On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage PROBLEMS OF CRAFT BY STEFAN KANFER Hero is the surprising word that men employ when they speak of Jack the Ripper. Susan Brownmtller, Against Our Will Women have very little idea of...
...Some months later Tolstoy ratified their verdict...
...He read the work and pronounced it "absolutely worthless...
...In the public print and on numerous radio call-in shows, hard-line feminists have been attacking his new play, Oleanna...
...John (William H. Macy) is a bearded, bespectacled pedant peering down at his failing student, Carol (Rebecca Pidgeon...
...whether in Annie Hall or Hannah and Her Sisters or Radio Days he always played the dry straight man to Allen's mishugena...
...Barry...
...There are some glints of gold among the dross...
...Had they attacked the dramaturgy or the direction they might have scored some telling points...
...Will you, will you just call Jerry...
...I had to kill it," he recalled sadly...
...At the very top of the roster is his own work...
...She hands him a list of proscribed books...
...Neither logic nor anger can reach her...
...In 1892 Dr...
...Laura Crow's costumes are appropriately low keyed, except for Daly's...
...Now that he is about to receive tenure, he has decided to buy a house...
...If the new charge of attempted rape is to be retracted, he must agree to the group's terms...
...Then there is the patented Mametian dialogue, all staccato exchanges and repetitious phrases...
...But he was only naive, even about sex...
...Or is she...
...The opening night audience in Petersburg didn't know what to make of it, and at the curtain they responded with catcalls and whistles...
...The tenure committee delays John's appointment to investigate the complaint...
...The incident inspired the doctor: What if a bird could be used as a metaphor for the cruel things people do to each other...
...Linney thrums with intelligence and grace...
...Incidentally, the tide has nothing to do with the text or the personae...
...When the plot calls for Carol to be moronic, she claims ignorance of the word "indict...
...Carol has become the highly articulate spokesperson for all the women in her unnamed "group...
...Surely she won't be vindictive...
...John attempts to reason with Carol: Surely she has misinterpreted his well-meaning anecdotes and gestures...
...Tyne Daly was a bolt of energy in the television series Cagney and Lacey, and a smashing Mama in the most recent revival of Gypsy...
...Oleanna has the marks of a drama written in haste, yet directed and acted with a worshipful attitude toward the author...
...I was wrong, too...
...How does John like that turn of events...
...Although she is as contemporary as the 6 o'clock news, Carol is forever yammering '60s bromides: "I don't want revenge...
...Today we may smile at the lack of perception, but The Seagullls, in fact, not a wellmade play...
...The most significant fault of Oleanna, though, is its confused purpose...
...But then, sense and sexual politics are strangers in America...
...But what is risible in those films is destructive here...
...Tony Randall's idea of presenting classic plays with established stars is admirable...
...she wonders...
...One thing is certain: It cannot speak Chekhovian, even in translation...
...No sexist works will be taught...
...Unless she withdraws the charges he will lose the down payment, causing his innocent wife and child to suffer...
...Instead, she suggests unpolished brass: Ethel Merman in Tsartown...
...But there is nothing in the text to justify such an assumption...
...The play's most obvious flaw is a lack of consistency...
...It could, of course, be argued that the playwright deliberately left out some pieces in order to have the audience fill them in...
...But John is no longer talking to the dumb undergraduate...
...The youth is supposed to be a budding playwright, full of self-doubt and romantic yearnings...
...For addressing the subjects of multicultural despots and academic freedom, Mamet is to be applauded...
...The overseer of this melange is Marshall W. Mason, who directs with uncertain pace and no discernible style...
...To compensate for the difficulties of the text, any convincing production must offer a combination of daring and lyricism...
...Not to be outcliched, John either spouts his own worthless aphorisms??teaching is the process of getting students "to retain and spout back misinformation"??or he is forever stepping on his own lines like a centipede tripping over its own feet: "Did you call Jerry...
...Classroom discussions are meaningless...
...Arch is the last word I thought I would ever use to describe this playwright...
...It fell to earth, thrashing in pain...
...I present the exhibits above in defense of David Mamet...
...To Carol this is plainly and simply a struggle for power...
...As her lover Trigorin, a famously unhappy writer, Jon Voight shows almost no sexual presence...
...As Act Two begins, the student has abruptly emerged from her chrysalis to become a full-grown gorgon...
...The conclusion is ours, not Mamet's...
...Almost every time John starts to make a point the telephone rings...
...For almost a hundred years, directors and actors have attempted to do Chekhov, only to find that they were involved in a fatal game of Russian roulette...
...suffice to note that the program credits "fight staging" to B.H...
...His play leaps from the headlines, and the arguments it triggers have been as heated as the ones onstage at the Orpheum Theater...
...According to Carol, he told lewd stories and made suggestive remarks...
...Macy, an excellent craftsman, is the only outsider, and he is practically a member of the family, having appeared in several previous Mamet productions...
...At the conclusion of Act One, Carol wanders off, as confused and unenlightened as before...
...I don't think so...
...As Madame Arkadina, fading star of the Moscow Theater, Daly is shaped like a cello and ought to sound like one...
...The author built his theater piece almost entirely out of triangles??A's who want B's who want C's...
...Fans of Woody Allen will recall Roberts...
...Alas, the best moments in Oleanna are only a small fraction of a short evening (the curtain rises at 8:06, and you are out on Second Avenue at 10:15...
...Germatne Greer, The Female Eunuch Decently married bedrooms across America are the settings for nightly rape...
...When he was a student, the professor recalls, he too was regarded as stupid...
...Miscasting is partly to blame...
...Here he seems confused and dim, unacceptable either as Madame's lover or as the seducer of Nina (Laura Linney), a naive young actress...
...Robin Morgan, Editor of Ms...
...So there is no reason to believe that Mason has lost his touch merely because The Seagull has eluded him??and most of the cast members...
...As Sorin, Madame Arkadina's infirm brother, John Franklyn-Robbins inhabits his role instead of reciting it...
...Onstage Hawke, who made a splendid debut in the movie The Dead Poets Society, has the narcissistic quality of a rock star...
...The little sophomore is baffled...
...Why, he used to believe that the richer you were, the more clothes you took off while making love...
...he was all animal magnetism in such films as Midnight Cowboy and Coming Home...
...Dorn...
...They claim that it distorts their aims and rhetoric...
...Surely this is just a misunderstanding...
...She seems to have been steamfitted into Mae West's castoffs...
...I want understanding...
...A pity...
...It would be improper to reveal the conclusion...
...he is the one cast member who truly seems at home in 19th-century surroundings??in this case, uninspired flats designed by Marjorie Bradley Kellogg...
...Once upon a semester the professor had it, and now the students do...
...What if that bird were a young woman, destroyed by a man just for his own diversion...
...The only way to justify Carol I and Carol II is to assume that this is a case of entrapment: John has been set up for his crash...
...The last film personality is Tony Roberts as Dr...
...This argumentum interruptus is typical of Mamet, fragmenting the dialogue so that his characters have trouble making themselves understood...
...Chekhov insisted that he had written a comedy, a statement that bewildered his director, the great Stanislavsky...
...Furthermore, he manhandled her...
...If theatrical works were only judged on their ability to provoke, Mamet would be en route to another Pulitzer...
...Even though Chekhov insisted that The Seagull had laughter in its bones, he meant Dorn to be a sympathetic commentator, not a self-satisfied poseur looking down at the fools around him...
...Furious, John tries to restrain her, causing Carol to scream until the lights fade out...
...What does it mean...
...Susan Brownmtller, Against Our Will Women have very little idea of how much men hate them...
...There was one creature of love less in the world, and two fools went home, and sat down to dinner...
...Shaw once observed that in a good play everyone is right...
...In its second season, however, the National Actors Theater is still struggling to find its voice...
...According to a publicist, Mamet simply liked the sound of Oleanna, mentioned in a song about a 19th-century Utopian community...
...That's odd...
...she cannot comprehend a single passage of the textbook he wrote...
...The scenes with Nina, Konstantin's great unrequited love, are reminiscent of MTV, full of caterwauling and devoid of substance...
...No doubt it was: Mamet is his own director, and the mannered Pidgeon happens to be his wife...
...Oleanna unfurls at the office of a sociology professor...
...The one at the Lyceum Theater has neither...
...The third member of the production's Hollywood quartet is Ethan Hawke, in the role of Arkadina's son, Konstantin...
...His previous work includes the fluent direction of 37 plays by Lanford Wilson and several highly successful Tennessee Williams revivals...
...What is everybody talking about...
...Calls come in from his real estate agent, his lawyer, his wife, with yet another anxious query...
...Anton Chekhov watched his friend shoot a woodcock...
...She should have stopped there...
...Yet when she turns into a villainess she has no trouble using "hierarchy" and "impinge...
...Alternately negotiating with them and with Carol, the professor assumes several roles: avuncular counselor, harassed consumer, browbeaten husband...
...Carol is more wrong than John, that's all...
...And so The Seagull was created four years later...
...In this editorial cartoon both characters are wrong...
...John now stands accused of sexual harassment...
...In the next scene she has taken full control...
...He is not to call his wife "baby" anymore...
...Before he can make a proper reply she heads for the exit, taunting all the way...
...As Carol edges toward hysteria, John becomes a bit patronizing, putting a hand on her shoulder, inviting her to sit down, offering a few autobiographical scraps...
...But how could anyone??even a lowly male??draw caricatures more ludicrous than the ones provided by the ideologues themselves...
...He has only a few days to close on the house...
Vol. 75 • December 1992 • No. 16
