The Herbal Bed & Golden Child

...Andrew Kwong (Randall Duk Kim) maintains an uneasy connubial equilibrium with three women: the formidable First Wife (Tsai Chin), an aging opium addict with a wry sense of humor...

...How do you know when you're done...

...As if taking their cue from rampant vegetation, tropes of sickness and healing proliferate through the script...

...In case we are too dense Commonweal | 9 June 5,1998 to understand the central theme, for example, First Wife intones: "When change comes, it comes like fire no one knows who will live and who will be lost...

...In the New York production (directed, as in London, by Michael Attenborough) the garden's rainforest-green leaves clustered thick as kudzu around a pavilion's wooden frame, providing an ironically sylvan setting for the skirmishes and illicit meetings of Act I. (The set was designed by David Jenkins...

...That movie biography needed a master of spectacle like David Lean at its helm...

...Look...

...She is about to commit perjury in diocesan court...

...Susanna herself should provide the key to the entire drama...

...his heroine cries, seeing complexity where the male establishment has ordained the stark duality of truth and falsehood...

...Kwong's travels have introduced him to Verdi, cuckoo clocks, waffle irons, and other Western ways, including Christianity--a religion that, to his mind, has one salient advantage: monogamy...

...Kramer videotapes the heist, while the other three make sarcastic comments--recorded, natch, on the tape...

...Veiling insults in courtesy, the women vie for Kwong's attention in and around their compound's three golden pagodas (Tony Straiges designed the elegantly simple set...

...Anybody who's watched the show knows that these four characters are as irrecoverably selfish as the worst--which means the most u n f o r g e t t a b l e - - o f Jane Commonweal ~ 0 June 5, 1998...

...Whelan is just as cagey when it comes to the other characters' beliefs...

...The supporting cast (including author McCabe as the town drunk) is uniformly apt but, though Jordan gets some nice moments from Eamon Owens as Francie, this novice actor can't deliver all the shadings the character needs to engage us completely...

...Seinfeld" itself--to NBC...

...Later that day, when my wife picked me up, she told me both her classes reached the same consensus...

...Therefore, the girl's rebellious love for Marius the revolutionary seems psychologically inevitable...

...For instance, Yglesias manages to s u g g e s t t h a t both Valjean's brutalization in prison and his spiritual reformation turned him into n The Herbal Bed, Peter WheI l a n ' s ponderous drama about morality and Shakespeare's daughter, a serving girl collapses from vertigo in Worcester Cathedral...

...Nothing else does...

...Whether lifting the cart off the crushed worker (and Neeson is the only star actor around, aside from Arnold Schwarzenegger, who looks physically capable of that feat) or tenderly watching his adopted daughter brush her hair, this Irish actor has captured Hugo's saintly brute to perfection...

...the household spirals toward tragedy...

...The supporting cast is fine, especially Peter Vaughan, who makes the bishop's loving nature almost palpable...

...It seems that if a director can get Hugo's big set pieces right (the bishop's candlesticks, the overnight rescue of Cosette, the death agony of Fantine, the escape through the sewers, the final confrontation of Valjean and Javert), whatever is done to the connective tissue in between tends to fade from memory...

...And when we got home and checked out the newspaper, we found that the Associated Press guy panned it too: unfocused, rambling, not funny...

...But the clumsily staged scenes that frame the body of the play put a hokey, optimistic spin on things...

...The intense passions of otherwise inscrutable characters, expressed in hyperventilating rhetoric, are often ludicrous, as when Susanna, dressed in her nightgown, falls to her knees in the garden, comparing the stars to "a thousand eyes...

...Anyhow...

...With its self-conscious gravity, the moment is typical of The Herbal Bed, a thoughtful but entirely humorless work that guttered briefly on Broadway this spring, before indifference snuffed it out...

...Although I sense that August didn't have the funds necessary for all the spectacle he had in mind, the costumes are magnificent...

...But the religious conficts in The Herbal Bed are designed for appearance only, like an artificial Romantic garden shaped, through painstaking labor, to seem the work of nature...

...How high is Worcester Cathedral...

...It is Hugo: poet, populist, and future powerhouse of the West End, Broadway and Hollywood...

...The key to playing Valjean is to suggest fathomless goodness within invincible animality, as if the soul of Francis of Assisi had transmigrated into the body of a Kodiak bear...

...Bille August has never been the most limber of directors even at his best (Pelle the Conqueror...

...In fact, in one scene a mother superior's headgear almost upstages Liam Neeson...

...As his policeman-nemesis, Geoffrey Rush is an electric current skimpily fleshed, the perfect foil for Neeson's brawny humanity...

...Were the Golden Child more subtle with its meaning, and The Herbal Bed more honest with its characters, the phoenix might struggle up more convincingly from the ashes...

...Or should we, rather, focus on God's curative powers: the garden as a "demonstration of his strength...

...It sucked," said a girl in the front row, and two hundred heads nodded in agreement...

...But which is the real Susanna--the selfless physician's assistant, cleaning vials with vinegar, or the accomplished liar...

...Whelan's thematic lattice cannot support the emotion piled on it...

...And here I am, your trusted media wallah, master of my domain, to tell you that you're wrong, wrong, wrong...

...The production, directed by James Lapine, features some shrewd character portraits--Chin's majestic, wisecracking First Wife, in particular--but it suffers from Hwang's insistence on vocalizing the subtext...

...something of a sexual puritan and, consequently, a rather stifling father to Cosette...

...The play never hints at truths when it can wallop the audience over the head with them...

...They're going to buy the show...

...As the last episode begins, Jerry gets a phone call from NBC in Hollywood...

...How closely does any society hold its faith...

...Instead, the play remains a hodgepodge of none-too-subtle images welded to abstraction--like a John Donne poem gone wrong...

...ike Whelan's play, Golden Child depicts the anguish people feel when forced to choose between conflicting values...

...Worst of all is Jordan's failure to dramatize the destruction of Francie's most cherished dream: the blissful honeymoon his parents supposedly enjoyed at a seaside hotel...

...Her courageous, compassionate vision of the universe ("Hate is the sin, not love...

...And doesn't it have to be the same for a sitcom of the quality of "Seinfeld," which was essentially a nine-year, episodic comedy of manners (albeit bad manners)--in other words one of the best written, best acted...

...Guilty in intent but not in fact, the spirited Susanna (Laila Robins) struggles to Commonweal | 8 June 5, 1998 persuade her tortured, deeply religious lover Rafe Smith (Armand Schultz) to lie, committing a small wrong for the sake of a greater good...

...The Herbal Bed--like another recent Broadway o f f e r i n g , David Henry Hwang's Golden Child--uses religious belief as a measuring rod to gauge its characters' alienation from the culture that surrounds them...

...Strolling through town, Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer witness a guy being robbed, at gunpoint, in clear daylight...

...But before Jerry and George leave, NBC--here's the only hard-to-buy departure from reality--grants them a trip in a private jet anywhere in the world with Kramer and Elaine...

...Since early on in the series, Jerry and George Costanza--George, the Jim Thorpe of fecklessness--have been trying to sell their idea for a "show about nothing"--i.e...

...Should we see illness as a punishment from God, wonders the amiable, puttering Bishop of Worcester (Herb Foster...

...Letting the Bard lurk behind the scenes, a ghostly, invisible presence, Whelan fleshes out this anecdote to ask a solemn question: Does duty to one's conscience outweigh a duty to others...

...Rafael Yglesias's script is a Reader's Digest Abridged Books skim-job that soon turns into Evelyn Wood speedreading...

...And while Jones gave the production's best performance as the steely-eyed Vicar, the character remained a cartoon villain, a foil for the improbably visionary Susanna...

...Respect for the past, once a form of ancestor worship, has become a source of secular identity in an inconstant universe...

...It marks a return to form for Neil Jordan after the conventional bustle and posturing of Michael Collins...

...How much better than Cedric Hardwicke's desiccated rectitude in the 1935 version...

...The fun of writing a novel is writing the first sentence and the most herniatingly difficult part, apart from the stuff in the middle, is writing the last sentence...

...But the real hero of this film is neither Yglesias nor August nor the costume designer nor even Neeson or Rush...

...Kramer's stomping causes some malfunction in the plane, which is forced to land for minor repairs in a small Massachusetts town...

...Kwong invites disaster when he forces his wives to accept baptism and stop offering ceremonial gifts to their ancestors...

...The Herbal Bed, by projecting the forces of change onto the personality of an inspired idealist, suggests the same...

...provides the p l a y ' s ultimate healing force...

...It's like trying to herd gerbils...

...But the flame of change, burning through the household, does not entirely destroy the old truths...

...o, what did you think about the last episode of "Seinfeld...

...So here's what Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, the original writers, did, and it's brilliant...

...I asked my class on the morning of May 15...

...But it doesn't matter...

...As realized by the glamorous Robins, whose every word might have been filtered through Harvey's Bristol Cream, Susanna often appeared downright shifty...

...At stake is the career of her husband, the brilliant physician John Hall (Tuck Milligan) who wages war against disease using the plants in his garden--the eponymous herbal bed...

...presiding as grand inquisitor over the Act II trial, he harangues Susanna on the century's spiritual sickness: "the moral void of our times--the retreat from grace...

...Yet the writing doesn't completely lack subtlety...

...Jordan is something else: a bad boy with a heart, a purveyor of shock who can also tug at heartstrings...

...Honesty is not one thing...

...Jerry and George are to leave New York for California, to make the idea of the TV show, "Jerry," the reality of the TV show, "Seinfeld" (got a little shiver of systematic self-consciousness up your spine, there...

...Through Susanna, Whelan has given the work a definite feminist slant...

...So I have to bet that if you watched it you agree with our students and the A.P...

...Rafe Smith and John Hall are apparently die-hard Puritans...

...Now comes the genius...

...The play alludes frequently to the conflicts of the Reformation...

...Seems there's a new Massachusetts law, making anyone who witnesses a crime without trying to assist the victim liable to up to five years in prison...

...most consistent TV novels in the history of the technology...

...But the days of traditionalism are over...

...Golden Child underwhelmed critics when it originally opened in 1996, and, though since rewritten, remains seriously flawed (although it did win three Tony nominations, including one for best play...

...And who can blame her...

...But after the plane takes off Kramer begins stomping madly about the cabin...

...ife is unfair, especially at the movies...

...His work here ranges from the cut-rate (the sewer escape needs more murk and more labyrinthine perilousness) to the first-rate (Javert's suicide truly shocks, and if I hadn't been familiar with the story, would have caught me off guard...

...Literary critics and psychologists love to talk about "closure," but really getting there is tough...

...the duplicitous, resentful Second Wife (Kim Miyori...

...The current version of Les Misdrables is nowhere near as inventive an adaptation as The Butcher Boy, nor does it cram as much of Hugo's novel within its two-and-a-quarter hour running time as the 1935 Hollywood entry (which was twenty-five minutes shorter...

...And as a result, her conviction that "love's kingdom has its own laws" seemed simply an expression of rebellion against a society that kept her from being a doctor in her own right...

...and the gentle Third Wife (Ming-Na Wen), Kwong's true love...

...The sinister Vicar General (Simon Jones), a zealous Puritan (who in the Broadway production looked like an oversized chess piece, with a lace ruff in choke hold round his neck) would rather ignore the body's welfare altogether...

...The Herbal Bed, which had a successful run in England before its luckless journey westward, is based on a historical event: a lawsuit brought, and won, by Susanna Shakespeare Hall against an acquaintance who had publicly accused her of adultery...

...The play asks us to view the incident as a tinge of historical color: It is the summer of 1613, when Shakespeare was dying, when cathedrals were skyscrapers, and people were not embarrassed to talk about God...

...To the clash of Peking opera cymbals, the wizened ghost of Kwong's fundamentalist Christian daughter (Julyana Soelistyo) appears to her agnostic son (a role doubled by Kim), and persuades him of the importance of family...

...A lyrical dream sequence was called for to show how much this fantasy mattered but, surprisingly, the director treats it perfunctorily...

...Inferior in artistry to The B u tcher Boy, Les Misdra bles nevertheless grips just as hard...

...They choose Paris...

...The director has revved the boy up for every scene and, in a film as hectic as this one, the childish shouting grows tiresome...

...As his overtures to a jovial Anglican missionary (John Horton) make Kwong's intention to convert--and choose just one spouse---increasingly plain, the wives revolt, scheme, plead, and Westernize in varying degrees...

...Otherwise, The Butcher Boy succeeds as a piteous comedy of horrors...

...And Hwang (best known as the author of M. Butterfly) also works thwarted love, grudges, and low-key intrigue into a historical setting: in this case, Southeast China in 1918-1919...

...Virginia Woolf once observed that there are three rules for writing a novel, but, unfortunately, nobody knows what they are...

...Such interplay of metaphor and idea might make The Herbal Bed a powerful meditation on the nature of spiritual health...

...Not that there's anything wrong with that...

...Claire Danes pleases as Cosette, and Uma Thurman has a good time, as all beautiful actresses do, making herself look tubercular and ugly...

...He's got water in his ear, you see, because he's just come from the beach, and....(Do you know how hard it is getting any "Seinfeld" plot down in properly grammatical, subordinated sentences...

...But--unless we count Smith's self-recriminations after bowing to the Bishop--we never learn what faith means to either of these men...

...And the quartet is then busted by the cops...

...And when she looks up at the building's soaring heights, she thinks she sees God the Judge...

...The fire of change is a transforming fire, Golden Child suggests...