyone else. 

The main problem with all the rest of the cast, even the members Isherwood singled out for low praise, is that they’re all in different plays.  No one really connects with anyone else, and no one feeds off of anyone else.  What it looks like to me is as if each actor has created his or her character alone, then they all assembled, 19th-century style, and blocked the action the day before they opened. 

It also sounds as if they all just memorized words without much attention to what they’re saying—or, more consequently, what they’re feeling.  Even Larry Bryggman as Gayev, who turns in an amusing performance (a little too like the loopy judge he played in Romance, the David Mamet farce I saw at the Atlantic in February [see my report posted on 21 August 2013]), seems to have been working in a bubble by himself; his work is just a little more complex and thorough than anyone else’s (except, of course, Epstein’s). 

The central omission, as far as I’m concerned, is the missing center of the play.  You know that little item, the cherry orchard?  Aside from being Chekhov’s central symbol for the old world that’s disappearing while the new, unknown one is forming, the orchard is also the most prominent focus of Ranevskaya and her family and household.  (Ummm . . . that’s why it’s the play’s title.) 

I mean, they let themselves go broke and have the estate sold out from under them because they won’t sell the orchard for the land and see it cleared for dachas.  They lose everything rather than sacrifice the orchard.  But the only time you know this cast is even thinking of the orchard is when the lines refer to it. 

I think you can keep the orchard center stage metaphorically without its being visible to the audience (as it was constantly in the famous Andrei Serban production at Lincoln Center in ’77), but the actors—with the aid of the director—have to accomplish this.  No one did. 

(Firs has a wonderful moment at the end, by the way, when he’s been left behind in the empty house and the workmen are chopping down the cherry trees outside—the orchard is out in the auditorium—and he stands, lost in his fog, looking confusedly out the imaginary window down front, his lips moving in silent, unintelligible monologue and his eyebrows twitching in befuddlement.  Now, that’s acting!  Total communication without a word or sound uttered.) 

The final result is that I didn’t believe any of the actors (except, again, Epstein).  Their trouble with the words may have been exacerbated by the adaptation (there were several line bobbles, which shouldn’t be happening at this stage of the run—unless, of course, the actors aren’t really paying attention!), but the missing center of the play and the lack of connection between the characters are the fault of the cast and director Zigler, one of the founders of the Atlantic, who’s staged a lot of Mamet both at the Atlantic and elsewhere, and who also teaches theater. 

Diana complained about the slapstick she felt is used inappropriately in the production, but the only character who is prone to pratfalls was Yepikhodov (Todd Weeks), who’s portrayed as inept and clumsy, so it doesn’t bother me.  But one instance does bother me—because of how it’s set up, not because it occurs. 

When Act III opens, the set includes a sofa along a wall jutting out from left center.  To the right of the sofa is a small end table—but the right end of the sofa’s at the very end of the wall, so the table’s set so that it stands out in the entranceway into the room.  As soon as the lights came up on the set, I said to myself, “Self!  (Nyuk-nyuk)  Why would anyone put a table there—it’s just begging to be tripped over.” 

Sure enough, Yepikhodov makes an abrupt exit, spinning around suddenly and stumbling right into the table, knocking it over.  (I think he also accidentally broke it—when Semyonov-Pishchik [Peter Maloney] tried to right it, it wouldn’t stand up again; one of the legs seemed to have broken off.)  Once again, Zigler seems to have selected a bit for its theatrical effect, not its fitness for the circumstances: he had to fudge the set-up to get it to happen.  

In what seems like an inapposite cross-cultural reference, the cruel nickname for Yepikhodov in Donaghy’s version is “Schlepikhodov.”  In van Itallie’s translation, the soubriquet is taken directly from the Russian: “Twenty-two Misfortunes.” 

Maybe I’m wrong here, but I don’t think a Russian aristocratic family or its servants would come up with so obvious a Yiddish expression.  This was the time of anti-Jewish pogroms, after all.  And Yiddishisms weren’t as common among non-Jews as they are today in New York.  Small thing, maybe, but it seems wrong—a joke for the New York audience that Chekhov’s Russians would never have made.  

(Furthermore, “Schlepikhodov” isn’t even an apt joke.  The character is portrayed as inept and clumsy, but schlep means “drag, pull, heave” [as a heavy load] or “lag behind.”  In German, a Schlepper is a tugboat, but in Yiddish, schlepper means a stupid, ignorant, or foolish person.   

(A word for a clumsy person would be schlemiel or zhlub.  Of course, they don’t rhyme with ‘Yep-,’ which is why I presume Zigler/Donaghy went with the inappropriate schlep.  Ah, well!) 

Chekhov is hard to pull off, as Isherwood observes.  Having attempted it myself a few times—most notably, I guess, in a grad-student rep production of The Wood Demon—I can attest to how tricky he is.  I’ve seen a lot of mediocre—and even a few bad—productions of Cherry Orchard and other Chekhovs, and this production isn’t among the worst, by any means.  But it should be much better than it is.  

Fundamental acting and directing principles seem to have been forgotten or lost along the way: being in the world of the play, connecting to the other characters on stage with you, making the main situation of the play real for you.  These are all in Uta Hagen’s Respect for Acting, for goodness’ sake!  How hard should it be for professional actors and directors to do these things?  It’s square one, isn’t it? 

Isherwood notes that the Atlantic, which performs in a converted church in Manhattan’s Chelsea [in what was christened the Linda Gross Theater in 2007], is best known for contemporary plays—though I’d debate that it has always “excelled” in this field—and they were clearly out of their depth here—but to have missed the very basics that even second-year acting students would have held on to (I hope, anyway) is almost inexcusable. 

The production might still not have worked—there are many pitfalls in Chekhov—but the result wouldn’t seem so, well, empty.  (And I probably wouldn’t have spotted all those silly little mistakes.)

*  *  *  *
MEMORY
by Jonathan Lichtenstein
Clwyd Theatr Cymru (Mold, Wales)
59E59 Theaters (Theater A)
5 June 2007 

I pretty much figured I was through with theater for the summer after the last play of Signature Theatre Company’s August Wilson season (King Hedley II, which I saw in March 2007 [and reported about on Rick On Theater on 16 March 2017 in “From My August Wilson Archive, Part 1”]), but my friend Diana called me because she wanted to check out some of the plays in the Brits Off Broadway series in Theater A (the Off-Broadway house) of 59E59 Theaters, a relatively new—it’s only three years old—glass-and-steel theater building on East 59th Street between Madison and Park Avenues. 

I hadn’t really considered the series: the first show reviewed was a Welsh play that is set in four time periods during the rehearsal of a play about a Holocaust survivor, and it sounded iffy (New York Times’ Charles Isherwood: “flawed but compelling drama”).  The rest of the bill is dominated by eight (count ’em, eight!) plays by Alan Ayckbourn, a British playwright for whom I have little regard. 

(I’m being kind.  I decided after one of the three plays in The Norman Conquests back in June 1976 that I just wasn’t going to pay money to see Ayckbourn’s plays anymore.)  But Diana wanted to see the Welsh play, Memory, by the company Clwyd Theatr Cymru [now Theatr Clwyd]; Cymru is Welsh for Wales and Clwyd is a county in the north-east corner of the country (which I wouldn’t want to try to pronounce).  I agreed to go with her, so we went on Friday, 25 May [2007].  The play was in English.

Unhappily, I was right about the play.  The New York Times review had been mixed but essentially positive (especially about the acting), but I found that Isherwood oversold the play even with his misgivings.  (He called it “engrossing throughout.”) 

Besides that, unfortunately, I have a problem with Holocaust stories, fictional or documentary: I get so angry that I get uncomfortable with the my own reaction.  Usually, I just don’t watch movies or TV shows on the subject—but I hadn’t considered the problem in this case.

The play—directed by Terry Hands, onetime artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company—is set in a theater where a diegetic play, also called Memory, is in rehearsal.  It’s about a 70-something Holocaust survivor in her East Berlin apartment in 1990 (the year Germany and the city of Berlin reunified—in October—and communist East Germany ceased to exist) where her grandson, Peter, whom she’s never seen, is coming for a visit to hear her stories of heroism and escape during the Nazi regime. 

When scenes from Eva’s past are being rehearsed, the time is the 1930s-’40s in Berlin; when the actors are just chatting among themselves, it is 2007 in Britain (the specific locale isn’t designated, but since the cast, who use their real first names as the diegetic “actors” and “director,” are all Welsh, I assume the play is being staged somewhere in Wales, probably Mold, the company’s hometown (150 miles north of Cardiff). 

The fourth locale is Bethlehem in 2006 where a young Israeli bureaucrat is trying to get a stubborn Palestinian to move out of his house which will be destroyed to make way for the “security fence.”  Author Jonathan Lichtenstein (b. 1957) sees parallels between the various times and locales: there’s a wall going up in Palestine in 2006; there was a wall that came down in Berlin in 1989 (a piece of which Peter brings his grandmother—who inspects it for blood and bullet holes). 

People in Palestine are being displaced from their homes in the land of their birth; Jews in Berlin are being displaced from their homes to a series of temporary “allotments.”  In all four times and places (1930s and ’40s Nazi Germany, 1990 East Berlin, 2006 Bethlehem, 2007 Britain), someone is a pianist—an artificial parallel that has little consequence dramatically, as far as I could see.  Maybe I just missed it.

My problem with Memory, aside from my difficulty with Holocaust tales, isn’t that I have no sympathy for the Palestinians or that I like the idea of the security fence.  Dramatically, however (not to say politically as well—the Palestinian circumstances are not equivalent to the Holocaust), the parallels Lichtenstein (who, despite his name, is Welsh) depicts are all superficial and obvious.  The events and circumstances he portrays have all been used—overused, I’d say—in literature (prose, plays, films, TV) for decades and he doesn’t say anything new or revealing about any of them. 

Some of them even seemed contrived and artificial.  For instance, in the Nazi-era Berlin stories, Eva (Vivien Parry) and her fiancé/husband, Aron (Simon Nehan), have a German friend, Felix (Daniel Hawksford), who becomes Aron’s business partner.  As the Nazis gain power and start their “race” policies, Felix slowly becomes a party functionary—even an SS officer (like, we’re going to be surprised when a guy in an SS uniform turns nasty!)—and a willing activist in the expulsions and transportations. 

In Bethlehem, Isaac (Oliver Ryan) first comes to Bashar’s house to persuade him to move with no emotional commitment; it’s just a task to perform (that is “orders” to “obey”).  But as he continues to meet with the recalcitrant Bashar (Ifan Huw Dafydd), the Israeli bureaucrat begins to like and even admire the Palestinian man who just doesn’t want to leave his home. 

The mirror images—both also clichés—are just too perfectly matched.  Not one incident in the play, in any of the time periods, is unpredictable.  The only adjustment that didn’t make immediate sense—but isn’t very convincing, either—is Eva’s attitude towards her grandson, Peter (Lee Haven-Jones).  She not only doesn’t want to talk about her actions when she tried to escape Germany in the ’40s, but she’s generally hostile to Peter from the moment he arrives at her apartment, soaked from a hard rain outside. 

Why is Eva so angry at Peter?  What had he done, if anything?  Well, nothing, really.  He just didn’t visit for a year after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 (he had to save up for the trip).  Apparently she’s angry because he didn’t come sooner—though she never says so (I’m supposing this, it’s just a guess on my part—otherwise I have no clue at all). 

As I said, it isn’t very convincing.  It struck me as just something Lichtenstein threw in to make Eva a little mysterious—aside from her reluctance to talk about her escape.  The key to that turns out to be another cliché.

Eva’s legend in the family is that she had been protecting two boys who were the sons of another couple.  When her own daughter—Peter’s mother—was born, she was able to get her out of Germany on a Kindertransport, but could only afford one passage.  The story was told that when she, Aron, and the boys were boarding a train to try to leave Germany, she protected the boys with her own body when a Nazi soldier threatened to shoot them for crying. 

The truth, it turns out, is that the boys weren’t saved at all—the soldier shot them both through the head with a single bullet.  While it’s understandable that Eva wouldn’t want this story revealed—or even to remember it—the story itself isn’t a new one—it’s been used many times before and I, at least, saw it coming long before Eva tells the truth.

In the end, what with all the clichés and overused plot elements, I never really figured out why Lichtenstein, whose own father apparently escaped Germany in a Kindertransport, wanted to tell—or retell—these events.  The most poignant idea in the play is how Eva contends with acknowledging to herself—through Peter—what really happened 45 years earlier. 

The tag-line in the program is “The recovery of memory is a present-day activity.  It’s not the past.  Memory occurs in the present.  Memory must live in the present and it must be truthful.”  But that’s not a new idea, either—and the exploration isn’t very deep.  Making the events part of a play in rehearsal—also not an uncommon tactic—doesn’t make them new or revealing. 

It doesn’t even add distance because, first, the actors are so emotionally wrapped up in their characters that the empathy Bertolt Brecht fought to avoid is nearly inevitable—it certainly isn’t being eschewed; and, second, the conceit of the rehearsal is dropped after one or two scenes, and the play-within-the-play unfolds with only the interruptions of shifting to Palestine and back to Berlin.  

I felt cheated, even at only 90 minutes.  I was misled by relatively positive reviews (Marilyn Stasio of Variety was also generally complimentary: “emotionally devastating production,” “finds fresh meaning in past atrocities”) which, as I said, I think oversold the play.  Yes, the performances were nice—but not special.  Just good, solid, repertory acting. 

The little personal problems of the actors at the rehearsal—one’s worried about feeding the parking meter—didn’t add to the drama, by the way.  It was just another gimmick.  But even this element had its curiosities: Peter, the grandson, is a music-school drop-out, and when Eva gets him to play for her—as I said, each scene has a pianist; Bashar also has a piano in his house—the actor, Lee, doesn’t play.  The (diegetic) director (Christian McKay) does, and Lee stands next to the piano! 

Now, the first time this happens, Lee complains that he’s a piano teacher, so he should be playing.  We never learn why this odd set-up happens.  I have no guess—except maybe that the actual Lee Haven-Jones isn’t a pianist—but then why make the fuss over the character Lee being a piano teacher?  Got me! 

This is not the only inexplicable occurrence in the production.  Near the end of the play, Peter brings a Hanukkah menorah on stage and sets it on the floor down center.  There’s no dialogue to accompany this act, as he lights all the candles.  (I was glad to see he did it correctly—lighting the shamus first then using it to light the other eight candles—but he never says the broche.)  I have no idea why Lichtenstein or Hands, whoever made the choice, put this in.  There’s no indication that the 1990 scenes take place at Hanukkah—and we certainly don’t need the reminder that Peter and Eva are Jewish.

I don’t know why this play exists or is staged.  (That’s the basic dramaturg’s question: Why this play, why now, and why here?)  and I certainly don’t know why it got such positive reviews (though a few papers—the Post, Daily News, and Newsday—didn’t run notices at all).  Diana suggested that plays about the Holocaust get a bye from critical examination—they’re untouchable.  I don’t know if that’s true—I’ve never noticed it one way or the other before. 

I can tell you, like it or not, that if I were still writing reviews, I’d be harsher on this play than the three critics I read (Andy Propst of the Village Voice was the third: “potent exploration,” “compelling tales,” “a theatrical blow that sends us reeling”). 

Diana said that plays about gay people also get special treatment—though I’m pretty sure that’s inaccurate.  (I remember, however, that back in the ’80s I was writing reviews for the New York Native, the major gay weekly in New York for a few decades before it went bankrupt in the ’90s, and was assigned to write up a new Robert Patrick play.  He was a darling of the gay community then, still riding the high of Kennedy’s Children—he was a local gay writer who made it to Broadway! 

(Well, I felt that Patrick had been writing the same lousy play for years by this time—and I said so in my review.  But I was concerned enough with my criticism that I called my editor, Terry Helbing [1951-94]—who had been artistic director of the Meridian Gay Theatre when I was auditioning around the city, so I had known who he was before I took the reviewer job. 

(I warned him that I was going to pan the play by a gay icon and I didn’t know how his readers would react.  As far as I know, though, no one objected when the review was published [“Hello, Bob,” 29 October 1990].  Patrick’s was one of only a few gay plays I saw for the Native—another was a lesbian, radical feminist play that I admitted I didn’t understand [The Rug of Identity, 15 May 1989]: I said I didn’t think I was the audience they expected to play for!—but not understanding and panning are two different things.)

All in all, Memory was very disappointing.  Isherwood remarks that the time-shifting is like “a playwright randomly changing channels” and the Village Voice interprets the Bethlehem and Berlin scenes as two different plays in rehearsal.  There’s nothing in the text to bear this latter out and neither the Times nor Variety cops to it—and I didn’t see it that way at all. 

Everyone remarked especially, after noting the casualness with which the cast approached the circumstances, on Vivien Parry’s transformation, without the aid of make-up and elaborate costuming, from a young woman to a septuagenarian recluse.  Okay, she was good at that—but it’s a trick a lot of actors have accomplished over the past few years—always to the same astonishment from reviewers.  It’s damn near an actor’s stock in trade—especially good ones.  

Any actors with some talent who went through college theater found themselves playing the old people—we (yes, it happened to me a lot) had the chops to pull it off!  I’m sorry (no I’m not) if that sounds like an ex-actor’s sour grapes—maybe it is, but it’s also true.

(I will add, too, that listening to the Welsh dialect is delightful.  The Welsh accent is really very lilting.  I have a friend, an actor, who’s of Welsh extraction and he’s been learning Welsh—an amazingly hard language, I gather; the spelling alone is daunting—and it’s quite beautiful to hear.  That’s all irrelevant, of course.)

'One November Yankee'

When Diana, the woman with whom I go to theater, called me and asked if I was interested in seeing a new play called One November Yankee by Joshua Ravetch at 59E59 Theaters, I had misgivings.  I’ve long been displeased with many of the plays I’ve seen at 59E59—the theater’s selection criteria seem lax to me—so I was leery to start with.  Then, everything about the play seemed to say “No!” to me. 

I used to have a sort of sixth sense about proposed productions about which I read in the casting notices in Back Stage and Show Business when I was trying to get work as an actor.  I could tell from the little descriptions in the notice if a play was a potential success or a pretty sure loser.  I never actually kept score, but when the productions came around and there were reviews, I was more often right than wrong.

These days, I don’t read casting notices anymore.  But I do read the little blurbs in rep company brochures, on promotional post cards, or hand bills distributed around the theater district.  I still get a sense of what’s worth seeing and what’s not—according to my own taste, of course.  So when Diana proposed One November Yankee, is got that frisson that it was a probably miss.

There were, however, clear signs that told me One November Yankee was a bad bet.  First, it’s a play directed by its author—which I’ve admitted on this blog at least once I think is a bad idea and smacks of vanity production.  Then, the leads were played by two former TV stars (in fact, the entire cast)—and promoted as such in all the publicity.  And not just TV stars, but actors whose most prominent appearances—the ones the publicity spotlighted—were 28 and 35 years ago. 

In addition, the play seemed like a gimmick like an Alan Ayckbourn play: the two actors play three pairs of brothers and sisters.  This, of course, sets up gimmick casting, too: the TV stars are playing the three sets of siblings.  I found out later that there were more iffy indicators, but these were enough to hint that the emphasis in this production was on elements of the play’s presentation and not on any inherent drama.  That did not bode well for a good evening at the theater.

As I’ve explained before, I don’t usually look at reviews of something I’m going to see—except for the New York Times because it comes to my apartment—until after I’ve written up my own impressions of the show.  But since I knew so little about this play, I told Diana that I’d check it out a little before we decided.  I skimmed some reviews of previous productions of the play—now I wish I’d read them more thoroughly—and one stated that “the star of this production and the epicenter of these stories” is the main piece of scenery in the set.  That surely suggests a problem. 

But Diana had wanted to check the play out.  After all, we’d started this exercise of seeing theater together after I’d taught a class at a nearby community college that she’d proposed, an intro to theater course.  Diana, who was a speech teacher, not theater, called me after the course—I had subbed for her one semester when she was accepted in a program in the city that conflicted with the evening class—and asked me to be her Beatrice through the alleyways of New York theater.  I was supposed to guide her to the less obvious and established theaters and plays she wouldn’t know about on her own.  So I’m always a little reluctant to say no to something in which she’s expressed interest.  So I didn’t press my reservations about One November Yankee.

The plot of One November Yankee, as I suggested earlier, centers on three pairs of siblings (all played in New York by Harry Hamlin and Stefanie Powers) in different circumstances linked by an ill-fated airplane flight.  The unifying element, aside from Hamlin and Powers, is a crashed yellow Piper Cub (the set designer is Dana Moran Williams).  The play’s title refers to the tail number of the plane: 241-NY. 

(For those who don’t already know, the phonetic alphabet—used by NATO forces for spelling words or other letter designations over voice communications so as to avoid confusion from letters whose names sound alike—uses the words “November” for the letter N and “Yankee” for Y.  Aviators use the same system.  A 1999 play and 2013 movie, Charlie Victor Romeo, was based on verbatim transcripts from actual aviation accidents.  The title is phonetic alphabet for CVR, which stands for “cockpit voice recorder.”)  

In Delaware and New York City, One November Yankee was performed as an 80-minute one-act with no intermission.  The performance is divided into four scenes.  This is a reduction from earlier productions which were two-hour, two-act versions; each act comprised two scenes.

In scene 1 we meet Maggie and Ralph as he puts the final touches on his conceptual-art installation, Crumpled Plane, in preparation for the opening at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, where his sister is a curator.  Now that Maggie sees the crashed plane, she’s not so sure how good an idea it was to get the museum board to give her brother a solo show.  Ralph explains to his sister that the artwork was inspired by an actual crash in which another brother and sister were lost and have never been found.  Sibling squabbling follows. 

(Readers may note that my last post, on 1 January, was “The ‘New’ MoMA, 2019,” a report on the museum’s reopening after extensive remodeling.  The coincidence was not planned.).

Then we travel back five years to some woods in New Hampshire where a plane has just crashed.  Margo and Henry, a pair of brother-and-sister “Jewish intellectuals” (he’s a writer; she’s a librarian and failed lawyer), were on their way to Florida for their father’s remarriage, but due to a series of mistakes, their plane has run out of gas and crashed.  Harry has badly broken his leg.  (If you guessed that this is the crash which inspired Ralph’s Crumpled Plane in scene 1, you get a gold star.)  Sibling squabbling follows. 

As scene 3 opens, we leap back to the same woods five years after the crash—a few days before Crumpled Plane’s MoMA opening is scheduled to take place.  Two hikers, Mia and Ronnie, have trekked into the woods and come across the crash site.  The pair find the remains of Harry and enough identification to discover who the pilot and passenger were.  Also, portentously, a copy of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (hint, hint!).  (So . . . a plane wreck is found mostly in one piece by a couple of civilian hikers five years later, and the occupants’ stuff is all right there along with the passenger’s body, but it had never been seen in all that time by dedicated searchers.  Did I mention that it’s bright yellow?)  Sibling squabbling follows. 

Finally we are back at MoMA as the exhibit opening is ending.  Ralph and Maggie learn that the plane has been found and they reflect on the evening’s events.  Sibling squabbling follows.

Williams’s set, which consists mostly of the canary-yellow plane, nose down and tail up—with the registration number 241-NY showing—dominating the small playing area in 59E59’s third-floor Theater B.  A few wooden boxes, which stand in for seats in the museum scenes, and, I guess, tree stumps or rocks in the forest scenes, are placed nearby.  It’s crowded and cramped at 59E59—but that’s okay since there’s no real action that needs any space.  The characters (except Harry, of course) pace a lot.  Ravetch is too busy telling us what everyone’s thinking to show us anything.

At MoMA in scenes 1 and 4, a projection on the small screen up high at stage right reads “Museum of Modern Art”; when the scene shifts from the museum to the crash site, some fallen leaves are strewn around and the projections change to trees.

Kate Bergh’s costumes are stereotypically correct for each character in the three stories; Ralph is dressed in what a stage designer might think an artist wears to work: all in black with a scarf around his neck indoors—he even gets some red paint on his shirt to add authenticity to his artiness.  Ronnie and Mia, the hikers, look like they stepped out of a Lands’ End catalogue.  Scott Cocchiaro’s lighting and Lucas Campbell’s soundscape contribute to the production competently.

Campbell does bring a measure of fun at pre-set while we’re waiting for the show to start.  There’s a video playing on the projection screen (no credit for the slides and videos is listed) with varied images of flying, planes, airships, and space craft.  An eclectic selection of recorded songs related to flying and planes is playing: Sinatra’s “Fly Me to the Moon” and “Come Fly with Me,” Elton John’s “Rocket Man,” Peter, Paul and Mary’s “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” and “Let’s Go Fly a Kite” from Mary Poppins, among others. 

One song that particularly tickled me is “Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines,” the theme song from the 1965 movie farce of the same name.  Accompanying the song is a silent-movie video sequence that I’m sure was from the opening moments of the film; if it was, I wonder if the producers had to pay for that. 

On the other hand, when I saw the play that followed this . . . well, amuse-bouche, I had to wonder why it was part of the production at all—since the play isn’t really about flying or even planes, despite the dominating set piece.  The crashed plane, Ravetch has Ralph-the-artist explain, is a symbol of civilization in ruin.  (Would any artist actually state his work’s point so bluntly, even to his sister?  I don’t buy it!)  We get this, because the playwright has Ralph say it a number of times—just to be sure we get the point.  (So, as reported below, Ravetch says he wanted to write a play about flying.  Well, he still hasn’t.) 

Ravetch, an Angeleno who turned 60 last November, says several things inspired One November Yankee.  Ravetch is a pilot himself and he’d wanted to write a play about flying.  The playwright also attended many modern-art shows in Los Angeles, and he went to one that featured a box of Kleenex on a pedestal in a white room.  He thought it was ridiculous, especially when he learned that the janitor kept throwing away the tissues. 

Somewhere in there, he came up with the idea of putting a crashed plane on stage.  Ravetch wanted the audience to think that they were going to see a play about the crash, but then it turns out that the plane’s really an art sculpture based on a “real” crash.  (The accident is “real” in the play—that is, diegetically—but apparently not in life.  Clear?) 

The play needed characters, but the playwright didn’t want a romantic couple, so he devised the idea of a pair of squabbling siblings. 

Ravetch also sees the plane as an allegory for America.  “It really all became about the journey of these people and the journey of America,” Ravetch said.  “How advanced we are in one way and how we’re crumbling in another.” 

One November Yankee débuted on 17 and 18 November 2009 at the Pasadena Playhouse in a workshop production, part of the theater’s HotHouse Reading Series.  The reading—and all other stagings so far—was directed by Ravetch and featured Loretta Swit (Maj. Margaret Houlihan of TV’s M*A*S*H, 1972-83) and Robert Forster (films Medium Cool, 1969, and Jackie Brown, 1997, Academy Award nomination; TV series Twin Peaks, 2017), who died last October. 

The play’s world première was from 16 November 2012 to 5 January 2013 at the NoHo Arts Center in North Hollywood, directed again by the playwright with Swit and Harry Hamlin (L.A. Law, 1986-1991).  This was followed by the East Coast première, 23 October to 10 November 2019, at the Delaware Theatre Company, Wilmington, again under the direction of the playwright.  Hamlin starred opposite Stefanie Powers (Hart to Hart, 1979-1984). 

(This constitutes another hint that something was amiss, had I known it in advance: it took One November Yankee—a two-actor, one-set script—10 years to reach New York City.)

The DTC production transferred to New York’s Off-Broadway, starting previews in Theater B at 59E59 Theaters on Manhattan’s midtown East Side on 29 November 2019.  The production opened officially on 8 December and Diana and I saw the 7:15 p.m. show on Thursday, 26 December.  The production closed on 29 December. 

The film rights to One November Yankee have been optioned by Pam Williams Productions as a feature film for Ravetch to adapt and direct and is currently in development.  Ravetch’s script has not been published. 

There are numerous thoughts raised in One November Yankee and one or the other of the siblings states them at one time or another during the play.  None are profound or even especially intriguing—I’ve already forgotten most of them—and none are developed or explored during the 80-minute performance. 

The play’s structure, in the way the three stories dovetail, and some of the dialogue suggest that Ravetch is also saying that everything is connected, that there are no coincidences.  (One reviewer even referenced “the butterfly effect.”)  Ravetch has written certain words and catchphrases into the dialogue that recur in each story so that we get the idea that, though the characters are unrelated, their lives are somehow connected.  (One such bit is the line “Jews don’t fly planes!”— which, despite the fact that it’s probably untrue, is the only thought in the play that’s about flying.) 

The fact that Ralph has used an actual incident as inspiration for his artwork seems meant to give it relevance, and the actual wreckage being found at the time of the art’s début appears to be intended to add significance somehow.  As far as I’m concerned, they don’t; they’re just more gimmicks Ravetch has devised to stand in for actual content—but maybe that’s just me. 

None of this, as I suggested above, has anything to do with flying.  (Oh, Ravetch incident-drops at every opportunity so that aviation is spoken of—but only in passing.  Someone brings up 9/11, the “Miracle on the Hudson,” John F. Kennedy Jr.’s ill-fated 1999 flight to Martha’s Vineyard, Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 that disappeared in 2014, the Concorde, and the Wright brothers.)  And none of these ideas, if that’s what they are, are deep or engaging enough, even had they been developed, to be worthy of sustaining a drama, even one as slight as One November Yankee.  (I can’t imagine what the L.A. show was like at two hours and two acts.) 

I don’t know any of Ravetch’s other work (his stage credits—he also writes for films and television—include two celebrity monodramas, Wishful Drinking, co-created and directed in 2006 for Carrie Fisher, and Step in Time: A Musical Memoir, written and directed in 2011 for Dick Van Dyke, and 2017’s Chasing Mem’ries: A Different Kind of Musical with Robert Forster and Tyne Daly, which won an Ovation Award, L.A.’s local theater award), but his writing in One November Yankee isn’t really dialogue, but a series of pronouncements in which the characters mouth the thoughts of the playwright so he can tell us what they and he are thinking. 

An example from the first scene is Ralph’s explanation for his sister of his art work: “This exhibit embodies the breadth of the twentieth century from the Wright Brothers to a post 9/11 world—and it depicts the immense chaos of that world and a once-great society, America, that is quite literally crashing in a heap of debris as we speak.”  Pretentious claptrap.  The lines are oral captions—like self-important wall panels in a museum gallery—not speech. 

In the words of Alexis Soloski of the New York Times, Ravetch “encourages a style of acting that’s arch and presentational rather than recognizably human.”  Soloski doesn’t say so, but this applies both to Ravetch as author and as director.

Hamlin and Powers stood up well enough to this burden.  Both actors began in the theater—Powers was a Broadway dancer—and have returned to it occasionally (Hamlin most recently on Broadway in Summer and Smoke in 1996 and Chicago in 2007; Powers in The King and I in 2004 and Looped in 2013), so they didn’t embarrass themselves, but neither did they lift the leaden text off the ground (speaking of flying)—which was certainly partly director Ravetch’s fault.  (As several reviewers noted, they both look damn good for, respectively, 68 and 77.  I’m 73 and I could play either actor’s father!) 

There’s a small critical track record for the earlier productions of One November Yankee in Los Angeles and Wilmington, but the coverage here in New York City was relatively meagre—maybe a dozen or so outlets.  I’ve selected eight to summarize here. 

Noting that the wrecked plane we see upon entering the theater is a “defiantly unsubtle” indicator that “[g]ravity . . . has had its revenge,” the Times’ Soloski, in the only print review I saw, went on to warn, “But if this two-hander . . . can’t achieve liftoff, blame bad jokes and broad acting, not physics.”  Remarking on how good the actors look, Soloski quipped that “wondering what has happened in their careers that has led them to a play this feeble is probably the best in-flight entertainment ‘One November Yankee’ can provide.”  

Labeling the plot implausible and the characters inauthentic (“I’ve yet to meet a working artist who talks like this or a curator who knows less about modern art,” she said of Ralph and Maggie), the reviewer felt that the playwright “sacrifices character and emotional realism for quips, few of them funny.”  Of the stars, Soloski declared, “The actors—with their big gestures and patchy psychology—don’t redeem the play or even improve it.  But because glamour has its own implacable logic, they make it nearly watchable.”  In the end, she reported, “For better or for worse, ‘One November Yankee’ . . . is too synthetic to be a true disaster.  That’s the cynical lesson on offer here: You can’t crash if you never get off the ground.” 

(Incidentally, like many of her critical colleagues, Soloski criticized Hamlin and Powers in scene 2 for adopting “unpardonable Jewish accents.”  Other reviewers used different modifiers, but I didn’t identify their speech patterns as an attempted Jewish accent—I am, so I think I would recognize one.  In fact, I never figured out what that accent was—I thought it might be something New-Yorkish, but that wasn’t it, either.  In the end, I settled for a made-up speech pattern that doesn’t actually exist anywhere—Lower Slobovia or someplace, maybe. 

(Why they needed any kind of accent, you’ll have to ask Ravetch; most of us have only the regional accent from where we grew up—mine’s a general Mid-Atlantic speech pattern.  I had a roommate in college who was Jewish and he sounded a little like Lucas Black, late of NCIS: New Orleans—because he was from Birmingham, Alabama; my parents knew a Jewish man from Melbourne, Australia, and he talked a bit like Crocodile Dundee.) 

“Veteran actors of screen, stage, and television Harry Hamlin and Stefanie Powers do their best to bring Joshua Ravetch’s ‘One November Yankee’ to the stage,” reported David Roberts on Theatre Reviews Limited.  “Despite their heroic efforts, Rav[e]tch’s script lacks the sophistication and strength to match the formidable skills of the cast.”  The plot, Roberts found, does “little to fulfill the promise of ‘exploring human connection brought on by tragedy in the aftermath of a plane crash that ripples across the lives of our characters’ [from the play’s promo blurb].  Nor are these stories ‘intricately interwoven.’” 

The TRL reviewer asserted that “the connections [among the characters] are there; however, they are more obvious than intricate” and he concluded that “the three stories fail to make a convincing argument for their telling.  There is no substance to them and no redemptive resolution or catharsis.” 

Determining that the plane is the “remarkably and stunningly apparent” “star” of One November Yankee, Marilyn Lester asserted on Theater Pizzazz that the play “is, at its best, a mediation [the writer may have meant ‘meditation’] on what classical Greeks referred to as storge—familial love, a powerful, supportive love that’s just as prone to disintegrate into chaos when family goals don’t align.”  Lester reported that the “conflicts [between the siblings] are explored with varying degrees of success” and continued that playwright Ravetch “is an articulate writer, but also a glib one, a facility that largely enfeebles the three stories.” 

The characters “speak to each other as if they’d just stepped out of a Noël Coward play,” the TP reviewer felt.  “Such archness may be occasionally amusing, but it certainly undercuts the valid points the playwright is striving to make.”  The playwright’s “relentless reliance on expletives,” a tactic Lester was not alone in pointing out (a couple of reviewers compared Ravetch to David Mamet), “which aid and abet his compulsion to be funny, plus his single-minded focus on the bickering between the siblings, detract from the possible depths the play could have achieved.”  In the end, Lester felt that the author “is ultimately One November Yankee’s undoing” because Ravetch is “a cleverness junkie with an addiction to flippant repartee.”  In the end, the review-writer determined that “Ravetch is fortunate that the acting prowess of Hamlin and Powers elevated the work to the heights it did achieve.” 

On Broadway World, Marina Kennedy proclaimed, “There’s real star power on the stage of 59E59 Theaters” and One November Yankee “is the one to see.”  The BWW reviewer affirmed, “The show’s intriguing premise is complemented by the outstanding acting skills of Hamlin and Powers.”  She also found, “It is interesting how these stories are woven together, revealing the personalities of the characters while it makes statements about the uniqueness of brother and sister bonds.” 

Kennedy felt that Hamlin and Powers are “an ideal pair to star in One November Yankee.  Each of them seamlessly assumes three very different roles during the course of the show.”  The reviewer added, “While they are convincing in all of their parts, Powers is particularly good when she portrays art curator, Maggie and Hamlin is compelling as the character, Ronnie [the hiker-dentist who identifies Harry’s remains].”  Kennedy praised the design team and concluded, “One November Yankee is an opportunity to see two beloved actors on one stage in a memorable show.  Get your tickets.  It is sure to sell out.”  (Note that the limited-run production at 59E59 has closed.) 

Victor Gluck of TheaterScene.net reported, “It is [Hamlin’s and Powers’s] star power which keeps this old-fashioned, rather sit-com-ish, interconnected triple bill as lively and as entertaining as it is despite clichéd writing and passé jokes.”  The actors “manage to be convincing in weak material.”  Gluck thought that Ravetch “has staged the scenes in rather static fashion,” but felt that Hamlin and Powers “are so accomplished at repartee that they keep the play moving despite the fact that they don’t move much in each scene.” 

New York Stage Review posted two notices. In the one, Melissa Rose Bernardo announced, “The most interesting character in the show, however, isn’t one of those six squabbling sibs.  It’s the broken-down taxicab-yellow Piper Cub plane.”  She added, “Unfortunately, none of the flesh-and-blood characters are as compelling as Crumpled Plane.”  Nonetheless, Bernardo affirmed, “The actors fare relatively well, though Hamlin overdoes both Ralph’s drunkenness and Harry’s accent; Powers, so glam on TV’s Hart to Hart, actually looks most comfortable as the crunchy-granola gray-haired Mia.” 

In the second NYSR notice, David Finkle observed that Ravetch “extends [his look at brotherly-sisterly love] but doesn’t deepen it.”  Finkle found, “Because he’s chosen the relatively quick sketch form, he keeps his writing, uh, sketchy.”  The NYSR writer explained, “As writer and director, he is able to maintain an amusing level of insights—with Hamlin and Powers maximizing his intentions—but it does seem as if he’s presenting a series of situations that might benefit from further delving.”  The reviewer finished up by suggesting: 

It could be said that just as Ralph sees a metaphor in “Crumpled Plane,” Ravetch discerns in the links between the characters from sketch to sketch a metaphor for our universal link to each other—a one-big-universal-family linkage that must not only be faced and endured but also honored.  He’s writing in the tradition of the old saw that goes, “Blood is thicker than water.”  As the history of humankind has forever demonstrated, there is a good deal of truth to the adage.

(I don’t frequently comment on a review in my play reports, but this calls out for some response.  Besides the fact that Finkle is presenting a clutch of clichés for his interpretation of Ravetch’s play—and rather commonplace ones at that—he’s far over-reading the play’s intentions, I think.  One November Yankee isn’t even as deep as Finkle seems to think it is.  Aside from the self-defined symbolism of the plane wreck, there are no metaphors here.  It’s all right on the text’s surface.  There’s no deeper meaning in Ravetch’s script.  It’s just as superficial as it seems.  Sorry, David.)

On Theatre’s Leiter Side, review-writer Samuel L. Leiter actually called the plane mock-up “perhaps the most memorable scenic unit I’ve ever seen on that modest, little stage.”  Really?  Poor Samuel must have seen some very dull sets at 59E59.  That plane isn’t all that remarkable that I expect to remember it very long myself. 

The play, Leiter felt, “escapes being a total wreck itself by virtue of its appealing stars,” a sentiment readers by now will recognize.  He pointed out bad jokes, like that Harry and Margo’s “reaction to the accident is ‘This doesn’t happen to people like us!’ by which he means, ‘Jewish intellectuals.’  ‘It’s the kind of thing you read about in the New York Times and it’s always rich Republican Goyem [sic].’  And that, if it somehow makes you laugh, is about the apex of the play’s humor.”  And he noted that “the seriousness of their situation [Harry does end up dying] taking second place to leaden attempts at humor based on fraternal squabbling.”

“Perhaps there’s a message somewhere in here about the vagaries of fate and coincidence and the inter-connectedness of experience,” mused Leiter.  “However, the overall superficiality of the writing and characterizations, the implausibility of the action, and the too-frequently banal dialogue defeat any attempt to take the play seriously.”  He summed up his assessment of One November Yankee by emphasizing, “When the image of a crashed plane upstages even actors like Harry Hamlin and Stefanie Powers, you may be forgiven for taking out flight insurance before you get on board.”