[On 24 August, I posted my report on The Acting Company’s production of an adaptation of the Richard Wright novel Native Son. In addition to my critique of the performance, I made some remarks about the adaptation and my problem with conversions of novels and other non-dramatic material to stage scripts. I seldom go to plays based on novels or stories—I don’t have the same issues with stage plays drawn from films—and occasionally I’ve found ones that even work well as stage plays. Certainly, a number have become successful as stage properties and even become theater standards; I think of Carson McCullers’s own adaptation of The Member of the Wedding and John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men.
[Looking
through my archive of past theater reports, written before I started Rick On
Theater a little over 10 years (and 798 posts) ago, I found that I had written
up my impressions of two adaptations. In
both productions—and both reports—the fact of their having originated as non-stage
prose works was a significant factor in my overall judgment of the
presentations. So now, published below,
I’m presenting those archival reports as another look at my receptivity to
plays adapted from prose material.
Looked at another way, these old evaluations, one 15 years old and the
other 10, may explain a little why I generally object to such reworkings.]
A PASSAGE TO INDIA
Shared Experience
(London)
Brooklyn Academy of
Music
8 November 2004
I went
to the Brooklyn Academy of Music on 5 November [2004] to see A Passage to India, a
stage adaptation of the 1924 Forster novel (which was made into a David Lean
spectacular back in 1984, you may recall). Charles Isherwood’s Times review the previous
day gave an excellent idea how I found the production. (Isherwood, who
used to do only occasional reviews of Off- and Off-Off-Broadway shows, seems to
be moving up lately—and, unlike Brantley, I find he has been capturing my own
responses pretty regularly. [Isherwood
was fired from the New York Times in
2017.])
I
hadn’t realized it until after I got back home and found the review (I hadn’t
read the whole arts section of the Thursday paper, so I missed the review
before I saw the show), but I’d seen an earlier production by this British
company, Shared Experience. They specialize in staging adaptations of
literary works and brought Jane
Eyre and Anna
Karenina to BAM before. It was the Anna Karenina that I saw
back in 1998, and I remember not caring for it much—and if I’d remembered that,
I might have passed on this show, too.
Shared
Experience likes minimal staging—unit set, few props, basic costumes (which don’t
change much over the course of the performance), which isn’t bad in itself, but
when it connects with the company’s tendency to try to compress too much novel
into a stage adaptation (this one lasted 23/4 hours),
cramming a lot of narrative into the script, it all makes the show seem like Masterpiece Theatre
channeling Reader’s Digest.
I vaguely remember that the Anna
Karenina Shared Experience did in 1998 turned into one of those
shows that was about a piece of the set or something. (That’s
really vague, I know, but I can’t remember what it was exactly, but it’s like
Cheek by Jowl’s December 1995 production at BAM of The Duchess of Malfi that
became a show about moving a chair. Sorry about my memory—that Anna Karenina was six years ago, you know.)
Passage didn’t devolve into
that, but it felt like a race to get through all the important points of
Forster’s story without pausing along the way to develop any characters or
examine Forster’s main (I think) point about the clash of cultures and the
imperiousness of the British Raj’s attitude toward the Indians. I am aware of the proclivity of the British
to a) try to Anglicize the peoples and societies they colonized and b) to wall
themselves off from them even as they live in their midst. I think this
was part of Forster’s point in Passage,
but it was given only lip service in the Shared Experience version.
In
fact, that was my real main complaint here, not that the production was sort of
simpleminded—but that it had no real point to make beyond telling (or
retelling, as the case was) Forster’s story. Any point Shared Experience
made here was already there in Forster’s novel, so they didn’t add or enhance
anything. (Actually, they diminished it by whizzing past it.) My
big question here is, since there’s the excellent 1984 movie—still available on
video, I’m sure—what’s the point in adapting the same material (less
effectively) for the stage? At least 1981’s Nicholas Nickleby (to which my
companion compared this production) hadn’t been a successful movie.
(I’m ignoring the fact that Nicholas
Nickleby had better actors and was somewhat more cleverly staged,
too.)
Which
brings me to the matter of staging. I guess I’ve already hinted (!) that
the production wasn’t all that terrific. It was way too literal (which Isherwood
also said, in the context of one specific bit)—not just in the text, but in the
acting and production style. Yes, they didn’t have “literal” realistic
sets (more out of practicality, I think, than artistic choice), but everything
was realistically presented and depicted, even in the cases of the mime they
used for anything slightly technical or otherwise beyond the scope of the
company’s stage.
Cars
were always four chairs lined up in a double row of two and facing front, for
instance, and the actors did the perfectly conventional miming of bouncing
along and jerking to a stop. When one character rides an elephant, the
ensemble forms the body as a sort of human pyramid, with some sort of fabric or
other as the trunk. (Isherwood liked this bit, but I found it in line
with the literalness of the rest of the production since they really tried to “make”
an elephant for us.)
Forster’s
novel, I believe, is told from the point of view of the Brits—especially the
two women—Mrs. Moore (Susan Tracy; Peggy Ashcroft in the flick), plus her
prospective daughter-in-law Adela Quested (Fenella Woolgar)—but Shared
Experience (the adaptation is by playwright Martin Sherman) took the tack of
creating a narrator out of the character of Dr. Godbole (Antony Bunsee), the
Hindu professor at the local college. Aside from the fact that they made
him a bit of a dodo—a comic-book Hindu mystic of sorts—this wasn’t a terrible
idea (also aside from the fact that a narrator in a stage show is kind of
anti-theatrical to start with), but it laid open a production concept Shared
Experience ignored (or rejected) that might have made the show much more
interesting as theater—at least for me.
Director
Nancy Meckler (Shared Experience’s Anna Karenina)
could have used some Indian performance techniques to reduce the literalness of
the production and to add some much-needed theatricality to it. (Remember
my two-pronged goal for a good theater experience? Do more than just tell
a story, and do it theatrically. [A
longer discussion of these notions appears below in the following report.])
I mean, if they’re going to violate Forster’s original perspective anyway, why
not take it further and do something that makes the show substantially
different from the novel and the movie—justify making the adaptation in the
first place.
It
might even have enhanced Forster’s point about the alien sense the Brit’s had
of the Indian culture—if, say, the Indian characters acted in a (modified,
perhaps) Indian performance style—there are lots to choose from; India has a
rich performance tradition from classical to many regional folk styles—while
the Brits did Stanislavsky. (Oh, the production had live Indian music,
performed by on-stage musicians (Sirishkumar and Chandru; music composed by
Peter Salesm), so there’s is a basis for some Indian performance work already
laid.)
I
kept thinking of two other really successful shows I saw in the past that were
vaguely related to this. First, back when I went to Baltimore in June 1986
for the Theatre of Nations [see my report posted on Rick On Theater on 10 November 2014], one of the performances I saw
was the Theatre Academy of Pune that did a piece based on a local story of
government corruption and deception. It was all told in a style adapted
from the local folk performance. The company spoke Marathi, but
since I didn’t understand it, it hardly matters. But the play was
completely comprehensible without language (TON didn’t use any translating
devices—just synopses in the programs) and also without knowing the performance
codes.
It
was a truly wonderful experience, and I remember hearing (I interviewed the
company leader as part of my coverage of TON) that when they did the play in
Holland, the Dutch audience connected to it so completely, they were sure it
was a Dutch story the company had adapted. Now, that’s communication!
The
other show—or shows—was the October 1992 BAM presentation of Ariane Mnouchkine’s
Les Atrides, the
four-play series of Greek tragedies about the house of Atreus which Théâtre du
Soleil did in classic Indian style. That was magnificent! Once
again the performance language was foreign—I forget now if they used the Greek
text or, like Peter Brook, mixed up some obscure or ancient languages, or maybe
they just used French and it was too much for my rusty skills, but it makes no
difference in the end since the point is that I couldn’t rely on verbal text to
follow the show and it made not one lick of difference.
Not
only did the company communicate perfectly well by acting and gesture (I guess
that’s also acting, isn’t it?), but it worked marvelously with the Greek
texts. I wouldn’t call it Brechtian in a literal sense, but it did what
Brecht wanted—it made us reconsider familiar material by making it seem strange
and new. (I always think of that Charles Marowitz Hamlet collage I saw
in London in 1969. A perfect example of making the audience look anew at
very familiar material.)
I
suppose I need to say a word or two about the acting as well, since I said
above that Nicholas Nickleby
had better actors than Passage.
I’m afraid it’s true—the Shared Experience company didn’t have one person in
the cast who created a stunning persona on stage. I don’t know if they’re
just not capable or if Meckler ironed out all their quirks and idiosyncrasies
and left nothing but bland, or if the material defies good acting the way TV
soap operas do.
Once
again, it was more like watching someone tell me a story than watching anything
dramatic. I can get that from the novel—and my imaginary actors are
better! Adapter Sherman (Bent, The Boy From Oz) and/or director Meckler
seem to have reduced everyone to a one- or two-dimensional figures with a
salient character trait or two, and the actors never went beyond this. I
already said that Dr. Godbole was turned into a cartoon Hindu mystic, but all
the Brits were portrayed as twits to one degree or another, from Ronny Heaslop
(Simon Scardifield) the son/magistrate—the main twit—to Adela, the prospective
daughter-in-law, who couldn’t make up her mind if the Indians were scary
foreigners or fascinating exotics.
Even
Tracy’s Mrs. Moore, who was supposed to be a genuine open soul who can be
friends with an Indian without condescending, had very little presence on the
stage. And I could never decide if there was really supposed to be some
homoerotic thing going on between Cyril Fielding (William Osborne), the English
professor, and Dr. Aziz (Alex Caan), the Muslim doctor, or if their friendship
was just supposed to be one with an open and free familiarity that ignored
sexuality. No one ever seemed to commit one way or the other—not the
actors, not the director, and not the script. (I don’t remember from the
movie if this was part of the story, but Isherwood does mention it in his
review, so I suspect it was timidity or incompetence on the part of the company
that left this ambiguous.) It wasn’t bad
acting—it just wasn’t very good. More like animated illustrations or
something. (So much for a
word or two!)
Anyway,
I guess I don’t have the right to redirect Shared Experience’s show, but if I
could . . . . (It seems I’ve done this before, too, haven’t I—with that
Tex-Mex musical at the Contemporary American Theatre Festival in Shepherdstown,
West Virginia, Keith Glover’s The Rose of Corazon, for one. [See my report on CATF on 8 July 2015.]
I think I wanted them to use more Mexican motifs—and especially music—to
theatricalize the play more. It’s a thing with me, isn’t it.) The
bottom line, I guess, is that even if using Indian techniques isn’t the right
answer, Sherman and Meckler needed to do something to make the adaptation more
. . . well, more not
like the movie, I guess.
If
I want literal, I can read the novel—or see the movie. (The
company did have a “mission statement” in the program. I won’t type
in the whole paragraph, but in it they say: “At the heart of Shared
Experience’s work is the power and excitement of the performer’s physical
presence and the collaboration between the actor and the audience . . . .”
Shared Experience never came near meeting this goal as far as I was concerned.
They also assert that they are “dedicated to innovation and exploration.”
NOT!)
* *
* *
SHIPWRECKED! AN
ENTERTAINMENT: THE AMAZING ADVENTURES
OF LOUIS DE ROUGEMONT
(AS TOLD BY HIMSELF)
Primary Stages
59E59 Theaters
59E59 Theaters
22 February 2009
In
1898, Henri Louis Glin (1847-1921), born in Switzerland, published the tale of
his 30-year adventure in the Coral Sea, New Guinea, and the Australian
Outback in the London popular periodical The Wide World Magazine.
He called himself Louis de Rougemont, and the story was entitled, in
19th-century style, “The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont as told by
Himself”; in 1899, it was republished as a book, making Glin an early link in
the chain of dubious and discredited memoirists, a sort of proto-James Frey or
-Herman Rosenblat.
After
his story became irresistibly popular across Britain and he became a lecturer
and storyteller in great demand (becoming very wealthy), people who claimed to
have known “de Rougemont” began to come forward and expose him as a liar and
fabulist, and naturalists and geographers questioned the veracity and even
possibility of his accounts. (Most famously, he claimed to have ridden on
the backs of sea turtles for recreation. Herpetologists asserted that
such a feat was impossible because the turtles would simply sink if someone sat
on their shells. In 1906, however, he demonstrated his turtle-riding
achievement at the London Hippodrome.)
Along
about 2007, playwright Donald Margulies, a Pulitzer Prize-winner for Dinner
With Friends (2000), decided to compose a stage adaptation, which he called
(also in 19th-century style) Shipwrecked! An Entertainment: The Amazing
Adventures of Louis de Rougemont (As Told by Himself) and it premièred at
the South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, California, which commissioned the
work for its young audiences series. (Shipwrecked! starring
Gregory Itzin and directed by Bart DeLorenzo played on the Julianne Argyros
Stage of SCR from 23 September-14 October 2007.) My friend Diana and I went over to 59E59 Theaters
on Friday evening, 20 February [2009], to see the Primary Stages production,
the New York première of Shipwrecked!
I’ll
get back to that next-to-last bit in a moment, but first let me remind everyone
of something I’ve probably said a time or two over the years. I have two
minimal criteria for good theater (in my opinion, of course; I don’t impose
this on anyone else): For one, a performance must be
theatrical. That is, it must use the stage and the stage’s unique
attributes and capabilities to create its magic. (That doesn’t, by the
way, eliminate stage Realism, which, when done well, is true magic in my book.)
I don’t want a theater performance to duplicate a rock concert or a movie
(though it may steal their techniques—and technology—of course!); I want it to
be theater.
For
the other, it must do more than just tell a story. Movies and TV—and, of
course, novels—do that quite well, thank you. It must reveal something
about life, the human condition, truth, whatever. But if all the
performance does is spin a yarn for me . . . well, I’d just as soon read the
book! (This criterion needn’t be a heavy one: I accept entertainment as a
worthy goal in itself. The Boyfriend is not a shameful
achievement. Many of my grad school classmates, both at NYU and at
Rutgers, would be—and, indeed, were—aghast at this concession!)
So, now you know my biases and prejudices when I comment on Shipwrecked!—because
they come into play here.
What
Margulies wrote isn’t a play, strictly speaking. It’s almost all narration,
with three actors (one, Michael Countryman, playing de Rougemont and two
others playing everyone—and everything—else) acting out bits as de
Rougemont tells us his story. (We are apparently present as the audience
for one of his animated lectures. It’s a storytelling about a storyteller
telling his story. Huh?) Margulies (or Lisa Peterson, the
director) even works into the adventurer’s opening remarks the standard
admonitions about cell phones (called “distracting devices” here) and wrapped
candy (“lozenges”).
It
was a clever enough way to start the evening off by evoking de Rougemont’s
fin-de-siècle milieu and keeping the bubble sealed. (De Rougemont also
enumerates each chapter, complete with title, as it goes by,
stressing the literary nature of the production.) In any case, this
was storytelling, which I maintain is a different art form from theater.
It may have performative elements and even take from theater in many ways, but
storytelling, a venerable custom in many cultures (though we in the industrialized
West have lost it for the most part as a performing tradition), isn’t a play to
me; it’s something different the way ballet is different.
My
other criterion, theatricality, was met well enough. Neil Patel’s set of Shipwrecked!
was minimal, with a large, raked circular platform in the middle of the stage
which served variously as the deck of the ship, the shore of the island on
which de Rougemont is marooned, or the lecture stage, among other
locations. It was surrounded by the detritus and effects of a
theater—props, set pieces, tech equipment, and so on—some of which were used in
the performance and others served as just obstacles and dressing. There
was a sort of balcony running along two walls, stage left and the rear, reached
from the stage below by a staircase at the right end of the rear
extension.
Among
the stuff around the stage area were sound devices that were used as in old
radio shows, including some I haven’t seen in use since my grad school days
back in the dark ages before computers and digital recordings: a rain stick, a
thunder sheet, and a wind machine. (The only one missing was a crash
box.) All of the sound effects (sound design was by John Gromada),
whether made by such low-tech devices or by the two theatrical poobahs (aided
occasionally by one or more stage assistants, to borrow a term from Kabuki and
Noh) by using their bodies or their voices (sometimes over the anachronism of
mikes), were performed live in view of the audience.
Except
for de Rougemont, who wore suitable 19th-century garb, Michael Krass’s
costuming was nominal. Jeremy Bobb, who may have had the most fun role in
the performance, played Bruno, the ship captain’s dog who became de Rougemont’s
boon companion for much of the story. In that part, which Bobb executed
delightfully and entirely convincingly, he used no props and wore no costume
aside from his street clothes. The other ”Player,” Donnetta Lavinia
Grays, and Bobb each performed both male and female characters. Bobb got
to appear—walking on his knees—as Queen Victoria. (That’s
the second production this season featuring an appearance by Victoria,
both of them portrayed by a man in drag! The other performance was
Virginia Woolf’s
Freshwater; see my report of 27 January 2009. Is that a trend, do you suppose?)
In
one of director Peterson’s silliest and neatest little gags, Bobb’s diminutive
queen entered directly up stage, “walking” on de Rougemont’s left. We couldn’t see his legs sticking out behind
him, but since we knew Bobb is a tall man and now he was only chest-high beside
Countryman, we knew what was happening.
Then the pair made a sharp right turn—and Bobb’s legs were clearly
visible trailing out behind Victoria like a peculiar kind of train! It was only worth a chuckle, but a good
little chuckle.
All
this was cleverly and charmingly done, and I can’t complain about the performances
or the quality of the work in general. Countryman has always been a
favored actor of mine since I first saw him over 20 years ago (in January 1987
in The Common Pursuit by Simon Gray,
which played at the Promenade Theatre from 19 October 1986 to 23 August 1987):
I think he’s a superb character actor who is always solid, convincing,
grounded, and committed. I don’t know why he’s not famous—though he does
work all the time as far as I can tell (counting TV, commercials, and movies
along with stage work on and off Broadway, as well as out of town).
At
an hour-and-a-half, Shipwrecked! is the kind of show that seems like
great fun for the actors to do—for an audience of pre-teen boys. And that’s
the big problem here. (I said I’d get back to this—and now I have.)
This is a boy’s adventure tale. It’s Robert Louis Stevenson, The Swiss
Family Robinson, Robinson Crusoe, and all the swashbuckling,
seafaring, storm-tossed tales many of us read before the days of Harry
Potter. Disney used to make the movies or they were serialized on the Mickey
Mouse Club.
Charles
Isherwood said Shipwrecked! is “best suited to children who are still susceptible
to the magic of bedtime stories . . . .” I’m 62 now: Pirates of the
Caribbean bores me (though, I admit, I find the Potter flicks cute—but I’m
still a sucker for magic). And most of the audience was older than I am
(with a handful of youngsters—real ones, I mean—here and there). I’m
sorry, but when I subscribe to a season of an Off-Broadway company, this isn’t
what I sign up for. (Okay, I took my mother to The Lion King for
Mother’s Day in May 1999—but that’s Julie Taymor, for Pete’s sake. That’s
different. That’s theatrical, by the way!)
The
story of Shipwrecked! is amusing, but it doesn’t tell me anything. (The announcement in the March 2009 issue of American
Theatre for the published text asserts that Margulies “takes on the nature
of storytelling and authenticity.” But
he doesn’t, really. He engages in
storytelling—but he doesn’t take on much of anything.) It’s Baron
Münchhausen, the kind of thing that I’d expect to find playing at the New
Victory or during the summer to attract families to otherwise dark theaters.
By
the way, there’s a curious disconnect in Margulies’s script; maybe someone
can explain it away for me. If we’re watching de Rougemont recount his
story, as the conceit for the performance has it, how does he get to end with
the debunking and disgrace? That didn’t happen, of course, until after de
Rougemont published his tale and did his lecture tours—and it wouldn’t have
been part of what he related from the stage.
In
other words, the narrative moves from the past, when de Rougemont is relating
his adventures, to the present or future, when he tells us what happens
afterwards. (I haven’t read Glin’s account, but I don’t imagine it
includes the latter part of the story; he wrote and published the tale before
all that happened. In fact, it happened because of the publication. Apparently Margulies has incorporated parts
of later, 20th-century biographies of de Rougemont in his script.)
I
think we’re not supposed to have noticed that. But I have a nasty habit
of noticing things I’m not supposed to. Oooops! (The other
paradox is much more intriguing—and appropriate to the endeavor: Shipwrecked!
is based on a true story—there really was an H. L. Glin—that in turn is based
on an untrue story—Louis de Rougemont never existed! But, as Isherwood
points out, Margulies doesn’t explore any of the implications of this or the
other questions raised by the tales; he just tells the story.)
[In 1899, Glin toured
music halls in South Africa billed as “The greatest liar on earth.” Aside
from his own book, there are two biographies of “de Rougemont,” coincidentally
entitled The
Greatest Liar on Earth (Melbourne:
Hawthorn Press, 1945) by Frank Clune and The Fabulist (Milsons Point, NSW, Australia; New York: Random House Australia, 2006)
by Rod Howard.
[A performance about
one of the greatest liars of his time—and a play, Souvenir, a few years ago about
the worst singer ever, Florence Foster Jenkins—makes me think that someone
ought to be able to write a very amusing play from the story of Robert “Romeo”
Coates, England’s worst actor. Theatricality is built into the story:
Coates pretty much practiced for real what Michael Green immortalized as The Art of Coarse Acting (New York: Drama Book Specialists, 1981). It would take a playwright to figure out what to
say with the story, but the territory seems fertile to me. I’m just sayin’
. . . .
[Coates (1772-1848) appeared on London stages, often in
the role of Romeo (hence his nickname), from 1809 until around 1815. If he couldn’t convince a manager to hire
him, Coates would bribe him from the family fortune he’d inherited (see my
article on ROT on 30 and 31 May and 2 June 2009). There is considerable source material
available on Coates, including several first-hand accounts of his acting.
[Souvenir, by Stephen
Temperley, was presented by the York Theatre Company from 1 December 2004 to 16
January 2005 and at the Lyceum Theatre on Broadway from 10 November 2005 to 8 January 2006. Jenkins
(1868-1944) flourished, if that’s what you call it, in the 1940s, including
self-financed appearances at Carnegie Hall and recordings.]
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