Guest blogger Bill Sights "The Whale"

From Jan: Samuel D. Hunter knew that he was going to alienate some people by making a 600-pound man the central character in his new play The Whale.  As he told the online theater magazine TDF Stages,  “I wanted to set it up where the audience was keeping this character at arm’s length at first, and then gradually shrink that distance.” The problem is that the distance never shrank for me.  I just couldn't get past my discomfort with the character’s size.  That surprised me because I'm not usually a looksist and, God knows, I could stand to lose a few pounds myself.  But my visceral unease also made me realize that it wouldn't be fair for me to write about the play. Luckily I saw it with my theatergoing buddy Bill, who has agreed to share his less prejudiced view of the show with you:

I thought I knew what to expect from The Whale. In one major sense, I was right.  In most others, I was wrong—which, as this longish (one hour fifty minutes  when I saw it two weeks ago) one-act play unfolded, was what fascinated me.  Playwrights Horizons bills Samuel Hunter’s new play (first produced in Denver  and upcoming at Chicago’s Victory Gardens and California’s South Coast Rep) as  being about “a six-hundred pound recluse [who] hides away in his apartment  eating himself to death.” And yep, that’s what it’s about. 

PH also describes it, with what I took to be the usual hype, as “big-hearted and fiercely funny.” Yep again, that’s what I found it to be—as well as eccentric and, ultimately and  unexpectedly, moving. In retrospect, I’ve come to think of The Whale as part of a trilogy of like-minded plays that I’ve very much enjoyed over the past six  months or so, each of which smartly, touchingly and with good will and great good humor focuses on a particular out-of-the-mainstream central character.   

 The other two plays in my make-believe trilogy are Nina Raine’s Tribes, whose central figure is a youngish deaf man, and Simon Stephens' The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, whose hero is a 15-year-old savant who attends a school for  special-needs youngsters and who appears to have Asperger’s Syndrome, though that phrase is never mentioned (to my recollection). Tribes has been playing in  Greenwich Village since March 4th and continues through January 6th. The Curious  Incident..., which just closed at London’s National Theater but is scheduled to  move to the West End in March, was screened worldwide recently as part of the National’s bargain-price, wonderful “live” ntlive.com commercial-movie-theater  program (for which I’ve become a shameless shill). I saw both of these plays  twice and liked each even more the second time.     

The playwrights of all three plays clearly want their audiences to regard their leading characters not with mere sympathy but rather to appreciate our commonality with them. Mr. Hunter, however, is aware that his grossly overweight Charlie, the titular Whale, presents an audience with particular challenges, as he explains in an audio interview that you can listen to here.

When I hear the word whale, I make three literary associations. The first is just a joke, from the musical Wonderful Town. Awkwardly trying to make party  conversation, one character says she’s been re-reading "Moby-Dick." Silence. “It’s  about this whale,” she continues, to no good effect. Well, Hunter’s The Whale also turns out to be partly about "Moby-Dick." And about the biblical Jonah, too  (he of the whale misadventure), in ways that become more and more clear as the  play progresses, though there are early references to each, both verbally and even visually, the latter in a subtle way that audiences should be allowed the pleasure of discovering on their own.        

Till now, I’d seen Shuler Hensley onstage only in musicals, but my gosh he’s an  accomplished “straight” actor. Wearing a huge “fat suit,” he makes Charlie into an appealing figure—no small feat in playing a gay man so morbidly obese and slovenly that he chooses to make his living online, tutoring  young, mediocre students in the craft of essay writing, unseen by them and vice versa.    

Quite accomplished too are the other four members of The Whale’s small cast, playing the roles of Charlie’s estranged, hateful and hate-filled teenage  daughter (Reyna de Courcy, all angles and bile); his ex-wife (Tasha Lawrence, brusque but surprisingly sympathetic); Charlie’s best, perhaps only, friend and de facto caregiver (Cassie Beck, warmly direct); and a Mormon missionary (Cory Michael Smith, late of the needlessly salaciously titled Cock and quite nicely different here). 

As The Whale slowly unfolds, the latter two characters are revealed to have unexpected relationships to Charlie—unexpected but dramatically credible.     

It’s that slow unfolding, though, that was for me the singular failing of this otherwise greatly satisfying play. Unlike Tribes and Dog in the Night-Time, which barrel along, The Whale takes its sweet time, a drawback in a play that sets up very little conflict among its characters to begin with. And when the  play finally yields its secrets, and its allusions to "Moby-Dick" and to the Jonah story are fully revealed, the revelations are a tad too cryptically brief to be  thoroughly absorbed and fulfilling. I could have used a little less “middle” and  little more “ending.”       

But along the way (as an essay by one of Charlie’s online tutees might have put  it), the time that I spent with Hunter’s characters gave me enormous pleasure  (pun intended). Individually they might seem to be potential clichés. But with empathy and expertise, Hunter has woven them into a rich, luminous tapestry.       

 

This "Cyrano de Bergerac" Doesn't Cut It

Nerds—even the homeliest ones—rule in today’s pop culture. They’re the stars of hit movies and TV shows. In real life, many are rich and envied. And the prettiest girls don’t even blink at hooking up with them. So maybe an old-fashioned romance like Cyrano de Bergerac in which the funny-looking guy ends up the loser has just outlived its time.

At least that’s what I found myself thinking as I watched the Roundabout Theatre Company’s pleasant but pallid revival of the play that is running at the American Airlines Theatre through Nov. 25.

The French poet and playwright Edmond Rostand wrote this paean to unrequited love in 1897. It played Broadway the very next year and there have been at least 15 major productions in the city since then—and that number doesn’t take into account the musical adaptations, including one composed by Victor Herbert.  

But Cyrano's popularity has been waning in recent years. The last time I saw it was back in 2007 when Kevin Kline played the title character who loves the beautiful Roxane but, believing that his big nose makes him too ugly to win her heart, helps a handsomer man woo her. 

Jennifer Garner, best known as the butt-kicking spy on the old ABC series "Alias", brought her fame and a contemporary approach to Roxane, playing her as a sword-wielding feminist. 

That production lasted just 56 performances. (Click here to read my review).

Now the British actor Douglas Hodge, who won a Tony for his portrayal of the cross-dressing Albin in the 2010 revival of La Cage Aux Folles, has climbed into the britches of a 17th century grenadier and donned Cyrano’s trademark feather-plumed hat. His Roxane is the French actress Clémence Poésy who is making her Broadway debut.

Call me heartless but I didn’t care what happened to either of them.   

Cyrano is supposed to have a swashbuckling swagger, which Hodge simply doesn’t have.  Hodge is a solid actor and he handles the play’s rhyming couplets and its low-humor moments well but his Cyrano is too meek and often gets lost in the crowd of soldiers onstage instead of commanding attention from them and from us theatergoers.

The only thing that really sets him apart is the ridiculously huge and fake-looking nose that’s been concocted for Hodge to wear.  Cyrano’s nose is obviously supposed to stand out but this snout is so outsized that seeing over it almost forces Hodge to cross his eyes.

Poésy’s Roxane seemed wimpy too.  And I’ve so totally forgotten Kyle Soller, who plays Christian, the dumb but good-looking guy who gets to get it on with Roxane, that I don’t even remember what he looks like.

Meanwhile, Jamie Lloyd’s direction is far too busy and messy (click here to read an interview with the director and his star).  Sure, it’s good for the members of the ensemble to play individual characters but Lloyd, a young Brit who spent the past three years as associate director at London’s Donmar Warehouse, should have found a way to rein in all the mugging.

But there is one saving grace: the performance by Patrick Page as Comte de Guiche, the vain nobleman who is also in love with Roxane (click here to read an interview in which the actor talks about his thoughts on love).  

The count is supposed to be the villain of the piece but Page has a plummy baritone voice and a winning stage presence. He’s not exactly a nerd but in the real world, Roxane would just ride off with him. Or at least that’s what I wanted to do.

Surviving Sandy and Beyond

Hurricane Sandy has done its considerable damage and is now gone. My husband K and I hunkered down and got through it with no problems at all, save for a few flickering lights during the worst hours on Monday, and we feel blessed for having done so. 

Meanwhile, most Broadway shows, forced to shut down when all public transportation in the city was halted on Sunday, are returning to the stage, starting with today’s matinees.  Still, it feels somehow off to chatter about the shows I’ve been seeing when so many people are still grappling with the storm’s devastating aftermath. 

Large parts of the city, including Lower Manhattan, where theaters like the Public and the Vineyard operate, are still without power. There’s no subway service anywhere because many of the tunnels are still filled with water. Thousands of people, including one venerable Broadway book writer, have had to evacuate their homes.  

So although I had a post ready for today, I’m going to save it. Instead, I want to refer you to a piece my friend Howard Sherman wrote about the lingering effect the storm may have on the theater community that we all love. Click here to read it.  

And, when you can, help the theater recover by going to see a show. 

"An Enemy of the People" Fails to Win Me Over

With just 10 days to go before the election and Romney steadily gaining on Obama, you probably don’t need anyone to tell you how disappointing idealism can sometimes be, how messy democracy often is, or how money always holds the power to corrupt. But just in case you need a reminder, the Manhattan Theatre Club is presenting a revival of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, now playing at The Samuel J. Friedman Theatre.

Ibsen was a true iconoclast, dedicated to punching holes in the hypocrisies of his day. In An Enemy of the People, which he wrote in 1882, he jabs at both sides when the the forces of morality line up against those of expediency. 

On the side of righteouness is Thomas Stockman, a doctor and public health official who discovers that the water in his town is contaminated and prepares a report detailing both the problem and a costly remedy that he thinks will be well received because it will keep people from becoming ill.

On the pragmatic side is his brother Peter, the town’s mayor who is determined to keep the doctor’s findings secret because the news will drive away the tourists who visit the baths in which the town has invested heavily and that are its main source of revenue.

This being Ibsen, An Enemy of the People is a talky play but the talk in this production has been updated by the British playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz (click here to read an interview with her).   

Her adaptation makes for easier listening—and a shorter running time of just two hours—but my husband K and I found the 21st century colloquialisms, including a lot of non-deleted expletives, to be jarring in the mouths of 19th century characters.

The Stockman brothers are played by Boyd Gaines, usually one of my faves; and Richard Thomas, whose work I’ve also enjoyed in the past.  But both seem off their game in this production.   

Gaines plays Thomas as more of a petulant naïf than a man of burning conviction. Meanwhile Thomas turns Peter into a Snidely Whiplash, complete with cape, top hat and a sneering smile. 

The characterizations undermine the complexities that Ibsen created. And it’s hard to root for either side when the advocates are so unconvincing. 

In fact, the entire production has the air of a melodrama performed by a well-meaning but minor-league theater troupe, complete with overwrought emoting, conspicuous sound effects and dreary lighting. 

When that much is wrong, the buck has to stop at the desk of the director, who in this case is Doug Hughes. Even his idea of having actors sit in the front row in an effort to make the audience part of the play's climactic town meeting comes off as hokey.

In that final debate, the Stockman brothers compete for the support of the townspeople.  All I can say is that I hope life doesn’t imitate art on Nov. 6.

It Would Be a Shame to Miss "Disgraced"

It’s not easy to talk honestly about race.  And the fact that it’s no longer just a black-and-white issue in this country ups the degree of difficulty.  Still, many of today’s brightest young playwrights are taking up the challenge and the latest to shoulder it on is Ayad Akhtar, whose ambitious new play Disgraced opened at Lincoln Center’s still-new Claire Tow Theater on Monday night.

Its central character is Amir, who, like Akhtar, is Pakistani-American. Amir is also as assimilated as a guy can get. He’s Ivy League-educated and on the fast track to a partnership at a corporate law firm. He lives in a swanky Upper East Side apartment and is married to a WASPy blonde named Emily who has a promising art career. And his attitude towards Islam is determinedly casual, even a bit contemptuous. 

But the good life begins to unravel for Amir when, as a reluctant favor to his more religious nephew and his liberal wife, he pays a courtesy call on a jailed imam who has been accused of terrorist activities. 

The gesture causes the Jewish managing partners at his firm to doubt Amir’s loyalty. It unsettles the relationship with his friend Jory, an African-American woman who also works at the firm and whose husband Isaac is Emily’s art dealer. It strains his marriage.  But even more important, it causes Amir to question his identity as a Muslim in a post-9/11 America. 

All these issues collide in a liquor-fueled dinner party in which political correctness is abandoned, racial epithets exchanged and the rawest of emotions revealed.

That’s a lot to pack into a 90-minute play and I haven’t even gotten to the other problems in Amir and Emily’s marriage. Yet, despite a tendency towards some soapbox speechifying, Akhtar handles it all pretty well. 

That's because he's created credible characters who push beyond the usual stereotypes. The people in Disgraced are like most human beings, sometimes arrogant when they're right, defensive when they're not but most often stumbling through the murkiness inbetween those certainties.

Akhtar gets superb support from a five-member cast that is sensitively directed by Kimberly Senior.  Leading them is Aasif Mandvi who gives a kickass performance as Amir. 

Mandvi is probably best known for his satirical news reports on the “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” but he’s also an experienced stage actor with credits both off-Broadway and in the regional theaters (click here to read a Q&A with the actor) and he is outstanding in this complex role.

Kudos also must go to Erik Jensen, who stepped in at the very last minute to play Isaac when the actor originally cast got sick and had to drop out. Jensen had only been on the job three days when my friend Stan and I saw the show but he was not only off book but had already begun to turn Isaac into a distinctive character.

As we left the theater, Stan said he had enjoyed the play but he questioned whether people really talk like that, particularly about race.  I knew what he meant.  I’d felt much the same way after I saw The Submission (click here for my review) Clybourne Park (click for my review of it) and David Mamet’s defiantly named Race (and click for my review of this one) when I saw them.   

The truth of the matter is that despite all the rhetoric, we don’t really talk honestly about race.  Courageous plays like Disgraced remind us that we really need to find a way to do it. 

"Him" Offers a Portrait of Complex Family Dynamics—Both On and Off the Stage

Hallie Foote has been celebrated as the foremost interpreter of the plays by her late father Horton Foote and more recently of those by her younger sister Daisy.  But as I watched Daisy Foote’s latest play Him, now playing in a Primary Stages production at 59E59 Theaters, I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to see some other actress in the part.

Like her father, Daisy Foote focuses on people who live in small towns but have big dreams. He set his plays in his native Texas.  She puts her in New Hampshire where she grew up. Family dynamics fuel the action in the works of both father and daughter.  

The title character in Him is the dying owner of his town’s failing general store. He is cared for by three middle-aged children who have never left home, are financially dependent on their father and desperate because business is so bad that their own cupboard is almost bare of food.  

The eldest is Pauline, a spinster who is haunted by the memory of the unborn child she either aborted or miscarried years earlier and by the feeling that life owes her more.  The middle brother Henry is a gay man who secretly yearns after a married drinking buddy.  And the youngest is Farley, a mentally impaired man-child.

After the unseen patriarch dies offstage early in the first act, the siblings discover that he had secretly bought parcels of land that are now extremely valuable. This legacy has the potential to change everything about the way they live—including their relationships with one another.

Comparisons between their situation and that of the dysfunctional family squabbling over property in Horton Footes’ Dividing the Estate are not only unavoidable (click here to see my review of that) but underscored by the presence of Hallie Foote who plays a similar character in both.

In fact, Hallie Foote’s portrayal of Him’s Pauline will be familiar to anyone who has seen her in almost any other play in which she’s appeared. There is the same slightly southern drawl to her voice, the same jittery nervousness in her mannerisms, the same deadpan affect.

The effect can be entertaining and Foote won a deserved Tony nomination for her humorous supporting turn in Dividing the Estate. But Pauline is the pivotal figure in Him and the role demands more subtle skills.

Alas, Evan Yinoulis’ straightforward direction is unable to push Foote into new territory or to bring out the nuances that would turn Pauline into a distinctive person. I sat there imagining what a more inventive actor like Elizabeth Marvel or Marin Ireland might have done with the role.

Other members of the cast fare better.  Tim Hopper’s Henry is particularly sympathetic and it’s great to see a gay man played as a regular guy without any clichéd affectations, which is the way most of the gay men I know are.

And Adam LeFevre does an equally nice job with Farley.  Actors tend to go overboard when playing the mentally disabled but LeFevre makes Farley a particular person with passions of his own, including a romance with a similarly impaired neighbor played by Adina Verson.

 The three main actors step out of their roles at moments during the play to deliver poetic monologs. It takes a while to figure out the connection between their recitations and the rest of the play. Both Daisy Foote and Yinoulis share the blame for that confusion but Him’s bigger problem cuts closer to home. 

By all accounts, the Footes are devoted to one another and nothing like the battling kin in the plays they put on (click here to read a piece about the sisters) and so I imagine that Hallie Foote will continue to perform the family's works even though it might be better— perhaps even for her—if she didn't.

"Grace" is Blessed with Fine Performances

Polls say that atheism is rising in the U.S. and that even believers go to church less often than they once did. But God still seems to be talking to America’s playwrights. 

Faith was in the background of John Patrick Shanley’s 2005 Pulitzer Prize-winning play Doubt, but it was front and center in his Storefront Church, which played at the Atlantic Theater Company in June. And A.R. Gurney is currently offering a contemporary spin on the story of Jesus in his new play Heresy at the Flea Theater through Nov. 4. 

Now comes Craig Wright’s Grace, a homily on faith, love and forgiveness that opened at Broadway's Cort Theatre last week.

Theatergoers don’t seem to know what to make of all this sermonizing. They’re OK with it if it comes cushioned in layers of irony or humor, as it does in The Book of Mormon. But they’re much less comfortable when the religious talk is earnest.  And it’s very earnest in Grace. 

The story centers around Sara and Steve, a young evangelical couple who have moved from Minnesota to Florida to start a chain of religious-themed hotels; and their new neighbor, a NASA scientist named Sam, who has not only lost his faith but his fiancée and half of his face in a car crash.

It’s not a spoiler to tell you that the interactions between them will end badly because the play actually starts with its final scene and then flashes back to show how things got to that tragic conclusion. 

And that’s not the only metaphysical trick Grace employs. The action, the Playbill tells us, takes place in two identically furnished rentals that are next door to one another. In this production, designer Beowulf Boritt has created one set that doubles for the two apartments and the characters often—and sometimes confusingly—occupy the supposedly different spaces at the same time.

Wright, a former seminarian, might have made better use of his time if he’d devoted as much thought to his plotting. For too many of the changes that happen to his characters seem unearned. The audience isn’t given a chance to see relationships build; one minute Sara and Sam are wary friends and the next they’re considerably more. 

And, perhaps in a bid to add some humor or to pander to secular theatergoers, Dexter Bullard has directed Paul Rudd to portray Steve as a priggish jerk, which undercuts the dramatic arc for that character.

Luckily, Grace has been blessed with a particularly able set of actors. Rudd has become famous for his roles in Judd Apatow’s comic movies but he's got admirable stage chops as well.  And both he and Kate Arrington, a member of Chicago’s top-notch Steppenwolf Theatre Company, work hard to fill in the gaps and, ultimately, make Steve and Sara believable.

But the evening belongs to the indie-theater favorite Michael Shannon. In his Broadway debut, he is simply brilliant as Sam. 

Shannon, known for such flamboyant turns as the frustrated producer in Mistakes Happen, gives a restrained and yet still compelling performance. You can see just from the way he folds his arms the changes that occur in Sam as he dares to believe in his love for Sara and in the possibility of God. (Click here to read a profile of the actor.)

And even though Ed Asner, forever famous as TV’s Lou Grant and making his first appearance on the stage in over two decades, seems slightly befuddled at times, he is enough of a pro to use that discomfort to inform his character of a Holocaust survivor who now works as an exterminator. And, particularly in the second of his two brief scenes, Asner brings a kind of Old Testament-wisdom to the play.    

The presence of three recognizable movie and TV actors (Shannon has developed a following for his role as the federal agent on HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire”) is drawing non-traditional ticket buyers to Grace.  And they greeted their idols with enthusiastic entrance applause at the performance my husband K and I saw. 

But I don’t think that Grace will convert many of them into regular theatergoers. Certainly not the frat boy sitting next to me, who threw back his head and laughed uproariously at each small joke (the slogan for Steve’s hotel chain is “Where would Jesus sleep?”) but spent most of the show’s 100 minutes squirming in his seat.

Grace is unlikely to convert any religious atheists or agnostics either.  Its theological message is too fuzzy for that.  But, if you worship good acting, then you probably won’t want to miss Shannon’s performance because it will make a believer out of you.