10 July 2019

Some Women Writers from the Archives


FRESHWATER
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.)
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.)

*  *  *  *
BLUE HEAVEN (GOING TO IRAQ)
by Karen Malpede
Johnson Theater, Theater for the New City
September 1992

[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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