'The Cradle Will Rock' (Classic Stage Company)

After having seen the 2013 concert rendering of Marc Blitzstein’s agitprop “play in music,” The Cradle Will Rock, I wanted to see a “full production” of it.  So when the Classic Stage Company announced its production for this spring, I signed up.  What CSC is presenting, directed by the company’s artistic director, John Doyle, isn’t a concert version of Cradle, but it’s still pared down—even without Doyle’s hollowed-out staging.  (Doyle also “designed” the set, with the assistance of David L. Arsenault.)  I guess I’ll still have to wait for a production of what Blitzstein originally intended: two acts with a full set, costumes, and orchestrations.

In my 1 August 2013 blog report (https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-cradle-will-rock.html), I provided a background of the play, particularly its abortive and theater history-making début on 16 June 1937.  There’s also a wrap-up of the play’s production history up to the 21st century.  I’m not going to repeat that here, so I suggest interested readers click on the link above and skim the old report.  I’ll focus on the new revival in the East Village.

First, the details of the presentation: Doyle’s revival is the first New York City production of Cradle since the presentation by Encores! Off-Center—a summer concert series for Off-Broadway musicals—at the New York City Center in Mid-town.  The CSC revival started previews at the Lynn F. Angelson Theater on East 13th Street just west of 3rd Avenue on 21 March 2019 and opened on 3 April; it’s scheduled to close on 19 May.  My friend Diana and I caught the Thursday evening performance at 7 p.m. on 4 April. 

My earlier report also includes a plot rundown, so I won’t add a full one here.  The Cradle Will Rock is set in Steeltown, USA.  Mr. Mister’s hand-picked, anti-union Liberty Committee, which includes the town’s leading citizens—Dr. Specialist (Eddie Cooper), Editor Daily (Ken Barnett), President Prexy (Barnett), and Reverend Salvation (Benjamin Eakeley), and, representing the arts, violinist Yasha (Ian Lowe) and artist Dauber (Rema Webb)—have all been arrested by the police by mistake, having been ordered by Mr. Mister (David Garrison), the steel mogul who owns the mill, most of the company town, and pretty much everyone in it, to roust anyone rousing the pro-union rabble. 

Another prisoner, Harry Druggist (Tony Yazbeck), explains to Moll (Lara Pulver), a young streetwalker, what the Liberty Committee is and how it was established.  (Blitzstein wasn’t subtle about alluding to such big wigs of 1930s America as evangelist Billy Sunday, newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, and the Du Pont family of tycoons.)  The play then unfolds as a series of back stories, shifting from the courtroom where all the prisoners await night court and scenes from the recent past that reveal how Mr. Mister cowed everyone in town and bought them all off.

Everyone in town takes Mr. Mister’s cash, which he literally throws around in wads to overcome any resistance from, say, the church, academia, or the press.  For instance, to keep Junior Mister (Cooper), the money man’s slacker son (echoes of Eric Trump, d’ya think?) out of trouble, Mr. Mister bribes Editor Daily to hire the boob as a correspondent—in Hawaii!  Dauber and Yasha mock Mrs. Mister (Sally Ann Triplett) and her insipid artistic taste; nonetheless, they take her money and revel in how much they love doing so.  Sister Mister (Kara Mikula), the tycoon’s daughter, is a privileged party girl and loves to spend daddy’s dough on sexy clothes (not seen in the CSC staging, by the way) and eye-candy beaux.

Only incorruptible Larry Foreman (Yazbeck), a stalwart young labor organizer, resists the pull of Mr. Mister’s bribery.  Foreman has also been arrested and exhorts the other prisoners to support labor unions and to rise up and defeat the capitalist robber barons. One day soon, he warns Mr. Mister. “the cradle will rock” and the cushy capitalist cocoon will fall.

(By the way, CSC seems to be trying out a very annoying new practice: no printed programs.  It’s on line, but not in the theater—except on your smart phone.  Boy, I hope that doesn’t catch on!  I keep mine—since I came to New York City in ‘74—and I often find myself using them for reference later.)

                                                                                        

The original Federal Theatre Project cast at the nearly-abortive première was about 17 actors (covering about 36 roles, many of them bits; there are seven principal singing characters) and subsequent Broadway revivals (’37 and ’47) cast as many as 35 actors; Sam Gold, who directed the Encores! concert, pared that down to 14.  Doyle’s gone even further, staging his revival with 10 actors—four of whom play the sole piano as well (they rotate as accompanist).  Gold’s production had no set, but Doyle’s cast also shifts the “scenery.”  (I’ll get to those quotation marks shortly—the ones above concerning the set design as well.) 

Blitzstein wrote Cradle for a full orchestra of a minimum of 25 players, though it was débuted after the historic shut-down with just the composer playing the piano.  Subsequent productions have often tried to emulate this event in various ways (including productions with two or three pianos), and Gold used a 14-piece orchestra on a large platform upstage from the actors.  Doyle, however, not only reverts to the single upright piano accompaniment (the music supervisor is Greg Jarrett), but has four of the actors (Barnett, Eakeley, Lowe, Mikula) alternate at the keyboard even as they shout lines from the script’s dialogue, backs to the audience or over their shoulders, from the bench.  (This tactic sort of operates in concert with the cast-as-stagehands decision.) 

The Angelson’s not built for musicals, and the acoustics are lousy.  The lyrics at CSC were hard to understand a lot of the time, drowned out by the piano or just lost in the flyspace.  (It’s not great for dialogue, either, but not as bad—and there’s less competition from the piano as well.)

(Gold’s Encores! concert presentation, which ran an  hour and 45 minutes, was performed as a series of discrete songs, like the score of any traditional musical.  What I learned at CSC, where Doyle trimmed the script to 90 intermissionless minutes, is that Blitzstein’s score is almost entirely sung through, with what seems like recitative linking dialogue to songs and songs to songs.  The play’s not an opera—although several opera companies have presented it—but Blitzstein did subtitle Cradle “A Play In Music,” not, you’ll notice, “A Play With Music.”)

As set designer, Doyle has split the difference between no set at all (Encores! and the 1937 Virginia Theatre première) and the full set the composer conceived and which was used in the New York City Opera mounting in 1960 (ironically, at the same City Center as the Encores! concert in 2013).  His “design” for CSC’s small, square space in the Angelson consists of small yellow metal drums (containing industrial waste, maybe?) which the actors carry around and reset in different configurations for each scene.  (A bunch are arranged in a cross in the middle of the acting area for a church scene, for example, and rearranged as a soda-fountain counter in Harry Druggist’s shop.  Sort of like cylindrical Legos.) 

This isn’t so much “scenery” in any common sense—hence all those quotation marks—but I guess, in the broadest sense of the term, it’s a visual environment for the actors to play against.  Not that it evokes “steel” or “factory,” but I suppose it suggests “labor,” considering how much the actors heft the drums around.  Except for wads of greenbacks that Mr. Mister tosses around, the barrels are the only props Doyle uses in the show.

Overhead is a spider’s web of telephone or telegraph wires; I only call it that because the wires all seem to emanate from a tall, wooden pole with cross pieces that looks like an old-fashioned telephone pole.  What it’s supposed to signify or symbolize, I have no idea.  One reviewer observed, “In revolution, those who rule the airwaves rule all,” but no mention of this notion or anything similar occurs in the production.  (The closest Blitzstein comes is his implication that Editor Daily and his newspaper is for sale to Mr. Mister when he tells the tycoon, “You’ve only got to hint whatever’s fit to print; If something’s wrong with it, why then we’ll print to fit.  For whichever side will pay the best.”)

The Angelson’s house, which is reconfigured from production to production (it was a compete arena for the Spring 2018 revival of Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke), is arranged as a thrust with spectators on the north, east, and west sides of the playing area; the south side is the “backstage” area where the piano is and where the actors hang out when not on stage.  Some dialogue, as well as singing, includes performers in the off-stage area, and as I’ve said, the piano-players deliver some lines while playing. 

Only David Garrison, as Mr. Mister, plays just a single character; some actors have as many as three roles, plus incidental parts.  Actors sometimes switch roles while on stage and without changes in costume or other visual or vocal clues, it’s sometimes hard to realize which character is talking or singing.  Everyone is dressed in factory-worker garb (designed by Ann Hould-Ward), so there’s also no distinction between the one-percenters and the laborers.  (Ironically, this is the reverse of the Encores! concert version in which everyone, workers and toffs alike, wore evening clothes.  I have no inkling why either director chose these homogenized costume schemes.) 

The performance starts stealthily—no noticeable change in lighting, no sound cue, nothing—as first one then small groups of actors wander into the performing area and cross to the south side neutral area.  Some carry a drum on their shoulder and as the cast assembles, some stop in gaggles in the acting area, which is essentially empty except for the shadows from the tangle of wires above.  (The lighting is designed by Jane Cox and Tess James.)

The first scene, which begins in the off-stage space, shows a cop rousting a bunch of citizens as laborite demonstrators as they protest that they’re actually Mr. Mister’s Liberty Community and that the cops are there to arrest the worker’s demonstrating for the union.  (If I hadn’t already seen a version of Cradle, I might have had a hard time figuring out what was happening, given that everyone was dressed like a steel worker.)

Though some well-known actors have appeared in productions (Howard Da Silva, Will Geer, Jack Albertson, Alfred Drake, Vivian Vance, Jerry Orbach, Lauri Peters, Patti LuPone, Randle Mell, Tammy Grimes), The Cradle Will Rock is the ultimate ensemble play, so I’m going to critique the performance in toto.  That works out rather well, since no single performance stood out at CSC in any case.

Timesman Jesse Green called the production “wan,” but that’s not the word I’d have chosen.  The performances were all right, but I remember the Encores! concert being both funnier and more forcefully agitprop.  I’d say, Doyle’s performance style was too soft-pedaled, as if the director were afraid today’s right wing would point and shout “Socialism!” and shut them down.  From Garrison’s Mr. Mister to Yazbeck’s Larry Foreman, not one of the characters came off as staunchly defending his or her position.  Not even Rema Webb, as Ella Hammer, whose machinist husband was injured in a suspicious accident at the plant, sings “Joe Worker” like the show-stopping number I remember from the 2013 concert. 

With today’s record of union-busting and the growing income gap between workers and bosses, not to forget the disparity between men’s pay and women’s for the same work and the current administration’s drive to strip away safety regulations (not to mention health care), The Cradle Will Rock should speak as loudly to a 2019 audience as it did to one in 1937—and I’d think that actors and directors, who are also members of unions, would feel this as intensely as any citizen.  But Doyle and his cast seem to have put a lid on the expression of strong feelings.  Perhaps they were over-Brechtifying the presentation—eschewing any emotional connection between the actors and their characters.  (Blitzstein dedicated Cradle to Bertolt Brecht, “first because I think him the most admirable theatre-writer of our time; secondly because an extended conversation with him was partly responsible for writing the piece.”) 

The press coverage of The Cradle Will Rock was middling, especially for a historically significant and seldom-produced play—and so was the critical response.  As of 11 April, Show-Score tallied 28 published notices with an average score of only 65.  Fifty percent of the reviews were positive, 32% were mixed, and 18% were negative.  Show-Score’s highest rating was one 90 for the website Musical Theater Review followed by two 85’s for Carole Di Tosti and StageBiz.com; the lowest score was a 35 for Talkin’ Broadway, backed by two 40’s for TheaterMania and New York Stage Review.  My review round-up will cover 20 published notices.

In the Wall Street Journal, Terry Teachout declared, “Theatrical politics being what they are, it was both inevitable that ‘The Cradle Will Rock,’ Marc Blitzstein’s 1937 pro-labor musical, would receive a major off-Broadway production in the Age of Trump, and desirable that it is being done by Classic Stage Company.”  Teachout added that director Doyle “is exceptionally good at staging small-scale musical revivals, and he knows exactly what to do with shows like this.”  He assessed the production as “spare, vital, perfectly legible and almost entirely satisfying.”  The Journalist did “have a caveat, and it is, alas, a substantial one:  This production is sung without amplification, and Mr. Doyle has cast actors who can sing rather than singers who can act.” 

Teachout observed that “it’s important that you be able to hear the lyrics in order to follow the action, and you will often find that hard to do.”  He further contended that Blitzstein’s “red-hot Stalinis[m] . . . is what keeps ‘Cradle’ from being the American ‘Threepenny Opera’ that Blitzstein longed to write: He shared Bertolt Brecht’s politics but lacked his rich dramatic imagination.”  In contrast, “The score is another matter.  Not only are Blitzstein’s clear-cut tunes full of off-center harmonies that light up every phrase, but his lyrics are as sharp as a switchblade.”  In conclusion, Teachout asserted, “The songs are what has kept ‘The Cradle Will Rock’ alive, and I expect they’ll keep on doing so for a long time to come.”

In the New York Times, Green expressed the opinion that:

musical theater is last on the list of mediums suited to agitprop.  At its best, it is too complex, too cosmopolitan and too pleasure-seeking to pass loyalty tests. What goes into the machinery as revolutionary rage comes out as “Les Miz.” 

“And yet there’s ‘The Cradle Will Rock,’” continued Green, which its 1930s audience “would have understood . . . as a leftist rallying cry and a satire of unfettered capitalism’s enablers.”  Then he asked, “But what is it now?”  His half-answer: “John Doyle’s revival . . . is too wan to answer the question.”  Of the director’s work, Green felt, “Though his stripped-down approach often enhances richly conceived works . . . it makes others, severe to begin with, seem cold and underfed.”  The Times reviewer explained:

The simplicity that has felt clarifying in Mr. Doyle’s best work feels stingy here.  The piano accompaniment strips “The Cradle Will Rock” of much of its sostenuto beauty; what’s left is further eroded by singing that sometimes grates the ears.  The staging, in one 90-minute act, is largely static and, where musical theater razzmatazz is called for, totally underwhelming.  Too much of the acting seems deliberately wooden.

Green found, however, that after an hour, “the production coalesces” and “you begin to feel the tension between propaganda and entertainment as Blitzstein evidently intended.”  The review-writer warned, though, “It’s only a start, but I’m not sure any production could manage the contradictions much better.” 

Calling the CSC Cradle revival “plodding,” Sara Holdren of New York magazine and Vulture, its website, contended:

There’s a strong sense of déjà vu hanging over the cozy bricks-and-boards thrust at Classic Stage Company right now, and not in a good way.  It’s a wonderful setting—intimate without feeling cramped, textured and a little gritty but still spare and elegant—and it’s just right for the kind of democratic, fourth-wall-breaking, we’re-all-in-this-together vibe that’s often distinguishes stripped-down stagings of the kinds of plays from which the theater takes its name.  But artistic director John Doyle . . . seems to be approaching his current production by rote. 

“There’s a fine line between a distinctive directorial signature and a bag of tricks,” asserted Holdren, “and with The Cradle Will Rock—already a blunt instrument of agitprop that requires lots of sharpening if it’s really going to sing or sting—Doyle seems, more than anything else, to be tired, resorting to his tool belt without honing the tools.”  Holdren seems to have agreed with WSJ’s Teachout when she found,

The problem with too frequent an application of the adjective “Brechtian” is that, while it might accurately call to mind a certain aesthetic, it doesn’t necessarily bring along with it any of that writer’s distinctive brilliance. . . . Blitzstein was no Brecht, and . . . The Cradle Will Rock comes off as wooden and ineffectually hammy.  It’s got a point to make—over and over again—but no sparkle, no true wit, and, here, not even much sense of playfulness. 

Director and designer Doyle “keeps the production characteristically spare . . . use of his purposefully limited aesthetic vocabulary here seems mechanical rather than ingenious.”  Holdren bemoaned that “[t]here’s something deflated under the defiance” of the workers, especially in the rendition of the title number, “The Cradle Will Rock.”  She reminded us, though, that “a play’s worth should [not] be determined by a simplistic debate over whether or not it’s capable of sparking social change—but the cradle aside, plays do need to rock us, and this one leaves its audience right where it found them.”

The cyber press gave the show the most coverage.  On Stage Buddy, Elyse Trevers praised the cast as “talented and versatile” but reported that Blitzstein’s “songs tell the story, but little is memorable and at times the stories are plodding and uninspiring.”  Trevers felt that despite “a few earnestly-moving moments, especially with Yazbeck as the struggling druggist and Lara Pulver as Moll . . . the show is little more than a series of events—interactions between Mister Mister and the people he controls.”  Our Stage Buddy concluded, “Although the economy is better today, the themes still resonate as the wealthy classes and big business continue to hold sway over all facets of the economy.  Foreman’s message, one of hope for the masses, still seems naive and unobtainable.”

Eugene Paul of TheaterScene.com characterized CSC’s Cradle as “[c]ool, attractive, more an homage than a fiery presentation” but observed that “the times have radically changed” (have they?) and the CSC cast “does not project the fire-[i]n-the-belly fervor” of the 1937 original company.  Paul continued, “Without that inner conviction and turmoil, Blitzstein’s stereotypical caricatures lose their power to shock, to convince, to persuade, making them uncomfortable to perform with conviction.”  Furthermore, Paul complained, “the piano [is] too thin in presenting Blitzstein’s powerful music” and found the director’s shifting metal-drum environment “a highly clever series of procedures, worthy of our admiration but fatal to Blitzstein’s  cause.  We admire what is going on,” the reviewer felt, “but remain at a cool Brechtian remove.”  He added, “If that is in Doyle’s design, it is a miscalculation.  We want to, we need to be fired up.”  Paul’s bottom line was: “It’s all very college little theatre.”

On The Wrap, Robert Hofler (who was even more annoyed with CSC for not providing paper programs than I am) complained that

Doyle’s patented minimalist approach worked best for Oscar Hammerstein II’s take on Bizet; the narrative is stronger and more linear in “Carmen Jones.”  Brecht’s “Arturo Ui” and Blitzstein’s “Cradle” aren’t only more episodic; the scenes are piled on top of each other, the connective tissue of a story being much less obvious.  When the actors aren’t switching roles, they’re busy rearranging the stage furniture, which, in the case of “Cradle,” amounts to a few barrels.

“Blitzstein isn’t subtle,” Hofler reminded us, “and neither is Doyle, who has Mr. Mister throw around an increasingly large roll of dollar bills whenever he wants to buy someone off.  At show’s end,” The Wrap’s reviewer reported, “the actors here are knee-deep in paper money.”  The review-writer praised Pulver as Moll and Sadie Pollock (that’s not like Jackson Pollock, by the way, but Polack, as in a slur for a Polish person), Eakeley as Reverend Salvation, Cooper as Junior Mister and Dr. Specialist, and the four piano players.

Ron Cohen, in Show-Score’s highest-rated review (90), gave CSC’s Cradle five stars on the website Musical Theatre Review and labeled the production “triumphantly alive” with an “ensemble bringing passion, immediacy and theatrical acuity to the script’s thesis, its music and sardonic, bitter humour [sic].”  Acknowledging that the current political times make Cradle relevant, Cohen applauds, “What Doyle and company succeed in doing is making it thrillingly relevant.”  The MTR writer interpreted the uniform factory-worker costume scheme as appearing “as if a company of everyday (but sumptuously talented) workers are putting on the show for us.”  With this, however, “the storytelling can get a little muddled now and then,” Cohen reported.  With respect to the music, though, Cohen cautioned that “it may take a while for ears to adjust to the emphatic rhythms and seeming tunelessness of Blitzstein’s” score, but “it’s all handled superbly by the company.” 

Carole Di Tosti on the blog Carole Di Tosti, in one of the two notices that scored 85, the second-highest rating on Show-Score, labeled the show, “which employed no elaborate spectacle,” “sleek.”  She described the play as “sung as a quasi opera, in a Bertolt Brecht style with ferocity and near didacticism,” which Di Tosti  found “certainly speaks for our time.”  She praised “the minimalism of props which the actors use seamlessly,” including “the use of greenbacks which dominate the scenes.”  The “talented actors” of the company produced “a fine production,” Di Tosti felt, and “Doyle’s direction/staging/design is spot-on.”  In the end, however, the reviewer reported that CSC’s Cradle is “a potentially stunning production which fell a bit short” because the singers “[a]t times . . . were imprecise” in their enunciation.  “Nevertheless,” she declared in the end, the revival “is a must-see as a trenchant allegory for our time.”

On CurtainUp, Elyse Sommer declared that Doyle’s cast “will pull you into the power of the gritty score” and “the finely sung songs make up for” the fact that “The Cradle Will Rock tends to come off as a sermon more than an entertainment.”  As her final word, Sommer admitted, “Ultimately, my biggest disappointment was that it wasn't hopelessly dated, but undeniably relevant.”

Steven Suskin acknowledged on New York Stage Review, in one of the site’s two reviews, “The CSC Cradle doesn’t rock quite so well, but it is an admirable presentation of an historically important musical.”  Suskin thought, “Doyle and his denizens blow the accumulated dust off the piece, bringing out the strengths in this most uncompromising work.”  The NYSR writer found that Doyle’s “intimate production places full attention on the cast, revealing some fine performances.”  He allowed that “Doyle and CSC do not reveal The Cradle Will Rock to be an all-time masterwork, no.  But it is a compelling production of a compelling piece of writing.” 

In the second NYSR notice, which received a Show-Score score of 40, one of the two second-lowest for Cradle, Michael Sommers complained at the outset that “Doyle [is] not at all at his considerable best” and “the result is less than impressive.”  Labeling the play a “mostly sung-through musical cartoon,” Sommers lamented, “It’s too bad that this often fevered, entirely fascinating work’s proletarian and musical charms are muffled in Doyle’s misjudged, under-performed production.”  Of Doyle and Arsenault’s set, NYSR number two caviled, “Such visuals do not suggest a Steeltown so much as an Oil City,” but Sommers had a more pointed criticism of the performing: he was displeased with “performers who more or less sing (and more or less act, alas)” and “the not entirely resonant sound of music they make.”  (He was harshest on Yazbeck.)  Summing up, Sommers found, “Generally, there’s too little zest to their group effort, however, and the show merely plods along rather than rouses the audience. Sad to say, this rendition of The Cradle Will Rock scarcely rocks at all.”

On TheaterScene.net, David Kaufman complained, “Without voice or costume changes, it’s difficult to know when Ken Barnett is Editor Daily or when he’s President Prexy.”  Kaufman found that “what’s missing from Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock is the heart and/or soul that every musical requires,” which he blamed partly on “Doyle’s direction.”  Kaufman dubbed Cradle “a wannabe musical or opera that, ironically, lacks substance, given its heavy-hitting intentions.”

Donna Herman of New York Theatre Guide, reminding us of the nearly-abortive début, remarked that “it makes perfect sense that, with the swamp returned to Washington, DC where another conservative congress is making headlines with corruption scandals, The Cradle Will Rock is being revived.”  The NYTG reviewer observed that “Blitzstein’s modern style of music that could almost be described as harsh, at times defying easy melody, fits [Doyle’s] kind of stripped-down presentation.”  Herman felt that the talented cast . . . all manage to nimbly navigate their multiple roles” but also found that “[w]ith almost everyone dressed in some form of overalls or factory worker garb, the early scene in the jail before you understand that everyone will have multiple roles is very confusing.”  Like me, Herman longs to see a fully mounted production of Cradle, but concluded: “I wouldn’t have missed this chance to see a full production of The Cradle Will Rock.”

“Though there’s the occasional lack of tension that makes the 90-minute production tend to lag at times,” reported Broadway World’s Michael Dale, “individual performances are quite good, and the clima[c]tic confrontation . . . is fiercely played.”  On Theater Pizzazz, Joseph Pisano noted that while the history of Cradle is “a great story of art fighting against censorship, that doesn’t necessarily mean the art itself was great.”  At CSC, though, as “[l]ed by director John Doyle . . ., the ten actors, each of whom portray multiple roles, give affecting allegorical life to Blitzstein’s Steeltown, USA.” 

Steven Ross of Front Mezz Junkies dubbed Cradle a “mesmerizingly sing-song sonata of a play” and the CSC production an “interesting and thought provoking revival solidly directed by John Doyle.”  Oddly, Ross suggested that “the passion and emotional depth of what dance might have brought to the thesis on corruption and resistance is what this CSC production is lacking.”  He felt, “The blood of the desperate isn’t pounding in [the characters’] veins.”  (All this seems to come from the fact that Ross longed to see Yazbeck dance because the actor’s a Broadway hoofer.)  In the end, the FMJ reviewer lamented, “The singing registers beautifully, the dance of the staging entertains . . ., the enthusiasm of the cast resonates, but the heart of the piece never pumps with the same power of . . . that first rebellious production.”

Characterizing CSC’s revival as “solid.” Cititour’s Brian Scott Lipton found that “Blitzstein’s bare-bones script . . . doesn’t quite make the stakes feel high enough.”  Nonetheless, countered Lipton, “Still, the entire cast . . . works very hard to flesh out their fictional counterparts.”  Though “sometimes engaging,” CT’s reviewer found that “the songs are also a bit one-note.” Doyle, however, “adds enough choreography to make the numbers more than just ‘park and bark’ solos.”  The director’s “ultra-minimalist” style, though, “has the effect of either forcing audiences to really pay attention . . . or allowing them to get distracted by their own thoughts.”  Lipton sums up by adding that “as a work of stagecraft, it still feels too much a piece of its time to make the same impact it did 82 years ago.”

On TheaterMania, Zachary Stewart, in another review that scored only a 40, proclaimed the history of Cradle’s 1937 opening “a joyous tale of regular people defying fearsome institutions, and singing in the face of power.”  Then he lamented, “It’s a pity none of that comes through in John Doyle’s dispassionate, soporific revival at Classic Stage Company.  The cradle rocks all right.”  The TM reviewer argued, “There’s never been a better time to revive The Cradle Will Rock,” as he recalled the Jussie Smollett embarrassment, the Varsity Blues college admissions scandal, and the Sackler art-funding disgrace.  “With the audience bringing so much pent-up rage into the theater, there’s no reason that a play like this should feel frozen in time.” 

Stewart criticized all of Doyle’s production choices, including the unit costuming, the non-representational set, the pared-down cast and consequent multiple casting, and even the unamplified singing, asserting that Doyle “does his production no favors by falling back on old tricks.”  The TM writer continued: “With this semi-intelligible production, Doyle seems to assume that his audience already knows this rarely revived play, robbing newcomers of the opportunity to discover the work in its full clarity.”  In conclusion, Stewart proclaimed, “Blunt by design and rarely hummable, The Cradle Will Rock still has the power to shake audiences awake . . ., but it takes a firmer hand than this to really push us out of our bassinets.”

Talkin’ Broadway’s David Hurst, whose notice was Show-Score’s lowest-rated at 35, reveled in the prospect of a revival of The Cradle Will Rock at this auspicious (“Trumpian”) moment, particularly one staged by Doyle and produced at CSC.  “Imagine my surprise,” sighed Hurst, “then to encounter a lifeless production which, despite an abundance of talent at his disposal, never explodes with rage under Doyle’s flaccid direction.”  Complaining that “there’s no energy or vitality propelling the storytelling of Doyle’s production.” Hurst declared, “The cast is terrific,” praising all 10 of Doyle’s company, especially “triple-threat Yazbeck,” as the TB reviewer insists, “who tries mightily to bring Doyle’s production to life with the rousing title song.”  In the end, however, not even “mighty” Yazbeck “can save this revival.”  Hurst’s final assessment is that “whether you call it an allegorical play in music or proletariat agitprop, The Cradle Will Rock deserves better than its current mounting at Classic Stage.”

On his blog, Theatre’s Leiter Side, Samuel L. Leiter dubbed the CSC revival of Cradle “problematic.” He warned, “If you don’t know the script, or can’t make out the lyrics as they’re being overpowered by the piano pounding . . ., you’ll have considerable difficulty in making out who’s the plutocrat, the cop, the druggist, the hooker, the foreman, and so on.”  He added, “Nor will it be easy to separate the different characters played by actors wearing the same garments for each.”  Leiter reported, “There’s a lot of talent involved in the ensemble," and “[s]everal moments are imaginatively staged but Doyle overdoes a few things” like the way Mr. Mister throws his cash around to make those he’s paying off crawl for it.  The revival lacked “nuance and character expression . . . in Doyle's fast-paced but monotonous production, so one-note that my plus-one couldn't help saying: ‘It had a certain ring.  Bo-ring.’”  The blogger-reviewer concluded, “The wind is blowing at the CSC but down has come baby, The Cradle Will Rock and all.”

'Summer and Smoke' (CSC)

I’m not a full-fledged authority on Tennessee Williams, but I do know good deal about him and some of his plays as the result of several years of work with and for some scholars who are TW experts.   (For a number of years back in the ’80s, ’90s, and ’00s, I did research for pay and my principal clients ended up being a passel of Williams scholars who lived out of town and needed someone in New York City who could track down information and documents here.   That led me to doing several Williams-related projects of my own—some of which have been republished on Rick On Theater—and thus, I gathered a lot of biographical, literary, and theatrical information about the great playwright.) 

In particular, I did a great deal of work on two of Williams’s connected plays: Summer and Smoke (première 1947, Broadway 1948) and The Eccentricities of a Nightingale (written 1961, première 1964, Broadway 1976), his  reconsideration of the earlier play.   One of the Williams scholars, Philip C.  Kolin, asked me to contribute the chapter on the two plays to Tennessee Williams: A Guide to Research and Performance (Greenwood Press, 1998), which he was editing.   That eventually led to “The Lost Premiere of Tennessee Williams’s Eccentricities of a Nightingale” for The Journal of American Drama and Theatre (Spring 1999) and ultimately to “‘The Sculptural Drama’: Tennessee Williams’s Plastic Theatre” in the Tennessee Williams Annual Review (2002).   (The latter was posted in ROT on 20 March 2010 and the former on 9 May 2015.   I also wrote two original pieces for this blog: “Getting from Summer and Smoke to Eccentricities,” 26 February 2015, which, as the title suggests, relates how Williams reimagined Summer and Smoke as Eccentricities, and “‘The Pieces Don’t Fit!,’” 13 March 2015, which was suggested by a line spoken in the first act of Summer and Smoke and echoed in the second.)

In the spirit of full disclosure, I’ll also note that I appeared in a production of Eccentricities of a Nightingale in New Jersey in 1979—my first union show, from which I got my Actors Equity card.   (I played Roger Doremus, Alma’s nebbishy wannabe suitor.)

So, as I said, I know a bit about Summer and Smoke, currently running at the Classic Stage Company (for the next couple of days, anyway).   I also have strong feelings about the play, somewhat proprietary in a way, which will necessarily inform my report on the production.   

Summer and Smoke was the second of his major plays Williams wrote but the third to be staged on Broadway.   He began composing it in 1945 (as Chart of Anatomy) and it was first produced (as Summer and Smoke) in Dallas by Margo Jones at her esteemed regional company, Theatre ‘47, premièring on 8 July 1947.   Because A Streetcar Named Desire, written after Summer and Smoke, opened in December, the Broadway transfer of Summer to the Music Box Theatre was delayed until 6 October 1948.  (The Glass Menagerie had opened on Broadway on 31 March 1945 and ran until 3 August 1946.)  Compared unfavorably to both Menagerie and Streeetcar, Summer ran only until 1 January 1949, 102 performances.  (Menagerie and Streetcar had original runs of 563 and 855 performances, respectively—very long for that time.)  The play was considered a flop and nearly derailed the nascent playwright’s career.   

Directed by Jones in both Dallas and New York with Tod Andrews as John and Katherine Balfour as Alma in the world première and then Andrews and Margaret Phillips on Broadway.   On Broadway, Mrs.  Winemiller was played by Marga Ann Deighton, Reverend Winemiller by Raymond Van Sickle, Dr.  Buchanan by Ralph Theadore; Anne Jackson appeared as Nellie Ewell and the wonderful Ray Walston had the near-cameo role of the salesman Archie Kramer.   The Broadway set and lighting were designed by Jo Mielziner and the costumes by Rose Bogdanoff; Williams’s friend Paul Bowles wrote original incidental music for the production.  Mielziner’s scenic design was highly praised in the 1948 reviews and I’ll have something to say about this aspect of the CSC production shortly.

In 1950, a tour of Summer and Smoke starring Dorothy McGuire and John Ireland covered the western United States.   On 22 November 1951, the London premiere, directed by Peter Glenville, opened with William Sylvester and Margaret Johnston as the would-be lovers.  (Foreign-language premières opened all over the globe from 1950 to 1994.)  Then, on 24 April 1952, Off-Broadway was born when Circle in the Square restaged Summer and Smoke starring Lee Richardson and Geraldine Page.   Running for 356 performances, the revival was directed by José Quintero.   The production established Off-Broadway as an important venue for serious theater, revived the reputations of the play and the author, and made names for Quintero (who went on to become a renowned interpreter of Williams’s work) and Page.   

Two years later, Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage produced a popular Summer (9 February-21 March 1954) directed by Alan Schneider with George Grizzard and Dorothea Jackson, with Frances Sternhagen as Mrs.  Winemiller.   In 1975, Gene Feist staged an Off-Broadway revival for New York’s Roundabout Theatre Company in its Chelsea home with Michael Storm as John and Debra Mooney as Alma.   In July 1986, Christopher Reeve and Laila Robins portrayed the central couple at the Williamstown (Massachusetts) Theatre Festival and two years later, Marshall Mason directed Reeve for the Center Theatre Group, Los Angeles, opposite Christine Lahti (11 February-1 April 1988).  Roundabout revived Summer and Smoke on Broadway in 1996 with Harry Hamlin and Mary McDonnell as John and Alma under the direction of David Warren.   

Paramount produced the film adaptation of Summer and Smoke, with a screenplay by James Poe and Meade Roberts, in 1961.   Geraldine Page, nominated for an Academy Award, repeated her Off-Broadway stage success as Alma opposite Laurence Harvey under the direction of Peter Glenville (director of the London stage production).   On 23 January 1972, a television adaptation of Summer and Smoke was aired in the British Broadcasting Company’s “Play of the Month” series.   Never broadcast in the United States, the program starred American actors David Hedison and Lee Remick.

Summer and Smoke is the only major Williams play to have been set to music in his lifetime (not counting the 1952 Streetcar ballet).   Composed by Lee Hoiby with a libretto by Lanford Wilson, the opera debuted on 19 June 1971 by the St.  Paul Opera Association with John Reardon singing John and Mary Beth Peil, Alma, under the conductor Igor Buketoff.   

The current Off-Broadway revival, co-produced with the Transport Group Theatre Company and directed by its artistic director and co-founder, Jack Cummings III, began previews at CSC’s East Village home on 11 April 2018 and opened on 3 May.  The production, extended from a 20 May closing, is now scheduled to end on 25 May; I saw the 8 p.m. performance on Friday, 11 May.

The Transport Group Theatre Company is a non-profit, Off-Broadway theater troupe in New York City.  Founded in 2001 by now-artistic director Cummings and actress Robyn Hussa, Transport stages new plays and musicals and revivals with a focus on American stories told in a visually progressive way.  The company, which currently performs in various venues around New York, also commissions new works by American writers, including re-imagined revivals.  Since 2007, Cummings has been artistic director and Lori Fineman, executive director.  Through its first eight years, Transport Group was a resident theatre company at the Connelly Theatre; an Off-Broadway venue in Manhattan’s East Village.  Transport’s produced several environmental productions including the OBIE Award-winning The Boys in the Band (2010), which seated the audience in chairs around the play’s living room set in a Chelsea penthouse, and the first New York revival of Michael John LaChiusa’s Hello Again (2011), in which round banquet tables doubled as both the audience seating and the actors’ playing space. 

In 2007, Transport Group received a special Drama Desk Award for its “breadth of vision and presentation of challenging productions” and in 2018 the company won a Drama Critics’ Circle Award Special Citation.  Transport Group has been nominated for 31 Drama Desk Awards, five Outer Critics Circle Awards, five Drama League Awards, three Off-Broadway Alliance, and two Lucille Lortel Awards, among others.  In 2011, Transport Group’s production of the Douglas Carter Beane-Lewis Flinn musical Lysistrata Jones transferred to Broadway and was nominated for a Tony Award.   The American Theatre Wing awarded Transport Group a National Theatre Company Grant in 2011.

In 1967, director Christopher Martin founded the Classic Stage Company Repertory in a 100-seat theater at Rutgers Presbyterian Church on Manhattan’s West 73rd Street as a theater committed to reimagining classic plays for contemporary audiences.  In 1973, after a period of peripatetic existence, the theater moved into its present home on East 13th Street, formerly an East Village carriage house.  Martin left the company in 1985 and was succeeded as artistic director by Craig Kinzer and Producing Director Carol Ostrow (until 1987), Carol Perloff (1987-92), David Esbjornson (1992-98), Barry Edelstein (1998-2003), Brian Kulick (2003-16), and John Doyle (2016-present).  In the 50 years since its founding, CSC has become a leading Off-Broadway theater that is a home for new and established artists, as well audiences seeking epic stories intimately told.  (The troupe’s performance space, a thrust configuration with seating on three sides of a floor-level acting area, holds only 199 spectators.)  CSC Productions have been cited by all major Off-Broadway theater awards including the OBIE, Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle, Drama League, and the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Body of Work.  Summer and Smoke is Tennessee Williams’s debut production at CSC.

Tennessee Williams (1911-83) was born Thomas Lanier Williams III in Columbus, Mississippi, to Cornelius Coffin (C. C.) Williams (1879-1957), a traveling shoe salesman, and the former Edwina Dakin (1884-1980), who like many of her son’s heroines thought of herself as a Southern belle; the couple married in 1907. (Tom Williams became Tennessee in 1939.  Through his father, Tom was a descendant of John Sevier, 1745-1815, the first governor of Tennessee from 1796 to 1801, and 1803 to 1809.)  Edwina was the daughter of the Reverend Walter Dakin (1857-1955), an Episcopal priest, and Rosina (Rose) Otte Dakin (1863-1944), who taught music and singing to some of her husband’s parishioners.  Because of his father’s peripatetic work, Williams and his mother, sister  Rose Isabel Williams (1909-96), and brother Walter Dakin Williams (known as Dakin; 1919–2008) lived with his maternal grandparents in the parsonages where Williams’s beloved grandfather was pastor. 

In 1915, Reverend Dakin, a fixer for troubled parishes, was assigned to St. George’s Episcopal Church in Clarksdale, Mississippi, a small river port in the Mississippi Delta area. The Dakins and the Williamses lived in Clarksdale until 1918 (and Tom returned there from 1920 to ’21 to finish elementary school), so the dramatist lived there for a large chunk of the period in which Summer and Smoke is set.  It’s generally accepted that Clarksdale became several towns of Tennessee Williams plays, including the Glorious Hill of Summer and Smoke and Eccentricities of a Nightingale. 

(From 1902 to 1905, Reverend Dakin served as Episcopal minister in Port Gibson, Mississippi, 175 miles south along the Mississippi from Clarksdale.  This town has a famous landmark: the First Presbyterian Church whose steeple is topped by “an enormous gilded hand with its index finger pointing straight up, accusingly, at—heaven,” as Alma describes her father’s Glorious Hill Episcopal church in Eccentricities.  The description doesn’t appear in Summer and Smoke, however.) 

Williams is far too well known (and his life much too full) to summarize here; he’s easy to look up in any number of sources.  This brief snippet, however, provides many clues to the origins and conception of the playwright’s second major play.  In all his plays, Williams was a compulsive recycler of bits of his biography and experiences.  In Summer and Smoke, like Reverend Dakin, for instance, Reverend Winemiller was the Episcopal minister of the town and like “The Nightingale of the Delta,” Williams grew up at the rectory.  (Williams once insisted, “I’m Alma.”)  Reverend Dakin’s father had been a small-town doctor like the Drs. Buchanan and Rose Dakin had taught piano and voice like Alma.  C. C. Williams was a drummer for a shoe company, just as is Archie Kramer, the young man Alma picks up in the play’s last scene.  (The salesman’s last name comes from Tennessee Williams’s first girlfriend, Hazel Kramer, the only woman to whom he proposed marriage when he was 18.)

Both Mrs. Winemiller and Alma manifest characteristics of Williams’s sister, Rose, and mother.  The older woman is drawn from the later, clearly schizophrenic Rose, but Edwina Williams’s depiction of her daughter’s overreaction to illness echoes Alma’s.  (Rose Williams began exhibiting symptoms of her illness at 14 and was diagnosed in 1937, when she was institutionalized.  Rose was lobotomized in 1943 and Tennessee looked after her all of his life.)  Much of Alma is also drawn from Edwina Williams, the small-town minister’s daughter with a streak of Puritanism who had been called a nightingale. 

The egocentric hedonist of Summer and Smoke, John, is a portrait of Williams’s father, who preferred carousing to domesticity.  C. C. Williams lost part of his ear in a fight over a card game; John is knifed in a drunken fight while gambling at Moon Lake. (Moon Lake is a real recreation area just 18 miles north of Clarksdale and Lyon, where Dr. Buchanan, Sr.’s fever clinic is, is a tiny town about two miles northeast of Clarksdale.).  The elder Dr. Buchanan, a remote, cold, and censorious father, depicts another aspect of C. C. Williams, who denigrated his son and called him “Miss Nancy.”  The Reverend Winemiller is inspired by (but not a portrait of) Rev. Walter Dakin, whom Williams adored all his life.. 

The foundation of Summer and Smoke (and Eccentricities) is Edwina Williams’s tales of her youth in Port Gibson and Natchez, Mississippi, that she told her children (and which were published in her memoir, Remember Me To Tom [G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1963]).  Both plays had their origins in a short story, “Bobo,” which Williams wrote in 1941, then revised into “The Yellow Bird” in 1946; published in 1947, “Yellow Bird” centered on a preacher‘s daughter named Alma Tutwiler.  (There were Tutwilers in Clarksdale; the name Winemiller came from another story, “One Arm.”) 

Like most of Williams’s plays, Summer and Smoke exists in two versions, a “literary” or “reading” text and an “acting” text.  The longer, “literary” version was the play as Williams wrote it, successfully produced in Dallas, but trimmed during Jones’s rehearsals in New York.  The shorter version is the text sold by Dramatists Play Service, the agent for all non-professional productions and publisher of the official “acting version.”  The “literary” text is published in hardcover volumes (including anthologies such as The Collected Plays of Tennessee Williams from the Library of America) and trade paperbacks (New Directions’ The Theatre of Tennessee Williams).  The historic Quintero revival in 1952 was based on the longer version, with the Prologue of Alma and John as children meeting by the stone angel, the iconic image of the play, and so is the CSC mounting.

Set in the fictional town of Glorious Hill, Mississippi, in “the first few years of” the 20th century to 1916, Summer and Smoke—the title comes from a line in the poem “Emblems of Conduct” (c. 1924, pub. 1926) by Hart Crane (1899-1932), an important emotional influence on Williams—opens at “dusk of an evening in May” in the town square.  There we meet Alma Winemiller, the daughter of Glorious Hill’s Episcopal minister, as a ten-year-old (played at CSC by the same actress who plays the part as an adult, Marin Ireland), standing in front of the stone statue of an angel—which in Cummings’s mounting is represented by a framed tinted photograph on an easel. 

As Alma leans down to drink from the statue’s fountain, young John Buchanan, Jr., son of the town doctor (Nathan Darrow, also the adult actor for the later character), sneaks into the square and startles Alma.  They are schoolmates and clearly well acquainted with one another as Alma has given Johnny a box of handkerchiefs because he has a runny nose, and he knows exactly how to tease her.  As they banter, Alma tells John that the stone angel has a name: Eternity.  In fact, the two Buchanans and the Winemillers are neighbors, for the church’s rectory and the doctor’s office and home are next door to one another.

This Prologue, omitted from the “acting” version of the text, prefigures Alma and John’s relationship as adults.  We see her as a sensitive, possibly even hyper-sensitive, girl with religious tendencies (“My name is Alma and Alma is Spanish for soul,” she tells Johnny) and an almost maternal concern for John’s well-being and demeanor.  John, on the other hand, reveals the beginnings of his carelessness, apparent callowness, and rebelliousness at the same time as he’s obviously drawn to Alma—though not in a particularly spiritual way.  As young adults, both will manifest these characteristics to a more (over-)developed degree.  In Cummings’s production, the Prologue isn’t Williams’s foreshadowing of things to come, however, but Alma’s memory of the way things were before life happened.  In this conception, the adult actors portraying their characters’ younger selves works well.

After the Prologue, the scene jumps to July 4th a few years before the U.S. entry into World War I.  Reverend and Mrs. Winemiller (Jay Russell, taking the place at this performance of T.  Ryder Smith, and Barbara Walsh) arrive just as Alma finishes singing in the town’s Independence Day band concert.  (In the “literary” version, there’s a short scene that Cummings didn’t use of townspeople gathering in the square for the entertainment.  It seems that the Transport Group director reverts to the shorter script at this point.)  It’s apparent that Mrs. Winemiller is, as we used to say, not a well woman, having suffered a breakdown years earlier.  She slipped “into a state of perverse childishness,” Williams states, and Reverend Winemiller and his daughter refer to her as their “cross to bear.”  

After the elder Winemillers depart, John, who’s just returned home after studying medicine in Baltimore, approaches Alma, who is waiting to meet Roger Doremus (Jonathan Spivey), Alma’s would-be gentleman caller who plays French horn in the town band.  To attract her attention, John tosses a firecracker toward her when she isn’t looking.  Also passing through the square, as Alma and John banter somewhat tentatively, are Rosa Gonzales (Elena Hurst), whose father (Gerardo Rodriguez) owns the Moon Lake Casino, and Nellie Ewell (Hannah Elless), a 16-year-old voice pupil of Alma’s; we learn a few details about both women (who both represent figures in Williams’s pantheon of women). 

From this point on, the scenes mostly alternate between the rectory and the doctor’s office, with occasional visits to the fountain and one trip out to Moon Lake.  This rotation starts in Dr. Buchanan’s office, which is visually distinguished by a wall chart of human anatomy (represented in Dane Laffrey’s minimalist CSC set by a framed chart on another easel).  Each scene emphasizes the differences between Alma’s and John’s outlooks on life, reflected in the “triptych” set that Williams conceived for the play: the rectory (soul) on one side of the stage, the doctor’s office (body) on the other, and the stone angel (“eternity”) between them.  Cummings, however, has conceived a non-set that dispenses with all visual representations of the themes except a photo of the stone angel and Dr. Buchanan’s anatomy chart.  (All hand props, from Mrs. Winemiller’s picture puzzle to the telephones in the rectory and the doctor’s office to the firecrackers, are mimed.  Kathryn Rohe designed period costumes, but they don’t change from scene to scene.)

The rest of the acting environment is a white platform with a half dozen plain wooden chairs, moved by the actors to create seating arrangements for each location, and a hanging “ceiling” of a framed opaque white fabric which, from my seat’s perspective (fourth row up in the center section of CSC’s three-sided audience), made the space that is Glorious Hill seem all the more claustrophobic and closed-in than the text alone ordinarily would.  (Jesse Green likened the set to a “coffin” in his New York Times review.)  According to Cummings, in a program note, his purpose here is to “return the focus back on the actor and the writing.”  In Williams’s script, he indicates the scene shifts with lighting cross-fades, but R. Lee Kennedy’s lighting design, which is essentially continual muted white light covering the whole acting platform, doesn’t accommodate this technique.

Alma, who reminds us several times that her name means ‘soul,’ is Williams’s embodiment of piety, exaggerated and exclusive of all other human impulses, and the young Dr. Buchanan, who lives to use “his senses to get all he can in the way of—satisfaction,” represents a life devoted entirely to physical experience in pretty much all its forms.  But the playwright doesn’t advocate for either position, and Alma and John essentially switch philosophies at the end of the play.  The actual struggle between these two impulses isn’t between Alma and John, however; it’s really within each of them.  Alma comes off the worse in the end, as she goes from one extreme to the other.  In the last scene of Summer and Smoke, Alma picks up a traveling shoe salesman, Archie Kramer (Ryan Spahn), following in the path of Nellie’s mother, who’s known as Glorious Hill’s “merry widow” because she meets all the trains coming into town to pick up drummers.

Other characters exhibit a range of other positions on the continuum, as well as other attitudes Williams diagnosed in American society.  Both fathers are remote and disapproving men, valuing public opinion and social reputation above all other attributes, but they are both leading representatives of the establishment (the church and business community).  Alma’s “little group . . . of young people with—intellectual interests” (Roger; Rosemary, the town librarian played by Glenna Brucken; and Mrs. Bassett, a gossipy widow portrayed by Tina Johnson) are the social rejects, along with Alma, Nellie Ewell (ostracized because of her mother’s reputation by everyone in Glorious Hill except Alma), and Rosa (the young Mexican good-time girl with whom John takes up), who are marginalized by the likes of Reverend Winemiller and the elder Dr. Buchanan (Phillip Clark).  The men, who are both images of Williams’s own father, don’t see that all the outcasts are products of their unrelenting censoriousness. 

Rosa is essentially a female counterpart of John, but she is also a manifestation of Williams’s view, now seen as an unflattering stereotype, of Latins as “elemental” people (South Americans and Mexicans, Spaniards, and Italians often appear in this guise in Williams’s plays and stories), while Nellie is the character who has found the healthy balance between her sensual and physical nature and her spiritual side—and is largely responsible for John’s salvation in the end when he turns from Rosa and a life of pleasure (in South America, notably) to marriage to the wholesome and rounded Nellie.  (Nellie Ewell isn’t a large role in Summer and Smoke, but the character is significant and dramatically pivotal.  Some top actresses, some before they became known, took the part.  In the Broadway première, it was Anne Jackson, who married Eli Wallach the year the play was presented in New York and became one of our leading actors of the 20th century; Pamela Tiffin played Nellie in the 1961 film.)

Summer and Smoke is filled with symbols and symbolism.  Some critics have complained that there’s too much of that, but Williams wove it into the play.  Cummings’s stripped-down mise-en-scène left me somewhat bereft because I felt the lack of the visualization of Williams philosophical and dramatic themes.  (I refer readers to my blog article on plastic theater, mentioned earlier, for a discussion of Williams’s notion that playwrights should construct their texts to include the physical environment they conceive as integral aspects of the play and not abandon that element of dramaturgy to directors and designers.) 

Very possibly, a viewer who doesn’t know as much about Summer and Smoke as I do now won’t have missed the triptych and the imposing omnipresence of the stone angel, and I had no serious problem with the mimed hand props or the imaginary fireworks (which all have symbolic significance in Williams’s concept, such as the plumed hat), but the total absence of any visual reinforcement of Williams’s ideas weakens the play in my estimation and interfered with my reception of the performance.  (A note: Cummings’s physical reinterpretation was not nearly as detrimental to Summer and Smoke as Sam Gold’s of The Glass Menagerie was to that production; see my report on 8 April 2017.)

The actors, however, do fine jobs in this bare-minimum production.  Among Williams’s principal strengths as a playwright were always his lyric dialogue, rising to the level of prose poetry in his best plays, and his characters, especially his women.  Cummings’s cast gives straightforward characterizations, strongly focused and beautifully delivered (including Jay Russell, who took the part of Reverend Winemiller at the performance I saw).

The CSC-Transport presentation of Summer and Smoke is an ensemble show, a strong one, though the portrayals are a bit bland for such a melodramatic property.  One exquisite performance, however, does stand out—that of Marin Ireland as Alma.  I gather that she has a reputation for fine acting, especially in contemporary roles, but I’m unfamiliar with her work.  I can’t compare her Alma with past work, but I can state that her embodiment of this ephemeral and conflicted woman is sensitive and emotionally gripping, and a lovely rendering of the heart of the production.  Alma, like all of Summer and Smoke’s characters, is, at most, two-dimensional, but Ireland keeps her alive and engaging; unfortunately, her John, in the hands of Nathan Darrow, is no match for her on this score.

For a guy who for most of the 2½ hours of this Summer and Smoke (there’s one ten-minute intermission) is a thoroughgoing hedonist, in the interpretation of Darrow, another actor with whom I have no experience, John Buchanan, Jr., is surprisingly tame.  Oh, sure, the script takes care of a number of depravations—he’s stabbed in a bar brawl over gambling, he hooks up with a hot Latina and a teenager, he drives fast—but Darrow’s persona is unthreatening. He fits the John of Eccentricities better than he does the John of Summer and Smoke.

The rest of the company, including Reverend and Mrs. Winemiller and Dr. Buchanan, Sr., do what they have to more than adequately but not excitingly.  This is  yeoman’s ensemble.  Only Hannah Elless’s Nellie Ewell comes close to sparkling—and much of that is accounted for by Williams’s writing.  They were like Laffrey’s set—utilitarian without being extraordinary.  (I will add that Elena Hurst brought a measure of earnest intelligence to her portrayal of Rosa which helped greatly to diminish the negative Latino caricature.)

On the basis of 34 reviews, the website Show-Score gave Cummings’s Summer and Smoke an average rating of 76, a somewhat middling score.  Positive notices made up 71% of the total, 26% were mixed, and 3% were negative.  The highest scoring review was 90, accounting for eight outlets, including BroadwayWorld, Time Out New York, and New York Magazine/Vulture, backed by a single 88 (the website BSonArts); the site’s lowest score was TheaterScene.net’s 45.  I surveyed 15 reviews for my round-up.

In the New York Times, Jesse Green singled out the performance of Marin Ireland for extensive praise.  Calling her “one of the great drama queens of the New York stage,” Green found her “a fascinating if counterintuitive choice” for Alma.  But the Timesman asserted that “the choice pays off; Ms. Ireland is riveting.”  Otherwise, the reviewer lamented, CSC’s revival of Summer and Smoke was “lackluster.”  Cummings “is known for minimalist, or essentialist, stagings,” observed Green; however, “this ‘Summer and Smoke’ has been scraped too close to the bone.”  By way of illustration, he wrote:

Dane Laffrey’s big white shoe box, or coffin, of a set conveys all too well Alma’s empty prospects but offers nothing to suggest either the suffocating trap of her Victorian circumstances or the richness and romance of her imagination.  Her statue of Eternity is not even stone; it’s a framed photograph.

I’m sorry if I seem to be beating a dead horse, but Green appears to feel the same way I do about the physical production at CSC.  He continued:

Williams specified minimalism—no doors or windows—but he meant something more poetic by it. In his production notes he refers to de Chirico and Renaissance paintings as a way of suggesting the natural world Alma must finally embrace.  . . . .  But it mustn’t play out its bleakness too soon or there’s nothing to lose, and thus no drama.

“Ms. Ireland’s imagination is so well calibrated that she manages, almost single-handedly, to correct for that distortion,” Green insisted.  If the production doesn’t fulfill Williams’s full intentions, the Times reviewer felt, “I don’t blame the cast.”  “No,” he insisted, “it’s the parsimony of the production that’s at fault, offering little that’s lovely.” 

Calling Cummings’s production “gripping” in the Village Voice, Zac Thompson contended that Laffrey’s “simple yet effective design is not only in keeping with the author’s production notes” (about which you know now I disagree strenuously).  Thompson felt that “the absence of scenery helps to strip away all distractions from the play’s central struggle between the sensual and the spiritual.”  Like most other reviewers, he heaped praise on Ireland, whose “gutsy depiction of what becomes a last-ditch grab for happiness is piercing and raw,” but the Voice reviewer also found Darrow’s “haunted vulnerability . . . adds poignancy to the character’s professed self-disgust.”

Sara Holdren of New York magazine/Vulture (one of the 90’s) labeled Cummings’s Summer and Smoke “a spare, intelligent, deeply affecting production” in which the director’s “light, exacting touch both lifts and elucidates the text.”  Holdren, too, lauded “the stellar Marin Ireland” whose performance “is an exquisite study in awakening.”  Darrow, she noted, “is delivering a tough, vulnerable performance” as John and the “riveting” Barbara Walsh makes Mrs. Winemiller “one of this Summer and Smoke’s brilliant surprises.”  The New York review-writer was pleased that Cummings and Laffrey didn’t pay any attention to the playwright’s detailed suggestions about the physical design of Summer and Smoke, providing only “a wall-less box that evokes both spartan purity and, despite its open sides, claustrophobia.”  She affirmed that “Cummings knows how little fuss-and-stuff a richly layered piece of writing needs to work on stage,” finding that “the play’s elegant staging is a lesson in trimming the fat.” 

In Time Out New York (another 90), Helen Shaw exclaimed, “Transport Group and Classic Stage Company's exquisite version is strong enough to power a rocket into orbit—and that’s without mentioning the gigantic performance at its center.”  That performance, of course, is Ireland’s and she “plays Alma Winemiller as though the part had been written for her, and as though it had been written yesterday; her Alma is at once radiant and frightening, as heart-stopping as a painting that looks up and catches your eye.”  Shaw declared Darrow “superb” and asserted, “The show is a painful dance between the two.”  She described designer Laffrey’s “cantilevered white roof-and-floor set” as “a tomb with the lid lowering into place” and felt that director Cummings “has taken away the heavy stuff of production so we can focus on—and have our hearts broken by—all those invisible shimmering things.”  The TONY reviewer left us with the thought that “the show does cling to you, hanging around you like a haze even once you’re blocks away.”

Pronouncing this Summer and Smoke revival “sultry and sensitive” (and “far superior” to all other recent revivals), Broadway World’s Michael Dale loaded his notice (yet another 90) with praise of Ireland, declaring her “one of the absolute best actors to regularly grace New York stages during this century.”  Dale proclaimed that Ireland is “so good” as Alma that “she just might have you leaving the theatre thinking that SUMMER AND SMOKE should be regarded right up there with A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE as one of the playwright’s master works.”  Darrow, the BWW review-writer said, gives a “nicely underplayed performance” and the ensemble is “fine.”  The director “creates a minimalist production that effectively focuses on Williams’ words and the captivating performances.” 

On New York Stage Review (still another 90), David Finkle dubbed Cummings’s production of Summer and Smoke a “first-rate, top-drawer, A-number-one revival” with the “treamwork” of “nothing less than the best tandem performance currently available on a New York City stage” as the center of the production.  All this was an excuse for Finkle to say (surprise!) that Ireland has “quietly announced herself as one of the City’s most astonishing players—maybe the best.  As the nervous, uncertain, giddy to the verge of frequent hysteria Alma, she gives her best performance yet.”  Finkle asserted, “Distinguished by an inner glow, she inhabits Alma,” but added, “Just as astonishing is Darrow as” John.  Eliciting “courageous performances” from his cast, Cummings, insisted Finkle, “works . . . at the height of his substantial powers.”

Zachary Stewart of TheaterMania characterized the CSC Summer and Smoke as a “scorching revival” that “smolders with unsatisfied longing thanks to powerful performances and a handsomely pared-down staging by” director Cummings.  Ireland is “commanding” and Darrow exudes the “languid confidence of one who knows he doesn't have to try very hard to be adored.” “A drama of unexpected richness,” Stewart concluded, “Summer and Smoke reaches full bloom in this glorious production” which the TM reviewer observed Cummings “stages . . . with brutal simplicity.”

“Under Jack Cummings III’s careful direction, the cast captures the essence of” Summer and Smoke, said David Roberts of Theatre Reviews Limited.  “Each member of the ensemble cast develops her or his character with sensitivity,” found Roberts, “and each delivers an authentic and believable performance.”  In sum, this Summer and Smoke “is given a captivating interpretation in this well thought out production.”  Fern Siegel of TheaterScene.com dubbed Cummings’s interpretation of Williams’s play “an interesting, stripped-down” production in which Ireland “delivers a standout performance,” though Darrow “does not equal Ireland’s nuanced efforts.”  Cummings’s direction is “minimalist,” but “compelling scenes and a capable ensemble grip our attention.”  Siegel ends by stating that “it is a calibrated Ireland who deserves the shout out this round.”

Jonathan Mandell labels Summer and Smoke at CSC “a minimalist” production “which feels neither classic nor transporting” on New York Theater.  Taking exception to Cummings program statement that he wants to “return the focus back on the actor and the writing,” Mandell contended that “ironically the staging has the opposite effect.”  He argued, “The writing and the acting would certainly be more affecting in the CSC/Transport production, however, if it weren’t for the distraction of the staging.”  Laffrey’s set, the New York Theater writer reported, “looks like something out of a low-budget sci-fi movie about life in a spaceship.”  Miming the props didn’t work for Mandell for several reasons.  In “a fine 12-member cast,” however, Ireland is the “clear standout.” 

JK Clarke of Theater Pizzazz found that Cummings’s “hyper-minimalist approach diminishes” the “inspired” performances of several of the cast.  Clarke also wondered why, with the “beautiful and impressive period costumes (Kathryn Rohe), the stark ecru-and cream rectangular set looks like the ladies footwear department at Bloomingdales, circa 1979.”  The TP reviewer also found the miming of the props “on the whole is [more] distracting than instructive, and doesn’t seem to augment the story in any way.”  Ireland, Clarke felt, “inhabits Alma beautifully, but the strange, austere production design distracts from her character’s development.”  Quoting Mrs. Winemiller’s line “The pieces don’t fit!” Clarke pointed out, “They don’t.” 

The “superb Marin Ireland” gives “a performance of heartbreaking intensity and meticulous desperation” in Summer and Smoke, “joined by Nathan Darrow who . . ., too, is sensational in an almost impossible role,” proclaimed David Hurst on Talkin’ Broadway.  “It's a shame Cumming[s]’s oddly directly production isn’t as electrifying as its stars and their game supporting cast.”  Hurst complained that the director’s “stark concept for this revival” is bereft of “the traditional elements of any Summer and Smoke production.”  He also objected to the miming of the props.  Like so many other reviewers, Hurst lavished praise on Ireland, but in the end he had this to sat about the production overall:

In addition to lots of clumsy blocking, it’s a shame so many distractions of Cumming[s]’s making pull the audience out of the action and away from the story.  Why isn’t the cast using props?  I can forgive the spartan set (though it does nothing to help the story), and all the white lighting, but why have detailed, period costumes with no props.  Can you give John a stethoscope and, for goodness sake, let Alma have a pair of gloves?  And can Mrs. Winemiller please have a hat with a plume?  What does such a decision serve.  It’s bad enough they’re performing in a white cube of sterility and colorlessness, but then you force them to do all this crazy pantomiming.  It’s a testament to how wonderful the cast is that Summer and Smoke remains as affecting and moving as Williams no doubt hoped it would be. 

On CurtainUp, Elyse Sommer, who admitted she’s admired Cummings “for years,” labeled this Summer and Smoke “sluggish” and “disappointing” and complained that “minimalism . . . can distract as is the case here by keeping the audience so focused on trying to figure out what’s happening and where we are.”  Nonetheless, Sommer found the “performances at CSC . . . seemed to be in good hands” with a “solidly cast” ensemble and (once again) singled out Ireland, who “has the acting chops to be [a] riveting Alma.”  (Sommer was also peeved because CSC has started an “annoying custom of not handing out programs until after the show.”  I couldn’t agree more!)  The review-writer concluded by observing, “Even in a disappointing production like this, Williams’s language still gives Ireland’s Alma an opportunity to break our hearts.”

Of Cummings’s production of Summer and Smoke, Samuel L. Leiter declared on Theatre’s Leiter Side, “It’s very likely . . . that, if Summer and Smoke’s lugubrious current Off-Broadway revival . . . were its premiere, it would suffer a fate worse than that of the original.”  Cummings, Leiter observed, follows an aesthetic of “paring shows down to their minimum” claiming that “the point of his sometimes daringly reconceiving familiar plays is to highlight the actors’ work.”  The TLS blogger proclaimed, “In Summer and Smoke, though, he seriously misfires.”  Leiter complained, “Removing all traces of traditional investiture and treating the play as if it were a cousin of the noh theatre completely deprives it of all-important atmosphere . . . and specificity of locale.”  (Leiter is an expert on Japanese theater, including Noh, and had published several books on the subject.)  One of the few reviewers who was displeased with Ireland’s performance, Leiter stated: “As Alma, the usually exciting Marin Ireland does a lot of acting, with numerous emotional transitions, but fails to conjure up the image of a wounded, soulful woman devolving into a creature of the flesh.”  The blogger finished by lamenting, “The uneven supporting cast is mildly satisfactory but, hampered by Cummings’s approach and the lack of a compelling Alma and John, it’s simply not strong enough to sustain interest in this doleful revival.”

In Show-Score’s lowest-rated notice (45), David Kaufman of TheaterScene.net (not to be confused with TheaterScene.com, quoted above) posited that Cummings’s Summer and Smoke “never rises above the play’s failure [in 1948] to become something of an accomplished piece.”  Kaufman complained about the lack of a set and that “the many players (a dozen in all) are often reduced to charades, as they describe a new gaudy hat, or a jigsaw puzzle, or gloves.”  He complimented Ireland somewhat wanly when he observed that “Alma is here played by Marin Ireland with appropriately scenery-chewing effects.” 

[I want to add two comments that don’t really fit in the report above.  One’s a simple complaint (already stated by reviewer Elyse Sommer of CurtainUp: I found that policy of not handing out programs until after the performance annoying and arrogant.  I like to read the program before the show and I like to be able to consult it at intermission.  That’s especially true if, like the CSC program for Summer and Smoke, there are informative essays or articles about the play or production.  But even if all there is are the credits, I still like to look them over to see if there are any actors or other artists whose work I know from before—or new artists about whom I know little.  I usually take my seat in the auditorium several minutes before the performance starts so I can look through the program.  It’s arrogant of the theater’s leadership to take that traditional activity away from me on spurious grounds that programs are some kind of distraction!

[The other note I want to make is about the plumed hat mentioned both in the play and in my report.  This is an interesting little bit of symbolism relating to Tennessee Williams view of himself and his family heritage.  Williams saw the two branches of his family, the Dakins (his mother’s side) and the Williamses (his father’s side) as descendents of the Puritans on the one hand and Cavaliers on the other.  He believed that his own nature was torn by a conflict between these two sides of his personality—represented in Summer and Smoke by Alma (Puritan) and John (Cavalier).  “Roughly there was a combination of puritan and Cavalier strains in my blood which may be accountable for the conflicting impulses I often represent in the people I write about,” the playwright wrote in 1952.  The hat with a plume is a symbol of the Cavalier side of Tennessee Williams’s nature; that’s why it’s in the play at all.  By the way, this isn’t a comment on the CSC production.  I just find it a fascinating little fillip and I wanted to share it.]