'A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder'

My last show in the September Series was A Gentleman’s Guide To Love & Murder, the profoundly silly Tony-winner for Best Musical in 2014.  I took my mom to the Sunday matinee on 28 September at the Walter Kerr on West 48th Street.  Now, let me state right at the start that I approve of theater as pure entertainment.  I think making audiences feel good (or cry or feel scared, whatever) is a perfectly worthy theatrical goal.  Some of my fellow theater enthusiasts disparage plays that aspire to no more than that, but I laud them—and Gentleman’s Guide accomplishes its aim with delirious success.  I can’t say if it deserved the Tony (I don’t know what its competition was), but it definitely deserved the nomination.  It was immense fun!

A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder, a co-production of the Hartford Stage and San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre, premièred in Hartford, Connecticut, from 12 October to 11 November 2012, under the direction of Darko Tresnjak, Hartford Stage’s artistic director, with Jefferson Mays in eight roles.  The musical then played in San Diego, California, from 8 March to 14 April 2013 with the same director and cast.  Gentleman’s Guide started previews on Broadway on 22 October 2013 and opened on 17 November with Tresnjak, making his Broadway début, continuing to direct and Jefferson Mays still in the lead.  The play won Tonys for Best Musical, Best Book of a Musical (Robert L. Freedman), Best Direction of a Musical (Tresnjak), Best Costume Design (Linda Cho); Drama Desk Awards for Outstanding Musical, Outstanding Book of a Musical (Freedman), Outstanding Lyrics (Steven Lutvak and Freedman), Outstanding Actor in a Musical (Mays), Outstanding Featured Actress in a Musical (Lauren Worsham), Outstanding Director of a Musical (Tresnjak), Outstanding Projection Design (Aaron Rhyne); Outer Critics Circle Awards for Outstanding Actor in a Musical (Mays), Outstanding Director of a Musical (Tresnjak); and the Drama League Award for Distinguished Production of a Musical.  (There were also many additional nominations for all these stage awards.  I saw Tresnjak’s staging of The Merchant of Venice at the Theatre for a New Audience in 2007 and posted that pre-ROT report on 28 February 2011.)

With book and lyrics by Robert L. Freedman and music and lyrics by Steven Lutvak, two relative newcomers to Broadway musicals, Gentleman’s Guide is drawn from on the 1907 novel Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal by Roy Horniman, the same source material as the 1949 British film Kind Hearts and Coronets, which starred Alec Guinness as eight doomed members of the D’Ascoyne family.  (In the musical, the family’s name is D’Ysquith—prophetically pronounced DIE-skwith.  In the film, one of the family is named Ascoyne D’Ascoyne; in the play, a family member is Asquith D’Ysquith.)  Neither the old flick nor the current musical play has a serious bone in its body—it’s all meant to be nothing but (ghastly) fun and inanity.  (I mean, who really minds watching an ambitious and ruthless young man dispatch a bunch of Colonel Blimp aristocrats, anyway.  Charles Isherwood called them “stuffed shirts or stuffed skirts” in the New York Times and they’re all made to seem self-centered, arrogant, and disdainful of the “lower orders”—there’s even a song in Gentleman’s Guide called “I Don’t Understand the Poor”!)

The plot, though essentially straightforward, is loaded with little details and side-trips, so I’ll just do a précis and assume most readers either know the story or have seen the Alec Guinness movie.  (If you haven’t, by all means, rent it—it’s a classic.  It was listed in Time magazine’s 100 greatest films in 2005 and the British Film Institute’s Top 100 British films.)  Let’s just say that in 1907, when destitute Montague Navarro, having just buried his beloved mother, learns that he’s actually a member of one of England’s most illustrious families, the D’Ysquiths, and is eighth in line to inherit the Earldom of Highhurst, he becomes intrigued.  And a little vengeful.  It seems that his mother, a cousin of the current earl, Lord Adalbert D’Ysquith, was disinherited and expelled from the family when she married for love instead of financial gain—“My father was Castilian.  And worse, a musician”!—and was forced to earn a living as a charwoman after her husband died when Monty was 7.  After finding proof of his status among his mother papers, he writes to Lord Asquith D’Ysquith, Sr., head of the family bank, requesting employment.  Asquith, Jr., responds dismissively and instructs Monty never to write to the family again, and the young pretender begins his campaign to claim his rightful place in the family.  

One by one, he arranges the demise of six of the seven D’Ysquiths between him and the Eighth Earl of Highhurst.  (Monty doesn’t actually kill any of them—he just sets up the circs.)  I won’t relate the ways Monty does in his relatives—it’s too much fun to see how he manages this and how Tresnjak, scenic designer Alexander Dodge, and projection designer Rhyne stage the deaths (but take particular note of the first demise for its visual cleverness and the second for Tresnjak’s preamble staging; I’ll say no more)—but I’ll tell you that Lord Adalbert finally succumbs (and wait till you get a load of his countess, Lady Eugenia, as played by Joanna Glushak!) and Monty becomes Lord Montague D’Ysquith Navarro (he never even knew he had a middle name before finding his birth certificate among his mother’s papers), Ninth Earl of Highhurst.  And lands in jail on a charge of murder.  (I won’t be specific about this, either.  Be forewarned, though, that the ending is a little different from that of the American release of Kind Hearts—and even differs some from the British ending—due to interference from the Breen Office and its Hollywood Production Code.  For more information on the Hays Code, you can refer to my article on that subject, posted on ROT on 7 July 2013.)  

Now, as I said, Gentleman’s Guide has no serious point or theme, so there’s little to discuss with respect to the play’s content.  I’ll even add that, as amusing as they are, Freedman’s book, Lutvak’s music, and their joint lyrics are nothing to write home about—or, for that matter, describe on a blog (though you’ll plotz when you hear “Better With a Man”!).  (The orchestrations are by Jonathan Tunick who earlier this year won the Stephen Sondheim Award.  I ran a tribute to Tunick on ROT on 15 May.)  They’re fine, reminiscent of British music hall, old-time musicals, or older-time operettas.  (Adalbert’s first number, “I Don’t Understand the Poor,” has definite resonances of Gilbert and Sullivan’s patter songs.  In another era, the role might have been played by Martyn Green, the master comedian and singer of the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company who played all those roles: Major-General Stanley in The Pirates of Penzance, Sir Joseph Porter, KCB, in H.M.S. Pinafore, Ko-Ko in The Mikado and more.)  I’m not well enough qualified in music or musical performance to criticize this part of the production cogently; all I can say is that the songs are fun and witty, and absolutely appropriate for the play’s style and period.  (They were also executed brilliantly, as I’ll note again in a bit.)

What makes Gentleman’s Guide such wonderful theater and so much fun over two hours and twenty minutes (including one intermission) is the staging, which is clever and delightful from start to finish.  It’s all little stage gimmicks, most of which are as old as the hills, but applied with such a light touch and such glee and panache that they seem . . . well, not fresh, but well-scrubbed and repainted.  To start with, inside the regular proscenium opening of the Walter Kerr (which dates to 1921, not too long after the play’s set) is a smaller proscenium with its own blood-red velvet drape and elaborately decorated arch (including a pair of busts that . . . ummm, figure amusingly in the proceedings—oh, and keep an eye on the family portraits hanging in Highhurst Castle!).  It resembles an oversized toy theater (can you do that—like “jumbo shrimp”?) or maybe a puppet stage.  Most of the play, which is a flashback from Monty writing his memoir in his cell awaiting the verdict from his murder trial in 1909, two years after setting out on his grisly quest, is enacted on the small set-within-the-set; the main stage becomes the street or Monty’s cell (over on stage left) or other locales, like a forestage in a different theater.  It’s just a conceit, but helps tremendously to establish that this is all theater, that it’s fantasy and imaginary, stressing the theatricality of all of this.  It’s also like a pop-up theater in a children’s book.  None of this is serious!  (1909 is Edwardian, as a passing mention makes clear, but you can look at it as an extension of Victorian England, when the gruesome was accepted as entertainment and even children were told the most bloody of stories and fairy tales.  Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd, for instance.)

Just like the details of the plot, I don’t want to describe too much of the production because a lot of the fun is being surprised at the effects engineered by Messrs. Tresnjak, Dodge, and Rhyne.  They functioned as a true team for this aspect of the show.  I’ll state that these are theater effects—though at least one is reminiscent of Hitchcock’s Vertigo (or perhaps Mel Brooks’s High Anxiety is a better analogy)—that would lose all their wonder in a film version.  It’s all about how they suggest reality, refer to it, without actually coming close to being realistic.  In film, that would be lost.  (When I say that one of my criteria for good theater is that it must be “theatrical”—and regular readers of ROT will know this reference—this is precisely what I mean.  Only the live stage can pull this off—not despite its limitations, but because of them!)  I’m not a theater techie, but aside from acting, this is why I love theater.  This is actual stage magic—and I delight in the very artificiality of it.  Gentleman’s Guide is chock full of this theatricality—almost every D’Ysquith death makes use of one of these effects, and every one of them alone is worth the price of admission.  (This is precisely why I don’t disparage theater-as-entertainment: serious theater wouldn’t try such hokey stuff, and it’s just too wonderful to miss!)

But the terrific staging—Entertainment Weekly’s Thom Geier described one fabulous number, “I’ve Decided to Marry You,” as a “a door-slamming bedroom-farce of a trio”—and effects are not the only things to recommend Gentleman’s Guide—though it could be sufficient.  There’s also Jefferson Mays.  Oh, what a joy!  What a great performance.  I’m sorry to report that I don’t know Mays’s work (I checked his credits and I’ve never seen any of his productions, much, now, to my regret.)  Of course, the job is a tour-de-force for the actor cast, so Mays got the material served up to him.  (He’s also aided tremendously and wittily by Linda Cho’s delightful Edwardian costumes and Charles LaPointe’s character-enhancing wigs.)  But what fun he had with it—and made of it!  He won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actor in a Musical for the work, but he was passed over for the Tony (in favor of Neil Patrick Harris for Hedwig and the Angry Inch, an honorable loss, I guess).  I won’t say that Mays made each of the D’Ysquith victims unique—that isn’t really the point: they’re meant to be basically the same personality with individual quirks—but he embodied each of them as fully as the play requires—let’s admit that Gentleman’s Guide isn’t deep, either thematically or performatively.  (There are some remarkably quick costume changes on display, however.)  But no one on any stage anywhere could surpass Mays’s hambone verve, energy, or joy in portraying all the aristocratic twits of the D’Ysquith clan.  (I can only imagine what he did with his role in the one-actor, multi-character play I Am My Own Wife, for which he did win the Best Actor Tony in 2004—and that wasn’t even a musical!)  If the production makes Gentleman’s Guide worth the cost of a Broadway seat, then Mays’s gorgeous performance just means you get twice what you paid for!  Now, that’s value for money!

Now, before I get to other individual performances, let me say that the singing voices are exceptional, even for Broadway.  Especially the women’s voices: Lisa O’Hare, as sassy, gold-digging Sibella, Monty’s love and mistress, and Lauren Worsham, Phoebe D’Ysquith, Monty’s fiancée and (ummm) cousin—he eventually makes her his countess—both, also two Broadway newcomers, have bell-clear sopranos which they use to wonderful dramatic effect, particularly in the duet scenes.  (Those scenes are where the frivolous musical comes very close to becoming operatic in quality and style.)  Bryce Pinkham, as Monty, has a good, strong tenor, with just enough of the juvenile in it to make him seem almost innocent—or forgivable—even as he plots cold-blooded death and mayhem.  (His plans for Lady Hyacinth D’Ysquith are bizarrely elaborate.) 

To continue about Pinkham, he has to walk a precarious line, theatrically speaking.  Well, narratively, too, since Monty must balance his love of Sibella and their continuing romance even after she married someone else and he’s engaged to his cousin Phoebe while still seeing Sibella—all while he’s plotting his deadly rise to the earldom and dodging arrest and jail or hanging.  It’s a little dance of love and death that Pinkham executes adroitly.  But I was considering his tightrope walk between dastardly murderer and sympathetic romantic lead.  (I especially applaud Cho’s designs for Monty: his skinny trousers may be a perfectly common Edwardian style, but they also communicated a touch of youth that helps make the dastardly murderer boyish enough to gain my sympathy.)  After all, much of the appeal of Gentleman’s Guide resides in the audience’s hope that Monty reaches the title and gets his retribution despite the method he uses to get there.  The ending especially depends on our wish that he escape punishment even though he’s spent two hours confessing his wicked deeds.  Okay, Freedman supplies him with the story line and the lines to rationalize his actions, but our sympathy comes almost entirely from Pinkham’s portrayal.  And he succeeds—with the help of Mays who makes all the D’Ysquiths—except Asquith, Sr., who treats Monty generously and who conveniently dies of a heart attack without Monty’s interference—upper-class ninnies of one variety or another.  The play’s a lightweight—not a fault—but the work isn’t.  (Dying is easy.  Comedy is hard!)

In the press, most reviewers shared my point of view—or were even more positive and, I daresay, giddy.  (The notices of Jefferson Mays’s performance(s) were positively ecstatic in most cases, as I’ll demonstrate later.)  The Daily News, New York Post, am New York, and the websites Talkin’ Broadway and New York Theater demurred, however.  Elysa Gardner in USA Today, for instance, called Gentleman’s Guide a “delightful new musical romp” with Tresnjak’s “witty direction—supported by the drolly imaginative scenic and projection design of Alexander Dodge and Aaron Rhyne, respectively.”  Terry Teachout opened his Wall Street Journal notice by exulting, “At last, a good new Broadway musical.  Really good, in fact,” and then went on to report that Gentleman’s Guide is “wickedly witty, wonderfully well staged and as pleasing to hear as it is to see.”  His summing-up note is about as laudatory as I could imagine: “If you’re tired of apologizing to out-of-town visitors for the shaky state of 21st-century American musical comedy, send them to ‘A Gentleman’s Guide’ and rest assured that they’ll go home happy.”  

In the New York Times, Charles Isherwood called Gentleman’s Guide a “frolicsome operetta” that’s turned “murder most foul into entertainment most merry,” adding that the “delightful show will lift the hearts of all those who’ve been pining for what sometimes seems a lost art form: musicals that match streams of memorable melody with fizzily witty turns of phrase.”  Linda Winer of Long Island’s Newsday called Gentleman’s Guide “at heart, a clever and jolly 90-minute frolic” that “runs a very leisurely 2-1 / 2 hours, not 90 minutes,” but allowed that the production’s over-length “should not dissuade patient theatergoers who want to relish” it and Tresnjak’s staging that “has the genuine charm of a miniature toy theater.”  The play, the Newsday review-writer observed, sports “one of those performances that people will be talking about all season” from Mays, and Lutvak and Freedman, the composer-lyricist-librettist team, after “the long, arch exposition, . . . deliver saucy impudence of bright operetta pastiche.”  The Financial Times’s Brendan Lemon pronounced that Gentleman’s Guide, “a jolly spoof with a tart first act and a sentimental let-down of a second, proudly wears old-fashioned virtues on its pinafores.”  

Winer had clear reservations, notably with the lack of “a courageous editor,” but Matt Windman stepped entirely over the line, calling Gentleman’s Guide an “inferior musical” and “a silly English music hall pastiche” in am New York.  “With a thin premise, a sluggish book and unmemorable songs” and “an air of slapstick,” Windman specified, “the show makes for a tiresome 2½ hours.”  In the New York Post, Elisabeth Vincentelli listed her objections, from the score’s “collection of innocuous music-hall pastiches,” to melodies that “aren’t very interesting,” the “uneven” pacing, director Tresnjak’s “staging tricks” that lead to “repetition,” and “the charmless Pinkham.”  Even Mays’s tour de force performances don’t “really register,” declared the Post reviewer.  And in the New York Daily News, Joe Dziemianowicz insisted that the “fun, but flawed” Gentleman’s Guide’s “got a hole in its heart” because it’s “without a great score.”  While the production “is a high-gloss beaut,” with fine performances, the Newsman pronounced: “Finally, there’s the score, and, alas, it’s a bit of a bore.”  The “songs are consistently cute—and that’s it,” reported Dziemianowicz.  “There’s not one number that really stands out and at times the music actually slows down the action.”  

The Village Voice’s Tom Sellar called the musical “charming and witty” and “a frequently funny faux-Edwardian romp” with a “sharp and witty book” by Freedman and a “serviceable score” by Lutvak.  A “commercial vehicle” which “motors its twisty plot with two terrific performances” (Mays and Pinkham), the musical, directed “with a meticulous hand,” is “a familiar tale, but executed—pun intended—with wit and delicious farcical timing.”  Sellar summed up by asserting, “A Gentleman's Guide stays fun because it celebrates and measures our material aspirations without trafficking in sentiment; it either sends up or dismisses any other psychology.”  Describing the show as “this delicious black satire” in the New York Observer, Rex Reed reported that the “spinning top of a show” is “creatively staged by the talented young director Darko Tresnjak with the breakneck pace of the Kentucky Derby and crossed with the dazzle of a British music hall revue.”  Unfolding from “one wicked stroke of genius after another, accompanied by fresh, funny scenic designs,” noted Reed, the production contains “rollicking songs by lyricist Steven Lutvak and composer Robert L. Freedman, performed by an able cast that has no trouble reaching the second balcony with perfect pitch.”  Caviling that “the show begins to sag” in the second act because “all the memorable murders have been completed,” the Observer writer said, the “rest of the show . . . is frankly anticlimactic.”  Reed, added, however: “Not to worry: There’s still a surprise ending on the way and more glorious singing,” concluding, “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder is the theatrical equivalent of exploding caviar, and Broadway has a new hit for the holidays.”   

In “Goings on about Town” in the New Yorker, the reviewer called Gentleman’s Guide a “musical entertainment with panache and precision” which “sets its arch humor to a tuneful score, served up elegantly in Darko Tresnjak’s production.”  In New York magazine, Jesse Green reported that the creators of Gentleman’s Guide “aim for droll comedy” and “usually hit their mark.”  “There are watered-silk smoking jackets and period-style songs and plenty of winks to the audience,” reported Green, and “the whole production looks terrific and moves smoothly from start to finish.”  But Green’s “one small” disappointment was “the songs”: “The tunes . . . are lovely, and . . . [t]he words . . . are often clever enough to raise a laugh”; however, “what this material needed from its songs, and does not get, is . . . a strong, clear, distinctive profile.”  

In the Hollywood Reporter, David Rooney dubbed Gentleman’s Guide a “toothsome new musical” that’s “propelled by a rollicking story, humor of the most delectable amorality and the cleverest lyrics assembled in quite some time.”  The HR reviewer wrote that the “creative team of first-timers,” Freedman, Lutvak, and Tresnjak, provided a “devilish book” and “tuneful songs.”  The “inventive direction,” served by “sumptuous design elements and versatile ensemble,” resulted in “a small-scale show that feels both intimate and lavish.”  Calling the musical “witty,” with an “ingeniously absurd plot,”  Variety’s Marilyn Stasio dubbed Gentleman’s Guide an “adorably wicked show.”  The “stylish spoof of Edwardian manners and (lack of) morals,” Stasio wrote, “mocks its own high style.”  “Although the naughty lyrics are the sweetest of the show’s bitter treats,” asserted the Variety reviewer, “the show’s heart is in the old music halls, where the jokes were vulgar, the songs were upbeat, the lyrics were in bad taste, and the thespians often got away with . . . well, murder.”  

“A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder is the new undisputed king of musical comedy,” declared David Cote right at the top of his Time Out New York notice.  Singling out Mays’s “mercurial” performance as the “the jewel in GGLM’s crown,” Cote described the show as “[f]illed with lunatic sight gags and the wittiest, loveliest show tunes in years, there’s not a weak link in the lively cast, and Darko Tresnjak’s antic, cartoonish staging is ideal.”  All told, said the man from TONY, the “peerless” Gentleman’s Guide is the “most fun you can have on Broadway right now.”  “Overkill has seldom been more enjoyable than in A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, a thoroughly delightful and uproarious new Broadway musical,” reported Thom Geier in his first sentence in Entertainment Weekly.  Directed with “ingenious wit” by Tresnjak, “Freedman’s script packs plenty of surprises” and “Lutvak’s jaunty score . . . sounds both fresh and period-perfect” with “gut-bustingly clever” lyrics.  “A Gentleman’s Guide,” concluded the EW review-writer, “remains winsome and charming despite an alarming surfeit of devious and devilish characters.  Quite simply, it’s a bloody good time.”

On TV, where the reviews generally echoed the print press, Roma Torre said on NY1, the Time Warner Cable news channel in New York City, that Gentleman’s Guide was “exquisitely constructed” and “[c]lever, charming, inspired,” even “if it’s a little too long (adding, “[W]ell then I say the more the merrier”).  “Director Darko Tresnjak’s production delivers with wry invention and humor,” reported Torre, and “[t]he music . . . is tunefully rich, and much like Gilbert and Sullivan ditties, the witty lyrics stand out,” concluding, “‘A Gentleman’s Guide’ could easily serve as a primer itself on how to put on an intelligent crowd-pleaser with supreme wit and ingenuity.”  Robert Kahn called Gentleman’s Guide “a deliciously dark comic musical” on WNBC, the NBC affiliate in New York City, and reported that Tresnjak “keeps matters moving apace,” even if “[t]he music and lyrics aren’t the most memorable you’ve heard.”  The set, Kahn observed in a simile I rather like, “has the effect of making the brutal events seem far, far away, like something you’re watching in a snow globe.”  “If it’s escapism you’re out for,” suggested Kahn, “‘A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder’ has the trappings of a fun, lightweight night out.”

The cyber-press was mostly in the same vein as the paper and electronic reviewers (with two notable exceptions, as you’ll see).  On the Huffington Post, Christian Nilsson quipped that Gentleman’s Guide “refines macabre with a wink, then another, and several more,” then added, “While the show lacks a tune that audiences will hum as they’re exiting the theatre, the music and lyrics perfectly compliment the book, and provide over two hours of non-stop laughs.”  The play’s second half, which features “the love triangle,” Nilsson warned, however, “is never as compelling as the musical’s darker moments.”  Yet the HP reviewer ultimately felt, “While more and more Broadway theaters are holding jukebox musicals or musical adaptations of hit-movies, the Walter Kerr Theatre has something that is fresh, hysterical, and bloody brilliant.”  “And for all lucky enough to nab a ticket for A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder, watching Monty do in the eight D’Ysquiths . . . will also set off gales of laughter,” declared Elyse Sommer of CurtainUp.  That, said Sommer, is because the musical’s “not only the funniest show on Broadway, but the most devilishly clever,” with a “savvy book and sparkling lyrics,” “nifty staging,” and “bravura performances.”  

On TheaterMania, David Gordon chuckled, “Death has not been this gleefully presented since the 1979 premiere of Sweeney Todd,” so “it’s hard not to find enjoyment in the show.”  (Perhaps Sondheim and Sweeney were “gleeful”—but they weren’t nearly as giddy over the prospect!)  The “lyrics . . . are whip-smart and impressively sharp,” Gordon wrote, and added, “Freedman’s book is similarly intelligent, but feels choppy in spots and meanders a bit too long here and there.”  Broadway World’s Michael Dale called the musical “a rollicking good time and a smashing Broadway debut for composer/lyricist Steven Lutvak, bookwriter/lyricist Robert L. Freedman and director Darko Tresnjak” and “a pocket-sized musical that dazzles with lyrical wit, dark comedic fun and bravura showmanship,” adding, “Intelligent and merry, all the elements work splendidly from start to finish.”  “The peppy period score is injected with the cleverest lyrics currently tickling Broadway ears,” insisted the BWW reviewer, and scenic designer Dodge “helps keep the dastardly doings lighthearted by . . . utilizing stagecraft no more advanced than what would be available a hundred years ago.”  Cho’s Tony-worthy costumes “complete the sumptuous picture.”  Tulis McCall of New York Theatre Guide declared bluntly, “This is a nearly perfect show.  It sets out to be a confection of light entertainment and achieves that goal in every way possible.”  The production is so well constructed that “all the parts come together exactly as they were meant to, and thus we have a cube of sugar that is exquisite.”  

On Talkin’ Broadway, Matthew Murray insisted that “it’s tough to remember another Broadway outing since Martin McDonagh’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore that’s derived so much gleeful entertainment in the hastening of mortality.”  While Murray seemed hung up on what he described as Monty’s “essential loathsomeness”—“you’ll probably be a little repulsed,” the TB reviewer assumed, by the putative heir’s actions (yeah, right!)—he also acknowledged that “when raw entertainment is the goal . . . you’re able to lose yourself in the show’s abundant charms.”  Murray complained that after all the deaths are staged in the first act, there’s “perilously little fun to be had” in the show’s second half since Mays “rapidly transitions from unforgettable to nearly forgotten,” thus “doing away with the one thing that makes [Gentleman’s Guide] distinctive rather than derivative.”  Mays’s performances, Murray declared however, “makes A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder a legitimate must-see, when otherwise it would be at best a forgettable lark.”  Somewhat more negative than Murray’s assessment, though, was Jonathan Mandell’s.  On New York Theater, Mandell affirmed that, despite its virtues such as “quick-witted comedy”; “some jolly acting,” especially from Mays; a “well-designed, well-acted” production; a “well enough plotted” script; and “all its cleverness and wicked charm, this is an entertainment I could easily have skipped.”  Though Gentleman’s Guide is “meant to be great fun,” Mandell found, “It becomes tiresome—and at times disturbing.”  He pointed to the “racist ignorance and condescension” of Lady Hyacinth D’Ysquith and Henry D’Ysquith’s “double-entendres, apparently based on the premise that homosexuality is hilarious” as deficiencies in the playmakers’ script.  Tresnjak’s direction is “brisk” and Tunick’s orchestrations “stand out,” admitted the New York Theater writer, then summed up: “But, let’s face it, ‘The Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder’ is primarily an opportunity to see Jefferson Mays in action,” though his fans will want “to see him in something that isn’t just clever.”

All the reviewers agreed on one thing, however, irrespective of each overall assessment of A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder.  Each and every one praised Jefferson Mays and his portrayals of the eight doomed D’Ysquiths.  Just a few samples of the encomia heaped on the chameleonic actor: “the knock-’em-dead performance of Jefferson Mays” (Green, New York), “This masterful actor’s precision and versatility is a complete marvel” (Torre, NY1), “jaw-dropping skill and ever-increasing daffiness” (Geier, EW), “one of the most tireless, whiplash-inducing performances ever attempted on the American stage” (Gordon, TM), “a bloody comic genius” (Cote, TONY), “actor conjuring the magic” and “virtuoso turns” (Lemon, FT), “shape-shifting and comedic gifts are on glorious display” (Gardner, USA Today).  And that’s only from the Broadway presentation; Mays got similar praise in Hartford and San Diego, not to mention at Tony time last spring!  And you know what?  I can’t even disagree.  He’s bloody hilarious!

'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.” 

'Fool for Love' (Round House, Bethesda, MD)

My second production (of four) in September was Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love at Bethesda, Maryland’s, Round House Theatre.  In town for a visit with my mother, I treated her to a performance of the intermissionless, 70-minute one-act drama on Thursday evening, 18 September.  The production, directed by Round House artistic director Ryan Rilette at the company’s East-West Highway main stage (there’s another theater in Silver Spring), opened on 3 September and closed on 5 October, after being extended from a scheduled 27 September closing.  

Fool is also my second play in a row set in a motel room.  But A. R. Gurney’s 1977 Wayside Motor Inn room near Boston (as designed by Albert Lieberman) doesn’t measure up in seedy barrenness to Shepard’s Desert Motel room somewhere in the Mojave (from Meghan Raham).  But I’m getting ahead of myself a bit here.

The première of Fool for Love, directed by the playwright and starring Ed Harris and Kathy Baker, opened at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco on 8 February 1983.  It had its New York City début at the Circle Repertory Theatre on 26 May 1983 with the same cast before transferring to Off-Broadway’s Douglas Fairbanks Theatre on Theatre Row on 27 November.  It won two 1984 Obie Awards for Shepard’s direction and for the Best New American Play.  (Harris, Baker, and Will Paton also won Obies for their performances.)  Fool for Love was also nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1984, the same year the London première at the National Theatre opened; it moved to the Lyric Theatre in 1985.  The play was revived at the Apollo Theatre in London in 2006 and again at Riverside Studios in London in 2010.  A restaging with Sam Rockwell and 2012 Tony Award-winner Nina Arianda at the Williamstown Theater Festival in Williamstown, Massachusetts, premièred on 24 July 2014.  A 1985 film version of Fool for Love, starring Shepard himself (who also wrote the screenplay from his stage script) opposite Kim Basinger and featuring Harry Dean Stanton and Randy Quaid in the other roles from the play, was directed by Robert Altman.

The Round House Theatre started in 1970 as Street ’70, a program of Maryland’s Montgomery County Department of Recreation.  The theater moved into a circular former elementary school building in Silver Spring in 1977, and took the name Round House Theatre.  In 1982, the Round House Theatre became a nonprofit corporation; separated from the Department of Recreation in 1993 to become an independent, professional theater; and in 2005, moved to its present theaters, with the 400-seat main stage in Bethesda and an experimental stage in Silver Spring, where the troupe also houses its educational programs.  The Round House has earned 140 nominations for Helen Hayes Awards, the Capital-area recognition of excellence in theater, and won 27.  The company won the Hayes award for resident play (as distinct from touring shows) four times and the 2003 Charles MacArthur Award for new plays for the world premiere of Shakespeare, Moses, and Joe Papp by Ernie Joselovitz.  Rilette, stage director of Fool for Love, has been Producing Artistic Director of the troupe since August 2012.  

Shepard, who’ll be 71 in November, was born in Illinois but moved from military base to military base with his bomber-pilot father until the family settled in Los Angeles County, California, where Shepard graduated from high school and worked on a ranch as a teenager.  He dropped out of college to join a touring theater troupe and then came to New York City in 1963, soon becoming involved in the nascent Off-Off-Broadway movement.  He wrote plays for all the new OOB theaters like Caffe Cino and Cafe La Mama, but he became most identified with Ralph Cook’s Theatre Genesis, which was an arm of St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery, which produced his stage début, the one-act plays Cowboy and Rock Garden on a double bill, in 1964.  (I posted a history of the Off-Off-Broadway theater scene in the Greenwich Village of the 1960s on 12 and 15 December 2011.)  Between 1966 and 1968, Shepard won six Obie Awards, the Village Voice’s recognition of Off- and Off-Off-Broadway theater that was intended to be a counterweight to the commercial theater honored by the Tonys.  In 1965, Elenore Lester of the New York Times described Shepard as “the generally acknowledged ‘genius’ of the OOB circuit.”  By 1968, Shepard was also writing successful screenplays, such as Me and My Brother (1968) and Zabriskie Point (1970, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni).  In 1971, the playwright moved with his family to London, and several of his plays premièred there.  Returning to the U.S. in 1974, the writer bought a ranch in Mill Valley in Marin County, California, where he continued to write plays.

In 1975, Shepard was named playwright-in-residence at the Magic Theater in San Francisco,  just 14 miles north of Mill Valley across the Golden Gate Bridge; many of Shepard’s plays premièred there, including Buried Child (1978), Curse of the Starving Class (1978), and True West (1980), as well as Fool for Love.  In 1978, he was cast as The Farmer in Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven, launching Shepard’s film-acting career in earnest.  His role as test pilot Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff in 1983 earned him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination.  In 1985, he wrote the screenplay for Altman’s film adaptation of Fool for Love and he took the lead part of Eddie himself.  At the same time, Shepard’s play A Lie of the Mind, which the playwright directed, was running Off-Broadway at the Promenade Theatre with a cast including Harvey Keitel, Geraldine Page, Will Patton, Amanda Plummer, and Aidan Quinn, winning a 1986 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play, an Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Off-Broadway Play, and a Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Play.  All this notoriety landed the playwright and actor on the cover of Newsweek on 11 November 1985, under the headline “True West.”  The magazine dubbed him “Leading Man, Playwright, Maverick.”

Shepard’s written over 50 plays so far (I’ll be seeing the U.S. première of his latest, A Particle of Dread (Oedipus Variations), at New York City’s Signature Theatre in December.)  His Buried Child won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Drama; he was elected to The American Academy of Arts and Letters and named a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, both in 1986; and he was voted into the Theatre Hall of Fame in 1994.  Shepard’s taught playwriting and related subjects in classes, workshops, and seminars in colleges, universities, festivals, and theaters around the country, and he’s written music (“Brownsville Girl” with Bob Dylan, 1986) and performed with musical groups (banjo on Patti Smith’s cover of the Nirvana song “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on the album Twelve, 2007).  Shepard named Ralph Cook, the founder and director of the seminal OOB Genesis Theatre, as a formative influence, but he acknowledges Joseph Chaikin, member of the Living Theatre and founder of the Open Theatre, as a mentor.  (The two theater giants collaborated on 1978’s Tongues and 1979’s Savage/Love, two pieces for voice and percussion which premièred, respectively, at San Francisco’s Magic Theatre and Eureka Theatre with Chaikin on stage and Shepard at the drums.)  The dramatist was also influenced early in his theatrical life by the writing of Absurdist playwright Samuel Beckett, jazz, and Abstract Expressionist painting.  

Fascinated with the myth of the vanishing West and nonconformist perspectives on American culture, Shepard attempts in his plays to deconstruct the American Dream, “exposing the lies and delusions we live under.”  His writing frequently employs symbolism and non-linear storytelling incorporating an inventive use of spare, evocative language.  (Along with Absurdism, there’s more than a touch of Surrealism in Shepard’s scripts as well.  Think of Beckett designed by Salvador Dalí.)  He combines ironic humor with outrageous satire.  His plays are often peopled by drifters, fading rock stars, drunks, loners, and others subsisting on the edges of society and are frequently set in a vague, nonspecific nowhere, usually in some unspecified Western landscape.  As literary scholar Sherrill Grace warned:

However straightforward they may seem at first, however careful Shepard may be about realistic details or with characters who seem very familiar, sooner or later an audience is forced to abandon the comfortable realm of logic, clarity, predictability, and familiarity for an illogical realm of intense emotion, violent unpredictability and complex symbolic, inner states.

“After years of exploring the myths that sustain us as Americans,” wrote Ryan Rilette, “Shepard turned his attention to personal myth, the stories that serve as the foundation of our families and relationships,” and many of his plays depict deeply troubled families.  (Three plays—Buried Child, Curse of the Starving Class, and True West—are often dubbed the dramatist’s “Family Trilogy,” which some critics extend into a quintet with Fool and 1985’s A Lie of the Mind.)  In these plays, Round House dramaturg Brent Stansell noted, “the family is a source of tremendous pain.”  Among his more constant themes are the conflict between illusion and reality, the fluidity of time and identity, and the vagaries of memory, all of which figure in Fool.   

Fool for Love is one of Shepard’s best-known plays, along with True West, Curse of the Starving Class, and the Pulitzer-winning Buried Child.  According to the director, “It’s a piece that lives on the dividing line between love and hate, between attraction and repulsion, and between fantasy and reality.”  The fools in the play are Eddie (Thomas Keegan) and May (Katie deBuys), a pair of sometime lovers, who may be more to one another than even that but are on the outs at present.  May’s hiding out in a run-down Mojave Desert motel.  When the lights come up on the sliver of the depressing, bare room, May is sitting on the end of her bed, head bowed, determinedly silent as Eddie, her friend since high school and former boyfriend, is sitting across from her trying to get her to respond as he attempts to convince her to take him back.  May rejects Eddie but still won’t let him leave, leading to what Nelson Pressley of the Washington Post described as “75 minutes of ‘Git out!’ and ‘Don’t go!.’”  Outside the motel room, in a kind of southwestern “blasted heath” or no-man’s land sits the Old Man (Marty Lodge) in a rocking chair over on stage left, silently at first, sucking on what looks like a styrofoam cup of coffee.  Though the fourth wall of the motel room is open, the impression is that the Old Man isn’t actually present in the same reality as Eddie and May, but soon Shepard begins to play with this perception.  

May, who’s angry at Eddie for, among other things, an affair she accuses him of having with a wealthy woman she only identifies as “the countess,” tells him she’s waiting to be picked up for a date with a man named Martin.  This information gets Eddie’s dander up and we begin to see the violent streak in his nature when he returns to his truck, first, for his rope—he’s a rodeo cowboy who’s beginning to feel his age—and practices lassoing the furniture.  Soon, he also retrieves his rifle and field strips it, briefly holding the barrel between his legs in what has to be a symbolic gesture, and cleans and reassembles it.  Suddenly, a big, black Mercedes limo cruises through the parking lot outside—we see only its headlinghts—terrifying Eddie and enraging May as the vehicle rams the cowboy’s truck and the occupant, presumably the countess, shoots out his windshield as it speeds off. 

When Martin (director Rilette, replacing Tim Getman) arrives, a mousy young man who’s cowed by Eddie’s bluster and implicitly threatening nature, Eddie, by now buzzed on tequila, starts to tell the newcomer about his relationship to May and how they came to know each other.  Though May tries to contradict Eddie’s version of the facts, we learn a few secrets—well, possible secrets, since the real truth may not be in evidence—including that the Old Man is the father of both lovers—they’re half-siblings, though they didn’t know that until after they’d begun to “fool around” in high school.  The Old Man has his own take on the whole story and joins in the account, eventually stepping up into the motel room.  I won’t provide the details of this twisty, perhaps-not-all-true story—it would detract too much from the play’s impact if anyone went in knowing my take on it, since viewers will work out their own impressions based on the way they hear the tale.  (I will add that Shepard has acknowledged that some of what the Old Man recounts is drawn directly from conversations the playwright had with his estranged, alcoholic father.)  Like most of Shepard’s plays, Fool focuses on the effect of the action more than on the narrative, and in the end, there’s no concrete resolution as Eddie and May don’t reconcile, the Old Man is losing himself in his own delusions, and Martin is left on stage as a confused observer.

Fool for Love examines two of Shepard’s principal ideas: illusion versus reality and memory.  As for the first theme, Rilette believes that the dramatist “recognized that reality is subjective, based on our personal experience, and exploited that to great theatrical effect, challenging . . . an audience to decide which stories to believe.”  The playwright, for example, gives us the Old Man sitting outside the motel room.  Is he real?  Is he part of the imagination of either Eddie or May?  Is he perhaps a ghost from the past?  When Eddie leans out of the motel room set and pours tequila into the Old Man’s cup, Shepard entirely blurs the line between the real and the imaginary; and when the Old Man enters the room, which he does by walking through the fourth wall, not coming in through a door in the set, the separation between the two perceptions is wiped out—but still ambiguous.  When May accuses Eddie of being involved with the countess, it sounds an awful lot like the delusion of an obsessed mind—but then the unseen Mercedes appears and Eddie reacts in real fear.  We never see the countess—is she real or just a powerful illusion?  Further, are the stories Eddie and May tell Martin true?  Partly true?  Made up?  We never really learn.  All this is enhanced, as far as I was concerned, by the Edward Hopper-like look of the motel room set, with faded wall colors, no decoration of any kind, and a light source that’s not evident (the stark white lighting is designed by Daniel MacLean Wagner).  (If it weren’t for the cityscape out the window, the room in Hopper’s Morning Sun could be May’s room at the Desert Motel.)  In the end, it’s the individual viewer who decides what’s real and what’s illusionary; Shepard doesn’t give many hints.

Eddie’s whole life is a struggle between the real and the imaginary.  He’s hung up on the image of the cowboy and the way of the mythical West.  But they don’t really exit.  Except in a rodeo, a form of entertainment, cowboy lore is illusionary.  And Eddie’s only steps away from being outclassed even there by younger rodeo performers.  May’s only a few steps behind him, though.  She believes in the myth of romance and a quiet life but can’t make the break from Eddie and his mercurial and violent nature.  She’s dating a regular guy, a considerate and thoughtful man—but she lives in a seedy motel and is on the run from her past.  How does that work? 

If any of what transpires in Fool is true, how come Eddie, May, and the Old Man remember the details so differently?  Shepard’s point seems to be that one person’s memories of an event in the past can vary from another’s depending on each person’s perspective.  In Fool, Eddie and May each remember the same occasions in completely different ways, and then the Old Man chimes to “set the record straight” about what happened with his own version of the specifics.  None of the characters will relinquish his or her truth; indeed, they all fight to prove they’re right and the others are wrong.  Can all three versions of Eddie’s and May’s childhoods be accurate?  Are any of the characters lying?  Deluding themselves?  Are all the perspectives correct depending on where you stood when everything happened?  It’s a sort of Rashomon of the mind.  I might feel, for example, that the Old Man (real or not) is self-delusional, but that’s my perception.  Another viewer could very well feel differently.  We can’t know for sure.   

Further, the characters in Fool have no secure grasp of time or even their identities.  Their pasts keep invading their presents to subvert their futures and we can’t ever be sure who any of them really are from moment to moment.  May, for example, alternates almost every minute between rejecting Eddie and their former relationship and pulling him back to her needily.  We never know where anyone stands—and neither do they.

I’ve seen maybe half a dozen Shepard plays, including Heartless at STC in August 2012 (reported on ROT on 10 September 2012), my last encounter.  Despite his renown and his popularity with both audiences and theaters, I’ve never taken to him.  (According to Round House artistic director Rilette, Shepard “was the second most produced American playwright after Tennessee Williams” back in the 1980s.)  I have to report that seeing Fool for Love hasn’t changed my response to his work.  Though the performances were fine, including substitute Rilette’s Martin, I wasn’t engaged by the play, even for its brief 70-minute running time (my timing was somewhat different from the Post’s Pressley’s).  The emotional, psychological, and narrative flip-flops got too much for me pretty quickly even as I admired the actors for handling them so smoothly and confidently.  

As I said essentially of Heartless, one of my biggest difficulties with Fool is that it deliberately keeps secrets.  Readers who know me now know that I have problems with Harold Pinter because of this; but Pinter was a genius at the tactic and was better at it than anyone else, including Shepard.  (We’ll see that I have this same disagreement with Amy Herzog when I post my report on Belleville in a few days.)  Nevertheless, it annoys me because it makes me feel manipulated and if I’m being annoyed, then I’m not really getting into the play.  So I sat through the entire first scenes of Fool wondering what was going on and why Shepard was keeping secrets from me just because he wanted to.  

I likened the set to a Hopper painting (Edward, not Dennis), though I have no idea if designer Raham (who also designed the nicely appropriate costumes) was in any way influenced or inspired by that artist’s eerie, barren scenes.  Either way, of course, it was apt and unpleasantly evocative—the atmosphere I imagine Shepard wanted.  The set was also raked so that nothing was quite plumb and it seemed as if everything and everyone might come rolling down into the auditorium at any moment.  One really interesting element of the set and technical production (I don’t actually know what part of the production team was responsible for this effect) was the sound the set seemed to make.  Every time a door slammed, a foot was stomped, something (like a rifle butt) smacked the floor, or a face was slapped (but I may have imagined that one), it echoed through the theater.  This effect adds to the ominous atmosphere of the whole play, as if the motel room and its immediate surroundings are afloat in a reality bubble (like something in a sci-fi movie—speaking of Star Trek Motel, which I mentioned in my Wayside Motor Inn report on 1 October).  

However this is accomplished, sound designer Eric Shimelonis certainly gets some of the credit, as he does for the music that led into and out of the performance.  The pre-show music, a kind of eerie techno moan— described on Shimelonis’s website as “atmospheric pedal steel lines performed by the talented Jamie Linder” (and I have no way of disputing or corroborating that because I don’t know what it means!)—was actually unpleasant, but as we sat looking at the empty set and watching the lighted letters of “Motel” on the big outdoor sign flicker and blink, it set up an expectation of both a weird and ominous piece of the world.  (The exit music was a country-and-western ballad, which seemed more literally appropriate, but less evocative.)  

As the lovers, deBuys and Keegan, the two actors director Rilette asserted were his impetus for producing Fool, a play he’d wanted to do for years, this season at Round House, had their work cut out for them (if you’ll pardon the cliché): they had to change emotional and psychological tacks on a dime, allow the control to shift back and forth instantly, and reach for connections to out-of-the-blue information and events that may or may not even be true.  (As actors, I assume deBuys and Keegan decided for themselves what’s true and what’s not—but that’s their business, not necessarily ours.  Or Shepard’s.)  If Rilette toned down the overt violence of Fool from the original New York production, as Pressley asserted, Eddie’s implied threats and May’s sometime verbal aggression at least hinted at a physical dimension to their on-again-off-again relationship.  I can’t say that if the Round House production included more actual physical confrontation (the fight choreographer was Casey Kaleba, who did an excellent job with the violence that was staged), it might have pulled me in to the play more.   Nonetheless, Keegan and deBuys, who’s relatively petite beside her stage lover, unquestionably implied a wildness and untamed nature, emotionally raw and on edge, even if it was kept in check for these particular 70 minutes.

Marty Lodge, in his fortieth appearance on a Round House stage, had all the attributes of a Shepard old-timer, the shadow of the mythical cowboy.  He was gruff, craggy, solitary, weary, self-absorbed, blunt—also controlled and deliberate—a sort of twisted prairie sage.  Lodge’s Old Man, whether you believe him or not, was the glue that held this tenuous tale together in the end—maybe a magnet is a better analogy, since he was uninvolved at first and the chaotic relationship between Eddie and May (and then among Eddie, May, and Martin) threatens to spin apart until the Old Man inserts himself and Lodge essentially took control and orchestrated the story-telling.  He’s not a likeable character, but he’s commanding and it helped explain some of what became of both Eddie and May that ended them up the way they are.  (On the other hand, Martin grew up without the specter of such a figure so he may not be as strong as Eddie, but he’s a mite nicer—which isn’t necessarily an asset in Shepard’s world.)

The Martin I saw, played by director Rilette, was a bit of a cypher.  I suspect that the part’s written that way, though the original actor seems to have been a tad younger and may have been more forceful in the role (only because I imagine he’d had more rehearsal and performances under his belt—though I don’t actually know that).  Rilette’s Martin was tentative and deferential, not just to the bullying Eddie, who belittles Martin, but to May as well—much to Eddie’s dismay.  It made him a little nebbishy, and I wonder if another actor might have offered a stronger persona that might have at least suggested a competition for Eddie.  On the other hand, Rilette’s softer Martin succeeded in suggesting that May has chosen him as a polar opposite to Eddie both as a better alternative and as a dig at her ex.  (It might be safe to assume that actor Rilette, who has some on-stage credits, followed the same acting guidance director Rilette gave his predecessor.)

In the press, the reception for Round House’s Fool for Love was pretty good overall.  The Washington Post’s Pressley called the production “a faded postcard” that “capably captured that vintage Sam Shepard desperation-at-the-edge-of-the-desert look” of the playwright’s “twisted cowboy romance.”  Rilette’s direction “clearly gets the Shepard vernacular,” but “[t]he show seems oddly well-adjusted” and Pressley demurred when it came to the actors: “the performance doesn’t kick up much dust,” though “not for lack of ferocity in the acting.”  “[T]he eddies of the conflict feel surprisingly shallow,” added the Post review-writer, because, he felt, “this ‘Fool’ generally tones down the business of May and Eddie wrangling and hurling each other into the walls.”  Pressley suggested that “this production isn’t fully immersed in the messy depths and psychic tangles that Shepard was tearing at. . . .  Rougher, more mysterious edges throughout would be welcome.”

On DC Theatre Scene, Richard Barry said, “Fool for Love peaks [sic] out from behind dusty blinds to explore the murk of male and female love as well a family history’s leviathan grip.”  The production, Barry asserted, has “a deep effect on those participating and witnessing, both within the play and without.”  David Siegel of DC Metro Theater Arts wrote that director Rilette’s “absorbing, sensually deep, measured take” on Fool for Love, “riveting in its hold even three decades after it was first produced,” was “[b]urnished to an earthy golden.”  The production, wrote the DCMTA reviewer, starts the Round House season “with danger and striking vigor” and “will linger with you after leaving” the theater.  Siegel concluded that the Round House’s Fool for Love is a “marvelous feast for those who like a strong brew.”  “[C]ompared to Shepard’s earlier work, Fool for Love seems a little lifeless,” wrote Roger Catlin on MD Theatre Guide, despite “some fire between the central characters.”  The MDTG reviewer then made his objections known in a list of (mostly piddling, IMHO) wishes: that deBuys “had a bit more twang in her delivery,” that “Keegan’s voice was a couple of octaves lower,” that “his clothes looked a little more dusty or worn.”  In the end, Catlin asserted: “Shepard’s play may be showing its age more than the shabby motel room.”  

On Talkin’ Broadway Regional News & Reviews, Susan Berlin declared: “Despite the efforts of the playwright, and director Ryan Rilette, to bring elemental grandeur to this setup, the production . . . is more effective as a showcase for two fine actors in the central roles.”  On Broadway World: Washington, DC, Heather Nadolny called the Round House’s opening production “a resounding start” to the season and then warns, “This show is far from one you would want to see to feel better about life,” continuing that the Round House production “will bring out the raw emotions and make you glad you’re not in the action itself.”  Nadolny concluded that “at the end of it, you will have seen a collaboration that truly works.  You will have seen a piece of life, dark and visceral in front of you, that, despite its desperation, has a beauty all its own.”

As I said, this presentation of Fool for Love hasn’t substantially changed my response to Shepard’s plays.  Let’s see what happens after I see A Particle of Dread in two months.