"Another Weekend in the Country"
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| Stars range from 5-1. |
Other Viewpoints:
OF GOOD STOCK
Manhattan Theatre Club at City Center Stage II
131 West 55th Street, NYC
Through July 26
Tuesday, June 30, 2015
Monday, June 29, 2015
32 (2015-2016): Review of HAPPY DAYS (seen June 25, 2015)
"Not Such Happy Days"
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Stars range from 5-1. |
Ever since its world premiere at New York’s Cherry
Lane Theatre in 1961, starring Ruth White, HAPPY DAYS, Samuel Beckett’s brilliant
metaphoric depiction of man’s existential plight, has received countless
productions. New York’s many revivals have starred a wide array of topflight character
actresses as Winnie—the aging woman who lives out her days partly buried in a
dirt mound—among them Jessica Tandy (1972), Irene Worth (1979), Ruth Malaczech
(1998), Joyce Aarons (2002), and Fiona Shaw (2014). Some of these performances
have been hailed as triumphs, others considered respectable, and yet others dismissed as failures.
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| Brooke Adams. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
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| Tony Shalhoub, Brooke Adams. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
The production, directed by Andrei Belgrader—whose
DOCTOR FAUSTUS is currently at the Classic Stage Company—originated at Pasadena’s
The Theatre@Boston Court and was seen also in Los Angeles and Boston. Its publicity
materials suggest that the play is “newly relevant to a generation burdened by
climate change and environmental doom,” which may be true, but there’s nothing
on stage that specifically calls attention to this or that draws attention away
from Beckett’s original intentions. Beckett, so fastidious about how his plays
were presented that he provided scrupulous stage directions for every movement
and even took to directing them himself (his 1979 staging of HAPPY DAYS with
Billie Whitelaw can be viewed on YouTube), might have argued with some of Mr.
Belgrader’s choices. Essentially, though (unlike Mr. Belgrader’s problematic DOCTOR
FAUSTUS), this is a straightforward, respectful mounting that follows most of Beckett’s
requirements.
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| Brooke Adams. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
I suspect, of course, that Beckett would not have been
happy with having the scene where the partly visible Willie, facing upstage, not
only examines an erotic picture (as in the script) but vigorously masturbates
while looking at it; where Winnie, having asked Willie for an encore after he
sings a bit, breaks the fourth wall and encourages the audience to call for an
encore as well; and an extended nose-blowing bit by Willie that goes on ad
infinitum. But such moments are thankfully few and, in general, there’s an air
of Beckettian authenticity to the proceedings.
HAPPY DAYS,
a landmark of the great Irish author's minimalism, is
set in a desolate, uneven wasteland (designed by Takeshi Kata) dominated by a
large mound of scorched grass in which Winnie, a woman of 50, is
embedded up to her waist. The landscape is surrounded by a cyclorama on which
blue skies, clouds, and distant mountains are painted. The lighting, by Tom
Ontiveros, is, as per Beckett’s dictum, “blazing.” This barren world may be
intended to evoke a world of environmental ruination, but it’s exactly what
Beckett asks for; however he may have sympathized with them, issues of climate
change don’t seem to have been one of his main concerns. Other productions have
attempted to suggest environmental issues by incorporating reminders of modern
man’s despoliation of the earth’s resources in the setting, but nothing like
that is apparent here.
To Winnie’s left is a large leather bag in which all her daily necessities are kept, including a pistol, a worn toothbrush, a
magnifying glass, eyeglasses, a bottle of patent medicine, a hand mirror, lipstick,
a music box, and the like, each of which she makes deliberate use of as she
rambles on. To her right is a parasol. At the rear, we can often see the back
of Willie’s head and shoulders, or his raised hand, a ratty straw boater on his
head worn rakishly directly over a carefully draped handkerchief. He lives in a cave,
reached by a tunnel, behind the mound. Beckett makes no attempt to explain
Winnie and Willie’s circumstances; they just are, and it’s the audience’s task
to comprehend the meaning behind the play’s rather accessible concerns as Winnie natters away to the unlistening Willie. She carries out her daily rituals, cheerfully insisting—when inspired by a hint of
positivity from Willie—that this will be a happy day, as human functions become
increasingly circumscribed and life creeps stealthily to its conclusion.
Her hair bright yellow, her décolletage bulging (the playwright calls for “shoulders bare, low bodice, big bosom”), Ms.
Adams, best known for her film work (Days
of Heaven), gives a fine rendition of Winnie; she brings her girlish, still
pretty charm (she’s eligible for Social Security) to bear, finding multiple ways to take advantage of the
limiting circumstances of performing while seen only from the waist up in act
one, and for act two with only her head visible. In Beckett’s own production, Ms.
Whitelaw had her neck exposed in the second act, but Ms. Adams’s mobility is even further
constricted by having her neck covered and only her head seen, thus further
increasing our focus on her face.
She handles all this quite well, is expressive enough
to capture Winnie’s many subtextual transitions, has a lovely smile, and convincingly
conveys the air of a personality whose eternal optimism and fondness for “the
old style” refuses to let her deteriorating condition defeat her; on the other
hand, she emits a rather low-beam intensity, partly because of her voice quality and partly because of the air of lassitude caused by occasionally draggy pacing.
Of course, she can be harsh, joyous, ironic, scared, angry, hopeful, and
despairing, and even hums “The Merry Widow Waltz,” but too often she comes off
as someone who chats mindlessly because there’s nothing better to do than as someone
who’s determined to get something off her chest. Beckett
offers Winnie many funny lines, some rather earthy, but, while Ms. Adams's performance
rolls on by more or less amusingly, there’s a dearth of laughs in it. There’s also
not much of the pathos needed to move us.
While it’s important to convey the tedium of Winnie’s
endless days in a world where the sun never sinks and sleep is incessantly
interrupted by the raucous ringing of a bell, the audience itself shouldn’t feel
the dullness; this, however, especially in act one, is what happens. Ms. Adam’s portrayal of this now iconic role, while far from a failure, misses
being a triumph and falls into the category of “respectable.”
Mr. Shalhoub is totally unrecognizable as Willie; he's scruffily bearded, wears a
comical hairpiece suggesting baldness and stringy, unkempt, gray hair, and looks
like a homeless man, unlike the more elegant look of shaved head and well-groomed handlebar mustache affected by Leonard Fenton in the Beckett-directed version.
He grunts his few lines, spoken mainly while facing upstage and reading the newspaper, rather than sharply enunciating them, like Fenton.
In the final scene, where Willie emerges in top hat and tails and
crawls toward Winnie, seeking either the gun placed by her side or Winnie
herself (Beckett is deliberately ambiguous), Mr. Shalhoub’s Willie goes through
all sorts of physical exertions as he seeks to get traction on the mound, none
of which Beckett calls for in his script, although others (like George Voskovic
in the Irene Worth production) have done something similar. We can perhaps excuse
this on the grounds that, after all, an actor of Mr. Shalhoub’s stature needed something notable to do in a play during
which his character is largely invisible.
Other Viewpoints:
New York Times
The Guardian
Talkin' Broadway
New York Theater
HAPPY DAYS
Flea Theatre
White Street, NYC
Through July 18
Other Viewpoints:
New York Times
The Guardian
Talkin' Broadway
New York Theater
HAPPY DAYS
Flea Theatre
White Street, NYC
Through July 18
31 (2015-2016): Review of THE QUALMS (seen June 27, 2015)
"Swinging the Polyamory Blues Away"
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| Stars range from 5-1. |
The program cover for Bruce Norris’s* 90-minute one-act,
THE QUALMS, at Playwrights Horizons, shows a cartoonish image of a pair of simians
doing the nasty, although the animal sex mentioned at length in the script
is mainly about creatures of the bovine persuasion. Not that Mr. Norris’s (whose CLYBOURNE
PARK snared the Tony and the Pulitzer) entertaining if dramatically skimpy play—originally
produced by Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater—is preoccupied with animal copulation
or bestiality, however; cows and bulls are only one of many subjects about
which his eight chief characters spend their time talking instead of taking
care of the business at hand (or elsewhere). Sex, mainly of the human variety—or,
better yet, varieties—is the chief subject on their minds, but they fill their
time wrapping their tongues around topics like the meaning of freedom, the
difference between a republic and a democracy, the necessity of monogamous marriage,
American materialism, pornography, same-sex experimentation, war, etc. Sort of
like an expanded episode of Bill Maher’s HBO series.
 |
| From left: Chinasa Ogbuagu, Sarah Goldberg, Jeremy Shamos, Donna Lynne Champlin. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
What brings the play’s four couples together—they're members of a
dues-paying group of swingers (to use the old nomenclature)—is a bed
and barbecue party (pork loins are the pièce de résistance) at a generically
attractive East Coast seaside condo apartment (nicely designed by Todd
Rosenthal and lit by Russell H. Champs); at the rear, we can see through
sliding glass doors a fancy patio grill and hanging party lights. Among the
accessories is a bowl of colorfully packaged condoms; another bowl is reserved
for the guests’ smartphones. An offstage “party room” has an air mattress on a
white carpet, but no red wine in there, please. Even a sex party has its rules
(including separate time limits in the party room for couples and threesomes). The
place belongs to Gary (John Procaccino), a bloviating, superannuated hipster, and
Teri (Kate Arrington), his pretty, dodo-ish partner with AC/DC tastes, who
considers sex the panacea for all the world’s problems: “Like if all the Israelis
and the Pakistanis had to have sex with each other?”
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| From left: Kate Arrington, Jeremy Shamos, Sarah Goldberg. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
The regular guests—there’d be two more but they’re
stuck in a storm in Toledo—include Deb (Donna Lynne Champlin), an energetic,
sexually adventurous redhead in the body of Melissa McCarthy, and her good-looking, notably swishy, but sexually ambivalent black companion, Ken (Andy Lucien), formerly the reflexologist for Deb’s
recently deceased husband; and Roger (Noah Emmerich), a former military guy with a brassy toilet
mouth and Libertarian ideals, who bickers with Regine (Chinasa Obguagu), his dishy, French-accented, black
girlfriend from Martinique, decked out in sexy, black silk stockings. The first
to arrive, though, are newlyweds Chris (Jeremy Shamos) and the sleek blonde Kristy
(Sarah Goldberg), newcomers to “the lifestyle,” who met their hosts during a
Mexican vacation; they're here because Chris, having lost his cool, wants to
test his jealousy limits after learning about a clandestine luncheon Kristy had with her
former boyfriend. (Note: Chris and Kristy don't seem to have any connection to
the governor of New Jersey.) Chris’s
eventual qualms (which Mr. Norris admits reflect his own) fuel the play’s only significant conflict.
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| From left: Noah Emmerich, Chinasa Ogbuagu, Sarah Goldberg, Jeremy Shamos, Donna Lynne Champlin, Andy Lucien, Kate Arrington. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
Mr. Norris has a gift for strikingly vivid chitchat spiced
with language ranging from the merely bawdy to the outright vulgar, but this language is used in service to what’s essentially a
conventional drawing room comedy about a bunch of articulate middle-class
people who sit around a living room chattering eagerly about this or that (abetted
by mojitos and a weed nebulizer). At long last, someone gets upset about something,
sparking a confrontation and thereby leading to the denouement. In this case,
Chris, desperate to see if the lifestyle can work for him and Kristy, gradually
finds that for all his professed liberalism he’s really rather uneasy about it
all, while Kristy, although initially jumpy, is ready to go with the flow, even if it means seeing what playing for the other side is like. Chris,
already edgy from Deb's attentions, goes nuts when
Regine tries to arouse him with a bout of (rather tame) rough stuff; he expounds in a climactic diatribe that takes every opportunity to trash the purpose of the gathering, unable to prevent the prejudices lurking
beneath his liberal exterior from leaping out full blown. The always enjoyable Mr. Shamos
makes histrionic hay out of his big scene, but it tends to be forced and
stretched beyond the bounds of plausibility.
 |
| From left: Chinasa Ogbuagu, John Procaccino, Sarah Goldberg, Jeremy Shamos, Donna Lynne Champlin. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
Under Pam McKinnon’s brightly paced direction, the ensemble's performances are terrific, although if anyone were to be singled out it would
be Mr. Shamos for his uptight Chris and Ms. Champlin for her buoyant
Deb, a buoyancy Chris manages to painfully deflate. Shortly before this mostly
sexless sex comedy ends, Gary notes that when a number of strangers are
gathered together, like the audience in a theatre, there’s a strong likelihood that they’ll somehow be sexually connected to others in
the same place. At this point, Mr. Norris calls for a surprising bit of
fourth-wall smashing of which the actors take full advantage.
While its foreplay is strictly verbal, and the only climax comes when Chris blows his top, there’s still enough amusing titillation
to make a visit to THE QUALMS a suitable way to get your theatergoing rocks
off.
*My playgoing companion, who thought THE QUALMS “bright, entertaining,
funny, and provocative,” later e-mailed me that on her subway trip home she was
reading a handout about the play she’d picked up at the theatre. “The young man
standing opposite me asked whether I had been to see The Qualms. He must have recognized the handout, because it was
folded in such a way that the title was not visible. Then he asked whether it
was good. I said yes, and he responded 'I’ll have to get down there.' I googled
Bruce Norris just now, and, based on the many photos of him that pop up, I
believe the young man on the subway was Bruce himself. Hah!” Only Bruce Norris knows for sure.
North Jersey.com
TheaterMania
Talkin' Off Broadway
New York Times
THE QUALMS
Playwrights Horizons
416 West 42nd Street, NYC
Through July 12
Wednesday, June 24, 2015
30 (2015-2016): Review of 10 OUT OF 12 (seen June 23, 2015)
"4 Out of 5 (Stars)"
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| Stars range from 5-1. |
With THE FLICK, Annie Baker demonstrated that watching
three low-end employees of a tiny movie theatre fill three hours sweeping rows
and scraping gum from seat bottoms could be mesmerizingly interesting. In 10
OUT OF 12, which runs close to two hours and 40 minutes at the Soho Rep, Anne
Washburn has done much the same in exposing audiences to the crushing sense of stasis,
interrupted by momentary crises, often experienced by theatre people during that
period called technical rehearsals, when lighting, sound, and scenic elements
are first brought into the process of preparing a production. Ms. Baker studied
in Mac Wellman’s unusually successful MFA program in playwriting at Brooklyn
College, and Ms. Washburn teaches in that program. One wonders if someone in
Flatbush is presently conceiving a groundbreaking play about gardeners watching
grass grow.
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| Bruce McKenzie. Photo: Julieta Cervantes. |
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| Conrad Schott, Bruce McKenzie, Sue Jean Kim. Photo: Julieta Cervantes. |
Although what we’re
witnessing is a greatly conflated, episodic compression of the many hours spent
during tech, mingling almost surrealistic interludes with straightforward ones,
it doesn’t flinch—prospective audiences, take notice—from creating a sense of
the same crushingly slow sense of progress experienced at the real thing. Ms.
Washburn based her play on the notes she took during various tech rehearsals
she attended over a five-year period, so the air of authenticity is thick. Having
directed a couple of dozen plays myself, I know whereof I yawn. The miracle
here is the extraordinary cohesiveness of the perfectly cast and technically impressive
production, which Les Waters (artistic director of the Actors Theatre of Louisville)
has directed with an awesome precision that nevertheless inspires believability
in every performance.
 |
| Bruce McKenzie. Photo: Julieta Cervantes. |
On the one hand, 10 OUT
OF 12 (which means that, according to Equity rules, 10 out of a given 12 hours will
be devoted to the rehearsal) is the kind of play and production that will
strike chords of recognition and appreciation in the hearts of any theatre
person who’s been there and done that; on the other, it may all seem like much
ado about nothing to civilians who couldn’t care less about how a play is put
on stage, and want to see a story and characters they can relate to. While some
of the characters do get to express themselves in personal terms, all we really
know about them is how they deal with their professional obligations, or what silly
things they do to prevent the ennui from driving them up the wall, not about
their lives outside the theatre’s womblike embrace. Apart from those playing
the actors, who get both an actor’s and a character’s name(s), most are
identified merely by their functions, i.e., Stage Manager (Quincy Tyler
Bernstine), Technician 3 (Jeff Biehl), Costumes (Rebecca Hart), Director (Bruce
McKenzie), Sound (Bray Poor), Technician 2 (Garrett Neergaard), Assistant
Director (Conrad Schott), Lights (Wendy Rich Stetson), and Assistant Stage
Manager (Leigh Wade).
 |
| Nina Hellman Photo: Julieta Cervantes. |
The audience sits in
bleachers facing a low stage on which David Zinn has designed what seems an
only partly completed set comprised of, at stage right, a long wall, with a
door set in it, built of unfinished plywood. When necessary, the entire wall,
sitting on casters, can be rolled across the stage to expose a forest glade
depicted on its back. Action occurs behind the audience, in the aisles, on
stage, and behind the set. While the non-actor characters are dressed in normal
everyday wear, the actor characters, once they’ve put on their costumes
(designed by Asta Bennie Hostetter), first appear in 19th-century clothes, the
women (Nina Hellman, Sue Jean Kim) in large hoop skirts; later, when scenes set
in contemporary times are performed, the costumes change accordingly. There
are, by the way, substantial play-within-a-play chunks, which offer tantalizing
glimpses of the spookily odd postmodern drama—which includes lots of ghostly, Nosferatu-inspired
hands—the actors are working on.
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| Conrad Schott (shadow), Sue Jean Kim. Photo: Julieta Cervantes. |
Since much of what
transpires during a tech is heard only by those wearing headsets, each member
of the audience gets a listening device to loop over one ear so they can
eavesdrop on the substantial amount of back and forth shared among the techies.
Ms. Washburn’s notes have been extremely useful in capturing both the
tech-speak used in cueing and setting levels, as well as in expressing the inanities
spoken during moments when not much else is going on. When thus isolated for
our listening pleasure some of these overheard sallies—consistently delivered in
a dry, off-the-cuff, naturalistic tone—can be hilarious. One, for example,
features a hungry techie, offered half of his colleague’s sandwich, seeking
information on each component, and finally deciding that maybe he’s not really
hungry enough to indulge in his friend’s generous offer.
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| Conrad Schott (shadow), Bruce McKenzie (shadow), Sue Jean Kim, Nina Hellman, Gibson Frazier. Photo: Julieta Cervantes. |
The play is divided into
two acts by the fifteen-minute break announced by the stage manager for the
company’s benefit. The second half turns out to be more conventionally dramatic
than the first, largely because a sizable, uninterrupted scene comes
screeching to a halt when the actor Paul (Thomas Jay Ryan) decides to
interrogate the director about his dissatisfaction with how his character is
written, while also subtly critiquing his fellow performer (Gibson Frazier). The
scene is exceptionally well played by Mr. Ryan, whose Paul is tiresomely
argumentative and rhetorically gifted, but completely
impractical. Mr. McKenzie’s frazzled but generally low-key director, unwilling
or, given his general air of quiet desperation, unable to engage in a
long-winded discussion, somehow manages to fend him off, helped by the reaction
of Mr. Frazier. Another dilemma ensues when someone has a bloody accident, but,
as theatre tradition would have it, the show—or at least the rehearsal—manages to
go on. Until it doesn’t, that is, and the next day’s call is announced.
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| Leigh Wade, Sue Jean Kim, Bruce McKenzie (back to camera), Gibson Frazier. Photo: Julieta Cervantes. |
10 OUT OF 12 actually
concludes by shifting to another mode in a charmingly sung and danced coda, choreographed
by Barney O’Hanlan, exquisitely signifying a love letter to the theatre and the
hardworking, mostly unsung artists and technicians who devote themselves to it
regardless of the sacrifices (such as having to take temp work to survive) they
must make. In a sense, it refutes a letter I happened to read on my subway
trip home, written in 1884 by America’s leading star of the day, Edwin Booth,
to someone seeking to become an actor and hoping for Booth’s encouragement. Hoping
to deter the man’s aspirations, Booth says, in part: “It is a life of wearisome drudgery;
and requires years of toil, and bitter disappointment, to achieve a position
worth having. . . . Were I able to employ my thoughts and labor in any other
field I would gladly turn my back on the theatre forever.” A far cry indeed from Ms. Washburn's uplifting message.
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| Sue Jean Kim, Leigh Wade, Gibson Frazier. Photo: Julieta Cervantes. |
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| Nina Hellman. Photo: Julieta Cervantes. |
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| Thomas Jay Ryan, Gibson Frazier, Sue Jean Kim, Nina Hellman. |
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| From left: Quincy Tyler Bernstine, Bruce McKenzie, Gibson Frazier, Nina Hellman, Conrad Schott, David Ross, Sue Jean Kim, Garrett Neergaard, Leigh Wade. Photo: Julieta Cervantes. |
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| From left: Sue Jean Kim, Quincy Tyler Bernstine, Garrett Neergaard (with headset), Nina Hellman, Bruce McKenzie, David Ross, Conrad Schott, Leigh Wade, Gibson Frazier. Photo: Julieta Cervantes. |
Other Viewpoints:
Soho Rep
46 Walker Street, NYC
Through July 18
Friday, June 19, 2015
29 (2015-2016): Review of DOCTOR FAUSTUS (seen June 13, 2015)
"Devilishly Dull"
For my review of DOCTOR FAUSTUS, please click on THE BROADWAY BLOG.
Other Viewpoints:
New York Times
New York Post
The Guardian
 |
| Chris Noth. Phone: Joan Marcus. |
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| Chris Noth, Zach Grenier. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
Thursday, June 18, 2015
28 (2015-2016): Review of MY PERFECT MIND (seen June 17, 2015)
"The Windmills of His Mind"
With his long, weathered, but still noble face, sad eyes, gentleness, lanky frame, wispy white hair, mustache, and goatee, Edward Petherbridge,
the distinguished British actor, would make a perfect Don Quixote. One can
easily see him tilting at windmills, but in the brilliantly conceived and
executed MY PERFECT MIND, part of the Brits Off Broadway festival at 59E59
Theaters, it’s King Lear he’s portraying; that is, when he’s not also playing other
persons in Shakespeare’s play, not to mention himself. And, as in the Jacques
Brel song, the windmills that he’s tilting at are the ones within his mind.
“I fear I am not in my perfect mind,” says the king in
act four of LEAR. The theatre piece that takes its title from that phrase
says much the same thing about Mr. Petherbridge’s condition following a stroke
he suffered in 2007 shortly after beginning rehearsals to play Lear in
Wellington, New Zealand, forcing him to abandon the show. His mind seems perfect now, however, at age 78, coming up soon, as he reminds us, on 79. He beautifully, and
with great charm and humor, navigates the extremely tricky shoals of this
nonlinear, narratively fractured, self-deprecating, metatheatrical reflection on his life, career, Lear, and, of course, the theatre.
 |
| Edward Petherbridge, Paul Hunter. Photo: Manuel Harlan. |
Originally produced for the Told by an Idiot
theatrical company, the Young Vic Theatre, and the Theatre Royal Plymouth, MY
PERFECT MIND was written (leaving room for improvisation) by Mr. Petherbridge
in collaboration with the exceptional comic actor Paul Hunter, who hilariously supports the
star in multiple comic roles, and the marvelous actress Kathryn Hunter, who
directed. It takes place on an assemblage inventively designed by Michael Vale
to signify and satirize theatrical conventions. A sharply raked white platform,
a trap door at its heart, set sideways to the audience; at its top a
thundersheet. A plain white panel for a backdrop. Traditional wind and rain
machines. A couple of bentwood chairs, a table, and random props. Not much to
look at, but as used during the performance, a cornucopia of theatrical, and
often terrifically funny, theatrical possibilities.
 |
| Paul Hunter, Edward Petherbridge. Photo: Manuel Harlan. |
Mr. Hunter serves both as Lear’s Fool in scenes from
KING LEAR, but also makes everyone else he plays part of a rogue’s gallery of people (not necessarily fools) in Mr. Petherbridge’s life. A few odd costume pieces, a wig, hair net, or cap infuse a farcical energy into all the people he portrays, including Dr.
Witznagel, a lab-coated, bushy-wigged neurologist with a comically phony German
accent, whose scenes serve as a sort of frame to the action. He begins the play
as if speaking to a class of future “doctors of the brain,” introducing a case
study of a man suffering from a brain trauma that has given him EPS (Edward
Petherbridge Syndrome), a condition wherein Mr. Petherbridge believes he’s King
Lear. Later, this morphs into its opposite, KLS (figure it out). Each time he
mimes writing notes on the thundersheet, it produces its expected sound effect,
causing him to look up as if the skies were about to open. Mr. Hunter’s comic timing
and sensibility make you chuckle no matter how old-hat his shtick is.
 |
| Edward Petherbridge, Paul Hunter. Photo: Manuel Harlan. |
Over the course of the play he embodies characters in
LEAR; himself when he costarred with Mr. Petherbridge in a flop 2010 West
End revival of THE FANTASTICKS; Mr. Petherbridge’s pregnant mother, who had a
stroke two days before her son was born; David Lawrence, director of Wellington’s
Bacchanal Theatre Company; a cab driver imagined to
have driven the star all the way from Wellington to Bradford, Yorkshire, where he was raised; a Japanese director casting Mr. Petherbridge in THE FANTASTICKS; Veronica,
a Romanian housecleaner who rehearses LEAR with him; Sir Laurence Olivier, who
at one point performs Othello by combining it with Richard III; Miss MacPride,
his Bradford movement teacher who taught him the importance of “economy and
selection”; the New Zealand doctor who treated his stroke, and others.
As the piece progresses it keeps shifting places and
situations, going back and forth in time, satirizing actors’ affectations, taking
us into rehearsals of Lear, informing us of major highlights in Mr.
Petherbridge’s career (including his famous roles in NICHOLAS NICKLEBY and
ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN, and his less famous one as an Incan priest in THE
ROYAL HUNT OF THE SUN*), showing Mr. Petherbridge reliving the acting exercises
he performed for Miss MacPride (such as “A Day in the Life of a Gnat”), presenting Mr. Petherbridge as a child performing “Chickery Chick” in a
talent contest at the Bridlington Pavilion, informing us of Mr. Petherbridge’s
family background, and so on. Famous English theatre names drop frequently along the way, although not everyone will pick up every anecdotal reference to
Coward, Wolfit, Finney, Branagh, and Holm. Ironically, we learn that, despite
Mr. Petherbridge’s leaving LEAR, Wellington audiences soon after were privileged
to see the world touring production of it starring Mr. Petherbridge’s friend,
Ian McKellen.
 |
| Paul Hunter, Edward Petherbridge. Photo: Manuel Harlan. |
Mr. Petherbridge, wearing jeans and a blousy white
shirt with various vests, jackets, and coats, shifts in manner from the
convincingly off the cuff, seemingly improvisational, to the classically
polished and powerful. He may sometimes give the illusion of searching for a word, but he never misses a
beat, and even his most throwaway moments are clearly set and perfected.
 |
| Paul Hunter, Edward Petherbridge. Photo: Manuel Harlan. |
Having
gained fame mainly as a stage actor, especially during his tenure with the
Royal Shakespeare Company, he’s not become a household name like those peers
who’ve had important film careers. His best-known non-theatre work was as the
debonair sleuth, Sir Peter Wimsey, in the 1987 BBC TV series based on the Dorothy
Sayers novels. But it’s in the theatre that you want to see him, and now you’ve
got your chance. Seize it.
[*Here’s a little anecdote of my own, stirred up when
Mr. Petherbridge mentioned THE ROYAL HUNT OF THE SUN. In 1963 I was a graduate student in Tokyo studying kabuki
theatre. That November an international theatre conference brought many
distinguished world theatre figures to Japan, including the director John
Dexter. I got to know him a bit at the conference and, when the visitors were
taken to see a kabuki production I sat next to him and explained the various
conventions. In 1965 Dexter’s production of THE ROYAL HUNT OF THE SUN, which
had starred Robert Stephens as the Inca king Atahualpa in England, came to New
York with David Carradine in the role. I was excited to see that Dexter had infused
a number of kabuki conventions into this highly theatrical work, and now to realize that, in my own tiny way, I'd had something to do with influencing a play in which the young Edward Petherbridge appeared.]
Other Viewpoints:
59E59 Theaters
59 East Fifty-ninth Street, NYC
Through June 28