'The Crucible' (Shaw Festival, 2006)

[On 8 and 11 December, after ROT published my friend Kirk Woodward’s article “Eric Bentley On Bernard Shaw” (3 December), I posted a two-part report on my attendance at the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, in August 2006.  The post was a large excerpt from a complete report of that trip from which I excised all the performance discussions except those of the two Shaw plays in that season’s bill.  One of the other plays offered that year was Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and because I’ve just posted a report on another Miller production, Incident at Vichy, on 16 December, I thought it would be worthwhile to run my excerpted remarks from that 2006 production of another Miller history play.  I hope ROT readers will find the comparison interesting.]

The trip to the Shaw Festival, which was organized by the Round House Theatre of Bethesda and Silver Spring, Maryland, left on Monday, 7 August, and returned on Monday, 14 August 2006; both Mondays were travel days, allowing for five days of theater (and a little sightseeing, too, of course).  The theater pre-booked six shows for us (leaving four from which we could select however many additional performances we wanted); Miller’s The Crucible was scheduled for the 2 p.m. matinee on Wednesday, 9 August, our second performance of the trip.  The show was presented in the 850-seat Festival Theatre, the largest and newest of the Shaw’s three performance spaces, opened in 1973.  After a rather wan theater experience there the previous evening at Arthur Kopit and Cole Porter’s High Society, the 1997 musical adaptation (based on the 1956 musical film) of Philip Barry’s 1939 Philadelphia Story, it was a terrific start to a most enjoyable week of theater.

The Shaw Festival has a “mandate,” to present the plays of George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) and his contemporaries.  (An explanation of this somewhat flexible directive is provided in my omnibus report on the festival.)  The Crucible was written three years after Shaw’s death, isn’t set during the Irishman’s lifetime, and even its inspiration, McCarthyism, didn’t really get started until after GBS’s death, so how did it qualify for the Shaw Festival?  In the category of plays by a GBS contemporary then, Crucible qualifies for inclusion in the festival’s program because Miller (1915-2005) lived during the latter half of Shaw’s long lifespan.  

The Crucible premièred on Broadway at the Martin Beck Theatre (now the Al Hirschfeld) in 1953.  It ran 197 performances and garnered the 1953 Best Play Tony for Miller.  The play’s been revived on Broadway four times since then and a new mounting is scheduled to come to the Walter Kerr next year as part of the informal celebration of the playwright’s centennial this year.  (The new revival will be directed by  Ivo van Hove, the Flemish avant-garde director who is also responsible for the current, highly-praised production of Miller’s View from the Bridge at Broadway’s Lyceum Theatre.  The upcoming Crucible’s cast is expected to include Ciarán Hinds, and Ben Whishaw and Saoirse Ronan in their Broadway débuts.)  There have also been three Off-Broadway productions between 1958 and 1990.  In Canada, a French-language production was staged in Montreal in 1966 and that same year, an English version was presented in Halifax, Nova Scotia.  In 1961, composer Robert Ward adapted The Crucible into an opera, which won the 1962 Pulitzer Prize for Music and the New York Music Critics Circle Citation.  British Independent Television aired an adaptation in 1959 with stars including Sean Connery and Susannah York.  George C. Scott, Colleen Dewhurst, and Melvyn Douglas starred in a CBS-TV broadcast in 1967; the BBC mounted another TV version in 1980   A French film, under the title Les sorcières de Salem and starring Simone Signoret and Yves Montand, was released in 1957 and in 1996, Miller himself wrote a film adaptation of the play (for which he received his only Oscar nomination—for Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material Previously Produced or Published) starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Winona Ryder, Paul Scofield, and many other stars from Hollywood and the British screen and stage world.  In 2014, London’s Old Vic filmed a stage production that was released as a movie in the U.K. and Ireland.

The play’s story, set in Salem in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1692, unfolds during the prosecution of the infamous Salem witch trials (1692-93).  Some 20 colonists were tried for practicing witchcraft and executed during this notorious episode as neighbor turned on neighbor.  Miller was already researching the story and considering it as the basis for a play in 1952 when his friend Elia Kazan, the Group Theater member who had directed Miller’s first two stage successes, 1947’s All My Sons and 1949’s Death of a Salesman, was called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (known informally and universally as the House Un-American Activities Committee, or HUAC).  HUAC (abetted by Wisconsin’s Joseph McCarthy in the Senate) was on its own witch hunt in the 1950s, searching everywhere for communists.  It was focusing on the American entertainment business, both television and film in Hollywood and theater in New York.  Once again, friend turned on friend and colleague on colleague.  Informing on others who might have associated with communist or socialist organizations as long ago as the 1930s was encouraged—and failing to do so could end in an actor’s, director’s, or writer’s imprisonment for contempt of Congress, while those implicated, even just suspected, would face, first, blacklisting in their industry and, second, incarceration.  As in Salem, little proof was required—just someone to point an accusatory finger.  Kazan, who’d been called once before, decided to name names rather than face the ruin of his nascent and burgeoning career as a successful film director. 

Miller saw parallels between HUAC’s and Tail-Gunner Joe’s commie witch hunts in the 1950s and the Salem trials in the 1690s.  This is what The Crucible was intended to examine in the story of John and Elizabeth Proctor, a Salem farmer and his wife caught up in the midst of communal hysteria and fear, duplicity and self-serving denunciation by one neighbor against another, one former friend against another.  Miller used actual transcripts and records of the hearings as the basis for his script—though, of course, he took some artistic license to create the drama.  The play still speaks powerfully to us today, even though HUAC and Joe McCarthy are both gone—and so is Soviet communism.  The spirit of McCarthyism continually raises its ugly head, both abroad and in our own country (think Islamophobia, for instance, or a few decades ago, Japanophobia, the fear that the Japanese were buying up the whole country).  Witch hunts, it seems, never really go out of style.  The witch-hunters just find new targets.

After John Proctor, a married man and independent-minded farmer, decides to break off his affair with 17-year-old Abigail Williams, Reverend Samuel Parris’s niece, she leads other local girls in a magical ceremony in the woods at night to cast a spell on Proctor’s wife, Elizabeth, to cause her death.  When the girls are discovered dancing with Tituba, Reverend Parris’s slave who practices voodoo in secret, they are brought to trial for practicing witchcraft.  Accusations begin to fly, often for motives more temporal than spiritual, and a literal witch hunt gets underway.  Before long, Elizabeth Proctor is suspected of witchcraft, and John’s attempt to defend her only makes matters worse and he ends up in the dock, too.  Soon, the entire village is embroiled in the hunt for witches and every settler is either an accused or an accuser.  Those who confess to witchcraft will be spared execution and many do so, but Proctor and some others refuse to make false confessions.  In the end, Proctor will hang, though the play ends before he goes to his death.

Some critics apparently felt that Benedict Campbell’s Proctor was too strong a man to have been tempted by Charlotte Gowdy’s Abigail.  I didn’t agree.  Aside from the fact that the fall of such a man makes the situation the more dramatic, I see no contradiction in the fall of a strong man at the hands of a weaker woman.  I believe it has happened—both in life and in literature.  Further, I don’t see Abigail, no matter who plays her, as so ineffectual: she does launch and maintain the conspiracy; she faces down the threats and intimidations of both Proctor and Danforth; and she keeps the girls under her control, especially the erstwhile defector Mary Warren (Trish Lindstrom), even right under the gaze of all the powers of Salem.  I had no problem with this pairing.

The other ensemble members were all good, carving out believable personae for their characters, both the righteous ones and the benighted, venal ones.  This was an ensemble production—I didn’t mean to single Campbell out for his acting; it was just the role that made him need comment—and the company portrayed a convincing community, albeit one coming apart at the seams from internal conflicts.  (This may be the one major fault in the play in production as far as its political point is concerned: even Jim Mezon's Deputy Governor Danforth, the self-righteous inquisitor, is understandable in his wrong-headedness.  Not forgivable—but understandable.  It was totally correct for the actor to play him this way—as a flawed human who believes in what he’s doing even when he’s wrong—but as a political allegory, he should be inhuman and evil, like, say, Dick Cheney, Vladimir Putin, or Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.)  The acting in The Crucible was all at a very high pitch.  In almost any other case, it would probably have been considered over-the-top scenery-chewing.  Here, it just seemed appropriate.  After all, think about what’s happening to these people: they’re being accused of the most heinous crime possible in their society—consorting with the devil.  Not only that, but it’s a false charge based on lies no one wants to acknowledge.  They’re caught in gigantic Chinese fingercuffs: the harder they struggle to get out, the tighter they’re bound.  And the end result isn’t jail or loss of property, it’s death—death and ignominy their families will have to live with after they’re gone.  If that’s not reason to rant and fulminate, I don’t know what is. 

The acting, as I intimated, was excellent.  Bernard Behrens, for instance, does a wonderfully fractious Giles Corey.  I especially noted the way the actors handled the array of local characters in the village.  This company demonstrated that they have the skill  to focus on bit characters with the same care that British casts apply (especially in films and television).  This was particularly in evidence in Crucible, though Miller’s characters are much more fleshed out in the text; there is even an edition of the published script with historical character notes from the playwright’s research.  I’ll draw a conclusion from perhaps insufficient evidence and say that this acting skill, the focus on incidental characters, is an inheritance Canadian actors received from the decades during which they were an adjunct of British theater up till the middle/late ’50s and early ’60s.  I know Canadian theater (and culture in general) struggled to carve out its own identity, separate from both its former British colonial overlords and its behemoth neighbor to the south, but it seems to me (being an outsider and not so emotionally invested in the struggle) that the theater, at least, has gotten some benefit from that long tutelage.  At the same time, they handle the Stanislavsky/Method stuff pretty well, too—something the Brits have only come to terms with in the past few decades.  So, in the short run at least, the Canadians got the best of both theater worlds.

The Crucible was the first production of the festival where I began to notice the design.  (In almost all of the festival presentations, the sets, especially, were remarkable elements of the productions.)  I’m not sure that I can adequately describe the kinetic set, so you may just have to accept my assertion that it was striking and intriguing.  The designer is Peter Hartwell, whose work I don’t know but he’s designed for many top U.S. companies, including New York’s Public Theater.  (The whole production design is good: costumes by Teresa Przybylski; lights by Kevin Lamotte; and original music by Paul Sportelli, the Shaw’s musical director for eight seasons.)  The performance started with a scrim across the proscenium opening, painted with a black-and-white forest as if we were standing in its midst.  The sounds of a Puritan hymn filtered in and we saw the enlarged shadows of people from the waist up, their arms raised to heaven.  As the people moved forward and the shadows shrank to human proportions, Sportelli’s music, based on the Puritan hymn, became distorted and skewed to make it sound ominous and frightening in contrast to the flat, univocal sound—the Puritans apparently didn’t approve of harmony—when the hymns were sung in church.  As the scrim rose, the townspeople scattered and we were in the upper floor of the house of Reverend Parris (Ric Reid), the bedroom of his afflicted daughter, Betty (Katie Cambone-Mannell).  (A variation on the scrim technique was used again at the top of act two.)   

The playing area was a square of raw planks in the center of the stage; the surrounding areas of the stage were dim and ambiguous.  Over the actors’ heads was a huge wooden frame filled in by panels of Plexiglas like a giant window or skylight.  The frame was angled like a slanted roof, but there were objects attached to it—a baby carriage, for instance—and there was a door in it.  Attached to the frame at the stage-left edge of the platform was a wheel like a small waterwheel.  When the scene changed—to Proctor’s first-floor room, for example—the frame rotated as if driven by the wheel, like a gigantic grinding mill—a dark Satanic mill—or a torture rack, coming to rest in a different position.  It formed the back wall of the room behind the court (hence the door), the ceiling of Proctor’s front room (parallel to the floor this time), and the wall of the cell in which Proctor is tempted by Danforth, Reverend John Hale (Peter Krantz), and Reverend Parris to sign his confession while he confronts his wife. 

All the set (with the exception, of course, of the clear plastic windows) was rough wood—planks, timbers, beams.  The few pieces of furniture—Betty Parris’s bed, the Proctors’ table, the benches at the court, and such.—were all crude, simple constructions as you might imagine in a 17th-century Puritan colonial village.  Though the set was fragmentary, all the elements—the furniture, props, and costumes—were essentially naturalistic (however symbolically they were used), as was the acting, yet the whole thing had an air of Russian Constructivism to it—an (infernal) machine for acting.  One significant design element was stylistically opposed to the basically naturalistic unit.  It seemed as if designer Hartwell was evoking a threatening and torturous world driving the little village of Salem.  It was all very effective.

I did have one, small problem with the staging—a directorial misstep, I think, rather than a design error.  For almost all of the play, that square, plank platform demarked the "on stage" playing area—the limits of the rooms in which the action took place.  Off the platform, between it and the wings, was no-man’s land—ambiguous territory.  No actor violated this space in any of the scenes, except in the second set that represented the Proctors’ first floor.  Characters entered and exited the house by walking across the no-man’s strip at stage left, and that was fine.  It should have represented the "outside" of the house.  But several times, when characters were coming and going (when the court officers arrived to arrest Elizabeth Proctor), several delivered lines from the ambiguous area as if they were still inside the house.  If they had indicated somehow that they were talking to someone inside while they were outside, that would have passed, but they didn’t.  It broke what I thought was established convention for the production, and I didn’t know why the director, Tadeusz Bradecki, did it.  There were about a half dozen people in the scene, and I wondered if the director thought it had gotten too crowded—but, first of all, I didn’t see that problem and, second, if he had to move some actors off to disperse the scene, there should be some adjustment to show that they are now outdoors.  The acting was far too good for this to have been just bad acting, a failure to execute a minor technical adjustment. 

Some in our group questioned another directorial choice, with which I had no trouble.  In the final scene, when Proctor first confronts his wife alone after months of imprisonment and separation, a lot of the Round House spectators thought Elizabeth (Kelli Fox) or John ought to have crossed in and embraced, or at least touched, the other.  Bradecki had them standing at pretty much opposite sides of the cell—and I saw this as perfectly appropriate under the circumstances as the production played them.  The psychological gulf between them, from John’s adultery, Elizabeth’s sense of guilt for having driven him to that and her slowness to have forgiven him, his dilemma over making a false confession so he can stay with her for the year she’s been granted to bear her child, her reluctance to persuade him either way—all these and other emotional burdens made a hesitancy to embrace perfectly acceptable to me.  As it happened, that was how Jackie Maxwell, the Shaw’s artistic director, explained director Bradecki’s reasoning, more or less, when someone raised that question at the Round House cocktail party later that evening.  I had no trouble buying it.  I also think the tension from what seemed like John’s and Elizabeth’s need to connect but fear of doing so made the scene more painful, which is right, too.

I know lots of people dismiss The Crucible as no longer relevant, somewhat precious, or politically suspect/naive, but I’ve always liked it.  I think Miller’s point is powerful and valid—perhaps even more today than it has been at any time since the 1950s—and the parallels he found or devised between the witch trials and the McCarthy probes are remarkable, especially considering how much they are based on actual 17th-century records.  (The fact that there are records of those trials is remarkable in itself—but that’s not a theater issue.)  Sitting and watching this then-53-year-old play made me realize very palpably how far backwards we’ve gone in recent years—and how very dangerous and frightening that is.  As powerful an indictment of McCarthyist society Crucible was in 1953, it is just as clear a warning for our era of Patriot Acts, Guantanamo prison camps, and warrantless wiretaps. 

I did wonder how the Canadians respond to this play since it isn’t about their society and Miller isn’t speaking to them directly.  Canada is the target of terrorism, too, of course, and there have been Canadian troops fighting—and dying—in Afghanistan—but, so far at least, Canadians haven’t been subjected to Bushfascism yet (any more than they had a Tail-Gunner Joe or a HUAC).  Maybe they see it as a warning not to follow too closely in our path.  Or maybe they see it as an indictment of the big bully to the south.  I can say, though, that in performance they didn’t soft-pedal the message or mute the play’s voice.  Director Bradecki (a 51-year-old Pole, which may have made his take on this drama more perceptive) staged a full-voiced production, especially the actor who played John Proctor, Benedict Campbell, who was excellent.  He gave full, unapologetic rein to Proctor’s stiff-backed pride, his anguish, his guilt, and his horror at what he sees happening to him and his neighbors even as he tries to stop it.  His final resignation—to die rather than swear to a lie to save his life, to put his precious name on a false confession—in the presence of his pregnant wife (who would live for at least another year without him if he doesn’t confess) was easily one of the most dramatic moments in the festival. 

[Some have pointed out that the putative parallel between the actual witch hunts of the 17th century and the red hunts of the 1950s is invalid because, as Molly (Day Thatcher) Kazan, Elia Kazan’s wife, told Miller, there never really were any witches, but there were communists (including in the entertainment business: Miller himself had been a member of the Communist Party in the 1940s).  Though this is undeniably true—witches are imaginary; communists are real—parallels still pertained.  The fear and paranoia engendered by both was equally real and both were demonized by the established authorities of their respective societies.  The communal hysteria generated by rumors of witches in Salem was almost exactly duplicated by the rabid anti-communists of the McCarthy era and though execution was not an end result in the commie witch hunt as it had been for the actual witch trials of the 1690s, many careers and lives were utterly destroyed as a result of the hearings, trials, and denunciations by such publications as Red Channels.  Furthermore, the potential dangers attributed to both witches and communists in the entertainment industry (I’m not referring to actual spies like the Rosenbergs), were equally specious.  Miller himself pointed out that while we know today that there are no such things as witches (I’m not talking about modern-day Wiccans), to deny their existence in Salem 325 years ago was ill-advised and doing so could put a settler’s life in jeopardy since it was the colony authorities (the colonial equivalent to the state or, in the case of HUAC, our federal government) which determined what’s real and what’s a myth.  In the 17th century, witches and witchcraft were as real as communists and communism was in the 20th; in 17th-century England, there was even a man, Matthew Hopkins, who assumed the self-appointed position of Witchfinder General.]

The 2006 Shaw Festival (Part 2)

[Part 2 of “The 2006 Shaw Festival” picks up with the Round House group’s second performance in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible.  I finish out the week of festival shows, which included the two Shaws on the bill in 2006,  below and in between the performances, I make some comments on the surroundings and my observations about the festival as a whole and Canadian theater.  Also in Part 2 are the two performances I’ve already excerpted from the original report and posted on ROT, Noël Coward’s Design for Living (29 March 2012) and Ruth and Augustus Goetz’s The Heiress (24 November 2012).  As I said in the introduction to Part 1, which I encourage ROTters to go back and read, I’ve omitted performance reports on all but the Shaw plays here.  For an interesting discussion of GBS and his ideas, I strongly recommend reading Kirk Woodward’s “Eric Bentley On Bernard Shaw,” to which this posting was intended to be a companion piece, on 3 December.]

On Wednesday afternoon, 9 August, we saw Arthur Miller’s The Crucible at the Festival Theatre, the first production of the festival where I began to notice the design, a kinetic set that was striking and intriguing.  The Round House hosted a “cocktail party” (wine, beer, and soft drinks—and hors-d’oeuvres—but no actual cocktails served) at the hotel that evening (the one at which artistic director Jackie Maxwell and the three company members appeared), so there was no evening performance for us.  Our next show was the first matinee I had selected, Coward’s Design for Living, at the Royal George Theatre in town Thursday afternoon. 

The Royal George is a converted movie theater that had been built in 1915 as a vaudeville house for entertaining the troops of World War I.  It’s a proscenium stage, as you’d guess, and seats about 330 spectators in an orchestra and a balcony, all painted in red and gilt, a little Edwardian gem of an old-fashioned theater.  I had booked the seats on line, so I didn’t check the lay-out and seat location, and we ended up in the last two seats on the house-left corner of the last row of the balcony; Mother said they were the best seats she’d ever had.  (Mom was small, and she always complained that whenever she went to a theater—movie or play—tall people always sat in front of her!)

Between the matinee and the evening show on Thursday, Mother and I had an early dinner—which we did when we had two performances on the same day—at the Angel Inn, reportedly the oldest operating inn in Canada.  (It’s pub food—perfect for what we wanted.)  The original inn dated back to 1789, but it was burned in December 1813 at the end of the American occupation.  (In reprisal, a plaque out front says, some Brits went down to Washington and burned some buildings there.  That qualifies as humor in Canada.)  It was rebuilt on the original foundations in 1816 (though the kitchen’s newer, I presume—and so’s the food).  The plaques outside the front door tell the story of Captain Colin Swayze of the British army, who some say delayed joining the retreat to rendezvous with his sweetheart near the inn.  When she was a no-show, Swayze took refuge in the inn’s basement and was killed in the basement by American soldiers searching the property.  (Surviving soldiers told a different story: it was common knowledge that a store of Royal Navy rum was kept at the inn, and the captain was denying the Americans any victory party with the British liquor.)  Legend has it that even today Captain Swayze’s ghost can be heard walking the inn late at night, and as long as the Union Jack is flown over the inn—as it does today—the ghost will remain harmless.  (In the basement, near the restrooms, is a locked storage room labeled “Captain Swayze’s Cellar – No Admittance.”  Maybe that’s where the inn keeps its rum!) 

After our meal, we walked back to the hotel to wash up and rest and then let the hotel provide us a ride to the theater for the evening show.  The hotel had vans to shuttle guests back and forth—a convenience we used on days when we went in and out of town several times in a single day.  On Thursday evening, the group saw the Goetzes’ The Heiress, also at the Royal George.  (This time we sat down center—and a tall man sat in front of my mother!) 

On Friday evening we saw our first Shaw at the Shaw.  (Sorry.)  Arms and The Man, as I think I mentioned once before, is my favorite Shaw play, and one of my all-time favorite plays altogether.  (When I was trying to be an actor—and still young enough to consider it—I really wanted to play Bluntschli.  Just another disappointment in my life.)  Though I actually heard someone from our group say she didn’t like the show (I didn’t ask her why not), I, at least, was not disappointed.  (I was surprised to hear several people comment that they didn’t know Shaw could be this funny.  I have no idea where that came from!)

Before evening performances at the Festival Theatre, it is the practice of the Shaw to have a pre-show introduction by one of the company on the Members Terrace out back.  Since we had arrived in time for the chat, we went out to listen, and it’s not anything most of us wouldn’t already know—except a little about the director’s choices and, in this case, the design inspiration (which I’ll hit later).  The guy—one of the directing interns—who delivered the intro, however, told an anecdote a friend told me years ago, about a heckler who booed when GBS appeared at the première of Arms in answer to calls of “Author!  Author!” and GBS replied, “My dear sir, I quite agree, but what are we two against so many?”  (The heckler later became GBS’s American agent.) 

Shaw’s play is set against the background of the 1885-86 Serbo-Bulgarian War (an actual European conflict)—though Maxwell’s staging moved it up pictorially a couple of decades.  The heroine’s Raina Petkoff, a young Bulgarian woman engaged to one of the heroes of the war, Major Sergius Seranoff, whom she idolizes.  One night, Captain Bluntschli, a Swiss mercenary fighting with the Serbian army, bursts into her bedroom, fleeing Bulgarian bullets.  He begs her to hide him and though Raina, the daughter of Bulgaria’s highest-ranking officer, Major Paul Petkoff, and his wife, Catherine, deems him a coward, she complies, especially when he tells her that he doesn’t carry ammunition in his pouch, but chocolate creams instead.  Raina is child-like, a romantic teen princess, enamored of heroism, gallantry, the “higher love,” and what she sees as the splendid nobleness of war.  Bluntschli, however, opens her eyes to the reality of life and she comes to realize the hollowness of her romantic notions and the values upheld by Sergius.  Raina discovers the true nobility of the “chocolate-cream soldier” through whom all her romantic dreams give way to true romance. 

Always an audience favorite, Arms was an altogether charming production.  I won’t repeat what I’ve already said about the ensemble acting except to note that it applied here as well as in all the festival productions.  Even the presence of Mike Shara, whom I hadn’t liked as Morris Townsend in The Heiress, as Sergius, the “hero,” didn’t mar this aspect of the production, though he demonstrated once again his peculiar and annoying vocal pattern.  Since none of these characters is American, I had no problem with his Canadian accent (the cast didn’t do British for this Shaw, anymore than they did for Ibsen—or, I presume, Chekhov or the Argentines of Magic Fire).  Shara’s “Dudley Do-right” voice, while still inconsistent with the other actors on stage with him, wasn’t quite as out of place here; it worked well enough for Sergius, who’s a kind of dimmer Dudley in a way.  If I’d seen this production before I saw Heiress, I might have assumed Shara was doing this voice as a character choice.  In any case, within the ensemble, the two parents really conjured delightful characters—a sort of Shavian Ma and Pa Kettle, without the hillbilly twang.  Nora McLellan’s mama reminded me a lot of the comedienne from SCTV, Andrea Martin—as Edith Prickley, perhaps.  (I believe Martin’s also Canadian, by coincidence.)  She’s bossy, frequently flustered, and in complete control of her husband.  Peter Hutt’s Major Petkoff was just a little numb in the head.  Not outright stupid—that wouldn’t really be funny, I guess—but oblivious.  Except when he’s in the field (mostly because she’s not around), he takes his orders from Mrs. Petkoff, even about military matters.  But as farcical as the set-up is—and Arms is really a farce (though, apparently, GBS had intended to write a serious anti-war comedy; he resigned himself to having created a successful farce when he couldn’t convince people that wasn’t his intent!)—Petkoff Père and Mère were a truly entertaining couple.

Patrick Galligan’s Captain Bluntschli was solid and commonsensical, which is how I believe Shaw meant him to be—the un-hero (not in the sense of the modern “anti-hero,” however—more like James Garner as Maverick in the old TV series, or maybe even his Jim Rockford), in contrast to the dimwitted Sergius (who becomes a hero in battle not so much by accident as by inanity and dumb luck).  What interested me here, though, was the casting—and it’s an element of the Shaw in general it seems.  (Again, I’m basing a conclusion on limited evidence.)  Galligan isn’t any kind of standard leading man—he’s not especially handsome, he’s short, he’s balding, and he’s prematurely (I assume) gray.  The fact that I noticed this shouldn’t suggest that it affected me in any way—the fact that it didn’t is my point.  The same casting characteristic was evident in Design, too: neither Graeme Somerville (Otto) nor David Jansen (Leo) are matinee idols, yet they were cast as characters who are presented as inescapably attractive to Gilda, a woman who is supposed to be desired by all men who meet her!  (The same casting decision didn’t seem to hold for the women, by the way—the actresses were all as attractive as their characters.  I don’t know what that says—maybe the Canadians are as sexist as the rest of us.)  I guess I liked this apparent practice because I was never a Leading Man myself, and the notion that we ordinary folks can still play those parts pleases me.  (I did have an acting teacher who told me I should go out for what he called “the sex-pot roles.”  Right!  Like any director would actually have considered me for them.  Although, I did once play Chance Wayne—much to my mother’s consternation—but those were peculiar circumstances.)  By the way, I never heard anyone in the audience remark on this casting.

Now, I have to talk about the set.  First, I’ll note that there was a stated artistic reference in this design: the Art Nouveau paintings of Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) were the inspiration for the costumes (by William Schmuck—unfortunate name) and set (by Sue LePage—and I gather it was her idea).  As I mentioned earlier, this is one of the plays adapted for the festival, moved from GBS’s 1885-86 to “the turn of the century.”  Jackie Maxwell, who directed, did give some sort of explanation for doing this, but I don’t see any need except that she and LePage apparently wanted to use Klimt as an artistic model for the production.  (Some of the costumes, especially those for Mrs. Petfoff, were also reminiscent of the designs of Léon Bakst, 1866-1924, for the Ballets Russes.)  Well, I can’t object to that—I did it myself for nearly identical reasons, more for practical convenience than specific artistic references—when I moved Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan from 18-whatever to the 1920s.  (Instead of Klimt, I got to evoke Mondrian and Modigliani.  I like them better anyway.)  Mrs. Petkoff, especially, looked as if she might have popped out of one of Klimt’s canvases. 

(Actually, on a purely realistic—not to be confused with Realistic—basis, Klimt probably wasn’t the most apt model for Shaw’s interpretation of Bulgarian aristocracy.  He’s way too hip and with-it for a culture in which being able to read is a notable asset and in whose house a library contains only three books!  Mrs. P. is thrilled to pieces to have just had an electric call bell installed in that library so she can summon her servants without shouting for them—which is what Major P. thinks is sufficient.  Oh, that Shaw!  Nevertheless, I can’t complain about a little artistic license.  I sort of figure, when you do the same Shaw plays over a span of years, as the festival does—they eliminate some Maxwell calls unproduceable (Back to Methuselah, Androcles and the Lion, Great Catherine)—they probably have to shake up the creative juices now and then or get bored repeating themselves.  And, as I’ve said in other contexts, it’s not drawing a mustache on the “Mona Lisa.”

(That library bit reminds me of an old joke from my home territory.  When Spiro Agnew was governor of Maryland, before he was nominated to be Nixon’s V.P., people used to tell this one: Did you hear?  There was a terrible fire at the governor’s mansion in Annapolis.  The library was destroyed.  Both books were burned!  And Agnew hadn’t finished coloring in one yet!!) 

In any case, the set as a piece of theatrical technique was stunning.  At curtain, the stage was a wintry forestscape at night with a tiny house far up center whose doorway was lit with a warm, yellow glow.  (With no disrespect to LePage’s design, it sort of reminded me of one of those hyper-sentimental cottage paintings by Thomas Kinkade.  As art, it’s execrable, but as set design, it’s charming.  But wait . . . .)  The little house started moving slowly toward the front of the stage; about midway it was joined by a larger set piece and the former little house became the front door of a larger version, with a lighted window in the second storey.  The new construction moved further downstage and other set pieces, all in a Wedgwood blue, moved in from the wings, plus furniture for a fantasy princess’s bedroom.  The former front exterior of the house was now the interior wall of Raina’s bedroom, the former front door now the French doors to the balcony (onto which Bluntschli would soon climb).  The whole process was like a little magic show, reminiscent of the old movies, usually by Disney, I think, in which a cartoon hand sketches a black-and-white scene, then a cartoon paintbrush swishes over it and transforms the drawing into color and, immediately, reality.  I described the set as ‘marvelous,’ I think—that’s right: it was a little marvel!  (The opening sequence wasn’t used again in Arms but each set-change is accomplished by swirling set pieces moving onto place in a perfectly effective use of an old-line staging technique.)

I can’t understand why anybody wouldn’t like Arms under any circumstances (barring a really terrible production), but there was absolutely nothing in this staging that I could see might turn a spectator off.  There was a lot of laughter in the audience, so I could only assume that most of them were enjoying Shaw’s humor (whether or not they got his anti-war point).  I certainly did, even with Shara’s Sergius.  (I must say, to Shara’s credit, that director Maxwell had him constantly exercising—doing push-ups, leg-bends, and other calisthenics, including one set with his feel on an ottoman and his hands on the floor, and he executed this behavior commendably.  It reminded me of dancers when they’re not working: they never stop moving.  Sergius couldn’t stop flexing and bending!  He also did that Capt. Morgan’s Rum thing—from an old TV advertisement: every time he was near a chair, a bench, or something like that, he put his foot up on it and struck a pose—almost always in profile.)  It was only his voice (and, when playing an American, his accent) that displeased me.  (It’s odd, but Sergius, also a cad, is the farcical version of Morris Townsend, the character Shara played in Heiress.  One worked acceptably, the other didn’t.)

On Saturday afternoon, Mom and I had our second non-group matinee, Rosmersholm at the 327-seat Court House Theatre.  Our usual procedure was to take it easy in the morning, having breakfast toward the end of the serving period, sitting by the pool reading, then walking into town around 12:30 (matinees were all at 2 p.m.)—it’s a 15-minute walk from the Pillar and Post to the center of NOTL—maybe treating ourselves to an ice cream or a cold drink, and getting to the theater around 1:30.  On the afternoon of the 12th, because Queen Street was turned over to the Peach Festival, we walked a couple of blocks up and back, seeing what was on offer in some of the booths.  Instead of a lemonade or iced tea, we bought cups of peach soup, a kind of thin puree, which was a very nice refresher. After the Saturday matinee, Mother and I did our usual early meal at another restaurant (the Shaw Cafe—I’ll let you guess why it’s so named!) and walked back to the hotel.  We took the hotel shuttle to the Royal George for the evening performance of the stage adaptation of H. G. Wells’s The Invisible Man commissioned by the Shaw. 

Let me insert a word or two (or 200 . . .) about the Shaw program booklets.  I posted a blog article on program notes and such (“To Note Or Not To Note,” 28 August 2009).  Well, the Shaw programs were like mini-texts (and I don’t mean that as a bad thing).   Each show had a critical and analytical essay by an academic or writer that discussed some aspect of the play—something the Shaw’s taken from British theater practice.  There was always a short piece by the director, and sometimes other artists, like the composer for Crucible who explained the inspiration and source of his music or, in The Invisible Man, the playwright.  There was also a short bio of the author (and, in adaptations like TIM, Heiress, and High Society, the adaptors as well), and there was a run-down of the play’s production history (including the source material and movies or TV versions/sources).  There were also lots of pictures of previous versions, and several of the current production.  My issue with the elaborate notes in some of the programs I complained about in my ROT piece was that sometimes the directors used the program to do the work they failed to do on stage.  None of these essays or notes did that—they added a dimension to our appreciation of the play without short-cutting the stage work or trying to substitute reading for staging.  Now, I did cavil with the essay on TIM because I felt it was overthought for that production, but the general idea was great.  It was worth getting to the theater a few minutes early to read the program beforehand.

Our final show in NOTL was the matinee performance on Sunday, the 13th, of Shaw’s Too True To Be Good at the Court House Theatre.  I think I said that I’d never seen or read this play (and I didn’t read it before I went to NOTL—it’s not in my collected Shaw), so I was surprised to learn that it’s a pretty late play—1932—and what’s more, premièred in the States.  (Poland, apparently, staged the second production!  The reason was timing, apparently.  Shaw wrote the play for the Malvern Festival, which was launched in 1929 and dedicated to the plays of GBS.  The problem was that it occurred only once a year during the summer so the Theater Guild copped the first production, which was in Boston in February.)  Anyone who knows the play probably knows it’s tied up with, among other topics, T. E. Lawrence (AKA, “Lawrence of Arabia”).  (Lawrence had a relationship with GBS—who seems to have had relationships with almost everyone living at the time.  The association was so strong that TEL used T. E. Shaw as one of his aliases and even eventually changed his name legally to Shaw.  He used to visit GBS on his motorcycle, the vehicle on which he was eventually killed, three years after TTTBG premièred.)

The plot of Too True To Be Good is too wild to summarize cogently.  Its opening scene, for example, is set in a classically beautiful upper-middle-class bedroom where a classically beautiful upper-middle-class young woman (Nicole Underhay) lies bed-ridden.  The action starts when a distressed microbe (William Vickers) in human form begins bemoaning his fate.  In the next scene, The Patient teams up with The Nurse (Kelli Fox) and The Burglar (Blair Williams) to steal her own necklace and run away so she can hold herself for ransom.  That’s only the first two scenes: in many ways, TTTBG is an absurdist play, even though no one had heard of that form in the early 1930s.  Eventually, we land at an overseas military base commanded by Colonel Tallboys (Benedict Campbell), who prefers water-coloring to commanding, but actually run sub rosa by Private Napoleon Alexander Trotsky Meek (Andrew Bunker) under the nose of Sergeant Fielding (Graeme Somerville).  Other characters in this mix include The Nurse, formerly with the army and now posing as a countess (Fox); The Burglar, an ex-RAF hero turned preacher (Williams); and a church Elder (and The Burglar’s father) who’s an avowed atheist (Norman Browning).  Along the improbable way to its even more improbable conclusion, TTTBG pokes fun at doctors, preachers, the military, the aristocracy, and many others of GBS’s favorite targets.

Anyway, TTTBG is a delightfully perverse little play—up to a point.  As its title reverses a common cliché, the play reverses many common values and accepted behaviors.  The Lawrence character (Private Meek, played nicely by Bunker) is great fun—more or less running everything in his isolated army unit to the complete consternation of his colonel.  Once again, the festival cast pulled off the silliness, the Britishness (this play, unlike Arms, depicts inescapably British types Shaw is satirizing), and the individual characters with smoothness and adroitness.  The program essay cited Shaw’s preface as describing TTTBG as “funny in the beginning, serio-comic in the middle and ‘a torrent of sermons’ at the close.”  That ending concludes with a very long monologue by The Burglar which just goes on and on, delivering Shaw’s philosophical points in the most undramatic and untheatrical way conceivable, despite actor Williams’s valiant efforts to enliven it. 

The program also included an excerpt from Shaw’s note from the Malvern Festival program in which he wrote: “When people have laughed for an hour, they want to be serio-comically entertained for the next hour; and when that is over they are so tired of not being wholly serious that they can bear nothing but a torrent of sermons.”  Where’d he get such an idea?  I couldn’t disagree more, I’m afraid.  (This could very likely make someone conclude that Shaw isn’t funny!)  I’ve opined that Shaw is very hard to cut, but I’d have been very tempted to try in this case.  It really ruined the production; however important Shaw’s points are, I, at least, stopped hearing them after a minute or two.  What a come-down!  (And an unfortunate way to end our theater experience in Niagara-on-the-Lake.)  

In tribute to Shaw, director Jim Mezon (also an actor, he was Deputy Governor Danforth in The Crucible), and actor Campbell—whom we’d previously seen as The Crucible’s John Proctor—though I expected a total Colonel Blimp caricature, Colonel Tallboys was only a partial Blimp caricature.  He kept surprising me, as did all the characters.  This is the big plus of the show—not only the situation, but the characters themselves subvert your expectations.  GBS didn’t name many of them—The Patient (Underhay, who was Gilda in Design), The Nurse (Fox, earlier Elizabeth Proctor in Crucible), and the aforementioned Burglar, for instance—so they appear to be types or allegories; but they quickly go off their tracks.  (The fellow who gave the intro to Arms in that pre-show chat said that GBS had originally wanted to call those characters by labels like “The Soldier” and “The Daughter.”  That was when he still thought he was writing a serious anti-war comedy.)  The TTTBG production design, a Cubist landscape of blond wooden planks (except the opening scene, which was an ostensibly Realistic sick room “in one of the best suburban villas in one of the richest cities in England”—it was sort of like Kansas in black-and-white and Oz in color!) turned the whole experience into a kind of off-kilter dreamscape.  If only it hadn’t been for that interminable oration!

The Round House troupe had a farewell dinner at Terroir La Cachette, the restaurant at Strewn Winery, one of NOTL’s many wine-makers, Sunday evening, and we left town the next morning by bus for Buffalo and the return flight to Baltimore.  While we were away, the Brits uncovered the putative bomb plot against U.S-bound airliners (8/10—as opposed to 9/11), and we’d all been following the changing restrictions on flights in the U.S.  (Remember, none of us left anticipating additional security measures, so we were caught betwixt and between.)  We were fortunate in a small way that we drove across the border, so we weren’t on an international flight.  Nonetheless, we left NOTL about an hour earlier than originally planned to accommodate any additional screening measures in place in Buffalo.  As it turned out, there were no problems, and we got back to BWI right on time (though Mother and I found ourselves standing at the wrong baggage carousel for a few minutes because the airport had apparently labeled the wrong one for our flight and then switched, and everyone else seemed to have caught on without telling us!).  We called our Ramada as planned, waited for about a half hour for the van to arrive, picked up Mom’s car at the motel and got back to D.C. by about 6-6:30 p.m.—in time to catch up on some of the news we couldn’t get in Canada.  (The hotel had cable, and we could get CNN and PBS as well as the local network affiliates in Buffalo, but either we were out of the room at news time or the coverage was stuck on the terror plot as if it were the only news for days.  We were especially interested in finding out what had happened in the primaries that took place on 8 August.  We got a complimentary Toronto paper in the hotel, but that didn’t cover the U.S. races much, and the Buffalo stations did mention Sen. Joe Lieberman’s loss in Connecticut, but none of the others.  By the time I found a New York Times, it was days after the votes.) 

As much as I wanted to get home, I stayed in D.C. until Friday, 18 August, so I could take a reasonably convenient bus back.  We filled the time by seeing several art exhibits in Washington, and the night before I returned to New York, Mom and I went out for Maryland hard-shell blue crabs at a joint that’s been around since I was a kid.  Growing up in D.C. and Maryland, I have always loved this food.  Since I’ve lived away from the area, I haven’t had it often—the season not only has to be right (though the restaurant, open year round, told us that they now get crabs from as far away as Louisiana when they aren’t available locally), but the crabs have to be sufficiently large to be worth the effort to pull them apart.  (It’s a very labor-intensive meal and my mother was a master at getting every morsel out of one of those babies.  I’d have picked three crabs pretty clean while she was just finishing up her first!)  I’ve missed this treat for years now.  From time to time, I’ve tried restaurants that advertise “real Maryland crabs,” but I’ve always been extremely disappointed.  My conclusion is that no one who doesn’t live within shouting distance of the Chesapeake knows a thing about hard-shell blues, no matter what they say (or even where they come from).  I’ve found the same to be true of Maryland crab cakes—though that’s something even locals don’t always do well.  So this was a very special indulgence for me.  It may be the most wonderful messy meal anyone can imagine!  And, surprisingly, it wasn’t a case of the reality not measuring up to my memory—it was exactly the same.  Isn’t that rare?

[I had a little emotional hardship reediting this piece because my mother, with whom I tried to make one big trip every year, died this past May at the age of 92.  She and my father both loved going to the theater—one of their first dates, Dad told me, was to the original Broadway production of Oklahoma!.  They came up to New York City from Washington whenever I was in something (even when I told them not to come!) and they also saw all the plays I directed for middle and high schools.  (They even saw me perform in an amateur show in Berlin when I was in the army!)  Mom kept up subscriptions to several rep companies in the Washington area even after my father’s death, and if I was in town when she had a theater date, I’d often go with her.  Not a few times, I went down expressly to see a show at one of the Capital’s theaters that was of special interest—Oklahoma! and Red at Arena; Fool for Love at Round House; Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Memphis, and Five By Tenn at the Kennedy Center—and our preferred New Year’s Eve celebration was to see a show and then go home to open a bottle and watch the ball drop on TV.  The Shaw was not the first theater festival we attended together (and she and my dad took in a few on their own, including the Stratford Shakespeare Festival); we went to the Contemporary American Theater Festival in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, and the Shenandoah Shakespeare in Staunton, Virginia, together.  The most difficult part of reediting this article was revising all the statements about my mom from present tense to past.]

The 2006 Shaw Festival (Part 1)

[On 3 December, I published an article by frequent ROT contributor Kirk Woodward, “Eric Bentley On Bernard Shaw,” about the great Irish playwright as assessed by Eric Bentley, the prolific American theater writer and translator.  I thought that a fitting companion piece would be my report on the Shaw Festival in Ontario, Canada.  I wrote this report on 21-26 August 2006; it originally included mini-reports on each of the plays I attended, but I’ve already excerpted the discussion of Noel Coward’s Design for Living (29 March 2012) and Ruth and Augustus Goetz’s The Heiress (24 November 2012), so I decided to omit all but the two Shaw plays I saw at Niagara-on-the-Lake—both of which got a mention in Kirk’s article.  I have, however, left all the coverage of the festival surroundings and what we did to pass the time between the shows—and my general comments on the festival as a whole.]

In the summer of 2006, I spent a week with my mother in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada, for the Shaw Festival.  The Round House Theatre of Bethesda/Silver Spring, Maryland, to which my mother subscribed, sponsored the trip bi-annually (in alternate years, they went to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival), and they made all the arrangements from Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport to NOTL and back (we were on our own to get to BWI and then back on the return leg), except lunches and dinners for most of the week.  (There was one lunch, on the road from Buffalo airport to Niagara-on-the-Lake; one dinner; and one cocktail party on the Round House—it was really our money, of course—and breakfasts were included in the accommodations of the Pillar and Post Inn, our NOTL hotel.)  The Round House reserved six shows, but several afternoons and most mornings were free if anyone wanted to add performances; we selected two additional shows to make a total of eight performances out of the season’s offering of ten plays.  (Mother decided that she didn’t want to go to two shows every day—though I probably would have done so on my own—and she eliminated one she didn’t want to see.  She left the rest of the selection to me.)

The trip ran from Monday, 7 August, to Monday, 14 August, but the plane from BWI was at 9:20 a.m. and Baltimore is a 45-minute drive from D.C., so when Mother saw an ad for an airport Ramada that offered a low rate for the night, plus free parking while we were away and a ride to and from the airport, we decided to drive over Sunday evening to avoid getting up at oh-dark-thirty (to arrive an hour before take-off), parking in an airport lot, and taking a shuttle between the parking lot and the terminal, or getting a limo early in the morning and then one back—which would have cost as much as or more than the motel.  (It paid off, too, because, as we found out Monday morning when we gathered at the gate with the rest of the group, there had been an accident on the road between D.C. and BWI and traffic had been backed up for about an hour.)  Anyway, because of this and the schedule of the bus I used from New York, I had to ride down on Friday, 4 August, so I had Saturday in D.C. with my mom and we took in a couple of art shows that Mother had saved till I came down.

So, on to Canada and Shaw. 

The Round House trip, as I said, left from BWI and flew to Buffalo.  A bus met us at Buffalo Niagara International Airport and we rode about an hour to NOTL.  (Because the hotel wasn’t going to be ready for us until after noon or so, we made a prearranged lunch stop at a restaurant in Amherst, New York, outside of Buffalo.  It was attached to a motel, but the meal, a buffet, was surprisingly good.)  The drive went through Niagara Falls, New York, and we had a view of the falls as we passed through (we could see the Canadian falls as we passed by, too).  The drive through town, along the Niagara River to the Lewiston-Queenstown crossing—where we crossed the border (and the river) rather than over the Rainbow Bridge at Niagara because the wait is shorter and the customs procedures are usually less arduous—revealed how tacky the town had become recently, especially with the addition of a huge casino built by the Seneca Indians in 2002 (the attached hotel opened in January ’06).  I spent a day in Niagara when I was teaching at the State University of New York at Oneonta in 1989 and it was pretty honky-tonk then, but it had ballooned in the intervening 17 years. 

NOTL, on the other hand, was pretty nice—more Cape Coddy.  There are obviously ordinances that keep certain development outside of the town’s tourist and historic center.  (In fact, we never saw a gas station, grocery market, fast-food restaurant, or drug store anywhere near the center of town.  The locals obviously get their staples—there wasn’t a Staples, either—somewhere outside of town—some mall somewhere, I suppose.)  The main drag, Queen Street, was lined with boutiques, restaurants, and about four different ice cream parlors (a very popular commodity in NOTL, it seems—everybody walked around eating ice cream).  Two of the festival’s theaters were also here (the other was a little ways in the other direction).  There were also a dozen or more art galleries in and around town—but Canadian artists may be the least interesting I’ve ever encountered.  We noticed this in both Vancouver and Quebec as well.  (I’d be surprised if anyone can name one world-renowned Canadian artist.)  The commercial part of town is only along Queen, so the blocks on either side are residential and many of the houses are 19th-century.  Many of them, both old and new, have been converted into bed and breakfasts—most of which had no vacancies when we walked around that week, suggesting they do a good business, at least at this time of year.  The town center is obviously devoted to the tourist trade, but it wasn’t cheesy like a Jersey shore boardwalk.  The weather while we were there was glorious and the town was full of people from all over the world—we could tell from the languages and accents—shopping, strolling, sitting on the benches that line both sides of Queen Street, eating at the many restaurants.  (The food in NOTL—perhaps a Canadian tendency, or an Ontario one—while not unpalatable, tended to be bland and flavorless.  Our one tasty dinner was a pasta meal we had at a restaurant with a few Italian-oriented dishes on its menu.  Maybe there’s an ordinance against spices, too.)

Niagara-on-the-Lake is located on a point of land formed where the Niagara River meets Lake Ontario.  The town has water on two sides, and I gather that this is part of what contributes to its climate that makes the land good for growing wine grapes and peaches.  (The place is alive with flowers everywhere, too!)  Those are the two major industries of NOTL, and it must be profitable because there are some really big houses in and around the town.  (It’s also a vacation spot, aside from the Shaw Festival.  I also wonder if it isn’t a retirement town or second-home community for wealthy Ontarians, too.)  There are dozens of vineyards and orchards in the area—we ate at one of the winery restaurants for the Round House “farewell dinner” our last evening there.  We had some of the wine, of course, and it’s pleasant enough for the most part—good vin ordinaire.  And as it happened, the weekend we were there, on Saturday and Sunday, was the Peach Festival.  (We had some cold peach soup before the matinee on Saturday afternoon.  Very nice.) 

The town was settled in the 1780s by loyalists fleeing the American Revolution and became the first capital of Upper Canada (now Ontario) in 1792.  It was a haven and remained a British outpost into the 19th century, with a British Army division stationed at Fort George (completed in 1802).  NOTL was also the site of the Battle of Fort George during the War of 1812.  (After a fierce fight in May 1813, Americans occupied Niagara-on-the-Lake for seven months and then burned it when they left—which is why there are so few 18th-century structures in the town.)  Mother and I walked around the town in two stages—one afternoon we covered the town itself, then another we strolled along the lake shore—and there were plenty of houses all over that date from the whole span of the 19th century.  From the look of both the old and new properties, it’s clear that NOTL must mandate a strict level of up-keep of both the buildings and the grounds—not one property we saw, neither private homes nor city parks, was run-down, unkempt, neglected, or overgrown.  Part of this is certainly just because it’s Canada, which has a reputation for being well-behaved.  There was no litter anywhere in NOTL, and even when we jay-walked, the cars stopped to let us cross the streets.  (We noticed this in Vancouver also—though I don’t recall if it was common in Quebec, too.)  The town didn’t have a single stop light, either—just stop signs.  (The main intersection had the only traffic signal I noticed—a single flashing red beacon, the same as a stop sign.)  It’s nice for vacation, but living there must seem like living in Stepford!

The festival was started in 1962 by Brian Doherty, a local lawyer and theater enthusiast, as a “Salute to Shaw.”  Its first productions, performed by local amateurs, were in a disused courthouse built in the 1840s (now the black box Court House Theatre, one of the festival’s three performance venues).  It quickly attracted both critical and financial attention and became a companion to the Stratford Festival, 2½ hours west, which was launched (with more professional intentions) in 1953.  (There is, in fact, a third theater festival in Canada, the Charlottetown Festival on Prince Edward Island, devoted to “new Canadian musicals.”  I didn’t know there were Canadian musicals, much less new ones!  More on this—the Canadian musical, I mean; not the Charlottetown Festival—later.)  The Shaw is considered one of the two largest repertory companies in North America—the other being, obviously, the Stratford Festival.

The Shaw runs from April through October and November—some shows opening later and others closing earlier.  (I understood from the locals we chatted with that the weather in NOTL is awful in the late fall and winter—cold, rainy, windy, and gray.  Except for Christmas, when there’s another influx of tourists, it’s pretty bleak in the off-season.)  Like most traditional theaters, the festival is dark on Mondays (which was clearly why the Round House trip arrived and left on that day), but during the performance week there are at least two shows a day at all three theaters, and often—I’m not sure it’s not also every performance day—an 11:30 a.m. “lunchtime” performance.  That comes to 36-54 performances a week (I did the math); you can figure out how many shows a season that makes.  (There are also script readings, poetry and song presentations, discussions, chats, workshops, lectures, and demonstrations going on many days as well.  These folks keep busy.)  The festival is a true seasonal rep: no play is performed twice in a row, which means some theaters change productions three times a day.  Most actors are in two plays (a few are in only one; no one I could spot was in more than two), and there’s no apparent attempt to consider which theater houses which show when it comes to casting.  The theaters are strung out along Queen Street in NOTL: the little Court House and the Royal George are only a couple of blocks apart in “downtown”; the Festival Theatre is a few blocks east on Queen’s Parade, an extension of the main drag.  (Nothing in Niagara-on-the-Lake is all that far away from anything else.  On afternoons when we didn’t see a matinee, Mother and I walked around most of the town and its immediate environs.  We had terrific weather for it, too.) 

The company comprises some 60 actors (directors and designers, as well as other artists such as composers, are hired individually for each show), but all don’t appear every season; about 30 or so work each year, and they are on contract for the season.  Many actors live in NOTL now and consider the Shaw their permanent artistic base, doing other work like films and TV (all those U.S. TV programs that are taped in Toronto and Vancouver are in many of the company’s credits) as well as other stage work from time to time, but returning to the Shaw regularly.  Some of the actors in 2006 were in their fourth or fifth season in NOTL, but others were into double digits.  (The other artists also come back year after year, but they aren’t part of the permanent company.)  Loyalty from both sides—the artistic director at the time, Jackie Maxwell (currently in her 14th season), still worked with artists who started at the Shaw before her arrival—is clearly an attribute of this community.  The actors who live in NOTL have bought homes and are raising families there.

The Shaw Festival mandate, as they call it, is to showcase the plays of GBS and his contemporaries.  (I don’t know if the idea when the festival was originally conceived was to restrict itself to Shaw’s plays only, but the inclusion of plays “written in Shaw’s lifetime” has been part of the concept for decades, in any case.)  Considering that GBS lived almost a century (1856-1950; the festival celebrated his sesquicentennial earlier in 2006), the definition of “contemporary” leaves a lot of leeway—and covers a lot of territory stylistically!  In 2000, the festival expanded its mandate to include plays written about the period of GBS’s lifetime, so now they do modern plays set in that almost-century.  The ’06 season included two Shaws (Arms and The Man and Too True To Be Good)—which I gather is the practice—plus an Ibsen (Rosmersholm) and a pair of Chekhov one-acts (The Bear and The Proposal, under the umbrella title Love Among the Russians).  Coming, I suppose, in the category of plays by Shaw contemporaries (though at the end of his century) are Design for Living (1932) by Noël Coward (1899-1973) and The Crucible (1953) by Arthur Miller (1915-2005).  (I’m guessing that Crucible was “in” because of Miller’s life dates since it isn’t “about” Shaw’s lifetime: it’s set in 1692 and was written three years after Shaw died; even McCarthyism, its subtext, really started after GBS’s death.  It’s kind of a stretch, I guess—a policy evidently known as “Jackie’s elastic mandate.”)  Two adaptations from novels could go either way—the source material is contemporary to GBS and the setting is, consequently, of that period, too, though the adaptations are much later.  Ruth and Augustus Goetz’s The Heiress was adapted from Henry James’s 1881 Washington Square in 1947 (which would barely qualify as “Shaw’s lifetime”), and the story is set in 1850.  The première of the festival-commissioned stage adaptation of H. G. Wells’s 1897 The Invisible Man qualifies because the 2006 play is set within Shaw’s life.  Another new play, Lillian Groag’s 1997 The Magic Fire, is set in the immediate post-World War II years in Argentina, barely fitting into GBS’s life span.  The final entry of the 2006 bill, Cole Porter’s High Society, is the 1997 stage adaptation of the 1956 film musicalization of Philip Barry’s 1939 Philadelphia Story.  Once more, the source material fits into the Shaw life span, but the qualification is again the setting: 1930’s Long Island (the musical having been transferred from Philadelphia’s Main Line for reasons comprehensible only in Hollywood).

The Round House booked High Society, The Crucible, The Heiress, Arms and The Man, The Invisible Man, and Too True To Be Good, leaving the other four available as options.  Mother, as I said, didn’t want to go twice every day (two of the scheduled shows were already matinees because we had evening activities those nights), and she also decided that she’d seen the Chekhov one-acts enough (including, I daresay, one that I had directed with seventh- and eighth-graders), so we decided to select two additional shows.  I wanted to see the Ibsen and Design for Living, so I left off Groag’s Magic Fire, about which I didn’t know anything and which just didn’t sound interesting to me.  The festival described the play as “set against a backdrop of the turbulent post World War II years of Buenos Aires.”  A memory play (the narrator is the grown-up 7-year-old daughter of one of the families), it is the “story of two immigrant families, the Bergs and Guarneris [who] had left their European homelands to find a better life, leaving behind Hitler, Mussolini, poverty, and persecution.  But now, with the rise to power of General Juan Perón, they face the potential of Argentina’s descent into fascist terror, in the dying days of Eva Perón, the infamous Evita.” 

So I booked the Coward and the Ibsen, and I have no regrets over my decision.  I did a private reading (a bunch of actors sitting around in someone’s living room) of Design many years ago, and I’ve seen the considerably bowdlerized 1933 flick (Cary Grant, Frederic March, Miriam Hopkins), but I’d never seen the play—and I figured a Coward would be fun, assuming the cast can pull off his comedy-of-manners style—which they did, wonderfully.  As for the Ibsen—well, I’d always rather see an Ibsen than some unknown, less-than-intriguing quantity, snobbish as that may seem.  Some years ago, one of the theaters off Union Square did a multi-year series of all of Ibsen’s plays in chronological order in good-quality showcase-level productions, and I tried to catch any that I’d never seen before.  But I saw Rosmersholm over five years ago, so I figured this would be a good chance to see another staging with better production values—and it was. 

Let me make a few general remarks—some, perhaps, only semi-justified generalizations based on minimal evidence.  (I’ll brave it—so sue me.)  First, the quality of the productions was excellent.  The acting and directing was top-notch, and the festival appears to promote ensemble playing over star-turns—and it accomplished this remarkably.  Maxwell, who addressed us at our cocktail party (which a trio of company members also attended), said that she wouldn’t do a play like Lear (wrong festival, of course, but what the hey . . .) if she didn’t have a Lear available, but I didn’t have the impression from this season that they focus on star roles.  Of course, they weren’t doing Candida or Major Barbara, and maybe that would’ve left a different impression.  She said the same thing, sort of, about directors: if a director she wanted to match with a play wasn’t available, she’d postpone that show until the director was free.  It’s possible, of course, that actors who want to be stars don’t make the Shaw a home the way most of the company seems to.  It wouldn’t be their kind of work environment, I wouldn’t imagine.  (But I also got the impression, both from ordinary life observation and from some recent reading about Canadian theater, that this is part of the Canadian cultural character.)

It also seems characteristic, at least of the Shaw, that directors don’t put themselves and their artistic personalities forward and stamp the productions.  Several of the productions we saw were “adaptations” (not wholesale reworkings, but changes of setting and period)—Rosmersholm was moved to “somewhere in Europe between the wars” (it looked about 1930 to me); Arms and The Man was reset in the “turn of the century”; and the Chekhovs were designated “adaptations” in the program, though I didn’t see them so I don’t know what changes were made (the pictures all looked 19th-century to me).  But those were essentially design decisions (and some language in Rosmersholm); in all other respects, the directing was straightforward, though I don’t know if that’s a provision of the Shaw, or if it’s a general characteristic of Canadian directors.  I don’t say this is a fault—the work was solid all around—but there was nary a hint of idiosyncratic directorial interpretation on any festival stage as far as I could see.

As good as the acting and directing were—and there were no names in either category that really stood out, though a few were generally familiar (Bernard Behrens, for instance, who did a wonderfully fractious Giles Corey in The Crucible)—the design and tech was truly superb.  One of my conceivably unwarranted generalizations was that Canadian theater’s major accomplishment is not acting or directing, which is good but not astonishing (secondary generalization: potentially star Canadian actors end up in England or the U.S.), or even writing (name two internationally recognized Canadian playwrights—John Herbert, author of 1967’s Fortune and Men’s Eyes, is one; who’s another?), but in production work.  (Designer Tanya Moiseiwitsch, who helped Tyrone Guthrie design the thrust theater for the Stratford Festival, was British, but worked extensively in Canada just at the time that Canadian theater was starting to become “not British.”)  Even the work in the tiny Court House (which is set up as a thrust, so there’s only one wall—and it’s the architectural back wall of the room) had some interesting design aspects in the shows.  Four other shows each had some startling, clever, or surprising design elements.  I don’t want to give the impression that the sets overwhelmed the acting—that wasn’t so—but the design and tech was outstanding in ways the acting and directing wasn’t.  (I remember going to a show at a nearby school when I was in college—a production of Cocteau’s The Wedding Party at the Eiffel Tower—and a friend and I left afterwards saying to each other, “What a wonderful set.  Too bad the actors kept getting in front of it.”  That wasn’t the case in Niagara-on-the-Lake.)

One characteristic of the acting, which I think must be a unique attribute of Canadian actors, was that they can shift back and forth pretty successfully and easily—or, at least, convincingly (for the most part)—between American characters and Brits.  They did well with both the Barry-Porter-Kopit upper-class Long Islanders of High Society, the Massachusetts settlers of Salem in Crucible, and the 19th-century New Yorkers of The Heiress.  Then they also nailed Coward’s toffs in Design as well as the denizens of small-town England in The Invisible Man.  And remember, these were often the same actors crossing over from one show to another.  (They also obviously handled the shifts from Cowardy and Shavian comedy to the heavy drama of Crucible and Rosmersholm, not to mention the melodrama of Heiress.  This isn’t something American can’t do, of course, but we don’t tend to do it very much in our theater since this kind of rep isn’t common here—outside of college theaters, I guess.  It’s still worth pointing out, though.)

You may notice that I don’t make the same compliment regarding going from straight plays to musical comedy.  As I suggested earlier, “Canadian” and “musical” is not a pairing I’d have come up with.  In another potentially unwarranted generalization, I’ll suggest that musical theater isn’t a Canadian metier.  As far as performances are concerned, High Society, which was the first of our shows on Tuesday evening, was the most lackluster show of the trip.  Now, I have to acknowledge that part of the problem with High Society was certainly the material, so maybe the Canuck actors could’ve done better with better material—say, My Fair Lady (since we’re talking Shaw).  The movical was presented at the 850-seat Festival Theatre, opened in 1973.

[This ends Part 1 of “The 2006 Shaw Festival”; please come back to ROT on 11 December when I’ll post Part 2, which begins with the production of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible on Wednesday afternoon, 9 August, and finishes up the week of our visit to Niagara-on-the-Lake.  The performance reports for Arms and The  Man and Too True To Be Good also appear in Part 2, along with some pithy observations.  I hope ROTters will return.

[The question regarding Canadian playwrights is kind of a cheat, by the way.  John Herbert (1926-2001) isn’t so well known as his play, Fortune and Men’s Eyes, which became an international success in 1967.  It’s probably a mark of something about Canadian culture that the play is not only unrecognized by most people as a Canadian creation, but that its world première was in New York City because no theater in Canada would produce it until 1969.]

'The Heiress' (1976 & 2006)

[On 1 November, a new revival of The Heiress opened at Broadway’s Walter Kerr Theatre.  A popular script, there have been numerous revivals both on Broadway and elsewhere around the U.S. and Canada.  I’ve seen two of them, one not long after I arrived in New York City, and I thought it might be fun to look back at them.  My performance postings on ROT aren’t usually reviews—I expressly call then “reports” to make this point—but the first piece here, from May 1976, is an unpublished review of a short-lived Broadway production.  The second, from 2006, is a report from the same Shaw Festival at which I saw the revivals of Noel Coward’s Design for Living (reported on ROT, 29 March) and the two Shaw plays Arms and the Man and Too True To Be Good (“Two Shaw Plays (Shaw Festival 2006),” 25 September).  (Those two posts, excerpts from a longer report on the festival visit, contain some observations about the Shaw Festival that I haven’t republished here.)]

7 MAY 1976

In this age of theatrical revivals, the supply was bound to run thin sooner or later.  The producers must be getting close to the bottom of the barrel with Ruth and Augustus Goetz’s The Heiress (based on Henry James’s novel Washington Square and currently playing at the Broadhurst Theatre).  The play is predictable, plodding, and cliché-ridden in its handling of the mid-nineteenth-century story of a plain, awkward girl, Catherine Sloper (Jane Alexander), wooed and almost won by fortune-hunter Morris Townsend (David Selby) until father, Dr. Austin Sloper (Richard Kiley), threatens to disinherit her and the ardent suitor skips to California.

What saves the evening—and elevates it beyond expectations—are the performances of Alexander and Kiley.  Kiley’s Dr. Sloper is a sardonic, resentful man, bitter toward daughter Catherine who is a reminder that his beloved wife died bearing her. He has no respect for his daughter and has wasted no love on her—only tolerance.  Kiley has a way of walking onto the set—or just sitting down in a chair—that makes us realize he is master of both the Sloper household and the Broadhurst stage.

Until her father’s death, Alexander’s Catherine is dutiful, submissive and obedient (albeit ineffectual). Her ungainly gait, awkward stance, and graceless manner are portrayed with sensitive care and completeness.  When Townsend jilts her, she realizes that not only does he not love her, but neither does her father.  At her father’s death, she inherits not only his money, but his control and mastery.  When Townsend returns, she now has the strength, wisdom, and fortitude to spurn him.  She also has the cruelty to do it big and bold.  The transformation is handled with smoothness and credibility by Alexander.

Other performances support father and daughter nicely.  Of particular note is Jan Miner’s Aunt Lavinia Penniman (recognizable as “Madge the Manicurist” of TV commercials).  Only Selby’s suitor is unconvincing.  His movement and speech belie his nineteenth-century costumes, and his casualness is too often that of a late-twentieth-century stud, not a mid-nineteenth-century fortune-hunter.

George Keathley’s direction is another problem.  As the play is slow, the directing should not compound the problem by being deliberate and meticulously-paced.  The work is nice, comfortable and pleasant—but slow.  Why, for instance, does Keathley insist on having the curtain dropped between each scene?  No set changes are necessary and this adds to the slowness.

The set (by Oliver Smith) is simple and elegant, but the lighting (designed by David F. Segal) has one unfortunate major flaw.  When Aunt Penniman and Catherine look out the stage-right window for Townsend’s carriage, the lights shine in like anachronistic automobile headlights. 

All this comes back to the original question: why do this show?  It has no apparent connection to today’s world.  Catherine is no liberated woman—even in her ultimate freedom she is a victim.  There seems no reason to bring the show back.  And the audiences are staying away to prove it.  If sterling performances can make you forget a mediocre script—then by all means catch Alexander and Kiley.  But do so before too long—The Heiress is not destined for a long run.  [In fact, this production of The Heiress, which opened on 20 April 1976, closed on 9 May, two days after I wrote this review—after 23 regular performances and 5 previews.  ~Rick]

24 AUGUST 2006

On Thursday evening, 24 August 2006, the Round House Theatre group from Bethesda, Maryland, saw the Shaw Festival’s revival of Ruth and Augustus Goetz's The Heiress at the Royal George Theatre in downtown Niagara-on-the-Lake.  (We sat down center—and a tall man sat in front of my mother, just as she predicted would happen!)  I didn't see the 1995 Lincoln Center revival with Cherry Jones, but in April 1976 I did see the Broadway transfer from the Kennedy Center.  (I even wrote a review of it for my criticism class at Rutgers; I still have it stashed in some file.  [This, obviously, is the review published above.  ~Rick])  I remember the performances pretty well—especially Richard Kiley's Dr. Sloper and Jan ("Madge the Manicurist") Miner's Aunt Penniman.  (I had to remind myself that Jane Alexander played Catherine, however.  I'll have to look up my old review to see if there's a reason I forgot that.)

Okay, enough reminiscing!  (Never, never! I hear you cry.  What good is life if you can't reminisce?)  Back to the Shaw.  And back to the show, too.  This production of The Heiress, directed by Joseph Ziegler and designed (sets and costumes) by Christina Poddubiuk, is generally excellent.  It's a melodrama, of course, and the company plays the emotions appropriately.  Catherine Sloper (Tara Rosling, who, when not made up to look plain, resembles Lynn Redgrave) does a fine job of being the painfully shy and awkward young woman who learns from her father how to be hard and untrusting.  Dr. Sloper (Michael Ball), who is less of a cold martinet than Kiley was 30 years ago, is not only convincing as the father who believes he's protecting his inadequately-equipped child from the cruelties of the world, he comes very close to being sympathetic—until he actually tells his daughter outright that he doesn't respect her.  (Kiley was so frosty and unfeeling in the role, it's a wonder his Catherine didn't become Ilse Koch.)  What this seems to do to the play is make it more credible, despite its contrivances.  Even Aunt Penniman (Donna Belleville) is less a ditz than Miner was—although she still can't help falling for Morris's lies and charm.  (Belleville does suggest in her manner that she knows Townsend's a cad and a fortune-hunter but fears that, unless Catherine accepts him anyway, she will never find any kind of love.  She may have caught her brother's disease in this regard.)  In any case, once again the production is a superb example of ensemble playing, with every character taking the requisite focus when he is the center of dramatic attention and ceding it when she is not.  If ever "there are no small parts" were true, it is true here.

The one hole in the production is Mike Shara as Morris Townsend, Catherine's suitor.  He has two problems that render his performance out of synch with the rest, and which I see as actual acting weaknesses.  (He is also Sergius in Arms and the Man, and the traits I spotted here were again in evidence—though less detrimentally due to the character and play—so I believe my evaluation is correct.  It's odd, but Sergius, also a cad, is the farcical version of Morris Townsend, the character Shara plays in Heiress.  One works acceptably, the other doesn't.)  Shara's first problem is that he, alone among the Shaw company, cannot or does not put his (very pronounced) Canadian accent aside for the role.  It's a pet peeve of mine that some Canadians who play Americans—and the Brits seem to use them a lot—don't make a point of talking like Americans.  If they can't do it, they shouldn't take the role.  I don't know if they can't hear the difference and think they're speaking like us southerners or if they just figure the accents are so close to one another, no one will notice and they can just get away with it.  Well, as GBS would say: pshaw!  Shara's second problem is his voice.  I'm not sure I can describe this adequately, but he has a very strange voice—it almost sounds phony (the way Carol Wayne, the woman who used to appear on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show and claimed she couldn't talk above a baby-doll whisper, seemed fake).  He has kind of a high tenor—I guess that's a lyric tenor—but it doesn't sound quite natural.  It's a little like he's doing Dudley Do-Right (from the cartoon—I don't know what Brendan Fraser in the movie sounded like) for real!  The best way I can characterize Shara's voice is to say that it sounds to me like a musical actor delivering lines between songs.  (He has no musicals in his credits—and he's been at the Shaw for 13 seasons.)  I don't know if that communicates.

Since I've been mentioning the sets, I should note that this one is fine without being extraordinary.  (They don't all have to be, after all.  [One of my general remarks in the full report was that the set designing was exceptional at the festival.  ~Rick])  It's a perfectly standard Realistic box and makes a perfect environment for the story without calling attention to itself in any way.  The costumes, though—especially the women's—are admirable.  They aren't showy—they shouldn't be in this play (except for Catherine's "cherry red" dress in act one)—but they just seem correct for each instance.