'Belleville' (Studio Theatre, Washington, DC)

For the third (and penultimate) show in my September Series this year, my mother and I went downtown to the Logan Circle area of Washington to catch a matinee of Amy Herzog’s next-to-latest play, Belleville, at the Studio Theatre on Sunday, 21 September.  Performed without intermission in the Metheny Theatre, a 200-seat thrust space, the hour-and-forty-five-minute Belleville opened under the direction of Studio artistic director David Muse on 3 September and was scheduled to run until 12 October.  

Commissioned by the Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut, Belleville had its première there in 2011.  (An earlier version, called The Doctor’s Wife—which the playwright discarded—was commissioned by Yale Rep in 2007.)  Two years later, Belleville was staged at the New York Theatre Workshop in the East Village, receiving a nomination in 2013 for the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play; later that year, Chicago’s renowned Steppenwolf Theatre Company staged the play.  (All three productions were directed by Anne Kauffman.)  The play was also a finalist for the 2013 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for women playwrights who write in English.  Belleville is Herzog’s third major production as a playwright (and the second at the Studio Theatre, following 4000 Miles in March through May last year).

A graduate of the Yale School of Drama (Master of Fine Arts, 2007), where she studied with playwrights Richard Nelson and John Guare, and Jim Nicola, artistic director of the New York Theatre Workshop, Herzog was born in New Jersey 35 years ago but lives in Brooklyn.  (I have a report on ROT of Nelson’s That Hopey Changey Thing, also at the Studio Theatre, posted on 15 December 2013.)  She turned to playwriting after having trained as an actor as a Yale undergrad, which may have influenced her writing.  In Belleville, the character of Abby says, “To be an actor you have to love to suffer, and I only like to suffer”; this may reveal something of why Herzog made the switch to writing.  She began composing plays after she graduated from Yale College (Class of ’00), starting with the 10-minute script Granted (2001).  Never having taken any writing courses before, Herzog started taking a playwriting class at Columbia University later that same year.  “I always thought of myself as a writer,” she’s said, “but not because I was actually writing.”  While at Columbia, the budding dramatist wrote In Translation (which she calls “this horrible play that I hope no one ever sees”) that gained her entrance into Yale Drama in 2003.  Her previous major works are After the Revolution, produced in 2010 by the Williamstown Theater Festival in Williamstown, Massachusetts, in 2010, and 4000 Miles, a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, was débuted by Lincoln Center Theater at The Duke on 42nd Street in New York City in 2011.  The dramatist’s fourth script, The Great God Pan, premièred at New York’s Playwrights Horizons in 2012.  Herzog has taught playwriting at Bryn Mawr and Yale. 

In her first two professional plays, Herzog mined her family history for drama, exploring secrets uncovered and surprises long buried in family lore.  She explains: “I’m interested in those moments of examination that, by necessity, come later.  I really don’t know anyone who is present and thoughtful going through their whole lives, and the things that we inherit from our families are the things that we really question.”   Of Herzog’s dramaturgy, review-writer and journalist Alexis Soloski wrote in American Theatre: “Her plays assiduously balance autobiography and fiction; personal interests and political ones; concealment and exposure.”  In Belleville, however, the playwright follows a parallel tack, but examines the misunderstandings and discoveries of a couple unrelated to her.  Studio dramaturg Lauren Halvorsen advises that “Herzog remains captured by stories of shifting understandings in our closest relationships, and the intersection of intimacy and deception.”  In his review of the NYTW début of Belleville, Time theater reviewer Richard Zoglin said: “Herzog . . . is a connoisseur of dislocation, a sympathetic chronicler of the tenuous hold we have on our ordered lives and comforting beliefs.  No one currently writing for the theater has a sharper grasp of character, or more sheer storytelling technique.”  He added of her treatment of the story of a marriage: “Herzog doesn’t write jokes, and her vision, though bleak, is neither cynical nor comforting.” 

Zack (Jacob H Knoll) and Abby (Gillian Williams), a young American couple—they’re both 28—are living the ex-pat life in the multiethnic, artsy neighborhood of Belleville in the City of Love—or is it the City of Light?; Abby isn’t sure which.  (Belleville, which means “beautiful town” in French, is a little like SoHo or Chelsea in Manhattan or some neighborhoods in Brooklyn like Bushwick.  Perhaps a more apt comparison is to the Logan Circle neighborhood in Washington, the home of the Studio Theatre.)  She’s teaching yoga and he’s working for Doctors Without Borders to develop a cure for pediatric AIDS.  What could be more romantic or more fun?  But there are secrets just below the surface and we can see almost immediately that this idyll isn’t quite what it ought to be.  It starts with an awkward moment when Abby returns early from her yoga class—no one showed up—and after dropping her shopping bags and yoga mat and shedding her jacket and such, enters the bedroom (from which we hear some suspicious moans) and utters a scream.  (Yes, we all know what Herzog wants us to think’s going on!)  Zack’s home from work when he’s not supposed to be and Abby catches him indulging in a little online porn and self-gratification.  As the couple begins the delicate dance of skirting the truth—not just about the afternoon surprise, but their whole life together, starting from when Abby proposed to Zack in college—we learn lots of secrets, not all of which are innocent or harmless.  Also embroiled, however reluctantly, in the deceptions and their repercussions are Zack and Abby’s landlord, Alioune (Maduka Steady), a Senegalese-born Parisian, and his French-born wife, Amina (Joy Jones).  

The playwright teases out the hidden truths in small increments like a hermetically-sealed thriller—in fact, some of them are never revealed.  According to dramaturg Halvorsen, Herzog watched suspense movies like Suspicion (1941, directed by Alfred Hitchcock) and Gaslight (1944, George Cukor) as research to see “exactly how many times does something get mentioned, and when is too much.”  I won’t reveal the details—the play only runs an hour-and-three-quarters; if I told you what happens, there’d be nothing left to discover!—but suffice it to say that the young lovers are co-dependents and co-enablers.  (The press packet given to publishing reviewers apparently contained a note admonishing journalists not to disclose any of the reveals in Belleville.)  It doesn’t end well, revealing, according to the theater’s promo, “the terrifying, profound unknowability of our closest relationships” (the theme, also, of Herzog’s family-history plays as well).

I’d never seen one of Herzog’s plays before Belleville, so I’ll backpedal a bit.  My initial response was that she wasn’t going to be a favorite, a writer whose work I’d always make an effort to see.  The work on the production at the Studio was as good as that theater’s high standards ever are, but I was not overwhelmed with the play.  (I’ll expand on this shortly.)  But since I haven’t seen her family-based plays, which sound more intriguing because they’re founded on characters, facts, and real events to which the playwright has a visceral connection, I won’t make that a declaration.  Oddly, some of my main objections are the same as those I raised regarding Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love which I saw at Bethesda, Maryland’s, Round House Theatre a few days before Belleville (see my report posted on 6 October).  (I’ll get to this, too, though you can perhaps suss some of it out from what I’ve said earlier.)

Now, as I said, the acting, directing, and production of Studio’s Belleville were marvelous; I can’t complain about any of these aspects of what I saw.  Director Muse handled Herzog’s contrivances with credibility and directness and in so far as the performances are concerned didn’t let any of the seams rip apart.  The actors, especially Williams and Knoll as the young couple, committed to what they were doing and saying (and not saying) as fully as I believe any actors could.  Steady and Jones as the African apartment managers were equally persuasive.  (Their dialect coach, by the way, was Gary Logan—and I was convinced that Alioune was an immigrant from Dakar and Amina was born in Paris.  I assume both actors have had some French because much of their dialogue is in that language, including almost all of the final scene.  Readers of ROT may know that I finished high school in Geneva and was pretty fluent in French—including acquiring a near-native accent.)  Steady’s portrayal of a friend who wants to be loyal and supportive but has broader obligations and Jones’s more leery partner (“We don’t know you,” she reminds Zack several times) were both touching and understandable, making them the two characters that rang the truest and most believable with respect to reality.

I’ve equivocated  concerning Williams’s Abby and Knoll’s Zack, not because of the actors’ work but because even the best acting would have left holes in the characterizations that Herzog put there.  First, in reference to the problem parallel to that in Fool for Love to which I alluded, Herzog has contrived a slew of secrets for Abby and Zack to conceal which they a) can’t reveal until the play’s dramatic denouement and b) have to hint about throughout the rest of the play.  It’s entirely artificial.  In order to justify that a married couple, two people who were purportedly in love with one another as far back as college, would keep all these secrets, some of them momentous, from one another, Herzog has to add more secrets.  So she gives both Abby and Zack psychological issues that essentially only begin to surface at the point the play opens.  The hint-dropping is also artificial because it’s for our benefit, not each other’s.  So, the actors have to contend with the artificiality of keeping secrets that real people, especially (I’d hope) married people, wouldn’t really keep—or, perhaps be able to keep for very long—and at the same time leave obscure little clues around for an audience to glom onto so we remain interested in what’s up.  (I assume that this can work differently in the plays that are based on real family secrets that are uncovered decades later.  Somehow the dynamics of that seem different to me—but, then, I’m only speculating.)  

This is all a little hard to write about without revealing any of the hidden facts on which the play’s conclusion (or, really, non-conclusion) depends because I can’t give examples of how this all worked for me.  And I also acknowledge that this kind of playwriting (and screenwriting, too) is a personal bugaboo for me—I don’t like it and it drives me up a wall, but others (obviously) don’t share my point of view.  I admit that.  Doesn’t change anything, though!  I feel what I feel.  It’s why I’ve never been a fan of Pinter or Shepard, and now I have my doubts about Herzog as well.  (Okay, I’m not consistent: I like Hitchcock and Stanley Donen—Charade, one of my all-time favorite movies, and Arabesque.  Maybe it’s just not the same at the movies.  Even Herzog observed, “It’s different onstage than in film,” though she was talking about a slightly different aspect of the suspense thriller.  Of course, Belleville isn’t actually a thriller, despite the writer’s research.)

The hidden psychology is also a problem, but of a slightly dissimilar variety.  It doesn’t ring entirely true.  First of all, both Abby and Zack treat some issues as much more impactful than they probably would be outside of fiction.  In other words, they overreact to stimuli.  Yes, Herzog has set up some really big problems, but we don’t learn of them for quite a while, so the smaller matters have to loom large or the burgeoning drama won’t germinate.  Of course, we can write off this overreaction to the characters’ mental problems—which might work on paper, but dramatically, it’s circular.  It also means that what we’re watching isn’t really a play about a failing marriage built on lies and deceptions, but a kind of latter-day David and Lisa—two crazy people feeding off one another.  I don’t believe that’s what Herzog wants to write about.  Furthermore, the mental issues Herzog seems to have decreed for her main characters don’t line up with reality, either. 

My feeling about this was confirmed with clinical expertise by one of my companions at the performance.  The subscription partner of the friend of my mother’s who drove us downtown that afternoon had been a psychiatric social worker, and she explained why I may have felt there was something wrong with Abby’s and Zack’s behaviors.  Abby, according to my informant, is a psychotic, which is a serious psychological state that can turn perilous if the patient stops taking meds—which Abby has done before the play starts.  Zack, however, apparently shows symptoms of neurosis, a far less dangerous condition (which Woody Allen, for one, has made a career of as a source of comedy), yet it’s Zack who takes the most drastic actions and harbors the most momentous secret.  According to my source, his behavior is out of line with his illness, which throws the whole play out of whack.  

I confess to feeling a little defensive about this criticism because back on 19 May 2012, I posted an article called “It’s Not Real – It’s Art” in which I took a couple of theatergoers to task for complaining about two plays whose factual aspects didn’t measure up to their experiences in the respective fields.  Here I seem to be doing the same thing for which I lambasted two other critical spectators—so why shouldn’t sauce for the goose be sauce for the gander?  Maybe it was because I felt something wasn’t right before I knew there was a factual basis for my unease.  Or that the problem is fundamental to Herzog’s dramatic point, whereas the issues raised by the other detractors weren’t central to those dramas.  Or, maybe more significant theatrically, that Belleville didn’t satisfy me thematically or dramatically so what was to me inconsequential— dramatic license, say—in the other plays (both of which I’d seen and liked tremendously) was more significant and damaging in Herzog’s dramaturgy.  Shakespeare made lots of factual errors in his plays, some deliberate for poetic and dramatic purposes and some predicated on the accepted knowledge of the Elizabethan era; Ibsen, too, included erroneous facts in his scripts based on inaccurate science of the 19th century.  Few admirers of their plays, however, raise the issue because they are such magnificent dramas that the errors are piddling and unworthy of concern.  I guess I can’t give Herzog a pass on that rationale—at least not for Belleville.  

The upshot of this is that no director and actors can hope to overcome such fundamental writing deficiencies.  The cast can act up a storm and still come up short because the playwright has supplied them with faulty foundations.  A house built on sand will be uninhabitable; characters built the same way will be unsustainable.  

Let me reiterate, however, that the Studio’s creative team put together a first-class production irrespective of the drama’s ultimate success.  In addition to the acting and directing, the Belleville apartment designed by Debra Booth was both funky and charming, evoking the mythical vision of ex-pat Paris the way Herzog saw it, “the Paris of the American imagination.”  (I have some idea what that’s like: my very first trip to Europe, when I was about to turn 16, was to Paris.  It was freezing cold that December—the same time of year as Herzog’s setting—but everything about the city, from our hotel room near the Étoile to the little bistro around the corner where we ate the first night to the café where I celebrated my birthday, was magical, exotic, and wonderful.  I later found other places more to my liking—I spent my next birthday in London which became my favorite city in the world from then on—but when I returned to my U.S. school after that vacation, one teacher stopped me and said there was something different about me.  She asked where I’d been for the school break and when I told her, she smiled knowingly and said, “That’s what it is.”  The myth of Paris can do that, whether you’re a 16-year-old like me or a 20-something like Herzog.)  Booth’s apartment, with its skylights, the windows in the bathroom door, and the French windows (what else?) out to the street below, but with perfectly ordinary furnishings and precious little decoration, all warmed by Peter West’s atmospheric lighting, caught that for me.  Alex Jaeger’s costumes were less evocative, but appropriate for the displaced American twenty-somethings and their resident apartment managers.

Most published critics, both on paper and on line, seem to have agreed with me.  “All four actors are superb,” reported Rebecca J. Ritzel in Washington City Paper, then continued, “What’s problematic about the play isn’t the plot itself, but Zack and Abby’s backstory.”  In the beginning, Ritzel said, “we’ve been willing to believe how these two people’s lives arrived at their present state, and then suddenly, the exposition doesn’t make sense—from little things like dates not adding up, to some rather preposterous final lies.”  (Sounds like shorthand for what I’ve said, doesn’t it?)  In the Washington Post, Peter Marks opened by lamenting, “‘Belleville’ is the sort of ­atmospheric thriller that comes to a delicate boil under a slender flame and leaves you, after all is ominously said and done, a bit creeped out but less than sufficiently gripped.”  Marks added, “As a genre piece, ‘Belleville’ remains a work of some interest, even if it’s not among this playwright’s best.”  He complained that the play fails because “the unraveling of Zack and Abby’s bond falls back on the conventions of suspense, in an effort to intensify the stakes” and of the way it “veers uneasily from subtle to cheap theatrics.”  The resolution is “too facile,” said the Post writer, and “Herzog resorts to a rather pat formula to explain the escalating tensions.”  In the end, Marks declared, “[Y]ou’re left with the suspicion that on this occasion, this talented playwright could have found a way to affect you more deeply.”  

On MD Theatre Guide, Roger Catlin offered the opinion that the sudio’s Belleville was a “strong production” but warns audiences that though it’s “a play they might think is nuanced consideration about how much we know about our closest relationships, . . . it is eventually a straight up thriller.”  Riley Croghan succinctly summed up my own feelings on dcist: “David Muse’s direction strives to bring the uncomfortable story of a marriage falling apart with unflinching (but often flinch-inducing) realism but doesn’t fully overcome Herzog’s script, written with characters and circumstances that don’t ring quite true.”  Nonetheless, Croghan concluded that Belleville is “a suspenseful and wild emotional ride, and one well worth seeing.”  

DC Theatre Scene’s Tim Treanor declared, “In Belleville, Herzog’s characters face moron dilemmas, as in how to survive in the face of idiotic decisions,” and even though “Studio Theatre plays the hell out of it . . ., there’s no there there.”  Treanor characterizes the climactic act as “so staggeringly stupid that we lose respect not only for the character who committed the act but to the character’s partner” and “we are left with no greater understanding, no insight.”  The Studio presentation, however, was “done beautifully,” the DCTS reviewer wrote, praising even Herzog’s dialogue as “absolutely authentic,” but finally determined that “the production would be a joy to behold except that most of it is about something which isn’t all that interesting and the rest is about somebody who isn’t all that bright.”  Conversely, “The Studio Theatre’s riveting production of Belleville gives us Amy Herzog’s writing at its electrifying best,” announced John Stoltenberg, “a full-on fan and follower” of Herzog, on DC Metro Theater Arts.  Herzog not only “tackles the psychological suspense-and-thriller genre,” asserted Stoltenberg, but “she has made it her own.”  The Studio production is advanced, in the view of the DCMTA review-writer, by Muse’s “razor-sharp” direction and “the eloquent precision of the performances.” 

On Talkin’ Broadway Regional News & Reviews, Susan Berlin wrote that Herzog “gives . . . a fresh jolt” to the “eternal” question of “How well can any two people really know each other?”  The Studio production, “with a solid four-member cast,” Berlin asserted, was “smoothly directed” by Muse, who “starts naturalistically and moves by infinitesimal steps into darker territory.”  “There’s no shortage of drama with Studio Theatre’s season opener Belleville,” stated Broadway World: Washington, DC’s Benjamin Tomchik; it “may be a challenging play to sit through, but that doesn’t stop Studio Theatre from staging an exceptionally solid production.”  Herzog’s play is “a powerful piece with characters that are terrifyingly real,” wrote Tomchik.  “What’s frustrating,” the BWW reviewer continued, “is that Herzog declines to answer one final question—why did we go on this journey.”  Tomchik asked, “What, if anything, is the ultimate lesson to be taken from their experience?” and then offered, “Despite a well-crafted and well-acted production . . ., Belleville remains a frustrating work” because we ultimately “question the rationale for why we’re being brought in to watch.” 

'Cock'

I paid a visit to my mother in Bethesda, Maryland, in May and while I was there she and her theater companion had seats for a performance at Studio Theatre in the District, a theater I’ve attended and written about on a number of occasions (“Venus in Fur (Studio Theatre, Washington, D.C.),” 11 July 2011; “Torch Song Trilogy,” 5 October 2013; “That Hopey Changey Thing,” 15 December 2013).  I think it’s one of the city’s best troupes and the acting there is always superior, even if I occasionally haven’t cared for the choice of material.  This production was Cock, a British play by Mike Bartlett, which was reviewed in the Washington Post just a few days after I arrived in town and Peter Marks gave it an unqualified rave.  We  saw the matinee performance on Saturday, 31 May, in the little Milton Theatre at Studio’s Logan Circle home on 14th Street, N.W.  The production, which opened on 18 May after starting previews on the 14th, is part of Studio Theatre’s New British Invasion Festival; the production is scheduled to close on 22 June. 

Cock, whose title refers simultaneously (or serially, perhaps) to the male sex organ, the British colloquialism for “someone who can’t get anything right,” and cockfighting as a metaphor for the combative scenes of Bartlett’s play, débuted at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 2009.  It played at the Duke Theatre in New York City in 2012 (in a presentation, whose title was The Cockfight Play for advertising and PC purposes—and in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal—staged by the London director, James Macdonald, and co-produced by the Royal Court) and has been produced in Chicago, Philadelphia, Houston, Dallas, Key West, Coral Gables, Toronto, Melbourne, and Bangalore, among other locales.  The plot’s the complex story of John, who’s in a several-year relationship with a man, called simply M, yet suddenly finds himself attracted and maybe in love with a woman, W.  In a world newly rife with choices, John has to confront his at a climactic (if you will) dinner cooked by M who’s invited not only W but his father, F.  Saying Cock concerns “categorisations,” the playwright has acknowledged, “It's about sex and sexuality, fighting, falling in love, and getting things wrong.”  In the words of Variety’s London reviewer, David Benedict, Cock “is like watching [Noel Coward’s] Private Lives on fast-forward, albeit . . . with saltier language.”

Bartlett, 33, is from Oxford and has been writing plays for the Royal Court since 2007 (My Child), where he’s been a member of the prestigious Young Writers.  He’d previously written Comfort for the Old Vic’s New Voices 24 Hour Plays in 2005 and his radio play Not Talking was broadcast by the BBC in 2007; Bartlett’s also written for television (The Town, a 2012 crime series on ITV1).  Cock won the 2010 Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement In An Affiliate Theatre and his 2013 play Bull received the National Theatre Award for Best New Play; he’s won a passel of other awards and honors in his short career already.  Bartlett was Writer-In-Residence at the National Theatre in 2011 and his most recent work includes the 2014 plays An Intervention and King Charles III, a “future history play” in verse which speculates on the reign of the current Prince of Wales. 

Bartlett says he became interested in theater at 16 when he saw Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking (Royal Court Upstairs, 1996), remarking that it was “the first time I’d seen a play by a writer that wasn’t dead, or wasn’t much older.”  The Studio program states, “Much of his early work is stripped of almost all theatrical trappings—set, costumes, and props—and leans on the spectacle and surprise of argument, of the brutality of competition played out linguistically among his characters.”   On the website WhatsOnStage.com British reviewer Michael Coveney, writing about My Child in 2007, said, “What I like about Bartlett’s play is its simplicity and starkness, its realization that to make good theatre you can pare right down to basics and raw emotions, and honest dissections of relationships, like you can lacerate them.”  Stressing the “theatricality of the contemporary world,” Bartlett’s work “strips theatre of its preciousness.”  “Theatre has to appeal to people who do jobs and have lives,” says Bartlett.  Instead of writing plays “thinking about other plays,” he insists the writer should “look out the window and say, my play is about that—whatever the world is, that’s what I’m after.”

With a reputation for finding dramatic forms to address our changing reality, evident in Cock, Bartlett’s plays often deal with the symbols of modern life: widescreen TV’s, tablets, iPhones (not so evident in Cock).  Characters Tweet, text, and check social media; they go clubbing or grab a coffee at Starbucks.  But Bartlett has more on his mind than seeding his scripts with the latest computer products and pastimes.  He says he wants “to find a theatre that can reflect that [computerized] landscape . . . forms that represent what it feels like to live now.”  The incipient dramatist thought, “I don’t understand why all plays aren’t like this.  Why are so many plays set in the past?”  His earliest experiments with playwriting blended “modernity with tradition.” 

His work is also political, but not polemical, confronting such topics as the British involvement in Iraq, the baby boomer generation, corporate corruption, and complacency over climate change.  Along with contemporary subjects and themes, Bartlett is considered an innovator with form as well, sometimes borrowing techniques from TV and film.  The press consistently labels him “one of Britain['s] hottest young playwrights,” “one of the most exciting new talents to emerge in recent times,” “one of the UK's most exciting and inventive young writers,” and other similar encomiums.  Even David Muse, Studio’s artistic director and the production’s stage director, dubbed the writer “Britain’s most exciting young contemporary playwright.”  His plays, however, except for Cock and 2008’s Contractions, which was produced in 2013 by Studio (which also presented a reading of Bartlett’s 2013 Bull on 2 June), don’t seem to have had wide exposure in the U.S.  (At any rate, I was unfamiliar with Bartlett’s name or his work before this presentation.) 

Cock is a peculiar play dramaturgically, which I gather is a trademark of Bartlett’s writing.  It could be a radio script (which we’ve seen the dramatist writes)—you could easily close your eyes and get a pretty full experience of the play.  Stripped, as the program notes of most of the playwright’s work, of “theatrical trappings,” there are no props or set pieces (there is a set, which I’ll get to presently), and Alex Jaeger’s costuming is appropriate but hardly revealing.  (Though the play covers several weeks of the lives of John, M, and W, they never change clothes, which is in line theatrically with the propless staging.)  Colin K Bills’s lighting is stark and monochromatic—bright white spotlights, with a huge, square fluorescent fixture illuminating the central playing area with its cold, characterless light which all black out between scenes but otherwise never change intensity.  (There’s enough light in the house to read the program or check your watch if you like.)  It’s the illumination of a sports arena—think night baseball or football for an appropriate image—not the emotionally charged atmosphere of a dramatic reenactment of lives in turmoil; there are no shadows.  None of this would be sorely missed in a radio performance; the only true deficit would be the actors’ appearances, especially their facial expressions.  You could probably manage without that, but it would be a loss.

The play’s setting is a dirt-covered ring, which I presume is meant to resemble a cockfighting ring.  (I wouldn’t know: I’ve never seen a real one.)  The lighting is also part of this image.  The Milton’s small amphitheater stage, which is circular anyway, is backed by a raw-plywood arc with two doorways cut into it and matching wooden benches built in all along its length.  When a character is “off” (that is, say, in another room but still present), the actor may take a seat on the bench.  Occasionally, they take swigs of bottled water like fighters or wrestlers between rounds (and, I’d bet, because the actors need to wet their whistles in this performance that keeps everyone talking for 95 minutes straight).  Everything—the wood and the dirt—is monochromatic.  (The floor surrounding the dirt ring is white, but that’s no-man’s land: it’s not part of the play’s reality.)  In the program, an illustration shows what looks like a bull ring, and I assume this image is also part of the environment Bartlett, Muse, and set designer Debra Booth want to evoke. 

After each scene, staged like a sort of verbal sumo-wrestling bout, a buzzer sounds (sound design is by James Bigbee Garver) and the actors change positions in the circle—sometimes switching sides completely, sometimes just shifting a foot or two one way or another, and occasionally “shaking it out,” like athletes getting ready for another round.  (As if to carry out the sumo analogy, in one early scene, M essentially backs John to the edge of the ring until John has to quickly dodge around M to avoid stepping off the circle and “losing” the round.)  Since the actors carry no props, all action of the realistic sort is imaginary.  I don’t mean mimed or indicated—it’s left up to us to “see” what the characters are doing, with occasional brief suggestions from the dialogue.  (“Can I have more wine?”  “There.”  But no one holds up a “glass” or tilts a “bottle.”  See?  Radio play.)  Even the sex is imaginary in the same vein—with suggestive sound effects from the actors, however.  No one disrobes or even goes through the motions, even when M does a strip for John.  (The kissing is real—the rest isn’t.  Neither is any violence, such as a slap.)  I found this very interesting theatrically, and it intrigues me as a technique, but it was also a little off-putting, especially in the beginning before the convention became established. 

With so little to do on stage, the actors have to work extra hard with their bodies to put some physical life into Bartlett’s slightly expressionistic dialogue.  I can tell you from experience, acting without props and business is among the hardest work an actor has to undertake on stage (right next to doing nothing at all, possible the hardest job for an actor to do well).  The set’s innate restrictiveness—what can you do in a dirt circle, after all?—means that the cast has to rely an awful lot on their faces, and the Studio cast does a marvelous job of this.  Rarely do they mug or over-articulate an expression (it did happen here and there), but all four of the actors (Ben Cole as John, Scott Parkinson as M, Liesel Allen Yaeger as W, and Bruce Dow as F—and, by the way, except for John, these designations only appear in the program, not in the dialogue) really pulled off this difficult assignment, fleshing out the characters—as much as Bartlett’s script allows them to.  I have to add that Parkinson has an extraordinarily special asset for this work: he has the most intense eyes I’ve seen on any stage recently.  They can be ordinary, no more expressive than any good actor’s, then suddenly get piercing and hard, like a hawk’s. 

As I watched the early scenes of Cock, I quickly noticed that Bartlett doesn’t actually write realistic speech.  Despite his claim to write about the world as it really is, his people don’t really speak like you and me and the folks we all know.  (Of course, neither did Tennessee Williams’s characters, Chekhov’s, Ibsen’s, Shaw’s, or Lanford Wilson’s.  It’s deceptive.)  Now, I don’t mean he sounds like Pinter or Ionesco, or Shakespeare or Marlowe.  You can be fooled for a time into thinking Bartlett’s people talk like ordinary Brits—but it won’t last for long.  (By the way, the accents slipped now and then—the dialect coach is Ashley Smith—and its region is ambiguous, but that turned out to be inconsequential.  The script could even be Americanized without harm, I think.)  But I couldn’t put my finger on what they were doing—until I finally decided to concoct my own literary style to describe what the playwright writes: expressionistic realism.  If lyric realism, what Williams wrote, is a heightened, poetic form of speech that sounds like real conversation but isn’t, then expressionistic realism is speech that seems ordinary but is more endowed with open emotion, exposed nerves than what most people utter.  Of course, this can get Bartlett’s characters into a lot of trouble—emotional honesty, no matter how elegantly expressed, is perilous.  I gather, especially if Cock is at all emblematic of Bartlett’s dramaturgy, that this is what the dramatist intends for his plays—to court danger, to test the waters of modern society, with its pitfalls and bear traps, and see how we survive, falter, cope, or founder. 

In Cock, none of the characters come out of their honesty particularly whole, no one gets what he or she wants, much less needs.  In fact, none of them ever learn what they need, let alone how to get it.  And it’s not as if they deserve to fail—no one’s venal here—it’s just not possible in Bartlett’s world for them to find happiness—or even mere satisfaction.  I guess Bartlett’s lesson (is that a terrible word?) is that in this modern world of choices and possibilities, making the right one just isn’t achievable.  It’s not just a matter that any given decision means someone gets hurt.  Every decision means everyone gets hurt—especially the chooser.  Cock starts out as a serio-comedy, with plenty of laughter (some of it embarrassed), and ends up a near tragedy: no one’s dead, but everyone’s soul is mortally wounded.

If that doesn’t daunt you, then you’re likely to like Bartlett’s play.  If it does, you should probably stay away, because Cock has a fairly painful outcome—and Bartlett offers no spoonful of sugar to help his medicine go down.  (Sorry.  I just saw Saving Mr. Banks.)  You are forewarned.

The Washington area press (I didn’t survey the London, New York, or other regional reviews) seemed fairly unanimous in its praise for Bartlett’s short play.  As I said at the outset of this report, Peter Marks pretty much raved about the play and Studio’s production in the Post.  Calling the play a “sizzling seriocomedy of straight-gay indecision,” the Post reviewer wrote, “You feel at certain knuckle-gnawing moments . . . that something is about to explode.”  The play “has the potential to propel us into the realm of the simple-minded rom-com,” Marks warned.  “But this crackling play, staged with acerbic brio at Studio Theatre by the ace director David Muse, is a far slyer work” that “falls enjoyably into line with the best drama created by other astute relationship-probers, such as Neil Labute.”  The Post writer concluded that “Muse and company bring this provocative argument to an intriguing boil.”  In the Examiner, Kyle Osborne dubbed Cock a “whip smart play” in which the lead actors are “displaying non-stop foot work that a heavyweight champ would envy.”  Osborne, however, objected that John’s “indecision will drive you crazy, mainly because Bartlett hasn’t shown us why these two smart and attractive people would put up with his bullshit.”  The Examiner review-writer acknowledged, though, that “what fun it is watching these characters throw words across the stage at each other like poisoned-tipped spears,” even as “the whole play merges into Farce” in the final scene (a characterization with which I don’t agree).  Reminding us, “You don’t have to like the characters in order to enjoy a play,” Osborne quipped that John’s indecision drove the reviewer to the point where he “was going to rush the stage and grab him by the lapels,. . . shouting, ‘Dude, just make up your f*cking mind!.’”  (That’s the Examiner’s asterisk, not mine; they used it in the play’s title, too.) 

Ian Buckwalter of Washington City Paper called Bartlett’s play “often hilarious,” the production of which at Studio is “a cockfight with M and W as preening roosters both looking to rule John’s roost.”  Buckwalter complained that John’s “paralysis is the play’s greatest hurdle, because Bartlett is trying to build an emotional narrative around a character who is unable to connect with his feelings,” making the character “maddening to watch.”  The reviewer for WCP added, however, that this is “a hurdle that Bartlett’s quick-witted style easily clears.  Even in the midst of crippling his protagonist, one can sense the playwright in the center of the ring, slyly asking, are you not entertained?”  Warning that “we need to have a firm grip on the arms of our seats, because we are in for an emotional ride,” Chuck Conconi called Cock a “tough, acerbic play” in Washington Life Magazine.  He noted the “minimalism” of both Bartlett’s writing and Muse’s direction, but also pointed out, “While mesmerizing, Bartlett’s play is painful to experience,” yet also “the kind of life-defining experience we understand and maybe even have experienced.”

On the website DC Theatre Scene, Jayne Blanchard dubbed Cock a “pugilistic, punch-drunk comedy . . . that sears you with snark while ripping your heart out.”  On the set she likens to a “Spartan arena,” Blanchard saw “three people peck and claw through this raw examination of power plays, the mystery of attraction, sexual orientation and responsibility” which is “sharpened by David Muse’s forceful direction.”  In his MD Theatre Guide notice, Elliot Lanes characterized Cock as “a thought-provoking evening of theatre” with “four great actors and a superb staging.” 

“Smart” and “bold,” Cock, said Sydney-Chanele Dawkins on DC Metro Theater Arts, is “a fresh twist on the modern day love triangle” and a “remarkable achievement of a play” of “absorbing writing” and “honesty.”  Bartlett’s “substantive amusingly, clever play,” wrote Dawkins, “is a refreshing exercise in new growth theatre” that’s “a transgressive, no-holds-barred, minimalistic, theatrical adventure to the wild side of sexual politics, competition and word slay.”  With “deft direction,” the production provides “a thrilling rollercoaster ride that not only demands your attention, it will engage and surprise you.”  Concluding that “Cock is a sharp, ripe experience,” Dawkins affirmed that Bartlett’s “incisive” play “pulls no punches.”  A few days later on the same website, John Stoltenberg promised that if he were writing “a theater review it would be an effusive rave.”  (Okay, I’m not sure what the cyber writer thought he was composing here.  Maybe like me, he figures it’s a “report.”  Fair enough.)  The production of the “riveting, tense, tightly wound script,” said the DCMT writer, is “impeccable,” all the elements “flawless.”  “I cannot recall the last time I left the theater having watched a play I found so brilliant and unnerving at the same time,” declared Stoltenberg, immersed as he was in “the extraordinary emotional/relational contest that Bartlett has devised here.”  Though “loaded with substance and insights,” the script “actually plays as a scintillating comedy.”  In the end, Stoltenberg warned, “you walk outside afterward gobsmacked by great theater.” 

I haven’t made up my mind about Bartlett yet, except to say that I want to check him out a little more.  I’m also curious where he’ll go next.  One reviewer here, Peter Marks, compared him with Neil LaBute, but LaBute’s a writer for whom I’ve never developed a fondness, so I can’t make the same assessment.  I have to reserve judgment and say only that I find Bartlett an intriguing and provocative possibility for now, someone I’ll want to watch.  I need more evidence.  I’m not even sure if I liked Cock or just found it interesting and stimulating.  If that’s inconclusive and wishy-washy on my part, then so be it.

'Venus in Fur' (Studio Theatre, Washington, D.C.)

[A few days ago, I published a report on the revival of Peter Shaffer’s 1980 hit play, Amadeus. I saw two plays while I was in Washington last month; the second was the David Ives two-character play Venus in Fur, originally staged here in New York City in the spring of 2010 at the Classic Stage Company in the East Village. Here’s my appraisal of the Studio Theatre revival of Venus in Fur.]

The day right after I accompanied my mother to the stunning revival of Amadeus at the Round House Theatre in Bethesda (see ROT, 6 July), Mom and another friend had seats for Venus in Fur at the Studio Theatre. The performance of David Ives’s long one-act on Sunday, 29 June, was also a matinee, staged in the Studio’s small second-floor space, the Milton Theatre.

For those who haven’t heard of this play from last season in New York, it’s a metatheater play: a play about a play. This one’s a little like the painters’ frequent subject, the artist and his model; it can also be seen as a twist on the Pygmalion-Galatea story. When Vanda, an actress between roles, arrives late and unscheduled for an audition, playwright-director Thomas, closing up the studio after a discouraging session, grudgingly allows her to read for his new play, an adaptation of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s 1870 novella, Venus in Furs. (Yes, he’s the guy whose name psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing borrowed to coin the term ‘masochism.’ Gives you an idea what territory we’re in.) The Austrian novella is something of a “metabook” itself: it centers on the reading of a book—a manuscript, actually. The manuscript’s the story of Severin, who’s so obsessed with Wanda—pronounced in German just like the name of the actress auditioning for the character—that he asks her to make him her slave, urging her to use him in increasingly debasing ways. “You don’t have to tell me about sadomasochism,” say Vanda in Ives’s play. “I’m in the theater.” With Thomas reading Serverin opposite Vanda, what begins as a fairly normal (if slightly—but only slightly—exaggerated) audition soon becomes a progressively seductive struggle for control. (Vanda arrives dressed in leather, wearing a dog collar, and carrying a trash bag full of props and costume pieces. Believe me, dressing the part and bringing props isn’t unheard of in the real world.) Ives shifts the action from the audition to the play-within-the-play and back again, and the actress and director engage in a game of give and take in which who gives and who takes shifts more often than the action. Gender roles are reversed (and then reversed again) in this acting tour de force, though the force (from the acting perspective, I mean) is mostly with the woman’s part. It’s no wonder that the actress who played the role Off-Broadway essentially became a star the day the reviews came out. (The actress in the D.C. production pretty much took all the reviews there, too. Vanda’s clearly the money gig in this script.)

Venus in Fur was staged in New York City from 26 January to 28 March 2010 by the Classic Stage Company at their theater on East 13th Street in the East Village. Directed by Walter Bobbie, it starred Wes Bentley as Thomas and Nina Arianda as Vanda. The reviews were generally strong, with the New York Times calling it a “tasty new comedy” and a “nifty, skillfully wrought entertainment, an enjoyable game of kitten-with-a-whip and mouse.” The New Yorker described Venus as a “wildly intelligent and sometimes frightening new play” and Back Stage, the weekly theater trade paper, asserted that “Ives turns what could have been a comic sketch into a devastatingly surreal examination of sex and power.” The New York Post said it was “exciting, but a challenge,” however, and “though filled with zingers,” reported the Daily News, Ives’s play “gets repetitive midway and leads to a lame conclusion.” (Arianda, a newcomer just out of NYU, stole almost all the reviews, won several awards for her performance, and landed the role of Billie Dawn in the recent Broadway revival of Born Yesterday starring Robert Sean Leonard and Jim Belushi. Last spring, Arianda was nominated for a Tony as best actress for that performance. She was also the subject of a recent New York Times profile by Patricia Cohen recounting her unusual background and career path: “A Storybook Ascent For One Actress,” 28 May 2011.)

Usually I start my theater reports with a critique of the play and then move into the production, ending with a description of the directing and acting. Let me turn that around this time and get right into the stage work in this 90-minute, intermissionless, one-act production at Washington’s Studio Theatre. Then we can talk about Ives’s play.

To begin with, the play demands a variation on what Timothy J. Wiles called “schizoid acting.” (The late Wiles, a professor of literature and drama at Indiana University, was the author of The Theater Event [1980].) Despite the misapplication of the word according to our understanding of schizophrenia today, this is an acting phenomenon that’s usually manifested by an actor appearing as both a performer enacting a role and a person with opinions and responses, a Brechtian performance. (It’s sometimes also called a “split” or “divided” actor.) In Venus, the actors don’t appear as themselves, but as two different characters: director Thomas, played by Christian Conn, and actress Vanda, Erica Sullivan, and the characters Severin and Wanda. This is complicated further because Conn and Sullivan aren’t just portraying Severin and Wanda, but Thomas and Vanda as Severin and Wanda—a performative palimpsest. The trick, of course, is making sure that the two sets of characters are distinctive enough to be differentiated but that the second characters, Severin and Wanda, have a recognizable component of the first, Thomas and Vanda. The ultimate burden is on the actors, of course, but both the director, David Muse, and, I gather, playwright Ives, had a hand in solving the acting problem.

Ives has indicated that when the actors are playing the diegetic roles, the characters in Thomas’s play inside Ives’s play (both plays have the same title), they speak with sham English accents to distinguish them from Thomas and Vanda. This also establishes an artificial quality to the diegetic play scenes different from the more natural scenes between the director and the actress. It was up to Muse to guide Conn and Sullivan to the right level of artificiality and keep them on the same scale, and the actors not only had to realize this dual dynamic but make the sharp break between the enacted play scenes and the outer, present-moment scenes when the actors behave realistically. Conn was saddled with two difficulties: first, his character isn’t an actor, so his performances as Severin have to be less vibrant than Vanda; second, Vanda gets all the best lines, as they say. (That this may be a scriptual imbalance is evidenced by the fact that several New York reviews gave Wes Bentley wan notices for his work in the part.) As the play unfolds, Conn’s character becomes less and less interesting except as a foil for Vanda. I don’t think Conn or Muse could have done anything with this situation; it’s endemic to the script, drawing all the attention to Vanda and, therefore, Sullivan. Thomas’s very ordinariness, which Conn had to play if the play is to work, puts him in Vanda’s shadow. Conn handled the shifts from Thomas to Severin well enough—they’re a little contrived in the text, I think—but the changes often aren’t as diametric as Vanda/Wanda’s so they’re not as showy or actorly.

Then the question becomes whether the actress playing Vanda is up to the job of carrying the play. I can’t compare Sullivan to Arianda (which is just as well), but I’ll say that Sullivan took charge of Vanda and the stage as thoroughly as Vanda took over the audition studio. She bursts into the drab little room, familiar to anyone who’s ever gone through an audition for Off-Off-Broadway or even Off-Broadway, where the amenities are fewer. I’ve been on both sides of that circumstance—as an actor and as a director hearing actors’ auditions. I’ve been in that room somewhere in New York City. I’ve also seen actors like Vanda seems to be blow into the audition, all discombobulated and disorganized, yammering about the traffic, the subways, the weather, whatever, in a whiny or braying or nasally voice. You just know they’re not going to measure up. (Believe me, in the real world, you can be as fooled as Thomas is about Vanda.) Sullivan nailed the entrance and the establishment of the character. What she went on to do, the aspect that’s not usually part of real life, was begin to intimate that the person we see isn’t necessarily the person beneath the leather bustier and rain-wet hair. (Many of us have heard the story, apparently true, of Barbra Streisand’s audition for Miss Marmelstein in I Can Get It for You Wholesale, her first Broadway try-out. She entered the stage wearing a raccoon coat and mismatched shoes, pages of sheet music falling loose behind her, and loudly chewing a mouthful of gum. She sat on a stool center stage and stuck the gum under the seat. After the audition, Arthur Laurents looked under the chair—there was no wad of gum there at all. But they remembered Streisand!) Vanda intimates that she may not be exactly what she seems (or that what she hints at might not be true), and Sullivan made you wonder where, if anywhere, the facts lay. It was a sly performance that only hinted at another reality that existed in the actress’s head and never got revealed on stage.

Sullivan attacked the role with so much verve and energy it was hard to resist her performance, even if she hadn’t done so well. (Sullivan used a quasi-New Jersey/New York accent for Vanda, and either she deliberately selected a non-specific accent—perhaps because Vanda’s putting that on, too—or Sullivan couldn’t nail an actual regional pattern. The dialect coach was Gary Logan.) She shifted back and forth, not only between Vanda, the actress, and Wanda, the dominatrix, but among several variations of, particularly, Vanda, so mercurially and so credibly that it was astonishing. (If Arianda did this better, I can’t imagine what her performance could have been like!) She pulled props and costume bits from her plastic bag like a demented Santa Claus and adjusted the lights in the studio to create just the right atmosphere—taking over the job of director, designer, and stage manager—and essentially turning the audition into her own piece of performance art. Not just Vanda, but Sullivan was in complete control of this stage at all times, as soon as she got in the room. She was by turns seductive, cajoling, teasing, joking, controlling—whatever it took to get the part—though that may not be all Vanda’s after. Conn did as good a job as an actor, playing the (ahem) straight man, letting Vanda take over the audition as Thomas, who turns over his director’s authority to the actress almost unwittingly, and then falls under the thrall of Wanda when he becomes Severin. Thomas—but not Conn—displays a whiff of uncertainty from time to time, as if events were moving too fast for the man to follow. Conn’s (as well as Ives’s and Muse’s) problem, as I said, was that the role becomes almost invisible when Vanda’s at full tilt.

According to the Studio Theatre staff, director Muse had the production moved from a larger space, the Metheny Theatre on the first floor, to the tiny Milton Theatre to keep the production intimate. The Milton’s a small thrust theater whose acting area (it’s not a raised platform) is semicircular. I’d say it seats about 200 spectators, which really is ideal for this small play. Muse kept the actors moving in the audition room, which had a chaise longue, a table and chair (for the director), a vertical pipe in the center like a stripper’s pole, and a door and a window upstage on the whitewashed plaster wall, where the light controls (of which Vanda makes frequent good use) were located. (The set was by Blythe R. D. Quinlan, lit by Michael Lincoln.) It was spare, barren, drab, shabby—and depressing if you have to spend a day there (as Thomas has by the time Vanda rushes in). Although a normal audition would probably entail the actors just sitting and reading from the script (a reader had already left by the time Vanda gets there), but I never felt as if Muse were inventing action just to keep the scenes moving. Vanda (and Ives) has taken care of the rationale for the movement, which is pretty constant and often vigorous. Given the script, it never seemed anything but natural and organic, and Muse and the cast avoided the problem I saw in the CSC production of Ives’s New Jerusalem in 2008—the need to move the actors around a thrust stage just so all three sides of the audience could see them. I said that I didn’t think Muse could have made Thomas a more engaging stage presence, but in all other respects he handled the actors nicely. (He had a good deal of help with this from Ives, who said, “I always think a playwright’s job is to let actors do their stuff.” In Venus, he gave them a solid platform on which to do that.)

This all sounds terrific, and from a purely acting perspective, it was. You could teach an acting class from this work, both from the performances on view and from the demands of the script. (You know this script will turn up in every scene study class from New York to L.A. as soon as the play’s published.) In the Washington City Paper, Chris Klimek called the play “a wickedly ingenious dark comedy” presented at the Studio with “its whip-smarts fully intact.” Klimek praised the paired performances as “a knockout” and in the Washington Post, Peter Marks labeled the production “rollicking.” But Marks added that Venus “ultimately gives itself away too cutely” and concluded, in an apt phrase: “It’s not a major work, just a smart scoopful of fun, a delectably compressed actors’ pas-de-deux . . . .” Ives’s text, though, caused problems for me and I began to lose focus about halfway through. I’ve already quoted Joe Dziemianowicz in the New York Daily News, but Marilyn Stasio said in Variety: “The wit breaks down, though, once Ives starts piling on plot contrivances . . . .” As this suggests, the drama is phony—it’s ordained by the playwright, not organic to the circumstances, and Ives attenuates the conflicts in order to fill 90 minutes. I may not always have known exactly what was coming next, but I knew another set-up was going to come in which Vanda/Wanda would take power over Thomas/Severin. How many times can we watch this and not get antsy? Ives goes over my limit, and I started to twitch in my seat. This fundamental flaw is exacerbated by the fact that an awful lot of Ives’s play is made up of scenes from Thomas’s script. While the acting was fine, the lines are taken apparently pretty much verbatim from Sacher-Masoch (I’m guessing: I’ve never read the Austrian novel) and the 19th-century language is stiff ("Your heart is a vast stone desert"; "Insolent swine! How dare you speak to me in that tone! Bring me my other shoes").

Furthermore, the play’s a comedy, but Ives wants it to say something more so he lards Thomas’s dialogue with heady theories about sexuality and gender relations. The academic tenor of these passages turns them toward lecture. These two writing weaknesses were also evident in Ives’s New Jerusalem, his drama about the heresy hearing of Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza in 17th-century Amsterdam: the playwright filled the play with discussions and debates about Spinoza’s extremely dense philosophies, turning the script into the scenario for a historical role-play rather than a drama. Venus in Fur, Ives’s comic fillip on acting and sex, then, turns into a demonstration of 19th-century gender psychology with comic interludes. I’m afraid that no amount of brilliant acting or perceptive directing can buck that up beyond, maybe, half an hour. Then it bores me and I want to move on.

[Manhattan Theatre Club has announced that Nina Arianda will return to the role of Vanda in David Ives’s Venus in Fur in a planned limited Broadway revival this fall. Walter Bobbie’s production will begin previews at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre on October 13, with an opening night in November that hasn’t been made public. Arianda’s co-star for the Broadway premiere has not been announced.]