Clybourne Park and Race in America

The cast of Clybourne Park (All photos by Joan Marcus)

Bruce Norris’s brilliant Clybourne Park – which just opened on Broadway in the first-rate production, directed by Pam McKinnon, that originated at Playwrights Horizon two years ago – begins as what seems like a satirical take on 1950s America. Daniel Ostling’s set reproduces a staid mid-century interior design; the locale, which the title identifies, is a middle-class neighborhood in central Chicago in 1959. But the backdrop beyond the front door, which we can glimpse through a stage-right window, has a touch of artificiality about it, and it feels as if there’s a film of gray over everything. The inhabitants, Bev (Christina Kirk) and Russ (Frank Wood), are moving out, so the living room is crowded with piled-up boxes and rolled-up rugs, but the sense you get of remoteness, transience, alienation go deeper. (Allen Lee Hughes did the lighting.) The opening conversation between these middle-aged people is mostly a meaningless disagreement about capital cities. Bev has a smiley-face quality, like that of a camp counselor committed to teaching a group of eight-year-olds the rules to a new game. She has a bit of a baby-talk sound, and a habit of buckling at the knees and rolling her eyes when she wants to make a point, and she waves her hands around to underscore her words, so we seem to be getting the Classics Illustrated version of everything she says. She’s set on getting her husband moving: he’s still in his PJs, and she wants him to get a footlocker out of one of the upstairs rooms but he keeps putting her off. Russ, who is reading a National Geographic in his easy chair, is agreeable enough, but as playful as his tone is, his replies sound like evasion tactics. When the local minister, Jim (Brendan Griffin), enters with a football in his hands – and golden-haired Griffin looks like a college football star – the number of motivators on the stage doubles. He chatters to the couple in wobbly clichés, his tone relentlessly upbeat. Then there’s the African American maid, Francine (Crystal A. Dickinson), whose husband, Albert (Damon Gupton), has arrived to pick her up. These two are like savvy domestics on an antiquated TV sitcom.

Nothing in Bev or Russ’s demeanor suggests they are people who have been through a tragedy except perhaps (if we’re looking for clues) Russ’s determined immobility. But Jim, who came by because of Bev’s concern over her husband, brings up the verboten subject of their dead Korean War-vet son, and Russ shuts him up by telling him to go fuck himself. Griffin’s Jim blinks and stares into space, disoriented, as if he’d suddenly found himself in the wrong play, and we wonder, too, as what we’ve been watching jogs for an instant into the kind of modern family drama where characters don’t feel the need to mind their language. Albert, who’s been standing around on the periphery of the action waiting for his wife, ducks out in embarrassment. We think we’ve been pulled back on course when another neighbor, Karl (Jeremy Shamos), shows up with a pregnant wife, Betsy (Annie Parisse), and a terrible sidewall haircut that makes him look as if he’d stepped out of a comic strip of the period. But Betsy’s deafness sets off her sweetness and cuteness so that they seem manufactured, and you register that you’d never find a hearing-impaired character rippling the perfect surface of a fifties TV show.

Race Riff: Smart People

Eunice Wong, McKinley Belcher III (top), Miranda Craigwell, Roderick Hill in Smart People (Photo: T. Charles Erickson)

When I was I was in graduate school I directed an African American freshman in a production of David Rabe’s Vietnam War play The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel. He had to play a working-class black soldier who spoke in jive, and though he was a stunningly gifted performer (who went on to a successful acting career) for a while he struggled with the requirements of the role. Here he was, a sophisticated young urban black man, a journalist’s son who’d gotten into Stanford, and I was asking him to sound like some hip street-corner dude. The fact that I was a white guy – and so was Rabe – couldn’t have helped.

My actor figured it out and gave a brilliant performance, and over the years I’d forgotten how resistant he was in the initial stages. What brought it back to mind was Lydia R. Diamond’s vivid and hilarious new Cambridge-set play Smart People, the season closer for Boston’s Huntington Theatre Company. Somehow I missed Diamond’s last collaboration with the Huntington, Stick Fly (2010), and missed it again during its New York run, and now I feel foolish because I had such a good time at Smart People. It’s a four-handed high comedy (as the title suggests) that mines the same awkward, slippery, rich territory as Bruce Norris’s great Clybourne Park. Diamond’s not up to Norris – she has a weakness for speechifying that keeps stopping the play cold, and she tends to fumble shifts in tone – but she’s very talented. The play is about how race sets up class expectations and the often ridiculous tangles that intelligent, educated, sensitive twenty-first-century liberals get themselves into as they try to negotiate the treacherous waters of race. The four characters are Jackson (McKinley Belcher III), a black surgeon who moonlights at a clinic he opened in a poor neighborhood; his friend Brian (Roderick Hill), a white Harvard neuroscientist whose study on racism in whites is getting him in trouble with his institution; Ginny (Eunice Wong), a half-Chinese, half-Japanese psychologist, also on the Harvard faculty, who’s conducting research on depression and low esteem in low-income Chinese women; and Valerie (Miranda Craigwell), an African American actor who dates Jackson (briefly) and gets part-time work in Brian’s lab when Harvard begins to pull his funding. All four are opinionated, tough-minded, outspoken and articulate, which makes them ideal figures for comedy of manners. They’re also touchy, quick to assume – through bitter experience – that other people tend to operate out of deep-dyed prejudices they mostly don’t know they possess. So they sally forth into conversational gambits with their dukes up.

Appropriate: The Chaotic American Family

Natalie Gold, Alyssa Emily Marvin, Michael Esper, Sarah Paulson and Corey Stoll in Appropriate. (Photo: Joan Marcus)

A magnificent cast under Lila Neugebauer’s direction brings Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate to fierce, scrapping life in its Broadway premiere, produced by 2ndStage Theater. The play is the latest entry in the postmodern American family saga sweepstakes, following in the footsteps of such works as Sam Shepard’s Buried Child (1978), Christopher Durang’s The Marriage of Bette and Boo (1985) and Tracy Letts’s August Osage County (2007). These plays scramble the conventions of classic American family plays – and there are dozens of those, all circling around Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night – adding elements of satire, parody and knockabout humor as well as anti-realist styles like theatre of the absurd (present in both Buried Child and Bette and Boo) and surrealism. Like Buried Child, Appropriate catapults into surrealism in its final moments, though it also folds in a generous dollop of Southern Gothic. Jacobs-Jenkins has set it on a dilapidated Arkansas plantation after the death of the Lafayette family patriarch, whose three children have gathered on the day of the estate auction. And like Shepard’s play, which it alludes to repeatedly, and also like Bruce Norris’s great Clybourne Park, Appropriate circles around a family secret. The secret isn’t buried in the garden like the corpse of the incest baby in Buried Child or under a tree like the chest belonging to the Korean War vet in Clybourne Park; the Lafayette siblings discover it among their father’s mementos when they clean out the plantation house. It’s a scrapbook of photographs of lynchings that complicates further the legacy of a man who was already difficult in life – irascible, sometimes cruel but also full of contradictions. And at the end of the play we still don’t have a clear picture of him, not just because his children had very different opinions about him but also because the playwright refuses to provide a reliable explanation for the photographs.

Oslo, Stage to Screen

Salim Dau and Jeff Wilbusch in Oslo..

Given the peculiarly insulated nature of theatre, despite its success on Broadway too few people are familiar with J.T. Rogers’s play Oslo, which dramatizes the story of the Oslo Peace Accords that came heartbreakingly close to bringing an end to the bloodshed between the Israelis and the Palestinians in 1993. (The play won the 2017 Tony Award.) So the HBO film version – directed, like the play, by Bartlett Sher – affords the opportunity for many more lovers of serious theatre to access what is, I believe, the best American play since Bruce Norris’s 2012 Clybourne Park. Oslo does, however, pose several daunting challenges to a filmmaker, especially one who is making his debut behind the camera. One can, as Rogers does in the screenplay, eliminate some of the more obvious theatrical touches, like the direct address to the audience and the elusive narrative structure of the first act: it begins with the allegedly accidental revelation of a secret and then flashes back to establish the necessity for the secret as well as the need to expose it and make the exposure look like an accident. (This trickery is highly pleasurable in the theatre, but on screen it would be more likely to clutter up the storytelling. Rogers was smart to get rid of it.) On the other hand, you can’t just place the actors in realist settings and pretend they’re speaking in realist prose. The language tends to be oratorical, in the manner of much historical drama: the characters often talk at each other, making political points, tossing gauntlets at each other and escalating to grandiloquent eruptions. This isn’t intended as a criticism – the dialogue is elegant and forceful and often quite beautiful. Either a director has to go for broke, throwing strict realism to the winds, or figure out how to make the language work on the screen so it doesn’t sound like posturing.

Recovery: People, Places, & Things and Cost of Living

Jacqui Dubois, Denise Gough and Sally George in People, Places & Things. (Photo: Johan Persson)

Denise Gough has received a great deal of justified praise (and the Olivier Award) for her energetic, incisive and often uproarious portrayal as Emma, an actress who enters a rehab clinic for drug and alcohol addiction in Duncan MacMillan’s People, Places & Things. (The play began at the National Theatre and transferred to the West End, where it recently ended its run.) Gough’s performance is a miracle of controlled chaos. The play is entirely in Emma’s point of view, and for much of the first act the character’s perspective is splintered (in some scenes half a dozen mirror images of Emma are on stage at the same time) and her sense of time is skewed. Like most movie and theatregoers, I’ve seen dozens of dramatizations of addiction but I’ve never encountered one in which the protagonist’s desire for help is balanced so finely against her resistance against the institution – any institution – that exists to provide it. Brilliant, well read, anti-authoritarian, fiercely atheistic, Emma uses her wit and powers of intellection and acerbic gifts, as well as her acting smarts, to push back against every tenet of the twelve-step self-help philosophy that underpins her treatment once she’s admitted to the clinic. “Have you read Foucault?” she demands of her doctor (Barbara Marten, who also plays her therapist and her mother). “Or Derrida? Baudrillard? Barthes?” “You’re an addict because of Post-Modernism?” the doctor, trained to recognize bullshit in all its forms, replies drily.

Neglected Gem #101: A Civil Action (1998)

John Travolta in A Civil Action

If you’re a big fan of Jonathan Harr’s A Civil Action, the 1995 bestseller about how the Boston lawyer Jan Schlichtman forfeited a civil-action suit against two chemical companies, Grace and Beatrice, for polluting the water supply in Woburn, Massachusetts, then the movie adaptation may drive you crazy. The writer-director, Steve Zaillian, takes major liberties with both the narrative and character of Schlichtman (played by John Travolta); he pares down Harr’s long, winding report of the case and shapes it into a melodrama – much as the writers on the TV series The Practice did when they borrowed the story for an arc centered around the firm’s proletarian lawyer, Jimmy Berlutti (Michael Badalucco). But I’m not sure how a filmmaker could remain faithful to Harr’s material and make it dramatic at the same time. The book bogs down in the middle – just as the case itself did – in endless scientific testimony, and it never recovers its momentum. Despite its colorful, complicated hero, who becomes so obsessed with the case that he drives his firm into bankruptcy, A Civil Action is an obstacle course for a moviemaker. Zaillian’s film may bowdlerize its subject in the course of streamlining it, but it’s a snappy, ingeniously crafted piece of rabble-rousing dramaturgy – a cross between a Warner Brothers urban potboiler from the thirties and a meaty thesis picture like Twelve Angry Men, which gives a large cast of talented actors plenty to do.

Berkshires Season Openers: Outside Mullingar, A Raisin in the Sun and A Human Being, of a Sort

James McMenamin and Shannon Marie Sullivan in Outside Mullingar. (Photo: Emma K. Rothenberg-Ware)

John Patrick Shanley’s 2014 play Outside Mullingar, which opens the Berkshire Theatre Group summer season, is a quirky romantic comedy set in the Irish countryside, and I’d say it’s two-thirds of a very good play. In the opening scene, an ornery widowed farmer named Tony Reilly (Jeffrey DeMunn) and his forty-something son Anthony (James McMenamin) have their next-door neighbors, Aiofe Muldoon (Deborah Hedwall) and her daughter Rosemary (Shannon Marie Sullivan), over for tea following the funeral of Aiofe’s husband. Anthony has been taking care of the farm for years and expects to inherit it, but unexpectedly his father reveals that he doesn’t think he loves the property enough and proposes leaving it to an American nephew. The resulting back-and-forth reveals that Rosemary and not her mother owns a tiny parcel of the land that blocks the Reillys’ access to the sea, and that, due to a gripe she has nursed against Anthony since they were kids, she has no intention of selling it back to them. We also learn that she has been in love with him all her life, and that holding onto the land is her way of holding onto him – though only, of course, if Tony can be persuaded to reconsider his plans for the disposition of the farm.

This section of the play recalls Chekhov’s one-acts, especially The Proposal, though it contains Shanley’s trademark off-kilter humor and his fondness for tall tales. But in the fourth scene it seems to stall. Upon his deathbed, some time after he’s reconsidered his plans for disinheriting his son, Reilly Sr. shares an intimate confessional moment with Reilly Jr., and it’s sentimental – not a word I’d apply to any of the three scenes that have preceded it. It’s also extraneous, except perhaps to signal the narrative shift away from the older characters to the not-quite romance between Rosemary and Anthony. By the next scene Aiofe, too, is dead, and we get a courtship of the two younger figures reminiscent of Lanford Wilson’s Talley’s Folly, where the characters have to uncover and then eliminate the obstacles that stand in the way of the happy ending. But the process takes too long and the obstacles are silly ones.

Despite its flaws, the play is engaging – especially in Karen Allen’s skillfully shaped and impeccably acted production. All four of the actors do fine, distinctive work, and the somewhat meandering nature of the last two scenes is countered by the chemistry between McMenamin and Sullivan. McMenamin, who played George in David Cromer’s celebrated Our Town at the Barrow Street Theatre in New York and was in the ensemble of Anna D. Shapiro’s revival of Of Mice and Men on Broadway, is one of my favorite character actors: he buries himself so completely in his roles that, though he’s a handsome, rugged man with a broad, recognizable face, from play to play he barely seems to be the same actor. I enjoyed everything about the show, including John McDermott’s set and the way it accordions in and out for scene shifts. A BTG season always proffers surprises; this one, coming right at the outset, makes you feel very bright about what might follow.

Mandi Masdon, S. Epatha Merkerson and Nikiya Mathis appear in A Raisin in the Sun. (Photo: Joseph O'Malley) 

A Raisin in the Sun opened on Broadway in 1959 and earned its place in the history of American drama: it’s the first major play about the struggles of an African American family, in this case trapped in a Chicago ghetto, and the work of a black female playwright, Lorraine Hansberry. I’ve always found it a little dull, on the page and even in the famous 1961 movie version, in which all four of the talented stars of the stage production (Sidney Poitier, Claudia McNeil, Ruby Dee and Diana Sands) repeated their performances. But I think it can come alive on stage, and for the first half of the Williamstown Theatre Festival production it mostly does. The director, Robert O’Hara, has coached the cast to overlap their dialogue, which works against the banality of Hansberry’s dialogue and gives it an electric, lived-in quality. Francois Battiste, who plays Walter Lee Younger, the angry, restless and impulsive son of the widowed matriarch, Lena, and Mandi Masden, who plays his wife Ruth, make it clear from the opening minutes that this marriage has a strong sexual core, and there’s an erotic tension between Walter’s college-age sister Beneatha (Nikiya Mathis) and one of her suitors, an African classmate named Joseph Asagai (Joshua Echebiri), that actors and directors don’t generally get at. And then there’s the amazing S. Epatha Merkerson as Lena. Everyone I know loves watching Merkerson on her TV series (Law and Order, Chicago Med), but you don’t know what a powerhouse she is unless you’ve seen her in the TV movie Lackawanna Blues or on stage. She gave a heartbreaking performance in a Broadway revival of William Inge’s Come Back, Little Sheba a little more than a decade ago, and she’s a commanding and utterly authentic Lena.

In act one these features more than compensate for the production’s shortcomings – a clumsiness in the staging (though the scenic design by Clint Ramos is excellent); intrusive, distracting music cues; and a tendency to indulge the actors in their big moments that damages the rhythm of some of the scenes. This is mostly a problem in Battiste’s drunk scene before intermission, but only Merkerson is immune – her instinct for the dramatic shape of a scene and her generosity as a performer keep her completely grounded. And though it isn’t ineffective, there isn’t much point to O’Hara’s choice to insert an expressionistic element with imposed scenes hovered over by the ghost of Lena’s dead husband – whose $15,000-dollar insurance policy, paid for (we’re told over and over again) with the blood and sweat of a selflessly toiling African American working man, Walter hopes will finance a liquor store he wants to open with some buddies and Lena decides should finance their move into their own house in Clybourne Park, a white neighborhood.

But the second half of this Raisin begins badly and gets worse and worse. O’Hara gives up even trying to orchestrate the scenes or maintain some stylistic integrity. A scene involving an interfering neighbor (Eboni Flowers) feels like it comes out of a bad TV sitcom; in this context the character seems Martian, and because the audience is encouraged to find her a hoot, the point of the interlude – that she represents a ghetto-bred parochialism and reverse snobbery that fight against the efforts of a black family like the Youngers to find a better life for themselves – is lost. When we meet Walter’s friend and prospective business partner Bobo (Walter Miller), he comes across as so obviously disreputable that O’Hara appears to have missed – or ignored – the fact that when their third (unseen) partner runs off with the insurance money that Lena has finally decided to let Walter handle, Bobo is just a much a victim. Most dreadful of all is Walter’s big meltdown, where he shows his family how weak he is. O’Hara stages it as a Brechtian interlude in which Battiste, whose acting has become insufferably hammy by this time, goes into a minstrel routine addressed to the audience while his poor co-stars are stuck in shadow behind him, delivering their lines as if they’re the only people involved in the show who still understand that the style of the play is unfettered American realism. The minstrel stuff O’Hara has grafted onto the scene contradicts the text.

So does the showpiece finale, where, as the family prepares to move to Clybourne Park despite the efforts of the neighborhood committee to buy them out, the set breaks apart and a scrim flies in showing us the front of their new house with “NIGGER” scrawled across it in red paint. Hansberry ended her play on a hopeful note, though she had to fudge a metamorphosis for Walter in order to push it through. The last note is sounded by Lena’s exit holding the plant she’s kept alive in their ghetto apartment. It’s a trite symbol, but it works – and it’s consistent with the rest of the text, which is about a black family fighting to conquer its obstacles to finding a better existence. It’s clear from the covert threats of the representative of the neighborhood committee, the only white character in the play (played here, not very well, by Joe Goldammer), that it will be an uphill battle – but the ending isn’t cynical or sour. You can write a sequel to A Raisin in the Sun that details the complications of what followed – and someone has: Bruce Norris with Clybourne Park, the best play written by an American, in my estimation, in the twenty-first century. But O’Hara’s hammerhead interpolations don’t enhance Hansberry’s play; they violate it. The audience at the matinee I attended, no doubt convinced by the aggressiveness of the production that they were seeing something important, gave it the obligatory standing ovation.

Antonio Michael Woodard and André Braugher in A Human Being, of a Sort. (Photo:Jeremy Daniel.)

The other season opener at Williamstown, on the smaller Nikos stage, is also about race. A Human Being, of a Sort, a new play by Jonathan Payne, is based on a shocking true incident, the exhibition of a Congolese pygmy named Ota Benga at the Bronx Zoo in 1906, and it gives audiences a rare opportunity to watch another brilliant African American actor known mostly for his TV work, André Braugher, live on stage. (His last theatrical appearance was in The Whipping Man at City Center in 2011.) Braugher, a mesmerizing presence, plays Smokey, a poor man sent to a Tennessee prison farm for three years for stealing some apples from a street vendor and recommended to the zoo’s director, William Temple Hornaday (Frank Wood), for the job of caring for Ota Benga (Antonio Michael Woodard). If he satisfies his new employer, Smokey will prove that prison has rehabilitated him. If he fails to, he’ll be sent back to the prison farm.

I loved watching Braugher and several of the other actors: Keith Randolph Smith, Jeorge Bennett Watson and especially Sullivan Jones as three black ministers who mount a campaign against the exhibiting of Ota Benga in a cage. (Woodard’s and Wood’s performances are less impressive, and I can swear I’ve seen Wood give precisely this performance before, and more than once.) But A Human Being, of a Sort isn’t a play; it’s a collection of scenes in which actors talk at each other. And since you get half the point the moment you see the cage marked Primate House – that’s not meant as a criticism of the set by Lawrence E. Moten III – and the other half as soon as the moralistic, bureaucratic Hornaday interviews Smokey for the job (another black man in a cage, though this one isn’t visible), all the play can do for the duration is tell you over and over again what you’ve already figured out for yourself. It isn’t the fault of the director, Whitney White, but play goes nowhere. The epilogue, a flashback to the discovery of Ota Benga by a white hunter named Samuel Philips Vender (Matthew Saldivar, whom I liked very much as Mucha in Bernhardt/Hamlet, utterly wasted here), provides one more leaden irony to guide us out of the theatre.

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.

London Revivals, Part I: Political Morality Plays

Andrew Garfield and Nathan Stewart-Jarre in Angels in America: Millennium Approaches. (Photo: Helen Maybanks)

This piece contains reviews for the National Theatre's Angels in America, Donmar Warehouse's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, and Young Vic's Life of Galileo.

The hottest ticket in London this summer – aside from Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, just beginning its second year in the West End – is the National Theatre revival of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, directed by Marianne Elliott (War Horse, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) and starring Nathan Lane and Andrew Garfield. I couldn’t get up much enthusiasm about it, but then I’m the stubborn cuss who doesn’t like Angels in America. No one could say that I haven’t done due diligence with the play. I saw Part I: Millennium Approaches, in its original National Theatre production in 1992 (with Henry Goodman as Roy Cohn), and both Part I and Part II: Perestroika, on Broadway in 1993 (with Ron Liebman as Cohn, Stephen Spinella as Prior Walter, Marcia Gay Harden as Harper Pitt and Jeffrey Wright as Belize). I’ve also seen Mike Nichols’s 2003 HBO film version (with a cast including Al Pacino, Mary-Louise Parker, Meryl Streep, Emma Thompson, Patrick Wilson, and James Cromwell).

Kushner subtitled the work, which runs for seven hours and forty minutes in its complete form at the National, A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, and clearly one of the elements that critics and prize-winning committees and the vast number of theatre professors who regularly include it on the syllabi of modern drama classes respond to is the enormity of its ambitions. It’s intended to be a chronicle of the AIDS crisis from the point of view of the gay community; a coming-out play; an excoriation of the repressive spirit of Republican politics targeted specifically at Roy Cohn (played by Lane in this latest production), Joe McCarthy’s counsel and a Department of Justice prosecutor at the Rosenberg trial, and a closeted gay man who died of AIDS in 1986; and a comparative exploration of Mormonism, Protestantism and Judaism focusing on politics and sexuality at the end of the twentieth century, with a disquisition on race in America. Three of the characters are Mormon, three are Jewish, one is white Protestant and one is African American, and there are many others, the roles divided among a small cast whose efforts, in any production of the play, are equivalent in physical endurance alone to running a pair of marathons. In style Angels in America is alternately realist, surrealist and Brechtian, with interludes of satirical caricature.