Some Prominent Playwrights from the Archives

BUFFALO GAL
by A. R. Gurney
Primary Stages, 59E59 Theaters
2 September 2008

Well, the 2008-09 season has opened!  Seemed early to me—Labor Day hadn’t even come and gone yet—but Primary Stages, one of our longer-running Off-Broadway companies (founded in 1984), started its program on 22 July 2008 with A. R. Gurney’s Buffalo Gal. 

The production had its press opening on 5 August, but its scheduled closing on 30 August was still earlier than most other companies’ initial productions.  (I’m also subscribing to MCC, whose first show doesn’t even open until 10 September; Primary Stages’ next production starts on 30 September.)  What’s next—Christmas starting before Thanksgiving?

Oh, wait.  It already does.  Never mind. 

Okay, enough silliness.  My friend Diana and I went to 59E59 Theaters, the Eastside space in which Primary Stages is working, to see Buffalo Gal on Thursday, 21 August, and it was an excellent theater evening.  Primary Stages is presenting its season in Theater A on the ground floor at 59E59, a 185-seat proscenium house and the complex’s largest space.

It’s not a great play—probably won’t go down in the canon of theater literature as a significant play—but it works on stage and was very enjoyable.  It was also a relief.  As I said to Diana as we were leaving, it’s been a long time since I haven’t left a theater either disappointed or worse. 

(I also let slip the hope that this bodes well for the season, but as soon as I said that, I remembered back to September 2004 when we saw what I thought was a wonderful production of two Ionesco one-acts—The Bald Soprano and The Lesson at the Atlantic Theater Company; see my 4 October 2004 report on Rick On Theater—after which the season went precipitously downhill.  Now I’m afraid I’ve jinxed this season!)

I’ve never been the fan of Gurney (with the exception of 1995’s Sylvia) that I have been of John Guare or Lanford Wilson, say, but he’s a solid playwright—and he’s been at it for so long that he can do it with his eyes closed, I’m sure, and still come out with a creditable script.  This may be a case of that to an extent—plus the fact that he’s dealing here with his own, and I assume beloved, field of endeavor: The Theater. 

Of course, he’s also writing about his main subject, the one he’s devoted his career to: the American WASP—and for good measure, he’s thrown in Chekhov, possibly every theater person’s most favorite playwright next to Shakespeare, and the city of Buffalo, where Gurney, like his leading lady, was born.  [A. R. “Pete” Gurney died at 86 on 13 June 2017.]  In an interview, Gurney said, “I’ve always loved the city of Buffalo and I wanted to write about it.”  Now he has.

So, Theater, WASPs, Chekhov, and Buffalo.  How could he miss?  Well, it’s not as if there aren’t problems with the script—not, that is to specify, the production—and so, I’ll dispense with those cavils tout de suite so as to get past them.  It’s not that they aren’t significant—in another play, they’d have scuttled the whole megillah (and I ain’t talkin’ about the gorilla, neither)—but Gurney, the cast, and director Mark Lamos pull it off smoothly.

I guess, since this is a pretty new play—it premièred at Williamstown in 2000 and had a regular run in . . . guess where!  Buffalo, in 2002—I should give you all a run-down of the plot and all. 

Buffalo Gal (and, yes, the song of that title does play during the show) is a sort of backstage dramedy.  Actually, to be precise, it’s an on-stage-before-rehearsals-start dramedy, but as far as sub-genres go, that’s the same thing.  It’s about actors, directors, producers, stage managers, costumes, sets, props, acting . . . and the stage vs. Hollywood (in this case, TV). 

In the interview, Gurney doesn’t suggest that he chose Chekhov for his model for this reason, but the Russian may be one of Western theater’s most “theatrical” playwrights.  Among all the modern dramatists, he’s one of the few who’ve had no success in films.  (1994’s Vanya on 42nd Street by Louis Malle and David Mamet comes closest.  I always wondered if Robert Altman’s 1978 film A Wedding was inspired by the Chekhov short story, but I’ve never found any confirmation of that suspicion.) 

Ibsen hasn’t done so well (both writers, of course, have had videos of stage productions or, in the case of A Doll’s House, a wonderful live TV production back in the ’50s), but all of Shaw’s major plays were turned into movies—and Pygmalion, of course, got double treatment: stage play-movie-stage musical-movie musical. 

But Chekhov, outside of Russia, has never transferred, yet his plays are considered challenges for actors and directors, loved by theater companies and, presumably, audiences.  I would guess that among actors—and maybe playwrights, too—the most beloved stage piece is The Seagull.  It’s all about us, after all.  But Cherry Orchard, the play at the heart of Buffalo Gal, is about coming home, and that’s what Gurney wrote about in his play. 

Amanda, the main character, even tries to quote F. Scott Fitzgerald on the subject, saying, “Americans always want to be back somewhere.  Something like that, only he said it better.”  (I wondered why no one came back with Thomas Wolfe’s admonishment about home—that you can’t go there again.)  The parallels Gurney constructs, though, are almost too obvious—and that’s one of the complaints I have.

Amanda (Susan Sullivan, whose professional life somewhat parallels Amanda’s), is a successful and famous TV star who’s returning home to Buffalo, where she grew up and started out on the local stage, to play Madam Ranevskaya in the production of Cherry Orchard staged by a rising local rep company.  Her career, mostly because her age is approaching late-middle, has hit a slow point and she’s hoping a stage success will give her a boost. 

The director, Jackie (Jennifer Regan), in turn, hopes that Amanda’s stardom will attract audiences, critics, and contributors to her still-new theater, and that, on the heels of this success (she’s even anticipating a transfer to New York), she can really bring quality theater to Buffalo again.  (It’s not in the script, but the Studio Arena Theatre, Buffalo’s long-time, high-rep regional company went dark earlier this year.  One of its better-known successes was sending Tennessee Williams’s Eccentricities of a Nightingale to Broadway in 1976.) 

The casting of Amanda as Ranevskaya is too perfect: on her way in from the airport, the actress—who’s arrived a day before the rest of the cast to get a feel for the theater—makes the driver from the theater take the long way to by-pass the freeway and to make a detour to her grandmother’s old house.  Amanda grew up there, playing on the veranda (“Amanda on the veranda,” grandma used to say), and now . . . can you all guess?—it’s for sale.  (There’s no cherry orchard at the old house, but there was an apple tree!) 

Of course, Hollywood keeps getting in the way.  Even before Amanda shows up, the director and her staff have been on the phone with Amanda’s agent to get the signed contract.  The agent is apparently delaying—he doesn’t even approve of the whole venture; he’s pushing a trashy sit-com on Fox in which Amanda would play a sort of trash-talking Estelle Getty grandmother (heavens!) role.  He’s raising all kinds of objections, including to the clause that guarantees Jackie a role in the potential transfer to New York if the show is successful. 

Amanda herself is afraid she won’t be able to learn the lines for a stage performance again; in Hollywood, she reminds everyone, you only get pieces of the dialogue at a time, and even then you don’t have to say the words exactly as long as you get the sense right.  She’s had some failed marriages and a daughter with problems, and she needs money to care for her.  The Fox show is lucrative, but insulting and demeaning; however, the producers keep upping the ante and enhancing her role with each offer, relayed by the agent from the coast. 

But before the company can begin to worry about Amanda bolting for TV again, they learn that the leading man, who was to play Leonid, Ranevskaya’s brother, had dropped out.  He and Amanda had worked together before—it’s one of the reasons she wants to do the play—but he’s immediately replaced with a local star, James Johnson (Dathan B. Williams), whom Amanda demands to meet. 

“James” turns out to be “Jimmy” Johnson, Amanda realizes suddenly—formerly one of the boys in her acting classes in Buffalo; he’s also African-American—the theater practices “nontraditional casting”—and Amanda quips, “The 19th-century land-owning Russian lady just discovers she has a black brother.”  

Finally, Amanda gets a phone message from a Dr. Dan Robbins, but she doesn’t recognize the name until a staffer calls the local dentist back and discovers he used to be Danny Ruben (Mark Blum)—her first love and the boy who got her into theater back in high school.  (They wrote and put on a musical—he sends along a CD of them singing the signature song, “Say When,” which is played over the theater’s sound system for all of the assembled characters to hear.  This is something else I’ll address in a moment.)

Among the other clichés are an ASM, Debbie (Carmen M. Herlihy), who’s a theater student conversant with every theater-history factoid you could imagine; and an assistant director, Roy (James Waterston), who admits he’s in theater because he just loves the words.  (His parents are both deaf; at home, communication is all signs.)

I won’t be a spoiler this time and tell you how things turn out—the play is too good as a theater piece, even if it’s not top-level dramatic lit—but I will say that the drama turns on whether Amanda will do the play or not, or whether she goes back to L.A. to do the sit-com (which, in another twist of coincidence, starts taping in the middle of the play’s run—that is, she can’t do both, wouldn’t ya know). 

There’s also the question of whether she’ll throw it all over to stay in Buffalo with her lost love, Dan, whose wife may be leaving him because he’s never really stopped loving Amanda (or, as we might suppose, the image of Amanda, the now-famous Hollywood actress).

All of the characters say too much.  I don’t mean they talk too much, but they say too much.  Debbie, of course, is a chatterer, so I don’t mean her—that’s her character and cliché though it may be, it’s believable.  But everyone else is constantly revealing the most private, intimate things to people who are virtually total strangers.  This is especially true of Amanda—who tells everyone about her daughter’s emotional problems, her money troubles, her failed marriages.  

She acknowledges she has a granddaughter by her unmarried daughter (though she specifies that that little fact—the grandmother part, not the unwed-mother part!—must not appear in her program bio) and finally, while her old boyfriend is trying to convince her to run away with him, she acknowledges that he had gotten her pregnant when they were teens and she had run away to have a secret abortion in Puerto Rico.  (The two are ostensibly alone on stage, but there’s no privacy with techies in the booth and others in the wings and off-stage offices.) 

Why she doesn’t just go on Oprah and reveal all, I don’t know—or write a lucrative tell-all book.  That would solve her money problems, I’d imagine!  Much of the drama and some of the plot rests on these revelations, but, my God!, aren’t some things just private?  Except for Dan (James/Jimmy has left the theater by this time), the actress has never met any of these people.  Remember, Amanda isn’t out of the YouTube and Facebook generation—she hasn’t grown up with her life on the ’Net; she’s a “lady” of a “certain age.”  Yeah, I know, that’s an anachronism . . . but puh-leeeze . . . . 

I don’t think I’ve caught all the contrivances and coincidences Gurney weaves into his plot, but I think you get the idea—it’s a little too convenient to be believed.  The parallels with Cherry Orchard, the Hollywood-vs.-stage conflict, the going-home sentimentality—it’s all a little too hard to credit.  If it weren’t a master craftsman like Gurney, with a terrific cast and sure-handed director, it would have fallen apart in the first scene.

So, that gets me to the acting (and, less obviously, the directing—since Lamos’s work was too subtle in this case to be clearly discernable). 

Make no mistake, this is a star vehicle—or the Off-Broadway equivalent of one.  Amanda is the main character and is on stage most of the play.  Nonetheless, the company worked as an ensemble, even though Susan Sullivan was also the best-known member of the cast by far.  [With a long, successful career in television, Sullivan would probably become most recognized for her portrayal of Martha Rodgers on Castle (2009–2016), the ABC crime-comedy-drama series.]  (James Waterston is the son of Sam Waterston, but in his own right, he’s not very well known yet.) 

The ensembleness of the cast was the clearest benefit of Lamos’s directing—that and the casting itself, certainly.  (Gurney apparently had a hand in casting Sullivan as Amanda—he promoted her for the role.)  Even despite the excesses of Gurney’s script, all the actors created believable characters and convincing circumstances.  It might be hard to believe me now, but while I was watching the play unfold, even as I asked myself from time to time if Amanda should really be telling everyone her private details so readily, I never actually doubted that that was what was going on in this set of lives.  (The jokes, by the way—it is a “dramedy,” as I said before—were not so predictable, though many were “theater jokes.”  I had no problem chuckling away, even guffawing occasionally.) 

It had to be Sullivan, however, who took the prize for making this all work as well as it did.  (The Times gave the production a near-rave—and also ran a feature on Sullivan about a week later—though other New York papers were less enthusiastic.  I admit, because of so many previous differences with Ben Brantley’s criticism, I had trepidations about the show before I went; the review came out two weeks before I saw the play.) 

I’m not sure how they all managed to pull this trick off, but if I had to make an educated guess, I’d say that all the actors simply behaved as if they believed every moment of Gurney’s script.  They never hesitated or flinched, and they didn’t try to run over the less credible bits.  Like con artists, I guess, if actors make as if they believe what they’re doing, the audience—ahem, “marks”—will, too.  I don’t know if there’s psychological justification for that assertion, but it seems true. 

I also assume that Lamos had a hand in this, since every cast member was doing the same level of work—Sullivan’s efforts were obviously greater, but they were all doing the same quality, even if she was doing more quantity. 

[This report was written before I included the review round-up that’s now standard for ROT.  The Times review was Ben Brantley, “Stranger in Newly Strange Lands: Home and Theater,” 6 Aug. 2008; the feature on Sullivan was Patricia Cohen, “Stage Role Close to Home for a Former TV Star,” 11 Aug. 2008.  Other New York City reviews were: Joe Dziemianowicz, “Susan Sullivan shines in ‘Buffalo Gal,’” Daily News 6 Aug. 2008; Frank Scheck, “Star’s Return Sheds Little Theatrical Light,” New York Post 11 Aug. 2008; Michael Feingold, “Hair’s Central Park Revival Still Shines With Youthful Energy; Buffalo Gal Skillfully Reworks Chekhov, “ Village Voice 12 Aug. 2008; and Marilyn Stasio, “Off Broadway: Buffalo Gal,” Variety 6 Aug. 2008.]

*  *  *  *
A BODY OF WATER
by Lee Blessing
Primary Stages, 59E59 Theaters
10 December 2008

My friend Diana and I saw the second show at Primary Stages, Lee Blessing’s A Body of Water, on Friday, 17 October 2008.  Charles Isherwood, whose New York Times review of Body of Water appeared two days before we went to 59E59 to see the performance, playing in Theater A, the large proscenium space on the first floor, was decidedly negative, which didn’t bode well.  (I have always had disagreements with the Times’s principal theater critic, Ben Brantley, but most of the time I have found that Isherwood’s judgment aligns with mine.) 

Primary Stages’ publicity summarized the plot of Body thus: “Avis and Moss awake one morning in a house set in the forested hills above a picturesque body of water.  The weather’s great, the view’s magnificent.  However, neither of them seems to know whose house this is or who they are.  Will a stranger at their doorstep be able to help?”  It suggested that Blessing was going to “explore” who we are without our memories. 

Neither Diana nor I, however, could say what the hell Blessing was up to; it was an overextended—and ultimately enervating—gimmick.  Isherwood called the play a “sputtering drama” and “ultimately forgettable” and recommended that Blessing put the pieces of his puzzle “back in the box.”  He may have been a little harsh in his specifics, but his overall evaluation of the play was, unhappily, on the nose.  In fact, my impression was that Blessing had dreamed up a concept and then wrote a play to fit the circumstances.  In fact, here’s what he said in an interview about the play’s “inspiration”:

I woke up one morning, and this idea had suddenly struck me.  You know, what if a couple of people like me woke up and didn’t know who they were?  It developed from there.  Some plays begin with characters, some plays begin with locations, and a play like this simply begins with a premise.

Well, I don’t think the play ever “developed from there.”  Blessing never came up with anything to say with, through, or about the situation or the characters he invented.  When asked what the theme of the play is, he talked all around the question but never really answered it, sounding to me like someone who didn’t have the answer. 

That stranger at the doorstep, named Wren (yes, like the bird; it’s a kind of running joke through the play—”Avis,” as she notes, means bird in Latin—but not a good enough one to recapitulate), may or may not be Avis and Moss’s daughter, and she basically manipulates them by revealing each morning when they awake with no memories of the previous day what she wants them to know, which may or may not be true. 

The problem here is not that Wren may be manipulating Avis and Moss, but Blessing is manipulating us.  And I hate it when a playwright manipulates me.  I don’t like it when Pinter does it, and he’s a lot better at it than Blessing.  Besides, Pinter generally has something to say by way of his manipulation; I’m not at all convinced Blessing does.

I don’t see the value in going in to a detailed description of this production of what I deem a phony drama—it pretends to have something on its mind, but doesn’t (or I’m too dumb to get it).  I will say that the acting was fine (Christine Lahti was Avis and Michael Cristofer, who is the playwright of 1977’s Pulitzer- and Tony-winning Shadow Box, was Moss) as far as the script allowed, and the direction, by Maria Mileaf, was competent given that same proviso. 

The problem wasn’t the production; it’s the script.  Blessing isn’t a writer I’ve followed much, though I enjoyed Chesapeake back in 1999, but here, for my dough, he failed.  (Come to think of it, Chesapeake’s a play with a gimmick at the center, too.  Mark-Linn Baker played a man who is, in truth, the reincarnated pet Chesapeake Bay retriever he had disastrously tried to kidnap.  They died together in the attempt, and Baker came back as the dog in human form!  But that, at least, was a little different, and Blessing had a point to make about free expression, artistic freedom, and right-wing demagoguery.)

*  *  *  *
THE THIRD STORY
by Charles Busch
MCC Theater, Lucille Lortel Theatre
28 February 2009 

Charles Busch’s The Third Story is a play about storytelling—mostly the Hollywood variety.  Busch has interwoven four stories about twins and mothers-and-sons in his play which had its New York première as part of the MCC Theater’s 2008-09 season at the Lucille Lortel Theatre.  (It had its world première last fall at La Jolla, which commissioned the play.) 

Diana, my frequent theater partner, and I went into Greenwich Village on Friday, 27 February 2009, to see the production, starring Kathleen Turner (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) and Busch himself (in several female roles), which was a replacement for a new Neil LaBute play MCC had originally intended to present, The Break of Noon. 

The theater, which has last season’s reasons to be pretty by LaBute about to open on Broadway, didn’t want another LaBute play to compete with this commercial debut, the playwright’s first on Broadway.  I’m no great fan of LaBute, but I’m not sure we got the better of this deal. 

I’m not really a big fan of Busch, either, so that may color my feelings some.  Not that I have any objection to Busch’s work; it just never seems more than mildly amusing to me.  In The Third Story, for instance, he’s composed a sort of showcase for virtuosic character acting, but it’s a pretty shallow exercise for the cast.  They get to display some Thespian pyrotechnics, especially Busch and Scott Parkinson, but there’s no depth to any of it. 

Busch’s playwriting is of the same vein, I’d say.  He includes a “Playwright’s Note” in the program which is a mini-essay on storytelling, especially in his family (some of the autobiography he reveals there shows up now and then in Story’s plot . . . er, plots). 

He also reveals that he started this script off as the story of a queen of crime, a sort of Ma Barker with fashion sense (she likes designer clothes!) and then rediscovered a sci-fi play he’d written in the ’90s about a “frosty lady scientist who creates a clone” and decided to combine the two. 

But that wasn’t enough for Busch, so he invented a Russian fairy tale and folded that in, too.  To lace these together, he created the screenwriter and her son who are writing the film script that encompasses these plots—four stories in all.  (The play’s title refers to an axiom the screenwriter posits that the first two drafts of a script only sketch out the characters and plot outlines, but in the third draft, the story comes together.) 

As I reckon, these were all supposed to interlace with one another, covering similar themes and plot elements, even using some of the same lines.  The difficulty I had, however, was that there were too many balls bouncing in the air for me to keep track of them all and keep them all connected to one another. 

At the same time, since all four stories were dealing with the same basic ideas, everything important got repeated four times (and more—several of the characters also tell stories themselves).  Since none of these ideas was especially profound (at least not in my opinion), that was overkill.  At two hours, Story felt very long; several members of the audience left at intermission and at least one pair walked up the aisle during the second act. 

It seems that this season a lot of the plays I’ve seen had the same fundamental fault: they were insubstantial.  Some also had dramaturgical problems as well, but even the ones that were well structured didn’t have much to say.

I’ll briefly mention some of the performances, since that’s really all there was on offer.  (The tech production was perfectly adequate—and unremarkable.) 

Busch, aside from his storytelling focus, is obsessed with old movies—especially cheesy old movies.  (That’s been a focus of his scripts since the start, whether they were travesties of ’50s teen romps like Psycho Beach Party or horror flicks like Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, or genre flicks of the ’30s and ’40s.)  Here he’s used the gangster films of the ’30s and a ’50s/’60s B sci-fi movie. 

Busch got to display his acting talents as Queenie Bartlett, mob queen, and Baba Yaga, an old crone (think Maria Ouspenskaya on ugly pills) in the Russian fairy story.  (He also played Queenie’s clone, which, I admit, was a pretty funny performance.  Imagine a Bizarro Joan Crawford.  But it was no heftier than a Carol Burnett sketch.) 

Busch has done this kind of thing so often, it’s close to being effortless—and I’m no longer sure what the point of his doing it is.  I mean, is it outrageous anymore for a guy to play a woman.  It’s been on Broadway, for Pete’s sake (M Butterfly, 1988; Victor/Victoria, 1995; Hairspray, 2002); how much more mainstream can you get? 

I can’t say it made the play any funnier knowing that Queenie and Baba Yaga were men in drag than if they had been played by a woman, or by an actor whose gender we didn’t know.  (That’s probably not fair—I didn’t find the play all that funny to start with.)

Kathleen Turner played Peg, the screenwriter, with much the same force and intestinal strength she used for Martha in Virginia Woolf (2005).  (Turner injured her knee a week or so before I saw the performance and almost had to drop out of the show, but she was performing by then with a cane and what looked like a brace hidden in her costume.  It just looked like part of the character’s bio that she was a little lame—after all, Peg goes back to the Hollywood of the silents!) 

The part really doesn’t deserve Turner’s strength: the play’s too slight for the force she emits on stage.  I don’t mean she overplayed the part; in fact, she did a perfect job of portraying this somewhat selfish, remote woman who has all but alienated her son (and sometime writing partner).  Turner’s whiskey voice, which worked so well for Martha, served her here, too. 

We got to see her do some real acting, simple and uncomplex as it was, while the others were all doing surface caricatures (all that’s demanded by the script).  It’s just that Peg doesn’t reach anywhere near the level of Martha, just as Story can’t come close to Virginia Woolf so that Turner’s talents are pretty much wasted.  She could have phoned this in—though it’s good for us she didn’t. 

Of the rest of the cast, Scott Parkinson was both the most fun to watch and, it would seem, had the most fun working.  He played Zygote in the sci-fi plot, the artificial human the “frosty scientist” created in her lab.  (For those who have forgotten their basic biology, a zygote is a fertilized egg.  Zygote, the character, turns out to have been created from Dr. Constance Hudson’s own egg in an experiment that went a little awry.)  Parkinson’s character is a cross among Peter Lorre, Gollum (Lord of the Rings), and Marty Feldman’s Igor in Young Frankenstein and he was both creepy and a little sweet.  But the character is so outlandish that Parkinson got to create the one truly unpredictable aspect of Busch’s script, which is so deliberately derivative that almost every surprise isn’t one.  In fact, if you think of Busch as a sort of Mel Brooks manqué, Zygote is the closest he comes to Brooks’s most inspired looniness, and Parkinson, like Turner with her character, hit it right on the nose.

The rest of the cast, because of their parts as I’ve suggested, never got beyond caricature and cartoon.  They were all surface roles because that’s all the script required.  Jonathan Walker’s Drew, Peg’s son, came closest to a real stage character, but his Steve Bartlett, Queenie’s gunsel son, was no more than a celluloid reflection of a Bogie or Cagney role. 

Sarah Rafferty’s Verna, Steve’s platinum-haired bride, was equally one-dimensional, as if the actress were doing Leslie Ann Warren’s Norma from Victor/Victoria (the film) without the camp. (Ironically, Rafferty’s fairy tale role, Princess Vasalisa, however briefly she showed up, was fuller and more warm-blooded.) 

Jennifer Van Dyck, as Dr. Hudson, like her castmates, did what was needed, creating a clichéd cold-blooded scientist.  I can’t fault director Carl Andress for any of this, either, because it looked to me as if this was what Busch had written.  (Since the playwright was always there, I have to assume that if Andress, who had also directed the world première at La Jolla, had gone off the mark somewhere, Busch would have had a word with him, no?)  All Andress had to do here was keep the actors from bumping into one another or knocking the set over!

In the end, I guess it’s obvious, none of this added up to much.  Busch, from what I know of him (I’ve seen a few of his plays, but I’m not a follower, as I said), isn’t a playwright of ideas.  He’s all about cleverness—Look what I did!  Isn’t this funny?—and, in the past, anyway, outrageousness.  He’s not terribly outrageous anymore, and cleverness, even if he were better at it than he was here, isn’t enough to sustain a play.  Carol Burnett did that kind of thing, but in three-minute sketches.  (And she did it on free TV, so we could change the channel if we wished, and back in the ’60s, when it might have been, if not new, then uncommon.)

'Love & Money'

September was an active theater month for me this season.  First, I saw Daniel Schwartzman’s one-act musical, A Casual Gathering, at TNC (report posted on 21 September), then I caught the Acting Company’s one-act collection of Tennessee Williams short story adaptations, Desire, at 59E59 (report dated 26 September).  Near the end of last month, my Signature Theatre Company subscription partner and I went back to the Pershing Square Signature Center for the first production in STC’s 2015-16 Residency One season, the world première of A. R. Gurney’s Love & Money. 

Signature’s Residency One program is an extension of its 20-year-old “one writer/one season” policy on which the company was founded, offering a one-year residency for an established playwright to provide freedom and support, including participation in all aspects of the production process, and to afford New York audiences a full experience of an accomplished artist’s body of work.  The current Residency One playwrights are Gurney and Naomi Wallace, whose Night Is a Room, which I’ll be seeing on 4 December, will be her third STC production.  Love & Money, a co-production with the Westport Country Playhouse in Fairfield County, Connecticut, is Gurney’s third and final Residency One production.  Under the direction of Gurney’s longtime collaborator, Mark Lamos (this is their seventh joint production), L&M opened for previews at STC on 15 August and had its press opening on 24 August; the play’s original closing date was 27 September, but it has been extended until 4 October.  (The current production opened at Westport, where Lamos is artistic director, on 21 July and ran there until 8 August.  The same cast as STC’s played the roles.)  Diana and I attended the 7:30 performance of Gurney’s new comedy in the Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre, STC’s 191-seat proscenium house, on the evening of Wednesday, 23 September. 

Gurney, whom Signature has dubbed “America’s leading chronicler of New England’s WASP establishment,” said he “wanted to say goodbye to that culture,” which he acknowledged he “had established a reputation to talk about.”  The 84-year-old playwright continued, “I wanted that culture in a sense to say goodbye to itself because I think it’s over.  I wanted to write a play which dealt with that.”  The play’s title, Gurney says, came from the common expression “You can’t get that for love or money,” except that the phrase “would be Love & Money, not Love or Money, ’cause the play isn’t about the combat between feelings and money, it’s all mixed up together: what money does to love and all the rest.”

Love & Money, a comic portrayal of the trials of class, family, legacy, and race, is about WASPs and money.  That’s not just me saying that—Gurney says it in the play.  In L&M,  wealthy widow Cornelia Cunningham (Maureen Anderman) has led a life of grace and privilege on Manhattan’s Upper East Side—and she’s atoning for it as fast as she can.  Wealth, you see, is “evil” according to Cornelia’s philosophy of life and she’s “committed the major crime of having too much money.”  Determined to donate almost everything she owns to charity before the end—everything in the townhouse is labeled with color-coded tags indicating where each leather-bound book, gilt-framed painting, antique piece of furniture is to go when the movers show up—Cornelia’s plans are cast into doubt when her estate attorney, Harvey Abel (Joe Paulik), arrives at the Cunningham brownstone to produce a letter ostensibly from a grandson she never knew she had—the lovechild of her late daughter and an African-American married man in Buffalo.  Sure enough, an ambitious and ingratiating young man who calls himself Scott (for F. Scott Fitzgerald; played by Gabriel Brown), soon arrives to claim his share of the family inheritance.  No one except Cornelia (she asks everyone to call her that), seems to spot a phony immediately: Harvey’s suspicious because his interest is in protecting the estate and honoring Cornelia’s wishes; Agnes Munger (Pamela Dunlap), Corneilia’s stalwart and loyal housekeeper and companion, distrusts him because she takes an instant dislike to the interloper.  But Cornelia seems taken with the brash fellow and they chat away animatedly while the others fume and fulminate.  The grande dame, though, continues with her plan to give away all her possessions—her other grandchildren and only heirs (her son is also deceased) have been given enough money to get on and have signed off on Cornelia’s decision—and while Scott’s in the house, a young acting student comes to look at the piano—a player with a penchant for Cole Porter—the old lady’s giving to Juilliard’s drama school.  Jessica Worth (Kahyun Kim) is intrigued by Scott’s assertiveness and glib charm—a circumstance which will come into play at the end of the story. 

I won’t reveal the exact ending, but Gurney throws out a slight surprise at the conclusion of Scott’s stay after Cornelia has made the most of his visit and fed him a gourmet luncheon.  The play’s almost entirely filled with badinage (a word Cornelia introduces to Scott), most of it about someone’s background and history (including Scott’s, whether or not it’s factual), even the interlude with Jessica, the acting student, whose scene seems almost irrelevant except that it gives Gurney a chance to insert a player piano for the fun of it (this is my second play this season that featured a player piano: there was one in Annie Baker’s John, on which I blogged on 1 September) and get many of the characters—Cordelia, Jessica, Scott, and even Harvey—to sing Porter songs.  (Gurney pronounces the composer “a poet of WASP culture,” whose music,  the dramatist asserts, “best illustrates both the wit and the cleverness of the WASP culture, but also its dissolute quality.”)  Cordelia also reveals many truths she’s learned about WASPs and wealth which are the root justification for her decision to give everything away. 

(By the way, except for mentions as part of Scott’s back story, the character’s race is treated as irrelevant in L&M.  In an interview, Gurney made clear he wrote the part for a black actor, but the few references to his race are just to explain how WASP Cornelia could have an African-American grandson.  There’s absolutely no mention of Jessica’s being Asian, so I believe that casting was director Lamos’s choice, not Gurney’s.  Since no substantive reference is made to either character’s ethnicity, I’m left with the conclusion that race prejudice, at least, is not one of Cornelia’s WASP stereotypes.  According to an interview with the playwright, this was not an accident or an oversight; during rehearsals, he continuously asked Brown, “Is this racist?  Does this offend you in any way?”) 

In Gurney’s words, Love & Money is “about a woman of a certain age who feels guilty about the money she married and inherited but didn’t earn, and gives as much as she can away to people who need it more than she does, and the consequences of that giving for her and her family.”  Gurney’s premise is that if you have enough money, you can make happen anything you want.  (One example in the play is the idea that Cornelia can buy someone a spot at Yale or Juilliard Drama if she throws enough money at them.  That actually incenses me.)  Let’s hope fervently that the playwright’s wrong—or else we’ll be ringing in 2017 with the inauguration of Pres. Donald Trump!  Now, there’s a frightening prospect if there ever was one.

Diana was very disappointed in L&M, but I have to report that this was the best Gurney I’ve seen, except Sylvia (which I saw in January 1996 on Theatre Row; a revival starts previews at Broadway’s Cort Theatre on 2 October and opens on the 27th).  That’s not praise, however, just less displeasure than the last times I saw a Gurney play.  (There are reports on ROT concerning Gurney’s The Wayside Motor Inn, 1 October 2014; a 2008 production of Buffalo Gal, 26 October 2014; and What I Did Last Summer, 28 June 2015.) 

L&M actually starts off promisingly, but quickly shows itself to be contrived and artificial.  One whole character is lifted intact from John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation.  (Just to be sure we see this—I did in short order and even said so to Diana—Gurney puts in a line about the play “where a young man pretends to be the son of Sidney Poitier.”)  When she first appears, Cornelia seems like a fun character, stubborn, independent, living according to her own lights, and not particularly concerned about how anyone else sees her.  But not long into the script, she becomes repetitive and predictable and her forceful personality begins to pall.  The character of Scott is a cliché for this kind of tale to begin with, but the story Gurney devises for him to sell smashes all credibility.  (I began thinking, Why not just test Scott’s DNA—or at least threaten to?)  Even Gurney’s surprise ending is only a surprise in its final detail—the one that riled me—principally because it doesn’t really suit the play; the overall dénouement is predictable because L&M just wouldn’t have supported the alternatives.  The rest of the characters all seem pat and loaded with traits tailor-made to fit into Gurney’s script like pieces in a child’s puzzle.  Agnes is kind of fun, I wish she had more to do with the outcome of the plot; as it is she’s ornamental.  And the whole sequence with Jessica, as I said, seems altogether purposeless, a diversion to liven things up. 

The performances are mostly fine, except that the manufactured set-up makes it hard for the actors to make everything they’re called on to say believable.  (Besides Six Degrees, Gurney must also have been channeling the 1956 film Anastasia.)  I think he thought he was turning the cliché on its head somehow—by sort of acknowledging it and then making everybody become friends in the end.  Yeah, like that would ever happen!

Maureen Anderman and Pamela Dunlap are both longtime stage vets and would have difficulty presenting uninteresting characters on stage and the roles of Cornelia and Agnes are right in their wheelhouses.  In fact, Dunlap’s Agnes is the liveliest and most enjoyable thing on the Griffin stage (except maybe the player piano programmed to play Cole Porter), even if her role is a stock character: the no-nonsense servant who’s more in charge of her mistress than the other way around.  (Four hundred years ago, Molière dined out on just that set-up.)  Nonetheless, both Dunlap and Anderman were pleasures to watch, even if what was going on around them was stale and trite.  (Good acting is its own reward.)

Joe Paulik and Kahyun Kim didn’t break out of their stereotypes—not that they had much real opportunity.  Paulik’s Harvey, the Wall Street estate lawyer, couldn’t have been more of a cliché if he’d come out of a 1960 TV melodrama—except that, like everyone else (apparently including A. R. Gurney), he loves Porter.  (I didn’t think of Harvey as a WASP—his family’s from Latvia, not Long Island or Westchester, but I guess love of Cole Porter isn’t exclusive to WASPs.  Hey, I like him, too!)  Kim’s Jessica is a little more quirky, but she has but one scene to bust out, and that’s just not enough time.  As well as Kim does with the role, it’s really a cameo. 

Finally, I have to talk about Gabriel Brown’s Walker “Scott” Williams.  I may not be able to put my finger on what bothered me about Brown’s performance, but there’s something off.  One thing, I think, is that he seems too young for the part.  Brown looks like a 19- or 20-year-old and has the lanky, loose-jointed physicality of an adolescent, but “Scott” should be older to be the son of Cornelia’s late daughter.  In his suit, tie, and hat, he looks like a kid dressed up in his older brother’s clothes.  Part of this impression may come from Brown’s over-eagerness in the role—like a rambunctious, over-sized puppy.  Besides, if we’re not supposed to guess that he’s a scammer but merely wonder, his enthusiasm for the circumstances in which he finds himself made me believe from the start that he’s a fake.  (Paul in Six Degrees—James McDaniel when I saw it—had much more heft both as a character and as an actor.)  If Gurney intended any suspense for Love & Money, Brown’s acting approach gives the game away as soon as he enters.  (The writer didn’t help a lot by providing Scott with the answers to all the questions that come up about him—as if he’d prepared for all potentialities.)

Mark Lamos doesn’t solve any of the problems the cast lays bare, whether of Gurney’s making or the actors’.  In particular, he doesn’t heal the rift between Anderman’s Cornelia and Brown’s Scott, a putative attraction which never gels.  There has to be something in Scott that tugs at Cornelia, but neither performer finds it—and Lamos doesn’t lead the actors to it.  In fact, Lamos doesn’t go very deeply below the play’s surface with any of the characters, leaving the actors with a shallow foundation.  (This is most damagingly true of Brown whose superficial charm, which can convincingly take in Jessica, isn’t sufficiently deep to work on Cornelia.)  The director does, however, keep the characters from becoming caricatures—though not stereotypes.  It’s hard to blame Lamos entirely for the believability problem, though, since the playwright gave him (and the actors) so little of substance with which to work.  In the end, the play is largely substance-free—and so is the production.

The physical production is fine—as it usually is at STC.  Michael Yeargan’s design for Corneilia’s brownstone study evokes the old-money elegance of an Upper East Side home.  (Yeargan also designed the set for STC’s revival of Gurney’s What I Did Last Summer.)  It gives nothing about the residents away except their wealth.  (Even the quirky player piano isn’t revealing until you know what it can do.)  The color-coded tags hanging all over the room might be a clue to something—but only if you know what they are.  Jess Goldstein’s costumes made everyone’s status and role immediately clear: Cornelia’s understated but high-quality stylishness, Harvey’s conservative Wall Street spiffiness, Jessica’s boho chic, and so on.  (Goldstein was also responsible for the garments of Broadway’s On the Town and Newsies, on which I reported on 18 July 2015 and 26 February 2014, respectively.)  The lighting by Stephen Strawbridge (STC’s première of The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek, reported on ROT on 3 July) kept it all together effectively, while the sound design of John Gromada (Desire; The Orphans’ Home Cycle, reported on ROT on 25 and 28 February 2010; and Donald Margulies’s Shipwrecked!  at Primary Stages, which predates the blog), which was principally the player’s Porter medley, speaks for itself. 

In a sense, Diana and I had been spoiled by seeing Desire less than a week earlier.  As I said to Diana several times when she kvelled about the Williams adaptations: When you start with Tennessee Williams, even filtered through another writer’s artistry, you have a big leg up.  Even his excesses can be wonderful in their own ways.  So now let’s see what the published reviewers had to say.  (I’m not going to report the press reception of the Westport run, but there are quite a few on line for any ROTter who’s curious.)

Love & Money is an “unfocused and unfunny comedy” which “has none of the wit, insight and clarity of Gurney’s better works,” declared Joe Dziemianowicz in the New York Daily News.  “Unbelievable characters and an unclear message about class, culture and legacies are major liabilities,” Dziemianowicz explained, adding that “the play lurches toward a conclusion” and, along the way, “strains patience, credulity and goodwill.”  To wrap up his opinion, the News reviewer reported, “The acting is so-so at best.  The script gives director Mark Lamos little to work with.”  In the New York Post, Elisabeth Vincentelli opened her notice by warning, “‘Love & Money’ runs just 85 minutes and still seems padded.”  Gurney’s comedy, she said, “is a trifle of a show, a soufflé that collapses as soon as you start thinking about the plot’s holes.”  Lamos’s production, the Newswoman reported, “goes down easy, but it’s also nutrient-free and meandering.”

Charles Isherwood called L&M a “slender new play” in the New York Times, noting that it has a “somewhat misleadingly titled, since love makes only a glancing appearance.”  Like many of his colleagues, Isherwood mentioned Six Degrees and then added that Gurney’s script “cannot really stand comparisons to Mr. Guare’s rich and funny play,” adding, “It’s much slighter,” despite the “wit and warmth” of Gurney’s dialogue.  The Timesman complained, however, that “the play doesn’t deepen or accrue much emotional texture.”  Lamos, the Times reviewer asserted, “hasn’t elicited performances that might give the relationship between Cornelia and Walker the intriguing emotional undertow suggested in the script,” blaming both actors for not completing their characterizations.   

Brendan Lemon of the Financial Times called STC’s Love & Money an “affectionate, altogether too predictable evening,” despite the fact that it’s “directed gracefully by Mark Lamos.”  Comparing L&M with Gurney’s early writing, Lemon stated that “what was once astringent is now anodyne.”  Of the playwright’s main career focus, the FT review-writer quipped, drawing a parallel with one of the Cole Porter songs the characters sing, that “neither the song nor the set-up has much life left in it, even ironically,” and concludes, “I have loved the privileged world of A. R. Gurney, but unlike Cornelia I am not wistful about seeing it go.”  In the  Wall Street Journal, Terry Teachout, calling Gurney “an in-and-out runner whose work varies widely in quality,” wrote that L&M “is light and slight, more like an extended comic sketch . . . than a full-fledged show.”  He also complained that “it’s also over-explicit in its treatment of one of his preferred themes, the devastating effects of money on the souls of those who inherit it.”  This occurs despite the staging of director Lamos, who “keeps ‘Love & Money’ moving at a gentle canter, making a point of not italicizing its self-evidently valedictory tone.”  The Wall Street Journalist concluded, “Nothing surprising comes of” Gurney’s play, “but Mr. Gurney rings his changes with smooth skill, squeezing solid chuckles out of” his dialogue.

In “Goings On About Town,” a New Yorker reviewer stated bluntly that in Love & Money, Gurney “lampoons [discontented WASPs] in an unpersuasive and unfunny bit of flimflam . . . that lacks the candor of comedy or the glee of farce.”  The review-writer concluded, “Michael Yeargan’s handsome set delights the eye; a few Cole Porter songs divert the ear.  But nothing can distract from the thinness of the play’s premise or the feebleness with which Gurney develops and resolves it, squandering his own rich inheritance.”  Time Out New York’s Helen Shaw dubbed L&M “Gurney’s dead-behind-the-eyes comedy” and observed that Signature’s choice of the dramatist for its Residency One program had a “downside”: “asking him for a world premiere seems to have caught him uninspired,” adding, “The play fills out the season, but no more.”  “Gurney’s recipe,” asserted the TONY reviewer, “is three parts exposition to one part pandering wheezes about Wall Street and Buffalo.”  Shaw concluded that “the brief piece doesn’t bother to develop the theme” of “egalitarianism” she saw developing toward the end, interpreting this as “a sure sign of a play written for a reason other than love,” intimating that fulfilling the STC commission was what had motivated Gurney. 

On New York Theatre Guide, Tulis McCall opened her notice with a single word: “Sophomoric.”  Love & Money, which McCall later dubbed a “flimsy tale” filled with “meaningless conversation,” “has so many holes in the plot that it seems more like a frivolous writing exercise created on a rainy afternoon than anything that should be taken seriously.”  (The NYTG reviewer’s main complaint is that Cornelia’s “decision to flee the city makes no sense and therefore the story has no validity.”)  “The entire play,” wrote McCall, “is a series of moments that either contradict or do not connect to one another.”  She went on to object that “Love & Money somehow feels long and lacks the sharp, careful craftsmanship that has made even Gurney’s flimsier efforts enjoyably watchable entertainments.”  The reviewer also lambasted director Lamos for not urging the playwright to make some revisions after ”test-driving” the script in Westport and for not “draw[ing] less stereotypical performances from the actors.”  In the end, McCall concluded that Love & Money is “a too slim and underdeveloped play.”

Matthew Murray of Talkin’ Broadway called L&M “entertaining but hollow” and complained that the “stakes aren’t high enough” in Gurney’s script which “demands a more committed, robust treatment than Gurney gives it.”  Murray continued, “Without out any underlying weight, all that’s left is the froth, and there’s too much even of that.”  The TB writer acknowledged, “There’s plenty of fun to be had here,” but lamented that “none of it really coheres.”   He added, “At once overwrought and underdeveloped, the play feels like a much longer piece that’s been cut down to appetizer size.”  Murray didn’t lay all the blame for his disappointment on the playwright, however; even though he admitted that Lamos “arranged things decently,” he reported that the director “can’t overcome these basic deficiencies; his staging has the feeling of pushing pieces around without ever explaining why.”  Murray continued, “The performances have a similar feel.”  

Huffington Post’s David Finkle pronounced Love & Money “a minor trifle” that at first looks as if it’s “going to be substantive,” but then “Gurney withdraws . . . so forcibly that patrons may experience a mild form of whiplash.”  “Your enjoyment of it will hinge on how fond of trifles you are,” allowed Finkle.  “Love & Money is so mildly amusing as it passes that I’m writing this review as fast as I can so that even more of it won’t fade from my memory before I finish.”  HP’s “First Nighter” summed up by noting, that “a work with the elements of a more probing examination of the haves and the have-nots definitely dwindles into something that couldn't be more light-hearted and gay in the now nearly forgotten sense of the word.”  Finkle praised the work of all the actors, whom, he insisted, weren’t at fault for Gurney’s deficiencies, and the HP review-writer complimented Lamos for “deftly capturing Gurney’s curious mood.”  He concluded, however, that while Gurney fans might be “wowed” by Love & Money, “Others are very likely to leave their seats thinking a baffled, ‘Huh?’” 

“[W]hile certainly flawed,” said Michael Dale on Broadway World, “the lightly philosophical comedy can provide a pleasing, if not totally satisfying time.”  Despite “director Mark Lamos' agreeable production,” Dale warned, L&M’s “big reveal is more of [a] groaner than a gasper” because “the shadow of the somewhat iconic [Six Degrees] is a major drawback.”  Nonetheless, the BWW reviewer acknowledged, because of Gurney’s skill, “there's enough of his gentle, cleverness to keep the proceedings genial” for 85 minutes.  The cyber journalist lays most of the blame on one actor: “Brown is playing one of those roles where the character may or may not be putting on an acting job.  If he is, he doesn’t seem very good at it.  His Scott continually sounds scripted to say the right things to push Cornelia’s buttons.” 

“In case you wondered what A. R. Gurney’s latest work is about,” offered David Cote on NY1, the local cable news channel for Time Warner subscribers, “he kindly puts it right there in the title: Love & Money.  However, for this slight and unsatisfying comedy he might have added Tedium, Padding and Contrivance.”  The plot of L&M, said Cote, “ambles harmlessly and dully from one tepid zinger about wealth and privilege to another.”  He explained, “The main problem in this [85]-minute piece, which seems like a puffed-up sketch, is lack of plot or dynamic characters.”  Cote’s final word is an admonition to Gurney: “Forget the love and money: next time, more art.”

'What I Did Last Summer'

For A. R. Gurney’s second Residency One production, the Signature Theatre Company is presenting a revival of his 1983 play, What I Did Last Summer.  (Gurney’s first Signature production was The Wayside Motor Inn, on which I reported on ROT on 1 October 2014.  A third, new play, Love and Money is scheduled for this August.)  The play began previews on the Irene Diamond Stage at the Pershing Square Signature Center on Theatre Row on 28 April and closed on 7 June.  The production opened to the press on 17 May; I caught the show on the evening of 5 June. 

What I Did Last Summer, a largely autobiographical tale, has been a moderately popular script for Gurney, especially in colleges and high schools.  (In an interview, the playwright confessed that the play “always has been a secret favorite of mine; it’s like a child that had a very difficult upbringing, so I have particular fondness for it.”)  It premièred in February 1983 at Manhattan’s Circle Repertory Company—for a run of only 37 performances.  A 2003 revival was staged in Houston and Retro Productions mounted one in 2007 in New York City.  It’s popularity over the years seems to have come from a couple of attributes: a small cast, the prevalence of mostly young characters from 14 to 19, a very simple unit set, and only as much tech as a theater can muster.  (There was a lone drummer stage right in the Signature revival, but that seemed dispensable.)  Even the costumes, as we’ll see, are undemanding: rather standard summer wear (ca. 1945) that even the smallest of troupes can manage on a limited budget.  The play’s also heavily nostalgic for the time, place, and values of Gurney’s youth, the World War II home front, when the notion of the “teenager” was pretty much invented.  What’s not to love, right?

Well, Gurney, who was only 14 himself at the time the play takes place (and 52 when it premièred), has written a two-hour, two-act snapshot of life at the end of the war (Japan’s surrender is announced near the end of act two) in a summer resort for “the leisure class,” as one of the characters puts it.  The picture’s fully developed and sharp enough, but the figures and scenery in it are meaningful mostly to those who were there.  It’s also a pretty conventional shot—the one nearly every family takes on vacation.  I have some just like it—and you probably do, too. 

As for the self-portrait . . . well, it’s not terribly revealing, either.  First of all, the direction in which it’s going to develop, like watching a Polaroid become visible before your eyes, is pretty obvious fairly early.  Then, in the end, we get an assertion from the Gurney-manqué character that he becomes a playwright (“I wrote this play,” he tells us), but there’s no actual evidence that we’ve witnessed the birth of an artist. 

(In a curious coincidence, I saw my last play at Signature this season at the matinee the next afternoon.  It was Athol Fugard’s The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek—a report on ROT will be coming soon—which shares some superficial aspects with Summer.  In both plays, a young boy—14 in the Gurney, 11 in the Fugard—is fundamentally changed by an encounter with an artist teacher who’s a kind of outsider.  The two boys grow up to be men who affect others: in the Gurney, he becomes . . . well, Gurney, the successful playwright; in the Fugard, he becomes a teacher.  The change and subsequent upheaval is more dramatic in the Fugard—it’s tied in with the end of apartheid—and we see what the boy becomes as a man.)

Okay, I guess I better get to the play itself so you’ll know what I’ve been talking about.  As I said, What I Did Last Summer is set in the summer of 1945.  The Higgins family from Buffalo (Gurney’s own hometown)—mom Grace, 19-year-old daughter Elsie, and 14-year-old son Charlie—are spending the season at a summer house on the Canadian shore of Lake Erie, a colony of mostly American well-to-do; their husband and father is fighting in the Pacific.   Looking for a summer job, Charlie, in the incipient stages of teenage rebellion, takes a job doing chores for the Pig Woman (so-called because her cabin used to be a sty), Anna Trumbull, a free-thinking, proto-hippie-ish sometime art teacher.

Charlie’s in a sort of puppyish competition with Ted, a Canadian townie who mows lawns, does yardwork, drives, and, at 16, is old enough to ride the nearby rollercoaster.  The two shock the sensitivities of the conventional WASP community, especially sister Elsie, by stuffing rocks in the fronts of their swim trunks, going skinny-dipping in broad daylight, and mooning the women and kids on the shore.  Charlie also has an innocent crush on Bonny, another summer resident his age, who returns his affections but tries to be fair to Ted (who wants to drive her to the rollercoaster where he’s told his friend, the attendant, that Bonny’s his “girl” so he’ll let the underage teen onto the ride).  This little side story precipitates the play’s climax when Charlie takes Bonny out in Anna’s old Reo, which he’s gotten to run for her, and crashes it when the brakes fail.  (To show how squeaky-clean Gurney’s memory of all this is, the accident isn’t Charlie’s fault—it was a mechanical mishap—and he didn’t steal the car—Anna let him drive it even though he doesn’t have a license yet.  Further, no one is seriously hurt; Charlie wears a temporary neck brace for the rest of the play.)

Anna, once a member of the “upper crust,” owns to being “of mixed blood” (she’s part Native American) and was the mistress of a prominent doctor, but she’s now lost both her money and her regard for the conventions of middle-class decorum.  Sensing a “potential” in Charlie, Anna puts him to work around her farm in the mornings and tries to teach him art—and metaphysical life lessons along the way—in the afternoons.  (Gurney’s acknowledged that not only was there a real Anna in his youth—a woman who remained a friend well into his adulthood—but that the scenes with the character “are pretty much verbatim what she taught me.”)  She exposes Charlie to vaguely radical and quasi-socialistic ideas about which his mother and sister become concerned (even though they’re hardly “dangerous,” as Anna’s been labeled by the American summer residents).  
Charlie’s increasing independence of mind impels Grace, who herself had a history with Anna before she married Charlie and Elsie’s father 20 years earlier (and which seems a bit contrived), to write her husband for advice.  He orders her to send Charlie away to boarding school to straighten him out—just as he says the experience did for him.   Anna’s influence and Grace’s decision eventually persuade Charlie to reject the idea of going back to school at all in favor of staying on Grace’s farm—he’ll sleep in the barn!—and a family crisis ensues and a showdown between Anna and Grace looms.  The anti-climactic meeting, which raises more questions than it resolves, is inconclusive but the Higginses return to Buffalo when the summer ends to prepare for Father to return home now that Japan has surrendered.  Before driving out of town, however, Charlie makes Elsie stop the car and he has a farewell with Anna—whom we suspect he’ll never see again (unlike Gurney and Anna’s real-life counterpart) as she’s being forced to move in with family elsewhere.  In the end, we’re led to sense that this summer has stimulated a self-awareness in Charlie that will shape the man he’s destined to become—a writer and, perhaps, a playwright.  (He acknowledges at the end that he’s written “this play.”)

The play itself is less impactful than I feel either Gurney or director Jim Simpson and producer James Houghton seem to think it is.  The story’s less compelling than it’s played up to be and the point Gurney appears to be making is less revelatory than a 2-hour play would suggest it ought to be or that Gurney thinks it is.  (As I wrote in my report on The Wayside Motor Inn, “I should probably confess here that I’ve never been a great fan of Gurney’s plays.  I just find them unengaging . . . .”  My limited experience with Gurney as a writer makes me feel that he’s something of a lightweight—more than I’d expect for someone who’s been around for 50 years.)  Anna’s far from a threatening figure—she’s no predator, just a kook—and her ideas would only seem radical to a member of the John Birch Society.  Charlie’s friendship with her is more comical and oddly sweet than fraught—she’s more Auntie Mame in hippie drag than Mephistopheles after Charlie’s soul—and his terrifying rebellion is no more than using the kind of vulgar language we take for granted today, even from 14-year-olds (it’d be PG-rated in a movie today), and refusing to go to a posh party at another summer resident’s house.  As for the final transformation . . . well, let’s just say that What I Did Last Summer isn’t Summer of ’42.  Nor is it Brighton Beach Memoirs, as Charlie demonstrates, at least during the play, no discernable talent at any kind of art; all his efforts under Anna’s tutelage (including an attempt at macramé) are abject failures.

Much of this was the source of the critical dismissal Summer got in 1983 (which may have accounted for its brief run of 15 days).  Signature director Simpson, founder of the Flea Theater in downtown Manhattan—he retires shortly—and a longtime collaborator of Gurney’s, has endeavored to paper over the script's obvious weaknesses with production, and he comes close to succeeding.  He’s devised a series of projections (which reviews of the Circle Rep’s mounting don’t mention, so I assume they weren’t used) of parts of the script being typed on a manual machine, accompanied by the sound of clicking keys.  The text of the projections (designed by John Narun) may be stage directions—which the actors actually refer to on the back wall of the set before executing them—or bits of dialogue.  When Charlie tells us he’s written the play, we realize that this is supposed to be the adult author typing the script.  It’s sort of Brechtian-lite—and more of a distraction than a theatrical enhancement, I found.

To go along with the projected text, Gurney includes presentational asides to the audience, some of which are minor exposition (Bonny has a speech about the dangerous thrill of the rollercoaster she’s legally too young to ride), but most, especially at the outset, are each major character—the three Higginses—turning to the audience and proclaiming that the play is about him or her.  This device didn’t seem to go anywhere, either dramatically (it’s in the last of these that we learn that Charlie is the play’s author, but that’s really the most we get) or theatrically.  It interrupts the flow of the play without providing anything revealing and Simpson didn’t come up with a technique to make better use of the device.  The rest of the performance is essentially representational Realism.

In another touch of Brecht, there’s also that solo drummer—no band, just percussion—who accompanies the dialogue to establish or emphasize the rhythm of the characters’ speech.  Performed by Dan Weiner, who also provides some sound effects like the slam of a car door and the ping of shelled peas hitting a pail as well as few rim-shots, this is also something I think has been added since the ’83 début (no mention again in published reviews) and I’m not sure what Simpson wanted it to accomplish.  It may have something to do with the acting style the director seems to have devised for Signature’s Summer, which I found a little mannered, especially among the actors playing the teens.  The actors—who are all young adults, not children—moved in a way that made them look choreographed and spoke in odd bursts of words as if they were doing cartoon adolescents.  It was a common characteristic, so I assume it was Simpson’s selection, not the actors’. 

I got the impression that Simpson wasn’t sure if the play was a form of straight Realism (as I think it is) or something like impressionistic Symbolism.  (Those interludes of direct address may have been a source of his confusion.)  It was probably Simpson’s way of diverting attention from the deficiencies of Gurney’s script, but it only partially worked.  (When Signature artistic director Houghton proposed both Wayside Motor Inn and What I Did Last Summer for Gurney’s residency, the playwright had his doubts that “those plays would quite stand up.”)  The near-eccentric acting style, the percussive accompaniment, the Brechtian projections, however, couldn’t cover the klutzy dialogue, sketchy characters, and flimsy drama. 

If I accept that the mannered acting was the responsibility of the director, I have to say that the cast executed their jobs well, despite the impediments supplied by Gurney and Simpson.  Noah Galvin (who bears a passing resemblance to a teenaged Gurney, as it happens) as Charlie was the most affected by the performance style; it made him seem a little fey.  (I also think Galvin, who’s only about 21 now and has been playing teens since he was one, has gotten in the habit of playing “cute,” an actor phenomenon I’ve encountered before in young performers who started out a child actors.)

The most pervasive problem in the performance was the relationship between Charlie and Anna.  As played by Galvin and Kristine Nielsen, there didn’t seem to be much passion in the pairing.  It was as if they came together merely to piss Grace off, not so much because they each had anything they needed to accomplish.  Much of this is (lacking) in Gurney’s writing, to be sure, and director Simpson didn’t do enough to build up the central relationship that should have been the core of this coming-of-age story, but the acting in general was so superficial that Galvin and Nielsen must take considerable responsibility for the hole in the middle of Signature’s Summer.  As Elsie, Izzie Steele (who replaced Kate McGonigle on 2 June) is no more than an annoying, self-centered older sister, exasperated by the very existence of her little brother.  Carolyn McCormick’s Grace is mostly a hovering cypher about whom we learn little beyond the fact that she feels bereft at the absence of her husband (and is having a casual affair).  (Any deep concern for dad off fighting in the Pacific isn’t portrayed in Summer; we only hear that he’s on a destroyer escort and, at the end, that he’s come home and Grace is going off by train to meet him in San Francisco.  Otherwise, he’s just the familiar empty chair at the dining table.)

Charlie’s two friends fare better, though neither character is fully fleshed-out in Gurney’s script.  Pico Alexander’s Ted, the Canadian local boy who feels like a sideman to the wealthier American summer residents on whom he and his family wait but who nevertheless is a role model for Charlie, is almost a cliché teenager, gangly and more bravado than substance.  We’re supposed to understand that there’s real boyhood affection between Ted and Charlie—the American is devastated when Ted announces that he won’t be around after this summer because his family’s moving to Toronto, but then the subject’s dropped for the rest of the play—though neither actor develops any kind of true relationship with the other that’s more significant than boyish horseplay and a little one-upmanship.  That competition focuses on Bonny, of course, the 14-year-old American girl on whom both boys have a crush.  But while Ted actively—at least within the restrictions of What I Did Las Summer—pursues his goal, a date with Bonny without Charlie tagging along, Charlie seems to be playing a very successful game of “I like you so much, I’ll ignore you.”  Bonny, as presented by Juliet Brett, is as typical a young teenaged girl as any in theater or film, and Brett manages to give her something of a personality.  Yet, she’s so underused as a character—her existence precipitates the incident that brings the play to its conclusion, though Bonny herself doesn’t actually do anything to cause it—that Brett has little do but serve as a sort of catalyst.  We know Bonny likes both Ted and Charlie, but there’s no actual connection between Brett and either boy on stage, almost as if she were in another, connected story that Gurney didn’t write.

Aside from Narun’s projection of the typing, the set was almost nonexistent; most props were mimed.  (“Pete [Gurney’s nickname among his friends] and I don’t like to see a lot of junk on stage when the essence of theatre is to say: ‘Can we join in this act of imagination together?’” said Simpson in an interview.  The director asserted that when staged “simply,” the play takes on “an improvisatory feel.”)  Michael Yeargan designed a two-level platform with a simple wooden bench which served as a number of seats (including, for instance, the front seat of the Higgins’s, Ted’s, and Anna’s cars).  Other incidental properties were toted on and off by the actors—a stand-alone steering wheel, some stools which also doubled as luggage and boxes for the car’s back seat.  Brian Aldous’s lighting kept it all sunshine bright—I guess it never clouded over on Lake Erie that summer—and with the nearly-bare stage, made the scene feel unvaryingly . . . well, sunny.  (Two scenes take place at night.)  Claudia Brown’s costumes, as I hinted earlier, were perfectly unsurprising summer dress for a lakeside community of the time (and, really, perhaps except for the length of Grace’s dresses, anytime since the middle of the last century).  Ted wore Bermuda-length shorts and Charlie almost always wore khakis and a tee.  Except for Anna, whose attire was standard bohemian/country eccentricity, nothing gave away individual character detail—which, of course, is typical of Gurney’s habitual turf: the conform-minded, middle-class WASP.

An inescapable element of Simpson’s production of Summer, one that is part of Gurney’s original script, is the music played in the background of many scenes and interstices.  (This is unrelated, by the way, to the drums which accompany the dialogue.)  Bonny speaks of listening to Your Hit Parade, a popular radio program on Saturday evening that played the top-selling pop songs of the week, and Gurney mandates a soundtrack for Summer of these tunes, most of them now familiar even to later generations.  It was still the Big Band era in the U.S., and songs like “I’ll Be Seeing You” (recorded by Tamara Drasin, 1938), “Swinging on a Star” (Bing Crosby, 1944), and “The Last Time I Saw Paris” (Ann Sothern, 1941) were the soundtrack of 1945 just as what we now characterize as classic rock was the soundtrack of my teens.  As coordinated by sound designer Janie Bullard, it was a very effective evocation of the period and with the minimal scenery and simple costumes, was significant in evoking the milieu.

In the press, the reception was extremely mixed (as it was in 1983, though the current consensus is overall less dismissive.)  Elisabeth Vincentelli of the New York Post, calling Summer a “Valuable Lesson play” that’s “predictable,” wrote that “it’s easy to overlook the story’s banality since the show’s warmly engaging, inventively staged and elevated by a wonderful cast.”  Vincentelli also said Summer’s “sepia-toned” as it “explores well-trod terrain” to “its inevitable bittersweet end,” but “well-crafted” (because the playwright “knows what he’s doing”).  “But you’re happy to go along,” the Post reviewer assured us, “because those clichés are so nicely wrapped.”  She summed up by adding that Summer “isn’t going to win any points for audacity, but either is mac and cheese.  But that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy them.”  In Long Island’s Newsday, Linda Winer’s review began with the “Bottom Line”: “A.R. Gurney's problem play is still a problem.”  The Signature revival, Winer wrote, has been “directed with intentionally exaggerated histrionics and strained stylization” which Simpson “stretches into a style that feels gimmicky and superimposed on the essential naturalism of the play,” which “only becomes meaningful in the final scenes.”  “Rather than a play about an annoying time of life,” concluded the Newsday reviewer, “this is an annoying play.”

In the Daily News, Joe Dziemianowicz dubbed Summer a “modest 1981 memory play” and the Signature revival “easy-to-like” and named Simpson’s additions of the drummer and the projection of the clacking typing writer “deft.”  In the end, Dziemianowicz affirmed that while the play itself provides “some laughs but little sting,” the “strong acting and staging” give the production “a mellow buzz.” According to the New York Times’ Ben Brantley, Summer is “a very forgiving play”—for everyone except Charlie, it’s “author,” and a “guilty memoir” for its actual writer, Gurney.  First labeled “a particularly undernourished work” in 1983, Brantley asserted, but in the hands of director Simpson, the play “turns out to have something more than what many critics first saw.”  The Timesman reported that that was “a half-baked story of adolescent growing pains,” but added that Simpson “asks us to consider these shortcomings” as a kind of metatheatrical examination of “a playwright’s coming of age.”  (From my own perspective, that seems a little heavy for this slender effort.  But then, I’m not Ben Brantley.)  Brantley felt that Simpson’s “self-conscious” insertions “give ‘Summer’ an emotional substance it might otherwise lack” and, if viewed from the proper perspective, “an unexpected poignancy.”  Nevertheless, said the Times review-writer, “the script . . . remains fairly clunky” and a “sketchy, watercolor-by-numbers reminiscence.”  The characters, too, “are outlines in search of flesh” and even the cast “never quite disguise” this. 

In the New York Observer, Rex Reed revealed that he thinks What I Did Last Summer “is not one of [Gurney’s] greatest achievements, but it is entertaining, narratively polished and well worth seeing, even for a second time.”  Still, Reed observed, Summer “shows some of the wrinkles in his struggles.”  “Slender as a thread, the play is nevertheless riveting and funny and worthwhile,” Reed concluded, and “you go away sated.”  New York magazine’s Jesse Green reported, “The lightness of the social comedy almost excuses the self-consciously weak dramatization,. . . undisguised exposition . . . and a predictable rhythm of crisis and revelation.”  He found the staging additions Simpson invented “needless” and “a distraction . . . that you eventually tune out.”  Nevertheless, “this moth-eaten, presentational style is enjoyable and convincing,” added Green, though “surface verisimilitude is generally left untethered to anything accurate at a deeper level.”  More significantly, though, the New York review-writer asserted, “The play seems confused about how seriously it wants to be taken,” resulting in an ending that Green found “slightly smarmy and slightly obtuse.”  In the end, however, the play “never makes the case that its two halves are even related, let alone that they add up to something important.”  The New Yorker’s “Goings On About Town” observed that the STC revival “can’t elevate the play beyond the maddeningly inconsequential” even though the “acting is generally fine”—special praise for Galvin and Nielsen—“and the dialogue practiced” while director Simpson “offers a few stylistic eccentricities.”

In Entertainment Weekly, Melissa Rose Bernardo deemed Summer “cozily familiar” in its “tender revival” at the Signature Center, even if the quasi-Brechtian elements “don’t work” and the lines are “less clever than annoying.”  Time Out New York’s David Cote called the revival of Summer “rather lovely and complexly articulated .”  The director, Cote found, “turns Gurney’s jokey audience asides and the watercolor-like haziness of his structure into an advantage” and “gives the bright, presentational staging a neatly abstracted sense of ritual.”  The “attractive and intelligent design,” reported the man from TONY, paired with the “excellent acting” to make the production “a pleasant discovery, the sort of show that almost feels like a vacation.” 

Among the cyber reviewers, Elyse Sommer credited “a pitch perfect cast and the insightful direction” on CurtainUp with giving Summer a “vivid new” life.  As if to contradict New York’s Jesse Green, Sommer asserted that under “Simpson's direction the essentially realistic family drama is fluidly integrated with the presentational style.”  Her only complaint about the “handsomely staged and well acted production” was “the contrivance of the way the plot twists.”  On New York Theatre Guide, Kathleen Campion stated that the Signature revival “benefits by charming staging and graphic effects that are brilliant in their simplicity and whimsy.”  Jonathan Mandell called Summer “knowing and affectionate” on New York Theater and added that it had been “given a deliciously acted production” at STC, one that is “deliberately simple and old-fashioned, but it is also deceptively so.” 

Samuel L. Leiter described Summer as a “frequently appealing but dramatically slight piece of nostalgia” on The BroadwayBlog.  “What makes this revival work,” said Leiter, is the “imaginatively stylized direction,” including “Simpson’s almost dance-like staging.”  He noted, however, that “little in the two-act play . . . is more than skin deep” even though “the dialogue is often amusing.”  With praise for the acting, the cyber reviewer lamented, “Simpson’s work is like a shiny veneer painted over a flimsy product that might not quite be all it seems if you could see beneath the surface.”  In the end, though, he found that Summer “makes it a pleasant way to spend a mid-spring evening.”  TheaterMania’s Hayley Levitt discerned that the play “is an imaginative riff on this era of cookie-cutter living” though it’s hidden beneath “an archetypal period piece.”  She noted, “The world of the play is sparse, but the world of the playwright is vivid with exaggerated memories playfully brought to life” by the acting and the directing.