FRESHWATER
by Virginia Woolf
by Virginia Woolf
Women’s Project, Julia
Miles Theater
27 January 2009
On
Thursday, 22 January [2009], my friend Diana and I went uptown to the Julia
Miles Theater on 55th Street, just west of 9th Avenue, to see a curiosity of a
theatrical/literary nature, the Women’s Project’s production of the only play
Virginia Woolf ever wrote. (It opened on 25 January, the “joyous” 127th
anniversary of Woolf’s birth. Isn’t that cute?) A coproduction with
Anne Bogart’s SITI Company (originally the Saratoga International Theatre
Institute because of the location of its founding as a summer institution), the
performance was directed by Bogart and featured members of her
troupe.
Freshwater is a slight bit of
nonsense, written first in 1923 and then revised in 1935, which Woolf composed
as a family entertainment, performed by her relatives for her friends in the
Bloomsbury group. It had one performance, but no professional staging, at
least in the U.S. (I don’t believe it’s ever been performed
professionally in England, either; I don’t know that for certain, but the
program asserts it hasn’t. A French company, which included Eugene
Ionesco and Alain Robbe-Grillet, apparently did a presentation at NYU in
1983. The play has been published, however, in a volume
containing both scripts.) The Women’s
Project production opened on 25 January [2009] after starting previews on 15 January;
it closed on 15 February.
To
be honest, though the performance itself is far from an embarrassment, the
history and background of the play is far more interesting than the play
itself, at least today and here in America. (I’ll get to this in a bit,
don’t worry.) Freshwater is a large village on the Isle of Wight where
many famous Britons had summer residences. One of these was Dimbola
Lodge, the home of Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-79), a photographer, and
her husband, Charles Hay Cameron (1795-1880), a philosopher. Julia
Cameron was the great-aunt of Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) and Dimbola was often
filled with other artists.
Among
the guests (and the characters in Freshwater)
were George Frederick Watts (1817-1904), a painter, and his very young wife and
the leading Shakespearean actress in Britain. Ellen Terry (1847-1928), and the
British Poet Laureate, Alfred Tennyson (1809-92), another Freshwater resident
himself. What Woolf was doing was writing a light entertainment spoofing
one group of artists, portrayed as eccentric and dotty, for another group of
artists a generation later. (Only Terry was alive when Woolf first wrote
her playlet; none survived when it was rewritten—from a one-act to a
three-act—and enacted.)
The
play, which in the Women’s Project’s staging is a combination of the two
versions which lasts only 75 minutes, has no depth and depends for most of his
humor on a familiarity with the characters and the times (there are many
references to other artists, especially Tennyson’s rivals and predecessors such
as Robert Browning and William Wordsworth). As a result, Bogart adds (I
assume—I doubt Woolf wrote this into her scripts) a lot of physical humor and
sight gags. What it resembles, in fact, is a Victorian-era Monty Python
sketch, but without the Pythons’ universality and subversive social
commentary. Woolf’s audience, of course, not only knew her private brand
of humor intimately, but had a much closer association with the subjects of her
jibes and parodies than any of us would.
For
instance, Terry, who was 30 years her husband’s junior (they married in 1864,
when Terry was 17), left her husband after less than a year of marriage.
In the play, she meets Royal Navy Lt. John Craig and, in the end of the play,
runs away with him. Now, my assumption was that John Craig would become
the father of the renowned scenic designer and theatrical theorist Edward
Gordon Craig, Terry’s son, but when I got home and checked the history, I found
that no such person existed. (Gordon Craig was born out of wedlock to
Terry—she was actually still married to Watts—and William Edward Godwin, an
architect. “Craig” was a name he adopted in adulthood.)
Now,
I’m only guessing, but I bet most of the rest of the audience, if they made any
connection between Terry and Gordon Craig at all, made the same mistake I
did. But Terry’s friends and family would have known all that because not
only were they closer to Terry than we are, they probably all knew Craig—and
possibly Terry as well. The character, one of only two who are fictitious
(the other is the maid, Mary Magdalen), was a joke the in-crowd would have
gotten.
The
mocking references to Watts’s paintings and Tennyson’s verse, which are obscure
to most of us (Tennyson perhaps less than Watts), wouldn’t have been for Woolf’s
audience because the painter and the poet were not only both still around
when Woolf and her friends were young, but they had been intimates from the
older generation. So all that’s left to amuse me is the physical comedy
and the cartoon characterizations the actors, from whom the characters are no
doubt as distant as Shakespeare’s or the Greeks’, create. The “original”
cast probably spoofed the real people like Saturday
Night Live lampooning present-day celebrities and politicians, but
with a lot of inside gags. That doesn’t leave much to fill the stage,
even for a scant 75 minutes.
There
is some amusing, if slight, verbal comedy. While John Craig and Terry are
out on some rocks in the sea, and Terry is describing her elderly husband, she
makes reference to “Titian. Titian. Titian.” “Sneezing?” asks Craig. “I
hope you haven’t caught cold.” (This reminded me of a line in the ’80s
TV series Moonlighting:
Maddie—Cybill Shepherd—says, “The man is looking for a clue, a clue, a clue.”
David—Bruce Willis—responds, “Gesundheit.”)
Watts,
the painter of classic scenes (with Terry as his model), is wont to say, “The
Utmost for the Highest,” a phrase he repeats frequently (and which is echoed
once or twice by some other characters). It’s an almost nonsense
expression, but its pretentious emptiness reminded me of the utterance of a
pompous holodeck figure in an episode of Star
Trek: The Next Generation: “The higher, the fewer.” But for
the most part, the verbal jokes are so tied to the life and works of the
Victorian-era artists Woolf was parodying that they don’t communicate very much
to me.
I
have never been a fan of Bogart’s work. I find her pretentious and
self-indulgent. (I tried to read her book, Viewpoints, which lays out her acting theory,
but I couldn’t make head or tails out of it, and what I could follow sounded
like complete crap to me!) From what I have seen (and read, mostly in
reviews), her company, which has at one time or another resided all over the
globe, picking up, I gather, the tricks of many varied acting styles and
techniques, is more devoted to physical work than verbal.
Not
having read the text(s) of Freshwater,
I can’t be sure of this, but it may be possible to translate Woolf’s
featherweight witticisms for a contemporary American audience, but I don’t
think Bogart even tries. Essentially, she skips over it, and covers it
all with mostly silly physical characterizations and sight gags that bear
little relationship to the play. Julia Cameron (Ellen Lauren) on her back
with her boot-clad legs in the air and her hoop skirt over her head and torso
may or may not be funny, but it doesn’t much depend on what’s happening on
stage or in the text. (And Carol Burnett did it better anyway!)
When
she drops into a chair at one point near the beginning of the play, while
Tennyson is sitting on the floor, leaning against the chair (having just been “worshiping”
Terry, his “muse”), she flounces her gown so it drops over Tennyson’s head,
leaving only his legs visible beyond the skirt’s hem. Maybe that’s funny,
in a Benny Hill sort of way, but it isn’t related to what’s happening in the
play: it’s just a set piece. All the characters have such moments, some
less elaborate and some more so, but their humor is independent of the
play. (Tom Nelis’s Charles Cameron does like to lose his trousers pretty
often—but that’s suggested by lines in the script. Considering the part
was played in the writer’s home performance by Woolf’s husband, Leonard, I
wonder if she intended it to be acted out literally, though.)
It’s
not that the actors execute this stuff badly, or are technically
incompetent. They’re fine, but they aren’t really doing anything.
It’s a clown show (I’m no fan of clowns, I confess) interrupted by a lot
of fast-paced dialogue that seems to be used as time-filler. Some of the
casting seems infelicitous: Ellen Terry, who was all of 17 when she left Watts
after only ten months of marriage, is played by Kelly Maurer. I don’t
know how old Maurer is, but she’s hardly a teen; she started with SITI when it
began in 1992—17 years ago, coincidentally—so unless she was born in a stage
trunk, she’s probably in her thirties. Maurer tries like hell to pull off
Terry’s youth and enthusiasm for the new and exciting—”It’s all so usual,” she complains
until she meets Craig—but she’s no “ingénue,” as Terry is identified in the
program.
On
the opposite side of the scale, Tom Nelis, who is about 55, plays the
octogenarian Charles Cameron (it’s hard to determine what year Woolf set the
play—somewhere between 1864, the year Terry was married, and 1875, the year the
Camerons returned to India and Ceylon as they do at the play’s end) by
channeling Arte Johnson’s dirty old Walnetto man from Laugh-In. (When his
wife puts a blue conical hat with white stars on his white-maned head, he
resembles a cross between Merlin and the Travelocity gnome. He also
appears as Queen Victoria at the end of the play, a tall, skinny version of the
short, stout monarch. We all had to stand for “God Save the Queen” when
she appeared, which made me feel a little disloyal!)
Charles
Isherwood, in the New York
Times, appraised the play about the same as I have (though he was
perhaps a little kinder regarding the notion to stage it at all), and he
praised Gian Murray Gianino, who plays Craig, as the actor who gets into the
spirit of the hi-jinks the best. His performance is perhaps a little more
stylized, more presentational, if you will, than the other actors, who, outside
their clowning, seem to take it all somewhat earnestly. (This may be a
difference between British and American acting: the Brits are terrific at
throw-away bits; Americans put a lot of weight into everything as a
rule.)
Gianino,
however, treats his role a little like the lead actor in a certain ubiquitous
late-night commercial for a “male-enhancement product”—as if he’s a bit of an
android. Something did bother me, though, even though it’s not Gianino’s
fault really: when he talks (or sings, which is when I first noticed this), his
mouth migrates to the right side of his face as if he had too much Botox on the
left. I first thought it might be a character tic, but it’s not—and it
looks a tad peculiar. (I’ve never actually seen that in real life—only in
cartoons!)
Isherwood
singled out the physical production for praise, and I suppose the set and
costumes (both by James Schuette) are creditable, but I suspect Isherwood was
latching on to one aspect of the production that stands on its own without explanation
or excuse. The main set is an almost-empty drawing room at Dimbola with
white walls painted with great strokes of green as if to represent tall grass
or seaside rushes. (In the center scene, which is set on some rocks in
the sea—The Needles—a pair of traps is opened in the center of the
green-painted floor. The inside of the trap is painted blue, and Craig
and Terry sit with their feet dangling in the hole as if they are sitting by
the edge of the water. No other set changes are made, except to clear off
the small props—Watts’s easel, a chair—from the first scene.)
The
costumes seems to be from the mid-19th century, circa 1860s (the time of Terry’s
marriage), though the image of Victoria at the end is the
one from near the end of her reign in the 1890s. (I suspect
this was due to Americans’ familiarity with that picture from Helen Hayes on
the screen, whereas a British audience from Woolf’s day might be more familiar
with earlier impressions—most of them having lived through the second half of
Victoria’s reign. Maybe not though, since the Queen does award Tennyson
his peerage and Watts his Order of Merit, which honors occurred
respectively in 1883 and 1902, after Victoria’s death.)
In the end, then, though, as I said, the
production was far from an embarrassment for anyone, I wonder what made any of
them want to produce this play. Women’s Project publicity says that Julie
Crosby, the artistic director, has wanted to produce Freshwater
since she first discovered it in 1997. Whatever for?
I have always said, when someone says they’ve found a lost, neglected, or
overlooked play by someone famous, there usually turns out to be a very good
reason that it was lost, neglected, and overlooked. (Twain’s Is He Dead?,
produced on Broadway last season [2007-08], is a good example. It just
isn’t very funny, so the director added a lot of physical humor to
compensate. Even in the 1890’s, when the very presence on stage of a man
dressed as a woman—remember Charlie’s Aunt?—was
automatically hilarious, no producer would undertake Twain’s play. The
modern production only lasted three months.)
Crosby, however, asserts that the play has
never been produced because of sexism, and cited the stats for plays by women
writers that had been mounted on Broadway—the plays, not the directors—over the
recent seasons. In a New York Times blog article, she
said, “There are some blinders on, and it becomes its own self-fulfilling
prophecy: Women don’t get produced because their plays don’t make money, so
they don’t make money because they don’t get produced.”
Believe me when I tell you that, at least in
this case, Freshwater
hasn’t been staged solely because it’s a waste of effort, funds, and
commitment, irrespective of the author’s gender. (There’s a limited
supply of money in the theater, as well as a limit to available talent and even
empty stages. What else more valuable could all those people have devoted
themselves and their budgets to?)
* *
* *
LIFE X 3
by Yasmina Reza
Round House Theatre (Bethesda, Md.)
Round House Theatre (Bethesda, Md.)
20
April 2005
I was in Washington, D.C., last week (my
mother and I had taken a little trip together; we left from and returned to
D.C.), and I stayed over this past weekend to go with Mom to a show on Saturday,
16 April [2006], to which she and a friend already had seats. Perhaps you know a play, a French import,
that did well in London (1996) and on Broadway (1998) a few seasons ago, Art by Yasmina Reza. (It was about a man who had bought a
minimalist painting for his apartment and all his friends criticized him for
his selection, a white-on-white composition.
Despite the title, and the main plot element, the play wasn’t about the
painting or even art in general. It was
about friendship and loyalty and betrayal.
It had a top-notch cast here, including Alfred Molina as the art
purchaser and Alan Alda as one of his friends.)
Well, one of D.C.’s local companies, the
Round House Theatre in Bethesda (a close D.C. suburb in Maryland) staged a
later play of Reza’s called Life X 3. I believe it played in New York a while back
[it did, in 2003], but I don’t remember what I read about it; I don’t know if
it’s had a track record elsewhere, like London [yes, in 2000-01 and 2002]. (I presume it’s played in Paris, but I don’t
know that for sure either [again, yes, in 2001.)
The play, which is performed without an
intermission (about 1½ hours’ running time), presents the same event, a failed
dinner party, in three different scenarios.
This wasn’t like Alan Ayckbourn’s Norman
Conquests—three perspectives on the same evening, as seen by three
different participants—or Rashomon,
where different witnesses recount their versions of the same event. It’s more like the 1998 movie Sliding Doors with Gwyneth Paltrow—her
life unfolds differently depending on whether she catches a particular London Underground
or misses it and gets home later.
In Life,
there’s no particular triggering event that alters the plotlines of the evening’s
events, but each time, things unfold differently—always ending in a
conflict. The problem is that none of
the events, no matter how they’re changed, are important or interesting. The events don’t change all that much, and
since the evening fails each time—that never changes, because the main fact,
that the guests have arrived on the wrong night (or the hosts forgot what night
it was—it’s not really clear, but no matter), never changes, either.
More significantly, nothing any of the four
people—two couples (plus an unseen, cranky, and spoiled 6-year-old who
interrupts the evening several times from his room)—does or says is the least
bit interesting. The two men are astrophysicists,
which limits the interest in what they talk about—and worry about—to other
scientifically-inclined academics. Most
of it passed over my head. And I had to
listen to it three times! Yikes!!
Even James Kronzer’s set design—which is the production’s
fault, not the playwright’s, I guess—was peculiar. It was extremely modern and almost
Japanese. The furniture looked like it
might have been designed for a Star Trek
episode, and there was some sort of lighted panel up center, apparently a work
of art, I guess, that may have depicted the universe or a galaxy—the topic of
the men’s research—in some allegorical way.
(It wasn’t part of the play—no one mentioned it or pointed it out—but it
was up center and lit up, so it was visually prominent.) I guess astrophysicists are all Futurists,
too.
In addition, the set, the apartment living
room, was on a turntable—well, two turntables and they revolved for the start
of each episode. I guess the idea was
that each telling was a “new” event in a “different” world, so the
relationships among the objects was different, like a parallel universe or
something. (Star Trek again—those series did several episodes on this
theme.) The objects were all the same,
of course, and they didn’t move independently, but as the outer and inner rings
of the set revolved in opposite directions, their juxtaposition changed. (In the third episode, the set continued to
revolve slowly throughout the scene—for reasons I never figured out at all.) It didn’t really do anything for the
play. I’m not sure anything could have.
The translation was by Christopher
Hampton. Given that he’s a playwright
himself (and writes in English for the most part), the language of this play
was stiff, awkward, and even unbelievable much of the time. I could hear the original French behind
Hampton’s translation—and there’s no reason I should. (Yes, the play remains set in France—Paris, I
presume, though that’s not certain—but the characters are all speaking English,
so it should be conversational I’d have thought.
By the way, being set in France, I somehow
doubt the hosts would keep boxes of Cheezits in their pantry—if they’re even
sold in France; or England, for that matter—even “white cheddar” ones. I think this was a substitution for some
similar French snack that the director or translator was afraid wouldn’t
communicate to an American audience.
Nonetheless, it seemed out of place.)
* *
* *
[In 1992, Drama Review editor
Richard Schechner asked me to write profile
of Leonardo Shapiro’s Shaliko Company for the journal. For the better part of a year, I shadowed Leo,
including attending rehearsals for the productions he was directing, such as
Shaliko’s main project during that time, the production at Theatre for the New
City of Karen Malpede’s Blue Heaven. I attended most of the rehearsals starting in
August, and shortly before opening, Leo, Karen, and I decided to try to get a
little early publicity by submitting an article to the Village Voice,
and I set out to write it, a description of the work-in-progress. The result, after much revision, was published
as “As It Is in Heaven” on 22 September 1992 (and posted on Rick On Theater on 25 March 2011). Below is an earlier , unpublished version of
the final article, which is a little more straightforward than the version the Voice ran.]
If you haven’t
had a chance to experience the new virtual reality around these days, the live
equivalent, albeit lower-tech, may be the performances of Blue Heaven,
Karen Malpede’s new play at Theater for the New City. Director Leonardo Shapiro, whose Shaliko
Company is co-producing with TNC, has turned the Johnson Theater into the
Heaven Cafe, a run-down habitat for “a sturdy group of artists, eccentrics and
visionaries” on the Lower East Side.
From 10 September to 11 October [1992], you can stroll in, have a drink
or a nosh, and witness the lives of the denizens of Heaven unfold magically
around you.
Not that Blue
Heaven is merely a slice of urban life.
Malpede and Shapiro have concocted a highly theatrical event with live
music, videos, film, masks, body art, and all manner of special effects. It’s all designed to draw you into the world
of Sada (Lee Nagrin) and Herbie (George Bartenieff), Aria (Rosalie Triana) and
Sierra (Lailah Hanit Bragin), Dee (Sheila Dabney) and Jill (Christen Clifford),
John (Nicki Pariaso), Daniel (Joseph Kellough), and Mary (Beverly Wideman), who
all live, work or visit at the Heaven during the time in our lives when this
country unleashed masses of high-tech weapons into the Arabian desert. [The production took place right after Operation
Desert Storm in Kuwait and Iraq in 1991
and the play is set on 16 January 1991, the day before combat began.]
Malpede was
working on the play, originally called Going to Iraq, during the
build-up to the Persian Gulf war, and her response to that event compelled her
to write about it. She was, however,
contemplating another occurrence which forms the base of the drama: the 1985
death of artist Ana Mendieta (1948-85) who fell or was thrown from the studio
of her artist husband, Carl Andre.
For Malpede,
Mendieta’s fate is emblematic of the position of women artists in America, and
she found herself struggling with this subject when war broke out in January
1991. How does an artist respond to such
a momentous happening, Malpede wondered?
What is her responsibility at such a time? Having created the character of Aria, an
artist of mixed Israeli-Palestinian heritage, Malpede uses Blue Heaven
to explore the question. “All of us
experienced the war,” Malpede points out, “and most of us also experienced the
death of Ana Mendieta. These are two
contemporary historical events that are part of our lives.”
Currently in
mid-rehearsal [I wrote the article in August 1992], the show, by the author of Sappho
and Aphrodite (1983), Us
(1988), and Better People (1990),
has a cast of nine that includes some of the leading figures in Off- and
Off-Off-Broadway theatre. Lee Nagrin,
choreographer and Obie-winning performer, is Sada, owner of the Heaven Cafe;
George Bartenieff, Obie-winning co-founder of TNC, appears as her partner,
Herbie; Rosalie Triana, who appeared recently as Mendieta, is cast as Aria. Other members of the ensemble are Bessie
Award-winner Nicky Paraiso, Obie-winner Sheila Dabney, Lailah Bragin, Christen
Clifford, Joseph Kellough and Beverly Wideman.
Director
Shapiro, whose recent work includes Mark Rozovsky’s Kafka: Father and Son
(1985, 1990. 1992) and Collateral Damage: The Private Life of the New World
Order (Mediations on the Wars) (1991),
a war-protest collage featuring Vanessa Redgrave, is interweaving the
present-moment reality espoused by Joe Chaikin with elements of broad
theatricality influenced by his love of circus and magic.
The director
intends to pack the environment of TNC’s Johnson Theater with life so that
spectators, seated at café tables amidst the action, will have to decide where
to look and listen. There is no seat in
the audience which will not require the spectator to turn around at one time or
another. At this stage in rehearsal, no
one can say whether Blue Heaven is going to work or not; even the
playwright is holding her breath.
Though
Malpede, whose plays are many-layered, is probing several serious contemporary
themes in Blue Heaven—the artist in society, war, AIDS, homelessness,
domestic violence, drugs—neither she nor Shapiro have neglected the humor. Much of Blue Heaven is funny, from
low-comedy clowning to sophisticated and subtle gags not everyone will
catch. As for spectacle, Shapiro plans
smoke effects, strobe lights, amplified voices, film and tape sequences, and
video broadcast live from the floor of the café. Saxophonist Gretchen Langheld has composed a
bluesy, urban jazz accompaniment for a three-piece combo—which includes
cast-member Paraiso at the piano—that plays under, against, and through the
action of the play. At times, the
dialogue Malpede wrote for her characters becomes a spoken oratorio.
Watching as
the production takes shape, two things intrigue me most. First is the prospect of being immersed in
the action. Not only being in the café,
but the contact with the characters is exciting and engaging. Shapiro uses his actors as actual presences,
not just as fictional characters, and they speak to the audience of their own
lives through the written dialogue. [See
my post “Acting: Testimony & Role vs. Character,” 25 September 2013, for a
discussion of this practice.] In effect,
we share in the examination of life with them and Shapiro has instructed the
cast to “cross-document our lives with the characters’ lives, . . . our voices
with theirs.”
Second is
Malpede’s poetic consideration of aspects of our world. The specific events she evokes are part of
who we are but, more immediately, the efforts her characters make to survive
each day are totally familiar to us. If
you don’t actually know these people, you have encountered them over and over
again at work, in your neighborhood, and in places like the Heaven Cafe.
[For more reports on women playwrights, see “Women Playwrights of the ’80s,” 21 December 2019.]
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