56. Review of SERIOUS MONEY (July 18, 2013)

56. SERIOUS MONEY

 

 

In 1987 the movie WALL STREET excoriated the manipulative business practices of the American stock exchange as represented by the lizard-like trader Gordon Gekko, so memorably embodied by Michael Douglas spouting lines like “When I get a hold of the son of a bitch who leaked this, I'm gonna tear his eyeballs out and I'm gonna suck his fucking skull.” Or, “one percent of this country owns half our country's wealth, five trillion dollars. One third of that comes from hard work, two thirds comes from inheritance, interest on interest accumulating to widows and idiot sons and what I do, stock and real estate speculation. It's bullshit. You got ninety percent of the American public out there with little or no net worth. I create nothing. I own. We make the rules, pal. The news, war, peace, famine, upheaval, the price per paper clip. We pick that rabbit out of the hat while everybody sits out there wondering how the hell we did it. Now you're not naive enough to think we're living in a democracy, are you buddy? It's the free market. And you're a part of it. You've got that killer instinct. Stick around pal, I've still got a lot to teach you.” And, of course, “greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.”

 

Atlantic Stage II, on W. 16th Street between 8th and 9th Avenues.

            That same year, British playwright Caryl Churchill enjoyed success with SERIOUS MONEY, a bitingly satiric exposé of the very same kind of ruthlessness and greed within the context of the English stock market, known as the City, with a Gekko-like banker named Zac Zackerman (David Barlow) as a central figure. A hit in London, it bombed on Broadway in a production starring Alec Baldwin. Last year it was revived Off Broadway for a brief run by the Potomac Theatre Project, and now that production, ingeniously directed by Cheryl Faraone, has been brought back, with minor cast changes, in a stingingly stirring staging at Atlantic Stage II. Against the background of Margaret Thatcher’s deregulation of the UK’s financial markets (an event known as the “Big Bang”), which allowed a whole new army of money obsessed troops to march in and take over, Ms. Churchill’s play, like a dramaturgical MRI, exposed their excesses and corruption. Her play may take place in the mid-1980s, but conditions since then have only worsened, so SERIOUS MONEY remains as seriously funny now as it was a quarter century ago.

            Like WALL STREET, SERIOUS MONEY also has brilliant writing illuminating the financial gluttony running rampant in the English stock market following the Big Bang. Many of these are in rhymed couplets, as for example, when Zac says:

           

The financial world won’t be the same again

Because the traders are coming down the fast lane.

They don’t even know it themselves, they’re into fucking or getting a Porsche, getting a Porsche and a Mercedes Benz.

But you can’t drive two cars at once.

If you’re making the firm ten million you want a piece of the action.

You know you’ve got it made the day you’re offered stock options.

There are guys that blow out, sure, stick too much whitener up their nose.

Guy over forty’s got any sense he takes his golden handshake and goes.

Because the new guys are hungrier and hornier.

They’re Jews from the Bronx and spivs from South California.

It’s like, Darwin says, survival of the fit.

Now, here in England, it’s just beginning to hit.

 

The plot is built around an upper-class woman named Scilla Todd (Tara Giordano) whose brother, Jake (a fine Mathew Nakitare), dies under mysterious circumstances. Unsatisfied with the conclusion that it was suicide, she is convinced he was murdered because of his shady dealings in the market, and, partly because there may be serious money in it for her, she determines to get to the truth of the matter. This brings her into the web of all-American arbitrageur Marylou Baines (an excellent Megan Byrne, who also plays a supposedly ethical British stockbroker) and her sycophantic personal assistant, T.K. (Noah Berman). Meanwhile, another plot line concerns the efforts of Zac and corporate raider Billy Corman (Alex Draper) to take control of a company called Albion, with various complications introduced by a sexpot Peruvian businesswoman named Jacinta Condor (marvelously limned by Jeanne LaSala Taylor) and her Nigerian associate, Nigel Abjibala (Aubrey Dube), purportedly a trader in cocoa.

            Everything is played at a frenetic pace, with plot complications piled on one another as the action shifts instantaneously from locale to locale, and backward and forward in time, usually with Zac informing the audience in direct address of where the story is going. Helping to move the episodically structured piece along is a spare set consisting of little more than an occasional piece of furniture, with four unusual chandeliers created out of upside down champagne bottles at each corner of the space. Telephones attached to long cords are pulled out of various unexpected places, sometimes creating a web-like environment when numerous phones are in action (this was in the pre-cell phone days). Countless lighting cues keep altering the look of the space, and every bit of movement is carefully staged by Ms. Faraone in a nonstop parade of directorial creativity. Expansive musical numbers, “The Futures Song” and “Five More Years,” conclude each act of this two-hour and ten minute show, with the entire cast dancing and singing to raucous music played by an upstage pianist revealed when a curtain parts. And there is even a prologue taken by Churchill directly from Thomas Shadwell’s THE VOLUNTEERS, OR STOCKJOBBERS, a remarkably prescient play about the London stock market written in 1693.

Enormous credit must go to the wonderful ensemble of actors, some of those in minor roles being students at Middlebury College, with which the PTP is closely associated. David Barlow, so vivid as Stucley in THE CASTLE: A TRIUMPH, which is playing in repertory with SERIOUS MONEY, does another bang-up job as Zac, the driven American banker. In THE CASTLE he has a very authentic British accent, but here is every inch the American mover and shaker, although his New York accent is sometimes tinged with a middle-American sound. The British accents of the entire cast, in fact, seem remarkably well honed, regardless of which regional characteristics are on display. Tara Giordano’s Scilla is another memorable performance, as is Alex Draper’s, who plays both the dynamic Billy Corman and a more restrained jobber named Frosby. He was not the only actor whose transformation from one role to another (many play multiple roles) was unusually deft. I still am not sure how he managed to make himself look nearly bald in one scene and to have a slicked down head of hair a moment later; if he used a wig, it fooled me.  

The theatre’s A/C was not working last night, which was horribly humid. I’m a great shvitzer, so if I had found myself too uncomfortable while watching a mediocre show I wouldn’t have hesitated to leave at intermission. That I didn’t means that, with SERIOUS MONEY, some serious theatre (which includes being funny, of course) is going on down in the depths of Atlantic Stage II (four floors below ground).

55. Review of THE CASTLE: A TRIUMPH (July 17, 2013)

55. THE CASTLE: A TRIUMPH

 

 

Why Howard Barker subtitles his 1985 play, THE CASTLE, “A Triumph,” is unclear to me, just as so much else in this sometimes fascinating but more often frustratingly obscure exercise in epic dramaturgy. The play is presently being produced by the Potomac Theatre Company (PTC) in repertory at Atlantic Stage II with Caryl Churchill’s SERIOUS MONEY, another British play with a very dark core. The PTC has had a close connection with the prolific Barker’s work since Richard Romagnoli, who staged the current production, directed THE CASTLE’s American premiere back in 1989, but this is its first New York staging. Barker, proponent of what he calls “Theatre of Catastrophe,” is a tough nut to crack and, while I was impressed with much of what I saw in this production, I found the experience ultimately unsatisfying.

            THE CASTLE is set in 12^th-century England and has a Shakespearean veneer in both structure and language, although you won’t find too many “shits,” “fucks,” and “cunts” in the Bard’s poetic lexicon. Some of this is funny, but it eventually becomes more like a dramatist’s tic, unrelieved, despite lots of sturm and drang, by enough human interest to make it consistently appealing. THE CASTLE is preoccupied with many serious themes, political, theological, and sexual, but Barker’s provocative manner is too obtrusive to allow for any serious identification with his characters and their dilemmas.

            A band of knights has returned to their homeland after seven bloody years of fighting the infidels during the Crusades. Instead of their wives waiting faithfully for them, like Penelope in THE ODYSSEY, they find to their disgust that the women have established their own nonreligious, nonhierarchical new society in which sexual freedom runs rampant, and the women have multiple babies by multiple partners, including old men. Ann (Jennifer Van Dyck), wife of the men’s leader, Stucley (David Barlow), is now the lover and associate of Skinner (Jan Maxwell), a witch who seems to have the most power among the women. To counter this subversive world, Stucley, employing the genius of a stoic, dignified Arab, Krak (Quentin Mare), an engineer Stucley has brought back from the Holy Land, leads the men in the erection (pun intended) of a huge new, extremely well-fortified castle, meant to reestablish the male power structure; however, a revelation toward the end hints at the coming of gunpowder, which will make all such fortresses vulnerable, just as the arms race implies the ever increasing power of new weapons to overcome the old. This premise leads to various side issues, including the establishment of a new religion when Stucley points out the Bible’s failure to note the presence of Christ’s “cock,” suggesting the need for a theology in which Christ’s sexuality is preeminent.

            Having read (or plodded through) the play before seeing it, I was surprised by the many levels that Romagnoli as director brings to it, and by the quite powerful performances of the leading players, whose intelligence and technical abilities are able to mine the verbally clotted lines for surprisingly clear motivations and transitions. Nevertheless, despite some truly strong actors and highly effective rhetorical moments, one never for a moment believes in the personal relationships among the characters; too much attention is paid to stylistic choices of presentation, including an abundance of direct address not indicated in the script. Even Brecht, for all his yada yada about the “alienation” or “estrangement” effect, sought fundamental reality in his characters’ interpersonal behavior.

            Set designer Jon Craine has imagined an apparently inexpensive and innovative way to represent the multi-scened drama by hanging long, cotton sheets that represent pillars or whatever you wish them to be, and having them gradually yanked down, altering the visual perspective, as the action progresses. In act two, coils of barbed wire hang threateningly overhead. Excellent lighting by Hallie Zieselman is supplemented by terrific sound effects designed by Cormac Bluestone, including the roar of a jet flying over the audience near the finale. And Jule Emerson has contrived costumes many of which manage to suggest the 12^th century yet with a few creative touches that allow them to allude to modern day garments making even the mirrored sunglasses worn by Stucley in his dictatorial mode look appropriate in the medieval context.

 

Jennifer Van Dyck and David Barlow.

            Of the actors, Jennifer Van Dyck as Ann has a richly theatrical voice and commanding presence that make you pay attention to her whenever she’s on stage, and David Barlow, although physically slighter than I imagined his character from the script, is continuously imaginative and interesting as Stucley.  Brent Langdon as Nailer, the priest, is highly expressive in his efforts to accommodate Stucley’s arguments as a way of reestablishing the church. The star turn belongs to Jan Maxwell in the highly demanding role of Skinner, and she demonstrates why she has won so many awards; unfortunately, even she is unable to sustain interest in her voluble and eccentric character; she is punished for killing someone by having to drag along his rotting corpse. Unfortunately, her many muddy lines in one long speech after another in act two become increasingly unintelligible, or, after nearly two and a half hours, simply too much trouble to bother about.

            A few critics have accepted the title at face value. For me, though, THE CASTLE: A TRIUMPH is not.    

 

 

 

 

 

           

54. Review of THE TWO-CHARACTER PLAY (July 14, 2013)

54. THE TWO-CHARACTER PLAY

 

 

A lot of serious theatergoers get excited whenever a new revival of a Tennessee Williams play lands on the boards, but some may forget that there are two Tennessee Williamses. Most familiar is the lyrical, sensual, and psychologically penetrating dramatist who gave us such great American classics as A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF, and THE GLASS MENAGERIE. However, even in those plays there are hints of the experimental playwright who would emerge full blown in the 1960s, discarding conventional narrative for more untraditional methods in works like THE MILK TRAIN DOESN’T STOP HERE ANYMORE, IN THE BAR OF A TOKYO HOTEL, and THE TWO-CHARACTER PLAY. These later plays were all critically and commercially unsuccessful, yet Williams himself supposedly found fulfillment in them, calling THE TWO-CHARACTER PLAY “my best play since CAT. Maybe better.” I beg to differ.

Lower lobby at New World Stages.

Stage 5 venue at New World Stages.

            The Broadway premier of THE TWO-CHARACTER PLAY (originally titled OUT CRY), which starred Michael York and Cara Duff-MacCormick, ran for only 12 performances in 1973. There are only two reasons I can offer to see its current revival, directed by Gene David Kirk (who previously staged a similar version in London with other actors), at New World Stages. Those are the performances of Brad Dourif and Amanda Plummer, who both fit snugly into the schizophrenic personas of the siblings Felice and Clare, the title characters. Both actors have made much of their reputations by playing kooky, unstable characters, and Plummer, especially, knows how to bring to vivid theatrical life someone whose balminess is convincingly, if not painfully real. Like her celebrated father, Christopher, whom she increasingly resembles, she possesses not only a talent for incisive character embodiment, but vocal powers that allow her to use her instrument in countless expressive ways. Unfortunately, she and her costar, like the characters they play in this revival, are trapped in a drama from which there is no escape until the run whimpers to its end. (The theatre was perhaps 60 percent full at the start; after the intermission, about 40 percent remained.)

            Ironically, THE TWO-CHARACTER PLAY is playing in New World Stage’s Stage 5 venue, where I was subjected last season to the Japanese torture of Williams’s IN THE BAR OF A TOKYO HOTEL. The leading actress in that ill-fated production kept calling for her lines, and, oddly, there’s a moment in THE TWO-CHARACTER PLAY where Ms. Plummer also calls “Line!,” but here it’s part of the script—or is it? My query arises from the context of the action, which imagines that Felice and Clare, having been determined by the other actors in their company to be insane, have been abandoned (in “a deep Southern town called New Bethesda”) and left to their own devices. Convinced that the show must go on they agree to perform their own “Two-Character Play,” which imagines them to be themselves, a reclusive brother and sister confined within the house in which they grew up, where their father killed their mother and then shot himself (a gun plays a part in the performance). There they are subjected to fear of the outside world, represented by abusive neighbors. Themes of isolation, claustrophobia, confinement, agoraphobia, fraternal dependency, and the like play out during the play within the play as we wonder what is real, what is illusion, what is performed, and what is lived. There are clearly autobiographical strains at work, most notably Williams’s relationship with his own sister, Rose, who was lobotomized.

            Everything takes place within the rickety-looking framework of Alice Walkling’s unattractive stage set, which indicates with lumber alone where the walls should be. Two giant sunflowers, symbols of something or other, are painted on the upstage wall, visible through the framework. The lighting is presumably manipulated by Felice, who frequently retires to an offstage switch to noisily bump up the intensity or create a new effect, although this conceit (and, it could be argued, that of the entire production) gradually is forgotten as the lighting devolves into cues handled by an actual technician, as when the play ends with Felice and Clare in a spotlight that isolates them before going out. If they’ve been abandoned, why is someone lighting them so dramatically? (The so-so lighting is by Jake Fine.) If the play followed Williams’s own dialogue, it would just end, with no special effects, and the audience might not even know it was over when it was.

            Still, this is the kind of talkative play, filled with pregnant pauses, where logic is not foremost on anyone’s mind, and all that counts is whether you can sympathize with the plight of these lost and helpless thespians, ensnared within the metaphoric world of theatre itself, a moody place where imagination can run free, but where it is sometimes difficult to come to grips with the difference between sanity and madness. Making sense of the “plot” from moment to moment is fruitless; Williams seems too enamored of the excesses of the era’s experimentalism, as seen in the far superior plays of Beckett and the early Pinter. You will either be bored to exhaustion (as I was) or intrigued by this little-seen facet of a favorite playwright’s art.  

53. Review of FOREVER TANGO (July 14, 2013)

53.  FOREVER TANGO

When you enter the Walter Kerr Theatre you are faced by the increasingly unfamiliar sight of a formal Broadway curtain, bright red, fringed in huge gold tassels, and highlighted with gold flourishes along its swags. Aside from several stunning gowns worn by the female dancers in this return visit of FOREVER TANGO, this is the biggest blast of color on display in this dance and concert show, which first appeared on Broadway in 1998 (458 performances and four previews) and returned in 2004 (114 showings plus six previews). The present show is set for a limited run of ten weeks. A comparison of its 2004 program with the current one reveals that perhaps half the show is new, and the other half old, although almost the entire company has changed. Luis Bravo, who created the original and has been with the show throughout its history, remains the director. The choreography, as in the past, is credited to "The Dancers."

Walter Kerr Theatre, W. 48th Street.

            The cast is composed largely of champion tango couples, and each gets to demonstrate its innovative versions of Argentina’s passionate national dance. Unlike its earlier incarnations, which had no specific stars, the present FOREVER TANGO lists three guest stars, singer and five-time Grammy winner Gilberto Santa Rosa (to be replaced on July 30 by Luis Enrique), and dancers Karina Smirnoff and Maksim Chmerkovskiy, the exceptional Ukraine-born pair who became famous on TV’s DANCING WITH THE STARS.

Gilberto Santa Rosa. Photo: Walter McBride

            There are several company numbers that involve all or most of the dancers, but most of the evening’s dance sequences are performed by couples, each more sensual, dramatic, and physically enthralling than the other. The women, of course, with their heads of radiantly gorgeous hair, are icons of sexy glamour, dressed in stunningly slinky gowns from which perfect, stiletto-heeled legs thrust, twist, and kick in surprising permutations, as supple derrieres suddenly shimmy faster than the speed of light. Their men, often dressed in black, sometimes with rakish fedoras, are sleek panthers, their Valentino hair so slick you could skate on it, capturing a sense of lust and danger as they smoothly maneuver their women around the stage in ever more flashy combinations, with each routine ending in an inventive pose suggestive of domination and submission. As appropriate for the tango, the mood is deadly serious, with eyes focused on some ulterior goal, or locked with one’s mate in intensely electric contact. Everyone is conscious of their own gorgeousness, and during the curtain calls, several female dancers, especially the spectacular Victoria Galoto (she’s on the program cover with Juan Paulo Horvath), revel in it. Two dancers, Natalia Turelli and Ariel Manzanares, however, do a couple of comically inflected dances that allow some smiles to break into the otherwise somber proceedings.

Maxsim Chmerkovskiy and Karina Smirnoff. Photo: Walter McBride

Juan Paulo Horvath and Victoria Galoto. Photo: Walter McBride

            There is no set to speak of, just a black backdrop on which stars are sometimes illuminated, and a two-tier platform for the 11-member orchestra of four bandoneons (something like a cross between a concertina and an accordion), two violins, a viola, a cello, a bass, a keyboard, and a piano; Víctor Lavallén, the bandoneon player-conductor, displays his virtuosity at several points. The dancers perform downstage of the musicians, who remain in view throughout. Since all but one of the musicians is gray or white-haired, their appearance makes a striking contrast with the youth and beauty of the dancers.

            The show is not all dance by any means. Guest star Gilberto Santa Rosa, wearing a tuxedo and carrying a mike, does several solos (all the songs are in Spanish), and a rather hefty portion of the evening is devoted to instrumental performances. These non-dance segments bloat the evening to a too-long two hours and 15 minutes (with one intermission). Still, few people chose to leave during the extended, danced-through curtain calls.

            But even without the concert-like performances, a show like this, no matter how talented or good-looking the dancers, is likely to pall unless you’re an avid dance fan. If you’re addicted to TV dance contests, you may find a couple of hours of this stuff delightful, but, remember, the dancing is all tango (or tango-like) so the lack of variety can eventually be problematic, there’s no thematic through-line that contextualizes what you’re seeing, and all the singing is in Spanish. By the end of act one, I felt I’d had a good time and had seen enough. Sitting through act two of FOREVER TANGO began to make me feel like the title might actually come true.

52. Review of CHOIR BOY (July 11, 2013)

52. CHOIR BOY

When the Manhattan Theatre Club’s production of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s CHOIR BOY, at the City Center Stage II, opens, Pharus Jonathan Young (Jeremy Pope), a vocally gifted but markedly effeminate student at the Charles R. Drew Prep School for Boys, is singing the school song, “Trust and Obey.” Suddenly, a student in the auditorium hisses a homophobic slur (something like "faggot-ass-sissy"). Pharus, taken by surprise, takes a four-second pause before he continues. Soon he is being questioned by Headmaster Marrow (Chuck Cooper), very disturbed about his performance, but Pharus, citing the school’s code of not snitching on his classmates, refuses to name names. Pretty soon, however, he exacts vengeance on his tormenter, Bobby Marrow (Wallace Smith), the headmaster’s nephew, by kicking him out of the school choir. The tensions created by Bobby’s virulent reaction to Pharus’s sexuality (possibly because of his jealousy of Pharus’s talent) and Pharus’s response create the play’s thematic through line.

Outside City Center's entrance to Stage II.

Drew is a school for African-American boys, and the only five boys seen are the members of the school choir, which concentrates on gospel music. The boys all dress neatly in traditional prep school uniforms, with blazers and yellow ties, and wear close-cropped, regulation haircuts. (They also undress to take showers, allowing for a bit of full frontal nudity.) In addition to Pharus and Bobby, there are AJ (Grantham Coleman), the star athlete, who is Pharus’s mature and understanding roommate; Junior (Nicholas L. Ashe), a baby-faced baritone who follows Bobby around like a puppy; and David (Kyle Beltran), a thin, eternally serious, bible-carrying divinity student. The only adults are Headmaster Marrow, relatively new to his job and somewhat insecure in it, and Mr. Pendleton (Austin Pendleton), an older white man who marched during the Civil Rights movement, and who has been hired to teach a required course in Creative Thinking; even though he has no musical ability, the headmaster puts him in charge of the choir, hoping he can somehow heal the fractious relationships among the boys. One of his first lines after making his entry caused a burst of laughter:  "It's not just black people who are late."

Pharus offers a strong fulcrum around which the drama revolves, although he does bring to mind Chris Colfer's Kurt on TV’s GLEE. He’s extremely bright and well read, extraordinarily talented, aggressively defensive, and creatively resentful. (Is he, perhaps, autobiographical?) Jeremy Pope plays him on multiple levels, showing his deep insecurities as well as his overt self-confidence. He’s able to mine the character’s limp-wristed effeminacy for both comedy and pathos. In one of the play’s most powerful moments, taking place in Mr. Pendleton’s class, he engages in a provocative debate about the meaning of spirituals, arguing against some historians’ belief that they are coded messages to slaves about flight,  advocating for them instead as still relevant tools for achieving spiritual healing.

McRaney’s intermissionless, hour and forty minutes play, which premiered in a hit production last year at London’s Royal Court Theatre, engages with sexual and racial issues in a number of ways, not least the habit some young black men have of tossing around the word “nigger,” a proclivity that detonates an explosive response from Mr. Pendleton, who categorically rejects such thoughtlessness. These subjects are always interesting and well conveyed by McRaney’s dialogue, although its crafting sometimes seems too carefully designed for dramatic effect and not what boys of this age would normally say. Smart as he is, for example, Pharus's speech about spirituals sounds more like an academic paper than an impromptu outpouring during a class discussion. Also, plays and movies that dramatize a gay boy’s victimization and consequent coming of age are becoming overly common, even when handled as creatively as in CHOIR BOY.  

What many spectators will take away from CHOIR BOY, however, are its musical interpolations, sung acapella in exquisite harmonies and solos as memorably arranged by Jason Michael Webb. Each boy has a terrific solo, but when the choir sings as a group, especially “Sometimes I Feel like a Motherless Child,” it’s almost as if you never heard the songs before. Despite the enormous ability of the young actors, the number that stood out for me was Chuck Cooper’s giving voice to “Been in a Storm So Long.”    

Trip Cullman does a fine job of staging CHOIR BOY, giving it a definite rhythm and precision; everything is well timed and fluid. On the other hand, there is a theatrical overlay that makes me feel that the boys, in particular, are not so much being as performing; the effect was to have me watching and listening with deep interest but not engaging on a deeper emotional level. For pure acting honesty, the palm goes to the marvelous Chuck Cooper. Austin Pendleton is the Austin Pendleton we have seen so often before, with his rumpled clothing, uncombed hair, and irregular speech rhythms, but when he blows the roof off with his attack on the n-word, he reveals a facet of his talent very rarely on display.

David Zinn’s set (he also did the costumes), surrounded by the audience on three sides, consists of a red floor and a red brick wall on which hangs a large blackboard. The wall is built so that its lower half can come down, revealing the interior of AJ and Pharus’s bedroom. This is clever and effective, as are the nicely choreographed scene changes using the actors and eschewing the need for visible stagehands.

CHOIR BOY has a great deal to offer, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it given an extended run, or even to be moved to another venue. It didn’t work for me on every level, but it did on enough for me to recommend it. Given all its laudatory reviews, of course, that may simply be preaching to the choir.

51. Review of THE SILVER CORD (July 6, 2013)

51. THE SILVER CORD

In light of the current revival of Sidney Howard’s THE SILVER CORD at the Theatre at St. Clements, I am appending here an adapted and abbreviated version of the play’s entry in my ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW YORK STAGE, 1920-1930. That production opened on Broadway on December 20, 1926,  in a Theatre Guild production directed by John Cromwell. Mrs. Phelps was played by Laura Hope Crews, David by Elliot Cabot, Robert by Earle Larimore, Hester by Margalo Gilmore, and Christina by Elizabeth Risdon. All were major Broadway players of the 1920s.  (The 1933 movie version starred Laura Hope Crews in her original role, with Irene Dunne as Christina, Joel McCrea as David, Eric Linden as Robert, and Frances Dee as Hester.)  

A Best Play of the Year, and one of the better remembered plays of the decade, THE SILVER CORD was a fierce indictment of the emotional and psychological havoc that possessive maternal affection could wreak. . . . As a study of a woman’s selfish obsession, it was compared to plays such as George Kelly’s CRAIG’S WIFE and August Strindberg’s THE FATHER. Many noted the Freudian implications of its Oedipal theme.

              Mrs. Phelps keeps her two grown sons, David and Robert, clinging to the symbolic umbilical cord to the extent that when Robert becomes engaged to Hester she manages to sever the relationship; the older and slightly more independent David nearly finds his marriage to Christina coming apart, but Christina’s [I mistakenly wrote Hester, who, however, also stands up to Mrs. Phelps] forthrightness (Brooks Atkinson called it “Shavian”) in confronting her soon-to-be mother-in-law makes him see the light. David frees himself from Mrs. Phelps’s clutches; not so the weakling Robert.

Some thought Mrs. Phelps was too exaggerated a monster for complete believability, and the last act’s resolution (Richard Dana Skinner called it “almost a lecture on the previous acts”) seemed tagged on; criticism also focused on the play’s lack of action and verbosity. But it was a vivid play for actors, and the Guild’s notable cast made the most of their chances. Atkinson found it “enormously exhilarating” theatre and approved loudly of its “flavorsome dialogue that depicts character and holds the interest at the same time.

Some of the original reactions to the play still hold water. By and large, however, the Peccadillo Theater Company’s mostly undistinguished production, directed by Dan Wackerman, only exacerbates the play’s weaknesses, THE SILVER CORD seems quite dated, with its overly elaborated and self-conscious dialogue. Lines that probably were shocking in 1926 now merit titters. Worst of all are the male characters, whose worship of their mother (Robert keeps calling her his “blessed, blessed mother”) and blindness to her blatant wickedness seems so pathological that it is impossible to find any sympathy for them. Instead you so want to scream at them that when Hester, and then Christina, tell her off, you realize how mismatched these strong women are with such world-class wimps.

Theatre at St. Clements, on W. 46th Street.

             Making things even worse is the misguided decision to cast a male actor, Dale Carman, as Mrs. Phelps. While Carman, who is clearly at home in drag, gives the most intelligent performance in the production (he played it for the same company 18 years ago), he is unable to escape either his gender or his unique facial attributes; despite his playing the role “straight,” ahem, his presence is a constant distraction and robs the play of any persistent impact it might have if a woman were playing this aggressively controlling mother. (Charles Busch, by the way, played Mrs. Phelps in a reading earlier in the year.) Is the production suggesting that such a woman can only be accepted if she has a strong masculine streak in her? Is there a gay agenda at work that seeks to explain the boys’ unyielding affection for their mother by having her played by a man? The production certainly seems inclined in this direction by its inclusion of a scene in which Dave is shown with his bare ass facing the audience as he changes into his pajamas (something that would have padlocked the theatre in 1926), or scenes in which one or the other of the young men hold their mother in intimate embraces, with Dave even kissing her at length as they lounge together in bed. Methinks the director hath been watching too many reruns of Olivier’s HAMLET.  

The action all takes place on a wintry February day in 1926 at Mrs. Phelps’s home in an Eastern American city. Set and lighting designer Harry Feiner creates a sense of outdoors and indoors by placing his interiors downstage where they are backed by a silvery painted backdrop showing frosty pine trees. The wall-less living room set has a fireplace at stage right and windowed areas upstage and stage right. Detailed period furniture and chintz effectively establish a conventionally old-fashioned living room. However, those nefarious destroyers of theatrical reality known as stagehands enter in dim light to change the set to David’s bedroom and back again to the living room, once more making it clear how damaging to theatrical illusion for plays like this is the absence of a curtain. And despite the alterations, the place doesn't look much different from the living room. Moreover, Mr. Feiner places a cramped and tiny bed at center, almost as if Mrs. Phelps arranged it so David wouldn’t have sex with his wife on it.

          Gail Cooper-Hecht’s costumes for the women seem appropriately authentic, but when David dons evening wear, its poor fit makes actor Thomas Matthew Kelley, who is rather tall, resemble Lurch in THE ADAMS FAMILY. At the end, as he, Hester, and Christina prepare to leave, he dons a heavy overcoat, but the ladies depart coatless, each carrying a piece of luggage that seems to weigh half a pound. These visual bloopers show a careless disregard for artistic integrity. 

           Despite its overwrought dramatics, its cluttered dialogue, its old-fashioned locutions, and its stagy theatrics, THE SILVER CORD does, in fact, come to life when each of the women stands up to the old harpy, and when Christina, a biologist who represents the “new woman” of the times, lays it on the line to her namby pamby husband in act two (of three). But the performances of Caroline Kaplan as Hester, Thomas Matthew Kelley, Victoria Mack as Christina, and Wilson Bridges as Robert fail to embody their characters with any depth; Bridges, in particular, seems at sea in this milieu.

            For those interested in a peek at what 1926 audiences viewed as daring drama, the play offers an interesting history lesson. But as quality theatre, 87 years after it was created, THE SILVER CORD has become hopelessly tarnished.

50. Review of UNLOCK'D (July 5, 2013)

50. UNLOCK’D

In 1712 Alexander Pope wrote a mock-heroic narrative poem, “The Rape of the Lock,” published in expanded form in 1717, in which he satirically commented on a true event. This was a dispute that arose between the families of one Lord Petre and the woman he loved, Arabella Fermor, when, without asking, he snipped a lock of her hair. Pope’s poem was written in the hope it would “comically merge the two” families by noting how silly the whole thing was, although he also underlined contemporary attitudes on women’s place as decorative accessories in a patriarchal society. Arabella, renamed Belinda, is surrounded by virginal “sylphs,” parodized versions of the gods of goddesses of epic poetry, whose mission is to protect Belinda (especially her hair) from inappropriate advances. Pope’s poem is the chief inspiration for UNLOCK’ED, the new musical at the Duke, directed and choreographed by Marlo Hunter, and presented by the Prospect Theatre Company.

            The plot circles around the romantic aspirations of dashing Roderick Shearing, the Baron of Windsorloch (Sydney James Harcourt); his attractively nerdy, book-obsessed brother, Edwin (A.J. Shively); Belinda (Jillian Gottlieb), an early 18^th-century version of the dumb blonde; and her more practically-minded, redheaded stepsister, Clarissa (Jennifer Blood), who often narrates the action in rhymed verse. There is a lot of maneuvering by the brothers with scissors to clip a lock of Belinda’s hair. She would sooner die than trim her locks, being so besotted with her luxurious tresses that she has personified them with names (Lotty, Letty, and Beatrice, for example) and even sings with them. When she discovers that one of them has been snatched, she ends act one by screaming, “Beatrice!”

 Through it all wander three actors and three actresses in double roles: the men (Chris Gunn, Adam Daveline, Hansel Tan) play both ragamuffin gnomes and gentlemen of the court. The former speak in syntax reminiscent of a cross between cockney and the Golem in THE HOBBIT, while the latter, with names like Sir Flittybud, Lord Inconstantine, and Lord Littlewit, wearing outlandish wigs (with plumes) and silken finery, are effeminate British fops. The women (Catherine LeFrere, Maria Couch, and Chandler Reeves) play both attractive sylphs and maidens of the court, their vivid gowns and wigs in the latter roles paralleling those of the three gentlemen.

The show, which won a Richard Rodgers Award in 2004 and was originally seen at the 2007 New York Musical Festival, does not slavishly follow Pope, and introduces elements from other sources as well, including Shakespeare, but, for all its occasional charm and musical pleasures, it never quite comes together in a more than mildly amusing way. It’s reminiscent of other fairy tale musicals (from ONCE UPON A MATTRESS to RODGERS + HAMMERSTEIN’S CINDERELLA) in its whimsical, self-mocking attitudes, where the actors more or less wink at the audience as if we’re all in this droll romantic charade together (ain’t we got fun?). You get a whiff of this from the program note on the setting: “Back Then-ish. Across the Pond-ish.” Characterizations are skin deep; everyone is handsome, pretty, or cute; the costumes (by Amy Clark) are lavish, clever, and colorful; the scenery (by Wilson Chin and David L. Arsenault), chiefly a bulls-eye patterned floor and three benches within a three-quarters round arrangement, is brightly imaginative and agreeable; the lighting (by Cory Pattak) is cheery and fanciful; the choreography, more like staged movement than dance, is energetic, with one memorable number involving giant playing cards during a game of War; and there is a pervasive sense of playfulness from start to finish.

What can get lost in this world of tongue-in-cheek make-believe, however, is honesty and truth, with performances so lacquered over with directorial choices designed to create a stylized fantasy world that they become cartoonish and ultimately unaffecting. It’s the kind of show that, however clever it may be, makes you wonder, “Why should I care?” It takes a remarkable talent to overcome this kind of stylistic imposition; apart from Jennifer Blood and Jillian Gottlieb, who come closest, the company by and large fails to manage this, although most of them do fine work not only in establishing their stock personas but in singing the quite listenable score (lyrics by Sam Carner; music by Derek Gregor). Unlike the too frequently cerebral style of John Michael Lachiusa and his followers, several of Gregor's tunes have the kind of tuneful appeal that is gradually vanishing from the musical theatre. Standout numbers included Belinda’s “The Hair Song,” Belinda and Edwin’s “Off to the East,” and the Baron and Edwin’s “A Delicate Thing.”  Regardless of its distinguished sources, or maybe because of them, however, Sam Carner’s book remains clunky, too talkative, and more smile than laughter inducing.

UNLOCK’D is around two hours and 20 minutes long, far longer than such slight material requires. Where were those scissors when they were really needed?