'The Heir Apparent'

On Friday evening, my theater companion, Diana, and I met at the Classic Stage Company’s East 13th Street home to see the New York première of David Ives’s The Heir Apparent.  I’ve seen a couple of Ives’s plays, many of which débuted at CSC (New Jerusalem, 2008; Venus in Fur, 2010) and had fundamental problems with them.  New Jerusalem, which is an attempt to dramatize the synagogue hearing that ended with the excommunication and expulsion from Amsterdam of the 17th-century Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza, was densely philosophical and “all the talk provided for a static atmosphere,” and Venus in Fur, which I saw in a Washington, D.C., revival, was what I call a “phony drama”: “it’s ordained by the playwright, not organic to the circumstances.”  (My ROT report on Venus was posted on 11 July 2011, but the production of New Jerusalem predated this blog so I’ve posted an old report on it on 20 April.  Ives is also known for his adaptation of the Broadway première of Mark Twain’s Is He Dead? in 2007-08.)  

The Heir Apparent is Ives’s adaptation of Le Légataire universel (1708), a farce in verse by French playwright Jean-François Regnard (1655-1709).  The Heir Apparent was commissioned by the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C., and first produced in 2011 under the direction of STC’s Artistic Director, Michael Kahn (who sent Ives Regnard’s play).  (There were earlier English versions of Légataire universel for the stage, first in 1769 by Thomas King, 1730–1805, the English actor, under the title Wit’s Last Stake and then again by Irish actor and dramatist Charles Macklin, 1699-1797, with the title Will and No Will.  A literal translation by English writer Richard Aldington was published as The Residuary Legatee in 1923.  Ives’s adaptation of Heir Apparent was published by Smith & Kraus in 2011.)   The CSC production, staged by John Rando, started previews on 28 March and opened on 9 April for a limited run; it was scheduled to close on 4 May but has been extended through the 11th. 

Regnard (his name’s related to the French word for fox, renard, which Ives found fitting), the son of a wealthy Paris merchant, led an adventurous youth devoted to pleasure and travel.  (In 1678, young Regnard, returning from Italy, was captured by pirates and held in Algiers until ransomed.)  Back in Paris, he took up writing largely as a leisure pursuit and his first efforts were farces for the Comédie-Italienne.  His later, more substantial works for the Comédie-Française, the House of Molière, retain the same Italianate spirit laced with recognizable echoes of his more famous predecessor.  (Influenced by Commedia dell’Arte, many of Regnard’s characters are takes on the stock figures of the Italian comedies: in The Heir Apparent, for instance, Geronte is Pantalone, Lisette is Colombina, Crispin is Harlequin, Isabella and Eraste are Innamorati, and the lawyer Scruple is a Dottore.  If you know your Commedia, you’ll spot them immediately.)  In Le Joueur (The Gambler, 1696) and Le Légataire universel, Regnard refuses to be censorious about the most callous, unsavory behavior.  No moralist, the farceur’s detached, uncomfortably frank view of a corrupt society is depicted with boundless vivacity and lively comic plotting.  

Ives described his source as “worldly, utterly honest, satirical without being condemnatory, ofttimes bawdy, sometimes scatological, now and then macabre and it craves jokes as a drunkard craves his pint.”  The playwright has called his version of Légataire a “translaptation” because, though Ives sticks pretty close to Regnard’s original story line—and the rhyming couplets—he inserts 21st-century humor and contemporary references couched in modern English.  (The New York Post’s Elisabeth Vincentelli described Ives’s process as putting the play “through his usual wash-and-spin cycle.”)  

Challenged by a woman in the audience, Peter Marks wrote his Washington Post review of Kahn’s première in rhyme, and I can’t resist quoting his synopsis of the plot:

The tale is of a tightwad who

Has never parted with a sou.

The greedy rest conspire to fill

The dole-out sections of his will.

To spell it out a little more: The rich old miser, Geronte, eternally at death’s door, is liable to seizures and violent bowel movements, courtesy of the potions Lisette, the old skinflint’s down-to-earth maid (potty jokes are rife).  Furthermore, he’s also burdened with the unwanted presence of rapacious relatives and servants who just want him to kick off after he’s written his will to their benefits.  Eraste, Geronte’s poor but handsome nephew, plots with Crispin, the young man’s crafty servant, and Lisette, to get his uncle’s money before Geronte dies so the young swain can marry Isabelle, the daughter of Madame Argante (whose name appropriately sounds like the French for ‘money’ as she’s as avaricious as Geronte is stingy).  As all this skullduggery, which involves a lot of reversals, twists, disguises, impersonations, and other tomfoolery, unfolds—or unravels, if you wish—geriatric Geronte, even as he’s shuffling off the mortal coil, spends most of his time lusting after young (and need I add beauteous?) Isabelle, greedy Eraste’s beloved.  (As may be obvious, Regnard was considered a successor to Molière.  Heir Apparent, at least in Ives’s hands, is The Miser meets The Imaginary Invalid meets The Misanthrope—with scatological humor.)  The main point of Ives’s rendition (and, I gather, Regnard’s, too) is . . . well, to populate the stage with zany, often ribald, buffoonery.  It’s just silliness made even sillier by Ives’s anachronisms and incongruities, with references to Godzilla, high colonics, Cadillacs, and soccer moms, among others.

That, of course, is the entire rationale for doing Heir Apparent, a play with no ulterior motives and nothing on its mind but good, dirty fun.  Oh, Ives inserts some comments about socialism and the 99 percent near the end—from the mouth of Madame Argante, who, it seems, was something of an anti-capitalist hippie in her youth—but it’s perfunctory and has no echoes anywhere else in the play.  (I assume Regnard didn’t try the same thing—his rep is that his plays were totally without social significance or moral judgments.  The Comédie-Italienne was closed by the king for its impolitic sentiments, but Regnard wasn’t implicated and moved over to the more prestigious Comédie-Française and greater success.)  Some of the jokes, aided by Ives’s rhyming couplets that make use of plenty of 21st-century language and references, try a bit too hard, but the second act had me tittering and guffawing pretty continuously.  (The poop jokes are so constant that a scan of Ives’s script would probably result in a complete lexicon of synonyms for shit.  Unless you want your preteens to bring the vocabulary home, you probably shouldn’t take them along to the theater for this show.  They’ll love it—you might not.)  

I hate to make a generalization on such scant evidence, but if pressed, I’d have to conclude that for me, Ives’s adaptations are better fare than his original plays.  I found both his other works forced and a little ponderous, as if in both instances Ives was showing off his erudition.  Heir Apparent, in contrast, is light and sparkling (still, with a touch of intellectuality in some of the more knowing references).  Certainly, a lot of that is due to the source material—from what I gather, Regnard’s writing is effervescent (some critics even say his verse is better than Molière’s), while Spinoza’s philosophy is notoriously dense and Masoch’s novel is . . . well, he did give his name to masochism, after all.  Of course, I’d certainly need to see (or at least read) more of Ives’s adaptations (Georges Feydeau's A Flea in Her Ear, 2006; Pierre Corneille's The Liar, 2010; The School For Lies, 2011, from Molière’s The Misanthrope) before I make a final judgment, but from what I know now, this is how I feel.  

In the end, of course, a farce like both Regnard’s original and Ives’s “translaptation” depend for success on stage on the production and the performances.  John Rando and CSC have put together an absolutely fabulous rendition of The Heir Apparent.  Paxton Whitehead, Broadway and Off-Broadway veteran, makes a perfect Geronte, befuddled and constantly diarrheic, his voice a gurgle of phlegm (and I-don’t-know-what-else) throughout the first three-quarters of the play (I’m not sure I want to know how Whitehead accomplishes this), but transforming into a clear and strong baritone in the end.  Whitehead likewise morphs from moribund, geriatric Geronte into a hale and clear-headed older gentleman in the last minutes of the play. The transition, aided marvelously by David C. Woolard’s stunning costumes and Paul Huntley’s picture-perfect wigs (about which more shortly), is accomplished nearly instantaneously: Whitehead goes off stage for his costume change as the near-dead Geronte and returns in moments as the more vigorous one.  (Getting in and out of those 18th-century costumes is a challenge in itself—believe me, I’ve done it—much less doing it fast!  Several of the gags depend on quick changes, including a cross-dressing shift.)  

Possibly the most delightful surprise in an altogether excellent cast is Carson Elrod’s Crispin, the resourceful servant whom Broadway World’s Michael Dale called a “versatile clown” who leaves “no set piece unchewed.”  I don’t know Elrod’s work (he played the same part in Heir Apparent’s Washington première three years ago), but he has quite a varied résumé, from contemporary farce (Noises Off) to Absurdism (Waiting for Godot) to Shakespeare (The Tempest, Measure for Measure, All’s Well That Ends Well).  I suppose it goes without saying that he handles the period comedy and style superbly, but what clinched his performance for me was that he blends the anachronisms and incongruities that Ives clearly loves into a nearly seamless performance with the fewest possible gear shifts.  It doesn’t hurt, in addition that Elrod does a more than passable impression of Whitehead’s feeble Geronte that suggests the actor’s a pretty good mimic on top of his other acting talents.  (I wonder how he did with Floyd King’s Geronte at STC, which I assume, knowing King’s work, would have been quite different from Whitehead’s.)  As Crispin crows, not erroneously: “Well, I don’t care what anybody says, / I am a one-man Comédie-Française!”  (On Huffington Post, reviewer Fern Siegel quipped, “He speaks no more than the truth.”)  Incidentally, while Elrod’s doing Geronte, Whitehead makes a reappearance and the two identically-dressed actors perform a wonderful mirror routine reminiscent of Harpo and Groucho Marx from Duck Soup.  (Director Rondo acknowledged that the Marx Brothers comedies were “very important” influences on his “great love for comedy.”)

Another wonderful turn is offered by David Pittu as the lawyer, Scruple.  His arrival is telegraphed long before he appears so we know that he’s very short—but I’ve seen Pittu on stage before (Gabe McKinley’s CQ/CX, 2012; John Guare’s 3 Kinds of Exile, 2013) and he’s a man of perfectly ordinary stature.  When Scruple finally enters, however, he doesn’t come up any higher than everyone else’s waist!  There stands Pittu in his long, brown Louis XIV peruke, wearing a long, black attorney’s robe, his buckled shoes barely poking out from under the hem.  He’s performing the role on his knees, surely a physically difficult posture, with the character’s shoes attached to the actor’s kneecaps!  (Is this what my college theater prof used to call “suffering for your art,” I wonder?)  Well, of course, his entrance is a sight gag that elicits an immediate uproar in the house.  But Pittu’s performance is much more than just a sight gag.  He makes Scruple (in Regnard’s original, the character’s merely a notary, but what a suitably ironic name for a lawyer!) a figure of both fun and—would you believe—sympathy.  Every reference to height, even if it’s not meant to be directed to him—is taken with supreme umbrage, with ever-increasingly pained expressions and objections.  All the time, of course, we know he’s being hoodwinked by Eraste, Lisette, and Crispin (disguised as Geronte), but Scruple, in the face of nearly impossible impediments (this is where the real Geronte turns up, among other hijinks), plows ahead, doing his due diligence and taking down, as we later hear, every word Crispin-as-Geronte speaks.  The scene as a whole is riotous, but Elrod and Pittu top everyone without for a moment violating the spirit of the barely-controlled pandemonium.  (I don’t know how he accomplishes it, but Pittu doesn’t move like a man shuffling on his knees, but like one walking with very short legs.  And once again, Woolard’s costume design comes to the aid of the actor because even though Scruple’s robe has a bit of a train, it hardly seems long enough to hide what I knew had to be back there but, try as I might, I couldn’t detect: the rest of Pittu’s legs.  I know theater is magic, but the last time I was this astonished by technical achievement was back in 1985 when I saw Louise Page’s Salonika during which a dead soldier rose up from beneath a beach of actual sand with no evidence of a tunnel or a trapdoor under the stage.  Before that, I was maybe seven or eight at a production of The Wizard of Oz when, after the tornado, the lights came up on Dorothy's house with the Wicked Witch’s legs sticking out from under one side.)

The entire ensemble, as I said, is excellent, and Claire Karpen’s Lisette, Dave Quay’s Eraste, Amelia Pedlow’s Isabelle, and Suzanne Bertish’s Madame Argante are all marvelously drawn characters even as they’re recognizable types (especially if you know any Molière at all).  Karpen comes off as a bit modern, though I don’t know if that’s a deliberate choice or not, and it actually works fine in Ives’s context—what with his own anachronisms and all.  The character’s written very knowingly, which suggests that she’s meant to be a little bit country and little bit rock ’n’ roll anyway.  Quay has the appearance of someone a little long in the tooth for a young innamorato (though I don’t think the actor actually is): he’s a tad stocky and his blond hair’s receding a mite, which makes Eraste look as if he’s been waiting a long time to get Geronte’s dough so he can marry Isabelle.  This, in turn, makes Quay seem more desperate to secure his inheritance, especially when his decrepit uncle sets his sights on Eraste’s beloved.  (This also seems to render his passion for Isabelle a little perfunctory, as if he doesn’t so much love her as need her complicity to gain Geronte’s million francs—but I’m not sure this effect is intentional.)  The partnership among Eraste, Crispin, and Lisette, though clearly led by the valet, is a mini-ensemble within the greater one: they do seem to read one another’s thoughts—as demonstrated when Crispin sets up the impersonation of a distant, hog-farming niece who’s come to claim Geronte’s fortune and Eraste shows up in 18th-century French country drag snorting like a pig, followed by an identically-clad Isabelle, and finally Crispin (with the addition of a snout).  Lisette emcees the melee.

Pedlow’s Isabelle is a take on the standard ingénue, which is precisely how she’s written.  Pedlow brings a contemporary knowingness to the girl, who’s not above a little coercion or strategic whining to further her ends.  The character’s essentially the pawn of the plot—Eraste must gain Geronte’s estate in order to marry her, Geronte himself plans to marry her, Argante bargains her daughter’s hand as a way to get some of Geronte’s wealth, and so on—but Pedlow’s not averse to a little “queening” now and then to assert herself.  Madame Argante is the only part in Heir Apparent who’s not a Commedia character, though she is familiar from later comedy of manners; in 200 years, she’ll be Lady Bracknell in rhyming couplets.  Billed as a “battleax,” Bertish plays her with little sense of humor, a stern visage at all times.  (She’s also something of a mercenary Miss Havisham.)  Until the mercurial shift at the end, when we learn of her hippie-ish youth, Bertish’s Argante is all business—and her business is the acquisition of money, particularly Geronte’s.  If she can get her hands on it by marrying Isabelle to Eraste, all the better, but she’ll marry her young daughter to ancient Geronte without Isabelle’s consent if that’s what it takes.  Bertish carries herself regally (perhaps more precise to say imperiously), made even haughtier by the tall “Fontange” wig she wears and widened by her farthingale, altogether giving her Argante an out-sized and severe presence on stage.  (Isabelle’s gown hangs more softly in contrast with her mother’s hard-edged silhouette of cash-green.)  Madame Argante’s transformation in the last scene of the play is less believable than Geronte’s—he’s at least been in a trance for a scene or two—and I’d be curious to see how Regnard wrote the play’s ending, but if Bertish doesn’t solve the problems of how an elegant money-grubber reverts to a socialist-leaning Occupier (or, for that matter, how she evolved from that into what we’d seen for most of Heir Apparent), the actress at least proceeds straight ahead without a hitch, as if the transformation were perfectly natural.  The politics, as I said before, is forced here, but Bertish just ignores that and forges on with commitment.

I’ve been commenting all along now on how well Woolard’s costume design enhanced Ives’s script and Rando’s staging, even the cast’s acting.  It’s probably almost unnecessary to say any more, but I’ll sum up by declaring that the designer made really terrific use of the TDF Costume Collection and his other sources (I gather CSC didn’t build the period clothes for this show) to put together the look of the production.  I mentioned Madame Argante’s green dress (and yes, I know francs aren’t green—but the audience is American and here green means cash), but Geronte’s spiffy new outfit at the end of the play, his wedding togs, is a silver suit of tunic and breeches, not quite lamé but suggestive of that, that also recalls money (and here, the French does parallel the symbol—money in French is argent, which also means ‘silver’).  Geronte now sports a brand-new peruke, also a silver gray, of elaborate curls and ringlets as styled by wig-designer Huntley.  

In contrast with the elegance of the final costume changes, though not so much of Geronte’s earlier attire, John Lee Beatty’s set is more like a storage room for discarded period furniture than a rich man’s sitting room.  (TheaterMania’s Zachary Stewart likened the set to “a Williamsburg antique shop”—not the Brooklyn neighborhood, I suspect, but the restored colonial town in Virginia.)  The theater’s brick back wall is exposed, as if Geronte hadn’t wanted to pay for paneling, and the décor is more jumble than Neo-classical orderliness.  We know that the old skinflint has kept his very first centime (on which keep your eye, by the way), but Beatty’s made it look like he’s closer to a hoarder than a mere miser: an 18th-century Charles Foster Kane, perhaps.  The lighting, which melds the whole together successfully, is by Japhy Weideman.

Rando, who seems somewhat inarticulate in the interview published in the CSC newsletter, has coordinated all these elements admirably.  He’s worked with Ives numerous times since the 1990s (Ancient History/English Made Simple, 1996; Mere Mortals and Others, 1997; Polish Joke, 2003; All in the Timing, 2013) and on musicals, especially those presented by Encores!, where Ives, a script adapter, introduced him.  They’re obviously on the same wave-length, and it shows in the stage results.  The film comedies which Rando admires, aside from the Marx Brothers’, include Woody Allen’s and the Peter Sellers-Blake Edwards Pink Panther movies.  The truth, of course, is that not all artists can speak glibly about their own work, but since, especially in theater, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, not the describing, Rando acquits himself and serves both Ives and his cast splendidly.  Regnard and Ives created a clockwork plot, with gears within gears, all spinning in different directions, though toward the same end, and Rando keeps it all on course and in rhythm (not to forget rhyme) with a nicely light touch.  

The press was surprisingly mixed—and a little light, a number of usual outlets not having published (at least not on line).  In the New York Post, Elisabeth Vincentelli opened her notice by declaring that The Heir Apparent “strains so much to be funny, it’s exhausting—if it were a jacket, it would burst its buttons,” comparing the play unfavorably with Ives’s previous writing in The School for Lies and Venus in Fur.  Complaining that “the more-is-less nature” of the production “grows wearisome,” Vincentelli blamed Rando’s “manic” direction.  Saying that David Pittu is wasted on a “one-joke role,” Vincentelli remarked that he may need “a post-show massage”—concluding that the “audience could use one, too.”  On the other hand, the New York Times’s Charles Isherwood described the play as “boisterous, bawdy and endlessly funny,” and the production as “directed with meticulous abandon by John Rando.”  “It is indeed excessively good,” the Timesman proclaimed, and the “entire cast excels.”  In the Wall Street Journal, Terry Teachout characterized Ives’s play as “brilliant” and “elegantly wrought.”  The WSJ reviewer said “Ives's couplets glitter with close-packed virtuosity,” the CSC “cast is perfect, and John Rando's staging is a slapsticky riot.”  

Among the weeklies, the New Yorker reviewer wrote in “Goings On About Town,” “Ives’s baroque rhymes often delight,” and, “The director John Rando sets a giddy, hurtling pace, crashing past unlikely verse and doubtful plot points.”  In his Village Voice notice, Tom Sellar dubbed Ives’s adaptation a “comic jewel” that “brims with contemporary wit.”  Concluded Sellar, “The production, directed with exactness by John Rando, is a delight with twin pleasures: the razor-sharp wit of Ives's flowing verse and the cast's gusto.”  Entertainment Weekly’s Jason Clark averred that, having “struck gold” in his past work, Ives “merely strikes bronze” with Heir Apparent, a “madcap laffer” in which Clark wished “more of [the jokes and gestures] actually stuck.”  Clark’s complaint was that the “machine-gun ratio of jokes to spoken lines is about three to one,” but he found that “so many of them pivot to the scatological, the result becomes more wearying than cheering.”  The EW review-writer called the cast “game,” but felt that they are “a bit over directed by John Rando.”  His final word was, “The Heir Apparent strikes the same chord a bit too often.” 

In the cyber press, Fern Siegel of the Huffington Post called Ives’s version of The Heir Apparent a “madcap” and “fast-paced” “fanciful delight” that “proves loads of fun.”  Director Rando “has timed the action perfectly,” Siegel said, and “his hilarious cast is uniformly tops.”  On Broadway World, Michael Dale called Ives’s script “nimbly penned” and the CSC presentation a “rollicking production.”  The BWW writer concluded, “Bouncing back and forth between highbrow wit and lowbrow crudeness . . ., The Heir Apparent is divinely silly and a heck of a good time.”  Zachary Stewart wrote in his TheaterMania review that Heir Apparent is “an irreverent laugh fest with more than a few moments of sublime linguistic brilliance.”  The “off-the-wall ludicrous” references and the “eloquent toilet humor” help make “for a zanier experience,” TM’s Stewart said, and the cast “lean into this cartoonish reality” in a “well-choreographed lunacy” which Rando “perfectly paces.”  Concluded Stewart, “You'll leave this one with a big grin on your face.”  On CurtainUp, Elyse Sommer called Heir Apparent “an old-fashioned caper” in which “we see [Ives’s] own spirit superimposed.”  Rando directed, Sommer felt, “fast and furiously, but not too fast to land every laugh.”  The technical production is “wonderful” and Sommer graded the whole cast “A or A+.”  It all adds up to “a full-featured, enjoyable entertainment for their ticket” price, concluded Sommer.

Now, I saved one published review for last because . . . well, you’ll see.  I remarked above that Peter Marks had met a Washington theatergoer’s challenge to write his Washington Post review in verse, and when I surveyed the New York notices, lo and behold, what did I discover?  Adam Feldman of Time Out New York had done likewise.  Instead of spot-quoting his review, I’m just going to reprint it here to close my report.  Enjoy:

When rusting classics need repolished lives,

Is anyone fitter than David Ives?

He loves to dip his quill where others daren’t,

Most newly in Regnard’s The Heir Apparent.

With rhyming verse, Ives kicks out all the jams,

Pentameter agleam with bright iambs,

And happily creates for all to see

A comic marvel at the C.S.C.

The 18th-century plot—already a

Tad familiar from commedia—

Concerns young lovers, lawyers and misers

And servants who serve as their advisers.

But here the stock is flavored to a T

With vibrant comic ingenuity.

A zippy Carson Elrod heads the cast

As Crispin, crafty valet of Eraste

(Dave Quay), a callow but handsome fella.

Amelia Pedlow plays Isabella,

Who loves Eraste, but who, despite her want,

Obeys her mom: the mean Madame Argante

(Ripe Bertish), who will only have her wed

To someone with a luxury of bread.

The old Geronte (ace Whitehead) fits that bill

And so Eraste must bend his uncle’s will

To get the ancient pincher to agree

To leave him all his dough as legacy.

This summary can only just begin

To limn the joys of Ives’s loony bin.

There’s John Lee Beatty’s rich set, and—oh

Yes!—whip-quick direction by John Rando.

Go see the play and you’ll surely concur

This Heir Apparent is a farce majeure.

Okay, Feldman’s not as clever at doggerel as Ives, but, hey—it’s like the dancing bear.  It’s not how well he dances, it’s that he dances it at all!

'New Jerusalem' (2008)

[Later this week, I’ll be publishing my report on a performance of David Ives’s new play, Heir Apparent, an adaptation of the 18th-century Le Légataire universel by Jean-François Regnard (1655-1709).  I’ve now seen three of Ives’s plays, which I mention in the upcoming post, and I’ve blogged about one of the other two (Venus in Fur, on ROT on 11 July 2011), but the first Ives play I saw, 2008’s New Jerusalem, predated Rick On Theater.  Since I’ll be making reference to that play in my Heir Apparent report on 30 April, I’ve decided to raid my archive of pre-blog theater reports and publish the one I wrote about New Jerusalem on 18 February 2008.  Readers will note that these pre-ROT reports were a little more casual than the ones I post now.  ~Rick]

I was supposed to see David Ives’s New Jerusalem, a première at the Classic Stage Company in the East Village, on Saturday evening, 2 February 2008, the day before it was scheduled to close.  At the last minute, I got myself screwed up, however, and I wasn’t able to get to the theater.  Diana, my frequent theater companion, saw the play and said it was one I’d have liked, so I got the theater, which had extended the production a week because of excellent reviews (the Times was pretty much a rave; Variety, on the other hand, was the only near pan I read), to exchange my unused seat for one at the matinee on Saturday, 7 February.  I haven’t entirely made up my mind about the play, though.  Maybe this report will help me sort out my reaction. 

Ives is best known around here for adapting scripts (the current “new” Mark Twain play, Is He Dead? is his) and writing librettos for concert versions of old musicals (he’s got several in the Encores! repertoire).  I’m not really familiar with his “original” plays, mostly light comedies (Polish Joke, Manhattan Theatre Club, 2003) and one-acts (All in the Timing, Primary Stages, 1993-94).  (He’s also a translator: the recent production of Yazmina Reza’s The Spanish Play at CSC in 2007 was his rendition and next season the Williamstown Festival will present his version of Feydeau’s A Flea in Her Ear.)  In a way, though, New Jerusalem’s also a kind of adaptation.  It plays out the courtroom-style drama of the inquisition at the hands of the Amsterdam authorities and the elders of his synagogue into the alleged atheism of Baruch Spinoza (1632-77).  (The full title of the play is New Jerusalem: The Interrogation of Baruch de Spinoza at Talmud Torah Congregation: Amsterdam, July 27, 1656.  I thought those kinds of titles went out with the ’70s!  A better title might have been Two Jews, Three Opinions—a line someone uses in the play.  I’m just sayin’.) 

Clearly Ives has done considerable research into both Spinoza’s life and philosophy, though there’s no indication that he used actual documents—there’s no transcript of the interrogation—to produce the dialogue at the hearing.  Nonetheless, New Jerusalem is akin to a documentary play, perhaps more in line with Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen (Broadway, 2000-01) which depicts a 1941 meeting between Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg that was known to have taken place, but whose content was always speculation.  (Several reviews made mention of Peter Parnell’s Trumpery, a recent Off-Broadway play about Darwin, but I’ve never seen it so I can’t speak for the parallels.  Other events and plays come to mind as antecedents: Putting a man of independent mind on trial for heretical thinking and using religious arguments to attack him sounds like 1955’s Inherit the Wind and the Scopes trial.  The Jewish authorities acting on behalf of their gentile overlords to silence an unorthodox radical is reminiscent of the Sanhedrin’s trial of Jesus.  Wielding the authority of the church and the threat of excommunication to force an intellectual to recant his threatening new theories parallels the story of Galileo.  Accusing a philosopher of corrupting society with his radical ideas is like the trial of Socrates.)  Ives’s text does have the ring (or, perhaps clang) of dramatized transcripts melded with philosophical treatises/Talmudic debates—as if someone tried to stage one of Plato’s Dialogues.

(Full disclosure:  I once co-wrote one of those “if they had met” scenarios—between Karl Marx and Nikolai Lenin.  It was a class project for a Russian-language course so mine was in Russian, but the concept was the same—and it was surely even more stilted.)

New Jerusalem is mostly the revelation of Spinoza’s beliefs and theories (which he hadn’t published at the time of the inquiry) as he defends himself against charges that he’s a dangerous atheist who’s disrupting both the Jewish and Christian societies in Amsterdam.  Ives condenses the complex ideas into a little over an hour in the second act; the first is a base-setting discussion of the historical and religious foundations for the Jewish presence in Holland, the rules under which the Jewish community is welcomed in Amsterdam, and the tenets of the acceptable Jewish faith.  I’m not even going to try to explain Spinoza’s ideas.  Suffice it to say that the young thinker, taking his lead from René Descartes, questioned everything, including free will and the existence of an afterlife.  If you’re interested in more, you’ll have to look him up yourself.  (Be warned: the Internet will yield over 2½ million hits relating to the philosopher.)  Saul Levi Mortera, Amsterdam’s chief rabbi, catechizes his pupil on Moses Maimonides’ 13 “articles of faith,” which Spinoza’s required to rattle off whenever Mortera barks out, “Baruch, what is the second article of faith?” or some such command.  (Each time they did this, I was reminded, blasphemously, I’m sure, of Grand Nagus Zek making Quark recite the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.)  Mortera and Gaspar Rodrigues Ben Israel, a parnas, a member of the Jewish community’s council of elders, prompt Spinoza to respond in words that demonstrate, they hope, that he’s a traditionally believing Jew, not an atheist or an apostate. 

The Amsterdam regent Abraham van Valkenburgh, who in Ives’s version of the event is the power that requires the examination and ultimate sanction—cherem, excommunication from the Jewish community, and exile from Amsterdam—acts as prosecutor and overseer, ultimately eliciting the statements from Spinoza that seem to prove his deviance from the accepted beliefs (the soul is mortal, God and Nature are one, eternity is now, miracles are myths since God/Nature can’t violate its own rules)—as we know he must in the end, since Spinoza was, of course, banished.  (In reality, it may have been the Jewish community that took the responsibility on itself out of fear of being expelled from Holland.  The Spanish and Portuguese Jews arrived in Holland two generations earlier in flight from the Inquisition.  They were welcomed in the Netherlands, but only under certain provisions: they mustn’t try to convert Christians, they  couldn’t talk about Christianity or Judaism openly, and they mustn’t disrupt the prevailing Christian society.  Otherwise, they could live, work, and worship how and where they pleased.)  Spinoza reveals himself to be not an atheist, but a deist, which van Valkenburgh declares is just as dangerous.  (Poor Ben Israel, when he sees that Spinoza isn’t going to adhere to the congregation’s beliefs, blurts out in exasperation: “This isn’t heresy, it’s Calvinism!  Baruch Spinoza is not a Jew; he’s a Presbyterian!”)  All this played out around the large table center stage in the middle of the synagogue’s sanctuary.  (The Ark of the Covenant was prominently visible on the rear wall of the set; Ben Israel expressly identified it for van Valkenburgh to be sure we all knew what it was.)

The playwright has, by virtue of the fact that little documentation exists, taken the liberty to mix fact liberally with fiction.  (Since the historical record indicates that Spinoza may not even have been present at what was probably a minor proceeding in the back room of the synagogue, Ives had considerable freedom to invent.)  The dialogue, of course, is all imagined; but some characters are historical (Rabbi Mortera; Rebekah de Spinoza, the philosopher’s half-sister) and some are fictitious (Van Valkenburgh; Clara Van den Enden, the Christian girl Spinoza loves; Ben Israel).  This allows Ives to couch the dialogue in contemporary language and to insert occasional moments of humor (Rebekah excoriates her brother for not appreciating her brisket) as well as to manipulate the characters’ responses to suit his dramaturgical needs.  He has invented not only an intellectual/Platonic love interest for Spinoza (historically Spinoza never married but he couldn’t have married a Christian without converting to Christianity), but a friend, the artist Simon de Vries who’s both youthful companion to the serious philosopher and, we discover later, his betrayer to the Amsterdam authorities. 

Most of this isn’t troublesome, though I occasionally found the contemporaneity of the language a little forced.  (I’ll have something to say about Ives’s convenient character shifts in a bit.)  Since I don’t know much about Spinoza’s philosophy (it’s famously difficult and dense), I have to assume Ives has capsulized it accurately, but because I also know he translated it into colloquial 21st-century speech, I did wonder if he hadn’t up-dated the ideas a little, too, as he abridged them.  (A confession: I didn’t do any research to determine if the playwright did that or not.)  He gives himself an out, though, by having Spinoza, who was only 23 at the time of the inquiry, constantly remind his questioners that he hasn’t worked out all the details of his theories yet.  This, along with his feelings for Clara and his friendship with Simon, displayed in a scene near a tavern where Spinoza’d been practicing the drawing Simon has been teaching him, is clearly an effort by Ives not only to show that Spinoza’s a young guy, but an ordinary, if brilliant, fellow. 

So much of the interrogation, which makes up the bulk of the two-hour play, proceeds in heady philosophical terms.  Spinoza comes off, especially in Jeremy Strong’s portrayal, as a bright grad student showing up his favorite professor.  In addition, Ives provides Spinoza, not known for his light wit, an irrepressible funnybone.  (To reinforce the sense that Spinoza’s not just a textbook icon, he’s called Bento by the characters who know him; that’s Portuguese for ‘blessed,’ the translation from Hebrew of his given name, Baruch.  His books, written in Latin, were published under the name Benedictus de Spinoza.  Ives titles the first act of New Jerusalem “Baruch/Bento” and the second “Benedictus.”  A small point is made of the meaning of the philosopher’s name—but what isn’t noted, though Jews will see it, is that baruch isn’t just a word that means ‘blessed’; it’s the first word in many Hebrew prayers, called in Yiddish broches, or ‘blessings.’  Ives, who I don’t believe is Jewish, may not have known this, but it resonates nonetheless.)

I guess overall, I’d have to say that Ives did a creditable job translating an intellectual exchange into a stageplay but that the material left him with little chance of doing more than that.  Most of the reviews stressed the intellectual rigor of the text, and the content wasn’t uninteresting; but I found myself wishing I could read the script (which isn’t published) because Ives crammed so much philosophy and theology into it that it was hard for a limited mind like mine to grasp it all.  (Spinoza was a genius; most of the rest of us aren’t.)  To add to this dilemma, director Walter Bobbie kept the dialogue moving at such a pace—can’t let it lag, can’t let a character take a pause to think, don’t let the spectators notice there’s no action; you might lose the audience!—that the difficult ideas went by at quite a clip.  Some of the cast seemed almost to be speed-talking at times.  (If New Jerusalem had been a tape I was watching at home, I’d have rewound and replayed more than a few moments.  What did that guy just say again?)  I don’t know about you all, but debating the existence of God and his relationship to nature or the soul’s relationship to the body isn’t something I do too often.  Not since college, anyway (and I recall I was drunk or high for most of those sessions, besides).  The mental mechanism’s a little rusty and cranky.

Bobbie did an adequate job keeping the play moving.  Except for a couple of contiguous scenes that took place on the street outside a tavern (the set wasn’t changed for these locales; the center table served as a pier or waterside curb—Amsterdam’s the Venice of the North, you’ll recall: lots of canals), most of the “action” takes place in the synagogue around this large, square table.  This meant that all the talk provided for a static atmosphere, so Bobbie had to find reasons to move the characters around some.  That may have accounted for the speed-talking as well: to compensate for the lack of natural movement and action.  In addition, CSC is a thrust theater, with audience on three sides of the stage.  (We were the assembled congregation and the characters occasionally addressed us as if we were part of the debate.  In one rather odd exchange, Rebekah, who’d been sitting in the front row of the audience, strode out onto the stage to confront Baruch, but then turned and made as if she was actually having words with another woman of the community several rows up in the seats.  Otherwise, our presence was acknowledged, but not engaged.  When van Valkenburgh took off his cloak at the beginning of the play, he walked over to where I was sitting and draped the cloak over the railing in front of me, though he didn’t make any gesture that I was there as he would if it had been real life.)  So, to accommodate the three-sided audience and to move the characters about some, there was a lot of pacing and circling the table.  I can’t say that Bobbie had other choices, and the cast executed this more than well enough.

Bobbie did make one puzzling decision and I have no idea what it signified or why he chose it.  At intermission, all the characters exited the stage as you’d expect—except Spinoza.  He went upstage and sat on the little raised platform that led from the main level of the stage up to the wall where the ark was mounted.  He sat there in silence, sort of in the attitude of Rodin’s Thinker, mostly motionless from what I could see (he was only a few feet from my seat) while members of the audience milled around, stretching their legs, for the full 15 minutes of the break.  I’m at a total loss to explain this behavior—and not one of the critics I read even mentioned it.  The play’s intermission did coincide with a declared break in the hearing, so the real-world pause was concurrent with the diegetic one.  Was this some kind of extension of the notion that the audience was the congregation of Talmud Torah?  But we weren’t playing the congregation—Bobbie may have wanted us to be and the actors may have related to us as if we were, but we didn’t respond.  The actors could break the fourth wall and address us when they were in control of the relationship—but inviting us inside the wall, when we were in control, doesn’t work unless we’ve been briefed on the rules of behavior.  What would have happened if someone had spoken to “Spinoza”?  What would have happened if someone had spoken to Jeremy Strong?  Would he have responded in character, like the people who impersonate Colonial residents of Williamsburg or Pilgrims at Plimouth Plantation?  (Television, sirrah?  I know not of what you speak.  Is’t some kind of devil device?)  I wonder if Strong could have handled extemporizing Spinoza’s philosophy if someone had tried to interact with him outside the script.  I wonder if it ever happened.  Not everyone knows or abides by the conventional etiquette of Western theater. 

(When van Valkenburgh hung his cloak over my railing, I remembered an incident from back when I was an Off-Off-Broadway actor.  In a play in a similarly configured space, the set was the deck of ship.  The wheel was down front, within reach of some of the front seats with no barrier separating it from the audience.  At one performance, an elderly lady sat in front of the wheel and she reached up and hung her cane on the wheel.  I guess she thought that the theater had provided this convenience for her benefit.  This being Off-Off-Broadway, the actor who played the captain, when he came on stage and had to steer his ship, simply removed the cane and laid it on the floor in front of the audience.  I once also got into an uninvited conversation with a spectator when I was playing Moon in The Real Inspector Hound and was planted in the audience before the show started.  Not everyone knows the rules.)

Most of the acting was fine.  Richard Easton was superb as Rabbi Mortera, Spinoza’s mentor and teacher, and David Garrison did a nice job keeping van Valkenburgh from seeming a complete anti-Semite and Dutch Reformed Savonarola.  Next to Spinoza, Mortera had the most at stake: if his pupil is found to be a disruptive atheist, it’s his own teaching that’s a failure.  The younger man had been his surrogate grandson and he’s pained at Baruch’s apparent apostasy and at the choice he’ll be forced to make.  I could see Mortera struggling when he was persuaded within his mind by Spinoza’s reasoning even as the rabbi understood he couldn’t accept what he suspected was the truth.  As Ben Israel, Yiddish theater vet Fyvush Finkel took a fifth-wheel character and created an endearing one by showing us the fondness he had for young Baruch and his devotion to the community and his bitter and confused disappointment as the philosopher explained ideas that were further and further from the mainstream fundamentalism of his faith. 

Michael Izquierdo as Simon made a good drinking buddy for Spinoza, but when he was revealed as the nephew of van Valkenburgh and his spy in Spinoza’s house, he began to shift allegiances quickly and without much motivation—as did Jenn Harris’s Rebekah, whose whole attitude seemed unreasonable as well as changeable.  Simon was a young Falstaff to a serious Hal at first, then he was an almost rabid detractor of his friend’s behavior and beliefs, then he spun on a dime (well, a guilder, perhaps) and defended his friend.  Rebekah, who resents her father’s having left Baruch his estate and putting her in her brother’s care—historically she apparently did sue Spinoza over the inheritance—stormed into the hearing demanding Baruch be excommunicated, mouthing off frequently to berate him, then switched to his defense suddenly—and briefly—only to return to her first position. 

It all seemed very convenient—as if Ives saw that too many characters were ganging up on little ol’ Baruch, so someone had to defend him or the play would end.  But even within the text, the vehemence with which the two characters argued whichever stand was at hand at that moment didn’t vary.  I put the blame here on both Ives and Bobbie, though I suspect Ives bears the most responsibility.  As Baruch Spinoza, Jeremy Strong gave a frequently mannered performance which seemed more like the actor’s own idiosyncrasies than anything he selected for the character.  He affected an air of bemused aloofness and his gestures and expressions sometimes seemed like something you’d see in the depiction of an autistic adolescent.  (Maybe Strong and Bobbie saw Spinoza as a sort of savant.  I don’t buy it, but maybe they did.)  The character breaks out into an occasional cough—an unacknowledged sign of the tuberculosis that killed the philosopher when he was only 44—and Strong always seemed self-conscious to me whenever he bent over to do this.

All other aspects of the production were more than adequate, if unremarkable.  The costumes, lighting, and set (Anita Yavish, Ken Billington, and John Lee Beatty, respectively) were all perfectly appropriate for their uses.  Beatty even modeled his set after a Sephardic synagogue (with the addition of the center table) which resembles a thrust or arena stage—though I wonder how many spectators would know that, even among the Jews.  (The oldest congregation in New York City—350 years—is, in fact, Sephardic; but I doubt too many Ashkenazim have visited the Shearith Israel synagogue very often.)

Possibly the most remarkable aspect of the performance is how well Strong, especially, kept all that convoluted philosophy straight.  (Would I know if he didn’t?)  Easton and Garrison had to do considerable philosophizing also in order to counter Spinoza’s precepts, and I can’t say that any of them sounded as if they didn’t understand what they were saying.  I had trouble understanding what they were saying, but that’s a different matter.  In the end, though, it probably isn’t all that important to get Spinoza’s concepts, since the conclusion’s a Billy Budd ending anyway.  Captain Vere/Rabbi Mortera has to sentence Billy/Baruch to be hanged/excommunicated even if Billy/Baruch’s guilt is mollified by his pure heart/unimpeachable reasoning because the consequences to the fleet/community would be too devastating if he shows leniency.  The Captain/Rabbi must condemn Billy/Baruch to secure the welfare and perpetuation of the fleet/community.  (Can you follow that?  Trust me, it works.)

I am left, however, with one really big question I haven’t been able to answer for myself:  What’s it all for?  Other than telling this particular story—much of which, in Ives’s account, may be fictional anyway—or exposing the 17th-century Dutch, despite their vaunted tolerance and openness, for crypto-anti-Semites, why write or stage this play?  (I bring up my two minimum criteria for what I consider good theater: It must do more than just tell a story; and it must be theatrical, that is, use the unique assets of the live stage as much as possible.)  What’s Ives’s point, other than a historical role-play?  Dunno.  None of the critics I read offered an opinion, either.  (The New York Post did make what I think is an invalid connection to the current drive political candidates have to declare their religious faith to court voters.)  

Oh, okay—when Simon’s revealed as van Valkenburgh’s spy who has been funneling copies of Spinoza’s notes and letters to the city regents, I muttered under my breath, ‘So, Homeland Security!’  Is Ives commenting on the current tendency by the Bush League and its enablers to silence dissenters by intimidation and the threat of legal sanctions?  (Judith Miller, anyone?  Joe Wilson?  Dr. James Hansen?)  Well, aside from the fact that we know this already, it’s not a point New Jerusalem makes very directly, if it makes it at all.  Dramaturgs are supposed to ask three questions when they’re advising an artistic director in the selection of the season’s plays:  Why this play?  Why here?  Why now?  I don’t know the answers for CSC’s selection of New Jerusalem.  (Aside from the fantasy aspects of the hearing, it’s a good text for a high school history, social studies, or civics class role-play or something.)

[I have to add one personal peeve.  I went to a matinee, as I said, and the audience, as the common wisdom has it, was mostly old ladies (and a few old men).  I mean older than me, of course.  Now, I know from my days as an actor that this population changes the audience’s response to a play, but that didn’t trouble me.  (Well, not much anyway.  I had a guffawer behind me.)  What annoyed the hell out of me, and I don’t really understand this, is that everyone, all the women, seemed to be carrying large tote bags—some of them two bags—stuffed to the gunnels.  Now, CSC isn’t a large theater—it’s an East Village storefront, with a small lobby now turned over for the most part to an espresso bar (hence, café tables occupying the front of the space).  It’s tight when the theater’s full—and this show was sold out.  Those damn bags bumped and poked me every time someone moved in that lobby—and no one cared or excused herself!  Who brings a suitcase to the theater, for goodness’ sake?  What could they possibly need for two hours in the East Village?  Doesn’t anyone have any common sense?  (Isn’t that the signature line for Shelley Berman’s judge character on TV’s Boston Legal?  And he’s dotty!)  Anyway, sheeesh!

[I hope everyone will come back to ROT on the 25th for my report on David Ives’s Heir Apparent.  And interested readers are encouraged to have a look back at my report on Venus in Fur (11 July 2011).]