New American Plays: Good People and The Motherfucker with the Hat

Nancy E. Carroll, Karen MacDonald, and Johanna Day in Good People (Photo: T. Charles Erickson)

In their Boston premieres I caught up to two worthwhile American plays I missed last season in New York. Good People is the latest by David Lindsay-Abaire, best known for Rabbit Hole – to date the only one of his works that has been made into a movie. Rabbit Hole focuses on a couple who are trying to handle life after the death, in a car accident, of their little boy. It’s one of those dramas (the Barbara Hershey-Geoffrey Rush plot in the fine Australian film Lantana is another) about the tension that the loss of a child creates between parents who mourn differently. (Both plays owe a debt to the great Robert Frost poem “Home Burial.”) I thought the play was banal but effective, and it felt authentic – as if it had come out of someone’s actual experience. The most surprising development, the friendship that grows up between the child’s mother and the teenager who, through no fault of his own, killed the boy on the road was the aspect of the narrative that worked the best, though in truth I believed in all of the relationships. But on stage the real show was Cynthia Nixon, who used that razor’s-edge anger she’s so brilliant at to illuminate the way a perceptive, intelligent woman deals with an unimaginable loss. The movie version was well done, too, but if you’d seen Nixon on stage you felt a void in the center because Nicole Kidman, who has a tendency to soften her characters, took over the part.

Recent Plays: The Balusters, Fallen Angels, Top Hat and The Fear of 13

The company of The Balusters. (Photo: Jeremy Daniel.)

David Lindsay-Abaire’s The Balusters, which enjoyed a twelve-week limited run as part of the Manhattan Theatre Club season, focuses on the tensions between neighbors of different races, cultural backgrounds and predilections whose veneer of politesse cracks under the pressure of their pursuit of different agendas. It’s a distinctly twenty-first century version of a social high comedy built around a melting-pot aristocracy that’s assumed to have eliminated the exclusionary class barriers of an earlier time but hasn’t really: the old divisions keep popping up, along with the old resentments. This variation of high comedy has produced some highly entertaining American plays (like Smart People and last season’s Eureka Day) and one masterpiece, Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park. The Balusters isn’t on the same level.

On the Shore of the Wide World: Still Life

Mary McCann and Leroy McClain in On the Shore of the Wide World.(Photo: Ahron R. Foster)

On the Shore of the Wide World, receiving its American premiere at the Atlantic Theater Company, is the English playwright Simon Stephens’s exploration of the effects of a tragic accident on a family in a Manchester town in 2004. Fifteen-year-old Christopher Holmes (Wesley Zurick) is hit by a motorist and killed. His death drives his father, Peter (C.J. Wilson) and his mother, Alice (Mary McCann) apart and exacerbates the tensions between them and Peter’s parents, Charlie (Peter Maloney) and Ellen (Blair Brown) as well as bringing to light the unsettling qualities in their relationship. Shortly before he was killed, Christopher walked in on his alcoholic grandfather strong-arming his grandmother and, in dismay, confided in his older brother Alex (Ben Rosenfield), whom he adored. The aftermath of the boy’s death and the evident crumbling of his parents’ marriage drive Alex to move to London with his new girlfriend, Sarah (Tedra Millan). Meanwhile both Peter and Sarah, who have so much difficulty communicating with each other, are drawn – not romantically but out of a need for confidants – to other people. Peter, who restores old houses, has been hired by the pregnant Susan (Amelia Workman), and she’s the first person outside the family with whom he shares the story of Christopher’s death. (This conversation also marks the first time the audience hears about it, for reasons I can’t quite work out; this choice doesn’t seem to enhance the drama.) Stranger – and more intriguing – is the friendship that grows up between Alice and John (Leroy McClain), the driver of the car that knocked Christopher down on his bike. John’s attempt to reach out to the mother of the boy he inadvertently killed and her responding to him (reluctantly at first) are reminiscent of part of the plot of David Lindsay-Abaire’s Rabbit Hole, though here it develops in a different direction.

Kansas Flatlands: Oz the Great and Powerful

James Franco stars in Sam Raimi's Oz the Great and Powerful, now in theaters

There is no good reason why a fresh movie spinoff of The Wizard of Oz shouldn’t be an eminently doable proposition. The new Disney film Oz the Great and Powerful – a “prequel” directed by Sam Raimi and starring James Franco as a two-bit carny magician who is whisked away to the magical land of Oz and, after proving himself through a series of heroic challenges, installs himself as the Wizard – has inspired a fair amount of anticipatory derision, and even some horrified shudders, as if it could only be an act of sacrilege, ever since it was announced. While the 1939 movie starring Judy Garland is rightly considered a classic, its status as a holy relic, like that of It’s a Wonderful Life and A Charlie Brown Christmas, has less to do with its inherent virtues than with the saintly reverence a lot of people seem inclined to feel towards anything they watched on TV ten times when they were kids. Years ago, this kind of living room repeat-viewing exposure was a rare phenomenon, but now that cable movie channels and home video have been a fixture of American life for so long that people who grew up on them are reaching maturity and getting jobs writing about movies, we’re seeing beloved-classic status automatically assigned to some real pieces of shit: movies from Top Gun, Caddyshack, Three Amigos, and even Sneakers. 

How would L. Frank Baum, the author of the original Oz books, feel about the idea that his masterwork was something more fragile and delicate than another potential franchise tent pole? He’d probably feel that he worked his hands to the bone to grow that tree and he didn’t need anyone getting in the way of it being properly sapped. Baum was an aspiring actor and playwright whose dreams of the stage had ruined him financially before he finally sat down and started writing children’s books. He wrote fourteen Oz books in all – the first great, long-running modern franchise of children’s fiction.  Baum charmed readers partly by using a theatrical ham’s instinct for showmanship as a substitute for the “mythic” qualities of European fairy tales. (Once Baum struck gold, he was quick to adapt his own work to the stage, and toured with a show that utilized film, slides, and live performers that promised a “travelogue” of Oz.) 

Judy Garland and Ray Bolger, off to see the Wizard in 1939

Pauline Kael wrote of the 1939 movie that Bert Lahr and Ray Bolger were so memorable as the Cowardly Lion and the Scarecrow because they understood “that the roles are vaudeville-comedy turns." The characters, and what the right kind of performers can bring to them, are at the core of Oz’s appeal, but every screen attempt to recapture that appeal – the 1978 movie of the Broadway musical The Wiz, Disney’s previous attempt to reboot the franchise with the 1985 Return to Oz, and the 2007 TV miniseries Tin Man – have gone big on concept at the expense of the characters. Much the same thing happens in Oz the Great and Powerful, but where some of the previous Oz films at least counted as honest failures by talented people committed to something they’d overthought, this movie doesn’t really have a concept so much as a marketing plan. It has a flat, defeated, half-hearted feeling that’s a little reminiscent of David Lynch’s Dune – another case of a gifted, idiosyncratic director “adapting” unusual material for a film that he has been made to understand isn’t really his project.