86. Review of GENERATIONS (October 14, 2013)

86. GENERATIONS

 

In less time than it takes to order, eat, and pay for a meal at the average restaurant you can ingest British playwright Debbie Tucker Green’s GENERATIONS, a 30 minute or so theatrical tone poem in which cooking plays a central role, served up by the Play Company in cooperation with the Soho Rep. Does it have some tasty parts? Yes. Is it well prepared and served? Yes again.  Did it leave me fully satisfied?  Not so much.



From left: Shyko Amos, Khai Toi Bryant, Ntombikhona Diamani. Photo: Julieta Cervantes.

As usual at the Soho Rep, the space has been transformed (by designer Amulfo Maldonado) to match the play’s dramatic needs. Powdery red-brown earth resembling what you see on a baseball infield covers the floor; the seating is a wildly eclectic assortment of wooden, plastic, and metal chairs, benches, stools, and crates, which looks like it’s been assembled from some local junkyard. Nearly every inch of wall space is covered with red, orange, blue, and yellow sheets of corrugated metal to create a shanty-like South African house. (Of course, no actual home would be as spacious as the one created in the otherwise limited confines of 46 Walker Street.)

A soiled kitchen counter with cooking facilities and implements stands near the center, surrounded by the audience on three sides. An old refrigerator, shabby cabinets and shelves, and other domestic items (including vegetables in plastic bags) line the walls. Local music plays on the radio when you enter, and, if you’re thirsty, chances are you’ll be sipping a bottle of beer purchased in the lobby.

As the play begins, a choir of 13 splendid singers, seated in small groups amid the audience, suddenly rises and begins to sing a cappella (in an undisclosed South African language) and to move rhythmically under the excellent musical direction of Bongi Duma. The words are the names of various people who’ve died, followed by “Another leaves us, another has gone,” which, although not mentioned in the dialogue, alludes, I’m sure, to AIDS victims. (Considering the play’s subject matter and the vagueness of the writing, one could be forgiven for thinking they died of food poisoning.) The play’s music, although often rather lively, is referred to in the script as a “dirge.” During the course of the action, at various moments of emotional intensity, the choir heightens the effect by its chanted interpolations, underscoring the lines.

The acting itself, effectively directed by Leah C. Gardiner, has a rhythmic structure, with its combination of realistic and stylized behavior, as the actors speak Ms. Green’s deliberately repetitious, choppily truncated, elliptical, and often monosyllabic dialogue in which the word “cook” (and variations on it) holds pride of place. At several places, Grandma (Thuli Dumakude) says to Grandad (Jonathan Peck): “I was the cooker—you was the cookless—I was the cooker who coached the cookless. I coached you to cook.” To which he remarks: “You couldn’t cook.” Also important are references to memory, both what is remembered and what forgotten.

What the characters present are the interactions within a family of three generations, Grandma and Grandad; Mama (Ntombikhona Diamini) and Dad (Michael Rogers); and Boyfriend (Mamoudou Athie), Girlfriend (Shyko Amos), and Junior Sister (Khail Toi Bryant). As time passes, the lights (nicely overseen by Matt Frey) gradually go from bright to dim, leaving only kerosene lamps hanging on the walls aglow; what seem at first like minutes actually have been years. The bustling action of the early scenes gradually subsides, a melancholy mood seeps in, and only Grandad and Grandma remain.

What little plot there is circles around the family’s relationship to cooking, the thread that links one generation to another. As the Boyfriend wonders, over and over, about the Girlfriend’s cooking skills, the characters banter, taking up pages of dialogue, about who taught whom to cook, with the words circling back on themselves, emotions rising and falling; meanwhile, as food is prepared, the older folk reminisce about how cooking played a role in their love lives. The Boyfriend and Girlfriend disappear to the chanting of the choir, but the same basic repartee as before continues when they’re gone. Next to leave is Dad, who’s soon followed by Mama.

The final scene, with only the saddened grandparents, hints at the tragedy of AIDS, especially when Grandad says, “This thing. This dying thing. . . . This unease. This dis-ease,” which is about the play’s only specific reference to something other than cooking and eating in this family’s lives. But why and how this specific family succumbed is never addressed, making them instead symbolic of South Africa and not representative of any specific individuals. This, perhaps, is why the South African national anthem is sung by the choir at the end.

GENERATIONS is artistically evocative; however, its insistent ambiguity, which some have found a strength, left me hungry for something more.

85. Review of IT HAS TO BE YOU (October 5, 2014)

85. IT HAS TO BE YOU

 

 

Many people have had the experience of seeing a widowed, aging parent, whose assets they one day hoped to inherit, disappoint them by marrying anew, even perhaps at an age when many others are in their dotage or suffering from a fatal illness. Usually, such marriages, however they may affect the financial dreams of the children involved, are between people of comparable age, so the children, whatever their objections are on other grounds, can’t make much of a fuss about how old the new partner is.

Catherine Butterfield, Adam Ferrara, Peggy J. Scott. Photo: Kim T. Sharp.

If an elderly father were to marry a much younger woman, though, there would certainly be suspicions of gold-digging intentions on the lady’s part, but such situations are common enough not to raise too many eyebrows, unless the amount of money involved is egregious; remember the scandal when actress Anna Nicole Smith wed the billionaire J. Howard Marshall, when Ms. Smith was 26 and Mr. Marshall 89? On the other hand, for a wealthy woman in her 80s to marry a man younger than half her age is rather rare, which is why the late-life marriage of Oscar-winning actress Celeste Holm was news. In 2004, when celebrating her 87th birthday at Sardi’s, the still glamorous Ms. Holm shocked her guests by using the occasion to marry her 41-year-old, opera singer boyfriend, Frank Basile, whom she had met in 1999. Two years earlier, her worried sons began seeking ways to protect Ms. Holm’s $13 million in assets; after she died, in 2012, at 95, the costly legal battle that had begun between the sons and Mr. Basile centered on the sale of the late actress’s expensive Central Park West apartment.

Regardless of whether both parties were truly in love, with Ms. Holm’s money being secondary to Mr. Basile’s happiness, the subject of such a relationship—elderly woman and prime-of-life man—and its effect on the woman’s grown children, certainly raises interesting dramatic possibilities. Catherine Butterfield—the author of IT HAS TO BE YOU, the December-May romantic comedy at the Dorothy Strelsin Theatre (in the Abingdon Theatre Complex)—says that Ms. Holm’s story was her inspiration, but that doesn’t mean the play is about the star. Further, there’s only a 27-year separation between the still hot-to-trot heroine, who’s a mere septuagenarian, and her gerontophile Romeo.

In the play, Mindy (Ms. Butterfield, the playwright), a Nyack realtor in her late 40s, and her brother Frank (Adam Ferrara), five years younger, who runs a failing New Jersey tuxedo shop, rush to the home of Dorothy (Peggy J. Scott), their well-to-do, well-preserved, 75-year-old, mother, when they learn from a neighbor that she’s been dancing naked on the balcony of her lovely Massachusetts home. They’re convinced that Mom is sinking into dementia and that it’s time to move her into a senior residence; although they love Dorothy, their concern about her is partly rooted in the selfish hope (based on real need, especially on Frank’s part) that they’ll share in the sale of her valuable home. When they arrive they discover the cause of her eccentric behavior is Burt (Peter Davenport), the good-looking, 48-year old piano tuner, painter, and gardening maven, with whom she’s been living. They insultingly call him a “gardener,” just as the Holm offspring dismissed Basile as a “waiter.”

The result is a lightweight play written with just enough wisecracking charm to keep you gently engaged during its 90 minutes, but one whose premise is never really convincing and whose performance doesn’t fully satisfy. Is Burt the gigolo Mindy and Frank accuse him of being, out to steal Dorothy’s riches from under them? Can he seriously be in love with Dot, as he calls her? Do Mindy and Frank have the right to deprive their mother of her happiness?

When Jed (Jeffrey C. Hawkins), Dorothy’s youngest (and favorite) child, a gay set decorator, arrives from Hollywood, things move in a new but predictable direction. Before the play ends, however, a broken heart will be mended and the famous Isham Jones-Gus Kahn tune referenced by the play’s title will, when sung at the piano, offer pleasantly sentimental solace to both those on stage and those in the audience.

Ms. Butterfield has a wholly acceptable idea in questioning the motives of otherwise fond children who can’t find happiness in their own love lives yet consider it perfectly okay to interfere in what gives their parent joy on the grounds of what they deem its unseemliness. However, the free-spirited Dorothy, who’s been making artistic studies of her nude body for years (to her children’s surprise), and is even now engaged in an art project involving taking pictures of herself every day at 3:00 p.m., must surely have behaved unconventionally before this. It’s a bit of a stretch to believe that her kids are so stunned by her current actions as to think they befit placing her in a home. be

There are other stretches, including the hokey resolution, but, let’s face it, you need stronger playwriting elastic—despite the example of the Holms-Basile affair—if you expect an audience to buy a torrid romance between a woman nearly three decades years older than her beau, especially one who’s spent nearly half a century in the closet. Older man, much younger woman? Fine. We see such stories every day. Older woman, younger man? Of course, as long as the gap isn't that large. It’s not hard to accept the 33-year-old Ben Foster being with the 47-year-old Robin Wright, or Hugh Jackman being married to a woman 13 years older, but the Dorothy and Burt romance doesn’t go down quite so easily, even with 19 years shaved off the Holm-Basile relationship. There’s certainly a lot of humorous potential in what goes on between such a couple in private, but barely anything of the sort makes its way into Ms. Butterfield’s comedy, which aims to build up sympathy for Dorothy’s late-blooming passion. Anyone who objects is just a geriatric-hating reactionary with no respect for old people’s individuality.

A woman of 75—even one with a youthful sparkle who dyes her perfectly coiffed hair blond, adds red streaks for highlights, and wears skintight pants and colorful chiffon ops (costumes are by Sherry Martinez) that make her look more like a denizen of Boca Raton than upscale Massachusetts—is a hard sell as an overripe cougar. Regardless of how annoyingly the obnoxious Mindy and the more hapless Frank go about sticking their nose into the affair, they definitely can be excused for finding the whole thing icky.

Perhaps the play might work better if it weren’t played so straightforwardly. The Strelsin Theatre is a tiny room seating 60 around a postage stamp acting area, here designed on  a shoestring by Ian Paul Guzzone, and lit by Michael Megliolia, to comprise several locales, but mainly Dorothy’s elegant home. Such an intimate space certainly needs a toned-down approach from director Stuart Ross, but too low key a performance is bound to dampen the spirited comic mood the piece requires; this, though, is essentially what happens. At the performance I saw, the pacing tended to drag, the smoothly professional cast (apart from the excellent Ms. Scott) failed to glow, and too many of Ms. Butterfield’s sprightly zingers were thrown away. I chuckled, but laughs were sparse; it was champagne without the fizz. Lacking more emphasis on its comedy, the play couldn’t survive its contrivances. Which is why, when the play ends, with Dorothy and Burt singing “It Had to Be You” to each other, they should be looking deeply into each other’s eyes, wondering if it’s really true.

84. Review of THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME (October 9, 2014)

84. THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME



 

This is only the second play directed by Marianne Elliott I’ve ever seen, the other being WAR HORSE. Still, after experiencing her production of THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME, now at Broadway’s Barrymore Theatre following its premiere at Britain’s National Theatre and a hit West End run (ended when the theatre’s roof collapsed), I’m ready to announce that she’s one of the most imaginative, yet accessible, directors now working in the English-speaking theatre. Both WAR HORSE and THE CURIOUS INCIDENT are works with wide popular appeal, although the latter, for all its powerful emotional undertow, inclines a bit more toward the cerebral, while WAR HORSE is aimed entirely at your heart. Regardless, both will remain among my most memorable theatrical experiences.

Excellently adapted by Simon Stephens from Mark Haddon’s 2003 novel, THE CURIOUS INCIDENT is about a 15-year-old boy, Christopher Boone (Alex Sharp; Taylor Trensch at matinees), living in Wiltshire, whose behavioral attributes strongly suggest Asperger’s, although no specific condition is ever mentioned. A mathematical savant, with encyclopedic knowledge of many things, Christopher aspires to be an astronaut. While high functioning, as the expression goes, he can be very difficult because of his severe lack of social skills, his inability to lie (in contrast to the lying that surrounds him), and his incomprehension of idiomatic expressions and even the simplest metaphors (like being the apple of someone’s eye). If he’s physically touched by another person he goes ballistic, and the best his usually brusque dad, Ed (Ian Barford, just right), can manage is a very carefully applied high five. You have to get past Christopher’s emotional limitations before you can learn to love him, which may be why the play is not as moving as WAR HORSE was.

The play begins with a blast of sound and light to reveal Christopher standing over the dead body of Wellington, a neighbor’s dog, stabbed to death with a garden fork (pitchfork). Despite Ed’s very strong objections, Christopher—a Sherlock Holmes enthusiast—determines to investigate the crime and find out who the killer is (curiosity killed the cat, not the dog), keeping a notebook of his findings. Christopher has been told by Ed that his mother, Judy (Enid Graham, very good), died of a heart ailment. When the boy, in the course of his investigation, discovers a hidden cache of letters, he embarks on a dangerous journey to London to shed light on this additional mystery.




Alex Sharp and cast of THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME. Photo: Joan Marcus.

The story, itself not especially complex, and potentially capable of a more realistic staging, requires many scenes and locales, giving it a cinematic sweep. Much of the action is narrated in Act one from Christopher’s notebook by Siobhan, although she does so as a conduit for the boy’s thoughts rather than as something she herself is saying. In Act two, the notebook, at her suggestion, has been transformed by Christopher into a play, and there are even self-referential comments to this effect between Siobhan and the audience. Christopher must overcome his negative response to playacting, however, which he considers another form of deceit.

The performance moves swiftly from moment to moment by using Bunny Christie’s abstract set, which is little more than a large black box built in forced perspective, with walls and raked floor covered in large, graph-like, white lines. The rear wall can move forward and backward, altering the sense of space. Traps in the floor, compartments in the walls, and sliding panels that create instant doors offer endless possibilities for scenic flexibility. Electrical elements built into the floor and walls allow for a remarkable number of digital effects that become especially vivid during Christopher’s trip as he negotiates the overwhelmingly complex world he encounters. A scene in an underground station when he jumps onto the tracks to retrieve his rat seems harrowingly realistic, despite its obvious artificiality. Another scene, which creates the impression of an escalator, has to be seen to be appreciated. Then there’s the miniature version of London Christopher creates, complete with a lighted train traveling through it . . . 

Ms. Elliott, and her equally brilliant choreographers, Scott Graham and Stephen Hoggett, using the company as an ensemble, have created as exciting a theatrical experience as you’re likely to encounter in a Broadway theatre. Aside from the actor playing Christopher, all the actors, even those playing principal roles, become part of the ensemble for crowd scenes. At times, an actor turns into a piece of furniture for Christopher to lean against. The ensemble rapidly moves a minimum of small boxes into place to serve a variety of purposes, and even Christopher is moved around by two of them when he’s held aloft in a sideways position as he runs around the walls. Aside from Mr. Barford, Ms. Graham, and  Ms. Faridany each handles just one named character, while the other actors play as many as eight roles. The lighting design (by Paul Constable), sound design (Ian Dickinson), and original score (Adrian Sutton) work in conjunction to enhance startling scene changes, aided by the video projections of Finn Ross. Ms. Christie’s carefully coordinated everyday costumes further assist the visual effectiveness of the play.

There are no missteps visible, and even the performance at the end of a sweet little puppy is perfectly calculated to offer just the right jot of sentimentality to offset Christopher’s emotional coolness. THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME is topped off by a superb performance by recent Juilliard graduate Alex Sharp, making his professional debut, who uses his body, voice, and facial expressions in a myriad of interesting ways to embody Christopher’s troubled but eternally resilient essence. Surely, though, if you’ve read this far, you must be curious to find out for yourself.

83. Review of UNCANNY VALLEY (October 7, 2014)

83. UNCANNY VALLEY

 

 

 

One thing I guarantee about Thomas Gibbons’s UNCANNY VALLEY at 59E59 Theaters is that, if you see it with a friend, you’re going to want to talk about it when you leave. And, while the production is excellent, you’ll be even more intrigued by the subject matter, the use of scientific research and technology to create a robot so humanlike you’d have a hard time telling the difference. UNCANNY VALLEY is making its local premiere after first being seen at the Contemporary American Theater Festival in West Virginia.

Alex Podulke, Barbara Kingsley. Photo: Seth Freeman.

Of course, the play, which has overtones of the Frankenstein’s monster story (there’s even a self-reflexive crack about “the villagers . . . gathering with torches and pitchforks”), owes a debt to Karel Capek’s R.U.R. (1922), which gave the world the word “robot,” and to all those films—too many to mention—in which artificial intelligence plays a crucial part, including PROMETHEUS (2012). In fact, Michael Fassbender’s performance as the robot David in that movie suggests a precedent for that of Alex Podulke, who plays the robot Julian in UNCANNY VALLEY.

Alex Podulke, Barbara Kingsley. Photo: Seth Fre

The subject is very hot right now, and there’s even another play of the same title playing at the Brick Theatre in Williamsburg from October 9-18; it’s unlikely that the stage and screen are going to stop finding ways to keep the cyborgs coming. The reason for the similarity in titles is because “uncanny valley” is a familiar term within the field of artificial intelligence. It refers to the quantifiable discomfort felt by people when confronted by androids whose appearance and behavior, no matter how close they are to seeming human, are not fully lifelike. 

Mr. Gibbons’s 90-minute one-act, smoothly staged by Tom Dugdale, is a two hander set in the office of Claire (Barbara Kingsley), a septuagenarian neuroscientist in a life-extension lab, who’s been training Julian to behave like a human being. When we first see him he’s just a head on a desk, learning facial expressions. Next we see the head on an armless torso, then with an arm attached, after which another arm is attached. Finally, he gets legs and wanders about the office with awkward deliberation, testing out his new accessories. As Julian slowly takes on all the physical attributes of a living man, he and Claire engage in a series of fascinating discussions about the process of becoming human.

All this leads to the revelation that Julian’s purpose is to provide a simulacrum of a billionaire with the same name, who’s dying of cancer and who’s spent $340 million to have Julian created so that his memories and personality can be downloaded into the robot, allowing him to continue running the late billionaire’s huge business and enjoying life. You may ask: is this really immortality (or something like it)? How the dead billionaire can appreciate this afterlife is never addressed.

The play is set in “the not too distant future,” and we’re told that 19 other such robots are being developed elsewhere. When the story breaks, and people (actual ones, that is) begin to express discomfort with the presence of robots so real they can pass for human, the possibility of advocating for robots’ rights is broached, just as it was in a satirical segment on "The Colbert Report"; its talking head is a sibling of the one in UNCANNY VALLEY. 

Despite the occasional laugh lines, UNCANNY VALLEY is a thoughtful, serious play. In its eighth and final scene, the previously clumsy robot enters, smartly dressed, a lock of his previously pasted down hair hanging casually, and his movements graceful and comfortable, albeit with a perfectly modulated hint of the control necessary to make them seem that way. Julian is having a major crisis with “his” son Paul, from whom the late billionaire was alienated; Paul is contesting Julian’s continuing to be the head of the family business, since he’s a robot, not a human, and Julian wants Claire to testify on his behalf in court. But Julian goes too far with regard to his interference in Claire’s personal life, and the play moves into mildly melodramatic territory.

Nevertheless, the sudden conflict serves to illuminate some of the potential moral, ethical, and legal issues that robots like Julian are likely to precipitate, if they ever get to where they’re as convincing as Julian. In fact, Julian, for all his being little more than wiring and algorithms, is constantly evolving. He even looks forward to not only being able to pleasure a sex partner, but to feeling sexual stimulation himself.

When you enter Theater B at 59E59 you notice that scene designer Jesse Dreikosen has hidden his set behind a crinkly white curtain on which a live TV image of the audience is projected. You may, perhaps, spend the preshow minutes pretending that you’re not looking at yourself. Later, a huge image of Julian’s eerily smiling face, eyes staring directly at you, fills the curtain’s expanse. (Video design is by Michael McKowen.) The windowless office, wooden floor and all, with opaque glass walls upstage, and a wall of shelves bearing Claire’s artifacts (including an earlier robot’s head), sets the right tone. Therese Bruck’s costumes and John Ambrosone’s lighting do their work unobtrusively and well. A marvelous sound design by Elisheba Ittoop offers just the right tone of strangeness to the atmosphere.

Barbara Kingsley, a petite, sylphlike, grandmotherly actress, plays Claire with the proper balance of friendliness, acumen, and sensitivity, especially when her personal life—involving a husband with dementia and a daughter who abandoned her—is involved. Like Fassbender, Alex Podulke has the kind of handsome, clean-lined, generalized features that make him seem both natural and unnatural when Julian speaks in his soft-edged, precisely articulated voice, and produces his programmed facial expressions and bodily movements. Even when he morphs into a believable human toward the end, he never quite loses that mildly unnerving quality that makes you wonder what’s really ticking inside.

82. Review of YOU CAN'T TAKE IT WITH YOU (October 9, 2014)

82. YOU CAN'T TAKE IT WITH YOU

 

 

What can a Johnny-come-lately reviewer add to the cacophony of praise being showered on the new Broadway revival of YOU CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU, at the Longacre Theatre? Unless he has a totally different take, he can add very little, and, in this case, he doesn’t. The show, apart from the usual unimportant quibbles, is every bit as delightful as most critics say. So instead of rehashing those opinions, I’m offering, for the most part, a revision of what I wrote about the play in my book The Encyclopedia of the New York Stage, 1930-1940 about the 1936 production. At the end are a few personal reactions to the current production. The original show ran 837 performances at the Booth Theatre, won the Pulitzer Prize for 1936-1937, and was one of the 10 Best Plays of the Year. For a memorable photo of the entire original company, with Kaufman and Hart standing proudly up center, click here.

YOU CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU, by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart (the program actually credits them in the reverse order), one of the all-time popular Broadway comedy hits—which has been given countless productions in amateur and professional theaters over the years—has had three (or four, depending on how you’re counting) previous Broadway revivals. In 1945 it had a very short run in a slapdash production at the City Center, starring ex-vaudevillian Fred Stone as Grandpa Vanderhof; in 1965 the APA Repertory Theatre did a fine production at the Lyceum, with Donald Moffat as Grandpa and Rosemary Harris as Alice; in 1967, the company returned to the Lyceum with the same basic production; and in 1983, Jason Robards as Grandpa Vanderhof led a terrific cast in a revival that tallied 312 performances at the Plymouth and Royale Theatres.

From left: James Earl Jones, Kristine Nielsen, Fran Kranz, Will Brill, Annaleigh Ashford, Patrick Kerr, Mark Linn-Baker. Photo: Joan Marcus.

What Kaufman and Hart contrived was a zany but heartwarming farce about a wildly unconventional family who live in the shadow of Columbia University. There’s the crustily individualistic, snake- and stamp-collecting Grandpa Martin Vanderhof (James Earl Jones), who retired 35 years earlier, gets much pleasure from attending Columbia’s commencement exercises, and refuses to pay income tax; his crackpot amateur-painter daughter, Penelope (Kristine Nielsen), who started to write plays (unproduced) when a typewriter was accidentally delivered to the house eight years earlier, and who asks the dipsomaniacal actress Gay Wellington (Julie Halston) to help get her scripts in shape; Penny’s husband, Paul Sycamore (Mark Linn-Baker), who manufactures firecrackers in the basement, aided by a onetime iceman, Mr. De Pinna (Patrick Kerr), who long ago attached himself to the household; candy-making, 29-year-old daughter Essy Sycamore (Annaleigh Ashford), who’s practicing ballet dancing under the tutelage of an emotional Russian, Boris Kolenkhov (Reg Rogers), and who performs to the xylophone playing of her screwy husband Ed (Will Brill), who prints radical statements; pretty daughter Alice (Rose Byrne), straighter than the rest, a bit embarrassed by her family’s oddities, and in love with Tony, the son of her Wall Street boss; and black domestic, Rheba (Crystal Dickinson), and her welfare-receiving boyfriend, Donald (Marc Damon Johnson).

Much of the action involves the contretemps that arise when Tony’s socially conscious parents arrive at the house (there’s supposedly been a mix-up in arrangements and they confront the ménage at its most outrageous). Ed’s inflammatory tracts and the discovery of the gunpowder in the basement result in everyone’s being arrested by three government agents (Nick Corley, Austin Durant, and Joe Tapper), and Alice’s decision to break off her engagement. Grandpa, however, steps in and applies his homely wisdom to straighten matters out, and everyone settles down happily to a meal of blintzes cooked by Olga (Elizabeth Ashley), a former Russian aristocrat working at the Child’s Restaurant in Times Square.

The play was completed in only a month, and went through titles such as GRANDPA’S OTHER SNAKE, MONEY IN THE BANK, FOXY GRANDPA, and THE KING IS NAKED before the authors came up with its perfect name. When it was awarded the Pulitzer, a few critics grumbled because they felt the piece, for all its humor and charm, was too obviously a commercial work without serious social import. The critics loved the play’s affectionately drawn eccentrics, its risible incongruities, its avoidance of superficial wisecracks, and its marvelous cast. Weaknesses cited included lack of social significance (its theme of the evanescence of material wealth was not much thought of) and its flimsy story.

As you watch this old chestnut unfold, you may wonder during the early parts of Act one (there are three) where all the hype comes from about how funny it is. There are some rib-tickling moments in this act but much of the time we’re busy learning who these folks are and about the essential conditions surrounding them. Act two explodes in more ways than one, and gets funnier and funnier, especially during a game that Penny initiates in which people write down the first word that comes to mind when she says a word at random. The scene is comic genius and I’m chuckling now as I recall it. Act three, while not without plenty of hilarity, is mainly concerned with resolving what’s come before, bringing everything back down to earth in a good-natured and emotionally satisfying way.

Despite the play’s being so inextricably a part of the mid-Depression, it’s amazing how well a splendidly staged and acted production of YOU CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU can not only keep you in stitches 78 years after it was first produced, but even induce tears of joy (yes, that actually happened to me) with its sweetly sentimental, feel-good idealism.

Nearly everything here works, starting with David Rockwell’s elaborate set, which replaces the curtain with the dollhouse-like façade of the Vanderhof home. Squeezing it at either side are imposing brick and mortar buildings that slide off when the action begins so the house can revolve and display its elaborate interior, every nook and cranny filled with the resident’s accumulated bric-a-brac. Broadway tunesmith Jason Robert Brown has created a sensational background score that captures the period tone and atmosphere, while Jane Greenwood demonstrates with her mid-30s garments why she still reigns as the queen of Broadway costume design. Jon Weston’s lighting, Donald Holder’s sound design, Tom Watson’s wigs, and the special effects of Hudson Theatrical Effects (all those firecrackers!) are all to be commended for what they contribute to this hellzapoppin’ production.

Scott Ellis’s direction flawlessly sews together an ensemble of comical maestros, each with their own eccentricities, but all perfectly attuned to the play’s dramatic needs. I’ve already taken up too much space and each of the actors has been praised to the sky by earlier reviews, so rather than enumerate the individual actors, of which there are 19 (count ‘em), let me say that they’re all joyously wonderful, and leave it at that. After you’ve seen this loving revival, you can take it with you in your memory for years to come.

81. Review of THE KILLING OF SISTER GEORGE (October 2, 2014)

81. THE KILLING OF SISTER GEORGE

 

 

THE KILLING OF SISTER GEORGE, a British black comedy by Frank Marcus, now being given a misfired revival at the Beckett Theatre by the Actors Company Theatre (TACT), was something of a sensation following its UK premiere in 1964, prior to its West End debut in 1965. It opened on Broadway in 1966 and, despite its highly controversial depiction of a lesbian relationship, its star, Beryl Reid, won that season’s Tony for her performance as June Buckridge, a popular BBC radio soap opera star closely identified with her role as a district nurse named Sister George on a show called “Applehurst.” Part of the play’s success, no doubt, came from its delightfully unforgettable title, with its quirky suggestion of violence toward a sister with a man’s name. In those days, “sister” was the common British word for nurses.

Caitlin O'Connell, Margot White. Photo: Mareille Solan Photography.

What the title actually refers to is the decision by the BBC to eliminate Sister George from “Applehurst” because of a need to boost the ratings by drawing renewed attention to it. (The movie version made “Applehurst” a TV series and even showed scenes from it on the telly.) The play is as much a satire of broadcast producers’ preoccupations and worries—nothing’s changed there—as it is a depiction of the effect news of the character’s demise has on the eccentric actress who plays her. And, of course, there’s the fun in seeing how a celebrity’s actual persona differs from the one the public knows.

Margot White, Cynthia Harris. Photo: Mareille Solan Photography.

Even though people in real life call her George, June, a “rotund” (Marcus’s word), cigar-smoking, sharp-tongued, middle-aged alcoholic, with butch tendencies, is nothing like the kind, helpful, motorcycle-riding soul she makes her living portraying. She lives with Alice “Childie” McNaught (Margot White), her developmentally arrested (although actually in her 30s) flatmate, whom she controls like a dominatrix; at one point, she punishes Childie by forcing her to eat a cigar butt. The bearer of the bad news about Sister George’s killing (via demolishment by a 10-ton truck) is Mercy Croft (Cynthia Harris), a fashionable BBC executive and radio personality. June’s nastiness grows only nastier, and she hits rock bottom when Mercy offers her a new series in which she’ll play a cow called Clarabelle. Mercy eventually assumes a protective role toward the abused Childie and takes her away from the obnoxious June, who ends the play guzzling gin and mooing.

Usually performed within a realistic setting resembling an overstuffed, eclectically furnished London flat, albeit one filled with Childie’s dolls, the play is here given a surprisingly theatrical environment, a sort of dreamlike abstraction of Childie’s infantile preoccupations. Designer Narelle Sissons covers the floor with a huge rug that overruns the stage’s boundaries and curls up at the sides, while a large backdrop representing floral wallpaper of the 1960s, except in hugely overblown patterns, hangs like an incompletely unfurled curtain, its lower edge partly rolled up before it hits the floor. An oversized chandelier with huge conical shades hangs nearly to the floor at stage left. Tea and scones are taken at a table and chairs you might see in a kindergarten classroom, and the tea service uses Lilliputian china. These theatricalist touches, however, interesting as they are at first glance, aren’t matched by anything comparably offbeat in the performances.

Drew Barr’s direction struggles to find the right tone, which veers from cartoonish farce to serious drama, and the actors are mostly adrift in creating a sense of truthful honesty. Ms. O’Connell never finds the core of June’s character; her choices lack the creative spark necessary to find the vulnerability within June that would give her the touch of sympathy she needs to prevent her from being a two-dimensional bully.

Ms. White’s Childie (played by the great Eileen Atkins in the Broadway production) overdoes her squealing little girl business, and although her performance grows stronger there seems no apparent reason, other than her last name, for her thick Scottish accent. As an eccentric, fortune-telling neighbor, Madame Xenia, Dana Croll-Smith is dressed by Ms. Sissons in flowing pink chiffon with a pink wig: only her Ariana Huffington accent tells us this isn't a Halloween version of Patti Streisand.

The most interesting performance is that of Cynthia Harris, who uses her smoky voice and Tallulah-like self-awareness to bring an air of gentle campiness to the worldly-wise Mercy. Still, one wonders whether Ms. Harris isn’t a tad too old for the role. Her casting, as my guest observed, converts what, in the original, is a homoerotic interest in Childie into a maternal one, thus softening the conflict between Mercy and June. Mercy’s interest in Childie would be far more interesting if she were more than a mere do-gooder. (If you have doubts, check out the still surprisingly explicit sex scene added for the 1968 (!!) movie (which was rated X) between Coral Browne’s Mercy and Susannah York’s Childie here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhB-N7BpXX0.

THE KILLING OF SISTER GEORGE was a milestone in the depiction of gay characters in mainstream drama. The play itself doesn’t discuss homosexuality; it merely presents it as a given. But, unless an incisive director can nurture a well-integrated ensemble to produce characters with real depth and conviction, accompanied by an edgy sense of humor, it remains a period piece, curious for its snapshot of a time and place but making one wonder if, perhaps, the BBC didn’t have it right when they killed off Sister George.

80. Review of STALKING THE BOGEYMAN (October 2, 2014)

80. STALKING THE BOGEYMAN

 

For my review of STALKING THE BOGEYMAN, please visit The Broadway Blog site at: http://thebroadwayblog.com/2014/10/06/11186-review-stalking-the-bogeyman