Pity the modern theater director who wants to stage the revival of a classic play. It seems that it’s no longer enough to just realize the writer’s text. Or to draw nuanced performances from the actors. Nowadays, you need to have an original concept, a new spin on the material, or, as the strippers in Gypsy might say, “you gotta get a gimmick.”
Sometimes the revisionism works, as with the current modern-dress productions of Mary Stuart and Our Town. Sometimes it falls short of its mark, as with the semi-Spanish version of West Side Story and the completely expressionistic interpretation of All My Sons. And sometimes it falls on its ass, as with the new revival of Eugene O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms that opened at the St. James Theatre on Sunday night.
No one was more surprised to see Desire Under the Elms land on its butt than me. I’m a sucker for O’Neill, despite—or maybe because of—his florid language and melodramatic plots. And I’m a big fan of the creative team behind this production. Its director Robert Falls and lead actor Brian Dennehy have done wonderful work together in the past with their collaborations on Death of A Salesman and Long Days Journey Into Night. Its co-stars Carla Gugino and Pablo Schreiber have given standout performances in previous shows. But, this time, they all get so tangled up in the concept that they forget the play.
Desire Under the Elms is set shortly before the Civil War and tells that eternally titillating story of the older man with the younger wife who falls for a young man—in this case, the young man is also her stepson. The original production, which opened in 1924, had 20 actors—12 of them townsfolk who attend a party where they make fun of the cuckolded older husband, played then by Walter Huston, father of the film director John and grandfather of the movie actors Anjelica and Danny. It ran for a solid year.
The play was revived in 1952, with a 39-year old Karl Malden, who made a career of playing guys older than he actually was, as the 75-year old husband, even though the actor playing his perfidious son turned 31 the day after the short 46-performance run ended. A young, 27 year-old Colleen Dewhurst played one of the busybody neighbors.
There are no neighbors in the current production. Instead there are just five actors—the members of the love triangle and two other sons who disappear early in the play. So there is no party scene. Other stuff has been cut too so that the play, which usually sprawls over three acts and three hours, clocks in at under two intermissionless hours. It just feels a lot longer.
There are no elms either. Instead set designer Walt Spangler has filled the stage with boulders that I guess are suppose to symbolize some kind of oppression but instead create such a bleak landscape that I found myself wondering if Spangler and Falls had secretly longed to show what they might have done with the existential wasteland of Waiting for Godot.
So what does Falls add? Well, a lot of sex. Schreiber—who apparently has been working out in preparation for the role—does the full monty for a gratuitous bath scene. Gugino, who showed her sexual fearlessness when she played the Marilyn Monroe character in Arthur Miller’s After the Fall a few seasons back, slinks around the stage in dresses that keep falling in revealing ways. And the two of them get down on places like the kitchen table.
When they’re not clinched together or trading smoldering stares, they—and Dennehy too—are yelling at one another. And they do it in gratingly different accents. The family’s farm—presented here as a kind of doll house that is raised, lowered and hovers over the stage—is set in New England. But, except for the occasional “Ay-yup,” you wouldn’t know it. Schreiber affects a southern drawl, Dennehy favors a kind of Irish brogue and Gugino, who apparently hasn’t yet made up her mind, alternates throughout the performance. O’Neill, who liked to write in dialect, bears some of the blame; but if Falls was willing to change the other stuff, why not downplay that?
None of the actors manages to convey real emotions and so Falls resorts to musical underscoring to cue the audience on how it should feel. At one point, he even plays a complete version of the anachronistic Bob Dylan song “Not Yet Dark.”
Several of the major critics, including the New York Times’ Charles Isherwood, have raved about this interpretation of Desire Under the Elms. But the only desire I felt was for the chance to see a fine production of the play that the playwright wrote.
Our Town is one of those shows that everyone feels they know. And, in some ways, everyone does because for decades it was a favorite of high school drama teachers everywhere. I think they liked it because Thornton Wilder’s play about life in a small New England town at the turn of the last century seemed to celebrate an old-fashioned regard for family and community. Because the playwright’s famous stage directions “No Curtains. No Scenery” meant the school budget only had to spring for a few props. And because the play offers plenty of speaking parts and even the least talented kids could play one of the silent dead townspeople in the final act. But as I watched the striking new production of Our Town that opened at the Barrow Street Theatre this week, it hit me that the best time to appreciate the play’s true message about the evanescence of life isn’t when you’re young and feeling as though you’ll live forever but when, like me, you’ve begun to grapple with your own mortality.
But that isn’t why I initially wanted to see this version of Our Town. I went because I wanted to see what its director David Cromer would do with the play. Last month, my friend Terry Teachout, the theater critic for The Wall Street Journal, praised a production of The Glass Menagerie that Cromer had staged for the Kansas City Repertory Theatre and declared him one of the most exciting directors in the country today. “Mr. Cromer,” Terry wrote, “has the uncanny ability to take a too-familiar script and make it seem entirely new—yet it is his special gift to serve the plays that he stages, rather than twisting them into unrecognizable and irrelevant shapes. Such is the essence of re-creative genius.” (Click here to read more of Terry’s review.)
My buddy Bill and I had seen and loved Cromer’s terrific reinvention of Adding Machine at the Minetta Lane last year and so we were eager to catch his Our Town. And he didn’t disappoint. Cromer has reconfigured the Barrow Street Theatre so that there is no barrier between the stage and the audience, which sits on risers around three sides of the floor-level playing space. Bill and I were seated in the front row and had to tuck in our toes as the actors walked by.
The lines between those performing and watching are further blurred by having the lights stay on during the performance, dressing the actors in regular everyday street clothes and having them make their entrances and exits through the audience so that you’re never quite sure who’s in the play and who isn’t. One handsome silver-haired man sitting across from us kept leaning forward and I expected him to join the play at any moment but he turned out to be just a rapt audience member.
The realistic tone of the production is set right from the start when Cromer, who also appears as the Stage Manager who narrates the play, stands in t
he middle of the audience and, without any fanfare, begins speaking his lines. He bares a distinct resemblance to the actor Ian Holm and is totally comfortable and unaffected in the role. The actors he’s chosen—some holdovers from Chicago where the production debuted—are just as natural. Interestingly enough, Anna D. Shapiro, the Tony-winning director of August: Osage County, is mounting yet another production of Our Town in Chicago this month (click here to read a comparison of the two in Chicago Magazine).
Because nearly everything else in Cromer’s concept of the play has been stripped away, the entire focus is on the actors. And for the most part they merit that attention. With one significant lapse. The final scene, set in a graveyard, is usually the emotional heart of Our Town but Jennifer Grace, who plays the heroine Emily, didn’t quite deliver the epiphany that the rest of the show promised on the night Bill and I saw it. Still, I saw tears in the eyes of many audience members as the actors took their bows.
Our Town is now such a revered classic that I was surprised to read about its troubled beginnings in Ethan Mordden’s “All that Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959.” According to Mordden, Boston theatergoers were so turned off by the play when it opened there in 1938 that the Massachusetts governor’s wife led a walkout on opening night, forcing the show to close. Producer-director Jed Harris had to scramble to find a Broadway home for it, only to have it draw mixed reviews when he did.
Luckily, one of the positive notices came from the influential and insightful New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson who declared it “a beautifully haunting play.” The show went on to play 336 performances after that, to win a Pulitzer Prize, and to be revived four times on Broadway, including the now-legendary 2002 production with Paul Newman as the Stage Manager. If current theater lovers are lucky, the Cromer production will enjoy a long run too.
Pity the modern theater director who wants to stage the revival of a classic play. It seems that it’s no longer enough to just realize the writer’s text. Or to draw nuanced performances from the actors. Nowadays, you need to have an original concept, a new spin on the material, or, as the strippers in Gypsy might say, “you gotta get a gimmick.”
