Review
Paris
Letter
Robert
Cohen
in Los Angeles
Four world premieres (of sorts) showed up in the Los Angeles
area this winter – all with future prospects.
Jon Robin Baitz’s continually engrossing The Paris
Letter is already booked into New York’s Roundabout
Theatre (though with a different director, and perhaps a new
cast), and it is enormously promising just as it shows here.
This second offering of the new Kirk Douglas Theatre, Letter
is an intense, closely-plotted depiction of one homosexual’s
self-loathing - and the havoc it wreaks on those who have shared
his life: his wife, son and lovers.
The
characters and the actors playing them are tightly interwoven:
Sandy Sonenberg, a millionaire New York investment banker, is
Baitz’s self-suppressing gay protagonist, while suave
restaurateur, Anton Kilgallen, is his openly and happily gay
counterpart. Baitz tracks the two men (each played by two actors
at different stages of their lives) through forty years - from
their post-college lovemaking in 1962 to Sandy’s violent
self-denial, attempted psychiatric “cure,” spectacular
business success, frantic stab at heterosexual marriage, and
subsequent dissipation, decline and death – in Anton’s
arms - in a bleak Parisian garret. It’s a savagely tormented
intertwining, particularly as Ron Rifkin plays both the elder
Sandy and the younger Sandy’s shrink, while John Radnor
alternates between young Sandy and the elder Sandy’s son.
Both performances are stunning, as is Neil Patrick Harris’
portrayal, by turns, of the dashing young Anton and the even
more dashing Burt Sarris who becomes the elder Sandy’s
lover and professional protégé.
There
are certainly themes in this play – politics and economics,
Jewishness and assimilation, the medical and political definitions
of atypical sexual orientation (as codified and then uncodified
by the all-powerful Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders), and echoes of Tony Kushner are all over the place
(Sandy’s denial of his homosexuality rings a little too
closely to Angels in America’s Roy Cohn for this reviewer’s
comfort). But what elevates Paris Letter over comparable
dramas is its unflinching portrayal of how fundamental human
struggles evolve over an adult lifetime. This is a mature play,
and a concerned one. The doublecasting of most roles (Patricia
Wetting as both the young Sandy’s mother and the elder
Sandy’s wife is also excellent) proves compelling linkages
rather than mere staging economy, and Lawrence Pressman, in
the production’s sole solo characterization, eloquently
limns the sadder, wiser and frequently choric presence of the
senior, and often retrospective, Anton. Michael Moore’s
staging helps keep the characters clearly identified, as well
as tossing in a few shockers just when we’re settling
into comfort zones. Bravo.
Travis Preston finds “the inner landscape of Macbeth’s
tortured soul” as the “source and center”
of Shakespeare’s Scottish play, and for the past several
years the artistic director of CalArts’ Center for New
Theater has been mulling over a prospective Macbeth to star
his friend and colleague, British actor Stephen Dillane, and
focus on that particular imagistic terrain. He’s found
it. The issue of the artists’ longtime gestation has now
opened at the new Redcat Theatre in Disney Hall’s downtown
L.A. basement: It is a 110-minute solo performance of the cut
(and sometimes intercut, and sometimes translated) Shakespearean
text, accompanied by three jazz instrumentalists and presented
under the augmented title Macbeth (A Modern Ecstasy) - the parenthetical
subtitle deriving from Ross’s line, “Alas, poor
country… where violent sorrow seems a modern ecstasy.”
Dillane plays all the parts (including the offstage “cry
of women,” delivered onstage), and is astonishing.
To be sure, this is a cognoscenti’s Macbeth. Dillane differentiates
the major characters - a querulous simper for Lady Macbeth,
a stammer for Malcolm, a basso profoundo for Banquo, creaky-bent
witches, a blind Duncan, and a leering, crotch-pumping Porter.
He does not, however, identify any of these folks to spectators
who don’t know them; as for Ross, Lenox, Seyton, young
and old Siward, and the various thanes, doctors, soldiers and
servants of Shakespeare’s tale, they are indistinguishable
voices in the thick night of the play. More frustrating to some
audience members, I would suppose - Lady Macbeth delivers close
to half her lines in French.
Nonetheless,
both actor and director’s work is spellbinding. Dillane
creeps, crawls and struts about the stage, lashing out at himself
(/herself) in an ecstatic fantasia. Lady M’s neo-Racinian
tirades are sheer intercultural genius: who would have thought
the old gal had so much Phèdre in her? Many moments were
indelible: Macbeth’s gulping, gasping horror at seeing
Banquo’s ghost; his subsequent leap into the second row
of the audience as someone seen seeing a ghost; his falling
sound asleep before the final battle - as a way to put necessary
distance between him and his Lady’s death (“Tomorrow
and tomorrow, etc., etc., snore, snore...”); and his final,
laconic, defeated, barely-held-together instructions to his
demoralized troops (including a barely-uttered “Scour
the countryside…” that clearly would not have yielded
him a single scourer).
The
spare setting (by Christopher Barreca) is a slightly mottled
but otherwise bare white wall, backing a wide rectangular beach
– a seeming moonscape, actually - of fine, grey-black
sand, oddly speckled with glitter. Precisely scored lighting
(by Benoît Beauchamp) superbly follows the action and
illumines the shifting moods. The single costume (by Ellen McCartney)
is Dillane’s plain, open-collared, maroon shirt, black
pants and black jacket (which the actor brilliantly reverses
for armor). Dillane plays barefoot throughout, and, groveling
in Barreca’s midnight moondust, sports glittery-black
fingers and toes by the end of the play, and at one point an
Ash Wednesday forehead. The near-continuous jazz underscore
(by Vinnie Golia) beautifully sustains Dillane’s anhistrionic
ironies, turning the play’s last movement in particular
into a neogothic oratorio. The play’s several silences
have never spoken so profoundly. Stars, hide your fires!
Across
town – and equally on the other side of the theatrical
universe - was the mistakenly updated 1951 musical, Paint Your
Wagon, at the Geffen Theatre, performed at the theatre’s
temporary space (pending a renovation of their home base) at
the nearby Brentwood Theatre – also recently renovated.
Wagon is a generally agreeable Lerner and Loewe show, but, as
this production makes abundantly clear, it’s no My Fair
Lady. Apart from the heroic (and out-of-nowhere) eleven-o’clock
number, “They Called the Wind Maria,” and the opening
theme song, “I am on my way,” the score is largely
plodding, repetitive and programmatic; written more from outline
than inspiration. But the biggest problem with these old musical
standards, particularly those with serious pretensions, is always
the book, and Wagon is no exception. The strike-it-rich story,
set in California’s gold-mine rush of the 1850s, has been
rewoven by David Rambo to include some multi-cultural and liberated-female
threads (I never saw the original version, so I can’t
say this for sure), but it’s still a derivative, hither-and-yon
odyssey, with its family homestead, dance-hall prostitutes,
burly stage villain and foreign-accented peddler straight from
the road tour of Oklahoma! And its fleeing young lovers heading
south, then north, then south again and north again, are apparently
in search of nothing but a plot. A polygamous Mormon scene (a
hold-over from the original) is gratuitously insulting, and
feeble updated gags about Sacramento traffic jams and wardrobe
malfunctions undermine the mining story – and whatever
disbelief we may have willingly suspended in order to buy into
the play’s sincerely sentimental (“The only thing
you’ve taken is my heart”) characters.
And
the awkward staging doesn’t help much. Songs are basically
sung straight out to the audience, and buttoned by predictable
freezes; scene changes and blackout entrances are uniformly
inelegant. A riparian piece of weedy scenery representing a
“crick” (that’s early California for “creek”)
is painstakingly hauled on and off by headset-attired stagehands
to indicate the spot where the lovers first swim naked (though
not at the same time, nor, unfortunately, in our presence),
but the only contribution of this piece of vegetal scenery is
to imprison the two lovers in a straight-across line, making
their love scenes (when not clambering out of the crick) as
physically romantic as a ping pong match. The Old West settings
(designed, as with the expert lighting, by Daniel Ionazzi),
were, however, a visual highlight of the show (once they were
set in place, anyway), as were the professional if not particularly
transcendent performances. All in all, it was a treat to see
this relic of American musical theatre history, and to hear
Maria sweepin’ down the plain, but it’s not yet
ready for prime time – not in the 21st century.
Finally, Christopher Shinn’s On The Mountain enjoyed (although
I didn’t) its world premiere at South Coast Repertory
Theatre early in the new year. Shinn, an American, has made
a considerable splash at the Royal Court with his early plays,
and I can only believe this is because English theatergoers
have developed a voyeuristic fascination with the banalities
of current American mores and slang, such as preoccupations
with grunge music and expressions such as “I dunno, whatever…!”
On the Mountain is a sad and pointless tale about five unremittingly
unhappy people, four of whom we actually see: a single, thirty-something
Mom, now in alcoholic recovery, her clinically-depressed but
verbally-adroit and iPod-savvy teenage daughter, and two of
Mom’s serial boyfriends, one of whom is obsessed with
Mom’s dead ex-boyfriend, a once-famous Kurt Cobain-type
drug addict and musician, and a second who, from all indications
(and they are few), is obsession-phobic. The daughter (played
by Daisy Eagan, whose performance is the show’s sole highlight)
is also a beginning fiction writer whose teacher tells her things
like “Your stories aren’t confusing enough,”
but the problem with Shinn’s play is that it isn’t
confusing at all, it’s just numbingly normal, and manages
to get less and less interesting as it goes on, falling completely
apart in the second act. I can imagine Sloan Square audiences
attending such a work might sate their curiosity about such
lost American souls much as they would enjoy looking at exotic
animals in the London zoo; for us, it’s like looking at
so many field mice. The actors were brave (for smoking cigarettes
that they obviously detested, among other things), but I had
the sinking feeling that the best lines of the play were those
Miss Eagan was presumed to hear through her iPod earphones.
The best treat of the L.A. winter, however, was not a world
premiere at all but Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 227-year-old
The School for Scandal that Brian Bedford restaged and starred
in at the Mark Taper Forum, five years after the production’s
first mounting (by Richard Monette) at the Stratford Festival
of Canada. Sheridan decidedly does not have second-act problems,
and Scandal is perhaps the greatest English comedy of the 18th
century, combining post-Restoration and pre-Wildean wit with
an ever-escalating farcical structure that Feydeau himself never
equaled. Characterizations were etched with diamond-like precision
by Bedford as Sir Peter, fully matched by the dazzling Kate
Fry as Lady Teazle, Edward Hibbert as Crabtree, Carolyn Seymour
as Lady Sneerwell, and Scott Parkinson as Snake – among
many other English and Canadian (and, yes, American) talents.
The wonderful Catherine Zuber’s costumes, and Gerald Altenburg’s
hair and wig designs, were stunning, comic and, most important,
precisely fitted to the drama as well as to the actors. The
action was firmly paced, the text live to every verbal nuance,
and the passions freshly (and fleshly) engaged. I had forgotten
what a marvelous play this is; I’m very happy that Bedford
has reminded me, and only miffed that no theatre company in
Los Angeles could itself have, on its own, mounted such a glorious
classical production.
