On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage MURDER IN THE PAST TENSE By Stefan Kanfer In the small hours of April 27, 1913, the body of Mary Phagan, a 13-year-old laborer, was found in the basement of the National Pencil...
...He refused, and the vigilantes strung him up...
...Revenge, says the ancient proverb, is a dish best eaten cold...
...The program notes that in addition to its seven producers, this version of Electra has received support from the Theater Development Fund...
...In general, Georgians were satisfied with the result...
...Director Joe Brancate, abetted by set designer David Harwell, uses every inch of the microstage at the Raymond J. Greenwald Theater, and in the process makes Off-Broadway glow a little brighter...
...In it a young girl refuses to speak after the death of her brother, killed in a mortar attack on his school...
...and a son, Marc (Tyagi Schwartz...
...Brent Carver plays Frank as a man composed of futile gestures and repressed affections, peering fearfully at the world through steel-rimmed glasses...
...Morris is also 75, and can't wait for the next day to begin...
...it is understandable that he would want to unearth the tragedy of Leo Frank, examining the circumstances from a current perspective...
...He is so concerned with the downtrodden millions that he neglects his marriage and it ends in divorce...
...The other members of the cast struggle to represent historical figures—lawyers, politicians, Southern belles, plutocrats, prison sentinels, workers—and are helped more by Uhry's text than by Brown's undistinguished lyrics...
...On Stage MURDER IN THE PAST TENSE By Stefan Kanfer In the small hours of April 27, 1913, the body of Mary Phagan, a 13-year-old laborer, was found in the basement of the National Pencil factory in Atlanta...
...Only the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence connected Leo Frank to the rape and murder...
...The males are unimpressive...
...Alfred Uhry has sought to change that with Parade, the new musical at the Vivian Beaumont Theater...
...The black voices, notably the gravelly bass of Ray Aranha and the swaggering baritone of Rufus Bonds Jr., give Parade an occasional jolt: "There's a black man swingin' from every tree/ But if a Yankee boy flies/ Surprise, surprise, surprise...
...And here they are again...
...Once he reveals himself to his half-mad sister, doom settles over the House of Atreus...
...In addition, the history of Southern bias and violence was not new in Frank's time and is a stale subj ect today...
...He liked his revenge scalding, as Electra has demonstrated for some 2,000 years...
...Marc plans to move in with a shiksa—and one with a hyphenated name, at that...
...nonetheless, a combination of inadequate defense attorney and ambitious D. A. railroaded him to death row...
...Carolee Cannello is impressive as the embittered Lucille, rising from obedient helpmate to irresistible force...
...Throughout the U.S., editorials predicted that a new trial was in the cards...
...No one was ever convicted for the lynching of Leo Frank—or, indeed, for the murder of Mary Phagan...
...But Frank's wife Lucille refused to accept the guilty verdict...
...The rest of the cast is barely adequate, their diction ranging from elocution-lesson British to acting-school American...
...his son is also a lawyer, but works the other side of the street, aiming for partnership in a white shoe firm...
...As the alcoholic newsman, Evan Pappas does well with a bromidic role, and Christy Carlson Romano makes an appealing Mary Phagan, the unavenged innocent forgotten by history...
...One of those rhymes gives new meaning to the word anachronism: "I'm sorry, Lucille/But I feel what I feel/And this place is surreal," sings the imprisoned Frank—even though "surrealism" would not be in common usage for another decade...
...When he returned from battle, he was assassinated by his vengeful wife Clytemnestra (Claire Bloom) and her lover Aegisthus (Daniel Oreskes...
...As for Engels' set, it is a mannered pile of Hellenic ruins, ludicrouslyjuxtaposed against a sectioned white backdrop that might have been left over from a Fred AstaireGinger Rogers film...
...The eldest is a retired widower...
...Once that got under way, they went on, the real killer would come to light and the condemned man would be pardoned...
...It is Riccardo Hernandez' set, which consists of a looming tree and cardboard cutouts of people used to represent marchers, jurists, etc...
...Now, many years afterward, the son returns as an unrecognized adult, seeking his own form of retribution...
...Over and over, movies like Inherit the Wind and To Kill a Mockingbird, as well as scores of television shows, have used much the same narrative devices to recall the kangaroo courtrooms of Dixie...
...Once upon a war, Agamemnon sacrificed a daughter in order to win at Troy...
...The title indicates three men: a grandfather, Morris (Sam Gray...
...his son is a prominent civil rights attorney...
...Once the subject of countless articles, a major film (They Won't Forget, 1937) and several dramas, the case is today only a footnote in the annals of Georgian vigilantism...
...Outraged by this turn of events, a group of infuriated Klan types determined to take the law into their own hands...
...Sophocles disagreed...
...He intends to marry his Haitian housekeeper—causing his ultra-liberal son to utter the word "schwartzer...
...Moreover, he was a Jew from New York...
...Bloom remains as coolly beautiful as ever, a proud woman who cannot make herself confront the evil she has engendered...
...The children of Agamemnon, Electra (Zoë Wanamaker) and Orestes (Michael Cumpsty), were separated when their father died...
...Leveaux states in a Playbill note that the inspiration for his speeded-up Electra (an unbroken hour and 30 minutes) came from an amateur documentary film made in Sarajevo...
...More shocking still is Nathan's decision...
...The manager was immediately indicted...
...In the process, the play is reduced not only in size but in stature, and its temperature is cooled by several degrees Celsius...
...How many times have we seen the wise child, or the harddrinking journalist with a 24-karat heart, wryly commenting on the biases of his neighbors...
...He appeared to have very little personality then, and seems even more remote today...
...A Yiddish proverb declares that a man who is too good for this world is no good for his wife, and this proves to be true of Nathan...
...His well-informed straight plays, Driving Miss Daisy and Last Night of Ballyhoo, both concerned his formative years in Jewish Atlanta...
...The sad fact, though, is that Frank was not nearly as compelling in life as he was in death...
...Perhaps...
...Soon afterward, the child-murder takes place...
...Furiously and tirelessly she campaigned for a new trial...
...The playwright is quoted in the program as saying that this, his first play, will probably be his last, "Not because it was such a struggle to finish it and have it produced, but 'because I'm an old man...
...hatred," writes the director, "are of course issues of our own century," implying that the story of Electra is as modern as today's global conflicts...
...The conflict arises not so much from the on-stage personae as from those we never meet: their Significant Others...
...This violently displeases his supposedly progressive father...
...Alas, it serves to make the rest of his performance all the more rigid...
...Slinging a rope over a branch they offered him one last chance to confess...
...The designer has encapsulated the evening with his array of two-dimensional characters...
...As the main evildoer, Oreskes booms his lines until he is fatally trapped, pauses, then booms some more, as if his imminent death is an annoyance on a good hair day...
...The apparently inescapable cycle of violence set off by inter-family or civil war, and the distortions inflicted by...
...Parade commences with a Memorial Day procession, complete with martial music, a baton twirler and rippling Confederate flags...
...Bloom's crimson, tent-like outfit unfairly makes her seem a candidate for Weight Watchers...
...Damned if they would let the Jew go free...
...a father, Nathan (Richard M. Davidson...
...He is 75 and this is his first play...
...Since the protagonist is pitiable without being interesting, Uhry, composerlyricist Jason Robert Brown and director Hal Prince have focused their lenses on the background...
...Granted, Rent and Titanic have recently demonstrated that grief can inspire Broadway melodies...
...Veteran Broadway producer/director Prince, listed as "co-conceiver," moves the show with the brisk efficiency of a civics lecture...
...One night they overpowered a penitentiary guard, seized the prisoner and took him to a nearby wood...
...Her scruffy hair, torn out in large scabby patches, is something out of a Wolf Man movie, and her gymnastic writhing says more about Electra's physical shape than her psychological condition...
...What is not so understandable is why Uhry and his collaborators thought the project should be set to music...
...He was, after all, a Jew...
...What will this wounded soul do someday in retaliation for the horrors she has experienced...
...This quality is barely discernible at the Ethel Barrymore Theater...
...As soon as they learned Frank's name and background they thought the worst of him...
...Only once, in a fantasy scene, is he allowed to break into a spirited dance...
...but Sophocles was not a documentarian...
...Her efforts attracted so much national attention that the Governor was finally persuaded to intervene, reducing the sentence to life imprisonment...
...What best summarizes Parade is not the intelligent but exposition-laden dialogue or the largely lugubrious score...
...Which of these three is the half Jew...
...Where Johan Engels' costumes are not drab they are garish—Aegisthus is dressed in an incongruous white suit that belongs neither to Sophocles' time nor to the 19th century, to which the drama has been transposed...
...In the title role, Zoë Wanamaker gives one of those bravura performances that is at once breathtaking and self-congratulatory...
...Yet the actress gives an uninf lected performance, enunciating the words of Frank McGuinness' fluent translation with none of the passion it requires...
...Cumpsty is mostly woofer, while his willowy servant, Stephen Spinella, is all tweeter...
...In some 30 solos and choral pieces the actors push the story uphill, articulating lines that clearly separate the good guys ("It's hard to speak my heart") from the evil ones ("Jesus was not a Jew...
...The third occurs a year after that, in the wake of the lynching...
...The trial, one year later, marks the occasion of the second parade...
...Who knows?'" He ought to take another look at the character he created...
...Judith Dolan's costumes and Patricia Birch's choreography evoke a period unmarked by attractive dress or infectious steps...
...Beware of gifts bearing Greeks...
...He was a poetic dramatist, and he aimed not at realism but at a moral statement that would echo through the centuries...
...Pat Carroll, as the Chorus of Mycenae, has a massive stage presence and great vocal authority...
...Alan Brandt's 2½ Jews has several things going for it, not least the author's age...
...How many times have we watched onlookers chatter and fan themselves as lawyers bombinate about justice—except, of course, for Nigras and Yankees...
...When Orestes completes the matricide, Electra licks blood off his hands in a gesture that is the epitome of overplay...
...That forms the central question of the evening, and Brandt is canny enough to keep the audience guessing...
...In director David Leveaux' new production, the work is boiled down from towering Greek tragedy to loud domestic calamity...
...Clearly, his sympathies are with the eldest of the trio, but he gives smart, witty lines to all three...
Vol. 82 • January 1999 • No. 1
