94. Review of THE COUNTRY HOUSE (October 24, 2014)

94. THE COUNTRY HOUSE

 

I saw the Manhattan Theatre Club’s production of THE COUNTRY HOUSE, Donald Margulies’s imperfect, sporadically enjoyable comedy about a theatrical family, on a Friday, but it’s really a throwback Thursday kind of play. Veteran theatregoers visiting the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre won’t be challenged by the show, which premiered at Los Angeles’s Geffen Playhouse this past summer, but they’ll bask in the comfort of the kind of immediately recognizable writing, scenery, staging, and performance for which the Great White Way is famous.

From left: Kate Jennings Grant, Daniel Sunjata, Sarah Steele, Eric Lange, Blythe Danner. Photo: Joan Marcus.

The play is an homage to Chekhov, and the influences can easily be detected, especially in the mommy-issue relationship of the incessantly whiny, self-hating Vanya/Constantine conflation, Uncle Elliott (wonderfully embodied by Eric Lange), and his glamorous Arkadina-like mother, Anna Patterson (Blythe Danner, perfectly cast), a grand actress at whose spacious country home in Williamstown, Mass., the action transpires. However, except, perhaps, when Uncle Elliott is even shriller than Uncle Vanya, the play’s tone seems more far more redolent of Broadway chestnuts about theatre families, like Nöel Coward’s HAY FEVER and Kaufman and Ferber’s THE ROYAL FAMILY, than it does of the Russian playwright. So, for all the fun you may think you’ll have finding Chekhov in Margulies, you’d be better off forgetting it and just watching THE COUNTRY HOUSE as a mildly predictable, old-fashioned comedy about theatre folk.

Williamstown, of course, is the Berkshires home every summer to a major theatre company that attracts important stars (like Ms. Danner), many of them famous in films or TV and seeking to find artistic solace by returning, if only briefly, to the stage, usually in the revival of an old play. Anna, whose beautiful country house, which, like her, is beginning to show its age, is conveniently nearby, making it a suitable place for theatrical types to visit. She’s preparing to play Mrs. Warren in Shaw’s MRS. WARREN’S PROFESSION, which gives her opportunities to express the frustrations faced by an aging star, both in terms of the difficulties of learning lines and finding suitable stage work, not to mention the “work” performers need to do to maintain their appearance.

At the supermarket, Anna runs into Michael Astor (Daniel Sunjata, charming), a handsome hunk of an actor in his 40s against whose Marchbanks she once played Shaw’s Candida. Michael’s going into rehearsal for Molnar’s THE GUARDSMAN, the show preceding Anna’s, so, possibly because she feels the stirrings of her still simmering libido, Anna invites the much younger man to stay at the house while his own digs are being fumigated to eliminate an insect infestation.  

The presence of this gorgeous man, now starring as a doctor in a hit sci-fi TV show, stirs more than Anna’s juices; it affects the hormonal chemistry of both her outspoken, 19-year-old, “plainly lovely” (as Margulies describes her), college student granddaughter, Susie Keegan (Sarah Steele, just right), who admits to having had a crush on him since she was in her crib, and of another woman, Nell McNally (Kate Jennings Grant, lovely). Nell, a struggling actress, is the beautiful 35-year-old fiancée of Walter Keegan (David Rasche, outstanding), Susie’s 66-year-old dad, a film director known for a moneymaking blow ‘em up film franchise.

Kate Jennings Grant, David Rasche. Photo: Joan Marcus.

Walter and Nell have come from Los Angeles in his Porsche to visit, much to the frustration of Elliott, who’s carried a torch for Nell since he acted with her at Louisville’s Humana Festival 11 years earlier; he’s also enraged that Walter not only is marrying someone—much less Nell—so soon after the early death from cancer of his wife, Kathy, but that he’s brought Nell with him on this visit. Kathy, a successful actress, was Elliott’s beloved sister, whom he regarded as his soulmate. Susie, Kathy’s daughter, also resents Nell’s intrusion and treats the woman rudely, although Nell is much more decent than others care to recognize.

Mr. Margulies allows these ingredients to stew as the characters renew old acquaintances or begin new ones, with plot lines involving Michael’s humanitarian work in Africa; his loveless—but far from sexless—love life and brief attraction to Nell (which culminates during the very funny conclusion of a power outage); Elliott’s attempt to rekindle what he imagines to have been a love affair with Nell; the reading by the characters of Elliott’s first play (his acting career in a shambles, he’s chosen playwriting as his new métier); and the disastrous aftermath of that reading when the tenaciously defensive Elliott seeks feedback.

Mr. Margulies’s dialogue is always crisp, convincing, and clever, suiting his characters and making their conversations entertaining. But the real fun in a play like this is the impression it gives that you’re overhearing real show people talk about the things that real show people talk about. Susie’s deconstruction of Michael’s status as an actor, and what people seek in a star, is one example; another is Walter’s  critique of Elliott’s playwriting aspirations, and his response to Elliott’s condemnation of him for “selling out” as an artist in order to make commercially successful schlock. The confrontation between Walter and Elliott, in fact, even though it doesn’t include Ms. Danner, the putative star, is the liveliest scene in the play, made vivid by the vitriolic dynamics of Mr. Rasche and Mr. Lange.

The play’s three acts, with one intermission, play out over a little more than two hours in John Lee Beatty’s classic iteration of the kind of realistically homey set he does so well, with its cutaway peaked wooden roof, upstage staircase, and down center couch. Peter Kaczorowski’s lights (especially during a fierce thunderstorm and blackout) and Rita Ryack’s costumes, supplemented by Peter Golub’s original music and Obadiah Eaves’s sound design (that storm again), give the show the Broadway gloss it requires.

THE COUNTRY HOUSE has a tendency to meander, and sometimes seems more like a collection of scenes than a fully integrated play, but, as directed by Daniel Sullivan, it gives the ensemble plenty of opportunities to shine, although you have to wait a bit for Ms. Danner to have her big moments. Elliott’s bitchiness, which annoys everyone on stage, eventually threatens to irk even the poor ticket-buying eavesdroppers, and too many moments, especially the closing ones, tend to drag, but, if you're in the mood for a pleasant, old-fashioned, throwback evening on Broadway, with a still glowing star leading the way, THE COUNTRY HOUSE’s doors are open for you to enter.