'The Lady from Dubuque'

On Friday evening, 9 March, Diana and I returned to the new Pershing Square Signature Center on Theatre Row to see the revival of Edward Albee’s Lady from Dubuque at the End Stage Theatre, the Signature Theatre Company’s largest and most formal performance space in its new complex. Albee’s 1977 play replaced the previously announced world première of his Laying an Egg which will now be produced in a future season. (The theater hasn’t offered a specific explanation of the indefinite postponement, but Michael Riedel in the New York Post reports that the playwright was having difficulty with the play’s third act, which is stylistically at variance with the first two. According to Patrick Healy in the New York Times, Albee had requested the postponement of Laying an Egg because he was taking longer to finish the play than he’d planned. Explaining, “I was overcomplicating things,” Albee says he’s had a “breakthrough” and would finish the new script this summer.) Albee, who has previously been the playwright-in-residence at STC in 1993-94 and has had plays presented there in other seasons as well, is the troupe’s first Legacy dramatist since establishing its permanent home this season at the Frank Gehry-designed Signature Center. The Legacy Program, which began as an occasional event at STC for its 10th anniversary season (when the company presented Albee’s Occupant), is a chance for previously produced playwrights at STC to revisit a play or to present a new one.

Lady was last seen in New York City at the Morosco Theatre on Broadway in 1980; it premièred on 31 January and ran a mere 12 performances. Clive Barnes in the New York Post had called Lady “a comedy of manners about death,” and John Simon, the famously acerbic reviewer for New York magazine, wrote: “The Lady from Dubuque is the worst play about dying since The Shadow Box. It is the worst play about anything, ever.” Simon added, “The Lady from Dubuque is a lot of desperate pretensions and last-ditch attitudinizing about nothing . . . .” In the New York Times, Walter Kerr pointed out that “‘The Lady From Dubuque’ is a play in two acts and three questions, none of which . . . is ever answered” and complained that “Mr. Albee is still working in an ornately convoluted ‘literary’ style that has no conversational feel to it . . . .” In the end, Kerr advised the playwright that if he “wishes to continue indulging himself in the sort of philosophical speculation he’s lately become addicted to (I find this speculation thinnish and familiar), he must first put some muscle, some tangible flesh and blood, onstage to serve as base.” The review concluded that “the play is far too much like its expiring heroine. ‘My arms go around bone,’ her husband says, ‘She diminishes.’” In contrast, Gerald Clarke, saying the play was “a major work,” characterized it in Time magazine as Albee’s “best since Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” After a three-week run at the Hartford Stage Company in Connecticut that June and July and some productions abroad, the play faded from the stages of the United States. (Indeed, new Albee plays were absent from New York stages for about a decade after the failures of Lady and two other ’80s flops—until the Signature’s Albee season brought him back.) Then the play was revived in 2007 by Seattle Rep (staged by the company’s artistic director, David Esbjornson, who directs the STC revival), the same year the play saw its London première. It’s still a relative rarity among Albee’s works.

Considered one of Albee’s bleakest plays, Lady’s negative reception on Broadway 32 years ago was partly due to its subject: death. At the time of the failure, however, Albee blamed reviewers, especially the TV reviewers, whom he called “dimwits.” “The play is fine,” the playwright insisted. In a comment quoted in People just after the play closed on Broadway, the playwright insisted, "Broadway audiences will rarely take a chance unless they hear it is worth buying. But commercial merit doesn't have to do with a play's merit." In Edward Albee: A Singular Journey, his 1999 biography of the dramatist, Mel Gussow wrote that Albee was drinking so much at the time he wrote Lady that he often couldn’t fix script problems even when he recognized them. “I remember not being sober enough to do the work,” Gussow reported that Albee admitted.

The STC revival is Albee’s opportunity to reintroduce this work to audiences, and he says he hopes it, and perhaps his other Broadway failures from what Gussow calls “Albee’s down period, when nothing seemed to go right,” Lolita (1981) and The Man with Three Arms (1983), will gain a reappraisal. “I don’t necessarily want ‘The Lady From Dubuque’ and those other plays to be liked, but I do think they are worthy of respect,” the three-time Pulitzer Prize-winner says. Like Tennessee Williams after his great early plays, Albee felt that following the success of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, he “was supposed to write, ‘Son of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ and keep on doing that. I didn’t, and that annoyed” the critics. Albee has revised the play since it flopped in 1980, and the London revival (which starred Maggie Smith) was more successful, running for three months at the Theatre Royal Haymarket.

The Lady from Dubuque starts while Jo (Laila Robins) and Sam (Michael Hayden) are having a late-night party, entertaining their guests with a game of Twenty Questions. As the evening progresses, the partiers drink more and become less congenial and it becomes clear that something more than meets the eye is going on. “Who am I?” demands Sam, inviting questions from his and Jo’s neighbor Edgar (Thomas Jay Ryan) and his wife, Lucinda (Catherine Curtin), and their friend Fred (C. J. Wilson) and his latest girlfriend, Carol (Tricia Paoluccio), as we learn what everyone else already knows: Jo’s dying and often in terrible pain. This doesn’t prevent the whole bunch, including—especially—Jo, from engaging in Virginia Woolf-type savagery, rubbing salt in old wounds and revealing unpleasant truths about one another. The games delay, though don’t prevent, the acid from spurting out; it’s a good thing, I suppose, that the game is Twenty Questions and not Truth or Dare. When Jo cries out in pain, there’s barely a lull in the proceedings—even Jo rejoins the party.

The house, a modernist, nearly characterless stage set designed in beiges and taupes by John Arnone, is not so much a boxing ring as an operating theater-cum-torture chamber. From time to time, the characters deliver asides, mostly short phrases but occasionally longer speeches, to the audience, but these aren’t self-conscious or furtive, and the other characters don’t pretend they aren’t aware of the piercing of the fourth wall; sometimes they watch us as if to see how we’ll respond, it seemed. The party breaks up and Sam carries Jo upstairs to bed and just as they disappear, an unexpected guest and her mysterious companion (Jane Alexander and Peter Francis James) arrive in the empty living room right as the first act ends.

When the second act commences and Sam descends the stairs to find the elegantly dressed woman posed in an easy chair in his living room, the question “Who are you?” takes on an altogether different urgency. He keeps asking, but she won’t answer, except in riddles. (Her name’s Elizabeth—she passes herself off as Jo’s mother, the lady from Dubuque, Iowa, though Jo’s always said her mother, a tiny woman with pink hair whom no one’s ever met, lives in New Jersey—but the woman’s never called by name except perhaps once, by her companion, Oscar.) What had been a largely realistic first act, brutal but life-like (except for the direct address, which I don’t feel really enhances the play except as an unnecessary signal that something’s off center here), now starts to veer off into Pinterland. When Oscar enters the room, Sam becomes almost apoplectic. A handsome black man of about the same age as Elizabeth, Oscar is equally elegant (the spot-on costumes are by Elizabeth Hope Clancy) and restrained, but nonetheless menacing and possesses combat skills that are downright scary. (Later, he puts Sam out with a Vulcan death grip—although that’s not how he explains it.) Soon enough, Edgar and Lucinda return, ostensibly to smooth over the acrimony of the previous evening’s end, and then Fred and Carol appear—no one seems to believe much in door locks and keys in this suburb. Despite Sam’s insistence, his erstwhile friends all believe that Elizabeth’s Jo’s mother and abuse Sam for his refusal to accept her. Oscar finally subdues Sam (with that death grip) and Fred takes the opportunity to step in and bind him, unconscious and on the floor, with his belt. Jo eventually comes down and even she, in her depleted state, seems to accept Elizabeth, who cradles the dying woman on the center couch.

On a wall panel outside the End Stage, where STC posts background information and sidelights relating to the production, among the quotations from the playwright was one in which Albee averred that one reason his post-Virginia Woolf plays were rejected by New York reviewers and audiences was that he’d begun to write plays, like Tiny Alice, that were confusing in ways in which theatergoers weren’t ready to be confused. Perhaps Albee’s partly right there: in 1980, maybe audiences and reviewers just weren’t ready for the kind of Pinteresque dramaturgy of Lady, packed with mysteries, unvoiced threats, and unexplained and inexplicable undertones. The big hit on Broadway was The Elephant Man and other significant new plays that season included Children of a Lesser God, Talley’s Folley, Nuts, Bent, and Loose Ends, all largely straightforward Realism with unambiguous themes. Strider was probably the closest commercial producers came to pushing the envelope on the Great White Way, and maybe Devour the Snow. (Musicals included Evita, Barnum, A Day in Hollywood/ A Night in the Ukraine, and Sugar Babies.) Nothing remotely approaching The Lady from Dubuque in style or theme challenged audiences or the press. Even the import from London, Pinter’s own Betrayal, wasn’t a stretch for conventional-theater lovers aside from the minor dramaturgical challenge that the story was told backwards. (Tennessee Williams also had a flop that season: Clothes for a Summer Hotel ran only 15 regular performances.)

Maybe Alan Schneider misdirected the Broadway staging (though neither the reviews nor later analysis suggests that). Or maybe Albee was right in this instance. In any case, Lady’s not a dismissible failure. Theater critic and editor Otis L. Guernsey, Jr., who included the play in the 1979-80 edition of Best Plays, posits that Lady’s Broadway failure “was a reflection on the system, not on this distinguished and durable play.” It doesn’t rank with Albee’s best work, but it’s intriguing, and it more than bears a reexamination and revival, especially in Esbjornson’s crackerjack production. Lady’s unquestionably a challenging play, artistically, psychologically (that is to say, thematically it’s hard to take), and intellectually. I suspect that everyone who sees it will come away with a different idea about what Albee’s saying, and everyone may even be right. The playwright didn’t give but the vaguest clues, and Diana and I spent more than an hour over coffee after the play talking about what we thought it’s about and why Albee constructed it the way he did. (We didn’t come to any agreement, and Diana found the play more lacking than I did in the end—though we both admired the stage work regardless.) Walter Kerr’s complaint that Albee raises questions he doesn’t answer is both true and immaterial; Kerr preferred straightforward well-made plays, but in reality, unanswered questions can be the most dramatic. They make the spectators draw their own conclusions.

Lady strikes me as a very personal play; even though Albee was supposedly inspired by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s psychiatry text, On Death and Dying, it seems the kind of play someone only writes because of something that happened to him—he went through this kind of loss or he saw someone close do so—and he had to write about it to work through it. Of course, I have no idea if something had happened in Albee’s life, but it doesn’t seem like the kind of thing a writer comes up with because he read or saw something and said, Gee, there’s a play in that (the way John Logan said he was inspired to write Red after learning about Mark Rothko and the Seagram commission; see my report for ROT on 4 March).

(I suppose it’s a logical assumption that the title character’s name, Elizabeth, comes from the author of On Death, the Swiss-American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. The play’s title, however, is a wry joke of Albee’s. In the script, it’s explained by Oscar: New Yorker founder, Harold Ross, when asked to identify who’d typically read his magazine, is supposed to have answered, “One thing I know, the magazine is not going to be written for the little old lady from Dubuque.” According to writer Don Shewey, Albee has quipped, referring to the worldly and sophisticated Elizabeth: “If The New Yorker is written for anyone, it’s written for her.”)

Lady happens to Sam; Sam’s the character who experiences this death and has the emotional response to it. Though Elizabeth comes for Jo, it’s Sam on whom she leaves a mark. It’s Sam’s panic and pain Albee’s examining. In Albee’s view, Death isn’t a kind or relieving presence, especially for the survivors. She doesn’t come in and immediately carry Jo off peacefully and sweetly, lifting her pain—she’s a torturer. Sam’s completely lost and helpless, but Death brings him no comfort or relief. All the people he should have counted on for support turn against him—or were never really with him to start with, but make it clearer when Death appears. (There’s more than a little of Everyman in Lady: Sam’s a kind of late-20th-century Everyman.) Michael Hayden goes from a kind of superior coldness when he insists on taking his turn for Twenty Questions at the beginning of the play, through increasing uselessness and cluelessness, to abject ineffectiveness and hollowness at the end. Diana wondered why Albee presented the experience of death this way, but, as I said, I think it’s one form of the experience that Albee witnessed or had and he wanted to depict it. In any case, Hayden (whom I first saw in Washington almost 14 years ago as Chance Wayne opposite Elizabeth Ashley in Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth) handles the descent, which is far from smooth or even, with extraordinary credibility and fullness. In fact Esbjornson has cast his show excellently with actors who embody the characters perfectly. Back Stage reports that “the fearless cast tears into the play” and this is unquestionably one of the best ensembles I’ve seen recently (a phenomenon that seems to be a happy habit at Signature, no matter who directs). Wilson, Paoluccio, Ryan, and Curtin present pitch-perfect images of the not-so-stalwart, narcissistic companions—can I really call them friends?—as they reveal the animosities and resentments that Fred, Carol, Edgar, and Lucinda harbor for Sam. Robins, one of our moist accomplished and commanding actresses (why isn’t this woman famous?) is the strongest and most vicious dying person ever, but she can go directly to unbearable agony in a blink. It’s hard to distinguish one actor above the others, but I have to mention how wonderfully Paoluccio slides from ditzy “dumb brunette” (Carol’s actually a natural blond, she explains, but she looks cheap “natural”) to street-wise sharpie who’s the only one to see what’s happening. I’ve never seen her on stage before, but Paoluccio’s someone to watch.

Elizabeth and Oscar are, of course, outliers in the Lady ensemble. They’re not supposed to be part of the gang, and Alexander and James stand alone in their tasteful gray outfits and well-coiffed hair—the epitome of elegance, sophistication, and reserve (Ben Brantley accords Elizabeth “patrician cool and surgical wit”). In 1980, I suspect, a mixed-race couple like this (played on Broadway by Irene Worth and Earle Hyman) might still have been a rarity enough to make an impression, but here, though Fred, who’s a bit of a bigot as well as a bully, points out that Oscar’s black, it’s only remarkable because Albee spotlights it. In any case, the actors make the characters so forcefully apart, so strongly separate by their demeanor and speech that what might have been lost to the passage of an era is not felt much on stage I don’t think. If these actors could float an inch off the ground, that’s how Elizabeth and Oscar would move, I’m sure. They don’t ruffle (though Oscar can lash out—all the more frighteningly for his stillness).

As I understand it, Albee did a little revising of Lady since 1980, though I gather it was mostly updating a few references. The STC production is set “Now,” but the script still harks back to the late ’70s. Oscar says he’s a vet of World War II, which in 1977 or even 1980 would have made him in his late 50’s or early 60’s but today would make him over 90. Elizabeth speaks of the Soviet Union as if it were still a contemporary reference point, as it would have been at the height of the Cold War in 1980 with Leonid Brezhnev still in charge, though some lines about Richard Nixon, added for the London production, were deleted here. (Sam also uses a cell phone.) Elizabeth also remarks that Japanese isn’t “a required language yet,” a comment that would have resonated 30 years ago when Japan was at the height of its economic mastery. (Today the reference might be Chinese or Hindi.) Arnone’s set is essentially timeless, fitting anywhere from 1955 to today, but the decor has a decidedly ’80s feel, with its abstract paintings and faux-African sculptures, boxy furniture, and even a cowhide rug. (Oscar also remarks on a console TV in the library—does anyone even still make those in this age of flat screens?) But since the date of the play or the production is really irrelevant, these are hardly consequential faults.

I could easily spend paragraphs trying to articulate what The Lady from Dubuque means—or means to me—but not only isn’t that what an ROT play report’s supposed to be, but it would ultimately be inconclusive and mostly meaningless to someone else. (There are both on-line and printed analyses of the play all over, of course, and many also speculate on the apparent reasons for its Broadway failure.) Even my suggestion that the play contends with something Albee actually experienced is irrelevant now, so all I’ll do here is reiterate what I said earlier: Lady from Dubuque is a worthy play, full of interesting and arresting stage images and thoughts, however difficult they are to contemplate. My only serious criticism is that both act one and act two have some tedious passages that make their points and then remake them, and if Albee had edited them a little, the two-hour Lady might be a neat 90-minute one-act. (Although, that would eliminate the strategically managed act break which is, itself, a dramatic moment.) It is, in any case, a terrific vehicle for theater artists, especially actors. The characters are just a notch off true Realism, making them challenging and demanding; I can only guess at the kind of work, both in and out of rehearsal, this cast must have had to do. For audiences, Lady’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea, but I think this revival shows that it’s time now for the play to be added to the repertoires of American theaters.

Notices were mixed, though most reviewers were largely positive, even enthusiastic about the production—especially the acting. Brantley calls the revival “scintillating” in the New York Times and concludes that it’s “exquisitely mounted,” even revealing to him that, as I noted earlier, the play’s about Sam (something Brantley had apparently missed). In Back Stage, Erik Haagensen goes so far as to write: “This blistering yet deeply humane metaphysical drama about death ranks with Albee's finest work” and concludes, “‘The Lady From Dubuque’ is a sure and stunning blow to the heart.” On the other side, Variety’s Marilyn Stasio was more in tune with the 1980 reception, asserting that the play “doesn't exactly rise triumphantly from the ashes” because the “metaphysical mystery is surprisingly shallow” despite “its handsome mounting” which “does . . . look absolutely stunning.” Elisabeth Vincentelli of the New York Post more or less agrees, saying that the reasons for the 1980 flop are understandable: Lady “relies on forced situations and straw men” even if Esbjornson “makes a good case for this play’s mix of sophistication and crassness, stylization and realism.” In the Village Voice, Michael Feingold asserts that “Albee has created a powerful, multi-layered image of dying and the sense of loss it brings” but adds, “Even a multi-layered image, though, isn't a drama.” He describes the STC revival as “sleek yet surprisingly poignant . . . with its strongly focused acting,” but states that this only makes the weaknesses of the script more apparent. He concludes by saying, “Riveting yet off-putting, it feels frozen, a fossil reality trapped in amber.”

'Early Plays'

On Friday evening, 2 March, my friend Diana and I drove over to DUMBO to see Early Plays, an adaptation of three one-acts from the Glencairn Plays by Eugene O’Neill, presented at St. Ann’s Warehouse. The adaptation, by Richard Maxwell, was performed by a combined company made up of actors from the Wooster Group, the long-lived experimental troupe whose usual home is the Performing Garage in SoHo, and the New York City Players, a 13-year-old group started and directed by Maxwell. While I’ve known of the Wooster Group for years (I was a grad student in NYU’s Department of Performance Studies and a frequent student of Richard Schechner’s, whose Performance Group was the precursor to the Wooster Group), I hadn’t heard of the New York City Players—at least I don’t remember having heard of them despite the fact that reviews of their shows and articles about them have appeared in the New York Times and elsewhere for over a decade. (Along with a collection of some of Maxwell’s plays, Plays, 1996- 2000: Richard Maxwell, there’s even a book about him and his company: The Theatre of Richard Maxwell and the New York City Players by Sarah Gorman.)

The four Glencairn Plays (also known as the Sea Plays) take O'Neill’s tales of sailors at sea and ashore, drawn from the playwright’s own experience as a merchant mariner, as a vehicle to explore themes of longing and eternity. Dark episodes depict the underside of turn-of-the-century maritime life—brawls, dances, and carousing—as the playwright captures the voices of seamen from different countries. The one-acts were written separately and weren’t all débuted by the same troupe. Bound East for Cardiff (1914) premièred at the Wharf Theatre in Provincetown, Massachusetts, on 28 July 1916 in a production of the nascent Provincetown Players; the Washington Square Players’ début of In the Zone (1917) opened at the Comedy Theatre in New York City on 31 October 1917; the Provincetown Players premièred The Long Voyage Home (1917) at the Playwrights’ Theatre, New York, on 2 November 1917; and The Moon of the Caribbees (1918), presented again by the Provincetown Players at the Playwrights' Theatre, opened on 20 December 1918.

O’Neill hadn’t intended the Glencairn Plays to be played together at first, even though they all share the same set of characters who are shipmates on the British tramp steamer Glencairn. It wasn’t until 1924 that the Provincetown Players first staged the four one-acts under one title, The S.S. Glencairn, at O’Neill’s suggestion, but since then, they’ve been considered a set. (The four plays were filmed together in 1940, updated from World War I to World War II, as The Long Voyage Home, directed by John Ford and starring John Wayne. It’s said to have been O’Neill’s favorite film based on any of his plays.) The Wooster Group had invited Maxwell, who’d worked with his company out of the Performing Garage a few times, to direct the plays, and he chose to do three of them (Zone isn’t included in Early Plays) on the set of the Wooster Group’s Emperor Jones and Hairy Ape (designed by Elizabeth LeCompte and Jim Clayburgh). In Moon, the ship is anchored off a West Indian island as the men listen to the eerie singing from shore and wait for the native women to come aboard to sell fruit and contraband rum. Two sailors fight over Pearl, who’d been flirting with them both, and one of the men is stabbed to death. The first mate throws the women off the ship, leaving the sailors alone as the on-shore singing haunts them. In Bound East, Yank takes a fatal fall down a hold and reflects bitterly on the life he’s leaving. His shipmates attempt to comfort him as death comes for him in a vision of a beautiful woman. Long Voyage is the story of Ole Olson, a Swedish sailor, who goes to Fat Joe’s, a bar on the London docks, with his mates. Olson won’t drink so he doesn’t get drunk, but he recounts his plans to return home to his family farm to sympathetic Freda. She distracts him while Joe slips him a mickey and he’s shanghaied aboard the Amindra, the “worst ship dat sail to sea.”

Early Plays, a world première that the companies plan to tour to Paris, Los Angeles, and San Francisco next season, explores the spareness and the musicality of this language in scenes that include songs by Maxwell. Elizabeth LeCompte, director of the Wooster Group, chose the New York City Players director to provide these plays a "re-mix," giving O’Neill’s romantic text a stark, Postmodern feel. After my experience at St Ann’s, I have to say, I don’t get the hype or even the attention Maxwell and his troupe have gotten. Granted, this production is different from the usual New York City Players’ fare: first, the company is a combined troupe of New York City Players and Wooster Group actors, so Maxwell’s not working with his usual crew; second, this is a rare effort with a script that Maxwell didn’t write. (In 2003, Maxwell and his troupe staged an interpretation of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1. Their only previous effort at presenting the work of another writer than Maxwell; it was universally panned.) I don’t know what difference that might make, but I have to consider it.

Maxwell, a North Dakotan who launched his theater work in Chicago around 1992, is the brother of Jan Maxwell, a well-regarded star of Broadway and Off-Broadway (and the wife of an actor I used to know quite well and greatly admire). Maxwell started the New York City Players in 1999 and their work has gained a great deal of acclaim among both devotees of experimental theater and the press. Ben Brantley of the New York Times, for instance, said of Maxwell in 2001 "that he may indeed turn out to be one of the most innovative and essential artists to emerge from American experimental theater in the past decade." According to the company itself:

New York City Players is a theater company creating original work about people, relationships, and above all, feeling. [Its] aim is to initiate a new dialogue with an ever-growing audience using original text and music. By rigorously stripping away the habitual identities that encumber work, we pursue the power of language, of story, of image, and what happens when people gather in a room.

I can’t unpack this manifesto, but what all this turns out to mean is that the actors create no characters and deliver the lines with flat affect so that not only are the emotional or psychological intentions erased, but the accents and dialects in which O’Neill wrote in the Sea Plays sound ridiculously childish and stupid. (I gather from reading criticism that Maxwell’s idea is that this emphasizes the words and impels the spectators to supply their own emotional content. I can do that by reading the plays—I even own a collection of O’Neill.) There are many jokes about untrained actors reading a script for the first time and reading all the words, including the stage directions. That’s what this is like, except instead of stage directions, the actors read the phonetically spelled-out dialects verbatim. The actors also speak in an even, slightly speeded-up pace and exhibit few, if any, facial expressions or body gestures. There’s no attempt to make the words sound like speech—indeed, the company deliberately subverts any such intent. If there’s some point behind this practice—and I gather that this is the performance style of the New York City Players—I don’t see it. Diana thought it was amateurish—but that’s simplistic. An amateur might do something like this out of ignorance or inability; these actors do it intentionally, as if it meant something to sabotage the sense of the dialogue. Now, I recognize that O’Neill’s writing in these early plays is stilted, inartful, and hard to speak. The Sea Plays are usually considered unstageable as they’re written. The dramaturgy is clumsy, fragmentary, and plotless. As Ben Brantley points out in his New York Times review of Early Plays, acting these plays “with ardor and earnestness often only amplifies their creaks.” But Maxwell’s approach hardly solves the theatrical problems; it exacerbates them. (The cast is split among Wooster Group actors and New York City Players, but the production's style appears to be exclusively Maxwell’s.) Frankly, I don’t get the point of the whole exercise.

According to Brantley (whose word I’ll take in this instance), Maxwell’s notion is “to look for the distilled essence beneath the hoary crust” of O’Neill’s novice efforts. The affectless monotones, phonetic pronunciation of the dialects, and robotic movements, however, don’t elucidate or clarify. They numb and enervate. Even the staging, using the Wooster Group’s O’Neill set as a kind of found object, has its detriments. Bound East, the playlet about the dying Yank, is performed far upstage right, off the actual platform that is the ship’s deck in Moon and the bar in Voyage. Yank is stretched out in a bunk or hammock a few feet up, his face and torso dimly lit by a lantern, as a shipmate stays with him to keep him comforted, and it was so hard to see this scene that I ultimately gave up and just tried to listen. (Some reviewers suggested that that was Maxwell’s goal for Bound East—but another name for that kind of production is radio drama.) Now, I’ll freely admit I’m a geezer, but I don’t automatically dismiss experimental art, especially theater. I’ve seen some performances that I didn’t really understand, but that I enjoyed for their flair, verve, and innovative impulse. I like seeing what younger minds than mine (which is . . . well, most of them these days) are coming up with to make the old new again. But here, I just don’t see the rationale for the approach—except just to do it, to thumb their noses at the audience. (Okay, that’s what Marcel Duchamp did in 1917 when he mounted a urinal on a board and called it art—but that was funny! At least I think it was.)

The plays include a few moments of song, such as the shanty the sailors sing in Moon and the haunting music they heard from shore in the same play. Oddly, when the men sing, the actors seem to forget their commitment to affectless performance and sing like working men engaging in an impromptu musical interlude. Then there are the songs that Maxwell composed for the breaks between the plays. As far as I could see, they had nothing to do with either the little vignettes of the seaman’s life or “the spirit of the sea” which O’Neill is said to have designated the hero of the Glencairn Plays. Like a lot of the work in Early Plays, the original songs struck me as self-indulgences by a self-important artist.

Aside from Brantley’s New York Times notice, which was cool but harked back to earlier Maxwell successes and laudatory estimations, Adam Feldman in Time Out New York, while also acknowledging that Maxwell’s style works effectively when applied to his own scripts, concludes that when applied to the work of other writers, as in Early Plays, “it can come off as smug and dismissive, as though diddling itself with a middle finger.” In Back Stage, Jason Fitzgerald calls “Maxwell meets O'Neill” “a carefully wrought and visually beautiful production that is defeated by its own rigor,” and suggests, “It lacks the thing O'Neill cared about most in his theater: a beating heart.” The Village Voice’s Alexis Soloski offers, “It’s a clever show and sometimes a startlingly charming one, but it never argues for its own necessity, never clarifies what drew these companies to it.” In the New Yorker, however, Hilton Als, saying that Early Plays “has the supreme realism of a dream,” lauds Maxwell for “short-circuiting our desire for the standard forms of theatrical pleasure” and asserts that the production “is reductive in the best possible way.”

Nonetheless, I’m left with the questions Why Maxwell and his company do this kind of work—because I don’t understand it—and then Why does anybody find it worthwhile and even praiseworthy. In the end, it was I who was at sea. I felt I’ve been witness to the emperor’s new clothes: the monarch’s naked, but no one’s dared tell him so or inform the people. Well, here I am to tell you all: The emperor ain’t got no clothes on! Go look if you want to, but don’t be fooled. He’s as naked as a jaybird!

[This play report, an application of the principal rationale for launching Rick On Theater three years ago, appears in the week of the blog’s third anniversary (on 16 March). There’s nothing especially remarkable about “Early Plays”—though I suppose it’s auspicious that my anniversary post focuses on the first American playwright to gain an international reputation and the only American dramatist to win a Nobel Prize (1936)—but it does represent the very purpose I had for starting this on-going effort. In the intervening months and years, I’ve branched out into other topics, even other fields beyond theater or the arts, but the mainstay of ROT is still the play report. This month and last will have seen a surfeit of reports on plays and performances, both from me and from my friend and contributor, Kirk Woodward. As far as I’m concerned, that’s all to the good. The season’s only about two-thirds over, so there will certainly be more production reports to come—and, I hope, well into future seasons. In between, I hope to present thoughts on topics that interest or concern me and to bring ROT readers ideas and opinions from other writers, both previously published and original for the blog. I also hope readers will keep returning to see what’s up on ROT. The past three years have been challenging and fun. I expect the future will be the same. ~Rick]

'CQ/CX'

On Wednesday evening, 29 February, Diana, my frequent theater partner, and I went to the Peter Norton Space, the temporary home of the Atlantic Theater Company (their Chelsea home base is under reconstruction until the spring), to see the world première of Gabe McKinley’s CQ/CX, a play set in the world of daily newspaper journalism.

CQ/CX follows Jay Bennett, an emerging African-American reporter at the New York Times. Bennett aspires to become a famous newsman, but his dreams disintegrate around him when he becomes the center of a plagiarism scandal. McKinley’s drama is inspired by the true story of Jayson Blair, forced to resign from the Times in May 2003 when the paper revealed that he had cribbed many of his stories and invented details and fabricated reporting and interviews without ever leaving his Brooklyn apartment. The playwright has changed the names of the people involved and some characters are composites, but the facts remain closely parallel to the real events. CQ/CX also doesn’t shy away from the more difficult aspects of the story, including the aftermath of the exposure. Because Blair is black, there were allegations that he’d been promoted and advanced in his career because of his race, and that he’d gotten away with what he’d been doing for so long for the same reason. “People of color who believe they’ve achieved on their own merits become insecure because they’re worried that they were only pushed forward because of affirmative action,” says Kobi Libii, the actor who plays Bennett. “That’s part of what drives this incarnation of the character to deceive his colleagues at the paper.” McKinley asserts that that’s a main theme of the play. “In any scandal the most dramatic and tragic elements are in the ways it’s ground up and churned out,” observes the playwright. While exploring topical questions such as what makes good journalism and how a story should be told, CQ/CX also looks at issues that include racial politics, gender bias, cultural elitism, and political correctness.

McKinley, whose last play in New York City was Extinction at the Cherry Lane Theatre in 2010, is in a good position to know something not just about journalism, but the Blair scandal in particular. He worked at the New York Times for 12 years, spanning Blair’s tenure at the paper, and his brothers Jesse and James are both reporters for the Times now. (James writes about music and Jesse reports on theater and heads the San Francisco bureau.) The McKinley brothers’ father was also a reporter (Esquire and Playboy in the ’70s), so it’s a milieu Gabe McKinley ought to know well. He affirms that the Blair saga had a “deep” effect on him: "I always thought it was such a dramatic situation, the confluence of personalities, and the news breaking at the time, from 9/11 to Afghanistan to sniper attacks and anthrax incidents. It felt like the whole world was ending.” He was compelled to write about the experience, he says. It took him almost ten years to come to grips with the events, however. Asked why he didn’t just write a biographical play about Blair, McKinley explains: “It’s a work for the theater and I felt, like Jayson, that to get closer to the truth I had to get farther from the facts sometimes. I had to create some characters and create composites of several people.”

The dramatist, who left the Times in 2008, got to know Blair some while they were at the paper. “He wasn't much older than me. We used to hang out quite a bit," McKinley recalls. But he adds, "It's hard to know what he was actually like. He had a secret life, obviously. He was a gregarious, fun-loving, charming guy. He enjoyed the nightlife. He liked the idea of the work-hard, play-hard journalist. He really embraced that as part of his identity." Though he still admires the paper greatly, the playwright acknowledges that the humans who run it can make mistakes. "This play is a look at traditions, at legacies and ultimately at hubris,” McKinley points out. “There are great minds involved who were basically hoodwinked." McKinley hasn’t seen Blair since the former reporter left the paper, but Blair, now working in Virginia as a life coach, has said he would try to see CQ/CX. “It’s kind of a great opportunity again for people to learn from my mistakes,” Blair says.

McKinley’s job at the Times included compiling the corrections that are published on page two of the front section every day. (He was an editorial assistant, but he says he worked in every department.) It’s from that aspect of newspaper work that the play’s title comes: “CQ” is the abbreviation of cadit quaestio, Latin for ‘the question falls,’ which editors write in the margins of a draft article when they determine that an unusual word or fact is, indeed, correct. “CX,” shorthand for ‘correction,’ marks text that needs verification. (Oddly, some sources give the definitions in reverse, but I derived mine from a published interview with McKinley—so I’ll go with the dramatist’s intent on this.) Unfortunately, McKinley never really develops this locution into a theme in the play and it remains just one of the factoids about newspapering that the writer drops into the script.

The play, unhappily, has several more serious problems, both on the page and on the stage. Let me start with the first set, the script troubles. It’s clear that McKinley’s a tyro playwright; his bio lists few scripts and only one’s been staged here. (McKinley wasn’t a reporter at the Times, either, but an editorial assistant, so his writing credentials in that field are limited, too.) I ascribe many of the dramaturgical faults of CQ/CX to a writer not yet sure how to handle the medium and who’s main knowledge of dramatic writing seems to be from television. The two-and-a-quarter-hour play’s made up of short scenes, some very brief, separated by swift scene changes covered by the sounds of a newsroom (typewriters, computer keyboards, ringing phones, etc.) as moving panels, covered with projections of news text, shift back and forth across the stage (“an overdose of moving scenery,” says Variety). (The set is by David Rockwell, with projections by Peter Nigrini and C. Andrew Bauer. The lighting design is from Ben Stanton and David Van Tieghem created the original music and the soundscape.) Few of the scenes are linked causally (though the narrative connects most of them), and they are frequently focused on exposition rather than drama. The one good scene theatrically was one among the publisher (David Pittu) and his managing and executive editors (Peter Jay Fernandez and Arliss Howard, respectively) after the crisis has broken: the three men engage one another, not always graciously, and each has a strong, private objective to pursue—it’s an actual dramatic scene, a confrontation, rather than just story-telling. Though I haven’t seen any corroboration of this supposition, my feeling is that either McKinley set out to write a TV movie or he inadvertently ended up having composed one.

Perhaps more damaging, the play’s not really about Jay Bennett or anyone else in the cast. Bennett’s function in the play is as a catalyst: he makes the story happen, but he doesn’t change as a result of the play’s action. We know the story’s about Bennett only because the source material’s about Jayson Blair; however, McKinley’s focus isn’t on any person, but the paper—or the idea of The Times, the Gray Lady, which the playwright clearly reveres. I’m not sure any writer can make this work on stage (it might work on film and especially on TV, though even Deadline U.S.A. had to have strong characters, led by Humphrey Bogart’s editor, to work as a film melodrama), but without characters on whom to focus, with whom to sympathize, the play becomes too diffuse for me to care much about anyone or, even, the paper itself. In the Village Voice, Michael Feingold gives a good, concise analysis of what I think went wrong in CQ/CX:

A story in a newspaper and a story onstage are two different things. A newspaper reports the facts—at least, one hopes it does—and only occasionally takes an in-depth look behind them. When a play takes up facts, it's supposed to dramatize them—meaning not only that we watch while, seemingly, the facts occur to the people involved, but also that we end by getting a deeper understanding of how and why these facts have occurred.

McKinley asserts that his play is about a number of human conditions he sees reflected in the scandal and the circumstances at the Times, but while lip service is given to many of them, the playwright doesn’t examine the issues, or look at the characters in their light. (The Internet gets a mention, for instance, but there’s no exploration of its effect on the future of the news business.) In my criteria for good theater, CQ/CX fails the test of doing more than telling a story. As Feingold intimates, I learn very little about the human condition from McKinley’s play.

As for the production, the first error, in my estimation, is a casting mistake. Young Kobi Libii may eventually be a powerful actor, but at present, he’s a lightweight. (Elisabeth Vincentelli in the New York Post says he “doesn’t have an ounce of charisma.”) He gets lost on stage whenever anyone else is there or whenever anything is happening that steals focus from him. Director David Leveaux seems to have taken a chance on an untried performer, and maybe that’s a generous impulse that could have paid off, but he chose wrong in this case. What the part seems to have needed is a young Andre Braugher, an actor who attracts focus even when he’s out of the spotlight; Libii fades away. (I don’t mean to put the blame on the actor’s physical attributes, but Libii’s slight and willowy with a light voice, making him seem more like an adolescent than an ambitious and manipulative young man.) When Bennett makes excuses for his behavior and argues that he isn’t responsible for his failures, Libii sounds more like a whiny teenager trying to get out of trouble at school than a fighter with his back against the ropes. Unfortunately, Leveaux’s other casting choices aren’t a whole lot better. (The best stage presence in the cast is Larry Bryggman, whose aging, obsolescent old-time reporter is a wonderful little portrait, if a bit of a cliché. Bryggman’s Frank King, however, is just a grace note in the play, a sort of echo of times past against whom to measure the current staff of both editors and cub reporters. If the character were cut, the play wouldn’t change.) None of the actors makes his or her character more than a plot point, someone to move the story along, but not to introduce dramatic conflict, tension, suspense, or revelation. Many (except Arliss Howard, who sometimes seemed as if he were on a different stage) seem to be indulging in what we used to call studio acting, what acting students do while they’re working on acting technique, but which isn’t meant for paying audiences. With the short and fast-changing scenes of the script, none of the characters registers for long, and the actors (and the director) never overcome this deficit.

The New York Times review was mixed, suggesting that the playwright was too concerned with the story and the details of the circumstances—the confusing and rapidly evolving situation at the paper, for instance—and not enough to the stage drama. It’s interesting to note, though, that the notice was written by Frank Rizzo, the theater reviewer of the Hartford, Connecticut, Courant, not someone from the Times’s theater or cultural staff. I’ve never seen that as far I can remember, and I wondered why at first. (Rizzo, also a frequent contributor to Variety, was identified in a blurb at the bottom of the column, but the paper gave no explanation for his appearance in its pages.) Suddenly, it dawned on me: Of course the Times would bring in an outsider to review CQ/CX. The playwright is a former Times employee, his brothers both write for the paper, the characters in the play are all versions of real current or former Timesmen, and the plot is a New York Times scandal. Whether or not any present staff writer knew Blair or was at the paper when he was there, the appearance of a potential conflict of interest could make any evaluation of the play suspect—especially considering how significant the Times’s reviews are believed to be in the world of New York theater. (Here’s an interesting question: If the New York Times is the most powerful voice in theater reviewing in this city, does a review by a non-Times writer carry as much weight just because it’s published in the Gray Lady? Not according to one reader: “I will disregard this review and await a proper review from a New York Times critic.” The commenter signed the e-mail, rather chauvinistically to my eye, “NEW YORK TIMES Subscriber. NOT the Hartford Courant.”) So the Blair scandal, which seems to have been ancient history at the Times in all other respects, still has repercussions eight years later, in a department with which Blair had no connection. (Why Rizzo was selected rather than any other non-Times reviewer, I have no guess. It might be interesting to find out, but probably not relevant.)

Rizzo, describing the play as “less ‘Front Page’ than ‘Front Page Correction’—a straightforward dramatization and a cautionary tale of ambition, deception and hubris,” concludes, “Like a good journalist Mr. McKinley lays out those facts, adds color and provides an authoritative voice, but . . . ‘CQ/CX’ only lightly suggests themes of class, power and race.” In Variety, Steven Suskin observes that the “real-life drama of the situation is pretty much absent onstage” and closes with, “The play itself could use some strong editing.” Back Stage’s Erik Haagensen writes that the play “rarely dips beneath the surface, playing more like an extended TV-drama episode” (as if agreeing with my own suggestion!) and declares that Leveaux’s “busy production” does little more in the end than “accentuate the shallowness of McKinley's two-dimensional script.” The Voice’s Feingold, while applauding the “smart efficiency” of Leveaux’s direction, says that the “first-rate acting, like the lucid wordsmithing and the bustle of Leveaux's staging, animate the story but never deepen it.” Vincentelli of the Post writes bluntly, “‘CQ/CX’ . . . is a cheesy, ham-fisted affair.” On the other hand, in New York’s Daily News, Joe Dziemianowicz asserts, “Save for some clunky exposition, McKinley’s script is crisp and smart,” though he adds, “It’s too bad that eventually the play becomes wimpy.” The nays far outnumbered the yeas.

Michael Feingold adds, “McKinley has dramatized for theatergoers the difference between old plays, which sometimes stay alive, and old news, which notoriously doesn't.” The Supreme Court has declared that corporations are people, at least for the purposes of politics. Gabe McKinley has proved to me that a newspaper isn’t a character, at least not for a successful stage drama.

[Coincidentally, the story of Jayson Blair at the New York Times was the basis for a murder mystery on Law & Order: Criminal Intent. In October 2003, the series aired an episode called “Pravda” (both the name of the Communist Party newspaper of the Soviet Union and the Russian word for ‘truth’) whose plot revolves around the investigation of a murder, during which the detectives question the alibi of Carl Hines, a star African-American reporter on the Sentinel, who can’t produce out-of-town receipts and has a history of filing false stories.]

'Red' (Arena Stage)

I took my usual Kosher Bus down to Washington to catch John Logan’s Red, his play about Abstract Expressionist painter Mark Rothko (1903-70), at the Arena Stage’s new Mead Center for American Theater at the matinee on Sunday afternoon, 26 February. I’d seen Washington actor Edward Gero as Salieri in a revival of Amadeus in May 2011 (see my report on ROT, 6 July 2011) and the actor’s program bio noted that he was going to be playing Rothko in Chicago and then at Arena, and I wanted to see the play. I’d missed it here in New York City, so my mother and I arranged the date so I could squeeze the trip in between shows here for which I had tickets already. (Red ran on Broadway in the spring of 2010 in a generally well-received production with Alfred Molina as the artist Mark Rothko and Eddie Redmayne as his assistant, Ken. The production had come from London’s Donmar Warehouse where Michael Grandage, who staged the show, is the artistic director. It won six Tonys, including one for Best Play.) The revival at Arena’s Kreeger Theater is a co-production with Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, where the play ran first, from 17 September to 30 October 2011, before moving to Washington; Robert Falls, the artistic director of the Goodman, the country’s second oldest repertory theater company, directed the revival.

Playwright Logan says he was moved to write Red when he was in London in 2007 filming Sweeney Todd, for which he’d written the screenplay. He paid a visit to the Tate Modern which has an exhibit of nine of Rothko’s 1958 murals intended for the elegant Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram Building in New York. “They had a very powerful effect on me,” Logan asserts. “I knew very little about Mark Rothko, very little about Abstract Expressionism, but I found the paintings themselves profoundly moving and kinetic in a strange way.” The writer was deeply moved by the paintings: “They touched me, mostly because of their sense of profound seriousness.” Taken with the story of how the painter had changed his mind and decided to keep the murals, returning the money for the commission, the dramatist decided there was a play “in Rothko’s complicated relationship with his work.”

Logan came to understand that Rothko’s “frame of reference, his world, was entirely that of painting. So before the character could speak about anything, I felt as though I had to have some facility in the visual arts and in the specifics of the language of art history.” With no background in art, the writer “realized I would have to gain a significant understanding of art history” because Rothko was “such an intellectually challenging artist” who “had an encyclopedic knowledge of painting and of artists.” The playwright recounts that “I spent eight or nine months researching art history. Going to museums, looking at paintings, and trying to see which artists had inspired Rothko, how he fit into the tradition, and why and how he broke with tradition. In a way it was like learning a new language for me—the language of visual art.”

The play’s not an actual biography of the painter (though Logan read one by James E. B. Breslin, as well as Rothko’s own writings on art and color), nor a depiction of any actual events in his life. The character of Ken, for instance, is invented, not based on anyone in Rothko’s life. (In the Washington Post, Peter Marks describes Ken as “a composite of the assistants who toiled in Rothko’s Manhattan studio,” but Logan has stated that he’s not even that: he’s entirely made up.) In fact, the relationship between Rothko and Ken in Red isn’t a reflection of the painter’s relationships with his actual assistants, who were mere practical employees, there only to do what Rothko needed, Logan explains. The playwright has said that “the play is really not about art at all, it's not about painting; it's about fathers and sons” and he sees Ken as a surrogate son for the “flamboyant” painter. Rothko would “be the prow of an ocean liner cutting through the ocean and Ken would have to be the wave that billows around it for most of the play,” Logan explains.

Red débuted in London at the renowned Donmar Warehouse, a cradle of new and experimental plays that have often had subsequent success both in the West End and at theaters in this country. It played in London from 3 December 2009 to 6 February 2010 before transferring to Broadway’s John Golden Theatre on 11 March 2010 for previews, opening on 1 April and running until 27 June. After the successes in London and on Broadway, Logan, who went to college and began his playwriting career in the Chicago area in the early 1980s when, he asserts, “it was like Paris in the ’20s,” says he knew there’d eventually be an American production, with an American director and an American cast. The Chicago-Washington staging is among the the first, though with its critical reception, single set, and small cast, I’d bet there’ll be more pretty quickly. (College productions would seem a natural, I’d think, especially since one character is a young man—and even Rothko is only 55 at the time of the play.) It won’t hurt the play’s prospects that it runs only 100 minutes and has no intermission. The D.C. production opened for previews on 20 January and is scheduled to close on 11 March (including an extension of eight additional performances).

Washington has made something of an event of the play’s appearance there. On 8 December 2011, Edward Gero performed excerpts from the production at the Phillips Collection, one of the District’s most distinguished art museums. The staged reading was followed by a conversation with David Dower, Arena’s associate artistic director, and Klaus Ottman, curator-at-large of the Phillips and author of The Essential Mark Rothko. The Phillips Collection maintains a Rothko Room which founder Duncan Phillips created with the artist in 1960, featuring four Rothko paintings in a small, chapel-like gallery off the main lobby of the museum. Before the performance at the collection, Gero paid the exhibit a visit on his own to experience Rothko’s paintings as the artist had intended: by spending time with them. He read the scene in Red where the artist instructs Ken the way to look at a painting—aloud to the Rothkos—and then he sat for three hours. The Rothko Room, the first public space devoted exclusively to Rothko’s art, has a bench specifically selected by the painter to encourage visitors to do this. (After contemplating the four canvases in the room, Gero met with Ottman who discussed the artist and his work with the actor. This was all part of Gero’s preparation for the part, which also included reading the 1993 Breslin bio, before he went to Chicago for rehearsals. Gero ruminates on this experience in “Field Trip: The Rothko Room at the Phillips Collection” on line at http://geroasrothko.wordpress.com/2011/07/14/field-trip-the-rothko-room-at-the-phillips-collection. Alfred Molina, the Broadway Rothko, also made the trip to the Rothko Room at the Phillips and to the National Gallery of Art’s collection of Rothko canvases.)

In 1985 and ’86, the National Gallery received a large gift of works from the Mark Rothko Foundation, including several of the Seagram Murals. (The third group of the Seagram Murals is part of the collection of Japan’s Kawamura Memorial Museum in Sakura.) From 6 December 2011 through 15 August 2012 the National Gallery will house a special installation of three of the Seagram canvases in the East Building’s Concourse Gallery to coincide with Arena’s staging of Red. Between 3 and 5 February, inspired by Rothko’s stand against art that only the elite would see (the artist’s stated rationale for withdrawing the murals from the up-scale Four Seasons), the Vestibule Guerrilla Gallery presented Seeing Red, an exhibit of street art that everyone can see, at Arena’s Mead Center. (The Guerrilla Gallery, as its name implies, is, well . . . peripatetic. It pops up where it can cause the most impact—wherever the Occupy Movement in Washington is demonstrating, for instance.) For Seeing Red, the gallery assembled a group of emerging D.C. street artists whose works have been seen on the streets and in galleries of the District. The artists in Seeing Red created new work using Rothko’s formula for making art: “I measure these ingredients very carefully when I paint a picture. . . . It is always the form that follows these elements and the picture results of the proportions of these elements.” Other activities and events coordinated with the production have been planned as well and the Washington Post has published several articles on the play, aside from the customary review. (Gero, who’s won four Helen Hayes Awards for his stage work, is a favorite actor of audiences in the District. That would generate press coverage as well.)

To cut to the chase, then—it was worth all the hype (not to mention my bus trip south and back). Red is a terrific play and the Goodman-Arena production is excellent. I was so engaged by this exchange between the narcissistic, self-important artist and his young assistant who grows into intestinal maturity in our presence, so absorbed by the exploration of relationships, legacy, worth, meaning, adversity, life that I knew I had to buy the script. What Logan put on paper and what Falls, Gero, and Patrick Andrews, who plays young Ken, put on stage was one of the most thrilling pieces of new theater I’ve seen in a very long time. Horton Foote’s Orphans’ Home Cycle came mighty close, but the main thrill there was the wonderful and monumental production; otherwise, the nearest I’ve come to this quality of theater experience recently has been at revivals—Brecht’s Threepenny Opera at BAM, Kushner’s Angels in America at Signature, or Schiller’s Mary Stuart on Broadway. (Do you think that’s effusive enough?)

Okay, I don’t think Red will go down as great literature. But it’s really good theater. In fact, it’s theatrical as hell! (Remember my two criteria for good theater? A play must do more than tell a story and it must do it in a theatrical way. Red aces the test.) As Sophie Gilbert of Washingtonian magazine writes, the staging “achieves the seemingly impossible . . . [it] makes spellbinding theater out of watching paint dry.” I’m sorry now that I missed it on Broadway, not because the Arena production is lacking, but because now I wish I could have seen what the other actors and director did with the show. This is the kind of play in which I get caught up in three different aspects, all at once, and each can be so different in the hands of different artists. There’s the text, of course, full of infinitely interpretable lines and scenes; there are the characters, each open to interpretation by different actors under the guidance of different directors; and there’s the relationship between the two characters, which will change if one actor changes even one beat. (I’ve heard, though I don’t know how accurate the report is, that Eddie Redmayne, who won a Tony and an Olivier for his portrayal of Ken on Broadway and in London, had developed such a different feeling about Rothko by the end of the play that he couldn’t deliver the last line of Logan’s script. Redmayne is supposed to have acknowledged that himself, though I’ve never seen it reported; but if it’s even partially true—that, say, the actor had trouble saying the last line because of all that went before in his work with Alfred Molina—that’s what I mean.) This play is so full of possible variations, all of which can be vastly different but equally true or valid, I can’t even contemplate the permutations that are possible. If I were still an actor (and ten years younger), I’d kill to play Rothko somewhere.

Maybe that’s enough enthusiasm for one report. Let’s get to specifics. The play opens on Rothko’s cramped, cluttered studio at 222 Bowery in lower Manhattan in 1958, just after, as we’ll soon learn, the painter’s gotten the commission to create paintings for the Four Seasons restaurant in the new Seagram Building being designed by Philip Johnson and Mies van der Rohe, giants of architecture in the post-World War II decades. Todd Rosenthal’s naturalistic set is visible when we come into the theater—the Kreeger’s a traditional proscenium space, but there’s no curtain on this production. Paint pots, buckets, drop cloths, frames, stretchers are all around the periphery of the room; a wheeled work table with cans, brushes, and painterly paraphernalia is stage left center, just below a slop sink; a glassed-in vestibule is up right. There are no windows: natural light isn’t good enough, we’ll learn. And up center, right in front of us, is a monumental canvas, orange and brown, unfinished: a Rothko! Classical music, the opening theme of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, starts playing from a Victrola—we’ll find out that Rothko hates jazz—and the painter comes in to sit in a green, wooden lawn chair, smoke a cigarette, and contemplate the work. Otherwise, silence. This is how art—Rothko’s art—is experienced, considered, understood, judged. This is how the artist himself decides if it’s finished. If it needs more work. What it needs if it does. This is Mark Rothko’s world. This is John Logan’s version of Rothko’s world. For all intents and purposes, this is the universe of Red—though now and then bits of other realities will spin into its orbit. They can be used, confronted, but they aren’t part of this universe. Not even other art is part of this universe.

In walks Ken, young, timid, overdressed—this is a place of work, the painter will inform him—and awed. “What do you see?” Rothko asks him. Me? You want to know what I think? Why? What should I say? And that’s where Ken and Rothko’s relationship starts. Rothko tells Ken in no uncertain terms that he’s not the young wannabe’s—he’s a painter, too, though his work is never seen, not by us or by Rothko— rabbi, father, shrink, friend, or teacher. He’s the employer and Ken’s there to do whatever the artist needs done: stretch canvases, prime them, buy supplies, clean brushes, mix paint, sweep up, move framed paintings, fetch cigarettes . . . whatever. A gofer. But that’s not what happens, as we know it won’t. Ken becomes a sounding board, an outside eye, a test audience, a punching bag, and, yes, a student and, perhaps, a surrogate son. (“The son must kill the father,” Rothko advises Ken. “Respect him, but kill him.”) Over a two-year span in 1958 and 1959, Rothko learns about the bloody murder of Ken’s parents in Iowa when the boy was seven, and Ken hears about Rothko’s witnessing a Cossack raid during a pogrom back in Russia when he was still Marcus Rothkowitz, a land he left at 10 and a name he shed in 1940 when a gallery-owner informed his there were already too many Jewish artists. Little by little, over the hour-and-forty-minute course of the drama, Ken learns to stand up to the bully, even finally to challenge him—and they end up respecting each other, however grudgingly and obliquely.

“What do you see?” It’s both the first thing Rothko says, and the last. Ken’s answer is also the same: “Red.” Red is the essence of the life force, we’ll learn; black is death: Rothko’s greatest fear is that “One day the black will swallow the red.” He means, of course, not only his own death—the painter committed suicide in 1970 by cutting his wrists in his studio (evoked in Red when Ken finds Rothko sitting on the floor covered with paint)—but also the death of his art, swallowed up by the popular work of the Warhols, Lichtensteins, and Rauschenbergs, swiftly coming up behind him—the sons killing the father. Just like he and his contemporaries did to the Cubists, their predecessors. And not only that, but the death of refinement and culture swallowing up all art and creativity.

As you might guess, red is a leitmotif in Red. But what does red actually mean when Ken says that’s what he sees? “What does ‘red’ mean to me?” Rothko demands. “You mean scarlet? You mean crimson? You mean plum-mulberry-magenta-burgundy-salmon-carmine-carnelian-coral? Anything but ‘red!’ What is ‘RED?!’” It’s about perception. It’s about seeing. Life is what you see—not just in art, we’ll discover, but in everything, everywhere. When you look at something, what do you see?

In a profile of Falls in the Washington Post, Gero explains that as a result of the director’s exploration of the play, “Patrick and I became very specific about what was happening at every single moment of the play.” And they did. Andrews, a prolific Chicago actor, and Gero, one of the Capital’s most sought-after performers, match up perfectly for this pair of characters. Andrews, small, slim (a dancer, as it happens), light-haired, mid-20’s, boyish, a tenor, is the physical opposite of Gero, stocky, tall, Italian-swarthy, dark-haired (though balding), mid-50’s, with owlish glasses, a booming baritone. But they’re identical beneath the physiognomy: steel-spined, strong-willed, vocally commanding, both capable of holding the stage either alone or as part of a duo. And they do, taking stage, giving it, sharing it. In fact, the performances are a little like a mostly-bloodless boxing match in the squared-off space of the studio—with the giant canvases as a backdrop (there are maybe half a dozen different “Rothkos” in various states of completion pulled up on the central piece of wall that is Rothko’s “easel”), often the focus of the debate or the catalyst for it. Sometimes Rothko prevails—well, usually he does—and sometimes Ken does, but the tussle is usually pretty even dramatically and neither Gero nor Andrews gives any quarter. It’s just like when the painter and the assistant stand side by side, backs to the audience, to prime a canvas, furiously smearing red-brown paint over the huge expanse of white with broad brushes, silently, except for the slap-slapping of the wet brushes on the fabric, stretching to the top and reaching down to the bottom edge in tandem action to get to the same result—be ready to work. Damn, this was something to watch.

I went down to Washington last September expressly to see the Arena’s revival of Oklahoma!, and that was great fun. I was delighted to have made the trip, but mostly because I just love the old musicals. This was a different pleasure. Granted, it was serendipitous, since I couldn’t have known what I’d see, but I wouldn’t have missed this performance of Red for anything. I know Gero’s work from past performances, and I expect him to be a strong stage presence—that’s why I decided to go down to see this show when I read he was doing the role. But I never heard of Andrews, and I’ve never seen his stage work, which has mostly (though not exclusively) been confined to Chicago. With any luck for the rest of us (I don’t know how he’d feel about this), someone’ll snap him up and get him out to the rest of the country, especially back East, much more often.

Now, Red is a play with only two actors in the cast. But there actually aren’t just two characters. There’s one more presence on the stage that becomes almost as powerful, at least at times, as Ken or even Rothko: the paintings. (Karl Kochvar, resident scenic artist at the Goodman and an artist himself who instructed the two actors about the use of brushes and Rothko’s painting techniques, made the prop Rothkos seen in the production. They look totally convincing to my eye—I’m no Rothko expert, but I’ve seen a few.) Starting with the large canvas seen at the start of the play, a brown field with a thick, rectangular, orange outline around the center (very like one of the actual Seagram Murals), through several changes of the work in progress, the paintings in various states of completion are ever present. There are also smaller paintings hung around the studio, and we gather from the behavior of Ken and Rothko that there’s a wall for displaying other canvases on the downstage “fourth” wall. Rothko’s world is surrounded by his art. (There are no representations of anyone else’s art in the studio, not even the greats with whom Rothko compares himself.) In the very first moment, when the artist examines his work-in-progress, from the first line, “What do you see?” to the last moment (also “What do you see?”), the paintings are the matrix of this small part of life. Logan says that the play’s not about art, or even painting, but the paintings are overwhelming presences, even the ones Ken and Rothko only talk about and we never see. (In the play, Rothko plans to paint 30 or 40 canvases and select the ones that work best together for the Four Seasons.) So Andrews and Gero don’t have to work just off of one another, create a relationship between themselves, but they have to work off the art, create a relationship between each of them and the paintings, let the paintings inform the relationship the actors develop between their two characters. And they do.

As Molly Smith, the Arena’s artistic director, points out, this is endemic to the drama of Red because before turning to painting, Rothko began to train as an actor at the American Laboratory Theatre in New York City (that was Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya’s troupe) and then performed with a company run by the wife of Clark Gable in Portland, Oregon, where he grew up. Painting was a source and an inspiration for contemplation and thought (“Most of painting is thinking,” says the artist), Rothko believed (which is why there’s a Rothko Room at the Phillips), but it was also a dramatic, theatrical act, a performance. Klaus Ottman, the curator and Rothko writer, says that the painter “continued to refer to what’s happening on the canvas as plays and to these color fields as actors that play out emotional dramas.” The Rothko Room at the Phillips and other spaces, like the 1971 Rothko Chapel in Houston, are stage sets in which the spectators are enclosed. Further, since Rothko doesn’t like or trust natural light for art, the studio and gallery lights are his stage lighting (there’s even a rolling Klieg light in the set to spotlight canvases), and Keith Parham’s lighting design for the Goodman-Arena production is both atmospheric and dramatic. (Most striking and effective is the final tableau when the painting on the wall, a black field with a red center, glows from within as the house lights dim. Now, that’s theatrical!) Red, then, is a drama about art as drama: “There’s tragedy in every brush stroke,” declares Rothko, and he doesn’t just mean tremendous sadness and loss. He advises Ken to read Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, a seminal work for theater artists. When he questions Ken about what reading he’s done, Rothko names Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Shakespeare among the philosophers and poets. “Hamlet?” he pleads. “At least Hamlet, please God! Quote me Hamlet. Right now.” To know art—to make art, you must know theater, Logan suggests.

Red’s critical reception in Washington was uniformly excellent. In MetroWeekly, Jonathan Padget calls the play “bracingly effective” and Washingtonian’s Gilbert especially states that the play’s pitting of the artist and the assistant against one another, the fundamental dramatic device, “works brilliantly.” While calling the production “immensely enjoyable,” Marks in the Post also speaks of “other powerful forces at work in ‘Red.’” On the website DCTheatreScene, Jayne Blanchard spotlights the “sublimely detailed and acted production.” She also writes that Gero and Andrews “work magic with the dark poetry” of Logan’s script. Amanda Gunther on another website, Maryland Theatre Guide, is so effusive as to say: “Never before has such a simply complex color blossomed to thrilling exuberant life upon the stage” and the Baltimore Sun’s Tim Smith, comparing the play to Rothko’s paintings, declared that “it pulsates. And the play's impact reverberates long after the curtain calls.” The Chicago notices were much the same, if not more laudatory (Logan, after all, is a kind of hometown boy): the Chicago Tribune’s Chris Jones calls the play a “superbly taut and compelling drama” and praises Falls’s directing and the acting of both Gero and Andrews, whom Jones thought all surpassed their London-New York counterparts, and Hedy Weiss in the Sun-Times calls Red “bristlingly smart, emotionally fiery.” In fact, in my survey of the reviews I didn’t find a single complaint or detraction, just praise and, often, astonishment that a play not only about art, but about talking about art could be so thrilling on stage. I couldn’t agree more wholeheartedly. (When a friend, a theater-lover who lives in central Virginia, asked me if he should make the three-hour drive north to see Red, I told him unequivocally that he should. I might have been more honest to have said he must.)

Now, if you’ll permit me, a side comment. When Red opened in New York two years ago, the Times’s art reporter, Roberta Smith, wrote a column complaining that the play didn’t align with her experience visiting artists’ studios in the years following the setting of the play. I was aghast when I read the comment (which reminded me of another cavil years earlier when a psychoanalyst wrote to criticize Equus for its inaccurate portrayal of clinical behavior by the play’s psychiatrist). Smith seriously misses the point. Red isn’t reality—not only isn’t it Rothko’s reality—it’s not a bio play, just as Logan asserts—but no play is a depiction of reality because it’s art. Logan has created an exciting and moving piece of art that explores the relationship between two men. I gather that it’s based on the dramatist’s relationship with his own father, but that’s really irrelevant, since it’s the artwork which we experience—but under no circumstances is it meant to be a snapshot of reality. It’s informed by reality, as Logan has acknowledged, and it comments on reality, as all art does to one degree or another, but it doesn’t present reality. That Smith, who, as a journalist in another field of art, should certainly know better, or anyone should go to a theater and expect reality to unfold astounds me. (I’ve already decided that I’ll write an ROT article on this topic soon. Look for it in a month or so.) Red is a contemplation, a dramatic effort to discover how two people working on a single project in a confined environment over a short time can affect one another, teach each other, help each other grow. In Red, the one who does most of the growing is Ken, but he effects some great changes on Rothko in the play, too. What Gero and Andrews accomplish, through Logan’s script and with Falls’s guidance, is let us see how that happens. Logan’s right: Red’s not about the Seagram Murals or art—it’s about . . . well, everything. In the play, Rothko tells us:

You have a lot to learn, young man. Philosophy. Theology. Literature. Poetry. Drama. History. Archeology. Anthropology. Mythology. Music. These are your tools as much as brush and pigment. You cannot be an artist until you are civilized. You cannot be civilized until you learn. To be civilized is to know where you belong in the continuum of your art and your world. To surmount the past, you must know the past.

Red’s not about an artist in his studio. What Logan wrote about, what Gero, Andrews, and Falls put up on the Kreeger stage, what I saw (and what Smith should have seen) is simple: Red’s about seeing—it’s about being human.

'Blood Knot'

My first performance experience at the brand-new Pershing Square Signature Center, the permanent home of the Signature Theatre Company in the glass tower at 42nd Street and 10th Avenue, was Athol Fugard’s Blood Knot, a 1961 play from this season’s Residency One playwright. Performed in STC’s Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre (to give it its full name—they like ‘em long at STC these days), the revival of the apartheid-themed play about two brothers separated by race inaugurated the new complex, and my frequent theater companion Diana and I caught the show on Wednesday evening, 22 February. (On 18 February, I published an article on ROT which describes the Signature Center and the three new theaters within it.)

A scathing indictment of South Africa’s policy of apartheid, against which Fugard campaigned fiercely, Blood Knot is the story of two biracial half-brothers, Morris and Zachariah. The men are the sons of the same mother but by different fathers, and light-skinned Morris has passed for white with little impediment—he’s even learned to read and write—but dark-skinned Zach strains as he labors in a park for whites only. The brothers live and clash together in Korsten, a black enclave outside Port Elizabeth (the town in which Fugard grew up), in a shack pieced together from corrugated metal and littered with bits and pieces of a miserable existence where Morrie has returned to look after his brother and save money—from Zach’s pay—to buy a farm. Morrie regulates the brothers’ daily lives, the sound of a ringing alarm clock signaling the times for eating, bible-reading, and sleeping, and monitors the expenses. While Morrie is focused on the brothers' future, built around a romantic notion of buying some land in one of the “blank spaces” of the map of South Africa, Zach is more interested in the present, especially when it comes to “woman.” The half-brothers frequently role-play with one another, adding an additional level of performativity to the play. These games, as the brothers call the interludes, especially the last, extended one, are reminiscent of Samuel Beckett and particularly Waiting for Godot, a play that had opened in London just six years before Blood Knot premièred. (There are also parallels between Zach and Morrie and Estragon and Vladimir that suggest the similarities aren’t accidental or even subconscious.) At the time of the play’s U.S. première, Fugard explained that the play had two aspects: “The first is an enactment of the race problem. The second is more meaningful and personal to me, since it is an expression of the white man’s guilt of responsibility.” (Nominated for a Tony as Best Play in 1985, the Broadway staging of Blood Knot starred Fugard as Morris and Zakes Mokae as Zachariah. The same cast appeared in the sole performance of the play in a makeshift theater inside an old factory in Johannesburg on 3 September 1961, its world première and the first South African play to have a multi-racial cast; previously, white actors in South Africa wore blackface to portray native African characters.)

Apartheid, the Afrikaans word for ‘separateness’ or ‘apartness’—in other words, segregation—was instituted in what was then the Union of South Africa in 1948. Under apartheid, residents of South Africa were classified into four racial groups: native (black), white (principally Afrikaner and English), Asian (mostly Indian and some Chinese), and “coloured” (mixed-race). The entire society was divided into services and areas restricted to one or another of these groups and non-white South Africans were completely disenfranchised in 1970, losing both the right to vote and, for blacks, their citizenship. (Native Africans became citizens of designated “tribal homelands.”) The system was in many ways far worse than the American Jim Crow era of segregation and there was both internal and international resistance to the policy. South Africa, which became a republic on 31 May 1961, simultaneously withdrew from the British Commonwealth because it wouldn’t have withstood the scrutiny of other members, especially the Asian and African Commonwealth nations, for a readmission vote required by its change of status. International opprobrium and sanctions increased, isolating South Africa as a pariah state in international business, sports competitions, and even tours by international performing artists. This status didn’t end until 1994 with majority rule, meaning the re-enfranchisement of native Africans and other non-white groups, and the election of Nelson Mandela as the first black president of the Republic of South Africa.

As the late Vaclav Havel of Czechoslovakia had been with respect to communist oppression in Eastern Europe, Athol Fugard, who turns 80 in June, was an articulate and passionate opponent of apartheid and one of the opposition’s most widely heard voices. His plays, starting in 1956, spoke eloquently and directly about the horrors of the system, even when they were comedies. Fugard used humor a great deal to illuminate the circumstances of oppression and brutality. He himself was persecuted and watched by South African authorities and his plays were banned in his home country; following a 1967 BBC telecast of Blood Knot, the South African government confiscated Fugard’s passport as a mark of its displeasure. He exacerbated this situation by insisting that his plays, which often have racially mixed casts, be performed before non-segregated audiences. Fugard had to start his own theater companies, constituted as private clubs, to effect this. Black actor Zakes Mokae, who died at 75 in 2009, was the dramatist’s frequent partner, collaborator, and colleague. The dramatist persisted, however, and plays like Blood Knot, one of his masterworks, helped spread the truth about the policies of the white minority government abroad and raised the consciousness of countless Americans and Europeans who pressed their societies and governments to pressure South Africa in increasingly effective ways. As Howard Taubman wrote of the first U.S. production, it “begins to dig deeply into what it must feel like to be a colored man in South Africa.” By depicting the dehumanizing world of South African apartheid in the lives of two individuals rather than entire groups, Fugard made the true awfulness of the system as it affected ordinary South Africans accessible to spectators who wouldn’t really understand it from a distance. In his review, Taubman continued that “as the play develops, Mr. Fugard strips away the protective coverings of playfulness and fraternity that the brothers wear for each other. At the end one sees them in a desperate struggle, which cannot be won or ended.” Using humor strengthens the sense of glimpsing reality because, as an acting teacher of mine used to quote Laurence Olivier, “Humor makes more human.”

Aside from the belated Broadway run, from 10 December 1985 to 2 March 1986 at the John Golden Theatre, a transfer from Yale Rep directed by the author (who’s also directing at Signature), there have been two other Off-Broadway productions: the 1964 American première at the Cricket Theatre in the East Village directed by John Berry starring James Earl Jones and J. D. Cannon, and a 1980 production by the Roundabout Theatre Company directed by Suzanne Shepherd with Danny Glover and Cotter Smith. The 1964 staging, produced by Lucille Lortel, launched Fugard’s career in the United States. The STC revival is the first in 26 years in New York City. (Concurrently, the first Broadway production of Fugard’s 1984 play, The Road to Mecca, is on stage at the American Airlines Theatre, a revival by the Roundabout Theatre which opened on 17 January.)

STC, which dedicates its seasons each to one playwright, has enhanced its programs with the opening of the Signature Center. The former “one writer/one season” residency has been transformed into Residency One, and Fugard, the first non-American dramatist in the series, is the designated writer for 2011-12. He’ll have three plays at STC this season: Blood Knot, which opened the new complex on 31 January; My Children! My Africa!; and the New York première of his latest play, The Train Driver. (Among its other expanded programs, STC now has another residency, Residency Five, for less-established writers. There are three productions this season from those dramatists, all premières. A seventh show in 2011-12 is Edward Albee’s The Lady from Dubuque, which I’ll be seeing next month. Albee is this season’s Legacy writer at STC.) Fugard has directed Blood Knot and will also stage Train Driver this summer; Ruben Santiago-Hudson, who directed the Signature revival of August Wilson’s Seven Guitars during the troupe’s 2006-07 season, will stage My Children! My Africa! in the spring. (I’ll be seeing both the other Fugard plays later this season and reporting on the performances on ROT soon after I do.)

The Griffin, as the theater is called, is a little proscenium house, modeled, as I reported in my article on the new complex, on an old-time European opera house. It served admirably, both from the perspective of its acoustics and its layout. Though the audience risers are fixed in place, the stage platform is removable and Blood Knot’s set, which includes its own sort of platform in the floor of the hut which is raised up as if built on sawhorses and junk, is constructed in the center of the room’s floor, some three feet lower. (In fact, Christopher H. Barreca’s design includes the floor beneath what would have been the stage, with piles of trash and discarded stuff littering the space around the hut in the center of the performance area.) This makes the performance area of the Griffin resemble a black box, with the walls of the room serving as the walls of the set, pipes and conduits and all, even as the auditorium remains a more formal theater environment. This provides the performance venue a kind of mixed heritage—like the characters in Fugard’s play.

The published reviews all had some reservations about the production or the play and the Times centered its misgivings on the acting—or at least the interpretation of the apartheid-affected world which the characters inhabit. My impression of Charles Isherwood’s response was that perhaps the actors, Colman Domingo as Zach and Scott Shepherd as Morrie, are too young to grasp completely the way that world was in 1961, that it is just too distant from them in 2012 for the actors to immerse themselves viscerally in that existence. I can only say that if that was so when the play opened in January, it wasn’t much in evidence when I saw the performance. Perhaps the South African accents—Morrie’s Afrikaans-inflected English and Zach’s native African speech pattern—are a little iffy (I’m not that up on those accents; the dialect coach was Barbara Rubin) and they wobble a bit now and then, but what Domingo and Shepherd do on the Griffin’s stage that paves over any possible flaws is create the most astonishing relationship I have seen in any performance in my memory since probably Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn did The Gin Game together back in 1977. Zach and Morrie may be the oddest brothers a playwright can imagine, but Domingo and Shepherd build a credible, grounded, solid, palpable blood knot that was thoroughly engrossing and holds the 2½-hour performance together even as the play’s structure grows more and more diffuse and fuzzy. (It’s interesting to note that the two actors come together in this production from pretty diverse acting experiences: Colman from musicals—a Tony nomination for The Scottsboro Boys—and Shepherd from the Wooster Group and the Elevator Repair Service—Hamlet, Vieux Carre, Gatz.) If the actors don’t fully inhabit the world of apartheid, they are so linked together and so forcefully connected to one another, that the relationship alone can carry the show.

The hut set, as I said, is built on a platform elevated in the center of the floor and there’s a pathway around it, like a mote around a castle or a stream surrounding a little island. The shanty’s claustrophobically tiny but suggests a refuge cut off from the rest of the world. Fugard directed the actors to enter at stage right, step down onto the floor level and then trudge all the way across the front of the hut, around the left side and the back and come back around the right side to climb up into the shack. There are no walls so we can see the whole passage, and especially when Zach returns from work at the park (where he’s been required to stand guard at the gate to keep blacks and coloureds out, instead of doing some kind of active labor, which he’d prefer), he walks like a bone-weary, footsore drudge. But when he arrives home, Morrie has prepared a footbath of warm water and bath salts to soothe his brother’s callouses and hard spots. (Like Beckett’s Estragon in Waiting for Godot, Zach has constant foot problems.) When Zach remonstrates over the smell of one brand of salts over the healing properties of the other, Morrie comes up with the perfect solution: he’ll pour in half of one and half of the other so Zach gets the benefits of both. Shepherd and Domingo parry and dodge; it seems that Zach won’t be satisfied while Morrie keeps trying to find a way to accommodate his brother and the two actors begin to build the brotherly relationship that grows deeper and more complex as the play unfolds.

The relationship sometimes looks as if it might degenerate into one of master and servant (a shadow of Pozzo and Lucky in Godot?), with Morrie taking command and almost cowing Zach into going along with one of his ideas, and Shepherd may skirt that dynamic but always pulls back before the brothers can descend into it. At the same time, Fugard seems to mean for us to see the danger of that possibility as an inherent consequence of the established divide South African society has mandated. At the same time, there are hints in the relationship of paternalism as Morrie cajoles or coddles Zach when the black brother hesitates or resists, or when Morrie must take command because he can read or write or rationalize, “white” skills in the segregated apartheid world. There are also clear indications of Morrie's sincere solicitude for Zach; for instance, there’s only one bed in the tiny shack, obviously Zach’s—so where does Morrie sleep? Possibly they share the bed, Zach sleeping at night and Morrie during the day while his brother’s at work, but I suspect Morrie sleeps on the floor beside Zach’s cot. I think this is what Fugard meant by “an expression of the white man’s guilt of responsibility,” but Shepherd and Domingo don’t play the political overtones, they play the personal core of the scenes, and that’s what makes this performance—these performances—so strong and vibrant and what makes the play so moving and powerful, even now when apartheid and Jim Crow are both merely nagging memories which we’re all still trying to shake and move on from.

Among the most remarkable aspects of Blood Knot are the games Morrie and Zach play. At first, they’re recollections of their shared childhood, before Morrie went off to live in the white world. We see the split that formed even then, though, when Zach tells his brother that Morrie got all the toys—somehow there was always only one, like a top Morrie doesn’t even remember—and that their mother sang different songs to each brother. Briefly, Morrie panics that maybe they didn’t share the childhood he thought they had had in common, but then they light on the game they played in the shell of an abandoned car as they took imaginary trips with Zach at the wheel and Morrie describing the passing scene as they drove out of the town into the country, going faster and faster. I could sense in Shepherd’s momentary fear the loss of the connection he was sure they had, and the return of the fraternal blood knot, “the bond between brothers,” when they relive the road-trip fantasy. Just when it looks like Morrie and Zach might slip into an exploiter-exploited relationship, Shepherd and Domingo realign the portrayals and I saw again the bond that brought Morrie back to Korsten. The farm is a dream, of course, almost certainly an impossible one, but Shepherd made me believe that he really wants it for both of the brothers, even if Zach isn’t so sure. Domingo keeps Zach focused on the here and now, the more immediate needs and desires: his feet, his racist boss at the park, and a woman for sexual companionship.

It’s that last desire that nearly breaks the brothers up and threatens real disaster. Since Morrie’s arrival in Korsten about a year earlier, Zach hasn’t had much contact with an old friend who used to come by so the two could drink together and go cruising for women. Morrie wants to save all of Zach’s earnings toward the farm, so socializing has been eliminated, and Zach misses it—especially “woman.” The more Zach talks about it, the more animated, even lustful, Domingo gets, and finally Morrie lights on an idea that he convinces Zach will be just as good as an actual woman: a female pen pal chosen from a newspaper ad. The next day, the brothers select a candidate and start the correspondence, with Morrie being the Cyrano of the duo and the illiterate Zach, the inarticulate Christian de Neuvillette—until the young woman sends a photo. It’s then Morrie discovers that Zach had brought home a newspaper for whites and that all the ads were from white women. To make matters worse, Ethel, the pen pal, has a brother who’s a policeman. Morrie sees the danger in continuing even to correspond with a white woman, but Zach insists and begins to wax more fanciful in his letters. Domingo’s portrayal hints at a kind of defiance, revolt against the kind of marginalization he’s suffered at the hands of a racist society (as illustrated by his treatment at work by his white supervisor). It’s nearly subliminal, but it’s there. Then Ethel announces that she’s going to be in Port Elizabeth for a holiday and would like to meet Zach, and Morrie nearly falls to pieces in fear of the likely consequences. The brothers decide they can’t avoid the meeting by lying about not being available, so Zach convinces Morrie to go in his place and they go so far as to buy a suit and other appropriate accessories for a white gentleman. Luckily, Ethel cancels the visit and ends the correspondence when she writes Zach that she’s getting married, but the potential that the entrance of a third party, even before the men learn she’s white, might tear the dream apart—the money Morrie’s saved to buy the farm has already been spent on the fancy duds—and that Ethel could split the two up, makes clear that what Morrie had in mind was a two-man farm, a world for just him and Zach to inhabit, a larger version of the shanty, a safe and happy place insulated from apartheid, prejudice, inhumanity, injustice, and all the failings Zach had experienced and for which Morrie had to teach him the names. In 1961, no place like that existed in South Africa, but Morrie is blind to that reality.

The games get more precarious and dangerous in act two, as the play slides inexorably away from Naturalism to Absurdism, when they move from innocent childhood role-plays to more contemporary situations, as when Zach brings home the new suit for Morrie so he can meet Ethel. (It’s amusing to see what Zach and Morrie’s notions of white gentlemanliness consists of, both in dress—the suit’s electric blue!—and in demeanor.) As the brothers rehearse for the meeting, Shepherd gets more and more into his role as the superior white man with Domingo playing the menial black man. Morrie gets carried away in a flash and calls his brother “nigger.” The look of shock on Domingo’s face and of instant shame and regret in Shepherd’s tells the whole story in a beat and reveals the very core of Fugard’s play—the destructiveness of apartheid and prejudice of all kinds, how it demeans all the participants, even those who resist its viciousness. (Morrie had returned to Zach because he didn’t like passing for white.) It invades the body and the mind, and no matter how hard you try, it gets in and eats away at your humanity . . . until you can call your own brother “nigger.” That right there is what Fugard spent his career writing about—and against.

The final game, during which Zach and Morrie essentially knock down the cabin and clear the floor platform, spins off into Beckett-land. (There’s also a bit of Jean-Claude van Itallie’s Motel in the scene, too, though that play didn’t come along until three years later.) The elements of Godot and End Game are so clear that I have to conclude that the impulse wasn’t subliminal but conscious and deliberate. If Becket was writing about the existential collapse of humanity and civilization (and I’m being very general and superficial here), Fugard was writing about the same collapse, but in a more concrete and visible context. I’d never seen Blood Knot before, though I’ve known about the play for years. From this 21st-century mounting, I can only imagine the impact it must have had on American audiences in 1964—it must have been a revelation.

Diana objected to the lax dramatic structure of Blood Knot (though in the end, she effused about the performances as much as I did, so I gather they overshadowed her intermission misgivings by the time the play ended). In the New York Post, Elisabeth Vincentelli agrees that the “first act of this revival dillydallies on a road to nowhere interesting” but continues that “the show eventually picks up. The first half lulls you into a snooze; the second slaps you awake” and Joe Dziemianowicz writes in the New York Daily News: “The play moves slowly and at times gets ponderous before delivering a wallop.” My feeling is that the problem’s nothing more than a very young playwright, 28 at the time with only four plays produced before this one, trying new ideas and styles, not having really come to grips with the form. At 2½ hours, the script could have stood some editing and streamlining 50 years ago, but the loose structure, almost non-structure, of the play didn’t bother me. (I should note here, perhaps, that among my all-time favorite plays are Godot and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, two notoriously unconventionally structured plays. I may not be the person whose judgment you want to follow in this instance.) Charles Isherwood, writing in the New York Times, says that “the production is more intellectually stimulating than emotionally engaging” because “a crucial spark of authentic feeling remains stubbornly absent.” I want to note, though, that Isherwood adds that the actors hadn’t “as yet” completely absorbed the nuances of their roles and the relationship, so I’m going to suggest that by the time I saw the production, both Shepherd and Domingo had nailed those aspects of the characters. (Of course, maybe Isherwood and I just don’t see this work the same way.) The Times reviewer concludes his notice by stating: “As the lights dim on the brothers facing a vacant future, bound in a relationship now potentially tainted by all that has passed, the heart remains cool because the performance never truly plumbs the play’s anguished depths.” I can’t agree. Maybe my heartstrings are more easily plucked than Isherwood’s, but I was left heart sore and moved. In Back Stage (a paper, after all, aimed at actors), Erik Haagensen declares that “thanks to the superb performances of Scott Shepherd and Colman Domingo and author Fugard's knowing direction, the show keeps picking up steam and ends with a Beckettian wallop.” In the Wall Street Journal, Terry Teachout (in a review headlined “Waiting for Mandela”) states unequivocally: “If you don't find this revival enthralling, you're not thrillable.” Most reviewers came down in the end, as I did, on Teachout’s side.

I should add at the end that though, as I said, the Griffin Theatre works excellently as a performance space, the umbrella of the Signature Center presented a few inadequacies that didn’t reveal themselves when I visited the complex on 2 February. First, when the company was housed at the single-theater Norton Space, the two-window box office was more than sufficient to handle the audiences arriving to pick up will-call tickets or to conduct other business before curtain. (My partner is often late enough that I have to leave her ticket at the box office when I decide to go on into the auditorium, for instance.) With three performances starting at about the same time at the new Signature Center, the line-up at Concierge Desk was well over a dozen people when I arrived to claim my seats, and when I decided not to wait for Diana in the lobby any longer, I saw that I’d be standing in a line again to leave her ticket for her, long enough to chance being late into the theater. There were three concierges on duty, but their efficiency was apparently poor as they searched for each arriving patron’s tickets, and had I not hesitated a moment to get back on the line, during which time Diana popped up, I’d have been waiting there myself a second time. That clearly needs to be ironed out. Further, when the staff announced that the house was opened for audience seating, the PA system was almost inaudible over the hubbub of three audiences gathered in the lobby. I’d noticed that the acoustics in the lobby weren’t good when I was there earlier, but I hadn’t realized that even under amplification, announcements couldn’t be heard there when there was a full room of people hanging about. As I did remark before, however, the Signature Center’s lobby isn’t a very comfortable space to wait; in practice it isn’t any more welcoming than I thought when I saw it on the tour. The Norton lobby, such as it is, is cramped and has little seating for waiting spectators, but it isn’t being sold as a place to gather and hang out; the Signature Center’s lobby is supposed to be more than a place to wait for the theaters to open their doors. For now, at least, I don’t think I’ll be treating it as anything more than that.