'Ivanov' (Lincoln Center Festival 2009)

The Katona József Theatre’s rendition of Chekhov’s first full-length play, Ivanov, opened on Tuesday, 7 July, opening day of the 2009 Lincoln Center Festival of international performances. It was presented at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College, 10th Avenue and 58th Street. Directed in Hungarian by Tamás Ascher, the production is reset in the Hungary of the 1960s and ‘70s--post-uprising, but decidedly within the grim, grey period of Soviet domination of not only Eastern Europe’s politics but its culture as well. To my eye, this resetting had several repercussions, mostly beneficial to this difficult play, which Chekhov saw as a bleak comedy. (As I mentioned to my friend Diana as we were reading through the program before the curtain, this kind of dark, ironic humor is a societal characteristic of the Russian character--the Russian soul, if you will. When I was studying Russian, especially at the Defense language school where our teachers were all native-born Russians, I learned several Russian jokes and read some literary humor. Both before and during the Communist era, Russian humor was rife with this bleak, dour, pessimistic sense of resignation.) The Katona’s production ramped up the comedy--there was copious laughter from the audience--without really losing the bleakness of the world of the play.

First, let me utter a discouraging word. I hate supertitles. I think I’ve complained about this technique before, and my attitude hasn’t changed with further exposure. I understand that it’s cheaper and more portable than the former practice of having actors reading the English translation over a PA system transmitted to earphones. And there were certainly drawbacks to that method of providing translations for foreign-language productions, the chief one of which was probably that the spectator can’t hear what the actors on stage are actually saying, but that was a partially soluble problem and the earphones allowed me to keep my eyes on the stage full time. (I learned to lower the volume of the earphones so I could just hear the readers while I could still listen to the tone and expression of the voices of actors on stage.) Supertitles, almost always high above the actors’ heads, force me to shuttle back and forth between the text and the stage, usually missing one or the other at a crucial moment. In addition, sometimes, too often for my wishes, the translation disappears too quickly for me to catch it and, if I’m seated far enough back, the writing is too small for me to read at all. It drives me batty and sometimes really ruins what might otherwise be a nice theater experience. I really do hate this technology. (I’ve mentioned a production I saw back in ’86 at the Theatre of Nations, a Russian play performed in Bulgarian, that didn’t provide a translation at all, just a synopsis of the plot. The company, the Ivan Vasov National Theatre of Sofia, were such excellent practitioners of Stanislavsky Realism that the truthfulness of the performances and the consistency of the characterizations managed to come through clearly enough to obviate the need for a translation. That’s extremely rare, I would image though.) I've suffered with my supertitle problem in many productions, though because of the set-up, the Ivanov was toughest for me at the LCF shows I've seen so far this year. I can’t be sure how much I missed--though I know I missed several of the laugh lines.

One thing the transposition of the production from 19th-century Russia to mid-20th-century Hungary accomplished was to allow the set designer (Zsolt Khell, for those of you who follow international theater tech) and director Ascher to convey the dismal, depressing world Nikolai Ivanov inhabits very vividly (if that’s not oxymoronic) without stressing it in the acting, which could sabotage the comedy Ascher obviously wanted to bring forth. “Chekhov viewed the world with a certain black humor, even if the most important characteristic of his protagonist is self-pity,” wrote Ascher in a program note. “I think that the performance cannot aim at the enlargement of this self-pity, but on the contrary, it should show this self-pity in a sarcastic way.” The director further explains, “With this production I am trying to create a very strong atmosphere which has nothing to do with the traditional, nostalgic Chekhovian atmosphere that we are used to seeing. My Ivanov is played in a cold, depressing world, very familiar to” audiences who experienced the era. Anyone who’s been to any of the Eastern Bloc countries in the ‘60s or ‘70s--and I visited Poland, Russia, and the Ukraine in 1965 and lived in West Berlin, a stone’s throw from the GDR, in the early ‘70s--knows how grey and cheerless much of that world was. Anything built after the end of World War II was characterless; it gave new meaning to the term “classless society”! (For those who never saw even a representation of the Stalinist/Socialist decor, take any institutional facility--a public school, a government office, a union meeting hall--and take away all the remaining grace notes and personality.) Nikolai is depressed--but if he weren’t already, this existence would make him so.

It may not have been part of Ascher’s plan, but one element of this atmosphere is derived not from anything he put on the stage but from associations spectators with some recollection of world history might add. First, the period of the Katona’s Ivanov is only a relatively short time after the abortive anti-Soviet uprising in Hungary in 1956. All but the youngest characters in the play would have remembered that short-lived reach for freedom that was so brutally put down by Russian tanks. Further back in history, though, was another world entirely. As part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Budapest was one of the sophisticated, glittering capitals of Europe; Hungary was a cultural power producing theater (Molnar), music (Lehar), and cuisine (Sachertorte, strudel) all of Europe sought out. World War I ended the empire and Hungary became an independent nation and its significance in the world receded between the wars, but the residual panache, the fading luster, hung around for a generation. What was left after World War II was erased by the Soviet Union. As disheartening as life in mid-century Hungary must have been, the contrast to what it had been and what it might have regained in 1956 made the play’s present time all the more joyless. (I have no evidence that Ascher even considered any of this, but I thought of it while I was watching the play. I didn’t bring it up to Diana, so I also have no idea if anyone else in the audience flashed on it. I may have been the only one. Wouldn’t be the first time!)

Another result of the temporal relocation was a reinforcement of the spareness of the lives of Nikolai and the other characters. In a traditional setting for a Chekhov play of the late 19th century--Ivanov was written in 1887 and revised two years later--there are all kinds of objects on the set, objects actors can use to occupy themselves and anchor themselves and their characters to the place. There are samovars, glasses of tea, liquor decanters, books, and chotchkes of all kinds that provide actors with activities and business. In the spartan world of the socialist ‘60s and ‘70s, there’s almost nothing around but bare walls. Now, it may well have been that Ascher didn’t want his characters busy, and even in a czarist setting he may have denied his cast any objects--but the lack of any decor not only looked empty, but enhanced the sense that the lives of these people are themselves empty. These people have nothing to do with themselves because there’s nothing to do it with.

The difficulty with these effects, though, is that they do leave the actors bereft of activity. As someone or other once said of Chekhov’s plays, You can write a play about boredom, but it can’t be boring. Plays about having nothing to do (actually, Ivanov isn’t exactly about having nothing to do--that’s just what’s going on in this world) are in danger if there’s actually nothing to do on stage. Okay, I’m exaggerating a little--there are objects on stage, but only the bare minimum for what Ascher wants his characters to do; they play with the tacky furniture a lot. But the danger is there, and as I remarked with Mary Stuart recently, a play with no action or even activity becomes all about the words. (Remember, I have a difficulty here with the text, so this problem would be exacerbated.) Thanks to Ascher, however, and the excellence of his company’s acting--like those Bulgarians, these folks are masters--whenever I could watch them, they filled the stage with animation, even if it was only inner animation. (That’s not a backhanded compliment: some actors can do with stillness what others can only accomplish through behavior. Their bodies become animated because of what’s happening inside.)

I guess I’ve been talking around this production an awful lot; I sort of started in the middle somewhat. Let me back up a few steps. Ivanov isn’t as well known as Chekhov’s four major plays. (Only Platonov and The Wood Demon are probably less familiar. Ivanov does get played more often than those two.) The play tells the story of Nikolai Ivanov, a landowner who farms a large estate. For the past five years, he has been married to Anna Petrovna who is suffering from tuberculosis. Nikolai's estate is run by a distant relative, Misha Borkin, who constantly advises people on how he can help them make money. Doctor Lvov, an honest man as he frequently reminds everyone, informs Nikolai that Anna needs rest in the Crimea. Unfortunately, Nikolai is unable to afford that, since he owes Lebedev's wife, Zhinaida, 9000 rubles. Nikolai’s friends admonish him for spending time at Pasha Lebedev's house instead of being with his sick wife. At the end of Act One, Nikolai departs to visit Lebedev and is followed by Anna and Lvov. Act Two opens with a party at Lebedev's where many of the guests gossip about Nikolai. According to them, Nikolai’s only motive for marrying Anna was the large dowry; however when Anna married him, she converted from Judaism to Russian Orthodoxy and her father disowned her. The Lebedevs have a daughter, Sasha, with whom Nikolai seems to be flirting. The act concludes with the two kissing. Anna sees them and faints. Act Three features a number of conversations between Nikolai and other characters, including talks with Lebedev about money and Lvov about the way Nikolai treats Anna. The scene ends with Anna bursting in on Nikolai and Sasha, who are simply talking, resulting in Nikolai's telling Anna she is dying, a fact she previously has not known. The last act takes place a year later. Anna has died and Nikolai and Sasha are preparing to marry. As the wedding is about to begin, Lvov appears and exposes Nikolai's intentions simply to marry Sasha for her dowry. Nikolai draws a gun, but Sasha intervenes. Nikolai shoots himself in front of the wedding guests. (In the original version, the suicide takes place off stage. This is really the only major change in the script Ascher made.)

The acting, as I have already hinted, was superb. Nikolai (Ernö Fekete) is clearly the lead character in the play because he’s the focus of not only the plot, but the theme. As we dramaturgs like to put it: the play happens to him. But the production was a fine example of ensemble playing. Fekete got more stage time than anyone else, but each of the others forged not just a character that belonged in this milieu, but a person who rubbed up against Nikolai in just the right way to add to the oppression that drives him. Even the gang of acquaintances, as opposed to the close friends and associates like Pasha (Zoltán Bezerédi), Misha (Ervin Nagy), or Lvov (Zoltán Rajkai), formed a very specific group, a kind of malevolent chorus or a pack of malicious Eumenides who created the atmosphere of gossip, rumor, and rebuke in which Nikolai must live. In other words, while Nikolai was at its center, the Katona company constituted a world that was self-contained (even, perhaps, hermetically sealed, like a ghastly snow globe).

Ivanov treats several different themes, the main one of which is Nikolai’s loss of taste for life. Most of Chekhov’s plays paint this picture in at least one of their characters, though Ivanov is the only one in which the sufferer is the central figure and the only one who analyzes his own malady. (Remember that Chekhov was trained as a doctor and that such figures as Pavlov, Vladimir Bekhterev, Théodule-Armand Ribot--the inspiration for Stanislavsky--and Freud were making medical history at the time.) The play says, for instance, that Nikolai had “fallen out of love” with Anna, but I think this was just a symptom of the malaise that Chekhov was exploring, the “Russian sickness” that he believed infected the Russian soul. It was a common belief at the end of the 19th century that moral decay was manifested in physical illness; Ibsen demonstrated this in many of his characters, most prominently Oswald Alving in Ghosts and Dr. Rank in Doll House. (It is this medical belief in part which makes Nora leave her children behind: she’s afraid of infecting them with the consequences of her moral lapse.) In Ivanov, Nikolai’s spiritual deficiency, his selfishness, his lack of compassion and empathy, are rewarded with depression, lassitude, and failure to thrive. He isn’t so much out of love with his wife as he is out of love with life altogether. (It’s little wonder, I guess, that, as Jason Zinoman pointed out in his New York Times review of the production, many well-known stage Hamlets have also gone on to play Nikolai: Branagh, Kline, Fiennes. Chekhov even refers to Shakespeare’s character in Ivanov.) At the same time, he’s beset from all sides, by his scheming estate manager, Misha; his idle uncle, Matvei; the self-righteous Lvov; not to mention Anna, Sasha, Zhinaida, and Lebedev.

Not, of course, that he’s an innocent victim. He married Anna, née Sarah Abramson, and then made her leave her faith, thus cutting her off from her family and community. He married her for her dowry--which he didn’t get in the end--and then plans to marry again after Anna’s death for the same reason. Like Nora’s having forged her father’s signature on bank papers, Nikolai’s moral failings have returned to haunt him. He may have even infected Anna. Is Nikaolai the cause of her tuberculosis? (TB, or consumption as it was called in the 19th century, was believed to have a spiritual component. Thomas Mann treats this contention extensively in The Magic Mountain.) But Anna isn’t entirely free of moral weakness herself: she’s suspicious, jealous, and obsessive. Maybe she helped cause her own disease.

There is a wide streak of anti-Semitism in the play. Ivanov’s neighbors gloat over Anna’s rejection by her family and, after he married Anna in the face of his society’s prejudice against Jews, Nikolai abandons her even in illness. When Anna confronts him with Sasha, Nikolai shouts at his fatally-ill wife, “Shut up, you Jew!” (Zinoman makes a small point of this translation, noting that David Hare rendered the line as “dirty Jew.” Another translation has “Jewess,” a slightly archaic-sounding epithet. The original Russian, however, goes further than any of these, calling Anna zhidovka, “you little Yid.” I can’t speak for what the actors said in Magyar.) In other words, as bold a face as he puts on when he marries Anna, he’s really still contaminated with his society’s prejudice. It is part of his moral illness.

(To increase the sense of Anna’s suffering, when she is near death and calls on her father to come see her, he refuses. On the surface, this just seems a cruel additional abandonment, cold-hearted punishment for her conversion to Christianity. Though Chekhov doesn’t say so, audiences familiar with Jewish practice might recognize this as traditional, if harsh, Jewish custom. When a child leaves the faith, most often by marrying a non-Jew, he or she is expelled from the community and ostracized. A son is mourned as if he died; a daughter is simply treated as if she never existed. If you remember Fiddler, this is what happens to Chava when she elopes with Fyedka. When she returns to plead with Tevye, he refuses to speak with her and admonishes the village to shun her. It may be severe, but it’s imposed on the faithful by convention. It is more an indictment of the culture than the man.)

It’s been a long time since I spent so much of a report on the script of a play as opposed to the production--not since Valle-Inclán’s Divine Words two years ago at another Lincoln Center Festival, I don’t think. This is partly because the play is so little known compared to Chekhov’s other main works, but it’s also because the production, as difficult as it was to follow sometimes because of the supertitles and my split focus, brought out much of this very palpably. (Some came to me as I watched or later thought about the play, and probably would have occurred to me no matter what production I saw, or even if I had just read the script. I’m not so good at literary interp, but occasionally things dawn on me.) In the case of the Katona’s Ivanov, the resetting in the Soviet era of the ‘60s and ‘70s and the visual stimulus of the institutional set drove some of this home, and so did the playing style of Ascher’s cast.

One of the repercussions of the resetting was that none of the characters, especially Nikolai, were in any way aristocratic or privileged. They were the most ordinary of ordinary men and women. Their clothes (costumes were by Györgyi Szakács) were pitch-perfect reproductions of what Soviet-bloc Eastern Europeans wore at the time--frumpy, ill-fitting approximations of western dress, no sense of style or taste. The women, especially, were overdressed in bold patterns and colors, with white go-go boots or clunky high heels, too much make-up and badly dyed hair. They looked like some of the people I saw walking the streets in Moscow or Kiev in ’65, and against the drab yellow plaster walls of the single-room set, resembling a sort of community hall in some provincial town somewhere, made them seem all the more garish and sad. The actors, who made their characters all seem desperate to find some respite from the grimness in which they lived, pushed the festiveness of the party scenes or, in Anna’s case, the compulsion for loving contact from her husband to extremes. Not over-the-top, farcical extremes, but the extremes of people in a frenzy for a life they can’t find. Even Lvov’s vaunted honesty was just the wrong side of uncompromising. The vocal and physical fluency of the cast made it possible for them to convey these changing states--they reacted to stimuli the way primitive organisms in petri dishes do: instantly--making my problem with the text often irrelevant (when I could watch what was happening on stage without concerning myself with the dialogue). Fekete, who looks like a man in advancing middle age who was once handsome, and Nagy had several moments of almost mercurial changes of temperament which they managed with complete credibility.

Credible, yes, but funny. These characters, in Ascher’s interpretation, were figures of fun. They were ridiculous and outré (though not far removed from the reality I remember from the same milieu or thereabouts!). One reviewer called Nagy’s Misha a clown, and perhaps he was to an extent. But this wasn’t a clown show. They weren’t Estragon and Vladimir. Clowns are subhuman; these characters were supremely human, just in extremis. That made them funny--as long as they aren’t you! It comes back to that Russian black humor, exacerbated by transposing the play to Soviet-era Hungary. You laugh at how silly and petty these people were, but then you see how shabby and empty their lives were. More than one reviewer compared Ascher’s approach to Ivanov as Chekhov-cum-Beckett; maybe that’s right, though I saw less absurdity as horrific contrast--more Chekhov-cum-Kafka. Consider The Trial, for instance. I think that explains the laughter in the face of all the grimness better.

'The Connection'

[15 July is the 50th anniversary of the opening of the original Living Theatre production of The Connection. The play ran for years in the Living's rep, accumulating 778 performances between 15 July 1959 and 31 March 1963. In view of this historic moment, I’m now posting this report, which I wrote a few days after seeing the revival, in recognition of the importance of the event.]

I took the opportunity of the revival of the Living Theatre’s landmark production of Jack Gelber’s The Connection to go down to Loisaida on 5 February and check out this bit of theater history. Charles Isherwood had given the revival of The Connection, which ran from 8 January to 13 February, a decidedly mixed review in the Times, but it happens that I wrote the entry for the play in The Cambridge Guide to American Theatre (1993), so I wanted to see it myself. It's not often that you get to go back a little in time and check out a theatrical experience that had such an impact, perhaps even changing everything that came afterwards. (No less a figure than Edward Albee, who made his own successful Off-Broadway debut the next year, asserted, "I was so affected and energized by 'The Connection.' It was exciting, dangerous, instructive and terrifying . . . .") You can go back and look at the paintings and sculptures that redirected the Dark Ages into the Renaissance or launched Impressionism. You can read Zola's Thérèse Raquin and see how literary realism began, but you can't go back and witness the time Sophocles stunned Athens by introducing a third actor to the stage or recapture the astonishment in the audiences the first time they saw Hair in the late '60s (despite its popular, Broadway-bound revival just now). Sure, there are revivals of Ibsen’s Doll House and Osborne's Look Back in Anger, but they are usually re-conceptions or modern interpretations. Few directors want to reconstruct their predecessors' results; they want to create their own. But here was the Living attempting to recreate the production that, in its way, defined mid-century American avant-garde theater, and Judith Malina, the original director, was going to stage it again herself. I sure had to take a shot at that.

Of course, no one can really turn the clock back, and the times have gone by: the original actors are dead or retired, Julian Beck (who designed the original set) is gone, and none of us is as theatrically naïve as the spectators were in the summer of '59. The Living Theatre's old building at 6th Avenue and 14th Street is still standing (it's an eyeglass store now), but the company's moved many times since then, including a five-year self-exile in Europe, so the performance space is different and the Lower East Side in the 2009 isn't Greenwich Village at the end of the 1950s. But maybe something of the old atmosphere remains hovering about the city, like that sweet smell New Yorkers experienced last January, when the revival opened, but couldn't identify until a month later. Maybe there's still a little Proustian magic in the madeleine, and a glimpse of that remarkable experience is possible even in 2009. (And it's not like I can't get lost in a theatrical world, either. I still remember seeing Pat Carroll in GS3 back in June 1980 and literally thinking, as I was watching the performance, "Gee, Stein's a fascinating person. I'm so glad I met her.")

Well, as theater history, a so-called museum production, The Connection was fine, and I'm more than glad to have seen it, even half a century after the fact. I'm trusting Malina, who is 82 now, to have recreated the basic theatrical mise-en-sène of the original staging as much as is possible with a new cast (only one of whom could possibly have even been alive in 1959!) and a different performance space. I have enough of an imagination to conjure up in that little theater offering the whopping great experience with the prompting of Malina's backward glance. I think I can also put myself in the mindset of the less-jaded and theatrically less-well-traveled spectator who sat there in 1959 and had never seen anything like it before. (To be honest, I was a little primed before I walked into the theater on Clinton Street. Having read something of the production when I did the research for the CGAT article--and having pretty much grown up with the notion of the famous Connection because it is part of theater lore--I may have been projecting the show in my imagination onto the one at the Living last winter. What can I do?)

I'll assume that most people know the outline of Gelber's Connection, that "it focused on the lives of heroin-addicted musicians listlessly awaiting their 'connection,' Cowboy" (as I wrote for CGAT) and that a jazz ensemble jammed on and off during the play. The audience is an "invited" bunch allowed to eavesdrop on this bit of "real life," which is an improvised play with producer and playwright in attendance, and a film crew on hand to record the experience. (Now it's a video crew.) The Connection, of course, was never actually improvised: Jack Gelber, who died in 2003, wrote it, after all (and it's published), though some of the dialogue might have been spontaneous‑‑or developed from spontaneity during rehearsals. (The Living had never been an improvisatory troupe up till then, though they later did engage in audience-interaction in some of their performances.) The "real life" witnessed by the spectators on 14th Street wasn't real--the characters were actors, not junkies (though, of course, being both wasn't impossible). There were, in fact, rumors that the cast were real addicts and that real smack was shot up on stage; it wouldn't surprise me if Julian Beck had started those rumors himself to keep the curious coming downtown. There were also reports of spectators fleeing the theater, finding the spectacle a bit too real and too hard to take; in London, audiences booed and shouted. Nothing like that happened down on Clinton Street (but, once again, I could imagine it that way 50 years ago).

There's little, if any, plot in The Connection: the characters wait in Leach's loft for Cowboy to arrive; he arrives; they get high. The end. The drama in The Connection is what everyone does while they wait--first for the dealer, then for the high to take hold. (Malina says that everyone's on a "search for the ecstatic," which the musicians look for in their music, Sister Salvation looks for "in the promise of Redemption," and the junkies in "the flash of the heroin.") They bicker, they philosophize, they confess--often to us, since we're "there"--and each character gets a soliloquy, delivered directly to us. I don't think that was a brand-new concept even in '59--the idea of the audience being literally present for the characters--but it wasn't common. And married to the edginess of the jonesing characters, the doping, and the general seamy alienness of the life they're witnessing up close, it's easy to see how a middle-class audience at the end of the Eisenhower era might find this experience exciting, even disturbing--but The Connection became the Living's most successful and, after Paradise Now, its most iconic performance and, as I noted, has gone down in theater history. (It was also filmed in 1962 and the music, composed by Freddie Redd, was recorded in 1960.)

In 1959, some critics rejected it, some embraced it. Louis Calta of the Times called the play "a farrago of dirt, small-time philosophy, empty talk and extended runs of 'cool' music"; and Walter Kerr in the Herald Tribune said that "the evening produced in me a restive feeling that we are at the end of the road, now, and faced with a choice: We must either return to believing in the possibility of art, which was the point we started at, or abandon the pretense to art altogether." Kenneth Tynan of Harper's Bazaar, the New Yorker, and London's Observer called The Connection "the most memorable theatrical experience at present accessible in New York," while Brooks Atkinson declared it "an engrossing piece of theatre in an obsessive style" that "cannot be ignored" in the Sunday Times. (In 2009, the critics were more united in their dismissal.)

Okay, all that's sort of prologue. As a contemporary theater experience, we got problems. Most of them are predictable and probably insurmountable, given the passage of time. As for the script, for example, it's hard to get exercised about junkie artists in our midst. After the '60s, with the deaths of so many from overdoses (Joplin, Hendrix, Morrison) and the celebrity junkies of the ensuing decades (Amy Winehouse, anyone?), it's just not shocking anymore. We've all lived too much since the '50s. The wasted lives, the days spent waiting for a fix or a high--well, even broadcast TV has that story in prime time a couple of times a week. (Hell, there's been a dope-dealing suburban mom on cable once a week for the past four years! Another cable net has a reality show of addiction interventions--though I can't imagine why anyone'd want to watch it!) Nothing anyone says in The Connection is shocking anymore. We've heard it all, sometimes in our own homes. Nothing Malina could have done, short of rewriting Gelber from scratch, could have changed that. (The characters don't shoot up on stage, by the way; it's done off stage, in the bathroom. That kind of mid-century squeamishness has passed, too: even the BBC's Sherlock Holmes series showed the great detective injecting himself with cocaine on screen.)

Then, theatrically: the concept of the "improvised" play, even the fake-improvised play, isn't new anymore, either. Plays with music aren't innovative now; they're commonplace: Sam Shepard did it in 1972 in The Tooth of Crime, for instance. Playing to a real audience is also a technique many companies have used or experimented with (Leo Shapiro, an avant-garde director I’ve written about, made it a hallmark of his work), just like confessional direct-address--on which entire Broadway (and HBO) performances have been based. All of the scary-fascinating new ideas for theater that Malina and Gelber originally incorporated in their production concept have become standard (which, of course, is why The Connection is historically significant). I don't know if you can go home again, but you can't run the clock back for real. The Connection is no longer an experience of unique impact; it is just a tribute. It's a little like comparing the first time I heard The Beatles sing "Hello Goodbye" in 1967 and hearing the current cover of the song by the Jonas Brothers: they sound a lot alike, but the impact isn't there.

Unhappily, though, it's not just the passage of the decades that damaged The Connection. Malina intended the current production to be present-day, not a glimpse into the late '50s. There were references to Starbucks, cell phones, and the current resident of the White House (unnamed, but clearly alluded to), not to mention the appearance of the afore-mentioned digital video camera. So, on top of all the other lost flashpoints, we have some anachronisms that drain the play of its full power. First, in 2009, the drug the junkies are waiting around for probably wouldn't be heroin--or at least not exclusively heroin. My inclination would be crack or meth, considering the demography of the group. (Cocaine would probably be out of their financial reach, as would pharmaceuticals.) Second, the music that would surround a bunch of 20-something dopers would less likely be jazz these days than rock. (The ensemble was a bass, a sax, drums, and a piano. Today there would probably be an electronic keyboard and electric bass in for the piano and strings. And, by the way, I'm not even gonna start wondering where the piano and drum set came from. Okay, maybe Leach has a piano in his pad, but does the drummer carry all his drums with him when he goes to someone's place to wait for his dealer?) Jazz is almost too high-toned now to fit the atmosphere of Gelber's world. The Man with the Golden Arm was 1955; if they made it today, the Sinatra character would be a rocker (and he'd be doing coke, crack, or meth). If you're gonna update, I think you hafta update, man. No half measures.

(Despite the updating, Gary Brackett--variously designated Director of Production and Director of Design--put a hula hoop on the wall of the loft, much to the consternation of the Times's Isherwood, who wondered why no one hula'd. Also, in the one truly absurdist moment--well, two: it was repeated in the second act--an unnamed man strode into the loft carrying a small case. Everyone stopped talking and watched as he opened the case to reveal a Victrola, plugged it into a light socket, and played a jazz 45. It wasn't an iPod, a CD-player, or even a tape-player, but an old-fashioned portable turntable. And a 45, to boot! So, is it real--present day--or is it Memorex--the '50s?)

I don't know if a '50s setting would have worked better--we spectators having been invited up to see an improvised play set a half century ago--but there might have been less time-bending that way. Other problems wouldn't have been so easily solved, and Judith Malina has to take responsibility for these. It's the acting, folks. Now, none of the actors was bad, but none was really more than competent. (I won't single out or name most of the actors because this was an ensemble performance and it was the group as a whole that failed. Isherwood did mention a couple of the cast members specially, but I don't feel that's warranted.) I imagine they'd all have done well enough in a conventional play, even a classic. But the fake improvisation and the audience-engagement didn't come anywhere near off. Everyone was so . . . well, actorly. This was especially so in the soliloquies each character has, when he (there are no women in the gang; the only female character is Sister Salvation, played by Malina herself) addresses us, and we're supposed to feel he's talking to us straight. But nothing in these moments seemed the least spontaneous or organic. The "producer," Jim Dunn (Tom Walker), was perhaps the worst: he seemed exactly like an actor playing a director in a sketch. As the "playwright," Jaybird (as in "naked as a . . ."?), Gelber's stand-in, Eric Olson was awkward and uncomfortable, as if he didn't know his lines or his cues or something. One of the cameramen (Isaac Scranton) kept saying, "That's the way it is. That's the way it really is." It's supposed to be a true expression of realization and bare-faced reaction but it sounded more like the mantra of the painter George Frederick Watts in Virginia Woolf’s Freshwater (which I saw a few weeks earlier last winter by the Women’s Project): "The Utmost for the Highest"--a hollow, meaningless phrase. The musicians were good as a band, but as characters, they were no better than the actors. (Their musical performances were terrific, but that was a problem for me, too. They weren't jamming while hanging around waiting for their fixes; they were performing. I never decided if they were supposed to be just noodling on their instruments because that's what musicians do when they're idle or if the virtuosity of their playing was another of Gelber's absurdist aspects, like the Victrola man and Sister Salvation. To enhance the improvisatory dynamic of the play, I think I'd have gone with the jam-session approach. Although, the absurdist take might "explain" the availability of the piano and the drum set . . . .) I don't know if Malina cast actors who couldn't handle the style of the script, or if she misdirected them. Either way, it's her fault.

The rest of the production went along with the foregoing: The set was too neat, and I don't mean in the sense of cleanliness. Leach says he keeps his place clean, but the walls weren't worn or marred, nothing was especially distressed; a tablecloth he spread on a table to cut up a pineapple looked as if it might have just come from K-Mart. (By the way, aren't pineapples slightly expensive as far as fresh fruit goes? These guys have no money--few of them have jobs.) The costumes were the same. Sam wore open-laced combat boots, but they didn't look like they ever touched pavement. Everyone was suitably sloppy, but more like frat boys than wasted junkies. (They were all clean-shaven, too--an anomaly in these days of the scruffy look even in the chicest of surroundings!) Nary a wrinkle could be detected, much less a tatter or a stain. (Mom may not like her boy's wardrobe, but she keeps it laundered, ironed, and mended!) I've seen pictures of the MAT's production of The Lower Depths that looked grottier than this set and its inhabitants. It all just supported the sense that this Connection was all fake. Whatever the problems inherent in the 50-year-old script, this was unnecessary.

So, as a piece of theater history, okay; as a piece of theater, what a downer. I guess nothing's authentic anymore, not even the Living Theatre.

[There was one line that has been annoying me since I saw the show. I wasn’t sure if it was an author's error, an actor's error, or a character's error. (Later I had a look at the published script, and that’s what Gelber wrote. So it’s either a playwright’s error or a character error.) Solly, the group's philosopher and thinker, played by Anthony Sisco, goes on in two bits about the speed of light. He says several times that it's "186,000 miles per second, per second." Now, I haven't taken physics or anything like it since junior year in high school (don't ask when that was!), but I remember that "per second, per second" (or "per second squared") is not a measure of speed; it's a measure of acceleration. It's not how fast something goes, but how fast it goes faster. Anachronisms are one thing; factual mistakes are something else again.]

'Der Illegale'

A couple of months ago, the New York Times ran a short article reminiscing about Colonel Rudolf Abel, the famous Soviet spy of the 1950s who was caught and then exchanged for Francis Gary Powers (1929-77), the downed U-2 spy pilot. 

When I was in the army back in the early ’70s, I was a counterintelligence officer stationed in West Berlin. Now, I was never involved in a case quite as dramatic or famous as the Colonel Abel capture, but when I attended the Bundeswehr intel school, I did discover something interesting in that line. 

I was a member of MAD Spezial Lehrgruppe “Abwehroperation” für Offiziere (MAD Special Class “Counterintelligence Operations” for Officers), a two-part course from 20 June to 7 July and 26 September to 13 October 1972. (MAD was the Militärischer Abschirmdienst, the military counterintelligence service of the Bundeswehr [the Federal Republic’s armed forces]. Military Intelligence Branch, in which I served, is solely army intel, but MAD was an all-service organization. It is now called the Amt für Sicherheit der Bundeswehr—the office for the security of the Bundeswehr.) 

I had been sent as a guest-officer to the MAD-Schule in the little hot-water spa of Bad Ems, across the Rhine from Koblenz, the town I had lived in ten years before as a teenager. (I got a little nostalgic trip “home” thrown in. I planned my arrival so I could spend the night in Koblenz—at a Pension right by the Deutsches Eck, down the Rheinanlagen from where we used to live—so I could check out the town and then report to the MAD-Schule fresh and in uniform the next morning.) 

I was one of two U.S. Army officers in the class, the other being a captain from Munich, our unit HQ. The rest of the class were German army, navy, and Luftwaffe officers, mostly majors and lieutenant colonels or lieutenant commanders and commanders, and that was an experience. I don’t mean the classes—they were interesting, of course, but purely from a professional perspective, nothing amusing. 

Going to class in German, especially an esoteric class like intel, was a trip, but it was a terrific exercise for me. The German officers—who were all older than both the captain and I—were rather astonished to find that we could get on so well in German. (Germans love the idea of foreigners learning their language. They’re much less jealous of it than the French are of their mother tongue.) And that’s where the revelations started. 

I’m assuming that this bunch was pretty much typical—I don’t see why they wouldn’t be. The school was its own facility in Bad Ems on the banks of the Lahn (Bad means ‘bath’ in German; all towns with that in their names are or were thermal spas)—there was no military base to which it was attached like the Armor School at Ft. Knox or the Intel School at either Holabird or Huachuca. (Even the language school I attended in Monterey, California, was at the Presidio, a satellite of the huge Ft. Ord on the other side of town.) 

So we had a little mess—decent food, by the way—and an O-club. Well, a bar. After classes, we’d all gather there for drinks and conversation—everyone was very gemütlich (an untranslatable word which here is best rendered as ‘convivial’)—and then we’d return after dinner. 

Man, could those German officers drink! My American colleague gave up trying to keep up with them pretty quickly—they kept buying rounds, and you can’t really say no. (Well, you can, but I was in my middle 20's, so I just wasn’t gonna.) 

So I’m drinking mine . . . and his to keep the Germans from feeling slighted. And not only are they buying round after round, but they keep changing liquor. (They even drank some bourbon, in deference to us Americans. I’m surprised they had any in stock. 

They also bought a round of Ratzeputz, a German liqueur I had experienced in my earlier days in the country. The name means something like “cleans out your gut” and it’ll eat the enamel off your teeth. It’s pretty vile.) Okay, so we’re all getting pretty plastered—nothing rude, but loose. We’re comparing backgrounds and home lives and so on, and then the Germans start to sing. 

Now, these guys weren’t all in the same service as I said, or from the same part of the country, but they all knew the same songs. And they knew them all the way through. They asked us to sing some American songs, and do you know that between the two of us, we didn’t know one song together through to the end? 

Germany is a singing society—or it was until that generation, at least. They would sing when they got together. (Russians are like that, too.) We just don’t. (The French don’t either much, but the English do a little and I think the Aussies are singers. And the Irish and the Welsh—well, they sing at the merest suggestion!) 

While I was in Bad Ems, a three-part TV movie, Der Illegale: Biografie eines Spions (the link is in German; use the computer’s translator), aired on German television. Der Illegale was based on a true story and was amazingly accurate in terms of “tradecraft,” as it’s called in most spy novels. The miniseries aired on ZDF—Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen—on Sunday, Wednesday, and Saturday evenings, 1, 4, and 7 October. 

(The title means “The illegal agent: biography of a spy”; spookdom distinguishes between legal agents, those with at least an ostensible reason for being in the host country—trade representatives, exchange students, embassy and consular employees, tourist or airline agents—and illegal agents, those who use false identities, forged documents, and other deceptions to gain entry into the host country.) 

The whole MAD class gathered in the O-club for the three evenings and watched as avidly as if it were a training film. For the German officers, this was the world in which they were working! In fact, since these guys were all senior officers, some of them might well have been active MAD lieutenants or captains when the real case had occurred. 

The story of Der Illegale, written by Henry Kolarz (1927-2001), directed by Günter Gräwert (1930-96), and starring Götz George (1938-2016) and Vera Tschechowa (1940-2024), is of a Russian-born ethnic German, Nikolai Grunwaldt, who is recruited at a very young age by the KGB. Nikolai is rigorously trained and then married to a female agent, Katharina Feldmann. 

He is then inserted into West Germany by one of the commonest means used, even as late as my day. He’s sent across the East-West border as a refugee and upon arriving in West Germany, he merely declares his “right of return”—any ethnic German by law was eligible to become a West German citizen by simply declaring his desire to become one. 

The Soviets and East Germans sent thousands of people across just this way—criminals, prostitutes, various other undesirables, old-age pensioners (so the West would have to pick up the tab) . . . and spies. It was easy—no muss, no fuss. (I encountered this tactic myself many times in the two-and-a-half years I worked in Berlin.) 

Most refugees had no ID documents so they just made up an identity (Nikolai, for example, becomes Kurt Blohm), which became “real” as soon as the West German authorities issued new documents in that name for their new citizen. Voilà: instant cover. 

“Kurt” then gets jobs in the French embassy in Bonn and then at NATO in Cologne and begins copying documents. Here’s the interesting part, from the tradecraft point of view: how Nikolai gets back and forth to meet with his handlers in Moscow. 

He simply gets on a plane and flies to West Berlin. Any German could do that without passport or international travel documents because the West Germans treated travel to and from West Berlin as internal travel—there were no customs controls, and no record. 

Then he goes down into the S-Bahn, the commuter rail service that was controlled by the East (the U-Bahn was the city subway system, controlled by the West; both systems, which predated the war, crossed under the Wall), and rides to Friedrichstrasse in East Berlin. There are no borders to cross so far, and no guards, no controls, and no records. It’s just like flying from D.C. to New York and getting on the subway to Brooklyn. 

The only tricky part is at Friedrichstrasse, because there are guards and gates to control the access in and out of East Berlin—but if you’re a KGB agent, you have a prearranged exit gate with a guard who knows you’re coming, and he lets you through with no questions. 

Then you take a cab to Schönefeld, the East Berlin airport, get on a flight to Moscow—again, no record or documents because you’re under Soviet control now—and make your meeting at KGB HQ. Then reverse the process and you’re back in Cologne and no one’s the wiser; you’ve just been away for the weekend. 

That’s exactly how it really happened—and exactly how easy it was to do. (Now you see why there were so many spies in Berlin, Cold War Europe’s Espionage Central. It was like Grand Central Station for Europe: you could go anywhere, in either direction, east or west, with so little trouble.) 

The plot of the show isn’t really important here—“Kurt” copies documents in both his jobs and carries the copies to Moscow—so I’ll just cut to the chase: Nikolai falls in love with his wife (!) and wants the gig in Moscow he was promised so his son can go to school at home. 

When the KGB reneges and assigns him to some place like South America, Nikolai looks up the CIA station chief in Berlin in the KGB files and makes one of his surreptitious trips to Berlin. But instead of crossing over to East Berlin, he contacts the CIA in West Berlin and defects, with the promise that they’ll also bring his wife and son out. 

The miniseries was a terrific program. Even just as a story, it was a good film: a sort of German Spy Who Came in from the Cold for the ’70s—very in tune with the Cold War times I was witnessing. I don’t think any of the actors became internationally known, but they were excellent. 

The series was, as I said, also very accurate with respect to the tradecraft and I decided that if it could be acquired and properly dubbed or subtitled, it would make an excellent training film for MI agents. 

Everything in the film was either historically true or, at the very least, possible with the technology and methods then in use. (The TV show used several real, even state-of-the-art spy techniques and practices, including a hand-held copier that was a technological innovation we'd only heard about in ’72!) And it was all excellently done for the film. 

One reason for this accuracy, I think, was that, as I said, the film was based on a real case. I knew that when we saw the broadcast in Bad Ems; the series was considered a Dokumentarspiel, a “docudrama.” I even learned, when I got back home to Berlin, that one of our DAC’s (Department of the Army civilian) had been involved in the defection. But I either never learned the name of the defecting spy or I forgot it in the ensuing decades. 

After I wrote up a memoir of the time I spent in Berlin a few years ago, I set about seeing if I could put together enough information to search out the real case and learn the story of the actual espionage adventure that led to the movie. 

(That memoir started as a five-message e-mail series I sent to a friend in 2005.  I reformatted it as an eight-part post, “Berlin Memoir,” that I posted on an irregular schedule in 2016 and 2017.  The first segment was posted on 16 December 2016, and then each part is linked to the next at the bottom of the installment.)

Bit by bit through November and December 2008, adding a small fact or a name each time I discovered it, I was able to gather together the outlines of the story as published in public records, without delving into government agency files or doing primary-source research in old documents. Here’s what I learned, and it’s amazingly similar to the story of Der Illegale, with only the smallest details changed, mostly for obvious dramatic effect. 

On 10 October 1967, just under four years before I arrived in Berlin (and five years to the week before the series aired), the CIA managed the skillful extrication from Moscow of Yevgeny (‘Eugen’ in German) Runge, 39, a KGB lieutenant colonel of German ethnicity who, under the cover identity Willi Gast, had led a spy network in West Germany since 1955. Runge, code-named ‘Max’ (or ‘Maks’ in Russian), defected in Berlin with his wife, Walentina, and his 8-year-old son, Andrei, just as Nikolai had in the TV series. 

After I identified the spy-defector so I had something to search, I tried to track down some of the history of the Runge case. There are scattered references around the ’Net, including some books that cover the period, the field of intel, and the Cold War in Germany. (The New York Times coverage, of course, ends shortly after Runge's defection, so it doesn’t say anything about what happened to him later.) 

The difficulty was that Runge is not an uncommon name in Germany and the man's first name has various spellings depending on how it's transliterated from Russian (Evgeny, Yevgeny, Evgeni, etc.—even Jewgenij, the German spelling of his Russian name), not to mention his German name, Eugen. (Then there’s also the question of whether or not to include his middle initial: Y—for Yevgenyevich.) 

I looked for sites in German, of course, but, as for Runge’s Russian name, as I’ve mentioned before, my computer isn’t equipped to handle Cyrillic well at all. 

(From what I was able to tell in my limited search, the German press didn't have more coverage of the case than the U.S. press did. Runge defected to the CIA and was brought to the U.S. almost immediately. We shared some info with the West Germans, but they didn't have access to Runge before he was brought here.) 

The books I found are fairly recent (late '90's for the most part), but they don't include much detail, or mention Runge's fate after he turned CIA informant in 1967. The rest of his record, however, seems to be thus: 

Runge, a "Volga German," was born on 8 March 1928 in Novo-Solenoye, the Ukraine, but raised in what became East Germany and, like the character in the TV show (who was ethnically German but born and raised in Russia), was spotted early and recruited and trained as an adolescent before being inserted into West Germany. 

Runge went to school in Russia until 1941, he said, the year the Wehrmacht occupied eastern Europe. The Soviet authorities deported his father and sister to Siberia, but the young Runge remained in German-occupied territory. 

The Germans sent Runge to eastern Germany as forced labor near the end of the war. He remained under German control until 1945 when the war front moved west back into Germany and the Soviet army occupied eastern Germany. The 19-year-old worked as an interpreter at the Soviet military headquarters in eastern Germany until he was returned with others from the German territory to a camp in Vologda in northern Russia. 

Runge escaped, however, and went back to eastern Germany, working again as a translator. When the Soviet authorities told him, “You can’t stay here,” he moved to the Soviet-occupied sector of Berlin where he lived under an assumed identity; he retained his actual name, but he asserted that he was born in Germany. 

Runge maintained his false identity until 1948 when he contacted the Soviet embassy to effect his repatriation to Russia and between 1948 and 1949, he began studying at Humboldt University in what became East Berlin (the German Democratic Republic was declared in 1949). 

The young student was recruited there in 1949, when he was all of 21, by the MVD (the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the forerunner of the KGB) on an “unofficial” basis. He finished his studies in 1954 and became a member of the Deutsche Einheitspartei (the German Unity Party, the official name of East Germany’s communist party) and received new identity documents as a Russian citizen. 

The KGB (which took its new name, the Committee for State Security, that same year) helped Runge with school and living expenses and got him a place to live, and after he graduated from Humboldt, formally signed their new agent up as a “junior” (i.e., second) lieutenant. 

Runge trained for five years before he was inserted in the West in 1955. He operated there for 12 years. 

Exactly like the TV character, Runge's first target was the French embassy in Bonn where his main focus had been NATO documents and plans. (France was still a participant in NATO’s military alliance in those years. France withdrew from the military part of NATO in 1966.) 

The spy in the movie was a loner, which was part of the psychology of his character, of course—he was alone except for his small family. Runge, however, ran a ring of spies and penetrated the French embassy through the work of another agent. 

He communicated with the KGB by written reports, on one-time pads and in code, which he mailed to an accommodation address in Vienna. When an agent in Runge’s circle was arrested, Runge’s handlers brought him back to Moscow briefly in 1967 for “operational reasons” in case he had been burned. 

When it was clear he hadn’t been, the KGB reassigned him to Frankfurt, the headquarters of the U.S. Army in Europe. Runge also began to prepare for an assignment in the United States, including a two-year temporary assignment while he learned more English among other new skills. 

Also like the TV character, Runge was married and had a son. Like Nikolai, too, he had married his wife on KGB orders. Walentina was an East German citizen, but had also been recruited by the KGB when she was in school. Furthermore, two of the agents Runge ran (who also became infamous spies and were among five Western sources arrested after his defection) were a couple, the Sütterlins. 

Heinz Sütterlin (1924-2025), who had a reputation as a “ladies’ man” (the United Press International dubbed him a “male Mata Hari”), had also married his wife, Leonore, because the KGB had ordered him to.  

Leonore (1928-67), whose cover name was “Lore” and who became known as “Rote Lore” (“Red Lore”), had gotten NATO documents from her job at the German defense ministry.  She committed suicide in her cell four days after her arrest by hanging herself with her pajamas.  She was reportedly distressed when she learned that Heinz had married her on KGB instructions.

In the TV show, Nikolai wants to go back to Moscow and educate his son in a Russian school and defects when the KGB reneges on its promise to repatriate him. Runge wanted to return with his family to East Germany, but the KGB assigned him to Bulgaria, so he engineered the defection in Berlin. (One report said that the Soviets wanted to make Runge’s son stay in Moscow as a “hostage.”) 

I don’t know if Runge’s still alive now (he’d be over 80), but he was brought to the U.S. within a few days after his defection in Berlin.  Right after he was transported to here, Runge was granted political asylum in the U.S. and he and his family were settled in an undisclosed “safe house” under CIA protection.  

Andrei, the Runge’s young son, who had been using the alias “Gast” provided by Soviet intelligence, found it challenging to adjust to his real name.  He played with the children of CIA employees.

Runge underwent many months of continuous interrogation by Western intelligence officials to gather information on Soviet espionage operations.  He provided a detailed account of his life as a Soviet spy, including his training as an illegal agent and his cover as a vending-machine dealer in West Germany.

After becoming a CIA asset, Runge and his family were expected to live under new identities in an undisclosed location in the United States.  (One report out of London asserted that the Soviet Union had “passed a death sentence” on the defecting KGB lieutenant colonel.)  He had possibly gotten a new appearance as well.  

He had revealed many espionage secrets of the KGB and the eastern bloc.  According to some members of the U.S. intelligence community, Runge’s defection was “the most important catch of a Communist operative since World War II.” 

I haven't found any reference that the miniseries is available on video here anywhere. As I said, I recall that it was really a good show, very well acted and extremely accurate in terms of the tradecraft and technology it displayed (for the day, of course). You know it must have been pretty good if I still remember it, even as poorly as I do, after 37 years. 

I probably wouldn’t have been able to find as much of the real history behind the miniseries as I have had I tried 30 years ago, before the Internet and all the connections it has provided. (The author of one of the books, Battleground Berlin by David E. Murphy, cites several government documents, including CIA memos and so on, to which I wouldn’t have gotten access, so the information, except what I might have found in the New York Times through its index, would have been hard to identify, locate, and access.) 

So, oddly, the fact that this TV series stayed with me for so long and resurfaced in my memory all these years later was a boon: it allowed me to piece together a rudimentary history of the actual subject of the plot of the TV show that had intrigued me for so long.

'August: Osage County'

On Friday, 19 June, my visiting friend Helen and I went up to Broadway to see Tracy Letts's Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning play, August: Osage County at the Music Box, where the play moved (from the Imperial) in April '08. (The play closed on Sunday, 28 June, after over two-and-a-half years on Broadway, but it's going on tour with Estelle Parsons as the matriarch, Violet Weston. She took over the part from Deanna Dunnigan, the original lead from Steppenwolf, and then Phylicia Rashad, whom I saw, took over on 26 May.) AOC won many awards here--I'm sure it won many more in Chicago as well--and it is unquestionably an epic piece of theater, running nearly three-and-a-half hours with two intermissions (how many plays have two intermissions anymore?), with a cast of 13 characters, but it has serious dramaturgical problems as far as I'm concerned. (I guess I'm just a curmudgeon. Too bad!)

AOC is an old-fashioned play, recalling such family dramas as Little Foxes, Glass Menagerie, Mourning Becomes Electra, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and many others that date from the '60s and earlier. It shares themes with many of those plays and its characters are drawn in ways that reminded me of some of the people in them, too. Dramaturgically, AOC also looks a lot like those oldies. These similarities and resemblances aren't faults, mind you, but the playwriting on display here is less a post-modern look at a family coming apart at the seams, a 21st-century take on a perpetual situation in this country (and, I daresay, most others as well), as a throw-back to a tried-and-true method of examining family dynamics. Stanislavsky would feel right at home with this script, I'm sure. Take out all the cursing and adult language, color it black-and-white, and it'd make a fine '30/'40s movie with the likes of Lionel Barrymore, Kate Hepburn, and other screen stars of the era. (Okay, the Breen Office would have real problems with some of the topics, but let's overlook that for the time being, shall we?) This is not a complaint, of course. I love those old-time plays and I see no reason a contemporary playwright can't draw on the styles of the past if they suit his needs. Theatrically speaking, I'm a pragmatist: Go with what works. I'm not even above a little artistic theft, short of outright plagiarism, here and there if it's useful.

Letts was an actor before he turned to playwriting a few years ago, and he still is. (This is his first Broadway transfer, I believe, though he's had some Off-Broadway successes as well as hits in Chicago, particularly at Steppenwolf where he's a member. He has a new play coming to Broadway soon.) Like many actors-turned-writers, Letts writes terrific roles for actors. He obviously knows what actors like to do on stage, what they can get their teeth into--especially the actors he's worked with on both sides of the footlights at Steppenwolf, for whom AOC was written. Without detracting from the work of director Anna D. Shapiro (who herself won a Tony for this effort), the cast of AOC knocks the ball out of the park in this play--and the cast I saw included many replacements of the original Steppenwolf company that came here with the play. Letts has created 13 separate characters, each with at least one moment to shine on stage, and the actors all developed clearly delineated personalities that were believable within the world Letts had created for them. (We all know that the families in these multi-generational dramas are . . . well, eccentric is the kind way to put it. They're not like you and me. At least I hope not.)

Speaking of the world of the play, I have to note here the environment that set designer Todd Rosenthal created for Letts's characters to inhabit. The three-story house from which the front wall had been sliced away was at once defining and confining. (I was a little confused by the configuration of the ground-floor rooms--I didn't know where the interior "walls" were supposed to be, but that wasn't terribly distracting or damaging.) Though we knew from the dialogue that the characters, especially the daughters, have lives elsewhere, the house in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, is the world they all inhabited together. At one time, they did so literally; now they do it emotionally and psychologically. (That's not an unfamiliar device in old-time dramaturgy, either--the family home to which everyone returns for some momentous event. Think, for instance, of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof or All My Sons.) Rosenthal's representation of this homestead evoked both the past history the Westons all shared here and the claustrophobia the place exudes. We could look in through the missing wall, but the Westons are boxed in when they are inside that house. It wasn't even open to the sky--Rosenthal roofed the top floor to be sure. A pressure-cooker might be a good analogy. (The costuming and lighting, by Ana Kuzmanic and Ann G. Wrightson respectively, enhanced the effectiveness of the world Letts's imagined without calling attention to themselves.)

Before Rashad, I believe the newest cast member was Elizabeth Ashley, who had joined the family as Violet's sister Mattie Fae in February. John Cullum (who I mentioned in my report on Heroes hightailed it from the Music Box, where he had recently started his performances as Beverly Weston, the patriarch, over to Theatre Row to appear in the French comedy) had been in the play for months by this time. So only Rashad was really new to her part, and she displayed some tentativeness here and there, but not detrimentally. At worst, she was a little superficial, maybe a little glib in her line readings, as if she were trying to get through the scene without screwing up. Helen remarked the actress was "playing to the audience," and maybe that's what was happening. Violet's big moments, her emotional explosions, were mostly solid and right-on, and I suspect that he had more rehearsal for those--and the one really huge scene when everyone in the family was on stage together eating the fateful dinner that's the centerpiece of the Letts's drama. She was probably still finding her bearings in the other scenes, having been performing the role for less than a month with a cast that had been doing it for up to three years or more in some cases. (Some members of the cast were still the Steppenwolf actors who originated the roles in Chicago.) I won't fault her at all for some nervous moments--she's a pro, and probably only another actor would really notice anyway. (I was at first a little unsure Rashad would have the intestinal strength to pull this role off. She's not known for playing ballsy characters; her strength is different. But, given her newness to the part, I'd say she managed quite well indeed.)

Overall, I can't say anything detrimental about the production. I think it was exactly what the play called for, and it deserved all the accolades and recognition it got. (It's perfect material for film, by the way--or, really, a TV movie if it weren't for the language, I guess--and it would surprise me if that doesn't come to pass in a few years.) I'm not thrilled with the three-hour-plus length: that's a very long time to sit, but that's a small quibble, I guess. But, as I said, there are problems in my opinion, and they're in the playwriting. For all its strengths and dramatic impact (it's really a melodrama, I think), AOC is weakened in the end by one tactic Letts uses all through the script. I don't know if this is a writing habit of his, as I haven't seen any of his previous plays, but it does strike me as the practice of a relatively novice dramatist. He drops bombs. That's what one of my acting teachers used to call it when a student, in an improvised scene, throws up a dramatic fact for which there has been no preparation or forewarning: "Dear, we're having a baby!" or "I've got cancer, Mom; I've only got six months to live!" (The teacher's point in the acting class was that no actor can deal competently with such a revelation dropped into the scene unrehearsed. As a playwriting tactic, the results are a little different.) At almost every turn, at every moment when the play seems to be moving along one track to a logical conclusion, one of Letts's characters drops a bomb--reveals a new, unlooked-for fact that stirs everything up again, and we start the throughline all over again on a new trajectory. Two salient examples: After Beverly Weston has disappeared and his body turns up, the family is all gathered and the old recriminations and resentments are brought back to the surface. The youngest daughter, Ivy, reveals that she has a secret romance no one in the family knows about. We soon discover that her lover is her cousin, the son of Violet's sister and brother-in-law. That's the first bomb--Ivy is dating her first cousin. (Remember, this isn't Kentucky or Arkansas--it's Oklahoma. That kind of thing isn't supposed to happen.) Because of that and the fact that no one in the Weston family really thinks much of "Little Charles," Ivy insists her sister Barbara keep the secret, but when Ivy comes to the defense of Little Charles (these people are in their 40s, by the way), the family starts to get the idea there's something going on between them. When Mattie Fae, Little Charles's mother, asks Barbara if there’s a relationship, and Barbara acknowledges it, Mattie Fae cries out that Barbara must stop it. When Barbara hesitates, Mattie Fae reveals bomb number two: Ivy and Little Charles aren't cousins. (Can you guess now?) They're brother and sister! Mattie Fae had had a brief affair with Beverly 40-some years ago, and Little Charles was the result, though no one, not even Mattie Fae's husband, Charlie, knows. So, a whole new line of conflict now opens, and new recriminations and angry outbursts ensue . . . and we're off to the races yet again. (A third little bomb connected to this series occurs a few scenes later when Violet, who has allowed that she knows everything about all her family, reveals she knows about both Little Charles's relationship with Ivy and his parentage. She doesn't care a whole lot, but she knows.) I didn't count, but I'd guess there are a half dozen or more of these bombs and bomblets in AOC. Now, maybe Letts thought this would be an amusing tactic: whenever the play seems to be leveling off, he injects an entirely new irritant into the mix and starts things up again. (Didn't Carol Burnett do that in many of her comedy sketches?) Maybe I'm just a fuddy-duddy (okay, I am a fuddy-duddy . . .), but unless this is intended to be a farce, and it was meant to be a joke, I get annoyed. I'm not keen on even one plot bomb as a dramaturgical device, but when they start to proliferate, I get pissed at the writer.

And finally, perhaps the most difficult problem I had with AOC is that none of the characters, with the possible exception of Johnna Monevata, the young Native American woman Beverly hired to keep house and care for him and his aging, cancer-infected, pill-addicted wife, is at all likeable. I said of the recent Fifty Words that I wouldn't want to spend any time with that couple; the family in AOC and their circle of acquaintances multiply that seven-fold. I get a headache listening to them yell at each other all the time. It didn't strike me as at all strange that Beverly, who drinks to excess anyway, would choose first to disappear and then to drown himself in the lake. How he lasted as long as he did is a mystery to me--one I probably won't try to solve. I can easily understand why actors would want to do these roles--we do love histrionics and scenery-chewing--but I'm not at all sure why spectators would want to watch them do it.

'Coraline'

On Thursday, 18 June, Diana and I went into the West Village to catch the last of our 2008-09 season subscription shows, MCC's Coraline at the Lortel. The New York Times had run it's review on 2 June, and I wasn't entirely sure what to expect. The play, a musical, is an adaptation of a popular children's book of the same name by Neil Gaiman, but Ben Brantley didn't make clear to me if, first, he liked the result or not, and, second, if the stage adaptation was for an audience of children or not. (The same children's book had been made into an animated children's film earlier this year. I haven't read the book--and I won't--and I haven't seen the movie--and I won't.) As I've reported before many times, I have problems with Brantley's reviews, so I don't accept his evaluations at face value, but I do rely on the review to give me an idea of what I can expect to see, and in this instance, I had no idea. (My friend Kirk told me he likes the author and that his older daughter, a young woman in her 20s, read and liked the book.)

I have no idea who David Greenspan (book) and Stephin Merritt (music and lyrics) figured their audience for Coraline, the musical, would be. The base material is strange to begin with, from what I can tell. Gaiman has won several prestigious awards, including the Newberry, the major award here for children's literature, and Coraline won a few in '02 and '03 its own self, among them two for sci-fi/fantasy. One of the awards the book got was the Bram Stoker prize, an award for horror stories! Stoker, for those who don't recognize the name, is the originator of Dracula. In other words, Coraline isn't just a children's book, it's a children's horror story. I can't begin to guess how appropriate that is, not being a parent, but I'd guess that its appeal is to 'tween boys--10, 11, 12 years old. I'd think real little ones wouldn't get it or it'd be too scary for them. (Some reviewers and critics have compared Coraline and Gaiman's other works to Lewis Carroll's Alice stories, but from what I can tell from synopses and summaries, Gaiman's stories are much, much darker and much more threatening.) Maybe I'm being a fuddy-duddy--it's more than possible--but in any case, if the book is aimed at 'tweens or youngsters, and I gather the animated movie was geared to little ones (I'm not sure how big 'tweens would go for a cartoon, even a 3-D cartoon), then who's the stage musical for? Leaving aside for the moment the storyline and its scary atmosphere, the storytelling of Greenspan and Merritt is very complex and stylistically sophisticated. I'll get to a description of the set, and costumes, and so on later, but they aren't straightforward or self-explanatory. There's little differentiation between some of the two worlds Coraline inhabits and the shifts in dimension, if you will, are not easily distinguished. The music is more along the lines of what I'd call recitative. (I'm not musically educated, so I may be misapplying the term, but they're not "songs" with distinct melodies and lyrics that set one kind of song off from another.) They're all very much the same in tone and all the characters sound very much alike musically, and I have the feeling that really young ears might just begin to tune them out as boring and indecipherable. But the 'tweens for whom this material might be most appropriate wouldn't seem to be attracted to the story of a 9- or 10-yr.-old girl lost in a big old house which encompasses two separate worlds. And an awful lot of the dialogue strikes me as too adult for the audience who might be attracted to the story or the themes. But (speaking as an adult--or almost), I have to wonder what Greenspan and Merritt thought we'd get out of this, except its pure theatricality (the way I was thrilled with Julie Taymor's creations in The Lion King when I took my mother, who was also delighted, to see it some years ago). The problem there is that there's not as much effective theatricality employed to tell this eerie story as there might have been--it quickly became repetitive. It was like a clever idea Greenspan and director Leigh Silverman came up with on day one, and then never managed to expand on and take beyond the idea stage to a full-blown accomplishment. So who does MCC expect to come and see Coraline? Ya got me! (I can tell you, it weren't me, that's fer sure. At an hour and a quarter, I couldn't wait to get out of the theater.)

I've hinted at some of the story already, but maybe I need to do a little plot synopsis since, unlike Mary Stuart, Coraline isn't likely to be familiar to some of you all. Because of the book's popularity and the existence of the movie, you can find a detailed summary of the story, so I'll make it really brief; the play is an abbreviated version of the novella's plot, but it's close enough if you really want to know more. (Both the book and the movie have Wikipedia pages, as does Neil Gaiman, too. IMDb.com has a site for the film, of course.) So: Little Coraline Jones, who's moved with her parents to a new apartment in an old house in a new neighborhood, walks through a mysterious door and discovers an alternate version of her life. On the surface, this parallel reality is eerily similar to her real life--only much more attractive. But when her adventure turns threatening, and her Other Mother and Other Father try to keep her forever, Coraline must count on her resourcefulness, determination, and bravery to get back home--and save her real family. Greenspan/Merritt and Silverman obviously put a lot of thought into how to stage these two worlds and the creatures that inhabit them. These latter include not only Coraline's neighbors in the house-turned-apartment building (there are parallels for the neighbors in the other reality, of course), but animals such as a mystical cat and a circus of mice, and ghosts of lost children.

Like the recent Shipwrecked!, MCC's Coraline is story theater. The set, by Christine Jones, is a jumble of abandoned and discarded objects, including four or five pianos in various states of disassembly. (Two, one of them "prepared" to sound like a toy piano or a harpsichord, are actually used by pianist Phyllis Chen who accompanies the songs and helps out with the sound effects which are all created by the cast one way or another). Except for Coraline and Other Mother, the actors all play multiple characters in the story and each character is differentiated by a bit of Anita Yavich's costume here or a hat there (there's no elaborate cat make-up, for instance, as in Cats) and, mostly, vocalizations and physicalizations by the actors. (Greenspan himself plays Other Mother. His long, ratty, black wig and the eye covers that represent the "buttons" sewn in place of eyes make him look a lot like Ozzy Osbourne in drag!) Realism isn't the style at hand here by any stretch--it requires the imagination of both the company and the spectators to make it all work. (This is part of why I question the appeal of this show for little kids: the clues are minimal and subtle to differentiate one character from another much of the time. Yet the story is pitched at their level.) Theatrically, it's all very intriguing--in a way, more like real story theater than Shipwrecked! was. I can't fault the work of the cast at all--that mixed bunch did yeomen's work. My complaint for director Silverman would be that she does a fine job with what was there, but never develops some variations (or encourages Greenspan and Merritt to add some) in the stage work, music, storytelling techniques, and so on, which become repetitive and predictable after a few encounters. I've done a few story-theater shows in my day, mostly children's fare, and the trick was to find the right--or a right--storytelling style for each tale. It wasn't just a matter of variety for its own sake, of course, but that every story has its own dynamic. The episodes of Coraline's explorations (that's what she called them) are like separate stories in a way, and each one should have at least a slightly different style. Even on the two sides of the magic door, in the different realities, the performance style is the same.

The one major gimmick in this production is the casting of Coraline. As I said, she's a 9- or 10-year-old girl; in the film, the voice was supplied by a real child, Dakota Fanning (if a child actor with her list of credits can ever be called a "real child"), who was 10 when the movie was produced (she's 14 now). In MCC's musical Coraline, the title role is played by Jayne Houdyshell, a 50-ish, stout, plain actress (of decidedly prodigious talent and energy). Now, this casting choice doesn't in any way add to the problems of the show, but I just wonder what the point of doing that is. Unless, of course, the intended audience is other middle-agers like me. (Yes, I know, they used adults as children in the very popular and successful 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee--but that wasn't a children's play. It was a play about children for adults. It ain't the same thing. Unless . . . .) Now, Houdyshell, who literally burst onto the theater scene only a couple of years ago, is quite wonderful, all other considerations aside. She does a more than credible 10-year-old without pretensions or apologies or winks, and it sure gave me something to watch. But why do it that way, except as a gimmick? (I sort of have the same question about casting Phylicia Rashad as Violet Weston in August: Osage County. It's event casting, I guess. There are other ways you could go, but this choice makes people take note.)

Another question I had, though of little final significance, I suppose, is why the show is performed in British accents. Yes, I understand that Gaiman is originally British, though he now lives in Minnesota or someplace, but there's no mention of place in the play (I don't know about the book) and there are no cultural elements that dictate that this must be a British locale. (Given the cast of the animated film, I'm guessing they didn't perform in accents.) No one does the accent badly or inconsistently, even in the songs, but I just question whether it's a necessary imposition on the cast. I couldn't see a reason for it. (The American actors in Mary Stuart all adopt British accents, but that was an existing production in which the two leads are British--and most of the major characters are Brits--except, of course, for Mary, who's Scottish raised in France. On the other hand, if Coraline uses British accents because the author is British, then the Mary Stuart cast ought to be performing in German accents! Go know!)

When the show was over, Diana, my companion, turned to me and asked if I knew Greenspan's work. I said, "Yes, and so do you." We had seen his adaptation of The Frogs last season at CSC--and we both thoroughly disliked it. She remarked, "Remind me the next time we come across one of his plays not to consider it." At the same time, the man sitting behind me, as he was putting on his jacket to leave, said, "It was enchanting." I believe most of the reviews were good to excellent, even enthusiastic. (I understand the New Yorker had reservations, but I haven't seen the notice myself.) I feel like I had witnessed a lot of creative energy pressed into service on material that wasn't worth the effort in the end. Greenspan and Merritt seem to have grabbed onto something that was a wonderful idea in their heads and worked at it, thinking, Ah, I know just how to do this bit, or something like that, but they lost sight along the way of the fact that the material wasn't being served by their creativity. Obviously I don't know how any of this came about, but that's what it felt like I had been sitting through.