For the Sheer Pleasure of the Text: Criterion's DVD Release of Vanya on 42nd Street

Louis Malle with the cast of Vanya.

One way of describing Louis Malle's extraordinary Vanya on 42nd Street (1994), which Criterion has just released on regular and Blu-ray DVD in a sparkling newly remastered print, is to say that it depicts theater director Andre Gregory's workshop of Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya. But it is neither a documentary nor is it filmed theater. It's not even in the traditional sense of the word a movie. Vanya on 42nd Street is more like an inspired laboratory where a number of actors plus their director delve into the play by peeling away all of its acclaim, its reputation and various interpretations, plus its legendary hold on modern theater, in order to get to the very root of its tragic realism, to reveal what it is that makes this seminal work last. As if he were setting out to rediscover an old forgotten language, Andre Gregory takes his cast through Vanya for the sheer pleasure of the text; to find out just what this text reveals to the actors about the characters they inhabit. "What Chekhov is about fundamentally is the nature of the quality of [the] passing [of] your life, of what it feels like to be here as we travel across the ocean of life," is how Gregory explains the making of Vanya in the DVD's documentary Like Life. If so, he started with the right play where its tone and substance, the very essence of contemplation, illuminates its plot.

Chekhov Vaudeville

As its name suggests, Christopher Durang’s Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike is a parody of Chekhov. It’s been a while since Durang has written one of these delirious literary/dramatic-literary burlesques; this one harks back to The Idiots Karamazov (which reimagines Dostoevsky’s Karamazov brothers as the Tyrone family from Long Day’s Journey into Night) and his one-act take-offs of The Glass Menagerie and Sam Shepard’s A Lie of the Mind (titled, hilariously, A Sty in the Eye). Vanya and Sonia is messy and overextended and it seems to stall in the middle of the second act. But it’s a vaudeville, so its structural problems don’t matter all that much – especially when it has so many funny lines and Sigourney Weaver, Kristine Nielsen and David Hyde Pierce in the leads. Fitted out in a deluxe production staged by Nicholas Martin at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse space, it made me laugh louder than any other recent comedy.

New Productions: Chekhov, Shakespeare, Wilde

Moya O’Connell and Neil Barclay in Uncle Vanya at the Shaw Festival. (Photo: Emily Cooper)

Uncle Vanya, staged by Jackie Maxwell (in her final season as artistic director), is the crown jewel among the offerings at the Shaw Festival this summer. (At least, among the shows I was able to see; unfortunately, I arrived too early to catch either Sweeney Todd or Strindberg’s The Dance of Death.) The production draws you in from the opening moment, where the old nanny, Marina (Sharry Flett, infusing the character’s grandmotherly warmth with ironic humor), calls Dr. Astrov (Patrick McManus) on his drinking, and you don’t break free of its spell until long after you’ve wandered out of the Court House, the ideal Shaw venue for Chekhov’s delicate, impressionistic “scenes of country life” because of its intimacy. (It’s where the company also performed a memorable Cherry Orchard in 2010.)

Toni Stone, Mother Play, Uncle Vanya: Deserting the Audience

Stanley Andrew Jackson and Jennifer Mogbock in Toni Stone. (Photo: T. Charles Erickson)

The titular protagonist of Toni Stone, currently playing in the Huntington Theatre’s revered space in Boston’s Back Bay, is the first woman who played baseball regularly in a professional league. She played for three Negro leagues in the forties and fifties, culminating in a season with the Indianapolis Clowns of the Negro American League, where she replaced Hank Aaron, who had been picked up by the Milkwaukee Braves. It’s an appealing story for the stage and especially for contemporary audiences. But the playwright, Lydia R. Diamond, hasn’t worked out how to dramatize it.

Ibsen Gone Wrong: A Master Builder

Wallace Shawn and Lisa Joyce in A Master Builder

André Gregory’s staging of Uncle Vanya (in the David Mamet translation), rehearsed over nearly five years and brought to the screen in 1994 by Louis Malle as Vanya on 42nd Street, is one of the great achievements in modern American cinema. (I’d say it’s the best movie of the nineties, as well the best rendering of Chekhov I’ve ever seen or ever hope to see.) But Gregory and Jonathan Demme come a cropper with their film of A Master Builder, from Wallace Shawn’s version of Ibsen’s 1892 play, even though Gregory rehearsed it with his cast for even longer than he and his actors worked on Vanya. Ibsen is notoriously difficult to pull off, and Master Builder poses even more daunting challenges than the plays he wrote between 1879 (A Doll House) and 1890 (Hedda Gabler). Some of those texts – The Lady from the Sea and The Wild Duck – have symbolist leanings, but essentially he’s working within a realist framework and with the conventions of nineteenth-century melodrama, which he alters in daring ways that made Victorian audiences uneasy. Master Builder, though, moved Ibsen more firmly toward the symbolism of works like Little Eyolf and When We Dead Awaken. Yet Gregory and his cast – with a single concession – treat it as if it were Chekhov, with disastrous results.

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.)

The Seagull: Desecrated Drama, Fake Cinema

Saoirse Ronan and Corey Stoll in Michael Mayer's film adaptation of Chekhov's The Seagull. (Photo: IMDB)

Of the four Chekhov masterpieces – The Seagull, Uncle Vanya,Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard – the earliest,The Seagull, seems to be the hardest to pull off. For years I thought the toughest challenge was the last one, The Cherry Orchard, because it has the most abrupt tonal shifts and because in a few odd places the playwright stretches his usual naturalism toward something else – symbolism, perhaps, though not the way Ibsen infuses realism with symbolism in parts of The Wild Duck. (I’m thinking especially of the unsettling sound effect in the second act of The Cherry Orchard, the dissonant chord of the stringed instrument the characters hear in the distance as they sit in the wood.) But I’ve been fortunate to see a couple of superb productions in the last few years, one at the Shaw Festival in Ontario and one at the National Theatre in London. The Seagull continues to fox directors, though it’s such an appealing play, with its two generations of bohemians and its tragic young lovers, that it’s easy to see why people are determined to stage it – to figure out how to get past the obstacles, like the overstated symbolism of the dead bird and the way Chekhov fast-forwards two years between the third and fourth acts. And it’s not as though it never works.

Juicing Up the Classics: The Importance of Being Earnest at Williamstown

The Importance of Being Earnest

The only hard-and-fast rule about refurbishing a classic play should be that any new production has to be true to the spirit of the text. And that’s a broad requirement: to my mind, Michael Almereyda’s 2000 film of Hamlet, set in New York at the millennium, and Alfonso Cuarón’s 1997 Great Expectations, where the hero becomes a young painter from the Gulf Coast whose mysterious mentor sets him up in a studio in Manhattan, both fit it. But some plays are so tied to the period in which they were written that removing them from it throws them into limbo.

I think that’s true of Chekhov’s dramas, in which the relationship between the women and men on stage and the culture that produced them is so specific. That’s one of the reasons that the Sydney Theatre Company’s touring production of Uncle Vanya, adapted by Andrew Upton and directed by Tamás Ascher, didn’t work at all for me. Actually I’m not sure when this version is meant to take place – as Yelena, Cate Blanchett (Upton’s wife) seems to be, from her costumes, living in the 1950s but the men’s suits look to be circa World War I – but the setting feels like the Australian outback, and though I imagine Upton and Ascher have sound reasons for making a connection between it and turn-of-the-century provincial Russia, I didn’t buy the switch, so instead of making a play that is timeless (in terms of theme and character) more relevant – a pointless aim – ironically it ends up being less convincing.

Uncle Vanya at the Sydney Theatre Company

So does the coarsening of Astrov’s language (he suspects the Professor, with his aches and pains, of bullshitting rather than shamming, as most translations, have it, and so forth). Ascher’s production is impressively staged and quite handsome, but I found it so uninvolving that I ducked out at intermission, right after the reconciliation scene between Yelena and her stepdaughter Sonya (Hayley McElhinney), which Ascher chose to stage as a drunken revel between a pair of schoolgirls, with a lot of eruptive laughter and flopping about the stage. It’s a serious liability in a Chekhov play when you don’t care about a single character. So I guess there’s another hard-and-fast rule after all: you have to give the audience an emotional reason to come back after intermission.

Drawing from a Bottomless Well: Unknown Chekhov Movies of the 1970s, Part I

A still from Three Sisters (1970).

The reason you can keep looking at productions of the four Chekhov masterpieces – The Sea Gull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard – is that there’s so much there. A good director and a good cast illumine corners of the text that you haven’t paid attention to before, or shine an unfamiliar light on one of more of the characters, or put the parts of the play together a little differently from their predecessors. I had that experience recently with two little-known Chekhov movies from the seventies. One I was returning to: Laurence Olivier’s 1970 Three Sisters, which transcribed his stage production for the National Theatre. It’s modest – like the movies he starred in of Uncle Vanya in 1963 and Othello in 1965 (both directed for the screen by Stuart Burge), it feels, with the exception of a couple of self-consciously cinematic sequences, like a filmed play. It was released in England, but on this side of the ocean audiences only got to see it as part of an experiment in stage-to-screen translations called American Film Theatre, which visited only large cities for two-day engagements. The other I encountered for the first time: the 1977 adaptation of The Seagull (Il Gabbiano) by the great Italian director Marco Bellocchio, which never opened in North America at all. Like Three Sisters, it’s available on DVD, but only from Europe. Both movies, I think, are wonderful. In this piece I want to talk about Three Sisters; I’ll deal with The Seagull next week.

The Country House: Chekhov in the Berkshires

Blythe Danner in The Country House (Photo by Joan Marcus)

In Donald Margulies’s new play, The Country House, at the Manhattan Theatre Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, Blythe Danner plays Anna Patterson, the matriarch of a theatrical family. A famous actress, Anna has returned to the Williamstown Theatre Festival – and to her summer home in the Berkshires – a year after losing her daughter, also an actor, to cancer. The family assembles in this house of memories. Anna’s son Elliot Cooper (Eric Lange) is a difficult, obstreperous man who can’t get parts because no one wants to work with him and who has stumbled into middle age without finding a romantic partner. At this juncture he’s suddenly decided to become a playwright; he’s planning to ask his unsuspecting family to read his first effort aloud. His brother-in-law Walter Keegan (David Rasche), who parlayed a successful career as a stage director into an even more enviable one as a filmmaker, shows up with his new, younger fiancée, Nell McNally (Kate Jennings Grant) – also an actress – a beauty whom everyone is drawn to despite their discomfort with the way Walter has moved on so speedily after the death of his wife. Nell draws the admiration of both Elliot – who acted with her one summer, years earlier, and has romanticized that brief friendship into unrequited love – and another celebrity appearing that summer in Williamstown, Michael Astor (Daniel Sunjata), the star of a hit sci-fi TV series whom Anna, with motives that are not entirely pure, has invited to sleep on the living-room couch while his house is being fumigated. The only person in the house who isn’t charmed by Nell is Walter’s daughter Susie (Sarah Steele), a Yale student, the only character on stage without either a theatrical career or an interest in obtaining one. Susie is incensed at what she sees as her father’s disloyalty to her mother’s memory, and when Michael falls for Nell, she has even more reason to hate her stepmother-to-be, since she’s had a crush on the handsome actor since she was a little girl.

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.

Empire of Light: Something Remains

 Olivia Colman in Sam Mendes's Empire of Light.

In Sam Mendes’s Empire of Light, Olivia Colman plays Hilary, the assistant manager of an old-fashioned moviehouse called the Empire in Margate, England in 1980 and 1981 who is sleeping with her married boss, Donald Ellis (Colin Firth). When Stephen (Micheal Ward), a young Black man, joins the staff they become first friends, then lovers – and then Hilary, who is prone to schizophrenic episodes, breaks down. Mendes, who also wrote the script, overloads the picture – with Hilary’s psychological struggles and Stephen’s encounters with the National Front and a layer of trite sentiment about the ability of movies to keep up our faith and hope when life seems most dire. Following The Fabelmans, this is the second recent picture by a well-known director to throw a load of symbolic weight on the idea of movies. (It doesn’t help that the movies Mendes chooses to embody the salvific quality of movies are hardly inspiring; perhaps that was his intention, but if so it doesn’t accomplish what he wants it to.)

Drawing from a Bottomless Well: Unknown Chekhov Movies of the 1970s, Part 2

Pamela Villoresi in Marco Bellocchio's adaptation of The Seagull (Il Gabbiano) (1977).

Drawing from a Bottomless Well: Unknown Chekhov Movies of the 1970s, Part I was published here last week.

It seems strange to think of the iconoclastic, Godard-influenced Italian director Marco Bellocchio, who came into movies in the mid-sixties with the jagged, coruscating dark comedy Fists in the Pocket and the startling class satire China Is Near, settling on the idea of adapting Chekhov’s The Seagull (Il Gabbiano) to the screen. One can imagine Bellocchio identifying with the protagonist, the young tragic aspiring playwright and short-story writer Konstantin Treplev, when he protests, “We must have new forms!” before presenting his symbolist play to a small audience of family and friends that includes his mother, Irina Arkadina, a famous actress. (When she refuses to take his efforts seriously, he rings down the curtain and goes off in a huff.) But The Seagull, first performed disastrously in 1896 and resurrected two years later by Stanislavski and the pioneering Moscow Art Theatre, is one of the signal works of theatrical realism, and Bellocchio plays it straight. This movie never opened in North America, hardly anyone on these shores has ever seen it (it’s available on an Italian DVD), and except for Laura Betti, who also worked with Fellini, Pasolini and Bertolucci, I didn’t recognize a single actor in the cast. But the ensemble is impeccable, and this is certainly the best movie anyone has made yet of The Seagull.

Gatz: Borne Back Ceaselessly into the Past

The cast of Gatz (Scott Shepherd, centre). Photo by Joan Marcus

By the time I caught up with Gatz, the Elevator Repair Service’s staged reading of the entire text of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, a few weeks ago, it was in the midst of a second run at the Public Theatre in New York and it had been touring. Gatz, which began performances in 2010, has been an unqualified hit for the company (whose founder, John Collins, directed it); it’s won a raft of awards and on weekends audiences are still lining up in hope of cancellations. The play runs for six hours plus three intermissions, including a ninety-minute dinner break, so it’s a considerable commitment of time and energy. I was certainly glad I’d made the investment but I’m not entirely sure what it was I saw.

The setting, designed by Louisa Thompson, is a contemporary office, indifferently furnished. When the computer of one of the employees (Ben Williams, substituting at the performance I attended for the usual star, Scott Shepherd) stalls, he pulls a copy of Fitzgerald’s novel out of a drawer and begins to read it out loud, and though his reading is interrupted briefly by the passage of time (the day ends; he returns to the office at night and again the next day), it’s continuous. For a while he’s the only reader, taking not only the role of the narrator, Nick Carraway, but the other characters as well, but the positioning of some of his co-workers and the odd prop or gesture echoes the text in an almost offhand way, and eventually some of them join in. Eventually they take the other parts, usually acting them, off book while he remains a reader. However, when Jordan Baker (I saw Annie McNamara, standing in for Susie Sokol) -- the beautiful, confident golf pro whom Nick meets through his cousin Daisy Buchanan (Victoria Vazquez) and her husband Tom (Gary Wilmes) and falls into a romance with – confides in him the story of Daisy’s interrupted romance with the young soldier, bound for the Great War, who turns out to be Nick’s neighbor Jay Gatsby (Jim Fletcher), she reads it rather than acting it. And on the two occasions when Meyer Wolfsheim, Gatsby’s gangster associate (based on Arnold Rothstein, the man who fixed the 1919 World Series), turns up, he’s invisible; Nick reads his role like a stage manager going on for an ailing actor.

Birthing Pains: Danny Boyle's Frankenstein

Back on April 4, 2011, David Churchill reviewed the National Theatre's production of Frankenstein for Critics at Large. A little over a year later, Steve Vineberg revisits the production for a second opinion.

The National Theatre’s mounting of Frankenstein, an adaptation of the Mary Shelley novel by Nick Dear and directed by filmmaker Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire), was a hot ticket in London last year, and the HD transcription was popular enough for NT Live to bring it back for a second engagement a few weeks ago. There’s a casting gimmick: the two stars, Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller, switch off in the roles of Victor Frankenstein and the Creature – just as Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly did in the last Broadway revival of Sam Shepard’s True West. In an interview that prefaces the HD screening, Boyle explains that the double casting is meant to comment on the relationship between the two characters. But that’s nonsense: creator and creation aren’t interchangeable, and Frankenstein and the Creature aren’t alter egos in the sense that the two brothers in True West (who trade places in the narrative) are. The Creature is Frankenstein’s Adam, or if you’re looking for a theatrical parallel, he’s to Frankenstein as Caliban is to Prospero in The Tempest.

Mark Rylance: Everyman in Extremis

Mark Rylance in Measure for Measure, at the Globe Theatre in 2004.

A friend who saw Christopher Walken play William Hurt’s roommate in the original Broadway production of David Rabe’s Hurlyburly in the mid-eighties once told me that Walken was so utterly relaxed that he scarcely seemed to be acting at all. My friend described a moment when Walken, in the middle of listening to a conversation, looked down at his watch, conveyed that he was late for a meeting, and disappeared, his rhythm so natural and free of even the subtlest dramatic rigging that it looked as if he’d improvised it – decided at that moment, on that evening, to leave the stage. I’ve seen Walken on stage twice, and I can imagine what my friend was talking about. Both times he was playing Chekhov, whose brand of naturalism demands that performers throw off theatrical self-consciousness and bury themselves in their characters. When he played Astrov in Uncle Vanya at American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the late Nineties, he executed one of the two most sublime drunk scenes I’ve ever seen live (the other was by Alan Bates in another Russian work, Turgenev’s Fortune’s Fool, on Broadway, the last play he appeared in before he died), and its special quality of improbably sustained distraction, the feeling of not just balancing on eggshells but pirouetting on them, was the result of an almost Zen intensity of relaxation.

Actors call this kind of spontaneity, which derives from a thorough and acute awareness of the dramatic situation and the energies of the other actors on the stage and a focus so complete that it seals out any other world – even in the presence of a live audience – acting in the moment. Mark Rylance possesses that ability in a greater degree than any other actor I’ve ever seen, even including Walken. Rylance is a Midwesterner but he’s spent so much of his career (which spans more than three decades) in London that audiences can be forgiven for thinking he’s a Brit: he was the artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre for ten years, where he famously played Hamlet and Angelo in Measure for Measure, and his last Broadway role, as the alcoholic trailer dweller Rooster Byron in Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem, is an English play that originated in London's Royal Court Theatre. His technique transcends national distinctions. It’s steeped in the kind of physical fluency that the British are far more deft at than Americans, yet when you see him in a comedy he seems to be continuing the legacy of the great silent movie clowns. Not so much Chaplin (who, of course, hailed from the English music hall) as Keaton, and even more the lesser-known but brilliant Harry Langdon – seen at his best in Tramp, Tramp, Tramp and the two comedies he did for Frank Capra, The Strong Man and Long Pants – whose persona was the most debased and battered of them. In Matthew Warchus’s 2008 Broadway revival of Boeing-Boeing (also a transplant from the West End, with only Rylance repeating his performance), Rylance suggested some loopy hybrid of Langdon and a maddened Alec Guinness from his Ealing Studios days (I’m thinking especially of Guinness’s performance in The Man in the White Suit), an Everyman in extremis whose panic and determination have pitched him right on the edge of hysteria.

Chains: A Resurrection from the Mint Theater

Laakan McHardy and Jeremy Beck in Chains. (Photo: Todd Cerveris)

The Mint Theater Company, an off-Broadway house in the business of reviving obscure European and American plays, has been on my radar for several years, but I had never seen one until they began to stream shows from their archive while the New York theatre was shut down by the pandemic. The plays themselves were interesting, but what struck me was the high quality of the productions. To be honest, I felt foolish for not having checked out Mint much earlier. (They’ve been around since 1995.)

Their current offering – their second since the reopening of live theatre and their first back in their home space on Theater Row – is Chains, a 1909 realist play from England by Elizabeth Baker. Baker had been inspired to try her hand at playwriting by the work Harley Granville-Barker was presenting at the Court Theater during his three seasons as artistic director. Chains was her first effort, but it’s a sophisticated piece of dramatic writing: skillfully structured, compelling in subject matter and character, illuminated by indisputable authorial intelligence. The social setting is the lower middle class residing in the London suburbs in the years before the First World War. The chains of the title are those imposed by duty, pragmatism and convention. The protagonist, Charley Wilson (played by Jeremy Beck), is a clerk suffocated by the dullness of his job and the dim prospects of improving his lot. He and his wife Lily (Laakan McHardy) live in genteel poverty, taking in boarders to alleviate some of the financial strain. They’re counting on his getting a raise, but instead his company, on the unconvincing excuse that they’ve had a bad year, reduces his pay. When their current boarder, Fred Tennant (Peterson Townsend), decides to walk away from his job and try his luck farming in Australia, his courage and optimism affect both Charley and his sister-in-law Maggie Massey (Olivia Gilliatt), who has become engaged to a man she doesn’t love in order to escape the shop where she’s employed. Everyone else who hears the news of Fred’s decision holds onto the conservative notion that a sure thing, however suffocating to the spirit, is better than a risk; they’re inured to the idea that work isn’t supposed to be pleasant. Only Charley and Maggie identify with his bid for freedom.

Neglected Gem #23: The Browning Version (1994)

Albert Finney in The Browning Version

The moment you see Albert Finney in the 1994 film of The Browning Version, you know you’re watching an actor in the grip of a great performance.  If you care about acting, you scarcely dare to miss anything Finney does, because you never know when he’s going to dazzle you:  in the British TV version of the Kingsley Amis ghost story The Green Man, for instance, or in The Playboys, as the alcoholic cop who’s strung up by his love for the independent woman he’s impregnated.  He’s even more amazing in The Browning Version – it surpasses anything I’ve seen him do, with the single exception of the 1982 Shoot the Moon. This was the performance of its year, but it was a trick to catch it on the big screen. Paramount – exactly the wrong studio to handle a British “prestige” picture – tried the movie out in Cannes, and when there wasn’t much response, they nearly dumped it. They didn’t bother screening it in New York or L.A. in time to make the long lead times of the monthlies, and when they opened it in the fall, they gave it a small ad campaign and a very limited release.  It was befuddling that no one at the studio figured out the audience for the Merchant Ivory pictures would happily troop out to see a film like The Browning Version if they knew about it, and even odder than no one could see Finney was a shoe-in for major award nominations if only his work was promoted.  (The Boston Film Critics gave him the Best Actor award despite the fact that the movie opened in the last-resort downtown art house – aborted by Paramount, it was ignored by Sony, the conglomerate that owned almost every theatre in the city at the time.) Ironically, Finney’s own (failed) performance in A Man of No Importance, a lousy movie about a gay bus conductor in fifties Dublin with an Oscar Wilde fixation, got far more notice.

Mike Figgis’s movie is the second film version of what is probably the best known of Terence Rattigan’s plays.  The script is built around the valedictory of an aging English schoolmaster named Andrew Crocker-Harris, a classics instructor at a ritzy boys’ school whose wife has come to despise him and whose students resent his old-fashioned doggedness and rigorousness, unleavened as it is by anything they can translate into humaneness.  In the course of the drama, Crocker-Harris suffers one indignity upon another.  When he finally gets a little pleasure – the one pupil with genuine affection for him gives him, as a retirement offering, Robert Browning’s edition of the Agamemnon – his wife ruins it for him by insisting that the boy was merely being shrewdly manipulative.  Rattigan’s play is small-scale and a little tight-lipped, but it’s poignant, and when Anthony Asquith filmed it in 1951 he had Michael Redgrave to march it through to greatness.  Redgrave laid a gently sibilant, slightly quavering voice like a skin over Crocker-Harris’s slivered bitterness.  As the performance proceeded, the teacher’s masterful control began to flake, and you saw what motivated the sarcasm and the misanthropy and the near-sadistic humiliation he leveled at his boys.  Probably no one in movie history besides Laurence Olivier has ever managed anything like the wit and elegant, intricate layering of Redgrave’s line readings, especially here and in Uncle Vanya and Dead of Night.  This first Browning Version isn’t the world’s greatest movie (it doesn’t contain a single memorable portrayal outside of Redgrave’s), but it is a great experience.

Why We Go to the Theatre: Rosemary Harris and David Hyde Pierce

Jim Dale, Carla Gugino, and Rosemary Harris in The Road to Mecca

In the Broadway revival of Athol Fugard’s The Road to Mecca by the Roundabout Theatre Company, the luminous Rosemary Harris plays Miss Helen, an aging Afrikaner widow in a small South African village (in an arid section of the country known as Karoo) in the mid-1970s who reaches out to a younger friend, Elsa Barlow (Carla Gugino), a Capetown schoolteacher, at a time of personal crisis. Miss Helen is an artist whose fanciful sculptures of animals and other creatures fill her yard and have unsettled her conventional neighbors for years. She and Elsa became friends when the younger woman, passing through the Karoo, stopped to admire the art – and Miss Helen, used to a mixture of disdain, mockery and dismissal from the other villagers, warmed to her enthusiasm. Elsa, too, is a renegade: she keeps getting in trouble with the school board because she encourages her students, who are black, to speak and write about equality. She loves Miss Helen because she sees her as that rarity, a truly free spirit, and that freedom is manifested in what she calls her Mecca, that yard full of wild creations that the close, churchgoing village of New Bethesda finds creepy, even shocking. But Miss Helen hasn’t been able to make any art for some time, and she fears that her inner vision – the images that appear to her, guiding her hand – may have stopped for good, leaving her in darkness. The desperate tone of her last letter has drawn Elsa to her cottage for a visit. She arrives just at the point at which the local minister, Marius Byleveld (Jim Dale), has almost persuaded Miss Helen to give up her solitary house and go into a home.

Awake and Sing!: Loveless Intimacy

Awake and Sing!, directed by Melia Bensussen, at the Boston's Huntington Theatre Company (Photo: T. Charles Erickson)

In a brilliant 1946 essay about Awake and Sing!, Robert Warshow called Clifford Odets the “poet of the Jewish middle class,” and when you hear his dialogue spoken from the stage of the Huntington Theatre in its deeply moving revival of the play you know exactly what Warshow meant. Odets – working from his own first-hand knowledge of Jews fighting to forge an identity in America, his consciousness of the hand-to-mouth struggle of families during the Depression, his Communist principles, his devotion to Chekhov, and his Stanislavskian training as a company actor in the Group Theatre – created a new kind of American drama. In 1935 he was twenty-eight and working at astonishing speed. In that year alone he churned out the agit-prop labor play Waiting for Lefty (which mixed Brechtian and naturalist elements and brought audiences literally to their feet, chanting, “Strike!” at the end along with the actors) and two magnificent realist dramas, Awake and Sing! and Paradise Lost. The best of the three – the best thing Odets ever wrote – is the Bronx-set Awake and Sing!, where the Berger family, in Warshow’s phrase, “live on top of one another, in that loveless intimacy which is the obverse of the Jewish virtue of family solidarity.” It’s a matriarchy that Bessie Berger rules over with increasingly desperate tyranny as the family threatens to come apart. Her husband Myron, who dropped out of law school for financial reasons, is a well-meaning, gentle-souled man who long ago ceded authority to his wife and who, in these hard times, has lost his breadwinner role, his work days cut back to three. When Hennie, their elder child, gets pregnant by an out-of-towner she can’t track down (either he gave her a false name or he lied about the company that employed him), Bessie marries her off post-haste to an adoring recent immigrant with a decent job who never questions the baby’s paternity. When Ralph, the younger child, falls in love with a poor girl, Bessie throws up obstacles; so does the girl’s family, and the romance dwindles. Ralph is close to the other inhabitant of this tenement apartment, his grandfather, Jacob, a Marxist who, though he himself is cowed by his daughter, fans the flame of the boy’s dreams and urges him to go out and change the world “so life won’t be printed on dollar bills.”