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