A few weeks ago, while my theater companion Diana and I
were working out the schedule for some performances coming up this season, she
raised the issue of an announced new play by Terrence McNally at the Pearl
Theatre Company. Now, I'm not a huge fan
of McNally, winner of many theater awards including two Obies (Bad Habits, 1974; Love! Valour! Compassion!, 1995)
and four Tonys (Kiss of the Spider Woman, 1993; Love! Valour! Compassion!, 1995; Master Class, 1996;
Ragtime, 1998), and I'd never seen anything at the Pearl that I
liked, but I hadn't been to that theater in a long, long time and Diana wanted
to see the new play, so I thought it'd be worth a look. So on the
afternoon of 27 November, the day before Thanksgiving (that's right, a matinee,
which Diana usually hates—because that's the only performance available considering
both Diana's and my conflicts), we met at the Peter Norton Space on far west
42nd Street, the current home of the Pearl, to see And Away We Go, the world première of McNally’s latest work which
opened on 24 November and is scheduled to close on 15 December. (Previews for the short run began on 12
November.)
After
decades of moving from neighborhood to neighborhood in Manhattan, including Theater
80 on St. Marks Place in the East Village and New York City Center Stage II in
the Theatre District, the Pearl opened its first permanent home in October
2012, the Peter Norton located at 555 West 42nd Street (where the Signature Theatre Company used to be). The troupe, which bills itself as “the only
theatre in New York City with a Resident Company fully comprised of Actors’
Equity members,” was
founded in 1984 and, in its own words, “has produced a body of work
encompassing the full breadth of theatre history, from ancient Greek tragedy to
contemporary works rooted in the classics.”
The production was postponed from its original dates last April and May in response to a shortfall in a
quarter-million-dollar fundraising effort this spring, but the company’s
supporters have partially filled the gap that had put the troupe in a
precarious situation.
McNally,
75 last 3 November, was born in St.
Petersburg, Florida, but raised in Corpus Christi, Texas (the setting—and one
level of the title-reference—for his controversial 1998 play, Corpus Christi). He moved to New York City in 1956 to go to
Columbia University (class of 1960, Phi Beta Kappa). He went to Mexico after graduating to work on
his writing, returning to New York when a play he’d submitted to the Actors
Studio was rejected for production but attracted the Studio’s attention to his
potential. Openly gay, he began a
personal and professional association with Edward Albee and later actor Robert Drivas. (McNally is now
married, since 2010, to Thomas Kirdahy, a public-interest lawyer, following a
seven-year civil union.)
What would have been the writer’s first major project was
the 1968 musical Here's Where I Belong, but the book writer had his name removed from the credits. (The show closed after a single
performance.) He gained critical
attention for his Off-Broadway plays like Next (1969) and The Ritz
(1975), and became recognized as a presence on the American stage with 1987’s Frankie
and Johnny in the Clair de Lune Off-Broadway (and the successful 1991 film
adaptation starring Al Pacino and Michelle Pfeiffer). In 2002, the play was revived on Broadway for
243 performances.
McNally’s gone on to win
acclaim for both the books of musicals (The Rink, 1984; Kiss of the
Spider Woman; Ragtime) and non-musical scripts (The Lisbon Traviata, 1989; Lips Together, Teeth Apart,
1991; Love! Valour! Compassion!); McNally even won a 1990 Emmy for Andre's Mother, an AIDS-related tale broadcast on the PBS
series American Playhouse. Then in
1998, the playwright stirred up a storm of protests and counter-protests with Corpus
Christi, his contemporary retelling of Jesus’ birth, ministry, and death in
which Jesus and his disciples are all depicted as gay.
The
Catholic Church condemned the play, death threats were sent to McNally (who
even received a fatwa) and the Manhattan Theatre Club, the company
producing the première, and anyone connected to the production. Right-wing pundits and commentators wrote
against the play—without ever having seen or even read it—and leftists defended
it on principal, also before any public performance or the publication of the
text. (I have written about this
incident in “The First Amendment &
The Arts” on ROT; see 8 May 2010.) The theater postponed the presentation, but
First Amendment advocates and theater artists across the country objected to
the cave-in and the play was rescheduled.
Subsequent productions of Corpus Christi have attracted similar
controversy, including legal action to prevent public money from being spent on
them at institutions that receive federal or state subsidies. (Some suits have been defeated by the
productions’ backers and others have succeeded.)
McNally
has won, in addition to the Tonys, Obies, and the Emmy, many other awards, including
Lucille Lortels and Drama Desks. He was
also nominated for a 1994 Pulitzer Prize for A Perfect
Ganesh. His last Broadway project was the book for
the 2011 musical Catch Me If You Can; a revival of Master Class
was mounted that year as well. (The musical
won several Tony and Drama Desk nominations—and one Tony Award—but none for the
book.) Off-Broadway, McNally wrote Golden
Age, a 2009 play about Italian opera that was staged by MTC here in 2012;
he also has this year’s Mothers and Sons, which premièred at the Bucks
County Playhouse in New Hope, Pennsylvania, in June and is slated to be staged
on Broadway next year starring Tyne Daly.
Previously
presented on 12 August 2012 at the Ojai Playwrights
Conference in California, And Away We Go is reportedly McNally’s first play composed for an ensemble of actors and the playwright
celebrates theater history, classic theater, actors and acting troupes (like
The King’s Men and the Moscow Art Theater), and the Pearl itself. In a statement, the dramatist acknowledged
that the classical acting companies to which his play pays tribute were “much like The Pearl”
which, McNally feels, has had a “commitment to . . . the challenge of
finding new life and relevance in the great plays of the past, many of them
written specifically for companies” like the one that commissioned And Away We Go. The playwright
explained that the new work is “a summation of what I've learned watching
theater.” A play with a serious tone but
humorous touches, “It’s also stylistically very different than anything I've
ever done.”
And
Away We Go is a theater melodrama—metadrama, if you will. (Be
assured, folks: despite the familiar ring to the play’s title—for those of us
of a certain age—McNally isn’t telling the story of Jackie Gleason, otherwise
known as The Great One.) As the Pearl’s
blurb says, “Times change but life in the theatre remains the same.” The play time-travels through theater history
from the Theater of Dionysos in ancient Athens, a backstage look at Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (458 BCE), to a rehearsal of Shakespeare’s The Tempest at The Globe
Theatre in Jacobean 1610, from the royal theater at Versailles (where several of Molière’s plays were
presented) on the eve of an uprising against Louis XV, to the first reading of Chekhov’s revised The Seagull (1898), and a stop at the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Coral Gables, Florida, where
the American première of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is about to close
as a colossal flop in January 1956.
Occasionally, as the periods accumulate, characters from one era bleed
into an earlier or later one, bending the minds of not only us spectators, but
the folks of the invaded time on stage. Interspersed among the scenes depicting the
historic theater milestones are scenes of a contemporary theater that’s facing
financial disaster, laying off staff, and, eventually, canceling its upcoming
season—until a well-heeled patron and board member comes through with a big
check. (Why, it’s just like the recent
history of the Pearl! You don’t suppose
. . .?)
It
all sounds like such fun, especially for someone hooked on theater. New
York Timesman Charles Isherwood declares that “fellow adorers of theater will find much to divert them” in McNally’s amusement,
and Elisabeth Vincentelli emphasizes in the New
York Post that it’s “aimed at card-carrying members of the Drama Club.” (This lines up with Diana’s assessment of the
play’s appeal. Its target audience, she
figured, is college theater students.
I’ll predict that if McNally publishes And Away We Go, it will become a favorite for college and high
school theater departments.) I not only
expected to have fun that afternoon despite the nasty weather out in the real
world, but I really wanted to. As the
first scene unfolded, the faux-Greek
tragedy in prep, and into the second, The Globe in the process of staging The Tempest, I was really trying to have
fun as McNally and the cast played with theater history. I'm sorry to report, though, that McNally's
theater folly isn't as good as I’d anticipated (hoped?) or as Isherwood found
it. I'll do details in a bit, but it's too long at an
hour-and-fifty-minutes without intermission, and very repetitive once the
pattern’s been set. It's not just a matter of the length of time I had to
sit in the theater (the recent Julius Caesar at St Ann’s Warehouse was
much more excruciating in that regard; see my report on ROT, 15 October), but
it's too long for the material to sustain. I'll try to explain this shortly,
but McNally has very little substantial to say—the play's just a paean to actors
and acting troupes; there's no subtext—so after a while, there's little to
listen to in his “valentine to theater,” as Vincentelli calls it.
McNally isn’t really telling us anything about either
theater or the lives of actors (except that they live a dog’s life, the
playwright quips in passing). As
Isherwood writes, he “plants a big kiss on his lifelong love” and hopes that the rest of us delight in his
fillip as much as he does. Vincentelli
observes that “few people are as convinced of their calling’s importance as
actors,” but that’s really true of all theater folk—not omitting playwrights
(though I’m not convinced it isn’t also true of a lot of other professions as
well). The performance even opens with a
reality scene in which the actual actors in the company, after ritually kissing
the stage floor, introduce themselves to us and briefly tell us about their
theater lives. There's no subtext,
nothing going on except the send-up, so after a short while, there's little to
listen to. I tried to amuse myself by
seeing how many of the dropped play titles I could identify—not the ones named
by the characters as plays they’ve done, will do, like, or don’t care for, but
the ones whose titles are used as phrases in the dialogue, like when one of the
members of the Godot company calls
Florida (the U.S. première was in a suburb of Miami) “the warm peninsula.” (It’s a 1960 play by Joe Masteroff. Few people outside the theater world know it
because it only ran 86 performances.
Inside joke.) I found I couldn’t
even concentrate on that and I forgot the ones I did catch. (I had the same problem with some emblematic
lines I thought I might quote in this report—but I can’t recall them,
either! Think I’m getting old?) Ultimately, the idea for And Away We Go is cleverer that the play ends up being.
The
repetitiousness comes about because once McNally sets up his conceit, that each
scene will be an imaginary recreation of a seminal moment in the development of
Western theater, they all tend to fall into the same basic shape. Oh, the women backstage in the Greek and
Jacobean scenes aren’t actors (Heaven forfend!), the Versailles scene is limned
as a sex-farce (with mentions even of a Monsieur de Sade, whose about to become
a Marquis and has a yen for one of the male actors), and the Coconut Grove
scene centers on a failed production instead of an imminent success, but the
basic outline remains the same enough that not much new happens. The accents change (and I’ll have a word or
two to say about that in a moment), but the sentiment stays the same. The characters in the Athens vignette are all
fictional, of course (we don’t know any of the names of the actors of classic
Greece; even Thespis, the legendary first actor whose name is dropped, is a
mythical figure), but they fit the same roles as the historical actors like the
Burbage family at The Globe and Bert Lahr in Miami, and we know that the
characters in Moscow are supposed to be Stanislavsky’s MAT company even if
their names aren’t used. There are the
same egos, squabbles, jealousies, romances, and so on—though sometimes the
players are remixed. (In Florida, the
romance is between the understudy and the concessionaire-cum-nascent
playwright, both men. They turn up again
in the 1980s as the actor dies of AIDS in a scene that’s dropped in totally
unnecessarily and out of place.) I guess
this is McNally’s definitive illustration that “[t]imes change but life in the theatre remains the same,” as the
Pearl’s advertising asserts. It’s
a little like playing with paper dolls—the form is the same but you get to put
different clothes on them.
I’d
like to report that the production makes up for the emptiness of the script, as
shallow and repetitive as that was.
Unhappily, there are some performance problems
as well. The cast is generally
competent, though no one really stands out or makes the flat characters
sparkle. (I said I’ve never seen
anything at the Pearl that I liked, and the reason has been that the
productions have been directed and acted wanly and without inspiration. For that reason, I won’t single out any
actors or performances in this report.)
McNally’s writing for an ensemble and at the same time praising
ensemble troupes, but I felt that the way to bring this divertissement to life
on the stage was to cast really brilliant actors, the calibers of, say, Patrick
Stewart and Ian McKellen (who just happen to be showing off their virtuosic
chops on Broadway right now in a two-play rep that includes, coincidentally, Waiting for Godot) and just letting them
riff on the roles like jazz musicians. Elisabeth
Vincentelli picks up on this, suggesting that “some star turns would have
certainly spiced things up.” I couldn’t
agree more.
Now, about those accents I said I’d get to. First of all, why use them, except to let the
actors have the fun of playing with them?
A bunch of French and Russian theater people wouldn’t stand around
backstage and engage in heavily accented badinage in English, would they? The Greek actors didn’t have Greek accents in
the first scene. I imagine that when
Olga Knipper chatted with Stanislavsky, they did it in Russian—without
accents. Second, if the actors are going
to do accents, let’s make sure the words all get out through the mush. I lost a word here and there throughout the
performance, but in the accented scenes, I lost phrases and even entire
lines. (I won’t complain about the overall
quality of the accents—but one actor actually sounded like he was channeling
Peter Sellers’s Inspector Clouseau for his French. Now, really.
At least when I had to do a Cockney dialect on stage, I channeled
Michael Caine, an authentic Cockney!)
I should make some mention of the direction of the
Pearl’s And Away We Go, however
brief. Transport Group’s artistic director
Jack Cummings III, new to the Pearl, has something of a reputation for working
in site-specific productions, including The
Audience,
2005; The Boys in the Band, 2010; and Hello, Again, 2011, with five Drama Desk
Award nominations. I don’t know his work
at all, however, and though he seems to have kept McNally’s play moving along,
he didn’t turn in anything I’d rate as extraordinary in either the translation
of the script to the stage or the work of his cast. I can’t pick any nits in his presentation
here, but neither can I find anything worthy of special praise—much the same as
I found with the acting. (I suppose he
has to take some responsibility for the mushy accent work of which I complained
earlier.) I don’t know for certain
whether the production’s opening ritual in which the actors each introduce
themselves, tell us their favorite and least favorite roles, and then reveal a
little personal truth—not always particularly telling, though I presume this
detail changes some from performance to performance—was his devising or
McNally’s, but though some reviewers liked it, both Diana and I found it
tiresome and uninteresting. The play’s
about lauding actors and I understand that this is an exercise in letting
actors show themselves as real and ordinary people, a peek behind the mask, so
to speak, but it adds little to the production as far as I’m concerned, no
matter how well motivated. (I mean, how does it help me to know that one
actress’s least-favorite gig is the Greek choruses in which she participated?)
The
physical production may be the star of the show. Sandra Goldmark’s organized-clutter set took
most of the reviews I read, and it was the one thing about which my companion,
Diana, commented as she sat down.
(Later, Diana had more questions and criticisms than compliments.) A wide-open space that spans the width of the
stage, the set is a combination green room, dressing and make-up room,
costume-and-prop storage (which contains an unbelievable number and variety of
lamps and shades—what plays did this company do that accumulated so many light
fixtures, I wonder), mask workshop (for the Greeks), rehearsal studio, meeting
room, and bull pen. If the work of the
theater takes place on the stage, its life takes pace here—and all around are
the leavings to prove it. It’s also a
playpen for the Pearl’s actors who live in it and fight in it as if it was the
only place where they felt they belonged.
On another plane, Kathryn Rohe’s costumes are as simple as can be:
street clothes. No matter what period or
role the cast members embodied, they all wore ordinary, 21st-century street
drag. This conceit united the scenes
into McNally’s central notion, that all actors are kin, and it allowed the
bleed-over of one era to another, as well as the frequent time-warps the
dramatist slipped in. (Bits and pieces of
character or period attire is used from time to time—such as the headscarf the
Russian backstage charwoman wears—and occasionally these show up in a sight gag
as well. ) I’m afraid I feel a little
like I did way back when I was in college and a schoolmate and I went to a
nearby campus to see a play. I no longer
remember what the play was, but I remember quipping to my friend as we left the
theater, “What a great set. Too bad the
actors kept getting in front of it!” The
Pearl’s And Away We Go wasn’t in
anything like that category, of course, but still . . . .
The press coverage of the new play has been spotty
(though some weeklies may not have published yet). Of the daily papers, only the Times and the News ran reviews. Isherwood
calls And Away We Go “a
time-traveling romp” in his Times
notice, characterizing the play as “overstuffed and halfway to haywire” (which
he doesn’t seem to mean as a fault). He
finds the Pearl production of McNally’s “loose and loopy comedy,” as staged by Jack
Cummings, “handsomely mounted.” Though
the Times reviewer deems that “[m]uch of
it is enjoyably silly,” he also acknowledges that “a certain exhaustion sets in.” He took “much delight in watching the cast
zip nimbly between periods and players,” calling them “terrific.” The Post’s
Vincentelli suggests that anyone who doesn’t “smile knowingly at a reference
to former Cowardly Lion Bert Lahr playing Beckett in Florida” might consider
that “it’s time to fire up Hulu.”
Although she finds the acting “fine,” she observes that “it also
tends to be workmanlike,” which is sort of how I found it. I like Vincentelli’s last line: “In the end,
the best love letter to the theater simply is . . . a good play.”
In “Goings On About Town,” the New Yorker laments that And
Away We Go “is curiously bereft of insight or emotion” and concludes that “this
play is plodding, and not as revealingly ‘inside’ as it wants to be.” In Entertainment
Weekly, Jason
Clark declares that the playwright “continues his love affair with backstage
stories, but this time with diminishing returns,” calling the play “mystifyingly
schizophrenic.” Clark writes, “[E]very lumbering scene
seems to boil down to one of two capital-P Points: Theater is Always in Trouble
or Theater Fills the Soul,” and director Cummings “seems to be at a
total loss of how to make sense of the material.” The cast, “mostly screechy hams fumbling with
McNally's thudding text,” says the EW
writer, has similar difficulties. Diane Snyder in Time Out New York declares that McNally “loosely knits together a
series of sketches for a play that’s lovingly made, but not an exemplar of
craftsmanship,” though she asserts that it gives the Pearl cast “a prime
opportunity” to show off their acting chops.
“There are some hearty laughs,” notes Snyder, “but it’s easy to drown in
the details without absorbing the resonance.”
Goldmark’s set, the woman from TONY
writes, however, is “a beautiful cathedral to the endurance of theater.”
On the web, Huffington Post’s reviewer David Finkle acknowledges,
“There’s much to recommend in And Away We
Go,” but adds that “McNally does go on—and on and on and yet on.” Though Finkle finds pleasure in McNally’s
jokes, including the inside ones, he also warns prospective theatergoers that “each
of the segments exceeds its staying power,” which pretty much echoes my own
assessment. Overall, the playwright “has
so much he wants to say,” observes the HP
reviewer, “that he’s determined to get it all in.” “This backstage journey
is lots of fun,” pronounces CurtainUp
reviewer Elyse Sommer, calling some of the theater gibes “particular funny bone
ticklers.” “I suppose And Away We Go
will appeal mostly to frequent theater goers who will ‘get’ all the allusions,”
concludes Sommer, but she finds the whole production exemplary. “Theater nerds, rejoice!” warns Pete
Hempstead on TheaterMania. “All others? Well, you may find yourself a bit confused
when you see Terrence McNally’s new play.”
But he continues that the “rollicking production, which gambols
higgledy–piggledy through the history of histrionics, can delight if you know
what to look for.” Hempstead sums up the
play’s concept by explaining, “All of this switching, not to mention the
frequent intersections of timelines, prevents the audience from having the
faintest clue where the play is going. Yet,” the TheaterMania
writer adds, “one often has the feeling that it is progressing toward something
satisfying.” He concludes that it
does. “And Away We Go delivers
the goods in the end,” insists Hempstead.
Calling McNally’s “love letter to the theater” an “engaging new work,” Ron Cohen, posting on nytheater
now, praises the company’s efforts as a “brave and well-realized taking on
of a new play.”
[I don’t usually append closing comments to a performance
report, and I only occasionally take exception to the published reviews and
promotional material put out by the theater.
I’m going to break that policy this time because I kept running into
small factual mistakes as I looked into the production. They’re not serious, and have little to do
with the reception of the play or its comprehension. But I’m something of a theater historian—not
only have I studied it, as most theater pros have, but I’ve taught it. I want to set the record straight for anyone
who reads ROT, so at least some people will get the facts
right.
[Some writers have put the Russian backstage scene in
1896, which is the year that Chekhov’s Seagull
premièred. That would seem to be correct
at first glance. But the characters make
very clear that their staging of the play isn’t the first one: the first
mounting had been a disaster, they tell us.
Theater students will know that The Seagull was first staged unsuccessfully in St. Petersburg in 1896 and flopped
so badly that the play was virtually dismissed and Chekhov’s career and
reputation looked to have been derailed.
In 1898, however, Konstantin Stanislavsky directed the play at the
Moscow Art Theater and turned it into a resounding success. Although McNally’s script doesn’t identify
the company or the players in the Seagull rehearsal, it must be set in 1898, two years after the St. Petersburg
failure.
[At Versailles, though the characters are fictional and
the play being performed for the king is not identified, it probably isn’t the
court of Louis XVI on the eve of the French Revolution of 1789. First of all, there are members of the
company who worked with Molière, who died in 1673, over a hundred years before
the revolution. It might be the
Versailles of Louis XIV, who reigned until 1715, but the key clue is the fact
that the audience includes a young Monsieur de Sade whom the king’s censor says
is about to become a Marquis. That
happened at the death of de Sade’s father in 1767—and the monarch at that time
was Louis XV (reigned 1715-74). It’s a
stretch for an actress to have worked with Molière and still been on stage 94
years later, but perhaps she was very young when she started and perhaps de
Sade was farther way from inheriting his father’s title than the censor intimates. (De Sade was, of course, around for the
revolution—he died in 1814—but he was already a marquis for a long time by
then. Also, from 1768 on, he was often
in exile away from Paris or on the run abroad because of his sexual exploits;
in 1777, he was imprisoned. It’s
unlikely he’d have been invited to Versailles at any time after his notoriety
had reached scandalous levels.)
[In addition, some synopses of the play state that the
French scene is set at the Royal Theatre at Versailles. (The script doesn’t actually specify this, so
I assume it comes from the Pearl’s publicity department.) Historically, there was never such a
place. Over the decades that Versailles
was the royal residence, there were many theaters built and replaced in the
palace, but none bore the name Théâtre Royal, or Royal Theatre. The main theater at Versailles was called
L’Opéra Royal—the Royal Opera House—and straight plays, including some of
Molière’s and Beaumarchais’s, were presented there for royal audiences.]
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