'One November Yankee'

When Diana, the woman with whom I go to theater, called me and asked if I was interested in seeing a new play called One November Yankee by Joshua Ravetch at 59E59 Theaters, I had misgivings.  I’ve long been displeased with many of the plays I’ve seen at 59E59—the theater’s selection criteria seem lax to me—so I was leery to start with.  Then, everything about the play seemed to say “No!” to me. 

I used to have a sort of sixth sense about proposed productions about which I read in the casting notices in Back Stage and Show Business when I was trying to get work as an actor.  I could tell from the little descriptions in the notice if a play was a potential success or a pretty sure loser.  I never actually kept score, but when the productions came around and there were reviews, I was more often right than wrong.

These days, I don’t read casting notices anymore.  But I do read the little blurbs in rep company brochures, on promotional post cards, or hand bills distributed around the theater district.  I still get a sense of what’s worth seeing and what’s not—according to my own taste, of course.  So when Diana proposed One November Yankee, is got that frisson that it was a probably miss.

There were, however, clear signs that told me One November Yankee was a bad bet.  First, it’s a play directed by its author—which I’ve admitted on this blog at least once I think is a bad idea and smacks of vanity production.  Then, the leads were played by two former TV stars (in fact, the entire cast)—and promoted as such in all the publicity.  And not just TV stars, but actors whose most prominent appearances—the ones the publicity spotlighted—were 28 and 35 years ago. 

In addition, the play seemed like a gimmick like an Alan Ayckbourn play: the two actors play three pairs of brothers and sisters.  This, of course, sets up gimmick casting, too: the TV stars are playing the three sets of siblings.  I found out later that there were more iffy indicators, but these were enough to hint that the emphasis in this production was on elements of the play’s presentation and not on any inherent drama.  That did not bode well for a good evening at the theater.

As I’ve explained before, I don’t usually look at reviews of something I’m going to see—except for the New York Times because it comes to my apartment—until after I’ve written up my own impressions of the show.  But since I knew so little about this play, I told Diana that I’d check it out a little before we decided.  I skimmed some reviews of previous productions of the play—now I wish I’d read them more thoroughly—and one stated that “the star of this production and the epicenter of these stories” is the main piece of scenery in the set.  That surely suggests a problem. 

But Diana had wanted to check the play out.  After all, we’d started this exercise of seeing theater together after I’d taught a class at a nearby community college that she’d proposed, an intro to theater course.  Diana, who was a speech teacher, not theater, called me after the course—I had subbed for her one semester when she was accepted in a program in the city that conflicted with the evening class—and asked me to be her Beatrice through the alleyways of New York theater.  I was supposed to guide her to the less obvious and established theaters and plays she wouldn’t know about on her own.  So I’m always a little reluctant to say no to something in which she’s expressed interest.  So I didn’t press my reservations about One November Yankee.

The plot of One November Yankee, as I suggested earlier, centers on three pairs of siblings (all played in New York by Harry Hamlin and Stefanie Powers) in different circumstances linked by an ill-fated airplane flight.  The unifying element, aside from Hamlin and Powers, is a crashed yellow Piper Cub (the set designer is Dana Moran Williams).  The play’s title refers to the tail number of the plane: 241-NY. 

(For those who don’t already know, the phonetic alphabet—used by NATO forces for spelling words or other letter designations over voice communications so as to avoid confusion from letters whose names sound alike—uses the words “November” for the letter N and “Yankee” for Y.  Aviators use the same system.  A 1999 play and 2013 movie, Charlie Victor Romeo, was based on verbatim transcripts from actual aviation accidents.  The title is phonetic alphabet for CVR, which stands for “cockpit voice recorder.”)  

In Delaware and New York City, One November Yankee was performed as an 80-minute one-act with no intermission.  The performance is divided into four scenes.  This is a reduction from earlier productions which were two-hour, two-act versions; each act comprised two scenes.

In scene 1 we meet Maggie and Ralph as he puts the final touches on his conceptual-art installation, Crumpled Plane, in preparation for the opening at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, where his sister is a curator.  Now that Maggie sees the crashed plane, she’s not so sure how good an idea it was to get the museum board to give her brother a solo show.  Ralph explains to his sister that the artwork was inspired by an actual crash in which another brother and sister were lost and have never been found.  Sibling squabbling follows. 

(Readers may note that my last post, on 1 January, was “The ‘New’ MoMA, 2019,” a report on the museum’s reopening after extensive remodeling.  The coincidence was not planned.).

Then we travel back five years to some woods in New Hampshire where a plane has just crashed.  Margo and Henry, a pair of brother-and-sister “Jewish intellectuals” (he’s a writer; she’s a librarian and failed lawyer), were on their way to Florida for their father’s remarriage, but due to a series of mistakes, their plane has run out of gas and crashed.  Harry has badly broken his leg.  (If you guessed that this is the crash which inspired Ralph’s Crumpled Plane in scene 1, you get a gold star.)  Sibling squabbling follows. 

As scene 3 opens, we leap back to the same woods five years after the crash—a few days before Crumpled Plane’s MoMA opening is scheduled to take place.  Two hikers, Mia and Ronnie, have trekked into the woods and come across the crash site.  The pair find the remains of Harry and enough identification to discover who the pilot and passenger were.  Also, portentously, a copy of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (hint, hint!).  (So . . . a plane wreck is found mostly in one piece by a couple of civilian hikers five years later, and the occupants’ stuff is all right there along with the passenger’s body, but it had never been seen in all that time by dedicated searchers.  Did I mention that it’s bright yellow?)  Sibling squabbling follows. 

Finally we are back at MoMA as the exhibit opening is ending.  Ralph and Maggie learn that the plane has been found and they reflect on the evening’s events.  Sibling squabbling follows.

Williams’s set, which consists mostly of the canary-yellow plane, nose down and tail up—with the registration number 241-NY showing—dominating the small playing area in 59E59’s third-floor Theater B.  A few wooden boxes, which stand in for seats in the museum scenes, and, I guess, tree stumps or rocks in the forest scenes, are placed nearby.  It’s crowded and cramped at 59E59—but that’s okay since there’s no real action that needs any space.  The characters (except Harry, of course) pace a lot.  Ravetch is too busy telling us what everyone’s thinking to show us anything.

At MoMA in scenes 1 and 4, a projection on the small screen up high at stage right reads “Museum of Modern Art”; when the scene shifts from the museum to the crash site, some fallen leaves are strewn around and the projections change to trees.

Kate Bergh’s costumes are stereotypically correct for each character in the three stories; Ralph is dressed in what a stage designer might think an artist wears to work: all in black with a scarf around his neck indoors—he even gets some red paint on his shirt to add authenticity to his artiness.  Ronnie and Mia, the hikers, look like they stepped out of a Lands’ End catalogue.  Scott Cocchiaro’s lighting and Lucas Campbell’s soundscape contribute to the production competently.

Campbell does bring a measure of fun at pre-set while we’re waiting for the show to start.  There’s a video playing on the projection screen (no credit for the slides and videos is listed) with varied images of flying, planes, airships, and space craft.  An eclectic selection of recorded songs related to flying and planes is playing: Sinatra’s “Fly Me to the Moon” and “Come Fly with Me,” Elton John’s “Rocket Man,” Peter, Paul and Mary’s “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” and “Let’s Go Fly a Kite” from Mary Poppins, among others. 

One song that particularly tickled me is “Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines,” the theme song from the 1965 movie farce of the same name.  Accompanying the song is a silent-movie video sequence that I’m sure was from the opening moments of the film; if it was, I wonder if the producers had to pay for that. 

On the other hand, when I saw the play that followed this . . . well, amuse-bouche, I had to wonder why it was part of the production at all—since the play isn’t really about flying or even planes, despite the dominating set piece.  The crashed plane, Ravetch has Ralph-the-artist explain, is a symbol of civilization in ruin.  (Would any artist actually state his work’s point so bluntly, even to his sister?  I don’t buy it!)  We get this, because the playwright has Ralph say it a number of times—just to be sure we get the point.  (So, as reported below, Ravetch says he wanted to write a play about flying.  Well, he still hasn’t.) 

Ravetch, an Angeleno who turned 60 last November, says several things inspired One November Yankee.  Ravetch is a pilot himself and he’d wanted to write a play about flying.  The playwright also attended many modern-art shows in Los Angeles, and he went to one that featured a box of Kleenex on a pedestal in a white room.  He thought it was ridiculous, especially when he learned that the janitor kept throwing away the tissues. 

Somewhere in there, he came up with the idea of putting a crashed plane on stage.  Ravetch wanted the audience to think that they were going to see a play about the crash, but then it turns out that the plane’s really an art sculpture based on a “real” crash.  (The accident is “real” in the play—that is, diegetically—but apparently not in life.  Clear?) 

The play needed characters, but the playwright didn’t want a romantic couple, so he devised the idea of a pair of squabbling siblings. 

Ravetch also sees the plane as an allegory for America.  “It really all became about the journey of these people and the journey of America,” Ravetch said.  “How advanced we are in one way and how we’re crumbling in another.” 

One November Yankee débuted on 17 and 18 November 2009 at the Pasadena Playhouse in a workshop production, part of the theater’s HotHouse Reading Series.  The reading—and all other stagings so far—was directed by Ravetch and featured Loretta Swit (Maj. Margaret Houlihan of TV’s M*A*S*H, 1972-83) and Robert Forster (films Medium Cool, 1969, and Jackie Brown, 1997, Academy Award nomination; TV series Twin Peaks, 2017), who died last October. 

The play’s world première was from 16 November 2012 to 5 January 2013 at the NoHo Arts Center in North Hollywood, directed again by the playwright with Swit and Harry Hamlin (L.A. Law, 1986-1991).  This was followed by the East Coast première, 23 October to 10 November 2019, at the Delaware Theatre Company, Wilmington, again under the direction of the playwright.  Hamlin starred opposite Stefanie Powers (Hart to Hart, 1979-1984). 

(This constitutes another hint that something was amiss, had I known it in advance: it took One November Yankee—a two-actor, one-set script—10 years to reach New York City.)

The DTC production transferred to New York’s Off-Broadway, starting previews in Theater B at 59E59 Theaters on Manhattan’s midtown East Side on 29 November 2019.  The production opened officially on 8 December and Diana and I saw the 7:15 p.m. show on Thursday, 26 December.  The production closed on 29 December. 

The film rights to One November Yankee have been optioned by Pam Williams Productions as a feature film for Ravetch to adapt and direct and is currently in development.  Ravetch’s script has not been published. 

There are numerous thoughts raised in One November Yankee and one or the other of the siblings states them at one time or another during the play.  None are profound or even especially intriguing—I’ve already forgotten most of them—and none are developed or explored during the 80-minute performance. 

The play’s structure, in the way the three stories dovetail, and some of the dialogue suggest that Ravetch is also saying that everything is connected, that there are no coincidences.  (One reviewer even referenced “the butterfly effect.”)  Ravetch has written certain words and catchphrases into the dialogue that recur in each story so that we get the idea that, though the characters are unrelated, their lives are somehow connected.  (One such bit is the line “Jews don’t fly planes!”— which, despite the fact that it’s probably untrue, is the only thought in the play that’s about flying.) 

The fact that Ralph has used an actual incident as inspiration for his artwork seems meant to give it relevance, and the actual wreckage being found at the time of the art’s début appears to be intended to add significance somehow.  As far as I’m concerned, they don’t; they’re just more gimmicks Ravetch has devised to stand in for actual content—but maybe that’s just me. 

None of this, as I suggested above, has anything to do with flying.  (Oh, Ravetch incident-drops at every opportunity so that aviation is spoken of—but only in passing.  Someone brings up 9/11, the “Miracle on the Hudson,” John F. Kennedy Jr.’s ill-fated 1999 flight to Martha’s Vineyard, Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 that disappeared in 2014, the Concorde, and the Wright brothers.)  And none of these ideas, if that’s what they are, are deep or engaging enough, even had they been developed, to be worthy of sustaining a drama, even one as slight as One November Yankee.  (I can’t imagine what the L.A. show was like at two hours and two acts.) 

I don’t know any of Ravetch’s other work (his stage credits—he also writes for films and television—include two celebrity monodramas, Wishful Drinking, co-created and directed in 2006 for Carrie Fisher, and Step in Time: A Musical Memoir, written and directed in 2011 for Dick Van Dyke, and 2017’s Chasing Mem’ries: A Different Kind of Musical with Robert Forster and Tyne Daly, which won an Ovation Award, L.A.’s local theater award), but his writing in One November Yankee isn’t really dialogue, but a series of pronouncements in which the characters mouth the thoughts of the playwright so he can tell us what they and he are thinking. 

An example from the first scene is Ralph’s explanation for his sister of his art work: “This exhibit embodies the breadth of the twentieth century from the Wright Brothers to a post 9/11 world—and it depicts the immense chaos of that world and a once-great society, America, that is quite literally crashing in a heap of debris as we speak.”  Pretentious claptrap.  The lines are oral captions—like self-important wall panels in a museum gallery—not speech. 

In the words of Alexis Soloski of the New York Times, Ravetch “encourages a style of acting that’s arch and presentational rather than recognizably human.”  Soloski doesn’t say so, but this applies both to Ravetch as author and as director.

Hamlin and Powers stood up well enough to this burden.  Both actors began in the theater—Powers was a Broadway dancer—and have returned to it occasionally (Hamlin most recently on Broadway in Summer and Smoke in 1996 and Chicago in 2007; Powers in The King and I in 2004 and Looped in 2013), so they didn’t embarrass themselves, but neither did they lift the leaden text off the ground (speaking of flying)—which was certainly partly director Ravetch’s fault.  (As several reviewers noted, they both look damn good for, respectively, 68 and 77.  I’m 73 and I could play either actor’s father!) 

There’s a small critical track record for the earlier productions of One November Yankee in Los Angeles and Wilmington, but the coverage here in New York City was relatively meagre—maybe a dozen or so outlets.  I’ve selected eight to summarize here. 

Noting that the wrecked plane we see upon entering the theater is a “defiantly unsubtle” indicator that “[g]ravity . . . has had its revenge,” the Times’ Soloski, in the only print review I saw, went on to warn, “But if this two-hander . . . can’t achieve liftoff, blame bad jokes and broad acting, not physics.”  Remarking on how good the actors look, Soloski quipped that “wondering what has happened in their careers that has led them to a play this feeble is probably the best in-flight entertainment ‘One November Yankee’ can provide.”  

Labeling the plot implausible and the characters inauthentic (“I’ve yet to meet a working artist who talks like this or a curator who knows less about modern art,” she said of Ralph and Maggie), the reviewer felt that the playwright “sacrifices character and emotional realism for quips, few of them funny.”  Of the stars, Soloski declared, “The actors—with their big gestures and patchy psychology—don’t redeem the play or even improve it.  But because glamour has its own implacable logic, they make it nearly watchable.”  In the end, she reported, “For better or for worse, ‘One November Yankee’ . . . is too synthetic to be a true disaster.  That’s the cynical lesson on offer here: You can’t crash if you never get off the ground.” 

(Incidentally, like many of her critical colleagues, Soloski criticized Hamlin and Powers in scene 2 for adopting “unpardonable Jewish accents.”  Other reviewers used different modifiers, but I didn’t identify their speech patterns as an attempted Jewish accent—I am, so I think I would recognize one.  In fact, I never figured out what that accent was—I thought it might be something New-Yorkish, but that wasn’t it, either.  In the end, I settled for a made-up speech pattern that doesn’t actually exist anywhere—Lower Slobovia or someplace, maybe. 

(Why they needed any kind of accent, you’ll have to ask Ravetch; most of us have only the regional accent from where we grew up—mine’s a general Mid-Atlantic speech pattern.  I had a roommate in college who was Jewish and he sounded a little like Lucas Black, late of NCIS: New Orleans—because he was from Birmingham, Alabama; my parents knew a Jewish man from Melbourne, Australia, and he talked a bit like Crocodile Dundee.) 

“Veteran actors of screen, stage, and television Harry Hamlin and Stefanie Powers do their best to bring Joshua Ravetch’s ‘One November Yankee’ to the stage,” reported David Roberts on Theatre Reviews Limited.  “Despite their heroic efforts, Rav[e]tch’s script lacks the sophistication and strength to match the formidable skills of the cast.”  The plot, Roberts found, does “little to fulfill the promise of ‘exploring human connection brought on by tragedy in the aftermath of a plane crash that ripples across the lives of our characters’ [from the play’s promo blurb].  Nor are these stories ‘intricately interwoven.’” 

The TRL reviewer asserted that “the connections [among the characters] are there; however, they are more obvious than intricate” and he concluded that “the three stories fail to make a convincing argument for their telling.  There is no substance to them and no redemptive resolution or catharsis.” 

Determining that the plane is the “remarkably and stunningly apparent” “star” of One November Yankee, Marilyn Lester asserted on Theater Pizzazz that the play “is, at its best, a mediation [the writer may have meant ‘meditation’] on what classical Greeks referred to as storge—familial love, a powerful, supportive love that’s just as prone to disintegrate into chaos when family goals don’t align.”  Lester reported that the “conflicts [between the siblings] are explored with varying degrees of success” and continued that playwright Ravetch “is an articulate writer, but also a glib one, a facility that largely enfeebles the three stories.” 

The characters “speak to each other as if they’d just stepped out of a Noël Coward play,” the TP reviewer felt.  “Such archness may be occasionally amusing, but it certainly undercuts the valid points the playwright is striving to make.”  The playwright’s “relentless reliance on expletives,” a tactic Lester was not alone in pointing out (a couple of reviewers compared Ravetch to David Mamet), “which aid and abet his compulsion to be funny, plus his single-minded focus on the bickering between the siblings, detract from the possible depths the play could have achieved.”  In the end, Lester felt that the author “is ultimately One November Yankee’s undoing” because Ravetch is “a cleverness junkie with an addiction to flippant repartee.”  In the end, the review-writer determined that “Ravetch is fortunate that the acting prowess of Hamlin and Powers elevated the work to the heights it did achieve.” 

On Broadway World, Marina Kennedy proclaimed, “There’s real star power on the stage of 59E59 Theaters” and One November Yankee “is the one to see.”  The BWW reviewer affirmed, “The show’s intriguing premise is complemented by the outstanding acting skills of Hamlin and Powers.”  She also found, “It is interesting how these stories are woven together, revealing the personalities of the characters while it makes statements about the uniqueness of brother and sister bonds.” 

Kennedy felt that Hamlin and Powers are “an ideal pair to star in One November Yankee.  Each of them seamlessly assumes three very different roles during the course of the show.”  The reviewer added, “While they are convincing in all of their parts, Powers is particularly good when she portrays art curator, Maggie and Hamlin is compelling as the character, Ronnie [the hiker-dentist who identifies Harry’s remains].”  Kennedy praised the design team and concluded, “One November Yankee is an opportunity to see two beloved actors on one stage in a memorable show.  Get your tickets.  It is sure to sell out.”  (Note that the limited-run production at 59E59 has closed.) 

Victor Gluck of TheaterScene.net reported, “It is [Hamlin’s and Powers’s] star power which keeps this old-fashioned, rather sit-com-ish, interconnected triple bill as lively and as entertaining as it is despite clichéd writing and passé jokes.”  The actors “manage to be convincing in weak material.”  Gluck thought that Ravetch “has staged the scenes in rather static fashion,” but felt that Hamlin and Powers “are so accomplished at repartee that they keep the play moving despite the fact that they don’t move much in each scene.” 

New York Stage Review posted two notices. In the one, Melissa Rose Bernardo announced, “The most interesting character in the show, however, isn’t one of those six squabbling sibs.  It’s the broken-down taxicab-yellow Piper Cub plane.”  She added, “Unfortunately, none of the flesh-and-blood characters are as compelling as Crumpled Plane.”  Nonetheless, Bernardo affirmed, “The actors fare relatively well, though Hamlin overdoes both Ralph’s drunkenness and Harry’s accent; Powers, so glam on TV’s Hart to Hart, actually looks most comfortable as the crunchy-granola gray-haired Mia.” 

In the second NYSR notice, David Finkle observed that Ravetch “extends [his look at brotherly-sisterly love] but doesn’t deepen it.”  Finkle found, “Because he’s chosen the relatively quick sketch form, he keeps his writing, uh, sketchy.”  The NYSR writer explained, “As writer and director, he is able to maintain an amusing level of insights—with Hamlin and Powers maximizing his intentions—but it does seem as if he’s presenting a series of situations that might benefit from further delving.”  The reviewer finished up by suggesting: 

It could be said that just as Ralph sees a metaphor in “Crumpled Plane,” Ravetch discerns in the links between the characters from sketch to sketch a metaphor for our universal link to each other—a one-big-universal-family linkage that must not only be faced and endured but also honored.  He’s writing in the tradition of the old saw that goes, “Blood is thicker than water.”  As the history of humankind has forever demonstrated, there is a good deal of truth to the adage.

(I don’t frequently comment on a review in my play reports, but this calls out for some response.  Besides the fact that Finkle is presenting a clutch of clichés for his interpretation of Ravetch’s play—and rather commonplace ones at that—he’s far over-reading the play’s intentions, I think.  One November Yankee isn’t even as deep as Finkle seems to think it is.  Aside from the self-defined symbolism of the plane wreck, there are no metaphors here.  It’s all right on the text’s surface.  There’s no deeper meaning in Ravetch’s script.  It’s just as superficial as it seems.  Sorry, David.)

On Theatre’s Leiter Side, review-writer Samuel L. Leiter actually called the plane mock-up “perhaps the most memorable scenic unit I’ve ever seen on that modest, little stage.”  Really?  Poor Samuel must have seen some very dull sets at 59E59.  That plane isn’t all that remarkable that I expect to remember it very long myself. 

The play, Leiter felt, “escapes being a total wreck itself by virtue of its appealing stars,” a sentiment readers by now will recognize.  He pointed out bad jokes, like that Harry and Margo’s “reaction to the accident is ‘This doesn’t happen to people like us!’ by which he means, ‘Jewish intellectuals.’  ‘It’s the kind of thing you read about in the New York Times and it’s always rich Republican Goyem [sic].’  And that, if it somehow makes you laugh, is about the apex of the play’s humor.”  And he noted that “the seriousness of their situation [Harry does end up dying] taking second place to leaden attempts at humor based on fraternal squabbling.”

“Perhaps there’s a message somewhere in here about the vagaries of fate and coincidence and the inter-connectedness of experience,” mused Leiter.  “However, the overall superficiality of the writing and characterizations, the implausibility of the action, and the too-frequently banal dialogue defeat any attempt to take the play seriously.”  He summed up his assessment of One November Yankee by emphasizing, “When the image of a crashed plane upstages even actors like Harry Hamlin and Stefanie Powers, you may be forgiven for taking out flight insurance before you get on board.”