Planned obsolescence: Now appearing in a repertory theater near you
Alleva, Richard
CULTURE WATCH Richard Alleva PLANHED OBSOLESCENCE Movie stars on a stage near you If you live in a fair-sized city or near one, you will soon be receiving an eye-catching and idealistic...
...Yet regional theater survives, even if it never quite thrives, and, even more miraculously, continues to fill the huge gap left by the theaters, Broadway and of f-Broadway, of New York...
...Twas not always so...
...The list goes on and on...
...Regional theater, which forty years ago seemed a viable alternative to the financial excess and artistic decadence of Broadway, now comes across as a luxurious tropical flower whose existence can only be maintained by wealthy horticultural aficionados (that is, the monies of patrons or cultural foundations) and skillful crossbreeding (that is, Broadway producers sometimes back a repertory production, then take the show over after a short local run and bring it to Broadway...
...The big casts, huge sets, and computerized lighting tricks of Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals and the Disney entertainments (The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, etc...
...Until they do, our culture will continue suffering a very tidy, limited lobotomy...
...the Lunts and Uta Hagen in The Seagull...
...Some of them (Wit immediately comes to mind) are superb, but even these shows try to hold down costs by having their actors walk through invisible settings waving invisible props...
...Stars...
...Judith Anderson and John Gielgud in Medea...
...Because of a desperate economics that I won't try to grapple with here, New York theater is gradually narrowing itself to two sorts of entertainment: the million-dollar musical and the sawbuck monologue...
...It is too early to call this a trend, but if so, it is a case of "back to the future": it was common practice in nineteenth-century theater for stars like Edwin Booth on tour to perform with local theater companies...
...Faustus...
...A stage adaptation of correspondence translated and performed by Myriam Cyr...
...Eva LeGallienne in Hedda Gabler...
...The movies drained much glamour from the stage...
...And this is just a partial list...
...The yoking of star power with classic text produced the sort of full-blooded entertainment that stayed in people's minds for decades and became, literally, the sort of show they told their children about...
...Shouldn't we rather rejoice at the absence of overpaid celebrities...
...In the musical world, this remained common practice...
...Perhaps there is a patriotic envoi: this theater is one of your state's chief sources of pride, has been boosted by the governor, and is the recipient of state and national awards...
...Just the opposite is true...
...Unless they're willing to humble their talents in character parts in movies, more and more major talents may turn back to the stage...
...There we find, in the "Long Run" section, several expensively mounted musicals, a ticket to any of which will cost you the same amount of money you spent on your child for a semester of college...
...I've seen amateur productions of musical comedies in which much of the charm of the piece came across even though glamour was totally absent from the cast...
...They not only regularly present the classics but flesh them out in largish productions complete with substantial sets and, when necessary, lots of bodies on stage, since local, nonprofessional actors can be drafted at little expense...
...Katharine Hepburn in As You Like It...
...When outsized actors aren't available to embody the tremendous visions of certain playwrights, when there's no actor of Olivier's electricity to communicate Shakespeare's vision of jealousy in Othello, when an Eileen Atkins isn't on hand to incarnate Shaw's idea of incipient Protestantism in Saint Joan, when if s not Jason Robards conveying the full blast of O'Neil's bleakness in The Iceman Cometh, the thought immanent in the text does not truly surface...
...Now that the studios cater to ever younger audiences with ever younger stars in ever goofier vehicles, actors (especially the distaff members of the profession) are considered over the hill at thirty-five...
...And what is that gap...
...But, if you flip to the "Opened Recently" section, you will discover quite a different sort of fare: • The Gathering: "Will Power's oneman show...
...At this point, theater attendance takes on the urgency of socially responsible stock investment...
...If s commonly believed that musical comedies and lightweight plays are the venues of glamour while sheer dogged seriousness is enough to convey Sophocles and Shakespeare...
...Eye-catching because it will feature color photos of actors strikingly dressed (or undressed) and caught in highly dramatic postures of combat or lovemaking or emotional confrontation...
...Ruth Gordon in The Country Wife and A Doll's House...
...Stones in His Pocket: "In Marie Jones's comedy...Sean Campion and Conleh Hill portray all the characters...
...This would never have happened in a reputable local rep production...
...Orson Welles's innovative revivals of Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and Dr...
...If they still want to play the great stage roles they've always dreamed of, it is likely they'll be willing to negotiate with the better regional companies to do the very plays that provide the real star-power roles: the classics...
...Idealistic because this pamphlet, dispatched from the regional repertory theater nearest you, lists not only the admirable plays that have been served up in the last nine months but also the equally ambitious schedule in the works for next fall...
...D Commonweal 10 May 4,2001...
...CULTURE WATCH Richard Alleva PLANHED OBSOLESCENCE Movie stars on a stage near you If you live in a fair-sized city or near one, you will soon be receiving an eye-catching and idealistic brochure in your mail...
...Admirable...
...But what the movies stole, they may yet give back...
...But if you've ever seen even a good production of Lear with only a journeyman actor on hand to howl imprecations at the heavens, you probably had a very boring time...
...Always has been, always will be, but it keeps soldiering on with various strategies, including guilt-mongering subscription campaigns to be carried on by phone if that brochure doesn't do the trick...
...Of course, there are also plenty of new plays opening with the usual mediumsized casts...
...Frank Langella's New York production of Cyrano Commonweal 18 May 4,2001 de Bergerac eliminated the all-important crowds in the dueling and battle scenes...
...In other words, your local rep is in big trouble...
...Well, so what...
...there's nothing unusual in Andrea Boccelli or Placido Domingo appearing with the Pittsburgh or the Santa Fe Symphony, or Christopher Plummer performing his one-man Henry V show with the Hartford Symphony playing William Walton's music as accompaniment...
...two (count 'em—two...
...Without glamour, masterpieces shrivel...
...And if the stars mitigate the perpetual financial woe of the reps, all the better...
...In fact, aside from the great musicals and the rare sensational dramatic premiere (Streetcar, Salesman, etc...
...The current absence of this sort of American theater has created a remarkable artistic vacancy, and it is to the great credit of local repertory theaters that they try to fill this gap...
...the real newsmaking New York productions from the twenties to the early sixties were the big revivals of classics: the Guthrie McClintic productions starring his wife, Katharine Cornell—Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, The Three Sisters (which Time featured as its cover story during the final year of World War II when news of Allied victories was competing for print space...
...In an interview he gave many years ago, Laurence Olivier spoke of theater as "the glamorization of thought," which remains the best definition I know of what theater, specifically the classic theater of highly charged language and outsized characters, does...
...What's conspicuously absent most of the time from New York is the full-scale, handsomely visualized production of multicharacter classic plays...
...I Will Bear Witness: "A stage version [that is, a one-man reading] of the diaries of Victor Klemperer...
...This is already happening...
...Why shouldn't the theater world follow suit...
...Are stars so important...
...Momma: "In her one-woman show, Siobhan Fallon...
...competing Broadway productions of Hamlet with Gielgud's melancholy Dane facing off against Leslie Howard's...
...are gambles of big bucks in the hope of making huge fortunes, while the one- and two-actor shows are a minimization of costs designed to make a small profit, which will then be invested in the next minimalist theater piece...
...We never got to see Marlon Brando's Hamlet or Meryl Streep's Beatrice or Robert De Niro's Iago...
...For instance, the Hartford Stage Company's recent commitment to reviving the work of Tennessee Williams has attracted the services of Rip Torn and Elizabeth Ashley...
...But what's missing from the repertory theater picture...
...High Dive: "In her one-woman comedy, Leslie Ayvazian...gives audience members the opportunity to read minor roles from their seats...
...But am I mistaken in thinking that a certain intellectual glint in the eyes is gone...
...Let us look at the "Goings On About Town" theater section of a recent New Yorker...
...Michael Cacoyannis's record-breaking off-Broadway staging of The Trojan Women starring Mildred Dunnock...
...The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe: "Lily Tomlin is back on Broadway in the one-woman, thirteencharacter show...
...Only one lobe of its imaginative life has been removed and the patient is doing very well, thank you, ambling along pretty much as it always has...
...Cartas: A Nun in Love...
...For what is a culture like without the glamorization of thought...
Vol. 128 • May 2001 • No. 9
