Four Actors

by Kirk Woodward

[Readers of Rick On Theater may know that my friend Kirk Woodward, a frequent contributor to this blog, is a long-time fan of mystery novels.  Among his most favorite series are the Erle Stanley Gardner novels about the indefatigable (not to mention undefeatable) attorney Perry Mason.  A devotee of the books and short stories (on which he’ll blog shortly), Kirk’s also a fan of the original television series starring Raymond Burr which ran from the 1950s into the 1960s.  I’m a fan, too, and we’ve each been watching the reruns on cable TV lately; we get different platforms on different services, so we don’t see the same episodes at the same times, but not long ago we both caught the four episodes filmed while Burr was recovering from an operation.  To cover for his absence, the series producers, Paisano Productions and CBS, brought in four prominent actors, two from the world of film and two from then-current TV series, to take the roles of the lead attorneys in the murder cases usually handled by Mason.  Kirk saw an opportunity to examine acting, especially—but not exclusively—TV acting, using the four contiguous 1963 episodes as examples.  So give “Four Actors” a read; I think you’ll find Kirk’s analysis of some aspects of acting edifying—and the look back at some old Perry Mason shows is kinda fun, too!  ~Rick]

A great deal has been written about the art of acting (including on this blog), much of it fascinating, but acting is difficult to write about. One reason is that to describe a performance of any size in detail is a daunting task, but, on the other hand, to zero in on a trait or several traits (as the New York Herald Tribune and New York Times reviewer Walter Kerr frequently did) risks oversimplification.

There is also a memory problem: how much of a performance on stage can one recall afterward? Even with a superior memory – something a reviewer surely needs – is there space in which to publish a description of a performance in detail? When Bernard Shaw reviewed performances of the same role (Magda in the play Heimat, written by Hermann Sudermann in 1893) by Eleonora Duse (1858-1924) and Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923), his review (in the London Saturday Review, 15 June 1895) was one of the longest he wrote. It takes up seven pages in the volume of his collected reviews.

And theorizing about acting isn’t much easier than describing it, as illustrated by the wide variety of ways the subject can be approached. (A convenient sample can be found in the classic collection of essays Actors on Acting, published in 1949, edited by Toby Cole and Helen Krich Chinoy.)

I can illustrate this problem by posing a classic question: is acting basically an internal or an external process? Typifying answers to this question are the Actors Studio (highly internal) and traditional British acting (highly external). The answer surely is that acting is both internal and external, in varied degrees of emphasis depending on the actor, the play, and so on; but this answer has hardly quieted the debate.

With the advent of film, video tape, and digital recording, fortunately, acting performances can now be studied over and over, and much can be learned from such study. One highly interesting example of contrasting acting styles can be found in four episodes of the original Perry Mason TV series (1957-1966). (For information that follows about the shows, I am indebted to the compendium The Perry Mason Book: A Comprehensive Guide to America’s Favorite Defender of Justice, published in 2014, by Jim Davidson.)

In 1962, Raymond Burr (1917-1993), who was in his sixth of nine seasons with the first Perry Mason TV series, had what was described as minor emergency surgery but was in fact the removal of an intestinal tumor that turned out, to everyone’s great relief, to be benign. Burr missed the filming of the four episodes we will discuss; brief instances of his talking on the phone with his substitutes were filmed after he got out of the hospital.

Four actors took Burr’s place as the lead attorney in the four episodes he missed: Bette Davis, Michael Rennie, Hugh O’Brian, and Walter Pidgeon. I will briefly comment on the acting in these shows, and at the same time try to identify issues about acting that are raised by the performances of those four actors in those episodes – which have been released on video and can also be encountered on stations that rerun the show’s episodes.

BETTE DAVIS – BELIEVABILITY, REPUTATION

“The Case of Constant Doyle” (season 6, episode 16, originally aired January 31, 1963)

“Constant Doyle” is the name of the character Bette Davis (1908-1989) plays in this episode – a tribute to Davis that was one of only two times in the series that a character name was used in an episode title. (The other was “The Case of Paul Drake’s Dilemma.” Ordinarily an episode title in the series would be something like “The Case of the Constant Doyle,” referring to an object or a situation.)

Doyle, Bette Davis’s character, is the widow (and former law partner) of an attorney whose reputation has been besmirched, and as she solves a mystery involving a young man arrested for a petty crime, with much larger implications, she clears her husband’s name as well.

In 1963 Davis’s career was at a difficult stage. She was fifty-five, not old by everyday standards but old for Hollywood (especially women), where she was no longer a top box office attraction. (She had, however, just finished filming the movie What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, which would significantly boost her career.) There was hope that the Perry Mason episode might lead to a new TV series for Davis, although this did not happen.

Fans of Davis’s work reflect in web postings enthusiasm for her performance as Constant Doyle. To my mind her performance is erratic and “stagy.” Davis did some stage work (including a lead in Tennessee Williams’s play The Night of the Iguana in 1961, quite a histrionic play in itself), but most of her work was in movies. It seems fair to say, though, that her acting style became increasingly mannered and baroque, a fact memorably displayed in Baby Jane and its 1964 sequel Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte. 

To put it another way: I don’t find her performance in the Perry Mason episode to be believable. But what do we mean when we say a performance is believable?

We might mean that if we saw the same person say the same words and do the same actions in everyday life, that behavior would be convincing to us. A moment’s reflection will show that that is seldom if ever the case. The simple fact that a piece of behavior is being performed before an audience changes the nature of that behavior. Add the conditions of the theater, a film set, or a television studio, and the result would definitely seem strange to us if transplanted to everyday life.

When we say a performance is believable, surely we mean believable in the context it’s presented in. One would hardly suggest a real life King Lear to walk in a pub, order a drink, and chat mildly about the weather. King Lear exists in the context invented by Shakespeare for his play, and a “believable” actor in the role is one that behaves appropriately in that context. In that sense, Davis simply does not strike me as believable in her role as Constant Doyle – or as a lawyer, for that matter. She seems to me constantly (sorry) to be a performer, rather than a person in the particular context of a particular script.

Comment on the web, however, often disagrees with me, which brings up another issue about acting, namely, the hopes and expectations we as audience members bring to and project on an actor’s performance. Bette Davis is a much admired performer and, although she hardly brings a “soft” dimension to her work, even (perhaps for that reason) a beloved one. Is an admirer justified in saying she’s wonderful in the role because she’s Bette Davis?

A stalwart aesthetician might say no, but I have no right to say that, because I do the same thing all the time. A best practice in reviewing is that a reviewer ought to analyze a famous person’s performance as though the person were unknown, and vice versa. Personally, however, I seldom do that. If I am an admirer of a particular performer, it is hard for me to admit that anything that artist does falls short of the mark.  In that respect I resemble, I imagine, many fans of Bette Davis. 

MICHAEL RENNIE – ACTOR AND SCRIPT

“The Case of the Libelous Locket” (season 6, episode 17, originally aired February 7, 1963)

Michael Rennie (1909-1971), appearing at the time of this episode as the TV incarnation of Harry Lime in The Third Man series (1959-1965) but best known perhaps for his role as Klaatu, the visitor from outer space in the film The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), plays a law professor, Edward Lindley. A student in one of his classes believes she’s killed a dance instructor – except that no evidence of that murder can be found, until the instructor is found dead the next day, murdered at a different time in a different way. Lindley, who at the beginning of the episode has belittled the profession of trial attorney, decides to defend the student himself (with a bit of encouragement from Perry Mason, seen, as in all four of the episodes discussed here, talking on the phone, in this case from the hospital).

Rennie’s performance, to me, is tentative and halting. (The Perry Mason Book says that “Lindley [note – the character, not the actor] seems diffident, out of his league, bland, and generally unappealing.”)

Not so fast, though – because the character Rennie plays is also uncertain how to proceed in defending the case, since he has little or no trial experience. Am I responding to the actor or the role?

The acting issue raised here, then, is that of the relation of the actor to the script. If my observation about Rennie’s performance is correct, is it the actor or the character who lacks assurance and confidence? (Or, of course, is it both?) Has the actor’s personality overwhelmed the script, or is the actor simply carrying out the script’s requirements?

Reviewers frequently point with conviction to a director, an actor, or a script as the reason for something that happens in a production, but in many cases it’s difficult to be sure who’s responsible for what, and some highly dubious assertions can be made.

For example, I recall a production of Bernard Shaw’s play Captain Brassbound’s Conversion (1900) in which reviewers generally blamed the script for the production’s weaknesses, when in fact, as far as I could tell, nearly every element of the production, including the acting, the direction, and the set, had the effect of sabotaging an excellent play.

The lesson I take from this subject is that we need to be careful when making statements like my “Rennie’s performance seems tentative and halting.” That impression, if accurate, may be Rennie’s fault; or he may be doing exactly what the director told him to do, or what he thought the script demanded. In deciding who’s responsible for what in a production, a little humility is perhaps not a bad thing.

HUGH O’BRIAN – PERSONALITY

“The Case of the Two-Faced Turn-A-Bout” (season 6, episode 18, originally aired February 14, 1963)

No apology is needed for the performance of Hugh O’Brian (1925-2016), best known for his performance from 1955 to 1961 as the title lawman on TV’s The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp (still running when he made his Perry Mason guest appearance), as Bruce Jason, a former World War II spy turned attorney, in a frankly pretty improbable story of international intrigue, including mysterious papers that could have a huge effect on public opinion; representatives of foreign dictatorships freely wandering around Los Angeles chatting about their government; and a doppelganger.

The Perry Mason Book says that O’Brian “handles the role competently, but comes off a bit smug – a quality Gardner always cautioned about.” Competently? The man is sensational – relaxed, in control, commanding every scene he’s in, polished, smooth, droll, entertaining. Smug? Absolutely – see the previous sentence! O’Brian breezes through the preposterous plot in high spirits.

Hugh O’Brian was also, in “real life,” a smart, funny man. Wikipedia gives us this glimpse of his mind: when he married, fairly late in life, “the couple spent their honeymoon studying philosophy at Oxford University.” From the same source, we have this glimpse of his humor: after his original last name (Krampe) was misspelled in a program as “Hugh Krape,” he changed his name because “I didn't want to go through life being known as Huge Krape.“

The acting issue here is that of personality versus, well, acting. Is O’Brian giving an acting performance or is he essentially just lending his personality to a role? My own response to this question is that at least he has a personality to lend. Many of the performers we really want to see are “characters” in their own right.

For example, I’ve written elsewhere in this blog about Bette Midler (“Two Greats,” 3 May 2017), who has just finished up her role as Dolly Levi in Hello Dolly on Broadway. Midler is and apparently always has been an outsize and vivid personality. She certainly brings that personality to the role of Dolly. However, she doesn’t use her personality to burst the bounds of the musical; she lends it to her role.

An actor who in effect ignores a script and imposes her or his personality on a play or film is another matter. Zero Mostel (1915-1977), for example, was accused of doing this in the later part of his run as Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof (1964), and was widely reported to be unpopular with both the director and the cast. I only saw Mostel once, in a preview performance of a revival of Ulysses in Nighttown (1974) on Broadway, and what I remember best is that Mostel at one point “broke character” and imitated an actor who bobbled a line.

O’Brian doesn’t impose his personality on his Perry Mason episode, but he certainly pours a great deal of what appears to be his own charm and energy into a head-scratcher of a script. He stays within the bounds of his character (such as the character is); but he fills it to the brim.

WALTER PIDGEON – LISTENING

“The Case of the Surplus Suitor” (season 6, episode 19, originally aired 28 February, 1963)

I have a memory of seeing Walter Pidgeon (1897-1984) at the Brown Theatre in Louisville, Kentucky, in a road company production of some Broadway play when I was a teenager, but I don’t remember much about his performance there. On his Perry Mason episode, Pidgeon plays Sherman Hatfield, a lawyer who takes on a case involving a struggle for the European rights to an electronics company, and, of course, murder.

Pidgeon’s performance on his Perry Mason episode is a delight. I spent a lot of time analyzing why I thought so – was it, for example, because of the richness and quality of his voice, equal to that of Raymond Burr’s? Finally I realized what struck me even more: Pidgeon is a terrific listener.

“Acting is reacting,” the saying goes, which implies that the actor has to listen to the other character in order to be able to participate in a scene. Similarly, the acting technique of Sanford Meisner (1905-1997) is based to a considerable extent on training an actor really to hear what the other actor is saying. In another example, the actor James Garner (1928-2014) wrote in his autobiography that he learned acting while appearing on Broadway as a juror in the Broadway production of The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (1954), in which he never spoke a word and only listened and reacted.

Listening is an essential of the actor’s craft. What sets Pidgeon apart as a listener is that he is an animated, active listener, essentially a participant in everything going on in a scene, even – or especially - when he’s not speaking. With a mobile face and a great deal of energy at his disposal, he listens so actively that one almost experiences the moments when he’s listening as two actors are speaking.

What’s more, he listens so completely to what’s happening that his spoken responses practically seem to bounce out of him. Unlike Bette Davis and Michael Rennie (but not Hugh O’Brian) in their Perry Mason episodes, Pidgeon doesn’t gather his thoughts and then speak; he is always on the mark. He has taken in everything that’s been said and he is ready to move the scene forward . . . which he does, with enthusiasm.

*  *  *  *

Acting is a fascinating subject. There’s always more to be said about it, and we are fortunate to have the four episodes of Perry Mason discussed here as examples of the craft.

Perhaps I should also say a word about Raymond Burr, who so memorably played Perry Mason in the series.

Burr makes a big impression – that’s no secret. For one thing, he was a big man, and he had a sonorous voice. But his acting is minimalist – it almost all takes place in his eyes. When he raises his voice, the effect is thunderous. He is not like any other actor I can think of. But surely that’s an important fact about actors – like snowflakes, no two are alike.

[At the top of “Four Actors,” Kirk says that a lot has been said about the art and craft of acting even on ROT.  Almost all my performance reports and most of the other review-like posts say something about acting and actors, and many of the other posts often include comments on acting or make some point pertinent to the art.  By my spot count, however, nearly 25 posts are specifically about acting or discuss it in significant terms, including “Acting Shakespeare,” 5 September 2009; “Kabuki: A Trip to a Land of Dreams,” 1 November 2010; “Herbert Berghof, Acting Teacher” by Kirk Woodward, 1 June 2011; “David Mamet On Acting & Directing,” 16 August 2013; “Acting: Testimony and Role vs. Character,” 25 September 2013; “The Father of Actor Training: François Delsarte,” 4 January 2014; “Why Acting Matters,” 10 and 13 February 2016; “Those Guys” by Bilge Ebiri (T magazine, New York Times), 11 December 2017; and quite a few more.

'Bette Davis Ain’t for Sissies'

My second trip to the 59E59 Theaters last month was for Bette Davis Ain’t for Sissies, one of the entries in East to Edinburgh, an annual series of plays from North American companies before they make the journey to the largest cultural festival in the world, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August.  The 2015 edition of East to Edinburgh ran from 7 to 25 July in Theaters B and C.  (For a brief background on the 59E59 Theaters, see my ROT report on Summer Shorts, posted on 12 August.)

Held each July, East to Edinburgh started in 2004 “as a way to help shows get on their feet before traveling to Scotland, simulating the same production constraints as the Edinburgh Festival Fringe but in a clean, comfortable and nurturing space to fine-tune their productions.”  As at Edinburgh, the programming is not curated and the technical productions are kept minimal.  The 2015 festival featured 17 productions from around New York and across the U.S. 

Bette Davis, written and performed by Jessica Sherr and directed by Antony Raymond, ran at 59E59 on 8-10, 15-16, and 21 July (it played in both 59E59 houses) before moving first to Rochester, New York, for a short run and then to Edinburgh in August; in October, Bette Davis is booked in Hopewell, Virginia.  Sherr’s one-woman performance piece began life in 2010 as part of a 30-minute show called The Redheads, which she had also authored.  Sherr rewrote the piece and Bette Davis Ain’t for Sissies débuted in 2011 at the New York International Fringe Festival.  (The title, for those who don’t recognize it, is a parody of a line attributed to Bette Davis, “Old age ain’t for sissies,” which she’s quoted as saying in a number of interviews in her later life.  The wording, of course, may vary and many other luminaries have used the line over the years as well.)  Bette Davis went on to several short runs in cabarets and small theaters, mostly Off-Off-Broadway, in New York City in 2011-2013, including 59E59’s Off-Broadway East to Edinburgh program in July 2013 (and then again in 2014). 

Sherr’s playlet has played at the Edinburgh Fringe previously in 2013 and 2014, followed in both instances by limited runs at St. James’s Theatre in London.  In between trips to the U.K., Bette Davis Ain’t for Sissies was seen at the Michael Chekhov Theatre Festival in Ridgefield, Connecticut, in September 2013 and at the IRT Theater in Greenwich Village in October 2014.  Though Sherr, a Southern Californian with a BA in English and Dramatic Arts from the University of California, Santa Barbara, has done other work as an actor—her most prominent is probably a featured role in the 2014 remake of Annie—her principal occupation seems to be touring Bette Davis.  Her program bio states that she’s “always had a love of the 1930’s and 40’s,” which led her to Bette Davis.  Given her preoccupation with her one-act personification, you might even call it an obsession.

Diana and I attended the Tuesday, 21 July, performance of the 80-minute, one-act Bette Davis Ain’t for Sissies at 8:30 p.m. in Theater C, 59E59’s 50- to 70-seat black box, variable-seating space.  The performance had general admission (no reserved seats), so the box-office staff recommended arriving early even though theatergoers weren’t admitted to the house (or even the third floor) until quarter or even twenty past the hour.  (59E59 publicity admonishes that “all shows begin promptly at their advertised time,” which turned out to be relatively accurate.)

The play’s set on 29 February 1940, the night the 1939 Academy Awards are being handed out.  Thirty-one‑year‑old Bette Davis has been nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for Dark Victory and Vivien Leigh has been tapped for Scarlet O’Hara in the blockbuster hit, Gone With the Wind.  The Los Angeles Times, however, released the winners’ names before the actual ceremony—and Leigh had won the Oscar.  Rather than sit at the banquet in the Coconut Grove at L.A.’s Ambassador Hotel, Davis decided to go home so her Hollywood friends and rivals wouldn’t see her obvious disappointment.  (Davis had won the year before for her performance in Jezebel and in 1935 for Dangerous.)  Bette Davis Ain’t for Sissies unfolds in Davis’s boudoir where she makes and takes phone calls, recalls memories of her Hollywood (some of which haven’t actually happened yet) as well as her pre-movie life with her mother, “Ruthie,” and on Broadway, and talks to us (whoever we are sitting in her home).

Overall, Bette Davis is unimpressive.  I’m not a fan of so-called monodramas—there have been exceptions: Clarence Darrow (1974) with Henry Fonda and Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein (1979) with Pat Carroll—but this one was less than engaging.  It zipped around Davis’s life and films with little rationale, ultimately revealing nothing but a few factoids of mere curiosity value (unless you have a thing for Bette Davis trivia).  For instance, the play’s descriptive blurb in the theater’s publicity makes a strong point that Bette Davis Ain’t for Sissies explores the stars’ “battle to win freedom from the grip and control of the Hollywood studio moguls,” an allusion to the 1937 lawsuit she brought against Warner Bros. studios to try to get out of a contract she thought was deliberately holding her back.  But this event is just one of many mentioned in passing and is not a theme of the performance.  (There really isn’t one, so far as I could see.  Except maybe to show that Davis was a strong woman—but, a), we know that by now, and, b), there’s an awful lot of that on our stages and screens these days.  Not really news.)

The play unravels haphazardly in time; though ostensibly set on Oscar night in 1940, it jumps back to her arrival in Hollywood and forward even to the ’50s.  (The closing line is the famous quotation “Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night!” from All About Eve, which was released in 1950.  I guess it’s supposed to be a comment on Davis’s decision to go back to the Ambassador Hotel, but I really think it was just an excuse for Sherr to get to speak Margo Channing’s legendary line.)  Sometimes it’s just Davis relating her memories to us, but at other times Sherr enacts moments from Davis’s past—one side of them, of course, since Sherr is alone on stage—as if we’re seeing the memories themselves.  Unless you know Davis’s biography or pick up on some reference in the lines, it’s sometimes hard to tell when in time the play is.

The actress-writer, Jessica Sherr, is not an impressive performer.  As long as she’s been doing this piece and as often as she’s spoken these lines, she still bobbled a few at the performance I saw, for example—the last of six.  (She also has a very strange mouth, which in the small proscenium house was very distracting.)  She doesn’t impersonate Davis, which is fine, I suppose, except that the movie star had such a distinctive and famous style it’s hard to picture her without it; when Sherr first came out on stage, my immediate reaction was that she looks more like a skinny Mae West than Davis.  (Sherr claims she was inspired to create this piece—in all its several incarnations over the past half decade—because she has “Bette Davis eyes.”  Personally, I didn’t see it.)  

There wasn’t much press coverage of the last New York outing of Bette Davis, though there’s some around from previous stagings that I’ve found.  Writing on Stage Buddy, K Krombie (apparently the guy—there’s a photo on the site—doesn’t use a period, like the actor A Martinez) described the one-act play as “a back and forth time construct “ that “works best during those moments in which the arch of an eyebrow or the inflection on a particular word transform Sherr into the Bette Davis so many are familiar with.”  “Sherr has made a wise decision in surrendering to high drama,” Krombie asserted.  “Bette Davis is not a woman who should ever be played down.”  Noting that “Davis’ acting strengths peaked with good, fast dialogue and her loaded trademark glances,” our Stage Buddy went on to determine, “Sherr uses the same technique, posturing, gliding, costume changing and cutting down to size those who dare to challenge her with ineptitude, discrimination or any kind of shortcoming.”  Krombie also acknowledged that Sherr’s “writing and characterization are well researched and plausibly over the top.”  Of Sherr’s 2013 East to Edinburgh appearance (directed then by Janice Orlandi), David Roberts wrote on Theatre Reviews Limited, “Jessica Sherr has those Bette Davis eyes along with remarkable Davis lookalike hair and lips.”  She uses these attributes, Roberts declared, “to create a winning retrospective of Bette Davis’ personal life and career.”  The TRL blogger further reported, “Sherr gives performances that are both comedic and dramatic,” delivering a portrait that Roberts felt “overall . . . is authentic and gracious” despite occasions when “the actor’s delivery loses the bite of the Yankee Davis.” 

Of the 2011 performance at the New York Fringe Festival, Erik Haagensen wrote in Back Stage, the theater trade weekly, that Bette Davis is “naïve” and “not remotely persuasive.”  Haagensen asked the same question about which I wondered: “To whom is the character talking?”  Noting that Sherr doesn’t seem to have answered it, the Back Stage reviewer posited that this “results in awkwardly unmotivated hopscotching through "Bette's memories.”  In addition, he noted, as I have, “Sherr neither looks nor sounds like the legendary star, despite an erratic attempt at a self-consciously cultured New England accent.”  (Davis, who referred to herself as “a Yankee,” was from Maine.)  The Back Stager went even further than I did by pointing out that “this Davis is suffused with self-pity, an emotion the flinty, iconoclastic, and ferociously intelligent original would have despised.”

I can’t agree with the praise leveled on Bette Davis Ain’t for Sissies by Krombie and Roberts above, but Haagensen seems to have come down right on my own position.  I don’t recommend Bette Davis at all, even if it returns in some new incarnation.  (I saw a play in 2013 at the Atlantic Theater Company called The Lying Lesson, about Davis in her later years, on which I was fairly cool—but it has this one-hander beat by a mile; see my report on 6 April 2013.  Coincidentally, it was by Craig Lucas, the book-writer for An American in Paris, on which I reported on 2 August.)

'The Lying Lesson'

I really had no idea what I’d be seeing at the Atlantic Theater Company’s Linda Gross Theater on 20th Street, Chelsea, when I walked over on Friday evening, 29 March, to see Craig Lucas’s The Lying Lesson.  That’s rare for me—to be so in the dark about a play I was attending.  I’d read Charles Isherwood’s New York Times review of the world première on 14 March, but I only came away with the knowledge that the play was about Bette Davis and that the reviewer didn’t think much of it.  I used to say that I generally agree with Isherwood’s assessments, but lately that hasn’t been so, so I couldn’t even go into this with a feeling that I might have the same reaction he did.  In fact, I anticipated having an opposite response to The Lying Lesson since I’d differed with the review-writer’s opinions on a string of recent productions, if not with his overall judgment (see my reports on Melissa James Gibson’s What Rhymes With America, 3 January, or David Henry Hwang’s The Dance and the Railroad, 17 March), then with the rationale for it (Lanford Wilson’s The Mound Builders, 27 March).

Well, guess what.  I’m now back on Team Isherwood again, at least for this play.  Even when we fundamentally agreed, I might find that the Timesman was kinder about some fault than I was or harsher in judging a misstep, though we often saw the same ones.  That’s what happened in the case of The Lying Lesson.  (Doesn’t that sound just like an episode of the old Perry Mason TV series?  “The Case of the Lying Lesson”!  Sorry.  Took a little side trip.  I’m back now.)  Anyway, here’s the poop on Lucas’s play and the ATC production, directed by Pam MacKinnon.

The Lying Lesson, which opened on 13 March after starting previews on 6 February, is set in 1981 in a small town in Maine where Bette Davis, using her birth name Ruth Elizabeth (Davis), is buying an old house.  She once lived in the town and the house belongs to a man she once loved when they were youngsters.  She arrives during a violent thunderstorm and finds the house empty—until, that is, someone creeps through a window in the dark (the power having gone out after one especially big thunderclap).  “Ruth” grabs a carving knife and threatens the intruder (“I will sever your carotid artery!”), who turns out to be a young woman who’s been caring for the property while the owners prepare it for sale.  At first, Minnie Bodine says she doesn’t have any idea who Ruth is (which seems to miff Davis a little, even though she keeps insisting that no one should know her “true identity” until after the closing on the house).  But that, like much else in The Lying Lesson, proves to be less than the complete truth.  (Those, I venture to guess, are the lies from which Lucas intends the characters and us to take the lessons of the title.  But I can’t actually prove it, as you’ll hear.)

What follows on stage is a two-hour, two-act two-hander (d’you follow that?) that is neither a celebrity exposé nor a take on the Grand Guignol films Davis was relegated to making (think What Ever Happened to Baby Jane, released in 1962), though there are suggestions that both or either could break out at any moment.  I was put in mind of another play about long-ago celebs that intended to use events around their lives to make some universal point, Austin Pendleton's Orson’s Shadow, staged in New York City in 2005.  In both plays, little tidbits of bio and theater or movie lore are dropped as the characters go about some business—in Orson’s Shadow, Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier are rehearsing the 1960 London début of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros—which forms a backdrop-cum-matrix for the real drama in the play.  (For the record, I didn’t like Orson’s Shadow very much, either.)  The Lying Lesson, which closed on 31 March, was billed as a comedy-thriller, but I found the laughs mild and few and the thrills predictable and unconvincing.  (A dark and stormy night?  Really?)  In fact, I found myself losing focus a lot as I tried to figure out where Lucas was heading and, after the intermission, what he was trying to tell us.  I never did, by the way.  (My companion, Diana, had the same problems and intermission buzz confirmed that we weren’t alone.)  According to the Atlantic’s P.R., The Lying Lesson’s supposed to be dealing with “essential questions about memory, identity, and truth-telling.”  Well, maybe—but on a pretty superficial and insubstantial level, as far as I could tell.  As I said to a friend afterwards, there was lying in the play, but the lies aren’t really very big and there's no lesson to be drawn from them.

I have no idea why Lucas wrote this play.  I’ve never been a fan of Lucas’s and I don’t know his work very well, but in his review, Isherwood says the playwright’s works “vary widely both in quality and style” and that The Lying Lesson is “an unusually temperate” example of his writing.  Maybe Lucas is just a big fan of Bette Davis.  The play seems to have no purpose except to sketch a portrait of the star in late life (it's set just eight years before her death).  Most damaging—and enervating (it's a fairly long evening)—is that there doesn't seem to be a point.  I think Lucas was just star-fucking.  (Of course, in this case, it's also necrophilia!) 

I suppose that what Lucas may have been up to, presumably anyway, was to bring together two people seemingly from opposite ends of the spectrum, a famous and worldly movie star at the end of her career and a small-town young woman with no apparent accomplishments, and by showing how much alike they actually are, reveal truths about them—and us all.  (I’m totally guessing here, you understand.)  Of course, nothing like that happens.  What we end up with is a sort of buddy play: two mismatched women thrown together in a somewhat fraught circumstance and they fill in each other’s missing bits.  Well, sort of: that last part isn’t so clear.  Lucas dresses The Lying Lesson up by making one of the two women Bette Davis  (and getting Carol Kane to do a sort of drag-queen impersonation of her).  That’s so he can drop a lot of Hollywood references and factoids to keep older folks like me (and I’m barely old enough—Davis was already a big star by the time I was old enough to watch movies) and old-movie junkies hopping.  (‘What movie was that an allusion to?’  ‘She said “Willy”—is that William Wyler?’)  The wordless bit at the end of the play is a reenactment of a iconic moment from a movie made four years before I was even born.  It was like a live version of Trivial Pursuits: Bette Davis Edition.  If it hadn‘t been two hours long (with the intermission), it might have been sort of fun: Not Bette Davis, but an incredible simulation. 

But of course, it was two hours and Lucas gave it a plot I also had to get through.  The story of buying the house and the lost teenage love and who is Minnie really and who’s lying now and about what is just an excuse to put Davis on stage, so it’s all essentially meaningless and uninteresting and tedious.  Trust me, if I get to the intermission and I ask, out loud, “Where the hell is this going?”—it’s tedious!  (At The Mound Builders the previous week, there was something of an exodus at intermission; that didn’t seem to happen at the Atlantic.  The house was, in fact, quite full even given the poor critical reception the play got.)  Anyone who’s been reading my performance reports know about my two criteria for good theater: 1) It must do more than tell a story, and 2) it must do it in a theatrical way.  Well, The Lying Lesson is theatrical—though much of that is cheap theatrics: the thunderstorm and the blackout, the intruder climbing through the window, a prop gun that turns out not just to be real, but loaded, and so on—but it only tells a little story, and not a very interesting one, so it’s not going on my list.

Physically, the production was fine: perfectly appropriate for the needs without being especially outstanding.  Neil Patel’s seedy, unprepossessing house, surrounded by dense foliage visible through the windows, looks just like hundreds of similar old homes, furnished haphazardly and without much thought to décor or style—a chrome-and-plastic table in the dining area with a couple of yellow vinyl chairs around it, a wood-framed couch in the center of the living room, and so on.  A dingy environment for a fading Hollywood star.  The stage was lit by Russell H. Champa to enhance the seaminess of the set, and the storm with which we were greeted, enhanced by the sound effects of Broken Chord, was entirely believable—and loud!  (There were signs in the lobby warning patrons about the herbal cigarettes smoked on stage, but no warning about the heart attack-inducing thunder claps and lightning bolts.)  Ilona Somogyi’s costumes made their points nicely: Davis’s Hollywood style, perhaps not red-carpet-worthy, but substantial and smart, and her loungewear that was way too elegant for her current surroundings, and Minnie’s country tom-boy get-up contrasted perfectly with one another.  Add the Bette Davis wig Charles LaPointe designed for Carol Kane, and the play looked terrific.

MacKinnon did a creditable job of moving the actors about the set, but the pace she set was, as the New York Post reviewer put it, glacial.  Since little happens through most of the play—I’m not confusing “action” with “activity” here: the characters do a lot of business—the deliberate tempo of MacKinnon’s staging only exacerbated the tedium of Lucas’s script.  It’s not as if there’s suspense that warrants attenuating the action of The Lying Lesson, so why not at least move it along more swiftly.  It wouldn’t have hurt, believe me.

I also can’t really compliment MacKinnon on her work with the actors.  Neither Kane nor Mickey Sumner (Minnie—yes, that’s right: “Mickey” is “Minnie”) did terrible work here, but neither was especially brilliant on stage, either.  Kane captured the familiar, almost-mannish walk and stance of the instantly-recognizable star, but she overemphasized it to the extent that it became a caricature.  Her vocal pattern was even worse: as nearly every reviewer noted, it sounded as if Kane were doing some kind of Eastern European accent.  As “Ruth Elizabeth” insists to Minnie that she should never reveal the star’s true identity until after the property closing, I wondered if Davis were intentionally doing some kind of foreign accent—except that she’d been doing it when no one was in the house.  At one point, Davis answers a phone call and the caller apparently tells her she sounds like a female impersonator doing an impression of Davis.  Well, that's close to what Kane sounded like.  Isherwood, in fact, remarked that Kane “keeps her performance from devolving into a vulgar drag act (without the drag).”  I only deny that the actress avoided the pitfall.

As for Minnie, Sumner makes the young woman gangly and boyish, loping around the set and draping herself into or onto the furniture as if she were loose-jointed.  Several reviewers complimented her on her Maine accent, but some observed that it was both a little shaky (it “detours from Bronx to Boston,” said Joe Dziemianowicz of the Daily News) and just as drawn out as the production was overall.  (I went to camp in Maine and I have family in Massachusetts where I’ve spent many holidays and vacations.  What Sumner voiced didn’t sound much like any Downeasterner I ever heard.  Ay-yup.  Sumner, who’s Sting’s daughter, by the way—his birth name is Gordon Sumner—was born and raised in England—the old one, not the New one.)  The dialect coach was Kate Wilson. 

Most of the press I scanned agreed pretty much down the line, with the few variations in opinion coming in the intensity of either the compliments or the detractions.  Isherwood, for instance, called the play “sedate and moderately sentimental” while Dziemianowicz said it was “an odd duck of a play—and an inedible one at that.”  The Lying Lesson is naught but “a cheesy thriller” to Michael Feingold in the Village Voice, but on CurtainUp, Simon Saltzman said it was “nonsensical and dreary.”  Only Time Out New York’s Adam Feldman actually found the play “engrossing and highly enjoyable.” 

The consensus is pretty universal with respect to what the play means.  On Talkin’ Broadway, Matthew Murray asked of the play’s intent, “Why.”  Murray’s response: “The Lying Lesson does not have a point of view” commensurate with Lucas’s other work.  Back Stage’s Erik Haagensen merely dubbed the play “not . . . particularly deep” but Saltzman called it a “meaninglessly meandering text.”  The Post’s Elisabeth Vincentelli, in arguably the most direct conclusion, declared simply that “it’s hard to tell what Lucas is trying to say.” 

Some outlets had better things to say about the acting than others, and some preferred Kane over Sumner or vice versa.  (“Mickey Sumner gives a very convincing performance as a New England townie, complete with flawless dialect.  You can practically smell the lobster wafting off of her clothes,” wrote TheaterMania’s Zachary Stewart.  “And Carol Kane is superb as Davis. Not only does she capture the star’s (very imitable) inflections and mannerisms . . . but she also acts through and beyond impersonation,” pronounced Feldman in TONY.)  Just about the only paper that was essentially positive in its overall assessment was Back Stage, the theater trade weekly.  Despite the reservation I quoted earlier, Haagensen found the play “mostly great fun” and with a “witty, biting script.”  Kane succeeds through her “humanity,” Haagensen asserted, and Sumner “keeps us guessing,” all under “Pam MacKinnon’s eagle eye.”  The Back Stage reviewer described the physical production elements in superlatives and, after suggesting that the “script could lose some fat” and acknowledging that the “ending, though perfectly plausible, doesn’t quite satisfy,” Haagensen concluded “‘The Lying Lesson’ is a nimble, twisty, and very funny entertainment.”  (Haagensen’s is not an assessment I agree with much.  I’m just reporting; you decide.)

According to a number of the reviews, Lucas wrote a note at the beginning of the script of The Lying Lesson stating “This play is a damn lie.”  Apparently what he means is simply that the events presented in the play are fictional, but to my ears, the statement pretty much sums up the theatrical experience altogether: it’s a phony drama.  It pretends to be substantial and portentous—and it’s played as if it is—but it’s really not.  Theatrically and dramatically, The Lying Lesson is a damned lie.  I said I wasn’t particularly a fan of Craig Lucas’s work.  The Lying Lesson didn’t change my mind on that. 

[When I told my friend Kirk that I would be seeing The Lying Lesson, just after Isherwood’s review came out, he e-mailed me this anecdote about the late movie star:

[I have one Bette Davis story.  For a while I weekended in Weston, Connecticut, near Westport, where Davis lived, and I saw her house – a modest ranch house.  We knew a cab driver who desperately wanted to pick her up at the train station sometime, and finally did.  He rattled on to her about her movies, her roles, her famous lines, etc.  Finally she said to him (supply the tone of voice for yourself), “You're queer, aren't you?”]