Political Melodrama: The Columnist

John Lithgow and Grace Gummer in The Columnist

John Lithgow gives a fine performance as political analyst Joseph Alsop in David Auburn’s new play The Columnist (currently receiving a Broadway production under the auspices of the Manhattan Theatre Club).  Alsop’s career began in the 1930s but Auburn focuses on his decline in the sixties, beginning with the KGB’s photographing him in bed with one of their plants, a young Soviet man (Brian J. Smith), on a trip to Moscow, through his intensified conservatism during the Vietnam War, when he turned his syndicated column into an ongoing tirade harassing Lyndon Johnson for not taking a tough enough stance on the war.  The play locates JFK’s assassination – it occurs just before intermission – as the moment that turned Alsop bitter and remote; he had been one of Kennedy’s most enthusiastic supporters (he was sure Kennedy would find a way to solve all of the problems plaguing America in the early sixties, including Vietnam and the Cold War) and a close friend.

Auburn balances the deterioration of Alsop’s journalistic reputation – as his colleagues, including his brother and one-time collaborator Stewart (Boyd Gaines) and the gifted young war correspondent David Halberstam (Stephen Kunken), who wins a Pulitzer at thirty, find his political position increasingly remote and irrelevant – with the disintegration of his marriage.  His wife is Susan Mary Alsop, a widow and a long-time friend who marries him knowing that he’s gay but, we learn eventually, hopeful that she can get him to return her sexual affections.  In Auburn’s version of events, it’s not just her self-delusion that wears away at their marriage but his increasing emotional unavailability to her while he forges a close relationship with her daughter Abigail (Grace Gummer).  Lithgow’s strongest moments, not surprisingly, are the ones where Joe lets down his guard and reveals the kind of feelings he prefers to keep to himself: shame and embarrassment when his Soviet lover, Andrei, seems hurt at Joe’s suggestion that he was pimped by a friend at the American Embassy (Andrei is faking it:  he was pimped out, though not by the Embassy); anguish at Kennedy’s death, which he won’t show until Susan Mary and Abigail have both left the house; shock when, after he and Susan Mary have separated (messily), Abigail admits to him that she figured out his sexual orientation long ago and assumes everyone else did too.  Another highlight of the performance is the scene where Joe turns mean after Susan Mary confesses that she’s lived in hope that his “nature” would change.  The marvelous actress Margaret Colin is cast as Susan Mary, and I wish I’d seen her play this scene, but at the matinee I attended her understudy, Charlotte Maier, stepped in, and she was merely serviceable in the role.

The Skin of Our Teeth: A World in Crisis

Ariana Venturi in the Berkshire Theatre Group production of The Skin of Our Teeth. (Photo: Emma K. Rothenberg-Ware)

Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth made a splash on Broadway in 1942, where it starred Tallulah Bankhead, Fredric March and his wife Florence Eldridge. America was at war and Wilder’s loony conceptual vaudeville, which presented the history of the human race in a modern American setting, intertwining Genesis with anthropology – in act one a dinosaur and a mammoth shiver in the back yard; act two ends with the animals marching onto Noah’s ark – addressed the struggle for survival and struck a chord with audiences. But after World War II it disappeared from the repertory (though there were two TV adaptations, one with Mary Martin and one with Vivien Leigh). Now, with its references to climate change and refugees and its presentation of war as an eternal verity, it’s popular again all over the country.

Something New, Something Old: Seared & The Petrified Forest

Michael Esper and Hoon Lee in Seared. (Photo: Daniel Rader)

The glimpse of the restaurant world proffered by Theresa Rebeck’s new play Seared (at Williamstown Theatre Festival) is just as delicious as the dishes credited to the chef, Harry (Hoon Lee). Harry is misanthropic, egotistical and neurotic. His partner in this small but impressive Brooklyn restaurant, Mike (Michael Esper), who furnished the cash for the venture and handles the finances, has to put up with his endless quibbling, his eruptions of temper, his perverseness (the moment a critic praises his scallops Harry stops cooking them), his anxiety (Mike avoids telling him they’re expecting a major food critic until the last possible minute – and then the results are disastrous), his expectations of privilege, and his endless pseudo-philosophizing. Mike does so because Harry is a culinary genius – but his partner’s conduct, in addition to the stress of keeping a restaurant afloat, is making him crazy and preventing him from sleeping at night. When he hires a consultant named Emily (Krysta Rodriguez) to, as they say, take the place to the next level – adding more tables, printing menus rather than settling for a chalkboard so that Harry can make last-minute decisions about the offerings – Harry views it as a betrayal and an outrage. But she stays, and it’s clear that her contributions are having the desired effect, even if everything she suggests strikes Harry as pandering. The fourth member of the crew is the waiter, Rodney (W. Tré Davis), who is almost always in the impossible position of trying to stay loyal to both Harry and Mike when they’re on different sides of an argument.

Water in the Desert: Summer, 1976 and Good Night, Oscar

Laura Linney and Jessica Hecht in Summer, 1976. (Photo: Jeremy Daniel)

Almost every straight play I’ve seen in the last two years has either infuriated me or made me feel desperate about the state of the American theatre. It’s partly the result of the Covid shutdown, partly the elevation of identity politics as subject matter, partly the pushback against the old priorities, like structure and narrative logic and character development – which is, of course, a form of the rejection of professional expertise, now considered a cover for racism or sexism or homophobia. But after you’ve sat through Fairview, POTUS, The Minutes, Straight Line Crazy and A Prayer for the French Republic (some of which were written by playwrights with some talent), you might long for a display of skill the way a stranded traveler in the Gobi Desert longs for water.

Lost Lake: Broken Gates

Tracie Thoms and John Hawkes in Lost Lake, at the Manhattan Theatre Club. (Photo by Joan Marcus)

Lost Lake, the new play by David Auburn (Proof, The Columnist), is very conventional, but I quite enjoyed it. It’s a two-hander with a familiar set-up: two strangers thrown together under unusual circumstances move from being (roughly) adversaries to becoming (unorthodox) friends because the tensions and uncertainties in their disparate lives bond them. They are Veronica (Tracie Thoms), a New York City nurse and single mother who rents a cabin in the woods upstate for a week in the summer for herself, her two young kids and her daughter’s friend; and Hogan (John Hawkes), whose cabin it is. (The three children remain offstage presences.) When Veronica arrives, she finds that Hogan hasn’t fixed up the premises as he’d promised; the phone doesn’t work and she has to retreat up the road to get a decent cell phone signal. She doesn’t realize that he’s in dire straits, financially and emotionally – that, in fact, he’s living in his car, having run away or been thrown out by his brother and sister-in-law. (He says he was thrown out, but, as we learn along with Veronica, he’s an unreliable source of information about his own situation.) He doesn’t know that she is also in extremis: she’s just lost her job and, for complicated reasons, is in the midst of trying to get the review board to agree not to rescind her nursing license.

Lost Lake: Hello, Stranger

Quentin Maré and Lynnette R. Freeman in Lost Lake, by Berkshire Theatre Group. (Photo: Emma K. Rothenberg-Ware)

In David Auburn’s Lost Lake, Veronica, a New York City nurse, forms an odd, thorny relationship, difficult to categorize, with Hogan, the man who rents her a cabin on a lake for a week in August so she can give her children (and her daughter’s best friend) a vacation. He seems a little slippery and doesn’t follow through on the promises he made to ready the place for her. Moreover, he’s fighting personal demons that he keeps hinting around about – fractured relationships with the local renters’ association, which is suing him; with his teenage daughter, who lives with her mother in Manhattan and won’t give him her e-mail; and with his brother and sister-in-law, whom he lived with for a time and who claim he’s stolen from them. (He also lets it slip, to Veronica’s consternation, that he’s living in his truck on the property he’s renting to her.) But though he presents as a loser and she comes across as confident and tough, it turns out that her life, too, is far from settled: she’s raising two little kids alone because her husband was killed in a hit-and-run two years earlier, and she’s just lost her job. The play, a two-hander that unfolds in a speedy ninety minutes, plays variations on the old dramatic set-up about strangers who meet in unlikely circumstances and are able to reach out to one another. But it never develops as you expect (for one thing, they don’t become lovers), and its unpredictability is part of its charm.

Broken Gates: Tennessee Williams' Period of Adjustment at the Berkshire Theatre Festival

Rebecca Brooksher and Paul Fitzgerald in Period of Adjustment (Photo: Christy Wright)

Like Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams wrote only one full-length comedy, but the comic efforts of America’s two greatest playwrights stand in different relationships to the rest of their output. O’Neill’s 1933 Ah, Wilderness! is a wish-fulfillment fantasy version of his own family; it’s the flip side of his autobiographical Long Day’s Journey into Night, with every tragic detail neutralized or reimagined to produce the benign, affectionate all-American family life he could only dream of. The best productions of the play air traces of the melancholy that the play deftly represses; the worst are situation comedies.  By contrast Williams’s Period of Adjustment (1960) isn’t at a far remove from his dramas.  In the two awkward, disappointed couples Williams juxtaposes on a snowy Memphis Christmas Eve, we recognize the playwright’s ongoing portrait of a fumbling humanity out of step with its own worn dreams but still on its feet.  A rare and sensitive production of the play by David Auburn at the end of the Berkshire Theatre Festival season highlighted the lovely qualities of this forgotten work. (A broad, frantic movie adaptation in 1962 with Jane Fonda, Anthony Franciosa, Jim Hutton and Lois Nettleton didn’t do much to bolster the play’s reputation.)

The Parisian Woman: Those Devious Politicos

Uma Thurman and Blair Brown in The Parisian Woman. (Photo: Matthew Murphy)

The last time I saw Uma Thurman, she appeared, in a remarkable ensemble, in the 2015 NBC miniseries The Slap, which deserved more attention than it got. Now she’s starring in a new Broadway play, Beau Willimon’s The Parisian Woman, and at forty-seven she looks more beautiful than ever – that long, sleek frame, that sculpted goddess’s face. She hasn’t done much previous stage work (she played Célimène in a production of Molière’s The Misanthrope at Classic Stage Company in 1999), but she seems just as comfortable on the stage of the Hudson Theatre as she does on camera, and, with Jane Greenwood’s elegant dresses dripping off her, her presence is mesmerizing.

Tick, Tick … BOOM! at Toronto’s Studio Theatre

Parris Greaves, Laura Mae Nason, and Ken Chamberland in Tick, Tick ... BOOM! (Photo by Vincent Perri)

First things first. The production of Tick, Tick … BOOM! currently playing at the Studio Theatre of the Toronto Centre for the Arts is excellent: fast-paced, funny, energetic, well-staged, well-performed and well-sung. It’s a terrific way to spend an evening.

In broad outline, the story of Tick, Tick … BOOM! is kind of old hat: Young artist suffers for his art, agonizes over his future and his talent – is it all worthwhile? – and then, despite all the obstacles, has a great success. What gives this small musical its special frisson, however, is that it’s pretty much autobiographical, and that the show’s creator, Jonathan Larson, is better known as the originator of Rent, the sensational, multi-award-winning rock musical (loosely based on Puccini’s La Bohème) that ran on Broadway for more than a decade, toured all over the world, and spawned a pretty good movie musical.

Master Acting Classes: The Firm (1993)

Sydney Pollack’s 1993 The Firm, out of a John Grisham novel, is a thriller about a young Harvard Law graduate named Mitch McDeere (Tom Cruise) who is wooed and hired by a prestigious Memphis firm and then discovers that anyone who’s ever tried to leave it has wound up dead. This sounds like the premise for a sci-fi fantasy – you expect to find out that the partners are body snatchers or the undead – and considering how preposterous the plot is, it might have been more satisfying if it had been. (The firm’s real secret, that it launders money for the Mafia, is both dumb and flat.) And Cruise is awful. In one episode, his mentor, Avery Tolar (Gene Hackman) – the characters’ names are more entertainingly florid than the story line – takes Mitch along on a business trip to the Cayman Islands, where he’s seduced on a moonlit beach by a young woman (Karina Lombard) he rescues when he finds her being slapped around by a date. Cruise is so inexpressive in this interlude that all he can manage is a wary, semi-frozen stare. Like a lot of his parts, this one shows off his athletic prowess, in this case his running, and it sure is a lot more impressive than his acting.

All Hail the Comic Muse

Mike Nadajewski and Kristi Frank in On the Razzle. (Photo: Emily Cooper)

This piece includes reviews of On the Razzle, Blithe Spirit and Village Wooing.

This summer the Shaw Festival has been bowing to the comic spirit. In addition to Shaw’s The Apple Cart and The Playboy of the Western World, which mix serious and humorous elements, the roster has included productions of four comedies from different eras: Marivaux’s The Game of Love and Chance (1730), performed outdoors in an improvised version – the only one of the quartet I didn’t get to; Shaw’s Village Wooing (1934), this season’s lunchtime one-act; Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit (1941); and Tom Stoppard’s On the Razzle (1981). In truth, the last of these can claim connection to several periods. It began in 1835 as a one-act English play by John Oxenford called A Day Well Spent, which the Viennese playwright and actor Johann Nestroy adapted seven years later as Einen Jux will er sich machen (He’s Out for a Fling). Thornton Wilder reworked it for Broadway in 1938 as The Merchant of Yonkers – a failure, despite direction by the legendary Max Reinhardt – and then again in 1955 as The Matchmaker, which altered the story about shop clerks out on the town by inventing the assertive, charismatic title character (played by Ruth Gordon on Broadway) and reconfiguring the play around her. It was filmed the following year with Shirley Booth in the role and featuring three talented young performers early in their careers: Anthony Perkins, Shirley MacLaine and Robert Morse. In 1964 The Matchmaker became the musical Hello, Dolly!, which, of course, ran for years. On the Razzle is Stoppard’s rewrite of the Nestroy, not the Wilder, so there’s no Dolly Gallagher Levi dashing around in aid of the young lovers while manipulating her sour-faced client into marrying her rather than the widow he’s after or the fictitious millionairess she’s promised him.

Mixed Bag

Jasna Djuricic in Quo Vadis, Aida?

This article contains reviews of Quo Vadis, Aida?, Uncle Frank and Georgetown.

Quo Vadis, Aida?, set at the end of the Bosnian War, is a remarkably taut piece of classical political filmmaking. The writer-director, Jasmila Zbanic, a Bosnian-Yugoslavian native residing in Berlin, has been working in film since 1998 and turning out features for a decade and a half, but I believe this is the first of her movies to open in North America, likely a happy side effect of its nomination for the Foreign Film Oscar. Zbanic’s subject is the series of events that led to the 1995 Srebrenica Massacre, where a combination of the hatred of the Serbs for the Muslims of the town of Srebrenica and the pathetic inadequacy of UNPROFOR, the peacekeeping force of the United Nations, to protect them led to the slaughter of the entire adult male population and the dispersion of the women and children. The Dutchbat peacekeepers established a UN enclave within the town but were too lightly armed to stave off the Bosnian Serb Army under Ratko Mladić’s command, which forced its way in, separated out the men, and bused them to their deaths. (Earlier they lacked the supplies to offer food and water to the Bosnians inside the gate, and lack of space obliged thousands of townspeople to wait outside; some, terrified of the arrival of Mladić’s soldiers, escaped to the woods.)

Iris van Herpen: The Future of Fashion

Iris van Herpen holding a bottle of Dom Pérignon Vintage 2004.

Fashion is now. But not in the hands of Dutch fashion designer Iris van Herpen. She projects fashion into the future, re-interpreting couture through a visionary lens. Incorporating a wide range of outside influences, from dance to 3-D computer technology, her designs blur the boundaries between art and science: Clothing as material innovation. “Creation is about constant change and is never finished. I think that is very beautiful,” said the 30-year old fashion sensation during a recent interview in New York City. The occasion was the unveiling of the latest vintage by Dom Pérignon, the 2004 Metamorphosis, for which the former apprentice to the late Alexander McQueen had created a limited-edition champagne box and ferrofluid sculpture. The latter was an extension of research done for her latest Spring/Summer 2015 womenswear collection which was created using metal powder and magnets to move the fashion forward in a new, otherworldly direction. Think spiny carapaces for the body combined with flowing fabrics to get an idea of what it looked like. For Dom Pérignon, van Herpen took the idea of magnetic attraction and applied it to the concept of metamorphosis as well as to the concept of time, an ingredient integral to the making of champagne, in particular the fermentation and aging process.

The Civil War on Page and Screen

The flurry of commentary last month on the fiftieth anniversary of President Kennedy's assassination just about drowned out all voices noting the sesquicentennial, in the same week, of another seminal presidential moment: Lincoln's delivery of a certain address at the dedication of the national cemetery in Gettysburg. One and a half centuries have passed since that two-minute speech, one and a half centuries since the battle that shares its name. And yet, as we roll into 2014 and begin the fourth of a five-year-long anniversary, Americans still face the imponderable question of the meaning of the Civil War. It demands an answer because the Civil War is the defining event of American identity—how we understand it determines how we understand our national character and purpose. It demands an answer from more than just Americans, too, for the question bears on the broader subjects of the viability of democracy, the ethics of war, and the meaning of human life and effort.