New Works for the Theatre: The Michaels, The Height of the Storm and Admissions

Brenda Wehle and Charlotte Bydwell in The Michaels: Conversations During Difficult Times. (Photo by Joan Marcus)

The Michaels: Conversations During Difficult Times is Richard Nelson’s first play since he directed his own translation, with the wizardly translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, of Uncle Ványa in the Hunter Theatre Project a year ago. Now he’s back at the Public, where he presented (also as both playwright and director) his tetralogy The Apple Family Plays and his trilogy The Gabriels, and like those plays – and like Uncle Ványa – the style is what you might call conversational realism. The venue is LuEsther Hall, the smallest space at the Public, and those of us who didn’t obtain a listening device in the lobby leaned in to listen as soon as the actors had created the set out of piled-up tables, chairs and benches, rolled-up rugs and props laid out in trays. Then the lights come up and Jay O. Sanders, as David Michael, a producer and arts manager, tells the assembled kitchen in his ex-wife Rose’s Rhinebeck house about having to appear in place of an ailing actor in his latest show. He describes what it was like to experience the sacred performance space actors and dancers claim that isn’t normally open to mere producers. (Rhinebeck, in upstate New York, is also the setting of The Apple Family Plays and The Gabriels.)

Election Day with the Apple Family: Sorry

J. Smith-Cameron and Laila Robins in Sorry (Photo by Joan Marcus)

Since I was a fan of both the first two parts of Richard Nelson’s Apple family tetralogy, That Hopey Changey Thing and Sweet and Sad, I would like to report that with Sorry, which he wrote to coincide with the presidential election, he hits another ball out of the park. But it’s something of a disappointment, despite the obvious intelligence of the writing and the usual skill of the acting. (As with the earlier entries, Nelson also directed.) Nelson’s coup with the first two plays is that he managed to create a plausible, compelling family of New York state liberals whose conversation veers easily and provocatively into the political. The plays aren’t doctrinaire or preachy; they’re political dramas by virtue of their setting (That Hopey Changey Thing opened around the time of the mid-term elections, Sweet and Sad on the tenth anniversary of 9/11) and the savvy of the well-read, articulate, deep-thinking quartet of main characters: a brother and three sisters meeting up at the home of one (now two) of the sisters in upstate Rhinebeck. But Sorry doesn’t manage the balance of the personal and the political with the grace and fluidity of the earlier plays (though the 9/11 content of Sweet and Sad, to be truthful, was its weak point). For an hour the election is barely mentioned and then, abruptly, the dialogue picks it up. For the first time in the Apple series, when the characters begin to discuss politics, I don’t quite believe it.

Illyria: Stage Folk

John Magaro and Fran Kranz in Richard Nelson's Illyria. (Photo: Joan Marcus)

Richard Nelson must be the most prolific playwright in America. Within the last several years he wrote the four Apple Family plays and the three Gabriel plays; the published texts of his work take up most of a shelf at the Drama Book Shop in Manhattan. And though I haven’t liked everything of his that I’ve seen or read, much of his work is first-rate, including some – like Nikolai and the Others, his 2013 portrait of the community of émigré Russian artists in New York after the Second World War, with Michael Cerveris and John Glover as Balanchine and Stravinsky – that deserved much more attention than it received. There hasn’t been much chatter about his latest, Illyria, which received a fine production at the Public, directed by Nelson himself, that closed a couple of weeks ago. Illyria is about the young Joe Papp, struggling to keep his first Shakespeare festival, in Central Park, alive in 1958 despite poor houses, fading finances and the menacing political climate: when the play begins, Papp (John Magaro, in a gruff, vivid performance) has just been fired from his job as a TV producer because the House Un-American Activities Committee has shown an interest in him. It’s a good play – well constructed, with a stage full of interesting, articulate characters whose conversation is well worth tuning into. And for theatre buffs, this glimpse into the scrambling, scrapping lives of young, idealistic, would-be-world-beating thespians of six decades ago has a special appeal and a special charm.

Arnold Wesker (1932-2016)

Playwright Arnold Wesker (1932-2016) at the Durham Book Festival in 2008. (Photo: Simon James)

The angry young man movement, which attacked England’s obstinacy about holding onto its vision of itself as an empire after the Second World War and quarreled with the bourgeois gentility of the mid-century English drama, detonated the British theatre in the mid-1950s. But except for John Osborne, whose Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer are still performed as Tony Richardson’s film versions continue to represent the exciting early years of the English New Wave, the playwrights who came out of that movement have mostly been forgotten. One of them, Arnold Wesker, died last week at the age of eighty-three. His output included fifty plays as well as fiction, poetry, essays and memoirs, but only in the first five years of his theatrical career did he write plays – five of them – that made both critics and audiences sit up and take notice – though unlike Osborne’s plays or Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey, they never developed lives beyond English shores. They were The Kitchen (1957), which the National Theatre revived in 2011, Chips with Everything (1962), and – book-ended by these two – the plays known as “the Wesker trilogy,” Chicken Soup with Barley (1958), Roots (1959) and I’m Talking About Jerusalem (1960).

The trilogy – in particular the first and third plays – is about the golden promise of socialism and how its true believers handle the fallout when, inevitably, it smashes up against the realities of the world. Political idealism is a great subject, yet only a handful of playwrights have chosen to dramatize it since Sophocles in Antigone. Clifford Odets took up the challenge in Awake and Sing! and Paradise Lost, both written in 1935, and John Guare in his Lydie Breeze plays in 1982, and more recently it’s provided one of the themes for Richard Nelson’s Apple family plays (which were written to coincide with significant American political moments) and Temple by the talented young English playwright Steve Waters. The Wesker trilogy is a kind of British equivalent to the Odets plays, and just as Odets found his home with the Group Theatre, the Wesker plays were produced at the Royal Court, the heart and soul of the angry young man movement.

Hanging Out with the Apple Family

Sweet and Sad at the Public Theater in New York City/Photo by Joan Marcus

Sweet and Sad is the second in a series of plays written and directed by Richard Nelson that sets a family living in Manhattan and the Hudson Valley against the political backdrop of contemporary America – specifically the Democratic north east. That Hopey Changey Thing brought together the Apples – Richard, a Manhattan lawyer; his sisters Barbara, Marian and Jane; their uncle Benjamin, who lives with the unmarried Barbara; and Jane’s actor boy friend Tim Andrews – at Barbara’s house in upstate Rhinebeck during the 2010 mid-term elections. Sweet and Sad takes place on the tenth anniversary of 9/11 and ends with the same group leaving Barbara’s to attend a local memorial concert at which Benjamin, who is also an actor but who has been suffering from amnesia following a heart attack, will be reading Walt Whitman’s Civil War poem “The Wound-Dresser.” These are intimate, small-scale pieces that attempt to accomplish something that seems to be increasingly difficult in the American theatre:  to depict three-dimensional characters responding to the political realities of present-day life without preaching or striking attitudes, using their relationships as a dramatic structure for reflecting their feelings.

Modernists: Naked and Uncle Vanya

Tara Franklin and James Barry in the Berkshire Theatre Group production of Naked. (Photo: Emma Rothenberg-Ware)

Among the virtues of the Berkshire Theatre Group is its dedication to reviving forgotten plays, both American and European. The BTG summer season included The Petrified Forest, and currently you can see an excellent mounting of Luigi Pirandello’s Naked. Italy’s famous modernist playwright, who invented a new style of theatre, theatre of identity (usually known simply as Pirandellian theatre), with Six Characters in Search of an Author in 1921, wrote Naked the following year. It was a remarkably prolific time for Pirandello, who turned out fourteen plays and a novel between 1921 and 1929; Naked was one of three plays he wrote in 1922 alone, including his second masterpiece, Henry IV. But I’d never read or seen it before. It’s rarely performed, and though I have six or eight Pirandello plays on my shelves, Naked isn’t among them. BTG is using the Nicholas Wright translation, which was produced at the Almeida in London nearly twenty years ago 2000 with Juliette Binoche and then in New York with Mira Sorvino.

A Modest Production That Must Not Be Undervalued: A Month in the Country at Williamstown

Jeremy Strong & Jessica Collins in A Month In the Country

It’s tempting to call Ivan Turgenev’s play A Month in the Country Chekhovian, but he wrote it in 1849-1850, nearly half a century before Chekhov produced The Seagull, the first of his four dramatic masterpieces. Richard Nelson’s marvellous production, which rounds off the mainstage season at Williamstown this summer, makes it clearer than ever how much of a debt Chekhov owes Turgenev. The provincial boredom and restlessness of the setting – a Russian country estate in the 1840s – anticipates the mood of scenes in all four of Chekhov's plays; the opening scene, where the mistress of the house, Natalya (Jessica Collins), grows impatient while her friend Mikhail Rakitin (Jeremy Strong) reads to her, shows up specifically at the top of act two of The Seagull. And the exchange between Natalya and her seventeen-year-old ward, Vera (Charlotte Bydwell), where she urges Vera to confide her feelings for Natalya’s son’s new Moscow tutor Belyaev (Julian Cihi), whom she herself is taken with, ends up – though considerably transformed – as the celebrated sharing of confidences between Elena and Sonia in Uncle Vanya. (It’s even in roughly the same spot in the play, halfway through.)

Time and Place: Tonight with Belafonte, The Mikado, And So We Come Forth

Harry Belafonte in Tonight with Belafonte (1959).

A friend who was trolling through YouTube this week came across something truly extraordinary: Tonight with Belafonte, an hour-long “special” (as they used to be called) from 1959 directed by Norman Jewison – who went on to make Fiddler on the Roof, among many other movies – and starring Harry Belafonte and Odetta. The Jamaican-American Belafonte was at the peak of his popularity: when I was a Montreal kid in the fifties, every family I knew stocked his albums, his rendition of “The Banana Boat Song” was a big hit, and he even made a pass at a movie career, though it didn’t pan out for him as it did for his buddy Sidney Poitier. (Belafonte made only a handful of movies, including Otto Preminger’s adaptation of Carmen Jones, Oscar Hammerstein’s Americanized version of the Bizet opera.) Staggeringly handsome and sexy – he had caramel skin and a taut, high-waisted frame – with a warm, dynamic presence and a magnificent vocal instrument, he was most famous for popularizing calypso in North America. But as charming as those sides were, I think he was at his best with ballads (like my childhood favorite “Scarlet Ribbons”), which he rendered with a focused emotional intensity that lit them up. Odetta was a folksinger with a deep contralto whose fame was eclipsed by the movement of folk to rock ‘n’ roll, but she had one of the great soulful voices of the twentieth century, phrasing of diamond-like purity and precision and a powerhouse delivery. (Think Ethel Waters, Mahalia Jackson, Nina Simone.)

The 99 Percent Speaks: Observing the Movement for a More Just Society

Thursday, they were enjoying “occu pie.” Their slices appeared to be made with pumpkin or apple but nobody mentioned the ingredients as I watched an Occupy Wall Street live video feed that showed a crowd chowing down at a live Thanksgiving feed in New York City. The multitude was gathered at Zuccotti Park, named Liberty Plaza until 2003, in Lower Manhattan. That’s where the original occupation began on September 17, with many demonstrators camping out round-the-clock in tents to protest the concentration of wealth among the top 1 percent of Americans while the remaining 99 percent – the rest of humanity – endures varying degrees of hardship.

The Zuccotti inhabitants established a small community of like-minded citizens with a kitchen, a field hospital with volunteer doctors and a library that sheltered thousands of books. All these things disappeared or were destroyed when police evicted the occupiers just after midnight on November 15 on orders from the normally moderate Republican mayor, billionaire Michael Bloomberg. Invariably denouncing the occupiers, he has morphed into an enemy of the people. The 33,000-square-foot park within spitting distance of the Stock Exchange now remains the site of lengthy gatherings but no one is allowed to sleep over any more.

A Smattering of Recent Releases

Tye Sheridan and Jude Law in The Order.

The Order (available on Apple+), based on Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt’s book The Silent Brotherhood: Inside America’s Racist Underground, is taut and gripping. It tells the true story of a secret white supremacist organization housed in the Pacific Northwest – the brainchild of a young man named Bob Mathews who splintered off from the Aryan Nation because he found them too weak-minded, all talk and no action – which the FBI uncovered and busted in 1985. Like other violent self-proclaimed revolutionaries (Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, for one), Mathews uses William Luther Pierce’s novel The Turner Diaries, published under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald, as a guidebook. He prepares to declare war on the U.S. government by staging, with a small cohort, a series of robberies and bombings and the murder of Alan Berg (played in the film by Marc Maron), a confrontational Jewish radio talk-show host in Denver who has been taking on rabidly anti-Semitic callers.