Carole Rothman: An Interview

[Carole Rothman is co-founder and artistic director of Second Stage Theatre.  In March 1987, on the eve of the company’s Broadway début with Tina Howe’s Coastal Disturbances at Circle in the Square (4 March 1987), I interviewed her about her work.  I was accompanied on the interview by Geoffrey Shlaes, artistic director of the American Directors Institute, the organization (now defunct) that published Directors Notes, the newsletter I edited.  This interview, a condensation of the full session, was originally published in the Spring Issue (vol. 1, no. 4) of Directors Notes in 1987.

[According to its own website, Second Stage was founded in 1979 to produce “second stagings” of contemporary American plays that deserved to reach a wider audience.  The company soon expanded this mission to produce new plays by a developing corps of writers.  Over time, the troupe’s dedication to telling essential American stories in their most exciting forms has come to include genre-bending solo performances, cutting-edge theatrical events, explosive new musicals, and world and New York premieres by America’s most esteemed playwrights.

[On 20 April, the New York Times reported that Second Stage had negotiated the purchase of the Helen Hayes Theatre on Broadway, to be the sixth Broadway house owned or operated by a nonprofit organization.  This advance in the company’s status has impelled me to republish this interview from 28 years ago, when the Off-Broadway troupe had just made its Broadway début.]

Rick:  To start out: I did enjoy the show [Coastal Disturbances at Circle in the Square, directed by Rothman], but I didn’t see the earlier [Off-Broadway] incarnation [at the McGinn-Cazale Theatre, opening 19 November 1986].  Were there many changes?

Rothman:  Well, it was totally restaged for the “Sausage in the Square” [and] we changed part of the set.  At The Second Stage there was a turntable for the lifeguard stand, but it turned on itself.  This time, the lifeguard stand moves so it changes the shape of the space.  That was the original concept of the piece anyway: to really emphasize the perspective you get at a beach.

Rick:  You’ve had something of a relationship with Tina Howe.  How did that begin?

Rothman:  Tina came to see [Wendy Wasserstein’s] My Sister in This House [Park Royal Theatre, opening on 18 November 1981] which I had directed at the end.  She decided she really wanted me to direct [Painting Churches].  Then she had asked me before Painting Churches even opened if I would direct her next show.  I think Tina had been a little battered before.  She hadn’t had great experiences with directors and my way of working doesn’t necessarily fit into someone who’s wary of working with directors because I don’t allow the playwright to come during the first week of rehearsal.  Tina and I both like to go into rehearsal with a script that we feel is ready to go.

We talked a lot about the play before I went into rehearsal, and we talked every night after rehearsal.  I had a vision of the play and a concept that was my own, but I think that it meshed perfectly with what Tina wanted.

[Then] she showed [Coastal Disturbances] to me, and I saw a focus problem and a couple of other problems and she went back and rewrote it.

Shlaes:  Did any of the visual things start to come into your head at this point?

Rothman:  Yes, you know.  Tina would sometimes call me and say, “Can we do a scene where there’s a little airplane that flies across with sky-writing?”  And I’d say, “No.”  (Laughter)

She also knew that she was writing it for The Second Stage—she knew what her limitations were.  Certain stage things like, “Could we have people walk along the beach?” and “Could we see the scenery go by?”  And I said, “No.  You don’t want tricks.”

So when I got the script, it called for scene[s] in the water and all over the place—not a really good sense of flow: morning, afternoon, rainy says—everything . . . .  How was I going to deal with this script that called for all these different elements?  I came up with the idea of a turntable then the rest was easy: rehearsals were a breeze, the script had a first reading that was a dream, and the run-throughs were really wonderful.  [The set for Coastal Disturbances was designed by Tony Straiges.]

We went to the first preview—and hit disaster.  The play wasn’t working for the audience.  We [had] to make big changes during previews.  It hadn’t happened to us [before].

Rick:  How many previews did you have ahead of you?

Rothman:  We were not about to open that play until it was ready, so we previewed the play for four weeks.  It was one of those situations where you’re rehearsing a scene in the afternoon that’s going to go in two nights later.  That night you perform the old scene: you’re teching the new stuff.

Rick:  What kind of changes were you talking about?

Rothman:  We cut about twenty minutes out of it.  There were six scenes in the first act; there are now five scenes.  We put two of the scenes together—which cut out the water scene so information from that scene had to  go into another scene.  The third scene of the play was originally between  just Ariel [Joanne Camp] and Faith [Heather MacRae], and I said, “No, we’ve got to put Holly into it.”  The scene with [Holly’s] boyfriend, Andre [Ronald Guttman], got worked on right up until the last minute.  That’s the one scene that still has problems.

Shlaes:  I thought it was the major accomplishment of the piece that after all the words and ideas got out, I was left with characters and also an atmosphere of the place.

Rothman:  I don’t really want to toot my horn too much, but my major accomplishment was that I had a wonderful cast.  And I was able to do it without stars.  It was so much more fulfilling to me to be able to have Annette Bening [come] in just through auditions.  I’m really proud of that.  [Bening, who won a Tony for her role, made her stage début as Holly Dancer.  Also starring was Timothy Daly as Leo Hart]

Rick:  So Circle really didn’t put any impediments in your way to moving [Coastal Disturbances]?

Rothman:  I think that they got a kick out of having us around—there’s never been a woman director at the Circle in the Square.  When I got my contract, it was all typed in: “He will do this.”

Shlaes:  You’ve altered the course of your company now to both second productions and first productions.

Rothman:  Eight years ago, Robyn [Goodman, my partner] and I found that plays were falling between the cracks and need[ed] a second production.  What has happened over the years is that there have been fewer and fewer places for new okays to be done.  A lot of theaters are doing [second productions] now.  [Goodman and Rothman were co-artistic directors of Second Stage from 1979, when they founded the company, to 2013, when Goodman left to become an independent producer and, ultimately, producer of the Roundabout Theatre Company’s Underground program for new work of emerging writers and directors.]

But the original reason we changed [was] you develop a working relationship with a playwright and if you say, “Take your play somewhere else and have it not do well, and then bring it here,” that was ludicrous.  (Laughter).  Then we got this play by Deborah Eisenberg, Pastorale, which was our first new play, and really liked it.  [Second Stage’s Pastorale opened at the Park Royal Theatre on 4 April 1982.]  We did our next new play, Painting Churches, because Tina came and said, “I want you to do this play.”  [Painting Churches opened at the South Street Theatre on 8 February 1983.  I saw a revival by the Keen Company; my report was posted on ROT on 14 April 2012.]

Shlaes:  Your reputation above the choices that you’ve made has been the quality of your product and the kinds of people that you’ve been working with.

Rothman:  It has to do with Robyn being an actress and me being a director.  Robyn has always maintained that this place has got to be a place where actors enjoy working.  Added to that is that I’m a very good problem-solver for other people’s work.  I don’t think that I’m ever really a threat to a director working here.  My responsibility is to point out where the problems may lie.

Rick:  [Robyn] spoke at the Drama Desk forum about artistic-director burnout.  The source of the burnout problem was that they are running the theater all by themselves.  You and she share this load so equitably that [burnout’s] not likely to be a problem.

Rothman:   Absolutely.  Some theaters have an executive director, but their responsibilities are separate.  Robyn and I share the artistic burden, so it’s much, much easier.

Shlaes:  It seems that what the two of you also share is affection, which would make the running of the theater a task that you would look forward to every day.

Rothman:  Oh, absolutely.  That’s why people get married (laughing).  It also is quite frankly why we can maintain relationships outside of the theater.  We pretty much go over the agonies of the day-to-day running of the theater here, and we can go home and have lives.

Shlaes:  It’s a pleasure to meet you.  You’ve made some wonderful comments about directing and about people and about work—things that I have long held true.

[Over the seasons, Second Stage has presented some important productions, including This is Our Youth (1998), Metamorphoses (2001), The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (2005), The Little Dog Laughed (2006), and Next to Normal (2008).  The company’s revivals have also been New York theater high points, many of them restoring interest in plays forgotten or overlooked—as much for the selections of producible material as for the excellence of the stage work and casting.]

Three Ionesco Plays (2004)

[Last 2 July, I published Kirk Woodward’s “Eugene Ionesco,” a consideration of the Absurdist playwright that’s based on Kirk's notes from a lecture given by the writer in 1988.  In the profile, Kirk mentions that I had previously posted a report on a performance of Ionesco’s best-known play, Rhinoceros, on ROT (15 October 2012).  Among my pre-ROT archives, I also have reports on three of his better-known one-acts, icons of the Theater of the absurd.  Two of the plays, The Bald Soprano (Ionesco’s first play, 1950) and The Lesson (1951), were presented on a single bill by the Atlantic Theater Company in Chelsea from 19 September to 17 October 2004.  The third, The Chairs (1952), was staged as part of the 2004 Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in Fort Greene between 1 and 4 December 2004.  As you’ll read, the two productions, which I happened to see six weeks apart during the fall of 2004, differed greatly in success in my estimation.  ~Rick]

 

The Bald Soprano & The Lesson

Atlantic Theater Company

Linda Gross Theater

4 October 2004

Diana Multare, my frequent theater partner, and I decided to subscribe this year to the Atlantic Theater Company (which is in Chelsea only a few blocks from my apartment) and their first production is a two-play bill of Ionesco one-acts, The Bald Soprano and The Lesson.  The texts are a new translation by playwright Tina Howe (Painting Churches, Coastal Disturbances, Pride’s Crossing) and the director was Carl Forsman, the artistic director of an Off-Off-Broadway company called the Keen Company.  (I saw a production of their revival of P. G. Wodehouse’s 1927 comedy, Good Morning, Bill, which Forsman directed also.  It was an amusing bit of fluff—fun but meaningless.  Well enough done, though.)  [I’ve subsequently seen two shows directed by Forsman, both for the Keen Company at the Harold Clurman Theatre and both reported on ROT: Heroes by Gérald Sibleyras (26 March 2009) and Tina Howe’s Painting Churches (14 April 2012).]

Overall, this is probably the best Ionesco production I’ve seen [until the Rhinoceros noted above], and certainly the best work of the Atlantic Theater I’ve seen over the several years I’ve gone there on and off.  Ionesco’s not for everyone—or, maybe, not even most people—so the plays may not appeal to one and all, but the presentation is excellent.  (The Lesson is particularly grim.  I think Ionesco does call it a comedy—but that doesn’t keep it from being grim.)  The acting is top-notch all around, but the ensemble work of Soprano and the individual performance of Steven Skybell as the Professor in The Lesson are really examples for acting students.  I imagine that sounds a bit hyperbolic, but the work is that good here.  Clean, clear, solid—all the things that make good lessons for students while at the same time being wonderful experiences for an audience.  It’s like a painting that’s a perfect example of a particular style and at the same time is stunning, moving, and evocative piece of art.  (The nice thing here for a class is that there’s a wonderful example of an ensemble working together to produce delightful group work and another of a single performance that stands out without being selfish.)

(One of the Soprano ensemble is Michael Countryman, who plays Mr. Smith.  I’ve seen him many times over the years, and he’s a character actor who always does excellent work.  He’s one of those actors who works all the time and is always good, but has never gotten famous outside the business—though he used to do many, many commercials at one point several years ago.  Whatever he’s done, I’ve noticed him.  Mrs. Smith is Jan Maxwell, the wife of a long-time actor friend of mine, Rob Lunney—formerly Rob Emmet.  She’s done quite a lot of high-profile work, including Broadway and TV, but Rob was in my productions of both The Gift—he was John Wilkes Booth—and Comes the Happy Hour!—he was the lead, the young patient.  Rob also acted with me in two shows at the Process Studio: Macbeth and Much Ado.  I always felt he deserved a better career.)

The ensemble work in Soprano is rendered even better when you consider how hard it must be to maintain the kind of connection this cast manages with dialogue that is so completely absurd.  I’m sure most theater people know the text of Soprano at least a little—haven’t we all read it at one time or another?—so they probably remember that most lines are non-sequiturs, and even the ones that aren’t are nearly illogical outside the world of the play.  Plus, the characters’ relationships keep shifting unpredictably, so the actors not only have to remember cues pretty much technically, but they have to reestablish their connections to one another every few lines without ever showing that they’ve shifted gears.  I’d guess that the cast, regardless of how they were trained, must all have to do this play entirely technically, but they make it seem as if they are living in a real world.  Not the same as our real world, but real in their diegetic existence.  (It starts, of course, with the famous 17 clock chimes to which Mrs. Smith responds by saying, quite matter-of-factly, “Oh, it’s nine o’clock.”  Doesn’t everyone’s clock chime 17 times for 9 o’clock?)  When the Martins (Robert Stanton and Seana Kofoed) arrive, and the relationship not only between the two couples (and even between Mr. and Mrs. Martin) but with the constantly shifting “facts” of the scene (they’ve eaten, they haven’t eaten; they know one another, they don’t know one another) careers from one set of truths to another, the quality of the ensemble acting really starts to show.  I think this was a preview performance—there was still an occasional tentativeness with some lines—and I kept waiting for it all to break down, even if only for a second.  But it never did.  Of course, a great deal of this feat is down to the director—first of all, for casting these actors to start with.

The set (by Loy Arcenas, who designed both sets) for Soprano was particularly . . . well, absurd, I guess.  It was, of course, the Smiths’ living room, but the wallpaper was flowered, the rug was flowered, and the upholstery was flowered.  But all different flower patterns.  It was like the Queer Eye guys went a little nuts!

I must also compliment Tina Howe on her translations—they were clear and direct without being either stiff or false to the originals.  She had a little insert in the program in which she writes about the difficulties with translation and I skimmed it, but I already know that translating plays, especially French plays for some reason, is always a holding action.  You have a choice of staying true to the original’s language and vocabulary, or trying to judge the author’s intent and being freer with the English to get there.  The first gets stiff and artificial, better for reading off the page than acting on the stage; the second strays from the original’s feel and style and can sound too colloquial and idiomatic.  Howe seemed to have managed to tread a line here, making the text sound both conversational in English (that’s probably not the best word for this dynamic) and artificial, in the sense that Ionesco was deliberately writing artificial French.  (This is esp. true in Soprano because his inspiration was the French and English of a phrase book.)  Samuel Beckett didn’t have this problem so much because he not only did his own translations from French to English, but he pretty much rewrote his plays for the English versions.  They were really two originals—one French and one English; Waiting for Godot, for instance, is a different play from En attendant Godot and there are things in one version that aren’t in the other.  (I compared them once.)  Howe only very occasionally writes a line that sounds a little too much like 21st-century American, and when she does, it sticks out a bit—but it’s not often enough to be harmful.

After the universal disappointments of the 2003-04 theater season in New York City, this was a terrific season-starter.  I was seriously beginning to fear that I had become one of those theatergoers who never likes anything—that maybe the season wasn’t so bad last year, that it was just me.  I hope this proves it isn’t. 

I’ll note here that New York Times critic Charles Isherwood had complaints about both Howe’s texts and the production’s acting.  [Isherwood’s notice is on-line at http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/20/theater/reviews/20bald.html.]  He felt the translations were a little too contemporary, but I only felt that in passing once or twice, and only because of a word or expression now and then.  The reviewer also felt, particularly in Soprano, that the actors had gotten too psychologically embedded in their roles and situations, too much like Stanislavsky Realism.  I don’t agree, however; I think he was wrong (or had seen an earlier preview or something).

*  *  *  *

The Chairs

Pick Up Performance Company (David Gordon)

Harvey Theater, BAM

13 December 2004

[The report on The Chairs below was part of a longer one that also covered the performance of Woody Allen’s A Second Hand Memory at ATC (22 November 2004-23 January 2005).  For this publication on ROT, I’ve excised the discussion of the other production, though some references still remain.]

I saw two shows over the past two weeks, and I have confirmed two things from the experiences—one bad and one . . . well, interesting.

First, the bad:  The 2004-05 season, after a promising start with the two Ionescos at the Atlantic [coincidentally, published above], has gone downhill precipitously.  The John Jesurun FAUST/How I Rose (Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater, 16-20 November 2004) may have been the low point, but nothing has been very good even by contrast.  (The German Nora, the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz Berlin’s adaptation of Ibsen’s Doll House at the Harvey, 9-13 November, was, at least, interesting, but there were a lot of serious problems with that, too.)  If the criterion is whether or not I would have been sorry not to have seen the play, then none of the performances since the Ionescos has measured up. 

The second thing I’ve discovered is that Charles Isherwood has been consistently writing reviews of the plays I’ve seen that almost exactly express my opinion.  (His reviews, that is, not the plays.)  If I’ve disagreed with his review of a show now and then at all, it’s been over a minor point (as in this last show) or over his harshness or generosity in stating his opinion on one point or another.  What I mean by this latter is that he and I may agree on some aspect of the performance, but he’ll say it more or less forcefully than I would have.  I’m beginning to find this very strange.  Like I said in a recent message, maybe I ought to give up writing my own reports and just copy Isherwood’s reviews—maybe with a few choice comments.  [Veteran ROTters will know that this hasn’t continued to hold true quite so consistently in more recent seasons.]

With respect to this last remark, I really ought to just download Isherwood’s review of The Chairs I saw at BAM Friday two weeks ago [posted on the New York Times’ website at http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/03/theater/reviews/03chai.html].  Like the Jesurun, I have no idea what this performance was all about.  Like Jesurun’s FAUST, it wasn’t just a translation of Ionesco and a straightforward attempt to stage his play (if ‘straightforward’ is even a concept you can use vis à vis Ionesco—but leave that aside).  It was another personal take, an idiosyncratic adaptation.  David Gordon—of whom I’d never heard before, but who is apparently known—is primarily a choreographer and he has a thing for chairs, especially metal folding chairs.  Several of his dance and movement pieces have featured chairs as the principal—even only—prop and set piece.  I can’t begin to tell you why Gordon has this obsession or what it means in terms of his performances—film of bits of several of which were featured as a sort of prologue to The Chairs—but I suppose it explains in part why he glommed onto this play.  What he thinks Ionesco’s play means, or what he tried to make it mean, was undecipherable to me.  This is the second play I’ve seen this season which I can’t even begin to interpret—the other being Jesurun’s FAUST—which makes it hard to report on them. 

I can sum up my experience with this performance—ironically by quoting Isherwood: it was “self-indulgent and largely ineffective.”  I missed the Théâtre de Complicité’s recent production here (John Golden Theatre, 1 April-13 June 1998) which was so well received, and Isherwood compares it to Gordon’s version to the detriment of the latter.  I can’t tell you what Gordon was up to, but I can tell you that he removed all the darkness and bleakness as he almost giddily careened around the stage moving the chairs from one configuration to another, carrying them, climbing on them, balancing on the back of one, ramming them into one another, shoving them in whole rows about the stage, as he rambled versions of Ionesco’s words almost gleefully at times.  (By the second half of the performance, Gordon was handed pages of the “script” from which he “read” his lines— Isherwood thought he was really reading and hadn’t learned the lines, but I’m not convinced that was so—and then tossed the pages on the stage, which ended up littered with pieces of paper.  I don’t know what this meant.)  I had trouble focusing on what was going on a lot of the time, so I fazed in and out of attention, but to the best of my perception, Gordon had no Orator (there were several assistants who functioned like stage attendants, moving the rolling door frames—the only other set pieces aside from the chairs—from one location to another as if the entrances to the “room” were unfixed in space) and he and his wife, his principal dancer and actress who played the Old Woman, never jumped out of the window at the end (as far as I could interpret what they were doing—though there was no window for them to jump from anyway, so I guess I can say this with some assurance).  Whatever else Gordon may have done, this sort of takes the guts out of Ionesco’s play, doesn’t it?  Without the deaf-mute Orator who is supposed to pass on the Old Man’s wisdom and without their defenestration, the futility of communication, of life itself—Ionesco’s main point, I believe—is entirely lost.  Turning the bleak and pessimistic dynamic of Ionesco into an antic rant (or a rantic ant) is further counterproductive.  (Gordon even sang bits of “You Are My Sunshine” and “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows,” just to further subvert the darkness of Ionesco’s play.)

I don’t know what else to tell you—and, like my Jesurun “report,” this seems terribly inadequate.  Those two productions also make me question the perspicacity of the BAM producers in selecting them for presentation—a sense I had after the Nora, too.

[Both these performance accounts, which predate my more formal play reports, were originally e-mails to a friend and didn’t include many of the elements that I later included in the versions I created for my out-of-town friends after 2005 and then, more recently and conscientiously, for ROT.  I’ve edited these slightly to amend my off-hand mentions of events and people the intended recipient would have recognized or which refer to details from earlier messages.  I’ve made an effort to fill in the names of the artists I didn’t identify originally, but for things like the press response to these productions, I’ll let curious readers look up the reviews themselves this time.]

 

 

'Painting Churches'

More or less on a whim, Diana, my frequent theater companion, and I picked up spot seats for Tina Howe’s Painting Churches for Wednesday, 4 April. (The production closed on 7 April.) The revival, staged by artistic director Carl Forsman for his troupe, the Keen Company, at Theatre Row’s Clurman Theatre, was the first in New York since the 1983 Off-Broadway première by Second Stage. (The play was aired on PBS as part of the American Playhouse series in 1986.) The last Howe play I’d seen previously was Primary Stage’s première of Chasing Manet in 2009 (see my ROT report on 30 April 2009); before that was Second Stage’s première of Coastal Disturbances in 1987. (I also saw the Atlantic Theater Company’s presentation of Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano and The Lesson in Howe’s translation in 2004.) I guess it’s fair to say I’m not a big Tina Howe fan—although I don’t have a problem with her work: I just haven’t found it all that compelling.

Painting Churches, reportedly a 1982 Pulitzer Prize finalist, is about an elderly patrician couple, Fanny and Gardner Church (Kathleen Chalfant and John Cunningham), who are packing up their Beacon Hill townhouse in Boston to move to a beach cottage on Cape Cod. Gardner is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and Fanny is a Boston Brahmin; their daughter Margaret (Kate Turnbull) is a portraitist who lives in New York. Mags, as she’s called, has come to help her parents pack and to “do” them on canvas for her first one-artist show at a SoHo gallery in New York. As she spends several days with Gardner and Fanny, Mags observes the mental deterioration of her father and her changing relationship to her aging parents.

Forsman founded his company in 2000. “Keen Company produces sincere plays,” says the company’s website. “We believe that theater is at its most powerful when texts and productions are generous in spirit and provoke identification.” I presume that’s Forsman’s voice—the company’s indisputably his. (I’ve only seen a few productions by the troupe, but Forsman’s directed all of them. From the posters in the lobby, I see that a few others have shared directing assignments with him, but he gets the lion’s share.) He is, after all, the guy who asserted that radical views and acts are no longer rebellious: “Now I think true rebellion is saying anything optimistic or positive about humanity.” In what may be the company’s manifesto, Forsman concluded: “Hope is radical.” In any case, Painting Churches seems to meet the criteria: it’s hardly an envelope-pushing, standards-challenging play or production. And there’s not a thing wrong with that—as long as the play meets my basic requirements for good theater: it must do more than tell a story and it must do so in a theatrical way. (I’ve defined those premises on ROT before, so I think I’ll dispense with that this time.) “There’s something about reinventing and rediscovering yourself that feels beautiful to me,” Forsman’s said, and that, to a degree, is what happens to Mags.

The problem is that Howe’s conceived a script in which her three characters have two modes of communication: 1) In various combinations of the trio, they talk at one another or 2), they recount, sometimes at great length, a story from their past. (I suppose the dramatist contrived to have Gardner Church on the cusp of dementia and Fanny forgetful just out of course so that Mags has to relate all her humiliating memories to them for our benefit. The gimmick for Mags is easier—the stories her mother tells are usually from a time when Mags was young enough to have forgotten the details.) In any case, what we get is three self-absorbed people who don’t really connect to each other most of the time, circling one another for two hours without entering each other’s orbit often before spinning off into their own galaxies, whether it’s Gar’s study or Fanny’s happier days of prominence and social influence. I told Diana this all reminded me of a gag we used to have when I was 10 or 12: the Wawa bird. The Wawa’s a bird that lives at the North Pole and flies in ever-decreasing concentric circles going “wa-wa-wa-wa!” until it flies up its own ass. That’s what the characters of Painting Churches are: three Wawa birds.

In any case, there’s a lot of talk about poetry—Gar’s become enamored of Wallace Stevens—and suitable boys from Mags's youth she might have married and other inconsequentialities, as Mags tries to get her parents to sit for her while they’re packing up the house for the move to the Cape. (Diana remarked that the best moments in the play were when Cunningham recited poetry. I observed that two of the longest moments occurred when the characters gathered around an object we couldn’t see: a parakeet which Gar’d taught to recite “Grey’s Elegy” and Mag’s completed portrait.) A great deal of the dialogue, especially Fanny’s lines, is larded with clichés—a piece of silver will fetch “a pretty penny” and things are “at sixes and sevens”—which the actors carry off with aplomb, but which made the play seem all the more stale. As far as I was concerned, nothing of consequence happens, though Howe sets up a few minor crises (Fanny begins to dump the pages of Gar’s manuscript, his magnum opus, unceremoniously into boxes, for instance, and he has a conniption because it’s all out of order like so much trash). The characters don’t move from where they were at the beginning and no one seems to have learned anything—though apparently we’re supposed to feel that Mags has. Even if they had, I never felt any connection to any of them, much less sympathy, which is why I recalled the Wawa bird of my childhood. If the characters don’t connect to each other, how can they connect to us? I say they can’t. In any case they didn’t, at least not to me.

I’ve now seen a few productions from Keen and Forsman, not including those Ionesco one-acts that he directed for ATC (and which were pretty good theater). In 2003, I saw Keen’s revival of P. G. Wodehouse's 1927 comedy, Good Morning, Bill, which Forsman directed also. I recorded that it was an amusing bit of fluff—fun but meaningless—though well enough done. In 2009, I saw Forsman’s staging of the New York première of the French drama Heroes (see my ROT report on 26 March 2009), of which I didn’t think very highly. In all cases, the productions were relatively fine, but the material all lacked any real substance, point, or theme. This seems to be a hallmark of Keen shows, and it suggests a weakness in Forsman’s taste when it comes to selecting plays. The company staff listed in the program didn’t include a dramaturg or literary manager, and maybe that’s a manifestation of the problem: Forsman chooses properties on his own and doesn’t have anyone whispering in his ear. (I wrote an article for ROT on 22 September 2011 about vanity theaters, and this is one of the deficiencies that can occur when an artistic director is answerable only to himself.)

The rest of the production was of a similar quality—competent and nice-looking but insubstantial. Beowulf Boritt’s set, the Churches’ living room, was outlined by curtains for walls with practical floor-to-ceiling shelf alcoves, windows, and a doorway center right. It was so spare, though, that the process of “emptying,” a symbolic reflection of the play’s thematic action, is neither progressive nor impactful. It looked fine, however, a fragmentary or suggested Realism—but every time someone came or went through the doorway, it swayed, shaking the curtain “wall” along with it. As small a breach as this may have been, it consistently broke the illusion that we were watching real people in a real place. Apparently no one could secure the doorframe so it wouldn’t rock, or no one cared enough to bother. The costumes by Jennifer Paar were also well-conceived without being remarkable—except for Fanny’s collection of pillbox hats. (I don’t know where Paar found all those 1960s-looking little creations, or if the company got them made for Chalfant, but they were the most fascinating objects on the stage. I’m not sure if that qualifies them to be called “fascinators” or not.)

By the way: this little fillip raises another, small problem I had. Painting Churches was written in the early ’80s and the preem was certainly set in that period. The program for the Keen revival doesn’t indicate the time of the action, just the place, but I kept vacillating back and forth between the 1980s and the 2010s. Some references seemed clearly to suggest that the “present” was the ’80s, such as recollections of past events that evoked the ’50s or ’60s, too far back for a 20-something Mags; others seemed to have been updated to today, such as the shift from an art gallery on East 57th Street, as the original script had Mags’s solo début, to a SoHo show for this production, making the timing seem more contemporary. Now, this might not be a major significance to the success of the play, but it was confusing to me and seems just sloppy and careless. Oddly, I noted a similar glitch in Edward Albee’s revision of his Lady from Dubuque at the Signature Theatre last month (see my ROT report on 19 March), but as that was a better play, I dismissed it as an inconsequential curiosity. It was inconsequential here, too, but it bugged me more.

As far as the acting was concerned, both Chalfant and Cunningham captured their characters impeccably. Whatever else didn’t work at the Clurman, it wasn’t at the hands (or faces or voices) of these two actors. They put across the epitome of the doddering ex-professor and the waning Boston aristocrat—it wasn’t their fault that Howe gave them so little to play that they quickly became clichés. Nothing Gar and Fanny did or said was particularly unexpected (most, in fact, was predictable), but what was surprising was how perfectly Cunningham and Chalfant did and said it. The eccentricities displayed by Fanny were entirely natural coming from Chalfant, and the fear and confusion that flitted across Gar’s face when he didn’t understand something was frighteningly convincing (and, unhappily, I’ve seen it for real). The nuances and quirks the actors found made the two oldsters wonderful to watch, even if not much they were up to was especially interesting. The same can’t be said for Turnbull, a much less experienced performer, who never found a way to make Mags anything more than a stereotype—the self-absorbed artist, the distracted daughter, or whatever label you like. She was trying too hard, both as Mags and as the actress playing her. Since Howe never got the family to interact more than superficially, the detail work of Cunningham and Chalfant went for naught and their strength as performers never had a chance to lift up Turnbull’s acting or to draw more out of her than the basic behavior Howe wrote for Mags. (Michael Feingold of the Village Voice disagreed: he found that the cast displayed “handsome teamwork, each having one foot firmly anchored in reality, yet each seeming capable of floating off at any moment into the shadow area . . . .”) Obviously, Forsman’s directing was at fault in this, too, in his failure to provide guidance and . . . well, direction to attempt to overcome the deficits in the script. (My impression is that Forsman can’t or won’t do this, even if he sees the problem. My sense is that he doesn’t dig beneath the surface of the play’s “sincerity” for anything more than the words and stage directions provide. That may please some writers, but it’s not theater directing as far as I’m concerned. It’s traffic directing.)

In the New York Times, David Rooney agreed that Chalfant and Cunningham were “transfixing” as the elder Churches but described Turnbull’s Mags as “strained” and “actressy.” Rooney characterized Forsman’s production as “pedestrian” and “imbalanced” and said it “robs the play of some nuance.” Linda Winer, while overall praising the revival in Newsday, noted the “imbalance”, too, suggesting the blame maybe on Forsman’s directing. In the Daily News, Joe Dziemianowicz hit a similar note, writing, “the strokes aren’t just right and the balance of light and dark is out of whack,” adding that under Forsman’s directing, “what’s meant to [be] idiosyncratic and charming grates.” Elaborately praising Chalfant’s portrayal, David Sheward in Back Stage continued that Forsman “allows the balance to shift too much toward Fanny.” He concluded that the revival was “still a moving version of a complex work.” In Time Out New York, Adam Feldman called the Keen production “disenchanting,” saying that “Howe's play is a compendium of unpleasant noises, amplified in a plodding production.” He described the play’s structure as “alternating tiresome chatter about silverware and breeding with self-piteous family-therapy confrontations.” Calling Chalfant the production’s “greatest asset,” Elisabeth Vincentelli wrote in the New York Post that it “otherwise never quite finds its pulse." In the Voice, however, Feingold defended the revival, saying that is “has been unjustly ragged on for providing almost exactly what Howe seems to desire.” In Variety, Marilyn Stasio called the production “earthbound” because Howe’s “suggestive style of poetic impressionism fails to register”—though she concluded that the play is “still a stunner.”

'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!