In Memorian: Clayton Riley

My friend Clayton Riley died yesterday. He was an ardent and constant advocate for African-American theater, an astute critic of theater of all kinds and a supportive reader of this blog. Clayton started off as an actor and his credits include the original productions of Martin Duberman’s In White America and LeRoi Jones’ The Dutchman. During that time, he also helped form the Frank Silvera Writer’s Workshop, which developed the works of African-American playwrights. Over the years, his articles and critiques appeared in the New York Times and The Village Voice. He also taught at Cornell University, Fordham University, the New School and my alma mater, Sarah Lawrence College, where I first met him when I took his class. He later married one of my closest friends and occasional theater partners Joy and my husband K and I have spent many wonderful evenings with them. We'll miss him. Clayton was a great raconteur and a generous friend and he remained until the end, an enthusiastic believer in the power of good theater. That will live on. Joy is setting up a fund in his name at Sarah Lawrence that will buy tickets for students who otherwise couldn’t afford to see theater here in the city. It's a fitting tribute for a true theater lover.

"The Master Builder" is Poorly Constructed

Chekhov and Ibsen are such an integral part of the theatrical canon that we often forget that most of us know their works primarily through translation. Sometimes, as with Christopher Hampton’s nimble reworking of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull (currently dazzling theater lovers on Broadway), a new translation can make one of those 19th century plays come alive for contemporary audiences. But other times, as with Frank McGuinness’ plodding adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s The Master Builder that opened at The Irish Repertory Theatre this week, the effect can be just the opposite.

The Master Builder, written in 1892, towards the end of Ibsen’s life, has never been as popular as his A Doll’s House or Hedda Gabler (the 18th Broadway revival of the latter is scheduled to open on Jan. 25 with Mary-Louise Parker in the starring role) so the Irish Rep gets some points for taking it on. But why bother if you’re going to go at it in such a dismal fashion? During intermission at the performance my buddy Bill and I attended, audience members walked by one another, heads bowed and avoiding eye contact, as though they were at the wake of someone who had died prematurely. One man grabbed the arm of another waiting for the restroom and whispered, “So bad, so bad.” Nearly one third of the audience, apparently feeling that it had paid its respects, opted not to come back for the second act.

The actors, of course, stayed. But they seemed just as despairing. The Master Builder tells the story of Halvard Solness, an architect who, abandoning his ideals for financial success, has become an uncaring husband and an unbearable boss. His life is changed when a young woman who still worships him because of the church he built in her village when she was a child tries to reignite his idealism. James Naughton, a two-time Tony winner and usually a fine actor, seems totally lost in the role. I didn’t even recognize him when he first walked on until I heard his distinctively plummy baritone. Unfortunately, he seemed to be reciting the part instead of playing the role and he didn’t even do that well since he kept stumbling over his lines. (Click here to read a Theatermania interview in which he talks about why he took the part.) Kristin Griffith, who plays his wife, remembered hers but she was still lifeless. On the other hand, Charlotte Parry as the young woman was so lively that she came off as shrill.

Normally, I’d blame their performances and the overall lethargy of the production on bad direction and assume that the director didn’t know what he was doing. In this case, however, the show was directed by Ciaran O’Reilly, the company’s producing director and an experienced hand. But he wasn’t the only vet who was undone by this production. Eugene Lee, who has won every honor available for his set designs including having been recently inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame, put together one of the clunkiest sets I’ve seen since my high school drama class productions: the main office setting is handsome enough but when the action moves from inside the Solness home to the yard outside, stagehands simply push the furniture to the side of the stage.

But in the beginning is always the word. And McGuinness’ words sound as though he were doing a parody of a stiff 19th century play. The result is, well, a stiff 19th century play. Bill later reminded me that whenever the legendary actress Eva Le Galliene did Ibsen, she translated the play herself because she thought the standard English translations were “stilted and unworthy of Ibsen’s language, style and intentions.” One can only imagine what she would have thought of this production

Swept Away by "A Body of Water"

Even acclaimed playwrights can have a tough time getting their works produced in New York. Lee Blessing made a name for himself 20 years ago with A Walk in the Woods, a smart and surprisingly moving drama about Cold War diplomacy that was nominated for both a Tony Award and a Pulitzer Prize. Four years later the Signature Theatre devoted its 1992-1993 season to his work. But although Blessing has written some 20 other plays over the last two decades, only five have made it across the Hudson.

Luckily for Blessing (and legions of other playwrights) there are scores of regional theaters on the other side of the river and across the country. A Body of Water, which opened at the 59E59 Theatres earlier this month, was first produced by the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis and has since played at The Old Globe Theatre in San Diego and the Round House Theatre in Silver Springs, Maryland. It won the 2006 Steinberg New Play Award, which is given to the best new work produced outside of New York City. And finally, it’s arrived here. New Yorkers—or at least New York critics—seem less taken with this meditation on identity and memory but I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind.

A Body of Water opens with an attractive middle-aged couple waking up in a comfortable waterfront home (designed by the increasingly ubiquitous and prodigiously talented Neil Patel) and empathetically lit by Jeff Croiter. Within minutes it’s clear that neither the man nor the woman knows where they are or even who they are. And none of this gets any clearer when a short time later, a mysterious young woman arrives who could be their caretaker, their daughter or perhaps just a manifestation of their shared insanity. The rest of the play is spent with the couple—and the audience—trying to solve the riddle of her presence and their existence.

I’m not big on absurdist drama and so this is the kind of play that usually drives me up a wall. But Michael Cristofer and Christine Lahti are so wonderfully compelling as the baffled couple that I found myself mesmerized despite my original misgivings (Click here to see a few snippets of the play and an interview they gave Broadway.com). And director Maria Mileaf injects just the right amount of suspense to create a real and unsettling sense of existential menace. It isn’t all grim; in fact, there’s a good deal of humor. But I won’t be able to tell you the solution to the puzzle Blessing sets up because I don’t really know what that answer is. Even he may not know. The playwright admits in the Primary Stages newsletter that “the final scene of the play has been changed every time the play has been done.”

That lack of resolution bothers some people. The man who shared an elevator ride with my friend Ann and me after the show declared the play “the worst thing I ever saw...it didn’t go anyplace.” Many critics agreed and more than one complained that the show simply “tread water” during its 90-minute running time. I know what they mean but I'm swimming against the tide on this one. I love how Blessing’s play literally so deftly set the stage for me to ruminate on the big questions. You know. The ones about life and death and love and redemption. There are, of course, no easy answers for them and we all must come to our own conclusions. A Body of Water runs through Nov. 16 so there’s time for you to go and draw your own.

It's Mother Knows Best in "All My Sons"

The email from my longtime-ago boyfriend Stan said that he would be in town come mid-October and wanted to go with me to see a good play. That kind of request always makes me anxious (how do you know what someone else will consider a good play?) but I felt an even greater responsibility this time out because Stan now lives in Bangkok and so it’s going to be a while before he gets a chance to see another Broadway show.

I decided to take him to the new revival of All My Sons that opened at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre this week. I thought that even if it wasn’t “good”, Stan would appreciate seeing an Arthur Miller classic. And if, by some chance, he hated Miller’s work, he could still get a kick out of seeing the much-talked about stage debut of Katie Holmes since even his friends back in Thailand would probably be just as curious as you, dear reader, about how Mrs. Tom Cruise fared in her first Broadway show. But more about that later.

All My Sons was the second of Miller’s plays to make it to Broadway when it opened in 1947. The first, The Man Who Had All the Luck, had played for just four performances three years earlier (a 2002 revival managed only 62 performances) and Miller, 31 years-old and the father of two, vowed to give up playwriting if All My Sons wasn’t a success. Luckily for him (and for theater lovers) Elia Kazan signed on to direct the play. Both men ended up winning Tonys. And the production played for a then-impressive 328 performances, launching Miller’s long and illustrious career.

Audiences were riveted by the then-contemporary story of a family struggling to deal with the after effects of the recently-ended war. Joe Keller, the father in the play, is a prosperous Midwestern business man who is suspected of shipping defective plane parts during World War II. The damaged equipment caused the deaths of 23 airmen, one of whom may have been the family’s eldest son Larry, still listed as missing in action. The father and surviving son, Chris, are eager to move on. Chris has even fallen in love with and wants to marry Larry’s former fiancée Ann. But mother Kate clings to the belief that Larry is still alive.

Women are usually relegated to supporting roles in Miller’s plays. They tend to be meek, long-suffering spouses like Willy Loman’s wife Linda in Death of a Salesman or comely young objects of desire like Catherine in A View from the Bridge. It’s the men—their desperate longing for a slice of the American dream, their tragic inability to live up to images they’ve created for themselves—who hold center stage. But that’s not quite the way it is this time out.

Both John Lithgow and Patrick Wilson who play the father and son are powerful actors and they don’t hold back in any way here. In fact, there’s a mano-a-mano scene where they are so intense that I thought they might do bodily harm to one another. But for me, it is Dianne Wiest as the wife and mother who walks away with this production.

And that isn’t easy to do. All of the pre-opening publicity focused on Holmes (and although several of the critics have predictably griped about her performance, I thought she did just fine.) Later, most of the reviews fixated on the post-modern devices—heavy musical underscoring, lots of conspicuous lighting, a highly stylized set, video projections that feature stage directions as well as movie clips, and other flamboyantly self-conscious stagecraft—that British director Simon McBurney has imposed on the play.

Still, Wiest manages to break through the din with a performance that transforms a woman who might have been portrayed as a scatterbrain into the heart and soul of the production. Her Kate is a quietly fierce woman who makes her choices not because she is unable to accept the realities of life but because she knows better than anyone around her how devastating they can be.

Not everything works as well in this revival of All My Sons. But it is nearly all fascinating to watch. In my book that counts as good theater. And I’m happy to be able to say that Stan thought so too.

"Fifty Words" Doesn't Say Enough

Have you noticed how curtains rarely rise anymore? Instead you walk into a theater and the set is right there staring at you. And, depending on how early you arrive and how distracted you are once you get there, you can stare back at it and, often, you can tell a lot about a show by what you see even before the play begins.

I got to the Lucille Lortel Theatre early and I went alone. So I had plenty of time to study the set for the MCC Theater’s production of Fifty Words, the new Michael Weller play that opened earlier this month. Neil Patel’s set design was so smart and so specific—a Peggy Piacenza dance poster on an exposed brick wall, the Crayola-colored Fiestaware on the kitchen shelves—that I started smiling because I could guess exactly what kind of people lived there. And because I figured if the furnishings were that good, I was in for a terrific evening.

I got the first part right. The second less so. The characters who live in the world Patel designed are an upper-middle class Brooklyn couple (he’s an architect, she’s a former dancer turned internet entrepreneur) played by Norbert Leo Butz and Elizabeth Marvel. Their nine-year-old son is off on his first sleepover, leaving his parents to their first night alone in nearly a decade. What ensues is another one of those long day’s journeys into a marital nightmare that calls to mind O’Neill and Albee. Only nowhere near as good.

Marital discord is a gift that keeps on giving to writers, from The Oresteia of Aeschylus to the “Desperate Housewives” created by Marc Cherry, and the tensions between contemporary dual-income spouses opens up a ripe new area for drama to explore. It would be hard to find two better actors to conduct the investigation than Butz and Marvel (click here to read a funny Q&A she did with Playbill). They are simultaneously cerebral and physical performers, fully committed to both approaches. So you get the whole package when you watch them. In fact, they go so full out that the play’s opening was delayed a few days because both actors got injured in their onstage brawling during the preview period. Director Austin Pendleton is also an accomplished actor and playwright and knows how to tell a stage story.

It’s the particulars of this story that bothered me. I just didn’t believe this couple. Or the night they shared. Maybe that’s because this is such a guy’s play. The husband’s fondest memory of his wife is about how she gave him a blow job in a cab the first night they met. His reminiscences about it are supposed to put her in the mood for another “romantic” evening. Huh?

The contrivances Weller uses to keep the plot moving along are just as clunky. Would the mother of the boy their son is visiting really call after midnight just to confirm what time she should bring the boy home? Would a wife who purports to still be in love with her husband really spend all her time working on her computer while he’s waiting in bed for her to make love on the night before he’s going away on a long business trip?

It’s true that I’m blessed with a happy marriage but it took me a long time to find my husband K and I know how couples can eviscerate one another (been there; been done in by that) but I’ve seen more realistic portrayals of a bad marriage on the Lifetime Channel. If a playwright is going to take this subject on, then he ought to have something fresh to say about it. "There should be 50 words” for love, “like Eskimos have for snow," the wife says at one point. That may explain the show’s title but in theater it's not how many words you use, it's how well you use them that counts.

A Blustery "Man for All Seasons"

People like me are always mouthing off about how we’d be happy to see our favorite actors onstage even if they were doing no more than reading the phone book. Well, it may be put up or shut up time for me.

Frank Langella is one of my very favorite actors. I’m a fool for his commanding stage presence, mellifluous voice and total commitment to character. A Man for All Seasons, Robert Bolt’s play about Sir Thomas More, the 16th century English noble who was beheaded for refusing to accept Henry VIII’s divorce from his first wife and marriage to his second, is hardly a phone book. In fact, it was a Tony Award winning-play and the Oscar-winning film version is one of my all-time faves. Still, there is a by-the-numbers quality about the Roundabout Theatre’s current revival of A Man for All Seasons that opened at the American Airlines Theatre earlier this month. And even the great Langella had a tough time making it come alive for me.

And it isn’t because I don’t appreciate the subject matter or think it’s dated. In fact, I’m one of those folks who can’t seem to get enough of the the lives of Henry VIII, his wives and his heirs. Since the beginning of the year, I’ve seen the movie “The Other Boleyn Girl”, looked at “The Tudors” series on Showtime, read three novels by Phillipa Gregory, the queen of literature set in the 16th century, and rented DVDs of the PBS mini-series “Elizabeth I” with Helen Mirren and the 1996 Oscar-winning version of “A Man for All Seasons” with the late Paul Scofield, reprising his role from the original stage version. And it's always the right time for a play about a man who will stand up for his beliefs.

But the play that we’re now seeing isn’t the same one that so intrigued theatergoers back in the 1960s when A Man for All Seasons ran for 637 performances. That version included a character called The Common Man, who spoke directly to the audience and served as a narrator and commentator on the play. Doug Hughes, director of the current production, persuaded the Bolt estate to allow him to drop that character because, he has said, he feels that Brechtian conceit has become too commonplace. And perhaps he also thought it would confuse people who had seen the movie, which also leaves out the character. But movies and plays are different species and although I didn’t see the original stage version, I suspect what The Common Man added was a theatricality that this production lacks.

It also lacks a truly supporting cast. The play is all about More and the battle between the demands of his conscience as a Catholic and the loyalty he is called upon to show his liege who breaks with the church. But there are other strong characters in the play, including Richard Rich, the ambitious acolyte who betrays More; Thomas Cromwell, the crafty cleric who becomes More’s chief foe and, of course, the king. A great hero needs a worthy nemesis. Scofield, who won great acclaim as More in the original production, had one in his Cromwell, played by Leo McKern, the talented character actor perhaps best known as Rumpole of the Bailey.

Zach Grenier, who plays Cromwell in the current production is a good actor but he’s not in Langella’s league. Nor is Jeremy Strong’s Rich. That throws the production out of balance and Langella seems like Gulliver in the land of Lilliputians, at times almost hammy by comparison with his co-stars.

Only Patrick Page as King Henry measures up. Page’s past credits include playing the Grinch in How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Scar in The Lion King and Lumiere in Beauty and the Beast (click here to read a New York Times profile about him). Maybe he’s just happy to be playing a human again but his Henry is a real person—charming one moment, chilling the next and Page brings a vitality to his one scene with More that made me sit up in my chair and stop shivering (the air conditioning in the American Airlines Theatre always seems frozen at full blast; take a heavy jacket if you go) and when he left the stage I wanted to go with him.

So, was I happy to see Langella under these circumstances? Yes and no. Yes because I’m always glad to see him and he still manages flashes of brilliance. No because even the finest gem needs a good setting to show it off to true effect.

Is "13" Too Immature for Broadway?

Tweens, that precocious generation between the ages of 8 and 15, have turned “High School Musical” into a cash cow for Disney. They made the Jonas Brothers (ages 17, 16 and 13 when they formed their band in 2005) one of the hottest acts in the music business today. They put 15 year-old Miley Cyrus on the cover of Vanity Fair this year. And they even helped Broadway’s Wicked become the international girl-powerhouse that it is. So as I sat watching the new musical 13 that opened on Sunday at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, I found myself wondering “Why didn’t someone think of this before?

This is a musical about 13 year-olds, starring a cast of 13 in which no one is older than 18 and even the onstage band is composed of players who probably just began to shave and wear bras. Unlike most of the shows aimed at this demographic (Wicked, Legally Blonde, The Little Mermaid), 13 has its eye on the boys who feel they’ve outgrown The Lion King. In fact, Broadway seems to be going a bit boy crazy this season because both the upcoming shows Billy Elliot and Shrek are aiming for the same audience.

Thirteen tells the story of Evan Goldman, a New York kid whose mother moves him to Indiana after his parents divorce and just a few months before he’s due to celebrate his bar mitzvah. The plot centers around Evan’s efforts to fit in with the kids at his new school so that they’ll join the festivities marking his entry into manhood. The book is by Dan Elish (who’s written such kid-friendly novels as “Born Too Short: The Confessions of an Eighth-Grade Basket Case”) and TV writer Robert Horn. And the music and lyrics are by Jason Robert Brown, composer of the Tony Award-winning score for Parade and the critically acclaimed The Last Five Years.

The whole idea is so smart and appealing that I really wanted to like 13. But, alas, I didn’t. It’s not the fault of the kids in the cast, who are, for the most part, talented and comfortable onstage, particularly Graham Phillips, who played Evan at the performance my friend Priscilla and I attended (he’s scheduled to take Saturday nights off). Phillips has the kind of bright, easy, and yes seductive, charm that brings to mind a junior version of the “M*A*S*H”-era mensch Alan Alda.

Other standouts include the clarion-voiced Allie Trimm as Patrice, the nice-but-non-cool girl who lives next door to Evan; and Aaron Simon Gross as Archie, a kid who gets around on crutches and a strong sense of humor. And even the young band plays well, although some of the heavy lifting is done by conductor and keyboardist Tom Kitt, whose last spin on Broadway was as the composer of the short-lived High Fidelity.

But aside from Kitt and director Jeremy Sams, who does a good job with such as young cast, I blame the show’s shortcomings on the grown-ups involved in the production. While its tunes are poppy and its lyrics witty (click here to hear a sampling), 13 struck me as the kind of show that adults think kids will find cool rather than a show that kids actually do find cool.

And I was totally turned off by how it fed into stereotypes. Does Indiana really have to be, as one song calls it, “the lamest place in the world” to live? Does the school jock have to be the predictably dumbest kid in the school? Does the blonde girl have to be the one that all the boys want? Does everyone have to be so thoroughly grossed out when two boys accidentally kiss?

Yeah, I know. I’m no where near the demographic 13 is hoping to draw. And I admit the audience the night I attended, heavily sprinkled with kids, seemed to enjoy the show, which runs just over 90 minutes. Even I got a kick out of seeing each young cast member show off in the joyful finale. And Priscilla, whose youngest is 14, said she's going to go back with her daughter and thinks that kids will like it. So what do I know? I don't even own any Jonas Brothers records.