Pat Carroll Pat Carroll Pat Carroll: A Tribute – Part 2

 

[This is the second and last installment of “Pat Carroll Pat Carroll Pat Carroll: A Tribute.”  (If you haven’t read Part 1, I recommend going back to 14 August and doing so; you’ll find this segment of the post makes more sense if you do.)  

[I’ll be presenting a “recovered” report on Carroll and Marty Martin’s one-woman play, Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein, introduced in Part 1, followed by a survey of the published reviews of the New York Off-Broadway productions.

[The recovered reports, which I’ve attempted a couple of times on Rick On Theater (“Some Out-Of-Town Plays from the Archive: Othello,” 22 December 2020; “Much Ado About Nothing: A ‘Recovered’ Report.” 20 March 2021), are analogous to the contemporaneous play reports I post on ROT, except that I never wrote up the plays after I saw them.

[These reports are based on some comments I’d made in other contexts and a random collection of very vivid impressions of the performances I saw.  I also use a little research to help remind me of details of the production.

[I called the result a “recovered” report on the analogy of “recovered memory”—which is defined as “a memory of a past event that has been recalled after having been forgotten . . . for a long time,” according to Dictionary.com.]

The Circle Repertory Company presented Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein at its Greenwich Village theater for six performances on Wednesday through Sunday, 6-10 June 1979 while the company was waiting for Sam Shepard’s Pultzer Prize-winning Buried Child to move from the Theatre de Lys (now the Lucille Lortel Theatre), but Pat Carroll’s performance and Marty Martin’s script proved so popular that Circle Rep decided to keep it running.

Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein and Buried Child opened in alternate-night rep on 24 June at the company’s Sheridan Square Playhouse, a former garage-turned-nightclub, and ran until September.  After a single benefit performance at the Baltimore Museum of Art, where Carroll viewed the celebrated Cone Collection—the Baltimorean Cone Sisters were friends of Stein, who advised them on their collecting—on 29 September 1979, GS³ returned to the Sheridan Square Playhouse until October.

The play then moved on the 23rd to the historic Provincetown Playhouse on Macdougal Street, where it ran for nine more months (and where I saw it in June 1980), closing on 3 August 1980—over a year’s run all together.  There was buzz about a possible Broadway transfer, but that never materialized.

After its successful New York run, the one-character play toured the U.S. into 1981 and beyond, including the Arena Stage in Washington; Cleveland Playhouse in Ohio; McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey; Zellerbach Theatre at the Annenberg Center, Penn State, in Philadelphia; Alliance Theatre in Atlanta; and other U.S. cities, many for a single night.  There were invitations to bring the play to festivals in Alaska, Canada, Europe, Australia, Israel, and South Africa.

There was talk of filming GS³ for either the big or small screen, and an adaptation was broadcast on CBS Cable (a short-lived pay cable service) on 6 and 7 March 1982.  (There was also the Grammy-winning 1980 Caedmon recording.)  Carroll reprised the role in productions across the country and around the world many times for the remainder of her career.

Carroll’s portrayal of Stein was a striking change from her habitual comic turns.  We theatergoers saw a compelling dramatic presentation—though with plenty of humor and (often snappish) wit.  I don’t write fan letters, but after seeing Carroll’s performance in GS³, I sat down and wrote one to her.  I told her that if she ever took on students, I was ready to sign up!  (She didn’t take me up on my offer.)

I trained as an actor and worked a decade in the profession, and retain a love for the practitioners of Thespis’ art.  I even used to keep a list in my head of a dozen or so individual performances that had astonished me.  Pat Carroll in Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein was prominent on that list. 

I’ve sat through a good number of realistic and naturalistic performances that fooled me into forgetting I was watching a play.  One of the most notable in my memory is Carroll’s Gertrude Stein.  Her performance was so magical that I found myself literally thinking, as I was watching her, ‘Gee, Stein’s a fascinating person.  I’m so glad I met her.’

When I realized what I was thinking—that that was actually Gertrude Stein in front of me—I was mighty glad I didn’t say that out loud so my companion and others near me could hear how deeply I’d fallen under Carroll’s spell.

The play is set in the Paris apartment in which Stein and Alice B. Toklas live at 27 Rue de Fleurus.  (The street, pronounced flur-ooss, is named for a town in Belgium that was the site of a 1794 battle during the French Revolutionary Wars.)  Stein has lived here since 1903, first with her older brother Leo and then with Toklas from 1910.  (Leo and Gertrude separated in 1913; the break is the climax of the play’s narrative.) 

Designer Anne Gibson’s set at the Provincetown—there was a different scenic designer at Circle Rep, Tony Straiges—was a representation of the cluttered apartment with the Picassos, Gauguins, Matisses, and other art works with which the Steins had decorated their walls.  There were a few pieces of furniture from the period.  The stark lighting was by Ruth Roberts.

When the lights come up—there’s no curtain—68-year-old Stein (Carroll, who was 53 when I saw the play) is seated in a chair, at the center of the room, dressed in a brown caftan (the sole costume was designed by Garland Riddle), with closely-cropped grey hair.  Not as closely-cropped as Stein’s was at this time in her life, which was a mannish brush-cut, but not as matronly as her hair was styled, in a graying bun, in the ’20s.  She’s drinking a glass of tea and lights a cigarillo.

In the play, Stein sits in the throne-like chair with her legs spread, but my vision of her that I still carry with me when I think of this performance is the Jo Davidson terra-cotta sculpture (Gertrude Stein 1874-1946, 1922-23) in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. 

While Stein seems to be kneeling, a Man Ray photo of her posing for Davidson reveals that she was, in fact, sitting in a chair just as Carroll was in the play.  Davidson merely sculpted her from the knees up, making Stein appear Buddha-like—which the artist thought was appropriate for his subject.

(From 1992, there’s been a bronze casting of Davidson’s sculpture in Bryant Park, behind the main research branch of the New York Public Library on 5th Avenue between 40th and 42nd Streets.  Whenever I see that rendering, it makes me flash back to the performance of Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein I saw in 1980.)

Over the shoulder of the famous expat, among the other paintings, is the well-known Picasso portrait of her.  It’s 1938, the day before she and Toklas will be evicted from their home of 35 years because the landlord’s son needs a place to live.  It’s raining and there are thunderclaps.

Stein and Toklas have been packing and Stein’s flatmate is sleeping upstairs.  The imminent eviction makes Stein reminisce about the life that unfolded at 27 Rue de Fleurus over the past 3½ decades.  The apartment is so full of her life and the ghosts of her illustrious visitors that it prompts an outpouring of memories that’s echoed by the downpouring rain outside.

“It is    it almost always is    it was and it is    almost always    an inconvenience to be evicted.”

After that, Stein/Carroll becomes a superb raconteur and confides in us many of the stories of her life in Paris in the first four decades of the 20th century.  She also reaches back into her childhood in California and her studies at Radcliffe and Johns Hopkins.  For 90 minutes, we become Stein’s confidants.  We hear Stein’s views on art, life, writing, and the import of genius and fame.

She recounts the disastrous Rousseau dinner the Picassos organized at their Montmartre home in honor of painter Henri Rousseau, known as Le Douanier (‘The Customs Agent’), at which everyone got very drunk—because there was nothing to eat but spinach—and behaved badly; the discovery of a painting by the as-yet unknown Paul Cézanne in a gallery by Gertrude and Leo; the time a drunken Hemingway paid Stein and Toklas a call and they refused to admit him, resulting in a rift between the young writer and older mentor and champion; and, finally, Leo’s loss of faith in Cubism and modernism and his embrace of a reactionary sensibility, causing him to call his sister’s avant-garde writing “tommyrot.”

At the end of the play, Stein looks around at the art works on the walls of the apartment.  She declares with quiet pride: “We moved out one century from these rooms and moved in another.”

There’s no plot in Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein, no narrative though-line, no cause-and-effect chain.  Martin’s text is a stream-of-consciousness tumble of memory, sometimes connected by a lot of “That reminds me”’s and “That brings me to”’s.

Needless to say, after all my undisguised praise, it was all wonderfully spun and fascinating to hear.  We’d been offered the invitation to be part of the literary world’s most renowned salonière’s Saturday evening soirée, and it was a delicious experience. 

It was a momentary puzzle why we’d be included among the intelligentsia who invented modern Western culture, not to mention how we’d all fit in Stein’s apartment—but that passed, unanswered, as we became engrossed in Carroll’s impressionistic portrayal of the disenfranchised intellectual.

There’s only a single actor listed in the program—GS³ is labeled a “one-person play,” but it’s really not.  Martin used the words and recollections of a score or more of the literary and artistic giants of the Western world in the early 20th century to make a portrait of Gertrude Stein, but Carroll contrived to bring them onto the stage for us to see and hear. 

Stein was a name-dropper extraordinaire, but Carroll did far more than drop illustrious names.  She made us see and hear the famous friends Stein and Toklas assembled at 27 Rue de Fleurus, creating and casting virtual playlets (long before that word had any meaning) that were as engaging as the one she was in.  I absolutely believed that Alice Toklas was just upstairs asleep.  It’s a conjuring trick no magician could accomplish.  Only an actor could do it.

Carroll accomplished this feat by recalling the personal traits of these people we tend to know only as icons.  Her Stein knew all their foibles and quirks, and sketched them in.  The distant legends of art and culture thus became warm human beings who did foolish—and sometimes hurtful—things.

Perhaps the most delicate memory Carroll’s Stein discusses is the matter of her lesbianism.  Carroll said she didn’t want GS³ to be a gay play, but she didn’t want it to be dishonest, either.  So when Stein reminisces about her first homosexual experience, with a woman at Johns Hopkins, it’s discussed paraphrastically, by inference. Nothing is said directly. 

But it leads Stein into talking about being fat, and that leads into talking about how she always felt different, which is ultimately what impelled her to leave America—because she never fit in.  It was also what made Alice Toklas follow the Steins, and what brought the two women together for the rest of Stein’s life.  (From 1907, when they met, to 1946, when Stein died, Stein and Toklas were never separated.)

The relationship with Toklas, however, isn’t emphasized.  It’s implied, of course, and hovers around the play whenever Stein brings her roommate up, but it’s not the emotional or dramatic center of the play.  As I’ve noted, the break-up with Leo was more impactful to the performance than Alice B. Toklas. 

That’s not in the least inappropriate.  After all, Leo had been his sister’s mentor for over 40 years.  But though he was the one who left their shared abode—Leo had actually instigated the salon, though Stein became the hostess—intellectually, she was the one who left him. 

She championed the new art and the new writing, going in her own direction, and he couldn’t handle that she stopped listening to him.  They never spoke to one another again.  That’s much more wrenching than a 30-year devotion between Stein and Toklas, isn’t it?

Carroll insisted that the performance was not a monologue, as most of the press coverage dubbed it.  It’s a “duologue,” declared the actress.  The other half of the conversation is provided by the audience.  (Occasionally, Carroll recounted, a theatergoer actually voiced a response to Stein.)  She added that the play is different at every performance, but not because she makes any changes.  Each audience responds differently.

Carroll sat in the chair for most of the play.  Only occasionally getting up, when Stein is especially agitated, for brief moments to walk about the apartment.  But her hands were so animated and eloquent that the play didn’t seem static.  Her face, too, was infinitely expressive.  Of course, GS³ is a verbal play, depending on Martin’s words to take the place of action. 

Ordinarily, that would be a detriment; word plays are almost always talky.  In one-actor plays like Hal Holbrook’s Mark Twain Tonight! (Broadway, 1966; television, 1967) and Clarence Darrow with Henry Fonda (Broadway, 1975; television, 1974), the actors walked about the set a good deal, but, as GS³ was conceived for an incapacitated Carroll, Stein is mostly seated.  Yet Carroll exuded energy so vibrantly that her Stein is always vital even when stationary.

Still, the words are the true action of Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein, and Carroll made them dance—the way one imagines Gertrude Stein would have when she captivated those students in 1934.

I guess it’s obvious without my even saying so that I thought Pat Carroll’s performance was extraordinary.  (I wasn’t the only one; her reviews were excellent.)  Even as restricted as she was, Carroll held the stage for the whole hour-and-a-half and never lost her grip on us.  She even made Stein’s idiosyncratic speech—those triple repetitions—seem like natural talk from a sophisticated, hyper-intellectual woman.

In several interviews, Carroll asserted that for this role, she didn’t just rely on the rehearsals and her homework to develop the performance.  She drew on everything she had learned over the thirty-some-odd years of her career. 

She pulled out all the stops, and whether she whispered or roared, she made the language alive.  No wonder the recording of the play won a Grammy.  (By the way, I even bought the album when it came out.  I wanted documentation of that performance.)

The smallest gesture—the shrug of a shoulder, the twitch of a finger, the slap of a table, or the clench of a fist—filled the theater.  Even her distinctive laugh that made her so popular on TV game shows was part of her offering; boisterous and infectious, it became Stein’s laugh.

Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein was one of the longest-running one-person shows of the ’70s.  The press found the evening “enormously fascinating” and “poignant” (from the New Brunswick Home News and Variety) and actress Carroll received the best reviews of her career, capturing both the humor and the sorrow of the character.  Let’s look at what some of the reviewers said about Marty Martin’s play and Carroll’s portrayal of the iconoclastic American expatriate in Paris.

Because the coverage was so extensive, with many regional papers reviewing the New York City run and then local papers all over the country writing about the national-tour performances, I’m going to limit my review round-up to the Off-Broadway productions alone.  (There were notices into 1985, and even reviews of Carroll’s performance in Jerusalem in the Jerusalem Post.)

In the New York Times in June 1979, after the play’s fill-in stint at Circle Rep was extended but before it moved to the Provincetown, Richard Eder characterized Martin’s script as “appealing,” but felt, “It lacks the intuitive brilliance of James Lapine’s effort to literally stage a poem of Miss Stein’s in “Photograph,”  two years ago.”  

Mr. Martin's assemblage is anecdotal, and intelligent rather than inspired; but it works very well on the whole, and it gives scope for Miss Carroll’s winning and often very moving performance.

(The 1920 poem “Photograph” is composed in five sections Stein labeled “acts.”  This gave Lapine [books for Into the Woods, Falsettos, and Passion] a rationale to stage it in 1977 for the Performance Workshop at SoHo’s Open Space.  “It is a lovely and remarkably successful attempt to render the qualities of Gertrude Stein in theatrical terms,” wrote the New York Times.)

The Timesman found that the playwright “has realized that Miss Stein’s wit, her reflections about herself and others, and the wealth of anecdote need to be anchored to something; and he has accomplished this very well.”

Carroll, reported Eder, “glares and beams as she talks, caught up in the fascination of telling and recalling. . . .  [She] revels in the beat and counterpoint of her phrases; but she disciplines them as well, cutting them off abruptly in the sheer enjoyment of showing who is boss.”

“It is, all in all,” concluded Eder, “a moving and splendidly personified picture that Miss Carroll gives us; a piece of cultural history that like all good history strikes us as the history of ourselves.”

Four months later, after Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein’s open-ended run had started, the Times’ Walter Kerr saw the play.  “Off to the Provincetown I went,” Kerr related, “and I went expecting a great deal.  I got more than I bargained for.”

He expected “outrageousness,” he confessed, and “Miss Carroll . . . obliges in spades.”  The Times reviewer noted that in her portrayal of Stein, “some of the time,” Carroll is

content to snuggle, warmed with self-satisfaction, in the chair built as four square as she is, as often as not she’s likely to leap to her sandaled feet, take a hearty belt from her omnipresent drink, and bellow out a great bleat of anger.

The review-writer asserted that “we feel confided in” with Carroll.  “I don’t know precisely how Miss Carroll is able to do it, but she manages—without any effort at all—to make us share Gertrude Stein’s attitude toward herself.”

In the end, Kerr concluded, having invoked a housekeeper famous for her outstanding souffles, “Miss Carroll’s own souffle is very choice indeed.  Superb texture, body and lightness both, four‐star anywhere, I’d say.”

Don Nelsen asserted in the New York Daily News that in Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein, “Martin’s script and Carroll’s performance make a perfect match and Milton Moss’ evenly paced direction is skillful, indeed.”

The Daily News reviewer proclaimed that “Pat Carroll has recreated [Stein] with remarkable fidelity and dimension.  She catches Stein’s snobbery, pettiness, perception, loyalty and wit and at the same time tells the story of an artistic revolution.”

Nelsen concluded, “I have never thought of Gertrude Stein as a particularly enchanting person but if she was anything like Carroll’s portrait, she must have been.”

“Wonderful wonderful wonderful is the phrase for Pat Carroll doing ‘Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein’ off-Broadway at the Circle Repertory Theater,” wrote Mary Campbell of the Associated Press in the Philadelphia Inquirer.  She was one of the many journalists who found it irresistible to mimic Stein’s triple-ese.

The AP reviewer continued: “Gertrude Stein calls herself a genius, and Miss Carroll makes that—and everything else—believable.”

“She tells an anecdote richly . . .,” Campbell added.  “She delightedly sets out insights and one-line quips.  She has a remarkable mind that makes one wish to have known her.”

In a later edition of the paper, Philadelphia Inquirer staff writer Barbara Kantrowitz commented that Carroll “dominates the theater’s small stage . . . .  She raises name-dropping to a fine art.”  Kantrowitz prefaced this remark by asserting that “both the actress and her subject have gained new images.”

The Hollywood Reporter’s Charles Ryweck observed that “‘Gertrude Stein etc.’ may be a one-character play but it evokes an entire gallery of the titans of modern art and literature . . . .”  Playwright Martin, Ryweck added, “has revealed [Stein’s] personality through the art of the raconteur.”

“Carroll,” the HR reviewer felt, “is a fascinating actress, funny, yet piercing . . . .” 

She is a mesmerizing actress as Gertrude and was rewarded with a standing ovation by an appreciative opening night audience.  Milton Moss directed the ebullient Carroll with flair.”

In the Allentown, Pennsylvania, Morning Call, William A. Raidy of the Newhouse News Service asserted, “The avant-garde writer would be both pleased and flattered by Pat Carroll’s charming portrayal of her in . . . ‘Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein.’”

Martin’s play “is a warm, intimate portrait of the woman from Allegheny, Pa., who from her armchair in a Paris studio encouraged such young artists as Juan Gris, Pablo Picasso and a whole Lost Generation of writers.”

“Martin rarely directly quotes his subject,” explained Raidy.  “Instead, he lets her tell her story as seen through her relationships with others . . . .  He makes, therefore, Miss Stein perhaps a bit more likeable—and modest—than she actually was.”

“Pat Carroll’s Gertrude Stein laughs a lot,” pointed out the Newhouse reviewer. 

Reading most of the Stein canon, we never thought Miss Stein the laugh riot actress Carroll portrays.  Then we came across this evaluation from her old friend, [literary critic, biographer, and historian] Van Wyck Brooks [1886-1963]: “Gertrude’s personality was magnetic; she had a laugh from the middle of her . . . .”

“More than anything else,” felt Raidy, “Pat Carroll has captured the physical sense of Gertrude Stein in this one-woman show.”  The review-writer concluded with the observation “what a pleasure it is to be reminded of [Stein’s] very special genius with the help of Pat Carroll.”

Calling Carroll’s performance “brilliant” and labeling it the “undisputed highpoint of her career,” Variety’s Madd. (the reviewing “sig.,” or pseudonym, for John Madden) characterized GS³ as “an intelligently drawn, poignant, often hilarious, entertaining, thoughtful, instructive, and most of all exhilarating theatre experience.”

“Milton Moss has staged the work with authority,” continued Madden, “but obviously allows Carroll the freedom of instinct.”  Quoting the Circle Rep program for the play, the Variety reviewer wrote, Carroll “was determined to make the world of Gertrude Stein, once again, come alive.”

Madden added, “To that purpose Carroll has perhaps exceeded even her own expectations, with a performance that illuminates the stage throughout two acts and ranks among the best of the solo theatre pieces offered over the last decade or so.”

“Carroll,” the reviewer continued, “brings such warmth and personal appeal to the role, as well as a marvelous gift for story telling, the audience becomes immediately intrigued with the gossip and friendly intimacies she reveals . . . .  A lengthy and hilarious tale about a near disastrous dinner party she attended, is a highlight of her impeccable delivery.” 

In Long Island’s Newsday, Allan Wallach, dubbing the play a “tour de force” for Carroll, reported, “Her triumph is so complete that the theater piece has become a surprise hit of the summer . . . .”  In explanation, Wallach said, “What Carroll has done to bring all this about is, simply, turn herself into Gertrude Stein at every performance.

The words of the play aren’t Stein’s, as we’ve seen, “but the actress invests them with Stein’s enthusiasm and rhythms.  The intelligence and humor—and occasionally a haunting sadness—shine through.”

Proclaiming that Stein “has been made, finally and inevitably, the center of an enormously fascinating play,” Ernest Albrecht wrote in the New Brunswick, New Jersey, Home News, “In the person of Pat Carroll she is also the play’s sides, top and bottom.”  The actress, he wrote, “is giving a performance of enormous energy and magnetism.”

“This is a real play,” the review-writer admonished us, “that happens to have as its one and only character a figure from real life.  It is a work created for the stage out of all the things the stage finds most useful.”

“Miss Carroll is seated at the center of the famous room at 27 Rue de Fleur[u]s, Paris, for virtually the entire evening. . . .  But,” observed the man from the Home News, “from this throne-like seat, Miss Carroll miraculously creates a[n] evening that always seems alive and active.  She tells the stories brilliantly.”

“Miss Carroll plays with the language as if it were a musical instrument.  Her stories are oral impressionistic paintings and the glimpse into the ego are startling revelations of vulnerability,” affirmed Albrecht.

He didn’t spare his praise: “If you want a model of stunning acting by which to judge all other such attempts, do visit Miss Carroll at the Provincetown Playhouse.  So much of what passes for acting in other enterprises merely seems so much ranting and raving in comparison.”

The Home News reviewer concluded by stating, “All of which adds up to an enormously varied evening that treats us as [her] intellectual and emotional equal.  What greater tribute can an artist pay her audience?”

“With Miss Carroll playing [Stein], it is sometimes difficult to remember that it is, after all, only a play,” continued Albrecht.  “She makes it seem like a private soiree.”

As readers can see, the reviews all hit much the same notes.  These were all notices of the performances in New York City, either at Circle Rep or the Provincetown, but the reviews of the tour dates were in the same vein.  So, I’ll stop here—with two exceptions.  The first is a review of the Caedmon recording (TRS 367) of the play, released in September 1980, about a month after the play’s New York run ended.

In the New York Times, Paul Kresh, an author, critic, record producer, and broadcaster who specialized in spoken-word recordings, advised, “Plays for one or two performers not only make for economical stage productions but are ideally suited to the recording medium.”

Kresh labeled the two-disk, stereo release “Pat Carroll’s tour-de-force monologue.”  Having seen the live performance, the record reviewer acknowledged,

It was a joy to watch Miss Carroll . . . thronging the stage with the ghosts of the great as she reminisced on a rainy afternoon in her studio about life in Paris at 27 rue de Fleurus.  You could swear that Alice B. Toklas was really napping away all the while in the next room!  Yet, little is lost when you only hear this performer, since most of the delights of Mr. Martin’s compelling script are in the flow of language that illuminates character as the formidable Stein recalls her adventures, her quarrels with her brother Leo, her love affair with modern art, and her attempts to make language do what Picasso was doing on canvas.

Kresh made a side note to say that compared to a recording of Stein’s actual voice, “Pat Carroll has caught its cadences and even its timbre without resorting to slavish mimicry.”

The other outlier is a review in the Hartford (Connecticut) Courant of the 1982 television broadcast of the play on CBS Cable.  (The telecast ran two hours, rather than the 90 minutes of the stage version.)  Owen McNally, the paper’s television critic, described GS³ as “a good play, a good play, a good play” (I warned you about the triple-ese) and credited Carroll’s “tour de force performance.”

“It is a one-woman monologue,” McNally explained, “with Carroll pulling out all the stops” in what he called Martin’s “imaginary monologue.”  The TV reviewer characterized Carroll’s work as a “vivid, earthy performance,” presenting “a very bold, flesh-and-blood Gertrude Stein, a Stein running over with brilliance as raconteur and writer.”

“Although most sympathetic,” warned McNally, “this is not a totally idealized representation of Stein.”  The reviewer added (as we recall what Anita Loos revealed), “What you get in this two-act monologue is no mere ‘Saint for Two Acts.’  Stein also comes across as at least a bit of a bitch.” 

The Courant writer reported, “The play itself is all but totally static.  Yet Carroll makes it come very much to life by generating static electricity that lights up the Stein character. . . .  The words—the words made flesh by Carroll—are the real action.” 

(Stein wrote the libretto to an opera with music composed by Virgil Thomson entitled Four Saints in Three Acts, 1927-28.  She also wrote a libretto, often performed as an avant-garde play, called Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, 1938—but I think that apparent reference is inadvertent.)

I will also quote a few passages from one of the tour-stop reviews because it was the only one I read that had anything negative to say about GS³.  James Lardner’s Washington Post notice was generally laudatory, especially regarding Pat Carroll’s performance (the piece’s headline was: “On Stage: Fierce, Convincing ‘Gertrude Stein.’”)

The WaPo reviewer, who saw the show at Washington’s Arena Stage two months after it left the Provincetown, found that Martin’s script “succeeds in making Stein an absorbing and sympathetic figure,” but “is much less successful in its structure and selection of material.”

Carroll is constantly forced to jump from one subject to another . . . .  And there is no compelling dramatic reason behind Stein’s speaking to us from the mid-1930s: The story doesn’t build to any ’30s climax, and indeed sweeps through the ’20s . . . with alarming briskness.

Lardner, however, immediately returned to his complimentary assessment of the play, which he dubbed “a highly entertaining excursion to a unique time and place,” and especially Carroll’s acting, which, he proclaimed “is the bottom-line reason to see this show.”

In Carroll’s bio in the Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein program, the actress made a statement, part of which the Variety reviewer quoted.  The rest of Carroll’s thought reads: “personalizing history through Gertrude Stein is a fantasy come true.”  I’m thrilled that it did and I got to share in it.  It’s remained indelibly engraved on my memory for 43 years . . . and counting.

[Thinking about the possibility of other negative reviews of Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein aside from a brief passage in the Washington Post notice, I wondered what John Simon might have written in New York magazine.  In my original searches, I never found a New York review, so I made a search specifically directed at finding one.

[It looks as if Simon may not have written a full review, but penned the blurb New York used in its theater listing for GS³.  It doesn't have his name attached, but it sounds like him and the abstract/citation on one database points to it if you look for “John Simon” and "Pat Carroll." 

[(Wouldn’t you know that the first use of the blurb in question—there was another text in the theater guide in earlier issues—appears in an issue that follows one that’s missing from the database of complete issues.  If there was a full review from which the blurb was excerpted, the frequent practice, it'd probably be in that missing issue.  I’ll try to remember to check in a library my next opportunity.)

[So, to complete the record, here’s what the “anonymous” critiquer of New York magazine said about Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein:

The Gertrude Stein that emerges is, unlike the title, far from triple—only a third.  She is less formidable, much more easygoing than the original.  The comedienne Pat Carroll plays her heroine with verve, variety, and finesse, but Marty Martin’s monodrama simplifies, falsifies, and vulgarizes the life and times and works of Ms. Stein.

[Assuming this is John Simon, I’m not sure how he would know “the original” Gertrude Stein—though he was 20 when she died.  I don’t know, though, that he was in Paris at the time.  We’ve heard in the testimony of people who knew, or at least met, her, that Stein presented a different face in person and in private than she did in her writing. 

[Besides, as Carroll and Martin both repeated, GS³ isn’t a history lesson, it’s theater.  It isn’t presenting historical truth, but theatrical truth—and, however the New York reviewer felt about Martin’s dramaturgy, he praised Carroll’s acting.]

Pat Carroll Pat Carroll Pat Carroll: A Tribute – Part 1

 

[As a tribute to actress Pat Carroll, who died last month, I’m presenting a hybrid post in two parts.  The first part will cover her obituary and a more detailed biography, focusing on her career.  Part 1 will conclude with a history of the play and Off-Broadway production Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein which I saw in 1980 and, which you’ll read, has stuck in my memory ever since.

[Part 2 of “Pat Carroll Pat Carroll Pat Carroll: A Tribute” will be a “recovery” of the report I might have written for GS³.  As with my real-time play reports, this one will end with a survey of the critical response to the production.  Part 2 will be published on Wednesday, 17 August.]

Comedic actress Pat Carroll, who had a seven-decade acting career on television, stage, and film, died at 95 on Saturday, 30 July, at her home on Cape Cod, Massachusetts.  The cause was pneumonia, for which she was being treated at her death.

Carroll began on the stage, making her professional début at the Brattle Theatre Company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in a 1947 summer stock production of Harold J. Kennedy’s A Goose for the Gander with Gloria Swanson.  She parlayed that into a long period as a game-show contestant and member of the casts of the popular variety shows on TV, then films (she débuted in 1948’s Hometown Girl) and the comedies, dramas, and musicals of TV’s “golden age.” 

By then she was a stage and screen mainstay, returning to the theater in what became her iconic performance as the title figure in the 1979 monodrama Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein by Marty Martin.

The success of GS³ made her not just a respected actor, but a sought-after performer and she made an artistic home in Washington, D.C., especially at the Shakespeare Theatre where she won three Helen Hayes Awards for her work. 

The Hayes Awards, recognizing excellence in professional theater in the Washington, D.C., area, were for her performances in William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children.  Carroll was also nominated for a Tony Award in her Broadway début in 1955, Catch A Star!

Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein brought Carroll 1980’s Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actress in a Play and Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Performance in an Off Broadway Play.

Carroll won an Emmy Award in 1957 for Caesar’s Hour, NBC’s live, hour-long television sketch-comedy program starring Sid Caesar.  The recording of GS³  won the 1981 Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word, Documentary or Drama.  In 1991, Carroll received the honorary degree of Doctor of Fine Arts from Siena College in Albany, New York.

In 2000, Carroll was part of the cast of Songcatcher that won the Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival for their outstanding ensemble performance; Carroll was also nominated for the Film Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Female in the same film.

Carroll became beloved as an actress when she fulfilled a lifelong dream of doing a Disney movie by voicing the character of Ursula, the sea witch, in The Little Mermaid in 1989.  If Gertrude Stein was Carroll’s most emblematic role, Ursula was her best known—especially among young audiences.

Patricia Ann “Pat” Carroll was born in Shreveport, Louisiana, on 5 May 1927.  Her family moved to Los Angeles when Pat was five, and there she began performing in local stage productions.  She graduated from Hollywood’s Immaculate Heart High School and then attended the associated Immaculate Heart College (closed in 1981).  After hiring on with the United States Army as a “Civilian Actress Technician” in the mid-’40s, Carroll transferred to the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.

After graduating from Catholic University with a bachelor’s degree in 1949, Carroll began performing comedy in nightclubs and gained early experience with appearances at vacation resorts.  Her 1947 theatrical début with Swanson led to more than 250 stage productions.

The budding character actress married Lee Karsian (1925-91), a William Morris agent, in 1955, but the marriage ended in a divorce in 1976.  Carrol and her husband had three children: son Sean Karsian (1956-2009), and daughters Kerry Karsian (b. ca. 1958), a casting director, and Tara Karsian (b. 1965), an actress, screenwriter, and producer.

She made her off-Broadway début in the revue Come What May (Weidman Studio Theater in Manhattan’s Chelsea) in 1950.  A talented singer, Carroll earned a 1956 Tony nomination for Catch a Star!, another revue, and then appeared in a number of regional and stock productions of such musicals as On the Town, Once Upon a Mattress, and The Unsinkable Molly Brown.

Then the new entertainment medium of television discovered Carroll’s talents.  First came the variety shows like The Red Buttons Show (1953), The Saturday Night Revue (1954), and Caesar’s Hour (1954-57), which brought her Emmy Awards in 1957 and ’58.  Carroll also earned good reviews (and lasting renown) in the recurring part of Bunny Halper (1961-64), the wife of Danny Thomas’s nightclub manager, Charlie Halper (Sid Melton), on the sitcom The Danny Thomas Show.

Carroll’s TV trademark was her distinctive, infectious laugh, which made her a popular panelist on game shows like To Tell the Truth (1961), Password (1961-64), You Don't Say (1963-69), and I've Got a Secret (1972-73).  One description of that laugh is:

Pat Carroll’s laugh starts deep in her ample body, knocks her head back, and explodes joyously into the air.

In 1965, Carroll co-starred as Prunella, one of the wicked stepsisters, in the first TV remake of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella starring Lesley Ann Warren in the title role.  (On 25 April 2013, I posted “Cinderella: Impossible Things Are Happening (CBS-TV, 31 March 1957)” about the première production of the endearing TV musical.) 

When her television shows, the early ones of which were broadcast live, were on hiatus Carroll returned to the stage to recharge her batteries, as she put it.  Though live TV had some of the performer-spectator relationship, as well as the immediacy, of stage work, Carroll believed that theater was the only place where an actor had a connection to the audience.

In 1979, the actress’s career got a big boost with the monodrama Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein, which garnered her multiple awards and excellent reviews.  Carroll commissioned the play and co-produced it (under the corporate name Sea-Ker Inc., named for her two oldest children) with the Circle Repertory Company, an Off-Broadway troupe in New York City.  (I’ll be writing in detail about this performance later in the post.)

Later, Carroll had recurring and regular roles on the last season of The Ted Knight Show (1986-87; retitled from Too Close for Comfort in its final season) and the Suzanne Somers sitcom She’s the Sheriff (1987-89).

Carroll had only limited success in film, including supporting roles in the slight comedies With Six You Get Eggroll (1968), her second big-screen appearance and Doris Day’s last, and The Brothers O’Toole (1973) with John Astin.  Late in her life, Carroll’s film work included Outside Sales (2006), Freedom Writers (2007), Nancy Drew (2007), Bridesmaids (2011), and BFFs (2014).

In the late 1980s, she became a popular choice for voice work on a number of animated films, largely for Disney.  The villainous Ursula in The Little Mermaid came in 1989 and Carroll’s rendition of Alan Menken and Howard Ashman’s “Poor Unfortunate Souls” became something of cult hit among the very young.  She did other voices in A Goofy Movie (1995) and following the turn of the millennium, Carroll gave voice to many Disney-related characters on screen, in video games, and on special projects.

The actress then returned to Broadway after 30 years to appear in the short-lived Dancing in the End Zone (1985; 15 previews and 28 regular performances).  That was followed by a revival of 1924’s The Show Off (1992; 26 previews and 45 regular performances) and Sophocles’ (by way of London’s Donmar Warehouse and Princeton, New Jersey’s McCarter Theatre) Electra (December 1998-March 1999; 15 previews and 116 regular performances) in which she played the Chorus.

Carroll surprised her fans by taking on Shakespearean roles, earning consistent critical praise.  She won Helen Hayes awards for her interpretations of the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet (1 November-23 December 1986; Outstanding Supporting Actress, Resident Production), a production I saw as it happens, and Sir John Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor (24 April-17 June 1990; Outstanding Lead Actress, Resident Production) for Washington’s Shakespeare Theatre at the Folger (precursor to today’s Shakespeare Theatre Company).  

Carroll won another Helen Hayes award for the title role in Brecht’s Mother Courage, also for the renamed Shakespeare Theatre (1994 Outstanding Lead Actress, Resident Play).   A life member of The Actors Studio, other challenging stage roles over the years have included the title role in Ben Jonson’s Volpone (Shakespeare Theatre; 1996) and the Stage Manager in Our Town (Round House Theatre, Bethesda, Maryland; 2001).

Still interested in comedy on occasion, the actress played the Reverend Mother in a number of adaptations of the wacky musical comedy Nunsense.  Branching out once again, Carroll took on directing, staging a musical version of Alice in Wonderland for Washington’s Kennedy Center’s children’s theater program in 1993—sort of “Carroll Doing Carroll” (though the Washington Post was quick to point out that there was “no relation, one assumes”).  Carroll remounted the show for a cross-country tour in 1994. 

Carroll helmed productions of Noel Coward’s Private Lives for the Interact Theatre Company at the Folger Theatre in Washington (1995) and George Furth’s The Supporting Cast (1995) for the Cape Playhouse (Dennis, Massachusetts), the Ogunquit Playhouse (Ogunquit, Maine), and the Westport Country Playhouse (Westport, Connecticut), as well.

Sometime in the early ’90s, Carroll moved to Cape Cod.  She was active in the Cape community, lending her talent to entertainments and fundraisers in towns all around mid-Cape, where she apparently had her home.  Oddly—though typically for the Cape—there was no obituary for her in the Cape Times at the time of this writing. 

(There’s an old quip about the slowness of Cape Codders to adopt as one of their own someone not born in Barnstable County.  An old man who originally came to the Cape from Boston as a small boy died after a very long life.  The headline of his obituary read: “Boston Man Dies.”) 

Forty-three years ago, when she was still performing GS³, Carroll said:

So, by the end of a career, I can look back and say, “I’ve done everything.”  That’s marvelous to say about life, for heaven’s sakes, much less a career.  Whether you’ve done it poorly or well, I think it’s the fact that you’ve done it that’s the most exciting thing.  I will have been fortunate enough to have done everything that I’ve wanted.  So any time the great producer in the sky wants to take me up for bigger casting, I’m ready to go.

Well, Carroll didn’t quite do everything in the entertainment field she wanted.  At the time of Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein, she said she’d never done a soap opera.  She didn’t want to return to TV, but she voiced the wish to someday do a soap.  She never got to.

Carroll had started on the idea that became Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein in 1975 when, recuperating from knee surgery, she began looking around for a woman she’d like to play in a one-woman show.  She eventually hit on Stein (1874-1946) and began reading her writings.

(A word about the typography of the play’s title: in many publications—reviews and other coverage—it’s written with commas and, at least in one instance, with slashes.  The way Marty Martin composed it, and the way it’s printed on the program cover, on the cover and title page of the published text, on the record album cover, and in advertisements is without any punctuation marks at all.

(I’m sure most readers will recognize that the repetitions of the name in the title is an invocation of Stein’s habit of doing that for emphasis, as in her famous line, “a rose is a rose is a rose.”  But Stein also had another habit in her writing: she eschewed punctuation—an occasional period, but few commas or question marks, or much of anything else.  Martin replicated that Steinian quirk in the title of his play—and I’ve respected that.)

After considerable reading and research—Carroll read not only Stein’s own works, but everything she could find by others who wrote about her—the actress was very engaged by the American expatriate writer and poet—but not for her writing.  Carroll had read some of her work in college and it hadn’t interested her much.  But now she read biographies of Stein and the famous woman’s personality, her life, fascinated Carroll. 

Gertrude Stein was born in Allegheny (now part of Pittsburgh), Pennsylvania, on 3 February 1874 to wealthy German-Jewish immigrants.  She was the fifth of five children; her brother Leo (1872-1947) was the next youngest.  When Stein was three, her family moved to Vienna and then to Paris.  

When Stein was 14, her mother died; three years later, her father died as well.  Stein’s eldest brother, Michael (1865-1938), moved his four siblings to San Francisco and in 1892 arranged for Gertrude and another sister, Bertha (1870-1924), to live with their mother’s family in Baltimore.

Stein attended Radcliffe College, the women’s college of Harvard University, from 1893 to 1897, where she studied psychology with philosopher and psychologist William James (1842-1910).  After leaving Radcliffe with a bachelor of arts degree magna cum laude, she enrolled at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University, where she studied medicine for four years, leaving in 1901.  Failing two courses, Stein didn’t complete the medical degree.

In 1903, Stein moved to Paris with Leo, an art critic and painter.  Alice B. Toklas (1877-1967) arrived in Paris from San Francisco in 1907, met Stein the day after she landed, and the two would remain partners throughout Stein’s life.  The brother and sister Stein took an apartment on the bohemian Left Bank at 27 Rue de Fleurus—Toklas moved in permanently in 1910—which soon became a gathering spot for many young artists and writers, the titans of modern Western culture.  

By 1913, Stein’s championship of Cubist painters and her increasingly avant-garde writing caused a split with Leo, who reverted to conventionalism and moved to Florence, Italy.  Her writing was profoundly affected by modern painting.  In her prose, images and phrases came together in surprising ways—similar to Cubist painting.  

Stein’s writing, characterized by its use of words for their associations and sounds rather than their meanings, received considerable interest from other artists and writers, but didn’t find a wide audience.  Until, that is, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), which was a best-seller.

The next year, Stein and Toklas returned to the States for the first time since they moved to Paris, for a lecture and reading tour of college campuses.  The young audiences—Stein was 60 by this time—was absorbed with this odd, new figure.  (This became a model for Pat Carroll’s performances in GS³.)  

Gertrude Stein died of cancer at the American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine on 27 July 1946.  She was 72.  Alice B. Toklas lived another 20 years, dying in Paris at 89 on 7 March 1967.  She died in poverty and poor health and was buried next to Stein.  Her longtime partner had willed most of her estate to Toklas, including the art collection, but because their relationship had no legal standing, Stein’s family wrested the art from Toklas’s home when she was away.

Another enticement for Carroll, she’s acknowledged, was a fascination with the period of the ’20s in Paris.  Aside from the many Americans who were living there in those years, Carroll saw that it was a time of cross-fertilization of the arts. 

Painters, sculptors, writers, composers, musicians, and dancers all knew one another and socialized together, sharing their creative discoveries and experiments, Carroll felt.  GS³ is a kind of a look back at the old practices being displaced by modern ones, of the 19th century being overrun by the true beginning of the 20th in art and literature. 

Stein, herself, responded to what the Cubists were doing in painting and sculpture—the fragmentation, the stripping away of the conventional structure, and the use of a part to stand for the whole—and tried to employ the same impulse to writing.  “Strip the object so only the idea remains, that’s what I did with my writing,” says Stein in the play.  “Do with words what they are doing with painting.”

Carroll tried writing the script herself, then she decided she needed someone to do the playwriting.  She’d read two of Marty Martin’s bioplays, not yet professionally produced, and in 1976, hired the 26-year-old Texan to write the script. 

As it happened, Martin was working on a Stein play—but it had a full cast . . . and was four hours long.  (Martin’s scripts tended to be very long, which may be why he hadn’t had a professional production yet.)  Carroll convinced him to rewrite his play for a single actor and shorten it to 90 minutes.

The actress and the dramatist were collaborators, working by phone, tape, and letter to exchange ideas, but both she and he affirm that Martin wrote all the words, while Carroll advised on the dramatic direction and the format (to which director Milton Moss also contributed during development).

Living at the time on a farm in High Falls, near New Paltz in upstate-New York, she turned the barn into the “salon” of the Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Company.  It was filled with books by and about Stein, copies of doctoral theses, literary journals, and other odds and ends about the best-known salon‐keeper in literary history.

The text isn’t made up of Stein’s writings—aside from not especially caring for them, Carroll didn’t want to have to pay large sums in royalties for Stein’s words—but is drawn largely from her autobiography, deceptively titled The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and colorful anecdotes about her and her Paris salon told by her illustrious friends like Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Henri Matisse, Marie Laurencin, James Joyce, Ambroise Vollard, Henri Rousseau, Isadora and Raymond Duncan—and, of course, Toklas, herself, Stein’s friend, cook, confidante, lover, muse, secretary, editor, and critic.  Most reviewers later declared that Martin and Carroll had captured Stein’s style and personality even without using quotations from her writing.

(A note about the Duncans: in the play, Stein remarks that the sandals she’s wearing were made by Isadora and Raymond Duncan.  Raymond [1874-1966] and his Greek wife used to dress in “classical” garb, including tunics and sandals.  Their son, Menalkas [1905-69], was required to do so, too, until he rebelled. 

(He apparently liked the sandals, though, and started making them to sell.  He opened the Duncan Sandal Shop in Provincetown, Cape Cod, which outlived him at least into the 1970s.  Duncan sandals, both real ones and knock-offs, were available all over the Cape.)

In the end, GS³ isn’t a scholarly or literary work, but a dramatic one.  It isn’t a reading of a writer’s works, but a theatrical presentation.  It’s also not a documentary or a role-play—Carroll doesn’t try to imitate Stein’s voice—but an actor’s (and playwright’s) impression of a character who happens to have been a real person. 

The actress referred to the character she played as “my Gertrude,” not in the sense of ownership, but as the particular version of the writer’s persona Carroll and her collaborators created.  As playwright Martin declared, “You can’t recreate Gertrude Stein anyway.  All you can do is try to share the sense of what she has done to you.”

Another revealing comment is by someone who knew Stein: actress, novelist, and playwright Anita Loos (1888-1981), who came backstage and admonished Carroll that in reality, “Gertrude Stein was a bitch.”  Then she added, “Anyway, you’re probably doing the Gertrude Stein she would like to have been.”

(Carroll may not have mimicked Stein’s voice, and she said she deliberately didn’t listen to any recordings of Stein or watch a recent documentary film, but reviewers of the production as well as the Caedmon recording attest that the actress caught the expatriate writer’s resonances nonetheless.)

The first draft of the pay, which was entitled Goodbye 27 Rue de Fleurus (a reference to Stein’s Paris apartment for 35 years and the setting for the play), was three hours long.  Martin and director Moss helped trim it to 90 minutes.  An early version of the play, which is performed in two acts, went on a small try-out tour in July 1977 to the University of Texas College of Fine Arts in Martin’s hometown of Austin.

On 4 and 5 May 1978, the play was tried out again at Pennsylvania State University in State College.  Then in February of ’79, the little troupe took the play to Seattle shortly before the New York première.  In Carroll’s initial conception, the Stein play was meant for university stages and concert performances, but it outgrew its intent—a sort of theatrical mission-creep.

[This concludes Part 1 of “Pat Carroll Pat Carroll Pat Carroll: A Tribute.”  Part 2 is ready to go and, as I said in my foreword, I’ll be posting it on 17 August.  I hope ROTters will return to this blog for the conclusion of my tribute to a wonderful actress.]

'Life Among the Ruins'

[In part 5 of Kirk Woodward’s series “Re-Reading Shaw,” which I posted on ROT on 2 September, he introduces a short piece called “Cymbeline Refinished” from 1937.  According to Kirk, Shaw “wrote an alternate ending [to Shakespeare’s play] that does not require unusual staging.”  Since Shaw rewrote William Shakespeare’s ending for Cymebline , I thought I might use that as an excuse to post my “archival” review of New York Shakespeare Festival’s production (directed in 1989 by JoAnne Akalaitis, Joseph Papp’s successor, as part of the NYSF’s multi-year Shakespeare Marathon).

[The following reviews were published together in the New York Native of 19 June 1989.  The Native  ran reviews in pairs, so there are two plays in the column.  (The paper gave me so many words for both plays, but I could divide them up any way I wanted.)  I saw the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theater’s Cymbeline, which ran between 9 May and 25 June 1989, in May and the Circle Repertory Company’s Florida Crackers, 17 May-25 June,  in June.  Even though the Florida Crackers review is totally unrelated to Cymbeline or Shaw, I’m leaving the two co-published pieces together here because . . . well, that’s the way they appeared in print 27 years ago.]

CYMBELINE

by William Shakespeare

New York Shakespeare Festival

Public Theater/Newman Theater

The ninth production in Joe Papp’s Shakespeare Marathon, Cymbeline certainly has elements of a gothic romance: twisted plots, separated lovers, lost and stolen children, disguises, poisons and potions, and ghosts.  A plot too complex to synopsize here—the program includes a page-and-a-half précis—it befits opera or all-day Kabuki.  It seems appropriate, therefore, that JoAnne Akalaitis sets her production in the mid-nineteenth century of Dickens, Austen, and Poe.  The final scene, with the entire cast unraveling the dozen or so complications, outstrips Gilbert and Sullivan. 

The shadowy, often fog-shrouded production, on George Tsypin’s chameleon set moodily dance-lit by Pat Collins, is over three hours long, but has such verve and energy it seems only half that.  The gothic ambience is enhanced by Philip Glass’s score of romantic viola with percussive counterpoint.

Sounds of a thunderstorm establish the atmosphere about fifteen minutes before curtain.  (Perhaps it was the air-conditioning, but I actually began to feel chilly.)  Then, two gentlemen complete with umbrellas step through the curtains and fill us in on the marriage of King Cymbeline’s daughter, Imogen, to impoverished Posthumus; the latter’s banishment to Italy, and the mysterious disappearance of Cymbeline’s two sons.  The curtain opens on “Celtic ruins” covered by heavy ground fog, lit sparsely from above and the sides.  Two large, square columns are center stage, the floor is covered with runic drawings and a Stonehenge-like ruin is projected on the backdrop. 

Scenes in England, Italy and Wales are quickly created by new configurations of the columns and new projections of forests, caves, walls and interiors—even a rippling stream.  The projections, black- or sepia-and-white, are unspecific, often fragmentary, and, combined with the shadowy lighting, evoke impressions rather than literal pictures.  In this way, Tsypin’s set accommodates the swiftness of Akalaitis’s direction, which moves the production without turning it into a headlong rush. 

The brooding elements, though constant, still permit Akalaitis occasional whimsy.  Twice, for instance, Cymbeline (George Bartenieff) on his throne is flown onstage from the wings, and Iachimo, gathering false evidence of Imogen’s seduction, peeks shyly down the sleeping princess’s bodice.  Broader humor is generated by Cloten, the Queen’s oafish son, played by a chubby Wendell Pierce.  His physical appearance, accentuated by an absurd page-boy mop of hair and outlandish clothes of clashing patterns and colors, belies the earnestness with which Pierce plays his lust for Imogen and his thirst for revenge on Posthumus.  The contrast, occasionally off-putting—especially when Pierce tries too hard—is often hilarious.

There is also considerable charm in the performances of Joan Cusack as Imogen, Jeffrey Nordling as Posthumus, Peter Francis James as Posthumus’ loyal servant Pisanio, Michael Cumpsty (who here resembles Robert Goulet or the late Guy Williams, TV’s Zorro) as the oily Iachimo, Frederick Neumann as the wrongly banished Belarius, and Jesse Borrego and Don Cheadle as Cymbeline’s long-lost sons Polydore and Cadwal.  These last two, it must be added, display virtuosic acrobatics in their several fights, and, as feral innocents, may be the most confused characters in the convoluted circumstances, for they fall naïvely in love with Imogen, disguised as a boy, not knowing that she is a woman, a princess and their sister.  The audience clearly appreciated Borrego’s and Cheadle’s performances, for their curtain call received the loudest applause.

Cusack is strong and stalwart, though her voice has a hoarseness that precludes much vocal variety despite the obvious emotional variety the actress commands.  Still, I found her more forceful and sympathetic here than in her last New York appearance, Circle Rep’s Brilliant Traces.  Joan MacIntosh’s Queen, a sort of Junior League Lady Macbeth crossed with a real-life version of Snow White’s queen, would be easy to caricature as a dragon lady, but MacIntosh and Akalaitis keep to a believable level of evil. 

Cumpsty’s unctuous smarminess as Iachimo, a sleaze if ever there was one, is clear without being telegraphed.  As a rake, he presses Imogen, importunes her fervently and then backs off quickly when she refuses him.  Having snuck into her bedroom while she is asleep, Cumpsty peeps down her nightgown with puerile glee, showing what a little boy this poseur really is.  Without this detail, the audience probably couldn’t forgive him, as Imogen and Posthumus do, for the near tragedy he causes.

Among the production’s remarkable moments is a choreographed battle with stylized individual combat, a slow-motion mass attack—and a leap by Borrego from a ten-foot-high ramp into a crowd of enemy soldiers.  Later, there is a literal deus ex machina as Jupiter, in the guise of boy alto Jacob White, sings an aria suspended on a giant bird. 

As steadily as it keeps its many balls in the air, Akalaitis’s Cymbeline is not without problems, however.  Whimsical as it is, the flying throne comes, literally and dramatically, out of nowhere.  And the good performances aside, it is momentarily troublesome that Cymbeline and his first queen should have a white daughter, a black son and an Hispanic son.  More difficult to accept is that Imogen, awakening from a drugged, death-like sleep, would mistake the headless corpse of Cloten, a stout black man, for her husband, a tall, slim white man.  (Cloten was wearing Posthumus’ clothes, but rather than explaining the confusion, that only raises the question how the tubby prince could fit into them.)  Also, the director includes Posthumus’ ghostly family, who appear to him in a dream shimmering like translucent holograms, in other scenes throughout the play, as if they are silently watching over the events of the story.  This presence seems unnecessary; however, like Akalaitis’s other inventions, it doesn’t ultimately harm the production. 

As the audience left, one spectator concluded that Cymbeline is the strongest entry so far in the Marathon.  I can’t necessarily go along with the exclusivity—James Lapine’s Winter’s Tale still stands out for the acting and individual character portrayals—but Akalaitis has unquestionably put together a marvelously atmospheric and theatrical spectacle.

FLORIDA CRACKERS

by Wm. S. Leavengood

Circle Repertory Company

There is a public service TV commercial that shows two young men sitting around a bedroom smoking pot.  One says he doesn’t believe marijuana is dangerous; after all, they’ve smoked it since they were twelve and nothing’s happened to them.  Then the man’s mother asks if he’s even looked for a job that day.  “No, ma,” he answers, and the voice-over declares, “Marijuana can make nothing happen to you, too.”  That, in a thirty-second spot, is what Wm. S. Leavengood seems to be saying over two hours in Florida Crackers. 

In John Bishop’s hyperrealistic production, in which real eggs are cooked, real sand is spread over the Circle rep’s stage and aisles and real barbells are bench-pressed, brothers Joe (John C. McGinley), Grant (Michael Piontek) and Russell (Scott Rymer) essentially dream their lives—and inheritance—away as they smoke, snort, deal, and deliver pot and coke around St. Petersburg, Florida.  Too enervated to do anything else, they know only one way to make money for their various pipe dreams.  It’s an unpoetic, brutish Iceman Cometh à la 1979.

The boys’ favorite song is the Eagles’ “Take It to the Limit” (1975) whose key line seems to be “I’ve always been a dreamer.”  Seven scenes spread over two acts reveal the lassitude of the brothers and their friends and lovers until they are finally galvanized by Grant’s arrest for transporting pot.  As to why these former preppies don’t break out of their self-destructive rut, the play’s only explanation is the description of fish caught in the deadly red tide: even though the algae will inevitably poison or suffocate the fish, they don’t swim away because they don’t know any better.

A talented cast, a detailed set (by John Lee Beatty), and appropriate but uninspired direction, however, can’t make these people interesting or worthy of sympathy.  Their lives weren’t ruined by some outside force against which we can root for them to struggle; they are victims of their own selfishness and inertia.  They get what they deserve.

[In my commentary on Kirk Woodward’s book The Art of Writing Reviews (Merry Press/Lulu, 2009), I related an anecdote that pertains to my New York Native review of Cymbeline, the one republished here.  In Part 3 of “The Art of Writing Reviews by Kirk Woodward” (11 November 2009), I wrote that after a contretemps I had in print with John Simon, New York magazine’s drama reviewer, over The Winter’s Tale, an earlier entry in the NYSF marathon, my Cymbeline notice was published.

On 19 June, however, my review of another NYSF production, Cymbeline (part of NYSF’s then-ongoing marathon of all Shakespeare’s plays over about a decade), came out in the Native and unbeknownst to me, the editors had put a banner headline on the front page of the edition saying, “Hey, John Simon: We Loved Cymbeline.”  Simon had obviously panned Cymbeline (12 June)--it was a controversial production under the direction of JoAnne Akalaitis--but the banner was clearly more directed at my difference of opinion with Simon over Winter’s Tale.

[In a later section of my comments, I quoted Kirk’s statement that “reviewers often are not responsible for headlines” and other accompaniments to their columns.  Though most of my reviews did appear under headlines of my own devising, I not only had no hand in writing that banner about Cymbeline that baited John Simon, but I didn’t even know about it until the issue came out.  Since my deadline was often 10 days before the issue date, I’d written my copy before Simon’s negative review of Cymbeline hit the stands.  (I no longer subscribed to New York and didn’t seek out Simon’s reviews anyway; I wouldn’t have known about his response to the play until someone told me about it.)]