For the final production in the Tony Kushner season at the Signature Theatre Company, my friend Diana and I went over the Peter Norton Space on far West 42nd Street for The Illusion, the playwright’s adaptation of L’Illusion comique (The Theatrical or Comic Illusion, 1636), Pierre Corneille’s 17th-century “mongrel oddity.” That’s what New York Times’ reviewer Ben Brantley called the play that features magic and other enchantments (“phantasms,” Kushner calls them), adapted when Kushner was working on Angels in America. The Illusion was first performed in a reading at the New York Theater Workshop in 1988 and the full production premièred, directed by Mark Lamos, in 1990 at the Hartford Stage Company “where the play became what it is now.” It went on to productions at such regional companies as Berkeley Rep in 1991 and around the country and abroad thereafter, becoming the work that made Kushner a playwright who lived off his writing. It was last staged in New York in 1994 at the Classic Stage Company. The Signature production, which has been extended through 17 July, was staged by Michael Mayer, best known for the musicals Spring Awakening and American Idiot.
Corneille (1606-84), older contemporary of Jean Racine (1639-99) and Molière (1622-73), is principally known for his tragedies, especially Le Cid (1637). His most popular comedy is The Liar (Le Menteur, 1643), a translation of which by David Ives (on a regional production of whose Venus in Fur I’ll be reporting for ROT shortly) was staged last spring at Washington’s Shakespeare Theatre Company. Corneille described L’Illusion comique as a “gallant extravaganza” and it’s often compared to Shakespeare’s The Tempest (including by Brantley and other reviewers), to which it bears some superficial resemblances. (Both plays have a sorcerer at the center and feature a pair of young lovers.) Coincidentally, like Ives’s Venus, L’Illusion has metatheatrical aspects: the two young lovers are actors and the play ends with a defense of acting.
Kushner’s Illusion follows the lawyer Pridamant of Avignon as he searches for the son he banished 15 years earlier. At the opening of the play, Pridamant’s been directed to the cave of Alcandre, a mysterious and powerful sorcerer who claims to be able to conjure images of the young man. Throughout the play, Alcandre presents three different versions of the son’s life, all with the same two women and three men, but they are referred to by different names and behave differently in each image, and the visions are in different locations. The old man recognizes his son, but the younger man is never called by his real name, which we never learn because Pridamant can’t seem to remember it. As the images become increasingly sinister, Pridamant becomes more determined to rescue his son from what looks like inevitable tragedy. In the end, most of what Alcandre reveals turns out to be illusion. The way Pridamant responds to what he sees is, of course, what Kushner wants us to observe.
Kushner’s rendition, which runs two hours and 20 minutes plus an intermission, has the adapter’s inimitable stamp on it, though the basic plot generally seems to follow the original. “Freely adapted” from Corneille, as the published edition states, none of the text is a direct translation from the French. L’Illusion comique (which I haven’t read) included only two visions; The Illusion uses a scene Kushner borrowed from a 15th-century Spanish comedia called Calisto [y Malibea] by Fernando de Rojas for the first illusion. The language in The Illusion, however, is purely Kushner’s, including the occasional verse passages. The text has aspects of both 17th-century formality (or faux-formality, perhaps) and contemporary colloquiality, but the two don’t seem to clash. (Kushner’s adaptation is published in a 1994 and a 2004 edition.) As Brantley says, Kushner’s “one of the most linguistically luxuriant dramatists of our time.” He’s besotted with language, in fact. If Alcandre casts spells with magic, Kushner does it with words—not incantations, but ordinary words. This early work, which was written on commission at the request of Jim Nicola of the New York Theatre Workshop for director Brian Kulick (now at CSC), is perhaps a pure example of Kushner’s love affair with language since it contains none of the political and social commentary of, say, Angels, which he set aside briefly to write The Illusion. “Of all my plays it’s the least overtly political,” says Kushner of The Illusion. He sees it as a romance “about love and disappointment and disillusion.”
And magic. Kushner also admits, “I’ve always loved magic,” including that it never seems to work fully on stage. “You can always see the wires,” he says with some apparent delight. (I wonder if he was thinking about the mega-musical in previews a few blocks east at the time of the interview, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark?) The Illusion, Kushner concludes, is “mostly very romantic and magical and it’s the only time I’ve ever given myself permission to really write about what we do.” I take that last clause to refer to the making of theater, because at the center of The Illusion, just as it is in L’Illusion comique, is theater, acting, and creating theatrical illusions. At least in Kushner’s version, that’s the plot line. As I discuss in my upcoming report on Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, the theme’s different. As Alcandre’s last speech makes clear, love is the greatest of life’s illusions, and the take-away for The Illusion.
(A note here: Though the French play apparently makes it known that Pridamant’s son falls in with a troupe of actors early in the plot, giving us a big hint about what’s going on, Kushner doesn’t tell us anything of that until after all the visions have concluded and Pridamant responds to what he believes he’s seen. If you didn’t read the reviews or a synopsis of Corneille’s play, you might be in the same position as the old man, but even though it’s retrospective, the theatrical aspect of the plot and theme are significant to understanding the play, and I’ve had to be something of a spoiler. Sorry about that. I don’t know how to get around it.)
Kushner considers that all his work is about family and love. The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide, he says, is his “conscious attempt to write a big family drama” and Angels is about the way “LGBT people have had a history of having to cobble together a family in the absence of a biological family” that had often rejected them. In The Illusion, the dramatist offers, “the central relationship is between a father and a son,” driven, Kushner says, “by the way the father has replicated in his son a kind of violence.” Indeed, the playwright believes we could perceive a connection between Pridamant and Roy Cohn in Angels, the surrogate father for the conflicted Mormon lawyer, Joe Pitt. All three plays, Kushner notes, depict “a struggling with the issue of fathers.” (Kushner insists that this wasn’t part of his own experience, but that he’d observed it among gay people he knew.)
The “improvised family,” a “trope” Kushner says appears in “a lot of gay literature,” is a force in Angels, of course, but it can also be seen in the theater troupe that Pridamant’s son substitutes for the father who banished him. But the father doesn’t entirely get the dilemma: when Alcandre reveals that the young man had become an actor, Pridamant ponders this news and though he’s glad his son isn’t really in jeopardy, he says he isn’t sure he likes the idea the boy’s an actor. (Is that irony—a lawyer looking down on an actor?) When Alcandre tells Pridamant that his son’s appearing at a theater in Paris and encourages him to travel there to see him, the old father demurs—the roads are bad and it’s an arduous journey. Maybe he’ll go—and maybe he won’t. So much for paternal love and regret.
Let me come back to the script shortly and say my piece about the production first. In all, the Signature’s staging is excellent, as it usually is. Christine Jones’s set and Kevin Adams’s lighting combine effectively to create a mystical and magical environment within Alcandre’s cave, with giant framed mirrors upstage for apparitions to come and go, entering our world at the sorcerer’s command; a half-buried piano (which may also be a portal to the nether world) with many mechanical applications around its casing; mysterious lanterns suspended from the ceiling that rise and fall for various purposes (not least of which is to brighten or darken the surroundings); and a huge vase from which flowers sprout instantaneously. (The set is crisscrossed with mysterious red string like some of Richard Foreman’s early environments.) It’s more like a spooky attic in an enchanted mansion than a dank bat cave, perhaps, but Pridamant is quickly convinced that anything can happen here, as on Prospero’s island, and I was more than willing to go along and, as Kushner wants, “suspend your disbelief and suspend your belief as well.” Susan Hilferty’s 17th-century costumes are at once theatrical and dream-like.
The performances are universally good, though there are clear standouts among the cast. The wizard Alcandre, usually a male role, is here played by the wonderful Lois Smith whom I last saw at Signature as Carrie Watts in Horton Foote’s The Trip to Bountiful in December 2005. I don’t think Smith can deliver anything less than a credible and warm performance, and she does here as a sort of maternal witch, if that’s a possible concept. (I suspect that casting the part with a woman, especially one as innately sympathetic as Smith, softens the character that appears to be written as a cynic and misanthrope. I mean, who else lives in a cave with only a deaf-mute servant? Really!) It works well enough here and Smith keeps the pressure on Pridamant to see the hatefulness of his actions toward his teenaged son so long ago. Her natural empathy also makes Alcandre’s final lines about theater, love, and illusion—which are really just romantic claptrap—almost believable.
Pridamant is played by another vet, David Margulies, a former teacher of mine from several decades ago. (Brantley remarked that together, Smith’s and Margulies’s “combined years on the stage total more than a century.” I suppose that’s accurate, if a little harsh.) I last saw David on stage in Tina Howe's Chasing Manet for Primary Stages in April 2009. He’s a little idiosyncratic as an actor—not enough to approach mannered, but he’s recognizable to me instantly, especially, since in this case he enters in partial darkness and covered by a large hat, by his voice. (David’s an old-school stage actor, despite his film and TV credits: he uses his voice not only to help create character and circumstances, but to project them to the back row of the house. You never miss one of his lines.) A true character actor, David can make any role unique, substantial, and believable no matter how eccentric or peculiar, and that includes Pridamant. (I think especially of his work in Comedians and Zalmen or The Madness of God.) While this man is the definition of bad fatherhood, David makes him worthy of sympathy even at the last moment when he balks at going to Paris to reconcile with his son. David’s Pridamant is so befuddled and confused, not only by the scenes Alcandre has set before him but because he just hasn’t ever understood what he’s done to his son or what it means to be a father, that it’s almost reasonable that he wouldn’t know what to do next. David here combines bluster and self-delusion in such a way that it becomes a whole new emotion. Just as Lois Smith makes Alcandre a sort of tough-love teacher rather than a sadistic cynic, David makes Pridamant almost a victim rather than an abuser.
The standouts, however, aren’t these vets. Abetted by Kushner’s writing (he created the characters that are the platform for the performances), another old hand and a newer talent stand in the spotlight, so to speak. Peter Bartlett, whose own career goes back to the ‘60s, is Matamore, a braggart, loony aristocrat with a rubbery face that suggests Jack Gilford when he did his bubbling oatmeal gag. Matamore shuts out the reality of the world to perpetuate the fantasy realm in which he’s a great warrior and lover and Bartlett makes you feel he may even have the right tack for Kushner’s funhouse-mirror universe. When Matamore’s inner world is pierced by the truth, the crestfallen Bartlett resembles nothing more than a bereft puppy, upon which he becomes a desolate hermit (and escapes inside that magical piano). But Bartlett could be performing in his own play, Matamore’s world is so self-contained. As a series of maids and confidantes, Merritt Wever has so totally captured the feeling of Kushner’s alternate universe that above all the other actors, she shone. She does tart extremely becomingly! Though we learn that the people Alcandre has conjured for Pridamant are actors in plays, the others project a tentativeness that told me they were acting, playing parts created for them. Wever is of that world, whether conversing with her mistress or the young swain, or delivering soliloquies and asides for our benefit. (I don’t know if Wever’s ever done Maria in Twelfth Night, but she’d be a natural. I bet she'd make a terrific Beatrice in Much Ado, too.)
(There seems to be an invasion of New York theater this season by members of the Nurse Jackie production company. Edie Falco—Nurse J her own self—was on Broadway with the recently-closed House of Blue Leaves; Rajiv Joseph, a writer on the show, had two plays on New York City stages, including his current Broadway début, Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo; and now Merritt Wever in The Illusion, who plays Nurse Zoey on the Showtime series. The show tapes and is set in the city.)
The other cast members—Henry Stram mostly as Alcandre’s put-upon Amanuensis, Finn Wittrock as Pridamant’s son and the young lover in the visions, Amanda Quaid as the high-born maiden, and Sean Dugan as the swain’s rival—all take on the multiple roles with energy and verve. Wittrock and Dugan even engage in a rapier-and-dagger duel (excitingly choreographed by fight director Rick Sordelet). Getting to play three different Renaissance parts like that—a commedia role, a Restoration-like romantic farce, and a tragedy—in one production must be an actor’s dream gig, and I’d bet this is a popular script for college theaters—or it should be. Director Mayer needed to have tightened the performances a tad to keep them from seeming like late rehearsals or scene-study acting—not quite off, but not finished. (I’m being generous here: another possibility is that the actors just aren’t experienced enough with classical roles to be comfortable with period characters like these and are still figuring out the style. They sometimes seemed to be playing Naturalism rather than Neoclassicism. Among the younger actors and the director, only Wittrock lists a number of classical roles in his program bio.) Mayer also didn’t really reconcile the duality of Kushner’s script. The writer said he loves the “doubleness” of magic, and his play has a dual dynamic as well: the fantasy of the illusions and the sincerity and truth of the Alcandre-Pridamant interludes. The production becomes segmented at the joints and Mayer never found a way to segue from one into the other without a jolt and change of gears.
The interstitial scenes between Pridamant and Alcandre only seem to attenuate the proceedings since they are far less active and more cerebral than the visions. At the risk of diminishing the characters played by Margulies and Smith, for all the good work those actors do, theatricality demands that the play move more quickly from illusion to illusion without so much delay. The greatest deficit to this production, though, isn’t in the performances at all, but in Kushner’s adaptation. I don’t know how long Corneille’s original runs, but the almost-2½-hour length of The Illusion is at least 20 minutes too much. I said that Kushner was besotted with language, an attribute evident in all three plays in the Signature’s season. (Angels took two plays totaling over seven hours and IHG was 3½ hours long.) He really needs someone to snap him out of his logorrhea—he needs an editor. First, the dramatist added a whole scene to the French original (one so long it had to be split between act one and act two), then each of the scenes goes on way too long and could all stand some serious trimming. The New Yorker sums Kushner’s weakness up nicely: “[A]s a genre parodist, he is nimble but lacking in urgency. . . . [The Illusion is] the work of a poet in search of his true subject.”
[The Illusion marks not only the last show of the Signature Theatre’s Tony Kushner season, the company’s 20th, but the final production at its longtime base, the Peter Norton Space at 555 W. 42nd Street. If all goes according to plans, the Signature Theatre Company will reopen in February 2012 in its brand-new, Frank Gehry-designed space, the Signature Center, housing three theaters, two rehearsal studios, and administrative offices, at 440 W. 42nd Street, within the new highrise building that will be known as MiMA (for “Middle of Manhattan”), occupying an entire city block on 42nd Street between 9th and 10th Avenues. Signature’s first Residency One playwright in the new Signature Center will be Athol Fugard.]
Showing posts with label David Margulies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label David Margulies. Show all posts
01 July 2011
30 April 2009
'Chasing Manet'
On Thursday, 16 April, my friend Diana and I went to 59E59 to see the last of our subscription shows at Primary Stages, the world première of Tina Howe's Chasing Manet. I'm not a big fan of Howe--not that I have anything against her work, I just don't follow it much. I think the last thing of hers I saw was Coastal Disturbances with Tim Daly (brother of Tyne) and a then-unknown Annette Bening, a good many years ago. (I remember that I saw it at the time I did an interview with Carole Rothman, co-artistic director of Second Stage and director of the production. I was editing Directors Notes, a newsletter for directors/artistic directors, at the time. That was way back in the middle '80s.) The Times had already run its review of Manet, of course, and it was middling, though Ben Brantley had some good things to say about Jane Alexander's acting and that of her stage partner, Lynn Cohen. A feature on Howe's long friendship with Alexander had appeared in the Times the day before and it had hinted at some aspects of the play that didn't bode well for me, so I guess I was primed to read what Brantley said the next day. As my friends already know, I have a problem with Brantley's reviews and I distrust his evaluations, but this case seemed like the adage about the stopped clock.
I'm sad to report that both Times pieces were right. (The article on the friendship wasn't meant to be an evaluation of the production; it just let some kitties out the sack.) Chasing Manet, which is old-fashioned dramaturgy, a well-made play, just isn't terribly exciting, either dramatically or theatrically. One review quipped that it's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest meets The Golden Girls--the TV comedy came up a lot in coverage--and I'd agree to an extent--though I'd add Heroes, I think. It's simplistic, but not inaccurate. Like Heroes, Manet's a study of the loneliness of age and the response of not going gentle into the night (with apologies to Dylan Thomas, whoever he was). As a theme, even ignoring the recent Heroes, that's been pretty well worked over, I think. There are scores of plays, movies, and TV shows that dissect that aspect of life from just about every angle and unless the writer has a really new perspective to jig things up some, she's covering well-plowed ground. The best acting in the world probably won't liven that up a whole lot. (I guess I could really just stop here, couldn't I? But I'm logorrheic, so I won't.)
Chasing Manet is the story of Catherine Sargent, a once-famous modernist painter, who now lives in the Mount Airy Nursing Home in the Bronx ("where they have that vulgar cheer")--Riverdale, her son emphatically reminds her--because, among her other ailments, she is virtually blind. The matriarch of a patrician Boston family, she is a cousin of John Singer Sargent and was once a lover of André Malraux. Her son, Royal Lowell, has installed her in this residence so she can be nearer to him (though he doesn't visit as often as he planned). Royal's something of a disappointment to Catherine: he's a professor at Columbia where, instead of writing poetry, he just teaches it. Catherine chants, "Out! Out! I want out!" and there's no place she'd rather go off to than the Paris of her youth and her dreams. When the play opens, her previous roommate has just died during the night, and Catherine gets a new one, a Jewish woman named Rennie with a swiss-cheese memory and focus. (She insists Rennie's short for Ramona, but her daughter keeps reminding her that that's her mother's name.) Rennie suffers from dementia and hallucinates; she thinks she's at a hotel and spends a lot of her time in conversation with her deceased husband, Herschel. Catherine persuades Rennie to act as her accomplice in an escape to Paris on the QE2: Rennie will be Catherine's eyes; Catherine will be Rennie's legs. (I won't say whether they succeed--unless you decide you're never going to see the play and insist I give away the ending.)
The two main characters are polar opposites, which seems quite contrived. Catherine is taciturn, erudite, aristocratic, self-centered, somewhat arrogant, depressed, and lonely. She spends the first several minutes of the play asleep in a near-fetal posture with her face to the wall. She's a little misanthropic, but though she says little most of the time, she has all her wits. Her body is failing, but her mind still works fine. Rennie, on the other hand, is loquacious, happy, friendly, loving and loved, and comfortably middle class. She's confined to a wheelchair or, for short distances, a walker, but it's her mind that's failing more than her body. But she's always surrounded by family who come to visit in packs. Just about every characteristic that's displayed is made a study in contrasts: Catherine dresses in a white satin nightgown--Rennie is partial to cotton flowered prints, sort of a Jewish Edith Bunker; Catherine wears her snow white hair long and flowing--Rennie is never without a hat over her nebbishy gray mop; Catherine is elegant--Rennie is dowdy-cute.
It turns out that much of this is drawn from Howe's own life and family. Catherine, a character the playwright has penned before in different guises, is based on Howe's Aunt Maddy but salted with aspects of a family friend, Margaret Holland Sargent, who was, in fact, a distant relative of the famous American painter and who dumped her husband in Paris. In the 1980s, when the play is set, Aunt Maddy was confined to a home in the same New York neighborhood as Catherine and she also kept to her bed as Howe and her brother visited in attempts to comfort her--much as Royal tries to cheer his mother in the play. At the same time, Howe's husband's 100-year-old uncle, a Jew like Rennie, was in an assisted-living residence where his family would gather by the dozens and gossip, eat, joke, and tell family stories. Furthermore, Howe and Alexander were college chums at Sarah Lawrence where Alexander directed and then appeared in Howe's first play, Closing Time. After graduation in 1959, the two pals sailed together for Europe, Alexander going off to Edinburgh (to study math--she was going to be a computer programmer!), but Howe, like her heroine four decades earlier, headed for Paris and the Sorbonne (to study philosophy). In Paris, as Catherine Sargent was drawn to the Louvre and Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe, Howe was taken by Ionesco's The Lesson and The Bald Soprano (which had opened in 1957 at the Théatre de la Huchette and are still running there today). Howe is recorded as having proclaimed, "It changed my life. It was like a bolt of lightening going through my head." (Actually, I can imagine a little of that: I was knocked on my ass the first time I saw Waiting for Godot at my college theater a few years after Howe had her epiphany in Paris. I saw my first Ionesco, Exit the King, a few years later at the same theater.)
Anyway, it seems Howe is doing a lot of recycling for Chasing Manet: her life, her family and in-laws, and previous plays. Maybe that's part of the problem. When I wrote about Charles Busch's Third Story, I complained that he had too many balls in the air because he seemed to have done a little house-cleaning in his file of unused plot ideas. I think Howe may have done the same thing--pulled together a whole bunch of ideas she wanted to use one day and put them all into one play. They only fit together with a lot of hammering and wrenching.
As I said, I'm not a fan of Howe's work, so I don't have the continuity to make generalizations, but according to most of the reviews and commentary, her most frequent theme is the celebration of "human (and particularly female) eccentricity and willfulness." According to Howe's own statement, "The play is about all those far-flung journeys of the departing soul, [the] longing for adventure, movement, for something else." The two most dramatic moments in the play, both monologues, are about striking out and experiencing the most profound moment in one's life. Catherine explains to the family of Rennie her favorite painting, Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe, a copy of which hangs over her bed--and which she says has always been with her as a talisman. With great passion, Catherine shows them that it was not the nude woman in the painting that was shocking, but the nude woman in the context of the family picnic, that she was so casually out of place. “It wasn’t the fact of her nakedness that was so shocking, but its implausibility,” Catherine tells her attentive audience. “Placing a naked woman in a public place sounded the call for artistic freedom, telling the artist he could paint not only what he wanted, but how." I suspect that was how the Ionescos had made the playwright-to-be feel when she first saw them 50 years ago. I think it's also meant to be the play's statement of its own theme.
The other poetic moment, delivered by David Margulies (an actor who was once one of my teachers at Rutgers a little over 30 years ago) as Henry, a near-silent patient who has up to this point uttered only variations on "I need help!" Suddenly he snaps into a riveting monologue that reveals he was an archeologist who discovered a mystical treasure at a dig in the Fertile Crescent. He launches into a passionate reverie of how he saw “flying dinosaurs singing actual lyrics.” Like Catherine and the Manet, this is Henry's transcendent moment, the one that's emblematic of how we're all supposed to live, but while Catherine's lecture on Manet has a rationale within the play, as wonderful as Henry's speech is as a piece of dramatic writing, it is a set piece--dropped in to an otherwise arbitrary scene of residents in an art therapy session. It comes out of nowhere, astonishes us for a moment, and then disappears, leaving no repercussions. (I'll bet it shows up in a lot of acting classes and audition sessions, though!)
As far as the production is concerned, I can't say that director Michael Wilson did anything wrong. The problems I had with the play are in the script, not in the staging. I don't believe Wilson could have done a better job, even if he didn't really do anything noteworthy or remarkable. The work of the cast is fine, so Wilson discharged that part of his job perfectly well. The set (designed by Tony Straiges with lighting by Howell Binkley), which is an open view of Catherine and Rennie's room and the L-shaped hallway downstage and stage right, is overshadowed with wheelchairs hanging from the ceiling--the one truly absurdist touch in an otherwise conventional play. (If Ionesco had such a profound impact on Howe, I'd hope his influence would shake up her dramaturgy more.) The set functions well enough, though it does make the therapy scenes, played in the downstage "hallway" area, a little cramped and unlocalized.
As for the acting, the five-actor ensemble who play all the other patients, the attendants and staff, and Rennie's visitors, are fine. The characters they have to play are often sketchy and flat, but each cast member finds at least one moment where she or he can fill out the outlines, like David Margulies's memory speech. On the whole, though, not much is demanded of them except quick costume changes and distinct vocal characterizations. (Vanessa Aspillaga, for instance, changes accents: she's a Latina as Esperanza, the attendant, and French as Marie-Claire, the art therapist. It's not subtle, but it does the trick.) Jack Gilpin, as Catherine's son Royal, has a thankless role: it's his job to stand in Catherine's room and let her scold him for being ineffectual. He plays three other roles, but Royal is his principal assignment. The two leads, of course, have more substantial fare to chew on.
I know I've seen Lynn Cohen before--I recognize her cherubic face from somewhere, but I can't begin to place her. (It turns out I haven't seen any of the New York shows she lists in her bio, and though I must have seen her in some of the TV and movie work she lists, I can't picture her.) She certainly bottles up the sweetness aspect of Rennie, and the bubbliness. She's more than believable whether she's being Mrs. Malaprop ("We create a division--then we make a break for it while everyone's distilled," she says to Catherine when they begin to plan their escape), chatting with Herschel, or talking about a dip in the hotel pool. Rennie's a little like Estelle Getty's part in Golden Girls in that she slips in and out of the conventional world. Sophia Petrillo couldn't censor her thoughts, which she spoke uncontrollably; Rennie can't distinguish between reality and her delusions and pops in and out of lucidity in an instant. Cohen handles this perfectly and makes it plausible, not to mention often funny. The problem is--and this isn't Cohen's fault--the laughs are cheap. In fact, they're much like Getty's on TV--the sight of a cute little old lady behaving irrationally is funny the way 12-year-olds find potty jokes funny. Mark Twain, it's not!
Finally, Jane Alexander. She's nothing if not professional, and she takes Catherine and runs with her. Her work on stage can't be faulted as far as I'm concerned. She makes the curmudgeonly Catherine not just believable but sympathetic and intriguing. The character's not one-note, but she isn't more than three or four, and Alexander wrings all the variety she can out of them. She does her friend proud--only Howe has let her down. The character doesn't really warrant the star-quality that Alexander brings to it. Tennessee Williams had a thing about Alma Winemiller--he identified with her and couldn't let her go. He wrote two plays for her, Summer and Smoke and then Eccentricities of a Nightingale. Howe has a comparable attraction for Catherine or Maddy or whatever Howe names the character, but while Williams gave his character two good vehicles (some would say at least one of them great), Howe has relegated Catherine to a contrived, middling, shallow little work, not worthy of her or the theme she articulates. (I wonder if this is why I've never become a fan of Howe's plays. D'ya think?)
Chasing Manet left little immediate impression on me; while I was watching it, I found my mind wandering and I had to make myself concentrate on the play. I looked at some of the other reviews on line and the Times was among the kindest. Only Back Stage actually praised the play; Show Business, the New York Post, and the Daily News were cool to cold, mostly summing the effort up as "a mildly pleasant diversion," "a strained dark comedy," and "a trivial pursuit." Variety was the absolute cruelest. Its opening line declared that "'Chasing Manet' almost makes you envy its mentally ill characters the good fortune of not knowing where they are. Everyone else in the theater is aware they're watching a bad example of the nursing home drama." It goes downhill from there!
I'm sad to report that both Times pieces were right. (The article on the friendship wasn't meant to be an evaluation of the production; it just let some kitties out the sack.) Chasing Manet, which is old-fashioned dramaturgy, a well-made play, just isn't terribly exciting, either dramatically or theatrically. One review quipped that it's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest meets The Golden Girls--the TV comedy came up a lot in coverage--and I'd agree to an extent--though I'd add Heroes, I think. It's simplistic, but not inaccurate. Like Heroes, Manet's a study of the loneliness of age and the response of not going gentle into the night (with apologies to Dylan Thomas, whoever he was). As a theme, even ignoring the recent Heroes, that's been pretty well worked over, I think. There are scores of plays, movies, and TV shows that dissect that aspect of life from just about every angle and unless the writer has a really new perspective to jig things up some, she's covering well-plowed ground. The best acting in the world probably won't liven that up a whole lot. (I guess I could really just stop here, couldn't I? But I'm logorrheic, so I won't.)
Chasing Manet is the story of Catherine Sargent, a once-famous modernist painter, who now lives in the Mount Airy Nursing Home in the Bronx ("where they have that vulgar cheer")--Riverdale, her son emphatically reminds her--because, among her other ailments, she is virtually blind. The matriarch of a patrician Boston family, she is a cousin of John Singer Sargent and was once a lover of André Malraux. Her son, Royal Lowell, has installed her in this residence so she can be nearer to him (though he doesn't visit as often as he planned). Royal's something of a disappointment to Catherine: he's a professor at Columbia where, instead of writing poetry, he just teaches it. Catherine chants, "Out! Out! I want out!" and there's no place she'd rather go off to than the Paris of her youth and her dreams. When the play opens, her previous roommate has just died during the night, and Catherine gets a new one, a Jewish woman named Rennie with a swiss-cheese memory and focus. (She insists Rennie's short for Ramona, but her daughter keeps reminding her that that's her mother's name.) Rennie suffers from dementia and hallucinates; she thinks she's at a hotel and spends a lot of her time in conversation with her deceased husband, Herschel. Catherine persuades Rennie to act as her accomplice in an escape to Paris on the QE2: Rennie will be Catherine's eyes; Catherine will be Rennie's legs. (I won't say whether they succeed--unless you decide you're never going to see the play and insist I give away the ending.)
The two main characters are polar opposites, which seems quite contrived. Catherine is taciturn, erudite, aristocratic, self-centered, somewhat arrogant, depressed, and lonely. She spends the first several minutes of the play asleep in a near-fetal posture with her face to the wall. She's a little misanthropic, but though she says little most of the time, she has all her wits. Her body is failing, but her mind still works fine. Rennie, on the other hand, is loquacious, happy, friendly, loving and loved, and comfortably middle class. She's confined to a wheelchair or, for short distances, a walker, but it's her mind that's failing more than her body. But she's always surrounded by family who come to visit in packs. Just about every characteristic that's displayed is made a study in contrasts: Catherine dresses in a white satin nightgown--Rennie is partial to cotton flowered prints, sort of a Jewish Edith Bunker; Catherine wears her snow white hair long and flowing--Rennie is never without a hat over her nebbishy gray mop; Catherine is elegant--Rennie is dowdy-cute.
It turns out that much of this is drawn from Howe's own life and family. Catherine, a character the playwright has penned before in different guises, is based on Howe's Aunt Maddy but salted with aspects of a family friend, Margaret Holland Sargent, who was, in fact, a distant relative of the famous American painter and who dumped her husband in Paris. In the 1980s, when the play is set, Aunt Maddy was confined to a home in the same New York neighborhood as Catherine and she also kept to her bed as Howe and her brother visited in attempts to comfort her--much as Royal tries to cheer his mother in the play. At the same time, Howe's husband's 100-year-old uncle, a Jew like Rennie, was in an assisted-living residence where his family would gather by the dozens and gossip, eat, joke, and tell family stories. Furthermore, Howe and Alexander were college chums at Sarah Lawrence where Alexander directed and then appeared in Howe's first play, Closing Time. After graduation in 1959, the two pals sailed together for Europe, Alexander going off to Edinburgh (to study math--she was going to be a computer programmer!), but Howe, like her heroine four decades earlier, headed for Paris and the Sorbonne (to study philosophy). In Paris, as Catherine Sargent was drawn to the Louvre and Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe, Howe was taken by Ionesco's The Lesson and The Bald Soprano (which had opened in 1957 at the Théatre de la Huchette and are still running there today). Howe is recorded as having proclaimed, "It changed my life. It was like a bolt of lightening going through my head." (Actually, I can imagine a little of that: I was knocked on my ass the first time I saw Waiting for Godot at my college theater a few years after Howe had her epiphany in Paris. I saw my first Ionesco, Exit the King, a few years later at the same theater.)
Anyway, it seems Howe is doing a lot of recycling for Chasing Manet: her life, her family and in-laws, and previous plays. Maybe that's part of the problem. When I wrote about Charles Busch's Third Story, I complained that he had too many balls in the air because he seemed to have done a little house-cleaning in his file of unused plot ideas. I think Howe may have done the same thing--pulled together a whole bunch of ideas she wanted to use one day and put them all into one play. They only fit together with a lot of hammering and wrenching.
As I said, I'm not a fan of Howe's work, so I don't have the continuity to make generalizations, but according to most of the reviews and commentary, her most frequent theme is the celebration of "human (and particularly female) eccentricity and willfulness." According to Howe's own statement, "The play is about all those far-flung journeys of the departing soul, [the] longing for adventure, movement, for something else." The two most dramatic moments in the play, both monologues, are about striking out and experiencing the most profound moment in one's life. Catherine explains to the family of Rennie her favorite painting, Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe, a copy of which hangs over her bed--and which she says has always been with her as a talisman. With great passion, Catherine shows them that it was not the nude woman in the painting that was shocking, but the nude woman in the context of the family picnic, that she was so casually out of place. “It wasn’t the fact of her nakedness that was so shocking, but its implausibility,” Catherine tells her attentive audience. “Placing a naked woman in a public place sounded the call for artistic freedom, telling the artist he could paint not only what he wanted, but how." I suspect that was how the Ionescos had made the playwright-to-be feel when she first saw them 50 years ago. I think it's also meant to be the play's statement of its own theme.
The other poetic moment, delivered by David Margulies (an actor who was once one of my teachers at Rutgers a little over 30 years ago) as Henry, a near-silent patient who has up to this point uttered only variations on "I need help!" Suddenly he snaps into a riveting monologue that reveals he was an archeologist who discovered a mystical treasure at a dig in the Fertile Crescent. He launches into a passionate reverie of how he saw “flying dinosaurs singing actual lyrics.” Like Catherine and the Manet, this is Henry's transcendent moment, the one that's emblematic of how we're all supposed to live, but while Catherine's lecture on Manet has a rationale within the play, as wonderful as Henry's speech is as a piece of dramatic writing, it is a set piece--dropped in to an otherwise arbitrary scene of residents in an art therapy session. It comes out of nowhere, astonishes us for a moment, and then disappears, leaving no repercussions. (I'll bet it shows up in a lot of acting classes and audition sessions, though!)
As far as the production is concerned, I can't say that director Michael Wilson did anything wrong. The problems I had with the play are in the script, not in the staging. I don't believe Wilson could have done a better job, even if he didn't really do anything noteworthy or remarkable. The work of the cast is fine, so Wilson discharged that part of his job perfectly well. The set (designed by Tony Straiges with lighting by Howell Binkley), which is an open view of Catherine and Rennie's room and the L-shaped hallway downstage and stage right, is overshadowed with wheelchairs hanging from the ceiling--the one truly absurdist touch in an otherwise conventional play. (If Ionesco had such a profound impact on Howe, I'd hope his influence would shake up her dramaturgy more.) The set functions well enough, though it does make the therapy scenes, played in the downstage "hallway" area, a little cramped and unlocalized.
As for the acting, the five-actor ensemble who play all the other patients, the attendants and staff, and Rennie's visitors, are fine. The characters they have to play are often sketchy and flat, but each cast member finds at least one moment where she or he can fill out the outlines, like David Margulies's memory speech. On the whole, though, not much is demanded of them except quick costume changes and distinct vocal characterizations. (Vanessa Aspillaga, for instance, changes accents: she's a Latina as Esperanza, the attendant, and French as Marie-Claire, the art therapist. It's not subtle, but it does the trick.) Jack Gilpin, as Catherine's son Royal, has a thankless role: it's his job to stand in Catherine's room and let her scold him for being ineffectual. He plays three other roles, but Royal is his principal assignment. The two leads, of course, have more substantial fare to chew on.
I know I've seen Lynn Cohen before--I recognize her cherubic face from somewhere, but I can't begin to place her. (It turns out I haven't seen any of the New York shows she lists in her bio, and though I must have seen her in some of the TV and movie work she lists, I can't picture her.) She certainly bottles up the sweetness aspect of Rennie, and the bubbliness. She's more than believable whether she's being Mrs. Malaprop ("We create a division--then we make a break for it while everyone's distilled," she says to Catherine when they begin to plan their escape), chatting with Herschel, or talking about a dip in the hotel pool. Rennie's a little like Estelle Getty's part in Golden Girls in that she slips in and out of the conventional world. Sophia Petrillo couldn't censor her thoughts, which she spoke uncontrollably; Rennie can't distinguish between reality and her delusions and pops in and out of lucidity in an instant. Cohen handles this perfectly and makes it plausible, not to mention often funny. The problem is--and this isn't Cohen's fault--the laughs are cheap. In fact, they're much like Getty's on TV--the sight of a cute little old lady behaving irrationally is funny the way 12-year-olds find potty jokes funny. Mark Twain, it's not!
Finally, Jane Alexander. She's nothing if not professional, and she takes Catherine and runs with her. Her work on stage can't be faulted as far as I'm concerned. She makes the curmudgeonly Catherine not just believable but sympathetic and intriguing. The character's not one-note, but she isn't more than three or four, and Alexander wrings all the variety she can out of them. She does her friend proud--only Howe has let her down. The character doesn't really warrant the star-quality that Alexander brings to it. Tennessee Williams had a thing about Alma Winemiller--he identified with her and couldn't let her go. He wrote two plays for her, Summer and Smoke and then Eccentricities of a Nightingale. Howe has a comparable attraction for Catherine or Maddy or whatever Howe names the character, but while Williams gave his character two good vehicles (some would say at least one of them great), Howe has relegated Catherine to a contrived, middling, shallow little work, not worthy of her or the theme she articulates. (I wonder if this is why I've never become a fan of Howe's plays. D'ya think?)
Chasing Manet left little immediate impression on me; while I was watching it, I found my mind wandering and I had to make myself concentrate on the play. I looked at some of the other reviews on line and the Times was among the kindest. Only Back Stage actually praised the play; Show Business, the New York Post, and the Daily News were cool to cold, mostly summing the effort up as "a mildly pleasant diversion," "a strained dark comedy," and "a trivial pursuit." Variety was the absolute cruelest. Its opening line declared that "'Chasing Manet' almost makes you envy its mentally ill characters the good fortune of not knowing where they are. Everyone else in the theater is aware they're watching a bad example of the nursing home drama." It goes downhill from there!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)