16 April 2020

Three Plays from Distinguished Companies from the Archives


THE DAY ROOM
Don DeLillo
Woolly Mammoth Theatre, Washington, D.C.
John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
9 & 12 Jan. 2003

I was in Washington, D.C., over the year-end holidays and my mother and I went to see Don DeLillo’s The Day Room by the Woolly Mammoth Theatre at the Kennedy Center [December 2002].  It’s one of only two professional plays that DeLillo wrote, I believe, because he’s a novelist.  (I think his bio lists a couple of attempts when he was a student.)  The Day Room was his first major play, and may be the only one staged, and I’d count it a success, but he went on to write only one other, I believe. 

[DeLillo has, in fact, written five major plays as of 2020.  The Day Room was written in 1986, and two other plays were composed by the time I wrote this report in 2003: The Engineer of Moonlight (1979) and Valparaiso (1999).  Since then, the writer has completed two more plays: Love Lies Bleeding (2006) and The Word For Snow (2007).  Except for The Day Room, none has been produced in New York City.]

I had read The Day Room back in ’87 when I was helping screen nominees for a Rockefeller Fellowship.  [I’ve appended the script evaluation following this play report.]  I was very taken with the script—in fact, I wrote in my eval report that I wanted to direct it—but have never had a chance to see the play staged. 

Woolly Mammoth has done it before—back in ’89—and it has been done in New York [28 December 1987-17 January 1988, Manhattan Theatre Club] at least once as well, but I’ve never caught it.  It’s an absurdist play, reminiscent (but not obviously derivative) of Pirandello and Beckett, with some Stoppardian word-play mixed in. 

The Day Room’s set in a hospital and the first act is in a regular semi-private room where two patients are awaiting procedures and trying to get along, until they begin to get visitors, none of whom turn out to be who they seem—including one patient’s doctor, whom he has known for years, but who turns out to be a patient from the Arno Klein wing—the psych ward.  The second act is in the titular day room, which is being set up as a motel room for a performance by the mysterious Arno Klein Theater—which no one has ever really seen, though they are well known. 

Once again, no one is who they appear to be—which is the basic theme of the play: What’s real, what’s performance—are the actors patients, or are the patients actors?  Or are they actors playing patients playing actors . . .?  What’s truth and what’s dementia? 

It’s a wonderful little puzzle, and the production was delightful.  (I might have tried playing it at a less “presentational” level—less theatrical on the parts of the actors—and see if playing it “straight” didn’t add another level of confusion.  But this director’s choice worked fine.) 

One wonderful aspect: In act two, in the motel room, one of the patients from act one plays a TV set.  He gets turned on and off and switches channels when someone points a remote at him!  The director, who is also the company’s founder and artistic director, is Howard Shalwitz—with whom I worked on the Richard the Third at Soho Rep way back in 1978.  Howard was an actor then, and he started his company while we were doing the show and then moved to D.C.

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ROCKEFELLER FOUNDATION FELLOWSHIPS FOR AMERICAN PLAYWRIGHTS PROGRAM

1987 COMPETITION

PRE-SCREENING                                                           READER: K*****
SCRIPT EVALUATION                                                     DATE: 10/8/86


AUTHOR/(TRANS.): Don DeLillo

TITLE/DATE: The Day Room, 1986

GENRE/STYLE: absurdist comedy

STRUCTURE: 2 acts, several scenes

SETTING: a hospital room; the day room, which becomes a cheap motel room; style is open to interpretation

LANGUAGE: minimalist, absurdist dialogue, reminiscent of Stoppard and Beckett; complex and multileveled

MUSIC/LYRICS: none

NO. CHARACTERS/SPECIFIC NEEDS: 6 men, 3 women

CHARACTER STRUCTURE/TREATMENT: first and second act have different characters played by same ensemble; characters are chameleon-like, difficult to pin down; they seem to be symbolic exponents of various ideas and concepts

CONCEPTION: an exploration of the meaning of reality and sanity

CHIEF THEATRICAL INTEREST: the Beckettian style; the absurd characters and situation; the wonderful language

BRIEF SYNOPSIS:
___________________________________________________________
This will be inadequate, just as synopsizing Waiting for Godot is inadequate.  In the first act, two patients try to develop a meaningful conversation, but are interrupted first by a wandering patient, who reportedly belongs in “the day room” in the Arno Klein Wing, the hospital’s looney bin.  Next, their room is invaded by a nurse and a doctor, who turn out to be day-room patients, too.  It seems the day room folk love to play-act, and are excellent chameleons.  Finally, the doctor of one patient arrives, but also turns out to be an imposter, despite the fact that he and the patient had been friends for a long time.

The second act shifts to the day room, which is being transformed into a cheap motel room, apparently for a play.  Several wandering people come in, looking for the peripatetic and elusive Arno Klein Theater company.  During this act, a man in a straitjacket behaves like a TV set, switching “channels” when a remote control device is activated.  No performance is given, but the spectators depart.

DISCUSSION/EVALUATION: You can’t figure this one out without at least reading it.  I think you really have to see it, and I wish I had.  This is a wonderful, whacky, inventive and provocative play.  DeLillo, a novelist (this is his first play), creates language that is spare but meaningful, airy but controlled, witty but unselfconscious.  There is the poetry and symbolism of Beckett with the humor and charm of Stoppard.  I don’t just want to see this play, I want to direct it!

Unquestionably, DeLillo is a budding theater artists much needed on the American stage.  Even for a successful novelist, a first play of this caliber—not to mention daring—is rare and encouraging.  He should by no means be discouraged or ignored.  However—and I don’t really know how to get around this—he’s hardly a mid-career playwright, this being his first script.  If the grant is for a mid-career writer, regardless of the medium, then my recommendation would be clearly “yes.”  If the award is for mid-career playwrights, DeLillo, despite his obvious potential, isn’t really eligible.  I find myself on the horns of the proverbial dilemma.

RECOMMENDATION:  Second reading

*  *  *  *
HOMEBODY/KABUL
Tony Kushner
Victory Gardens Theatre, Chicago
and
Center Theatre Group, Los Angeles
Next Wave Festival
Brooklyn Academy of Music
Harvey Theater
28 May 2004

I had looked forward to seeing Tony Kushner’s last-but-one play (I haven’t seen Caroline, or Change) earlier this month [May 2004] because I recalled that when it premiered here Off-Broadway a few years ago [New York Theatre Workshop, 19 December 2001-3 March 2002], it was received well.  I particularly remember that, because it was written long before 9/11, it was seen as prescient.  I had no expectation that, after the disappointments of the rest of the season so far, this would be one of the greatest.  And it started right at the beginning.

[Set in 1998, just before and just after the U.S. bombed terrorist camps in Afghanistan in response to the 7 August 1998 bombings of embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya, by the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a group associated with al-Qaeda.  Kushner started writing Homebody/Kabul in 1997.]

The production of Homebody/Kabul at the Harvey Theater at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival was a collaboration between Chicago’s Victory Gardens Theatre and L.A.’s Center Theatre Group.  I didn’t check back, but I believe the performances in those cities had been well reviewed. 

Also, the two theaters have pretty good reputations in general: Victory Gardens is up there with Steppenwolf in one of the premiere theater towns in the country and the Center Theatre Group is the Arena Stage/Goodman Theatre of L.A.  (Center Theatre Group’s home, the Los Angeles Music Center, is half Kennedy Center and half Lincoln Center: it houses a rep company like the Lincoln Center Theatre Company but at the same time serves as L.A.’s main commercial venue and hosts events at the Ahmanson like Kennedy Center’s Tennessee Williams Explored in the spring and summer of 2004.) 

Anyway, with that imprimatur, along with my recollection of Homebody/Kabul Off-Broadway here in ’02, I figured it would be a good show—provocative, interesting, and quirky, all the things that the rest of the season had not been.  I couldn’t have been more wrong!

Right from the start there was a problem.  The play’s first hour (of nearly four, by the way) is devoted to a monologue by the title character (Linda Emond), a British housewife who has become obsessed with the history and culture of Kabul.  The play is set after the Taliban have taken over Afghanistan and after President Clinton’s bombing raid, but before 9/11 and our invasion that followed. 

However, the Homebody (she has a name, but this is how she’s listed in the program—and I presume the script.) has become absorbed with the legends, history, and “contemporary” sights of the city as laid out in an out-of-date guide book from which she reads and to which she refers. 

She sits in a chair center stage—the scene is set in her London living room, but all we see, isolated on the stage by a square pool of light, are two wooden chairs on either side of a small table—essentially lecturing us about Kabul as it has invaded her imagination. 

Try as I might, I just couldn’t keep focus on what she was saying.  I also had no idea what she (or Kushner) was up to, either.  My mind kept wandering to all kinds of irrelevant stuff, no matter how hard I tried to pay attention.  For all intents and purposes, this was the end of the play for me—I got lost and never got back into it.

The rest of the play (until the last scene)—in which the Homebody never again appears, although she is the focus of the plot—is set in Kabul and ranges from a semi-realistic hotel room to various streets in bombed-out Kabul to other locations in the city which are suggested by a few set pieces and props.  The Homebody’s husband and daughter (Reed Birney and Maggie Gyllenhaal) have rushed off to Afghanistan because they have gotten a report through the British embassy in Pakistan that Homebody has been killed in the streets of Kabul when she appeared insufficiently covered by the burka.  A mob of enraged Muslim men literally tore her apart. 

The husband is completely distraught and is unable to comprehend any of what he’s hearing, despite the assistance of a British ex-pat (Bill Camp) whom the embassy in Pakistan has put them on to in Kabul (where there is no official Western representation).  But the daughter is confused, too, though her impulse is not to believe anything—her mother’s body is missing from the hospital where it was taken after the attack—and she rushes out to wander the streets of the city in search of either her mother, her mother’s body, or some clue to what really happened and why/how. 

She meets a street guy (Firdous Bamji) who becomes her guide—and her “uncle,” since a woman is not supposed to walk about the city unaccompanied by a male relative.  (She wears a burka, but often removes it or lifts it up or drops the veil.  Occasionally this enrages some man on the street, once or twice an armed religious cop.) 

Little by little, she learns that the Homebody came to Kabul to see what it was all about, met a Muslim man and married him.  Not only did she not divorce her husband back home—hence her “death”—but her new husband is also still married to his Afghan wife.  (This part gets nearly impossibly complicated, and I’m not sure I can do it justice.) 

The guide has met someone who knows her mother and brings word that if the daughter and her father get the Afghan not-quite-ex-wife (Rita Wolf) papers to go to Pakistan and on to London, she will grant her husband a divorce without further trouble (she has been haranguing him in the street and at his house) and her husband and the Homebody can live on in peace. 

Of course, the wife is a strange woman who herself is suspect for having contacts with anti-Taliban activists and having been an educated woman—she was a librarian—who speaks several foreign languages (including Dewey Decimal!).  In fact, her dialogue is a mix of Pashto, English, French, and what I gather is Arabic (and maybe Russian, too—I forget what-all she threw in; there weren’t any supertitles). 

I can’t relate the rest of the plot—it was extremely attenuated, with many long—and, to my mind, irrelevant—scenes of incidents like the husband back at the hotel (he never goes out) smoking hashish with the strange ex-pat, and later even shooting heroin, or the daughter finding the site (in a mine field) that is said to be the grave of Cain.  I’ll just say that the “story” went on interminably without seeming, at least to me, to go anywhere or say anything. 

By this time, of course, I had long since lost control of my concentration, and maybe I just missed all the pertinent bits—but if so, it was Kushner’s fault, not mine!  (I was actually quite angry when I left the theater—that I had sat for nearly four hours and got nothing to show for it.  Especially after looking forward to the performance so much.  Moreover, the seats at the Harvey are less than plush!) 

To catch you up quickly (would that Kushner had), the daughter never finds her mother or learns conclusively what happened or why, but she comes to some kind of understanding that I didn’t get.  She and her father do get the first wife papers to cross into Pakistan (where there’s a scene involving border guards—Taliban, I presume—who suspect them of being anti-Islamic activists because the daughter has some Pashto “poems” she’s supposed to transport back to London that are really political tracts and threaten to kill them all. 

The last scene is back in the London living room where the Afghan wife is now living with the Homebody’s husband.  I can’t explain a bit of what any of this was about or what Kushner was trying to tell us.  He’s too smart not to have had something in his head, but he put it into such a convoluted vehicle that I can’t suss it out even though I assume it’s there somewhere. 

The Times review [“Afghanistan Still Stirs A Housewife,” 13 May 2004] did agree with some of my complaints, but Ben Brantley found that endless monologue a brilliant coup de théâtre.  He also praised Gyllenhaal’s performance and, especially, her voice.  I found her flat and artificial, and her raspy voice was a constant annoyance every time she spoke.  (I kept wanting to shout out, “Stop smoking!” for that’s what it sounded like had made her voice so gratingly rough.)

I’d have to say that Frank Galati’s production was good—even excellent.  The sets by James Schuette were appropriate and well-designed (though in the Kabul scenes, there was a revolving wall across the back that facilitated the set changes—and after the intermission a chunk of it seemed to have disappeared inexplicably) and Mara Blumenfeld’s costumes were, too. 

The acting was all quite fine—except for Gyllenhaal, film actress sister of Jake, currently in the Roland Emmerich film The Day After Tomorrow), who’s rather central in the revised script used in this production—particularly Bill Camp as the ex-pat (who’s called Quango Twistleton, apparently a funny evocation of a P. G. Wodehouse character), the Rita Wolf’s Afghan wife, and the actors who played the street people, guards, and other incidental Afghans—they really seemed to catch the cultural nuances.  (Many of these last are actors from that part of the world originally—Iran, Pakistan, India, and so on; they probably were authentic in their behavior.) 

It’s probably odd—and telling—that I picked up on this, given how diffuse the rest of the play was.  In any case, even with good work from the company, it all seemed to have gone for naught—at least as far as I’m concerned. 

*  *  *  *
ORSON'S SHADOW
Austin Pendleton
Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Chicago
Barrow Street Theatre
5 April 2005

I went up to the Theatre Development Fund’s TKTS booth in Duffy Square to try for some tickets on Friday, 1 April [2005], with Diana, my frequent theater companion.  We had only one show to consider—Austin Pendleton’s Orson’s Shadow.  Charles Isherwood’s New York Times review back on 14 March [“Two Titans of Drama Assemble For a Battle of Wills and Wits”] was very strong. 

(The promotional card quoted a review by Ben Brantley, which was also pretty positive, but that turns out to be from an omnibus column in the Times he did back in January 2000 about Chicago theater, including the Steppenwolf production of Shadow that was the origin of the current Off-Broadway show in New York [“Critic's Notebook: Extracting the Essence of Real Lives Onstage,” 27 January 2000].)

Anyway, we picked up tickets—not much of a discount, by the way: only 25% off, so it cost us almost $90 [the equivalent of $119.21 in 2020] for two seats to a show in a Greenwich Village community house auditorium!  (The Barrow Street Theatre is a space I remember going to when I was reviewing for The New York Native; Soho Rep was in there and it was still just an auditorium then—folding chairs on a flat floor—but now they’ve built risers to rake the seats, which are no longer metal folding chairs, though not actual theater seats, either.  Still, $55 [worth $72.85 in 2020] for a ticket there—that’s full fare—seems outrageous.)  To get to the end first, Diana liked the show, but I found it pointless and self-indulgent. 

As last month’s Times review reported, the play’s about the relationship among Orson Welles (Jeff Still), Laurence Olivier (John Judd), Kenneth Tynan (Tracy Letts), Joan Plowright (Susan Bennett), and Vivien Leigh (Lee Roy Rogers).  (The characters within the play, by the way, are called “Orson,” “Larry,” “Ken,” Joan,” and “Vivien”; aren’t we chummy!)  Welles is doing a stage version of Chimes at Midnight before empty houses in Dublin, trying to raise money to make the film. 

[Chimes, best known as 1965 film, centers on William Shakespeare’s character Sir John Falstaff and contains text from five of Shakespearean plays: Henry IV, Part 1;  Henry IV, Part 2; Richard IIHenry V; and The Merry Wives of Windsor.] 

It’s 1960, and Tynan proposes that Welles direct Olivier and Plowright (Olivier’s wife from 1961 until her death in 1989) in the London production of Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros.  Tynan also wants Olivier to hire him for a post at the new National Theatre, to which Olivier has just been appointed director.  (A theater critic, Tynan was appointed the National Theatre’s literary manager in 1963.)

Olivier’s marriage to Leigh (1940-60) is falling apart, and he’s already started an affair with Plowright.  The bulk of the play is a rehearsal of Rhinoceros somewhere in the Royal Court—seems like a room under the stage or something.  (I think it was supposed to be the empty stage, but it looked more like a basement space.) 

As for the script, there’s a lot of talking, much of which is name-and-title-dropping.  It occurred to me that if you weren’t old enough to remember the characters (only Plowright’s still alive [she still is, at 90]; the rest were all dead by the ’80s) or aren’t a film buff, you wouldn’t have any idea what any of these people was talking about, and maybe not even who they are anymore. 

Olivier and Welles might be names you’d recognize, but I wonder if you’d have any sense of who they were in theater and film.  Forget Tynan!  (Oddly, Leigh might be the most well-known figure for younger people because of Gone with the Wind and Streetcar Named Desire, but she has the smallest part in Orson’s Shadow.) 

Maybe people know Citizen Kane, but Chimes?  Or That Hamilton Woman, which Olivier drops a few times because it was the movie he and Leigh made together when they met.  I doubt too many will know The Magnificent Ambersons, Touch of Evil, or The Entertainer too well, and the stage work these people mention endlessly, if they are known at all, are just names in theater history. 

(Olivier talks about directing Leigh in the London production of Streetcar, before she did the film with Kazan.  Even I barely recall that, and I’ve done a little research on that play for an academic in Mississippi.  Olivier also did the film of The Entertainer, but it was his stage performance—with Plowright—that boosted his career, and that’s what he talks about in Shadow, not the film version.  Fro the record, I saw Olivier on stage only once: in a special performance of August Strindberg’s The Dance of Death—with Geraldine McEwan, I believe—in London in the summer of 1969.)

There are two clues that tell me this is just a backstage bio-play.  First, a big deal is made of referring to Macbeth as “The Scottish Play.”  Both Welles and Olivier do this, and when Leigh doesn’t, Olivier makes a thing of it.  (She’s on the phone from home—that is, not in a theater—but he’s at the Royal Court.) 

Then Sean, the young stagehand (Ian Westerfer), asks about the reference—that’s how Pendleton gets to explain this bit of theater arcana—and then says Macbeth and is instructed to run around the theater to remove the curse.  (That stagehand is something of a walking joke—he’s too young to know any of the people the other characters mention, and he likes movies but doesn’t know anything about theater even though he works in one.) 

The second clue is that at the end, Plowright—the only one left alive (even the stagehand apparently died)—runs down a list of what happens to everyone (except Sean, the stagehand—she doesn’t know what happens to him) after the play ends.  Not only is this an undramatic device, but she does it by answering questions from the characters.  (“Joan, what happened to me?”  Riiight.)  Those two bits tell me that Pendleton had nothing really in mind but to do a backstage theater play.  Ho-hum!  (As Diana pointed out, actors like to talk about theater.  Pendleton, an actor, just put his ruminations on stage.)

 Aside from all the name-dropping (they mention lots of people from that era, too—the ’30s through the ’50s), I didn’t see that Pendleton was trying to say anything beyond putting some interesting theater/film people on stage together.  The dialogue wasn’t bad—literate—but no one really presented any ideas that went beyond the imagined confrontations.  (There’s not much record of the production of Rhinoceros; it apparently figures as a footnote in all the memoirs of the people involved!)  There just wasn’t any point to this.

I also had serious objections to the production—Tyler Micoleau’s lighting, Takeshi Kata’s set, and David Cromer’s directing.  (The acting was fine.  No one tried to impersonate the famous people they portrayed, but they got the idea across well enough.)  As I said, the space looked like a room beneath the stage (the same set  was used for all the scenes—Tynan meets Welles at the Dublin theater after a performance, then he meets with Olivier and Plowright at the Royal Court, then the Rhinoceros rehearsals; all were backstage scenes). 

There’s a staircase going up at the rear left, an entrance up right, and a line of ropes and pulleys along the stage left wall.  For some reason, the actors had to go through those stage-left ropes a lot, and Olivier especially had to stay back there for long periods.  (Leigh had two appearances, one of which was via telephone.  As she sits upstage right in a chair placed in a corner, Olivier is down left, behind the ropes, on the backstage phone which was situated in the down left corner.  He looked like he was doing Hello, Out ThereI 

Then on top of this, the director, David Cromer, put a lot of the actors below the stage, on the house floor.  (Several entrances were also made from the rear of the house.)  I suppose there’s nothing wrong with this in principle, but a good part of the audience can’t see anyone walking around down there.  We saw a lot of tops of heads moving about! 

And Micoleau’s lighting didn’t help.  It was basically dark—I suppose to approximate a theater without stage lights.  But many scenes were lit with spots on the actors, so there were these isolated pools of light—mostly focused on the actor’s head only—while the rest of the space was dark.  I’m not sure what the point of this was dramatically, but it was annoying.  I didn’t read Micoleau’s bio, but maybe he was a dance designer before this.  (I think the whole production, techies included, were from the Steppenwolf version.  Maybe all this worked better in Chicago.)

Remember: all this cost me $45 [$59.60]!  You can put up with a lot for $20, but at $45 (and that was a discount), I expect more for my money.

It’s not that Shadow was totally uninteresting.  As a nostalgia piece, a peek backstage at some big names, it was even kind of fun.  My suggestion—do it on HBO or Showtime as a TV film.  You might have to get actors who can pass for the famous faces—or do make up (there was a recent Welles bio-flick on the tube, wasn’t there?), but it would work better on TV (not in a movie theater, I don’t think) than on the stage.  [I don’t know if this is what I was thinking of, but HBO aired RKO 281 in 1999 in which Liev Schreiber played a young Welles.]

I can’t guess why both Isherwood and Brantley liked this play so much.  I remember saying recently that Isherwood’s reviews were so much in line with my own opinions that I was beginning to feel spooked.  I don’t agree with him at all this time.

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