Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: Five for One and One for All

Nathan Darrow in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. (Photo: T. Charles Erickson)

The Scotsman Robert Louis Stevenson wrote two of the most enchanting children’s adventure novels, Treasure Island and Kidnapped, as well as the ineffable A Child’s Garden of Verses, a collection of sixty-four poems for the young. But his most celebrated literary work is most emphatically not for kids. His 1886 novella Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in which a scientist obsessed with the human capacity for holding both good and evil within one personality devises a potion to isolate the two impulses and ends up turning himself into a monster – evil unchecked by restraint – shares with Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, written half a decade later, the distinction of being the quintessential portrait of the repressed Victorian Age. Jekyll and Hyde is, like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, a work of conceptual genius framed as a great horror story. And like Frankenstein it’s continued to excite the cultural imagination without interruption since its publication. It’s been filmed repeatedly, notably on three occasions: as a silent picture with John Barrymore in 1920; by Rouben Mamoulian in 1931 with a famous Oscar-winning performance by Fredric March; and in 1941 under Victor Fleming’s direction with Spencer Tracy in his most surprising – and possibly his finest – performance. (The Fleming version is the real gem; it’s one of the best literary adaptations in Hollywood history.) Stevenson’s narrative has generated countless replicas and parodies, the most delightful of which is surely Motor Mania (1950), the Disney cartoon in which Goofy plays the placid pedestrian Mr. Walker and his demonic alter ego Mr. Wheeler, whom Walker morphs into as soon as he gets behind the wheel. At this juncture, sad to say, probably most people know the Stevenson story through the wretched Frank Wildhorn-Leslie Bricusse-Steve Cuden musical.

Killers: Rope and Punch

Ephraim Birney and Daniel Neale in Rope. (Photo: Hartford Stage.)

The English playwright Patrick Hamilton – best known for Angel Street, the thriller that became the classic 1945 film Gaslight – wrote Rope in 1929, five years after the celebrated Chicago murder case that inspired it. Two well-heeled University of Chicago students, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, who were lovers, kidnapped and murdered Loeb’s fourteen-year-old cousin Bobby Franks to prove that they could commit the perfect crime – and that, as superior intellectual specimens, they had the right to operate outside the realm of accepted morality. (The irony was how badly these self-proclaimed Nietzschean Übermenschen bungled it.) The case, which their lawyer, Clarence Darrow, used as his most famous argument against capital punishment – he succeeded in getting his clients life sentences rather than the gallows they seemed fated for – has never entirely disappeared from popular culture: it has generated plays, films, a musical and one famous novelization, Meyer Levin’s Compulsion. In a 2018 review in this publication of the book The Leopold and Loeb Files: An Intimate Look at One of America’s Most Infamous Crimes, Devin McKinney conveys with poetic eloquence the enduring power of this murder, which has moved so many interpreters to theorize on the motivation of the killers but has remained an unsolvable mystery.

New Takes on Modernist Classics

Dani De Waal, Miles Anderson, and Mary VanArsdel in Heartbreak House. (Photo: T. Charles Erickson)

This piece contains reviews of Hartford Stage's Heartbreak House, Irish Repertory Theatre's The Emperor Jones, National Theatre's Hedda Gabler, and John Golden Theatre's A Doll’s House, Part 2.

When Andrew Long strides onstage in Heartbreak House at Hartford Stage as captain of industry Boss Mangan, made up and bewigged to look like a parody of Donald Trump, the production utterly loses its moorings. I guess that the director, Darko Tresnjak, couldn’t resist – but he should have. George Bernard Shaw’s “fantasia in the Russian manner on English themes,” as the playwright billed it, written during the First World War but not performed until 1919, is a one-of-a-kind high comedy: Shaw’s take on Chekhov transforms him in the process, but the experiment has an equally transformative effect on Shaw. The dialogue sounds like Shaw, the sly challenges to accepted social and political attitudes smack of Shaw, but the air of fatalistic melancholy (inspired by the fact of the war) is distinctly Chekhovian, and the result is a play unlike anything else Shaw ever wrote. Transposing a replica of Trump out of Saturday Night Live isn’t meant to transport the play to the present day (the actors are still wearing Edwardian outfits) but to make it relevant to contemporary audiences, as if one of the undisputed masterpieces of the modern theatre didn’t already offer enough to engage them. And the decision to Trump Mangan makes nonsense out of the proceedings. Every time he makes a comment about politics, the audience laughs – not because it’s witty or the actor has mined its comic potential but because we make the connection to Trump, even though the connection isn’t real but merely a red arrow inked by Tresnjak on the surface of Shaw’s text. Everything the character says and does, everything about the way he looks and the way he sounds, takes us out of the play.

Nut Cases: Rear Window and Choice

McKinley Belcher III and Kevin Bacon in Rear Window at Connecticut's Hartford Stage.

Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 Rear Window is gripping and playful in equal parts. It puts us solidly on the side of a voyeur, “Jeff” Jefferies (Jimmy Stewart), who – amusing himself while laid up with a broken leg by peering at his neighbors across the courtyard through a pair of binoculars – determines that one of them (Raymond Burr) has murdered his wife and disposed of the body somehow, and nearly gets himself and his girlfriend Lisa (Grace Kelly) killed trying to uncover the evidence. Jeff and Lisa and Jeff’s part-time nurse Stella (Thelma Ritter) follow the lives of the people across the way, watching them as if they were characters in a play. The set design by Joseph McMillan Johnson and Hal Pereira is like an advent calendar revealing the honeymooners, the quarreling couple, the struggling songwriter, the perky, exercising young woman with a raft of suitors, and Jeff’s favorite, an increasingly desperate spinster whom he nicknames Miss Lonelyhearts. So it’s easy to see why a playwright might want to convert the ingenious John Michael Hayes script (out of a Cornell Woolrich short story) into an actual stage play.

Renaissance Man: Andrew Vaughn's Pilot of a Steam Powered Aereo-plain

It’s knowing that your door is always open and your path is free to walk/That makes me tend to leave my sleeping bag rolled up and tucked behind your couch/And it’s knowing I’m not shackled by forgotten words and bonds and the ink stains that have dried upon some line/That keeps you on the back roads by the rivers of my memory/That keeps you ever gentle on my mind.

- Glen Campbell, "Gentle on My Mind."

Sure, it was Glen Campbell who made the song famous. But it was John Hartford who wrote those words and the music that made them memorable. He was the tall, lean banjo player with the grin and the easy-going personality that backed Glen up on Campbell’s summer replacement show. Hartford had recorded his own version of the song which Campbell heard on the radio and decided to try his luck with a cover version. In 1967, they both won Grammy Awards, two each; Hartford for writing and for his own recording, Campbell for Best Country & Western Recording and Best Male C&W Vocal Performance. Hartford always said that “Gentle On My Mind” bought his freedom. He was more than a one hit wonder though, and not because he wrote dozens of hit songs. Hartford was a renaissance man in his own way; musician, songwriter, steamboat pilot, author, artist, disc jockey, dancer, folklorist, historian, and probably a handful of things we don’t know about. He had a comic side, although writing comic sketches for the Smothers Brothers wasn’t his forte, they kept him around for his razor sharp wit.

The Flamingo Kid: Bare Bones

Alex Wyse, Jimmy Brewer, and Ben Fankhauser in The Flamingo Kid. (Photo: T. Charles Rickson)

In The Flamingo Kid, the new musical premiering at Hartford Stage, with music by Scott Frankel and lyrics by Robert L. Freedman, an impressionable Brooklyn teenager named Jeffrey Winnick (Jimmy Brewer) spends the summer before college – the summer of 1962 – as a cabana boy at a posh Long Island club. There he loses his virginity to a beautiful, grounded UCLA freshman (Samantha Massell) and gets swept up in the lifestyle and values of her uncle, a car salesman named Phil Brody (Marc Kudisch) who is legendary for his finesse at gin rummy. The book, like the screenplay of the 1984 Gary Marshall movie on which it’s based, pits Jeffrey’s real father, Arthur (Adam Heller), an honest, industrious plumber who wants his son to get a college education, against Brody, who is all flash and offers the kid the appeal of an entrée into the high life – though it’s clear to us that, to Phil’s brittle, unhappy wife Phyllis (Lesli Margherita) and the rest of the El Flamingo clientele, Jeffrey will always be “the cabana boy” (whose shapely ass the sex-starved women are forever ogling or pinching). The material, set firmly in the world of New York Jews, is all about class – and it’s rigged. We don’t have to be told that Phil cheats at cards just as he cheats on his wife, and that Jeffrey, who’s a good kid, will ultimately expose him (while he slaughters him in a legit card game) and choose his father’s square, unvarnished life over Brody’s superficial one, which is both morally and emotionally vacuous. If the seductive car salesman weren’t such a transparent phony and Jeffrey’s parents (his mother, Ruth, is played by Liz Larsen) weren’t so solid and decent – if we could sympathize with the boy’s restlessness with his Brooklyn roots and his fascination with Brody – then the musical (and the movie) might be more than a pat fable. But even Karla, Jeffrey’s girl, is drawn to the Winnicks the moment she meets them and appalled at his insensitive treatment of them.

Tennessee Williams’s Swan Song: The Two-Character Play

In its current form – that is, as it’s being performed by Amanda Plummer and Brad Dourif at New World Stages in New York – The Two-Character Play was the last work Tennessee Williams produced; it opened in 1975. But he struggled with it for nearly a decade; quite different versions of it appeared in London in 1967, in Chicago in 1971 (under the title Out Cry), and in New York in 1973. It’s a meta-theatrical psychodrama about a pair of co-dependent siblings, Felice and Clare, down-on-their-luck actors who tour around the country in repertory. As the play begins they find themselves in some dilapidated theatre on their own (their staff having quit on them after weeks, or perhaps months, of working without salary), performing a piece, written by Felice, simply called The Two-Character Play. The play within the play is also about a brother and sister, also named Felice and Clare, agoraphobic recluses living in their childhood home in the South after their parents’ violent deaths.

The Two-Character Play, which shows the heavy influence of Beckett and especially of Waiting for Godot, certainly sounds like Williams, but it isn’t very good; it’s both rambling and strained. You don’t get drawn into the hermetic world of Clare and Felice the way you get pulled into the run-down motel-room existence of The Man and The Woman in Talk to Me Like the Rain and Let Me Listen, another two-hander and one of the playwright’s early one-acts. Here we hardly need to be told that the play is a metaphor for life or that at the end, after the (invisible) audience has departed, the characters are going to be locked in the theatre, holding onto each other for dear life as the last special fades. Yet you can understand why a couple of adventurous, unconventional actors like Dourif and Plummer (who proposed the project to Dourif) would want to explore it, and it’s worth seeing the production, which Gene David Kirk directed, for their performances.

Two Left Feet: An Opening in Time

Deborah Hedwall and Patrick Clear in An Opening in Time at the Hartford Stage. (Photo: T. Charles Erickson)

Christopher Shinn’s An Opening in Time is about a middle-aged man and woman, once colleagues on the faculty of a high school, who nearly became lovers when both were married to other people. Now widowed, Anne returns to the town she once lived in, partly to be closer to the son who has stopped talking to her but mainly, it turns out, in the hope that she can rekindle the spark of romance spark with Ron, who is now divorced. Shinn has spoken about the influence of The Winter’s Tale on the writing of this play, and certainly the idea links up with Shakespeare’s theme of interruption and delay and his double vision of time as both thief and healer. But An Opening in Time, which is having its premiere at Hartford Stage in a clunky production by Oliver Butler, is more interesting to contemplate than to watch. I don’t know Shinn’s other plays (Dying City garnered some notice) but this one is crippled by banality and by dramaturgical clumsiness. The characters have to keep explaining themselves to each other because the writing doesn’t develop them dramatically.

Murder on the Orient Express on Stage: Riding High

David Pittu, Leigh Ann Larkin, and Evan Zes in Hartford Stage's Murder on the Orient Express. (Photo: T. Charles Erickson)

What two sets of filmmakers (screenwriter Paul Dehn and director Sidney Lumet in 1974, screenwriter Michael Green and director Kenneth Branagh in 2017) couldn’t manage to do – turn Agatha Christie’s 1934 mystery Murder on the Orient Express into entertaining dramatic stuff – playwright Ken Ludwig and director Emily Mann have managed with seeming effortlessness. The production from the McCarter Theatre Center (where Mann is artistic director), currently playing at Hartford Stage, is charming, funny and stylish. The veteran Ludwig, whose long list of credits includes Lend Me a Tenor and the book for Crazy for You, the Gershwin musical that began life as Girl Crazy, has taken a light, parodic approach to the famous Christie material, her tenth Hercule Poirot adventure – which begins when the eccentric Belgian detective, with the aid of his train-line director friend M. Bouc, cadges a last-minute seat on board the unexpectedly crowded Orient Express from Aleppo to Istanbul. The first night of the trip, an American gangster calling himself Samuel Ratchett is stabbed to death in his compartment. The next day, while Poirot is interrogating the other first-class passengers and the conductor, the train is immobilized by a snowstorm – and in both the Lumet and the Branagh versions, the movie follows suit.

The Wolves and The Engagement Party: Young Talents

The cast of The Wolves. (Photo: Mark S. Howard)

Sarah DeLappe’s The Wolves is set among the members of a teenage girls’ soccer team during a series of pre-game warm-ups. The play’s off-Broadway run in New York two seasons ago was sold out, and now it’s opening all over the country to enthusiastic audiences; I caught the production at Boston’s Lyric Stage. DeLappe has a finely tuned ear for the chatter of adolescent girls – the mix of sincerity and sarcasm, the accidental humor, the push and pull of their discussion of world events, the way their parents’ values and opinions season their own but don’t bury their own tentative perceptions of the world around them, the tension between blasé worldliness and naiveté when it comes to sex. And she knows just how to use language to differentiate them, though the playbill identifies them only by their numbers, and it’s not until the last scene that we learn a couple of their names, when we finally meet one of the soccer moms. She’s the first grown-up we see. The coach, Neil, is in the stands, but he seems to be hungover all the time – at least, that’s how the girls describe him – and in any case he’s very hands-off. So what little coaching they get is from their captain, #25 (Valerie Terranova), and it’s generic; you can feel her reluctance to take on the role of an authority figure.

Ghosts: The Body of an American and Our Mother’s Brief Affair

Michael Cumpsty and Michael Crane in The Body of an American, at the Hartford Stage. (Photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Dan O’Brien’s The Body of an American, currently playing at Hartford Stage, has already been performed at Portland Center Stage in Oregon and at the Gate in London; it’s won four different playwriting awards and is bound for New York. Yet it still feels like a work in progress – like ideas for a play that O’Brien hasn’t worked through. He based it on a series of interactions with journalist Paul Watson, first on e-mail and then during a visit he made to Watson in the Arctic in 2010. Watson reported on war zones throughout the world for The Toronto Star and The Los Angeles Times and early in his career, in 1994, won the Pulitzer Prize for a photograph he took of a dead American soldier, Sergeant William Cleveland, in Mogadishu. (He retired from The Toronto Star last year.) But the play, a two-hander, can’t make up its mind whether it’s about Watson (Michael Cumpsty) or about O’Brien (Michael Crane) writing a play about Watson. The first seems an eminently worthy idea, the second a self-indulgence – especially since, for all of Dan’s claim of identification with Paul, they don’t seem remotely comparable. Considering what Paul has seen in Somalia, Rwanda, Iraq and other places, Dan’s stories about his alienation from his family and his brother’s depression, and in particular his feelings of inferiority in Paul’s presence, his sense that he’s somehow been bested by this reporter, come across as self-aggrandizing and distasteful.

I Could Go On Singing: Giant and A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder

Brian D’Arcy James and Kate Baldwin in Giant at the Public Theater in New York (Photo by Sara Krulwich)

Considering that Show Boat is one of the most phenomenally successful musicals in history, it’s surprising that it’s taken nearly a century for someone to get around to adapting another Edna Ferber novel to the musical stage. Like Show Boat, Giant, which she wrote in 1952, is a vivid soap opera that sprawls across two generations. Ferber has been out of fashion for a long time (though her books are still highly readable); most people who are familiar with the material would know it through the famous 1956 movie version, directed by George Stevens and starring Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson and, in a posthumous performance, James Dean. The giant of the title is Texas, where Jordan “Bick” Benedict (Hudson) brings his Virginia bride Leslie (Taylor) to live on his enormous ranch, Reata: he has to get used to her independent-mindedness and her social conscience and she has to get used to the ways of Texas, which is crass, self-adoring, patriarchal and racist.

The movie, which runs on for three hours and twenty minutes, is uneven in every conceivable way: visually, in the storytelling and in the acting. Stevens was past his prime when he made it; he’d begun to equate length and subject matter with prestige, in that distinctly Hollywood way. (Giant has approximately the same running time as a double bill of his two best pictures, Alice Adams and the Astaire-Rogers classic Swing Time, both of which he made in the mid-thirties.) Still, like the book on which it’s based, Giant is very absorbing, and even though it’s a mammoth Oscar-boosting extravaganza, it doesn’t try very hard to convince you that it’s an important drama. By contrast, the musical, which began at the Dallas Theater Center and made it to New York’s Public Theater last month, is more inflated than the loudest-crowing, most self-righteous Texan in its cast of characters. Moreover, it’s something that you could never call a single one of those Texans: it’s a twenty-four-carat phony.

Seder: Night of Revelations

The cast of Seder at the Hartford Stage. (Photo: T. Charles Erickson)

Sarah Gancher’s new play Seder (Hartford Stage, Hartford, CT) is dense and complicated – and I mean that as a compliment. Set in Budapest in 2002, it strives to find a way to dramatize the entire blighted history of Hungary from the Holocaust through the country’s reincarnation as a Communist state after the Second World War and its wholesale rejection of that ideology after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The protagonist is Erzsike (Mia Dillon, in a fine, restrained performance), a Jew who survived the war in Budapest but lost her father in a concentration camp. In the post-war days, the only job she could land was as a janitor at 60 Andrássy Street, which had been the headquarters of the notorious Arrow Cross – the Hungarian Nazis – and where the AVO, the secret police of the Hungarian Communist Party, were now interrogating people in the basement using the same instruments of torture. Her boss, Attila (played by Jeremy Webb in flashbacks), promoted her to secretary and began a long affair with her; she permitted it because his generosity helped her to support her family – a co-worker, Tamás (Liam Craig), whose marriage to her Attila himself arranged when she got pregnant, and her three children. She has long kept the secret that her eldest, Judit (Birgit Huppuch), who adored Tamás, was not his daughter. Judit has always resented her mother for cuckolding Tamás and, she thinks, driving him to drink. At nineteen, after the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc, she left home. And though she maintains a relationship with her sister Margit (Julia Sirna-Frest), who still lives with their mother, and her brother Laci (Dustin Ingram), she does not speak to Erzsike, who is agonized by their estrangement, and has forbidden them to tell her anything about the life she’s led since she walked out. As it happens, she’s allied herself with the center-right party Fidesz, which is working to eliminate all remnants of Hungarian Communism. She is on the board of the recently opened House of Terror Museum in the building at 60 Andássy, which Erzsike visits in the opening scene – only to discover her own photo in the “gallery of murderers.” Her own daughter hung it there: it’s her conviction that no one who worked in that environment during the AVO presence could possibly have failed to know what atrocities were being perpetrated in its basement, and so even the secretaries and janitors were complicit.

Wounded Souls at the Edge of a Rain Forest: The Night of the Iguana at ART

Amanda Plummer, Dana Delany and Bill Heck (centre) in The Night of the Iguana at the American Repertory Theatre.
(Photo: Gretjen Helene Photography)

Amanda Plummer gives a wondrous performance as Hannah Jelkes in Michael Wilson’s new production of The Night of the Iguana at American Repertory Theatre. In Tennessee Williams’ 1961 play, set in a hotel at the edge of a Mexican rain forest in 1940, the protagonist, T. Lawrence Shannon – a southerner and one-time Episcopalian minister, now a tour guide for an American company – describes Hannah as a “thin-standing-up-Buddha.” In fact, she’s a Nantucket spinster who travels with her nearly-centenarian grandfather, a poet. He recites and she paints portraits; that’s how they live, traveling from hotel to hotel, though when they appear at the Costa Verde, run by Maxine Faulk, the recent widow of Shannon’s old friend and fishing buddy Fred, they’re distinctly on their uppers. Hannah possesses the sort of philosophical endurance that is indistinguishable from grace, though, she assures Shannon, who has worked himself up to a fine state of hysteria – he’s slept with a teenage girl on this latest tour, of Texan Baptists, and its supervisor, Miss Fellowes, is determined to get him fired – her serenity has come at a steep price. He is trailed by his “spook”; she fought a tense battle with her “blue devil,” defeating him at last because, she explains, she couldn’t afford to lose. Shannon finds an unexpected companion in Hannah, who is almost supernal in her perceptions and utterly non-judgmental of other people. (“Nothing human disgusts me,” she asserts.)

Plummer has been one of my favorite actresses since Lamont Johnson’s lovely, too-little-known 1981 western Cattle Annie and Little Britches, where, at twenty-four, she and sixteen-year-old Diane Lane played a pair of orphans who join Burt Lancaster’s gang of outlaws. Around the same time she took up the role of Jo in a rare New York stage revival of Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey, and in both projects she demonstrated a poetic ferocity and gallantry that weren’t quite like anything I’d seen before. (God knows she came by her talent honestly – she’s the daughter of Christopher Plummer and Tammy Grimes.) Those qualities ought to be a perfect match for Tennessee Williams’ heroines, but the first time I saw her attempt one, Alma in Summer and Smoke at Hartford Stage in 2006 (under Wilson’s direction), oddly enough she couldn’t seem to get her mouth around the poetry – at least not until the epilogue, where Alma, once the eccentric of her small southern town, has become its scandal, picking up salesmen in the square. Plummer had been off track since the opening scene, but in that last five minutes she was exquisite; I couldn’t help thinking it a pity that she couldn’t start her performance all over again. But she did some fantastic work opposite Brad Dourif in Williams’ The Two-Character Play four years ago, and her line readings in this Night of the Iguana are quicksilver and often very funny and always, always unpredictable. And she’s radiant – a kind of earth angel with a sometimes unsettlingly level gaze.

Three Musicals: My Paris, Anastasia, Presto Change-O

Mara Davi and Bobby Steggert in My Paris, at New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre.. (Photo: T. Charles Erickson)

The music in My Paris is breezy but it gives off the unmistakable whiff of melancholy and regret. It’s on the cusp of light jazz, honky-tonk and folk; it’s reminiscent of the sort of thing Django Reinhardt used to play in Paris in the twenties and thirties, but most of the time it sounds like the music chanteurs like Charles Aznavour and Charles Trenet are famous for. That’s no surprise, since Aznavour himself wrote the score, and even though Jason Robert Brown’s translations saddle it with banalities, sometimes of the self-help brand (one second-act number is called “You Do It for You”), the music is a good enough reason to check out this new musical about Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec at New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre. (It was workshopped at the Goodspeed Opera House last summer.)

Another Time, Another Planet: Detroit ‘67

Johnny Ramey and Myxolydia Tyler in Detroit '67. (Photo:  T. Charles Erickson)

Detroit ’67 (at Hartford Stage) is part of Dominique Morriseau’s ambitious trilogy about African American life in Detroit; the others, Paradise Blue and Skeleton Crew, are about, respectively, the jazz scene in the post-war years and the decimation of the auto industry after the economic breakdown of 2008. Detroit ’67, of course, depicts the city at its nadir, during the riots and the police violence that reinforced the racial line and shocked the nation. Morrisseau’s instinct for dramatic material is unerring, but having seen productions of all three plays, I have to say that only one, Skeleton Crew, works. She doesn’t have any feeling for either of the two historical periods she’s chosen for the other two: the characters are two-dimensional and you don’t believe in them as representatives of their eras. The muumuus that the costume designer, Dede M. Ayite, has put on one of the two women in the cast, Nyahale Allie, her Afro wig and the Motown soundtrack tell us this is supposed to be 1967, but I didn’t buy it for a moment.

Marines in Overdrive: Queens for a Year

Jamie Rezanour and Sarah Nicole Deaver in Queens for a Year at Connecticut's Hartford Stage. (Photo by T. Charles Erickson)

Queens for a Year, the ironic title of T.D. Mitchell’s new play at Hartford Stage, is a pejorative Marine Corps term for female Marines serving their year-long overseas tour: the idea is that because women are so rare in the service, they get special treatment. The play, set in 2007 and inspired by the case in that year of Lance Corporal Maria Lauterbach, who was murdered by a male Marine she accused of raping her, reveals the true situation. At one point PFC Amanda Lewis (Sarah Nicole Deaver) – whose mentor, 2nd Lieutenant Molly Salinas (Vanessa R. Butler), has taken her home to her family to remove them both from the officer Lewis has made a complaint against – explains that all female Marines are relegated by the men in the Corps to one of three categories. Any woman who “fraternizes” willingly or is forced to have sex is a slut; if she refuses and manages somehow to stand her ground, she’s either a dyke or a bitch. If she’s raped and files a complaint, then the brass consider her a problem and look around for reasons to disregard it: her sexual history, her record of using alcohol, the impreciseness of her narrative. (Lewis’ word is doubted because she lost her virginity at fourteen and because she didn’t notice whether the penis that was being shoved down her throat was circumcised or not.) Female officers are no more likely than male ones to stand in her corner: the captain (Jamie Rezanour) Salinas consults for advice warns her to keep her distance from Lewis because associating with her is sure to undermine Molly’s chances for promotion.

Shaw and Stratford Festivals: Twentieth-Century Classics

Julia Course and Martin Happer in Heartbreak House. (Photo: David Cooper.)

The allegorical high comedy Heartbreak House is one of George Bernard Shaw’s strangest plays; it is also, in my estimation, his greatest. (For me the other contenders are Man and Superman and Major Barbara, though I don’t pretend to have seen or read them all: he wrote more than sixty.) Set in a country house in Sussex constructed by its patriarch, Captain Shotover, in the shape of a ship, it brings together a disparate set of characters, a few of whom are related to one or another of the inhabitants but they haven’t seen each other in so long that they don’t always recognize each other. Toward the end some unidentified foreign power begins to bomb England; two of the characters are killed in the midst of attempting to protect themselves by hiding in a storage shed. And though the bombardiers move on, obviously the war goes on and for all we know it will signal the doom of civilization. In the final minutes of the drama Shaw’s characters are as witty as ever, and the mood isn’t Wagnerian, yet the play is a Götterdämmerung. Written in 1916 and 1917 and first produced in 1920, it is the playwright’s response to the First World War – the Great War, as it was called until 1939. The work it feels closest to is a masterpiece from two decades later, Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game, which was released on the cusp of the war that made that descriptor obsolete. Renoir’s movie doesn’t end in an apocalypse, but the tragedy at its conclusion, the senseless murder of a national hero – a case of mistaken identity – feels like an inevitable final act of carelessness and self-involvement that embodies up the attitude of the French nouveaux riches, the new aristocracy that has replaced the old, inherited one, the death of which Renoir had chronicled two years earlier in Grand Illusion.

Romance and Regret: The Age of Innocence

The cast of Douglas McGrath's adaptation of The Age of Innocence (Photo: T. Charles Erickson).

I returned to Edith Wharton’s 1920 novel The Age of Innocence before seeing Douglas McGrath’s stage adaptation, the latest collaboration between Hartford Stage and the McCarter Theatre Center, currently playing a run in the former space. It’s a diverting read but it’s never been one of my favorites. Wharton retraces Henry James’s steps and, coming seventeen years after The Ambassadors, her book feels shallow and a little obvious. In The Ambassadors the characters’ motivations are concealed behind exquisite screens that keep shifting, and you have to catch those motivations during the shifts, through the minute shafts of light that vanish moments later; his feat is to raise our stake in discovering the truth of these human interactions so high that the epiphany at the end, which is devastating for the hero, Strether, is devastating for us as well. Wharton also builds her novel around a blind American, half-stiffened by his upbringing, who is seduced and altered by the whiff of European exoticism and mystique, in the form of Ellen Olenska, an émigré New Yorker who returns home on the lam from a disastrous marriage to a count. But Wharton spells everything out for us. And her protagonist Newland Archer, who is about to marry the Countess Olenska’s cousin May Welland, doesn’t synthesize our own conflicted feelings, the way Strether does; he comes across as a boob.  When Ellen falls in love with him, you wonder what on earth she could see in him.

White Christmas and A Christmas Carol: Second-Tier Holiday Cheer

Clyde Alves, Jonalyn Saxer, and the company of White Christmas. (Photo: Diane Sobolewski.)

I loved the stage transcription of Irving Berlin’s 1954 Christmas movie musical White Christmas when it came through Boston in 2006 and again in 2015, so I was looking forward to seeing the Goodspeed Opera House version that opened last week, directed by Hunter Foster. But except for Kelli Barclay’s dance numbers it’s a letdown. The major problem is the acting, which is somehow simultaneously flat and overstated. The book by David Ives and Paul Blake, adapted from the screenplay by Norman Krasna, Norman Panama and Melvin Frank has a fairly complicated plot involving the efforts of Bob Wallace and Phil Davis, a pair of Broadway song and dance men, World War II veterans who fought under a beloved general, to round up their unit in order to pay tribute to him at Christmas when they discover he’s running a ramshackle Vermont inn – and to mount a revue there to put the place in the black. Still, it’s light and casual. The jokes aren’t inspired, but on both tours the clowning had the low-key pleasures of a good old-fashioned TV variety special from the decade of the film. And the characters were all satisfyingly human, so you felt drawn in. At the Goodspeed, the humor feels warmed-over and then juiced up so that you’re doubly aware that what you’re not hearing isn’t fresh. The vaudeville touches make you groan, especially a running gag involving a pair of chorus girls who keep trying to chase Phil (Clyde Alves) down at the worst possible moments, when he’s trying to woo Judy Haynes (Jonalyn Saxer), half of a sister act he and Bob discover in a New York club and end up hiring for the show. And the actors aren’t strong enough to make their characters convincing, including Omar Lopez-Cepero as Bob, Lauren Nicole Chapman as Betty, the other Haynes sister, who falls for him until a misguided rumor makes her think he’s a rat, and Bruce Sabath as General Waverly. (In the movie Bob and Betty were played by Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney, Phil and Judy by Danny Kaye and Vera-Ellen, and the general by Dean Jagger.)