[Back in the mid-1980s, I worked with a former New York University instructor of mine, Cynthia Jenner, to try to start a new theater. It was to be called Theatre Junction and Cynthia, who’s a dramaturg, planned for it to be a playwrights’ theater with a particular focus on women writers (though not exclusively). She enlisted me after we’d become acquainted during her Production Dramaturgy course to be her assistant and I did a number of jobs for her, including a lot of scouting of new writers and plays. While I initiated some of the reconnaissance missions, more often Cynthia would send me out to see a performance, presentation, or reading that she’d read about. (I also read some scripts and other material to determine their potential suitability for TJ. Cynthia had a number of performance projects she was considering calling for different types of material, including adaptations of non-dramatic sources and lunch-time presentations of non-traditional performances.)
[The procedure was pretty standard. I’d see a presentation and write a brief
report for Cynthia. Unhappily, the
theater never came to be, but since I had recently started writing on a word
processor (no Internet yet), I kept all the reports I wrote for Cynthia on
file—and I still have them to this day.
Below are three reports I wrote for Cynthia in 1985; one is a staged
reading (Nancy Beckett’s Labor Relations at the LaMaMa
Galleria) and two are fully-produced plays (Louise Page’s Salonika at the Public Theater and Faulkner’s
Bicycle at the Joyce Theater as part of
the American Theater Exchange). All
three writers were considered “emerging” artists at the time these plays
appeared; unfortunately, none of them attained the level of renown their
boosters had hoped for in the 1980s.]
LABOR
RELATIONS BY NANCY BECKETT
24 March 1985
The
reading of Labor Relations by Nancy Beckett at The Galleria (La MaMa; 9
E. 1st Street) on Friday, 22 March 1985 was a rehearsed, semi-staged reading of
a “work in progress” ostensibly for the consideration of Ellen Stewart of La MaMa. (At the last minute, Stewart did not come,
but sent a representative. Stewart
asserted often that she judges artists not on their proposals, résumés, or
track records, but on an almost mystical individual response to their
personalities. She never reads texts,
she says, never does any kind of “in-depth analysis about anybody about
anything,” never goes to rehearsals unless asked, and seldom even sees a show
at La MaMa.)
The play is a three-character, autobiographical exploration of the
relationship of a girl/young woman with her oldest brother and older sister
spanning, in non-linear fashion, from her sister’s wedding when the girl was
only 6 through the birth of her own illegitimate child when she was 18. There is very little plot, the play unfolding
by episodic scenes from various points along the pertinent time continuum
arranged in an apparently random order.
In flashbacks within flashbacks, we see bits of the conflict among Kay
and Ed, the older siblings, and Anne, their unwelcome baby sister; the conflict
between Ed and Kay and their parents; the sudden death of their father, Kay’s
wedding, and Ed’s surprise return on leave from the Army; his permanent return
to take a union job from which he is currently laid off; Anne’s pregnancy, and
the birth of her baby. We never see the
parents; Ed’s wife, from whom he is divorced; Kay’s husband, who beats her; her
children, or Anne’s boyfriend, the father of her baby.
The play is structured into 15 or 16 scenes and a Prologue with no act
break. In the Prologue and occasionally
during the rest of the play, Anne narrates her story presentationally. There may be some little dumb-show acting
behind her, but not much. This material
particularly becomes talky and undramatic.
The other scenes, which are essentially realistic from what I could
gather from the reading, are representational, but not very active. The non-linear arrangement of the events
seems to enhance this non-action since the progress of the small events dealt
with in the plot are always delayed and attenuated. The only real event of the play is the birth
of Anne’s baby, and we know that’s going to happen right from the start because
she tells us in her Prologue speech and the first scene is Anne going into
labor. (By the way, note the two uses of
“labor” in Labor Relations: Ed’s job problems because of a labor
dispute, and Anne’s “relationship” with her brother and sister which changes
because of the birth of her baby.) The
only “surprise” in the story is that the baby is born on Christmas Day.
There
are a considerable number of references to Catholicism, Jesus, church, and
religious beliefs in general in the play.
Except for the obvious connection between Anne’s baby and the baby
Jesus, a picture of which is the subject of a repeated monologue she delivers,
I don’t know what Beckett was saying with these references. It is clear, however, that she is making some
important (to her) comment about her family’s belief in Catholicism, and I suspect
(but I have no evidence for this) that she is using Kay and Ed as some sort of
surrogate for Mary and Joseph (although, she has aspects of Mary in the
character of Anne, too. I was confused
about all this anyway.) This element
seems to be the important reason for writing the play, but I didn’t understand
what Beckett was trying to say. I
acknowledge that this may be due to my own lack of receptivity to this
material. Not being a Christian (though
I, too, was born on Christmas Day), I very likely missed some significant point
innate in this symbolism and, so, lost the point of the play.
Overall, I was bored and confused.
I don’t know anything about Nancy Beckett, but the play struck me as
mildly self-indulgent, as if she felt compelled to write this, but I didn’t
have to hear it. (To give you a
measuring stick, I feel the same way on a grander scale about Arthur Miller’s After
the Fall.) It is important to note,
however, that I may have been the wrong person to judge this material because
of its apparent central concern with Catholicism for which I have no feel.
[Since
this report focused on the play and, especially, the writer, I didn’t record the names of the actors
in the three roles in Labor Relations. There may have been no program
because it was a reading, or I lost it over the ensuing 33 years, but I now
can’t reconstruct the cast of the La MaMa reading. There were, of course, no reviews of this
reading, and La MaMa never produced Beckett’s play (although I see that a
staging was mounted in Chicago in 1988).]
* *
* *
SALONIKA BY LOUISE PAGE
22 April 1985
Though Louise Page’s Salonika, presented at the New York Shakespeare Festival at the Public
Theater, was not an uninteresting play, I was disappointed when I saw it on Saturday,
20 April 1985. I suppose I expected more
from a playwright to whom so much attention is being paid lately, with a
production of her Real Estate at Arena in D.C. (opened at the Kreeger
Theater on 8 February 1985) and this one here at the Public (2 April-19 May
1985 in the Anspacher Theater).
Briefly, the play is about two old women, a mother, Charlotte (Jessica
Tandy), and a daughter, Enid (Elizabeth Wilson), who come to Salonika, Greece,
to visit the grave of their husband and father who died there in World War
I. They spend the morning on the beach,
in the company of a naked young drifter, Peter (Maxwell Caulfield), and return
there in the afternoon, after having gone to the cemetery. Joining them unannounced is the mother’s man
friend, Leonard (Thomas Hill), who wants
to marry her. Throughout the play we see
glimpses of the relationships between the mother and daughter, the mother and
her friend, the mother and her dead husband (who appears as a young soldier,
played by David Strathairn, from beneath the beach), and the daughter and her
fantasy of her father (whom she never knew).
The
problem with the play is that it is disjointed and unfocussed. The reviews have all centered on Page’s
treatment of the dependent relationship between the mother and her spinster
daughter, but, in fact, that is only part of the theme. There is apparently equal weight given to the
fruitlessness of war and the waste of dying in one. I was never sure which was Page’s central
message. I don’t think she was,
either. I also gathered that we were
somehow supposed to feel sympathetic to the dried-up old daughter, who in the
end propositions the young man to sleep with her on the beach for money. He literally keels over and dies almost
immediately thereafter—probably from the prospect. Trouble is, though I was sympathetic to her,
I certainly didn’t fault her mother for her state. The older woman didn’t give the impression of
having forced her daughter to stay at home and wither away. Her father’s death couldn’t be blamed—though
she tries. And the fact that she finds
her mother’s having a beau threatening seems pure selfishness to me.
The play wasn’t unenjoyable.
However, this was mostly due to the superb performances (can you expect
less from Jessica Tandy?) and a few telling moments. The rest was more curious than good. The chief theatrical (not to say dramatic)
interest was the technical feat of bringing the dead husband up through the sand
(which covers the Anspacher stage) with no evidence of a tunnel or a trapdoor,
and the appearance of Maxwell Caulfield as the nude sun-bather.
Page, who’s British
and has something of a track record across the pond (though Real Estate
and Salonika are her débuts in the States), may be
someone to keep an eye and an ear on, but as of now, her stuff seems less than
exciting. She may emerge as a more
dynamic writer than she is now, however, with some exposure of the magnitude
she’s now experiencing. I wouldn’t
dismiss her entirely.
* *
* *
FAULKNER’S BICYCLE BY HEATHER McDONALD
12 June 1985
The presentation of Heather McDonald’s Faulkner’s Bicycle, a
Yale Repertory Theater production
presented by the Joyce Theater Foundation as part of the American Theater
Exchange. I saw it on the afternoon of Wednesday,
12 June 1985; Frank Rich had panned the play and the production on 10 June as “something
of a sleepfest.” As a writer “in the
early stages of her career, . . . one can easily forgive her failures of craft. What is harder to countenance is her
play’s utter lack of an original theatrical voice. ‘Faulkner’s Bicycle’ is pure synthetic; it
contains hardly a line, character or scene that we haven’t encountered dozens
of times before.”
I don’t agree with Frank Rich’s review at all. I also don’t think the script has been badly
damaged by the Yale production, though I don’t think they helped solve any of
the problems that I spotted when I read it. As a matter of fact, the production pointed
up some of the problems.
I thought the set was an unnecessarily ambiguous half-way measure between
cluttered realism and symbolism. My
preference would have been for something that didn’t try to recreate any of the
scenes realistically, and was all one unit.
The constant blackouts between each scene to shift set pieces emphasized
the disjointed, episodic nature of the script, rather than supporting the
tenuous continuity that lies beneath it.
With some 26 scenes (I didn’t count them at the Joyce; that’s how many
there were in the original script), that means at least 25 blackouts, which is
excessive, I think. (Faulkner’s Bicycle ran 90 minutes. Without the blackouts, it might run closer to
75.)
McDonald’s play is
about Claire Pierce, a spinsterish young woman in Oxford, Mississippi, the
hometown of novelist William Faulkner.
In the summer of 1962, Claire has to contend with her aging, senescent
mother and her sister, Jett, a struggling writer who’s fled the big city, to
which she took off years earlier, to return home. Shortly before the novelist’s death, Claire sets
her cap for Faulkner, and he is soon giving her nocturnal rides on his bicycle.
He is wary of encounters with strangers
but finally comes to tea at the Pierces, arousing a forgotten friendship with
Claire’s mother; they’d gone to school together. As Faulkner sits uncomfortably in the Pierce parlor,
Mama says, “People say you’re drinking yourself to death.” He replies, “People say you’re growing senile,”
and adds, “You were a bit like that in high school.” The writer loosens up after taking out a flask
and brings up detailed recollections of their shared youth. (In St. Peter’s Cemetery in Oxford, there are
four graves in the Faulkner family plot.
One is marked cryptically with only the initials “E. T.,” believed to be
a family friend. Do you suppose McDonald
is imagining that it’s one of the “Pierce” women?)
The casting bothered me, too. All
the actresses were very accomplished, though I found Tessie Hogan as Jett a bit
stiff and Cara Duff-MacCormick as Claire mannered. The real problem was that all of the women
were too young for the roles. Kim Hunter
hardly comes off as 61, and the two daughters looked more like early 20’s (and
Claire seemed younger than Jett, which is backwards), not mid 30’s. This seriously weakens the impact of most of
the play. (Though she’s 60, Hunter doesn’t
look it on stage, and Addison Powell, who plays Faulkner, is 64 and looks every
day of it, with his shock of white hair and weathered face. Faulkner was also 64 in 1962, the year the
play is set and the year the writer died.)
Middle-aging daughters facing this problem are more dramatic than
youngsters, who just seem self-indulgent.
Also, their being older means Claire has been taking care of Mama
longer—which is significant. Mama must
be the same age as Faulkner (they were schoolmates, after all), and the fact
that she’s old should be important, too.
A younger woman facing senility is different than an older one. Except for finding a role for a favored Yale
School actress (Hogan), I can’t understand why the women were cast this way.
I thought the slide projections were mostly ineffective. When I read the script, I found this device a
wonderful touch, but they didn’t really amount to much here. I think this is because they were so far
away. Perhaps the rear of Yale’s set was
not so distant from the audience as the Joyce’s, but I think the slides would
have been more effective if they were projected at the proscenium, say above
the actors’ heads, or to the side. In
any case, they were mostly lost for me.
Except for the disjuncture caused by the blackouts, none of this really
diminished the play as a piece of theater.
It still had a strong impact on me, particularly the scenes with Mama in
the bathtub. (The “shit” scene, despite
its scatology, was very powerful). None
of the character problems (such as recluse Faulkner being affable at an
afternoon tea) are resolved, but the production did not damage the play beyond
redemption. The weaknesses were more
obvious and the strengths weren’t played up in this production, but I could
still see the play we liked. It’s still
there.
[The American Theater
Exchange’s festival at the Joyce Theater was a new program designed to bring
works from regional American theaters to New York. It was meant to be a continuing event, but the
1985 presentation turned out to be its only season. The ATE presented three plays at Chelsea’s
Joyce Theater; besides McDonald’s Faulkner’s Bicycle from Yale Rep, which ran from 30 May to 22 June, the festival also brought
Season’s Greetings by Alan Ayckbourne
(6-27 July), produced by Houston’s Alley Theatre, and Jack Henry Abbott’s
autobiographical In the Belly of the Beast adapted for the stage by Adrian Hall and Robert Woodruff, produced by
the Mark Taper Forum of Los Angeles (8-31 August). (I saw another production of Belly, the portrayal of convicted killer Abbott,
from Chicago’s Wisdom Bridge Theatre that same year at the John F. Kennedy
Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., with William L. Petersen as
the convicted murder.)]
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