A Stellar Crew for "The Seafarer"

If there were a Tony Award for Best Ensemble (and why isn't there one?) it would be the most competitive race this Broadway season. The frontrunner probably would be the Steppenwolf gang from August: Osage County. And not far behind would be the merrymakers of Is He Dead? and the lethal quintet in The Homecoming. But I'd cast my vote for the brilliant band of actors in Conor McPherson’s The Seafarer. The cast—Jim Norton, Conleth Hill, Sean Mahon (standing in the photo above), David Morse and Ciarán Hinds—is listed alphabetically in the Playbill, the actors come out together for the curtain call and it's hard to set a hierarchy on their uniformly superb performances. Like the members of a crew team, each man grabs his oars and, working together as a single unit skillfully steered by McPherson who directs his own play, they transport the audience into an engrossing evening of theater.

It's a particularly impressive feat because their vehicle, the play with its fanciful twists, isn't quite as sturdy as one might hope. Like The Weir and last season's Shining City, The Seafarer is another one of McPherson's ghost stories. The Dublin-born playwright has the Irishman's love of a good yarn and he is a great raconteur. But at the end of each of his plays I've seen, I found myself asking, So what was that about? The critics, whose reviews I'd saved and read when I got home, also seemed confused by The Seafarer's meaning and divided on whether or not it was a really good play or just a good time.

At its simplest, The Seafarer is about a ne'er do-well (Morse) who returns home during the Christmas season to take care of his brother (Norton) who was blinded when he got so drunk that he fell into a dumpster. Two local friends (Hill and Mahon) drop by and a mysterious man (Hinds) whom one of them met at a local bar joins the group. There is much drinking, much storytelling some gambling (metaphorical and literal) and inquisitions into the meaning of good and evil, the nature of heaven and hell. Souls are imperiled and salvation is sought. There are also lots and lots of laughs. The great actor Brian Dennehy was sitting in front of my friend Bill and me and he laughed so hard that he doubled over at times, a good thing since he's a huge man who, at times, blocked Bill's view.

You wouldn't know this just from watching the play, unless maybe you were a particularly wonky English major in college, but I learned from the articles and reviews I read afterwards that the title of the play apparently refers to an old English poem of the same name. And even a quick perusal of the poem seems to provide some clues as to what McPherson may be getting at. "Death leaps at the fools who forget their God," goes one line (click here to read the entire poem).

It's odd when you think about it but religious faith isn't often the subject of a Broadway show. A photo of Jesus hangs on the back wall of The Seafarer’s set and right at the start of the play, the returning brother almost absent-mindedly lights a small votive candle in front of it. The flame seemed to flicker on and off throughout the performance Bill and I saw. I don't know if that was intentional or not but right before the final lights dimmed, it glowed.

A Brief Encounter with "The Receptionist"

There are so many holiday-themed shows running between Thanksgiving and New Years that you wouldn't think a play centered around a chubby middle-aged woman who answers telephones for a living would be the choice for a multi-generational family outing during Christmas week. Yet sitting behind me at the Manhattan Theatre Club's production of The Receptionist were a grandmother and her three grandkids, who looked to be between the ages of 12 and 19. And, for the most part, they also looked to be having a pretty good time.

Perhaps they were primed for the show by its seeming similarity to "The Office," the NBC sitcom about an obnoxious boss and the poor saps who work for him. Or maybe they were simply amused, as I was, by Jayne Houdyshell's pitch-perfect performance as the good-natured busybody familiar to every workplace. And I suspect that the now-notorious twist in the play may have appealed to the sense of the macabre that, if the current popularity of horror movies is any indication, seems to excite lots of young people these days. "I wasn't so sure about this at the start," I overheard the grandson say during the curtain call. "But then things started getting interesting." Finally, I imagine that the play's running time may also have played a part in their enjoyment. The Receptionist runs just 70 intermission-less minutes.

I'm a big fan of one-act plays. Unlike the opera, where you get a comfortable 30 minutes or so of intermission, the 10 to 15 minute breaks during plays always strike me as stingy and a waste of time and effort. By the time you shove your way into the lobby, it's time to shove your way back to your seat. Which is why I rarely leave mine. I also like the fact that a short performance gets you out at a decent hour so that you can go somewhere afterwards and linger over dinner talking about the show or, if you choose, find a cab home easily since the other shows haven't yet let out. But 70 minutes kind of startled me.

The brevity of The Receptionist seemed to take the rest of the audience by surprise too. When the stage lights went out, signaling the end of the show, it took a few seconds for the applause to start and even then it was tepid, although people had laughed and, in some cases even gasped, out loud during the performance. I think we all felt cheated.

Going to the theater obviously isn't like renting a car or seeing a shrink, you don’t pay for it by the hour. But the regular ticket price for The Receptionist, which ends its run this weekend, is $75, and that works out to more than a dollar a minute. I don't bear any resentment towards Houydshell and her co-stars—Josh Charles, Robert Foxworth and Kendra Kassebaum—who were all terrific. Or towards playwright Adam Bock, whose play deftly captures these distressing times; or director Joe Mantello, who paced the work perfectly; or sound designer Darron L. West, who created just the right undercurrent of menace. But shouldn't someone at MTC have made the call that asking folks to pay more than a buck a minute for a performance is, well, distressing.

Luckily, other theater companies and producers are looking for ways to make theater more affordable for more people. Playwrights Horizons has a number of programs including Hot Tix, which sells $20 tickets to people who can prove they’re 30 or under; and LIVEforFIVE, an online lottery that offers $5 tickets for first preview performances (click here to see all of its discount programs). And earlier this month, the producers of August: Osage County, The Homecoming, and November announced a package deal to see all three for $199 (click here for more details on that offer).

I don't know how often the young people who sat behind me at The Receptionist go to the theater. But I think seeing it may have persuaded them that a live show can be just as enthralling as a movie at the Cineplex. Alas, it may also have made them think that going to the theater is something that you can only afford to do when an indulgent, well-heeled grandmother takes you.

Why "The Homecoming" Doesn't Hit Home

Harold Pinter's The Homecoming created a sensation when it opened at the Music Box Theatre in January of 1967, just as it had done during its earlier run in London. People took sides with the kind of passion displayed today only by fans at a World Cup final. In his opening night review, the New York Times critic Walter Kerr declared the play too slight and too slow. But a few weeks later, his colleague Clive Barnes proclaimed it "the most important English play since the war." The New Yorker wasn't impressed. Newsweek, however, thought it redefined drama. Readers heatedly debated the play in letters columns for weeks. Five months later, Tony voters chose it as the year's Best Play and gave it three other awards as well.

I know all of this because I was so befuddled about the meaning of The Homecoming after seeing the new production that opened on Sunday at the Cort Theatre that I started looking things up as soon as I got home. "What you need," said my husband K, who had decided to see it with me because he had never seen a Pinter play and thought he should see one, "is a kind of Cliff Notes." I checked the Cliff Notes website and they didn't have anything but I did find something like it on Amazon.com and was delighted to discover that I could download the PDF to my computer immediately (click here if you want to do the same) although I can't honestly say it helped.

I can say that it's unlikely the new production of The Homecoming will create the kind of commotion it did 40 years ago, even though it is nicely directed by Dan Sullivan and performed by a superb cast that includes Raúl Esparza, Michael McKean, Ian McShane and Eve Best. Back then it arrived after the assassination of John F. Kennedy and in the midst of the burgeoning women’s movement but before the events of 1968 that many people consider the heart of that paradigm-changing period we call The Sixties and the play seemed fittingly emblematic of those disjointed times. But now it is an established classic, considered by many to be Pinter's masterpiece. And Pinter himself has become a revered theater elder who has won the Nobel Prize and been knighted by the Queen.

On its most basic level, The Homecoming tells the story of a philosophy professor, who, after living in the U.S. for nine years, returns with his wife to his native England to visit the all-male household of his widowed father, two brothers and the uncle who lives with them. They are—no surprise—a dysfunctional family (are there any other kind in dramas?) and so the play is also about the sexual dynamics, power plays and betrayals among them. What Pinter brings to all of this is that indefinable feeling of creepy unease that even people who haven't seen his plays refer to as Pinteresque.

Which raises the question, at least for me, of what I would have thought if I'd seen the same show but the playwright had been listed as some other name. Because, dear reader, as much as I wanted to, I couldn't figure out what the play was supposed to be telling me (is it a proto-feminist work? or just the familiar old male fantasy?). Admittedly trying to discern that kept me riveted. And I was equally fascinated by how Best, who played Josie in A Moon for the Misbegotten last season, and Esparza, who most recently played Bobby in Company, transformed themselves into such completely different characters. And, of course, I came home and started reading (click here to read a terrific piece that the New Yorker critic John Lahr wrote about how The Homecoming changed his life) and found out lots of interesting things. But the play still hasn't hit home for me. Maybe that's because there’s really no way to turn the clock back and experience a breakthrough work in the same way that people did when it first broke through. Or maybe, it's just me.