On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage PAST PERFECT AND IMPERFECT BY STEFAN KANFER AFTER THE OPENING of Guy Domville. Henry James' only theater piece, the author was led onstage. A handful of Jamesians clapped their hands...
...Sloper is disdainful, cruel, imperious, but right in his appraisals...
...The place is Sid-ley Park, a large country estate in Derbyshire...
...Certainly it disturbs her aunt Lavinia (Frances Sternhagen...
...Meanwhile, in a neighboring century...
...a husband and wife team whose The Heiress took James' elegant, if somewhat ponderous novel...
...Her work brought the actress an Academy Award...
...His Dr...
...Catherine quiets the old lady with six gelid words, "I have been taught by masters...
...The professionalism of Mark Thompson's imaginative set and costumes only magnify the ultimate amateurishness of Arcadia...
...Did he fight a fatal duel with the very minor poet Ezra Chater (Paul Giamatti) over the honor of Mrs...
...That night Catherine gives Morris the bad news...
...she is grotesque as a child and wholly unbelievable as an adolescent...
...She regards him the way a mongoose looks at a cobra...
...With this work he has fashioned a Jamesian evening...
...He is now 57, a bit long in the tooth to be offering challenging ideas wrapped in undergraduate twaddle...
...somehow their child has turned out to be a creature "without a shred of poise...
...As it turns out, Thomasina is a prodigy whose equations are 180 years ahead of her time...
...But this is of no interest to Nightingale...
...I can only say that we have done our very best...
...Instead, his biographer Leon Edel correctly noted, "the theater had 'chucked' him...
...Maloney might have stepped from a Rowlandson caricature, but his part is minuscule...
...His entire estate will go to a clinic...
...She is addressing her tutor, Septimus Hodge (Billy Crudup...
...To discourage the budding romance, Sloper covers Catherine with sarcasm...
...It may provoke the same response here, but I doubt it...
...Washington Square, and transformed it into a vibrant drama...
...Sexual congress," muses Thomasina, "is it the same as love...
...At other times the skirmishes and the flir-tations seem to be taking place under water...
...Still, she points out, she has a small inheritance...
...As the three investigators begin searching the evidence, they are joined by a fourth...
...Morris foresees no difficulty in eventually prevailing, and to avoid yet another family squabble the couple decide to elope...
...Two years later The Heiress reached the screen, with Olivia De Havilland and Ralph Richardson in the main roles...
...Several hours later she has her answer...
...For one thing, Trevor Nunn has directed with an unaccustomed lack of pace...
...Chater...
...Once again we are on the mottled turf of Tom Stoppard, a playwright whose entire oeuvre might be subtitled "The Enigma Variations...
...Or is it...
...His chosen field is living on the money she will inherit—provided Dr...
...Since this is a Stoppard play, no ticketholder should be surprised that nothing is the way it appears, and that innumerable traps and mazes lie in wait for the characters in both epochs...
...The third party is Catherine's father, the wealthy and ailing Dr...
...she listens attentively, while concocting a reprisal that might well have shocked her father...
...Among the men Garber is the most amusing...
...Nightingale offers a pronouncement: "In scholarly articles, as in divorce, there is a certain cachet in mentioning members of the aristocracy...
...Several years slide by...
...It would take an exquisite sensibility to appreciate all the ironies of these posthumous victories...
...The best of these were Ruth and Augustus Goetz...
...Hannah has a query of her own...
...Or is he as self-delusive as the old Romantics...
...Time only goes backward onstage...
...he demands...
...It took writers of smaller talent to make James' characters come alive onstage...
...So does director Gerald Gutierrez...
...Poring over Thomasina's papers, Valentine Coverly (Robert Sean Leonard) discovers that his distant ancestor was on the verge of discovering the chaos theory: She simply lacked a computer and enough years, for at age 17 the adolescent burned to death in a fire...
...Banes is best, merely because her character is an exaggeration to begin with...
...What else could two people possibly require...
...What was that secret...
...he has found the treasure he was seeking and thus made "the most sensational literary discovery of the century...
...Your charm...
...The women tend to use their voices as uncertain flutes, ending sentences with a piping that hurts the ears...
...his mastery of the novel, the short story and the essay received worldwide recognition...
...Stoppard has often said that he wants his works to challenge audiences and make them think...
...Your grace...
...But she is also a child of the Romantic Era, and anxious to know about sex as practiced by everyone, including the family's celebrated offstage visitor, George Gordon, Lord Byron...
...Does she really believe Morris is after her and not her money...
...Has he...
...What one cannot imagine is James writing a play so tightly constructed or shrewdly cast as the Lincoln Center Theater production of The Heiress at the Cort Theater...
...An inarguable reply rang out...
...Stoppard travels with a big, overinflated reputation, and remarks like these are considered witty by intimidated audiences in England where Arcadia has been running for almost a year...
...He also knows a wallflower when he produces one...
...Another character offers the wisdom that according to the second law of thermodynamics, "we're all going to wind up at room temperature," one of Rush Lim-baugh's favorite sayings...
...Afterward, the poet abruptly fled for the Continent, declaring "I will never live in England if I can avoid it...
...Austin Sloper (Philip Bosco...
...In an age of banal musicals and propagandistic dramas, there can be no more laudatory adjective...
...Tenney, a bit insubstantial at first, gradually gains in stature and makes the denouement all the more devastating...
...Morris fails to appear for their departure...
...Discussing a liaison, Hannah asks, "And did the earth move...
...What else...
...The question comes from 13-year-old Thomasina Coverly (Jennifer Dundas...
...Far too familiar, however, are the playwright's pretensions, beginning with his mock-Wildean epigrams...
...Unl ike Catherine, Dr...
...Whilst ransacking, he tries a desultory pass at the visiting novelist and historian, Hannah Jarvis (Blair Brown...
...Sloper dies, making Catherine a very rich woman indeed...
...But the applause he longed for so deeply was denied him...
...Leonard, normally a winning performer, here seems better suited to a fashionable prep school than the Vivian Beaumont Theater...
...Instead of answers, she is given evasions by her tutor and her mother, Lady Croom (Lisa Banes...
...one can imagine Henry James using it as the basis for a novella...
...Similarly, Jones portrays a three-dimensional young woman who is both foolish and yet sympathetic in her desire to get out of her cage, even if Catherine's liberator is a scoundrel at heart...
...Now they have an aphrodisiacal effect...
...Most of them wrestle with intonations, and lose...
...Shocked, the company manager stepped forward: "These discordant notes have hurt me very much...
...Replies Septimus, "No, it's surely nicer than that...
...She has learned that if they marry, her father will cut her off without a cent...
...The 1947 stage version starred Wendy Hiller and Basil Rath-bone...
...Your beauty...
...His late wife was a paragon of beauty and accomplishment...
...His latest effort will set audiences thinking, if their heads are screwed on straight, that from Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead to Jumpers to Travesties and beyond, the playwright has been marching in place...
...The time is 1809...
...Masters have also been at work at the Cort Theater...
...He had confidently announced that he would "chuck" the theater if Guy Domville did not succeed...
...His booming smugness makes a virtue of vanity and an advantage of affectation...
...The surprise is the coherence of Arcadia, given its plot twists and temporal experiments...
...Actually, the text makes clear, Morris has only one talent: persuading Catherine that he is in love with her...
...On such occasions there are intriguing suggestions of mystery, class warfare, and the unending collision between science and intuition...
...Then there is the business of British accents...
...The supporting cast, from Sternhagen to Liz-beth Mackay, as Morris' hapless sister, do splendid work...
...They can live on that, and on love...
...John Lee Beatty's sets evoke the opulent, suffocating atmosphere of Washington Square circa 1850, and Jane Greenwood's costumes deserve the highest praise...
...Tain't your fault, guv'nor, it's a rotten play...
...Who is the hermit portrayed in some paintings by Richard Noakes (Peter Maloney), the architect credited with transforming Sidley Park's formal grounds into what Hannah terms "the Gothic novel as landscape...
...he has fled to California in search of other gold...
...A handful of Jamesians clapped their hands until hoots from the gallery drowned them out...
...Before the father-daughter confrontation, Morris' attentions were beguiling...
...Perhaps a letter can be unearthed among the family papers...
...Sloper can be brought around...
...Bernard Nightingale (Victor Garber) is an academic racketeer in search of some fresh scandal about Byron, known to have visited the main house two centuries ago...
...Morris pours out his heart to Catherine...
...James never quite recovered from this public rejection...
...a woman who never met a flatterer she could not oblige in bed...
...Why, must remain a secret...
...From then on The Heiress becomes a revenge play...
...A few minutes later, another man and woman enter the same setting, unseen by the others...
...He sums up her virtues in a sneering sentence: "You embroider well...
...In Catherine's eyes he becomes the beau ideal, with a brilliant future in whatever field he chooses to enter...
...James went on to enjoy many triumphs...
...And guess who turns up in New York, older, wiser, poorer, full of contrition and excuses...
...Sometimes the exchanges are delivered with clarity and precision...
...Should Nightingale get lucky, he could make his career and a handsome profit en route...
...True to form, Stoppard trots out the weariest jokes as if he had just coined them this morning...
...In essence, the story is a triangle with only two lovers: the shy, unprepossessing Catherine Sloper (Cherry Jones), and the handsome, unscrupulous Morris Townsend (Jon Tenney...
...Your quick tongue and subtle wit...
...Then again, so does the play...
...Sloper knows a fortune hunter when he sees one...
...After that, there is nothing left between the two of them but suspicion and loathing...
...The reference is to a bit of dialogue from For Whom the Bell Tolls, published in 1940 and kidded mercilessly ever since...
...Bosco, who grows in authority from play to play, gives a rounded and subtle performance...
...No doubt because of union regulations, the Lincoln Center Theater version of Arcadia is overstaffed with Americans...
...The overage Dundas comes off badly...
...This chapter, called Arcadia, concerns the interrelation of the chaos theory of present-day physics and the chaotic practice of long-ago lovers...
...WHAT IS carnal embrace...
Vol. 78 • March 1995 • No. 3
