Harry Clarke: Breaking the Ice

Barrington Stage Company artistic director Julianne Boyd (left) with Mark H. Dold during rehearsal for Harry Clarke. (Courtesy Barrington Stage Company)

The mood at the Barrington Stage Company production of the solo performance Harry Clarke, which I saw over the weekend, was cautiously jubilant. As the ad campaign reminds us, this is the first live production in the United States since March, performed under a tent down the street from BSC’s home space in Pittsfield to a restricted, socially distanced audience that was ushered in slowly, temperatures taken at the door. The only unmasked people in the arena were on the stage: the artistic director, Julianne Boyd (who also directed the play), when she introduced the show with a speech – expected but not unwelcome – about the need for art in challenging times and reported that the company had put up the tent during the hurricane, and the actor, Mark H. Dold. I won’t underestimate how great it felt to be seeing live theatre again, whatever the special conditions may be under which it must be purveyed.

Gaslight: Stage and Screen

Kim Stauffer and Mark H. Dold in Barrington Stage Company's Gaslight. (Photo: Scott Barrow)

The 1938 British chestnut Gaslight is seldom revived; most people know it – if at all – by the 1944 George Cukor movie, which won Ingrid Bergman her first Oscar. (A previous version, made in England in 1940 with Diana Wynyard, shows up on Turner Classic Movies every now and then.) Barrington Stage has chosen the play to close its 2017 season, and it’s the first time I’ve seen it live since another regional group nearly three decades ago produced it under its original Broadway title, Angel Street. Gaslight is a psychological melodrama, set in London in the 1880s, about a woman whose husband is slowly driving her to madness by convincing her that she loses or hides objects in their home and then can’t remember she’s done it, and that, moreover, the footsteps she hears over the ceiling at night and the inexplicable dimming of the gas lamps are all in her mind. Jack Manningham is two kinds of villain: a sadistic domestic tyrant of the Victorian variety as well as a psychopath who killed the previous owner of their house to rob her of some priceless rubies that he was never able to unearth. The murder remained unsolved, and now, fifteen years later, he’s returned with a bride whose fortune he uses to buy up the property so he can continue his search. Driving her into an asylum is his way of getting rid of her. But Bella Manningham is the play’s protagonist, though she’s able to triumph over her husband only with the unlooked-for help of Inspector Rough, a Scotland Yard detective who was a novice on the original investigation and who recognizes Manningham (though he’s changed his name) when he passes him in the street after he and Bella have moved into the murder house.

Boeing Boeing: Farce Unmoored

Christopher Innvar, Stephanie Jean Lane, and Mark H. Dold in Boeing Boeing. (Photo: Daniel Rader)

The irony of farce is that, though it’s supposed to be ridiculous, it can only work if it’s grounded in reality. There’s a delectable scene in the British stage hit The Play That Goes Wrong where a phone rings and one of the hapless amateurs stuck on stage in a fiasco of stunning proportions is expected to answer it. But the platform underneath him has come apart and he’s in danger of sliding off it onto the floor below and possibly breaking his neck. So the actor standing next to the phone, spurred by a desperate need to play out his string, rigs a series of increasingly nutty links between the jangling instrument and his stranded castmate. What makes the moment hilarious is the loopy logic of the two actors who are breaking their backs improvising a piece of compensatory staging, as if they could somehow save the show if only the poor bastard on the semi-collapsed platform could answer that phone. It’s the kind of logic that Buster Keaton was a genius at, where the performer meets a loose-screw issue with sober, one-step-at-a-time persistence.

I thought about The Play That Goes Wrong while I was watching Barrington Stage Company’s mounting of Boeing Boeing. The comedy, by the French playwright Marc Camoletti, was first produced in London in an English translation by Beverly Cross and Francis Evans in 1962, where it remained on the boards for seven years. (Jerry Lewis and Tony Curtis co-starred in a Hollywood movie adaptation in 1965.) Matthew Warchus revived it in the West End in 2007; the Broadway transfer, with a tip-top cast led by Mark Rylance and Bradley Whitford, was the funniest two and a half hours I’ve ever spent in a theatre. The play isn’t much more than a sketch for a series of farce routines. But it has a strong enough premise to support them: an architect living in Paris near Orly Airport conducts simultaneous affairs with three different flight attendants from different countries and different airlines, and he and his college buddy, who happens to be visiting him, find their mental resources stretched nearly to the breaking point when all three women show up on the same day. And, as in any bare-bones farce, the sharper the routines and the more skillful the actors the richer the entertainment.

Strange Journeys: Kafka on the Shore and Shining City

Kafka on the Shore is an adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s 2002 novel. (Photo: Takahiro Watanabe)

Yukio Ninagawa’s Kafka on the Shore, which I caught during its brief stop in London at the Barbican (it will perform at the Lincoln Center Festival in July), is an unconventional example of East-West translation. Frank Galati adapted Haruki Murakami’s 2002 magic-realist novel for the Steppenwolf Theatre Company seven years ago; the Ninagawa Company has returned it to the Japanese (Shunsuke Hiratsuka did the translation). If this cultural back-and-forth is a little disorienting, that effect seems perfectly appropriate to a stage version of Murakami’s haunting, dreamlike work. Fifteen-year-old Kafka Tamura (played in the Ninagawa production by Nino Furuhata), who is under an Oedipal curse, runs away from his father, a famous artist, and winds up working at a small private library in Takamatsu. The head librarian, a reclusive figure named Miss Saeki (Rie Miyazawa) still lost in mourning over the long-ago death of her lover, may or may not be Kafka’s long-absent mother. (Since Murakami is working on an ambiguous, oneiric level, the question of Miss Saeki’s relationship to Kafka doesn’t have a realist answer.)