On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage Comediennes and Classics By Stefan Kanfer This spring, when two of Broadway's most prolific impresarios, Alexander H. Cohen and David Merrick, died within days of each other, the...
...The accelerated tempo does nothing to destroy the playwright's reputation or his play...
...He sneers to himself) The oldpoetic bull, eh...
...The tragedy resides in the person of James, whose life has been disfigured with guilt...
...From commercial smashes like Gypsy, Hello, Dolly...
...Jane Greenwood's costumes, Pat Collins' lighting and Eugene Lee's set summon up a rural, halfmythic past...
...Not long ago he starred in a wry one-man production about his experiences ("the H stands for horseshit...
...Mike Poulton's tangy translation is admirable...
...Rebuked for going over the top on occasion, Lord Olivier used to acknowledge the criticism with a merry reply, "But I'll never bore anyone...
...Crap...
...Dotrice makes an amusing, dotty old man, but he is an Englishman born and bred, and the strain of impersonating an Irish-American becomes discernible as the evening wears on...
...an oil sheik's bodyguard...
...Last season The Iceman Cometh told us in lengthy and portentous terms that we need our illusions in order to get through life...
...Not even a Big Mac is within reach as he frantically tries to accommodate some of the pushiest clients in New York...
...Reverting to a teasing tone) You don't ask how I saw through your bluff, Josie...
...Yet when the Roundabout Theater dares to stage Uncle Vanya as a fast-paced farce, the critical howls can be heard in three states...
...Tim Zagat, who edits the influential book of restaurant ratings, has arrived with wife but sans reservation...
...Fully Committed is one of the rare and notable exceptions to this theatrical rule...
...almost all of them are amusement-free fools...
...True, he works in a four star restaurant on Manhattan's Upper East Side, but the young hopeful is located one floor below the action...
...A patron has become ill in the ladies' room, and the busboys have gone into hiding...
...It is a technically adroit, poignant performance...
...Eugene O'Neill, another playwright whose work is customarily treated with awe, is back on Broadway too...
...Throughout the intermissionless play steam issues voluminously from under the door, as if that emission was hilarious in itself...
...But they are unhappy in an absurd way, at once ludicrous and pitiable...
...her cool manner and thrumming voice prove ideal for the play...
...As a young man James showed promise...
...As the title suggests, Vanya (Derek Jacobi) is the play's epicenter...
...Writing and impersonating this large and riotous cast would be accomplishments enough...
...Meantime, above stairs, crisis follows crisis...
...Michael Mayer has been reproached for his less than reverent direction of a classic...
...We're Jews...
...As for Jones, this outstanding young actress has turned into one of the great leading ladies of the American theater, and her Josie is the stuff of legend—particularly since she has been cast against type...
...I was born white...
...Only Jerry Adler, as Howard's bewildered father, brings any merriment to the proceedings...
...As Vanya, Jacobi is by turns self-mocking, enraged and ridiculous without missing a beat...
...In this one, as in so many of his plays, O'Neill wants credit for being a member of the literati, but he also wants to be counted as tough and uncompromisingly honest, ruthlessly putting down any evidence of bathos...
...They all lie to each other...
...She promptly disabuses him: "No we can't...
...The pompous self-involved Professor spends most of his time bellyaching about his physical deterioration and neglecting his young blonde trophy wife Yelena (Laura Linney...
...Ambiance: Warm and inviting...
...at the age of 84 he was still active, developing yet another production to bring to the Great White Way...
...Compounding this misery are Sonya (Amy Ryan), Serebryakov's daughter by his first wife, who has an unrequited crush on Dr...
...The 88-year-old had been in ill health for some time, but he, too, was nurturing plans for more productions at the time of his death in London...
...No matter: She inhabits the role, at once a raucous slut and a secular Virgin capable of granting absolution to a sinner...
...At first, Howard thinks he and Selma might fix the faucet themselves...
...Here, so are Tony Walton's evocative set and costumes, and Kenneth Posner's magical lighting design...
...Many aspiring actors wait on tables between auditions...
...Nor can Vanya, who craves anything out of reach: his employer's wife, a new job, a meaningful existence...
...Price: A bargain...
...The aura of piety that surrounds Anton Chekhov is so heavy, it rarely admits light...
...a big-league secretary whose boss wants softer lighting and a vegan menu...
...Worse still, Tyrone remained so inebriated in New York that he could not attend the funeral...
...Tony Walton's gross set design—one broken-down interior, one askew front stoop—is as unappealing as the play, and Martin Pakledinaz' costumes are as drab as the playwright's recycled gags about the Ronald Reagan Presidency...
...This remark is an indication of the originality and wit of Taller Than a Dwarf...
...THE PROGRAM for OffBroadway's one-man shows usually contains the words, "written and performed by...
...Ryan is a bit too much of a kvetch, and Gam has too little to do...
...Of the women, Linney, as usual, comes off best...
...And usually it contains the actor's life story—as in Claudia Shear's Blown Sideways Through Life, Eric Bogosian's Wake Up and Smell the Coffee, and just about anything with Spalding Gray...
...he is also inertia personified...
...Although May is the major perpetrator here, she has been abetted by Alan Arkin's hammerand-anvil direction...
...O'Neill disfigures his dialogue with pretension, though, and then with self-mockery...
...Ineffectual in this as in all things, he misses...
...The play that contains him, however, is smaller than a microbe and nearly as unpleasant to contemplate...
...He would do anything—scrupulous or otherwise—to keep his shows running...
...The story can be told in a few lines: A rumbustious Phil Hogan (Roy Dotrice) and his rambunctious daughter, Josie (Cherry Jones), are tenants eking out an existence on a scruffy Connecticut farm...
...As usual, O'Neill can summon up scenes of ferocity and poignance...
...an 84-year-old who wants an AARP discount, and who complains that her last meal there was "bitter cold...
...But a Standard Oil tycoon has just made him an offer he can't refuse...
...That he was, but he was not created with charm, warmth, intelligence, or any other attractive quality...
...I've listened to them at the Inn...
...Cohen was overshadowed by only few rivals, of whom David Merrick was the biggest and loudest...
...Let Shakespeare's works be presented in a hip-hop musical, in modern costume, with allmarionette, all-black or all-female casts, and not a complaint is registered...
...Gogol and Mr...
...The middle-aged gentleman manages the property of Professor Serebryakov (Brian Murray), who married Vanya's late beloved sister...
...The mobster's parents are ready for their favorite tune, and no waiter knows the lyrics...
...The items on her vita are relevant...
...It was soon withdrawn, but Merrick had made his point...
...A lesser but equally unrevealing play, A Moon for the Misbegotten, is now on display at the Walter Kerr Theater...
...The critical assessment was on the money the first time...
...Cohen produced more than 100 shows, ranging from Baker Street, a lackluster musical about Sherlock Holmes, to the current Noël Coward revival, Waiting in the Wings...
...Ultimately, the two people who seem least capable of action make their moves...
...Because you and I belong to the same club...
...Dubbed "The Abominable Showman" by his many enemies, Merrick spent a professional lifetime creating tumult on stage and off...
...We can kid the world but we can't fool ourselves, like most people, no matter what we do—nor escape ourselves no matter where we run away...
...To say that nothing happens in a Chekhov play is like saying that nothing happens in a 1-0 baseball game...
...Reshaping the original text from four acts to two, Daniel Sullivan directs with precision and grace...
...The recently knighted Jacobi reminded me of Laurence Olivier in middle age...
...This, her first play, is a knowing, sometimes acrimonious but always hilarious account of restaurant life written from the inside...
...Since then, Nichols has gone on to become one of the most important and bankable directors in the world...
...a sentimental Godfather who demands that his mother and father get serenaded with "The Lady Is a Tramp...
...The title comes from a line meant to cheer Howard—with all his miseries he is, after all, taller than a dwarf...
...You pretend too much...
...The confessionals—Josie's, that for all her raw, steamy come-ons she is a maiden...
...The informing incident happened just after his mother died...
...Current Broadway producers are not in the same league, and neither, alas, are their shows...
...Nor was his mate, nor his nudnik of a mother (Joyce Van Patten), nor Selma's lamebrained mother (Marcia Jean Kurtz), nor three ethnic caricatures: a fresh-mouthed little AfricanAmerican child (Marc John Jefferies), a lunkheaded Slavic superintendent (Sam Groom) and a bullheaded Irish cop (Greg Stuhr...
...Preen (also unmentioned...
...Rees provides a measure of dignity and wit to Astrov, a role that often gets misinterpreted...
...In the end, no one is happy...
...And they know you don't give a damn how they lie...
...Of course, Chekhov did not have a thigh-slapping satire in mind, but he did see much that is laughable about provincials miserable with their lot who nevertheless would not lift a finger to alter their destinies...
...As the central figure, Byrne affects a dry, dispassionate air until the moment of his breakdown, when the emotional floodgates open...
...a fame-dropping society lady who wants table 31 for herself and Philip Johnson ("our greatest living architect" in case the name is unfamiliar to Sam...
...On Stage Comediennes and Classics By Stefan Kanfer This spring, when two of Broadway's most prolific impresarios, Alexander H. Cohen and David Merrick, died within days of each other, the curtain descended on an epoch...
...This time out she has concocted a pseudoabsurdist comedy built around the struggles of a young couple, Howard and Selma Miller (the squeaky-voiced, clearly uncomfortable Matthew Broderick, and Parker Posey...
...We shall not look upon the likes of Cohen and Merrick again...
...Playing all participants in some 30 phone conversations, Sam is, among others, a screaming yenta...
...Long ago, in one of his lucid moments, Tyrone promised the Hogans that he would never sell the farm out from under them...
...No one wants to admit all he got was a slap in the puss, when he thinks a lot of other guys made it...
...His act is triggered by a morning disaster: Stepping into the shower he turns the hot water faucet counter-clockwise and is unable to shut it off...
...Rating: Four stars...
...The work of all these gifted people disproves another old maxim: The sum of A Moon for the Misbegotten is less than its glittering parts...
...The show was written byBecky Mode, a former waitress and hatcheck girl...
...Occasionally Serebryakov sends for a local doctor, Astrov (Roger Rees)—but then refuses to see him...
...Yelena's move is nobler: She persuades her husband to keep the place, even though the couple will move to an urban residence...
...Happily, three bona fide stars occupy the central roles...
...The old adage says that you can't have it both ways, but O'Neill can and does: He recalls his own alcoholic brother in tear-soaked scenes—before jeering at the results of his own sentimentality...
...plus Sam's modest, recently widowed father, who wonders if his son can come home to South Bend, Indiana, for Christmas...
...He deserves better...
...The wispy plot concerns Howard's refusal to get out of bed one morning, when the young market researcher decides that the world is hopeless...
...Early in their careers May and Mike Nichols established themselves as bright young comedians worthy of Broadway (in a show produced, incidentally, by Cohen...
...this is, after all, a Russian play...
...When Serebryakov decides to sell off his estate, thereby depriving the underpaid Vanya of a job, the younger man gets a rifle and attempts to kill the landowner...
...Chef Jean-Claude (also played by Setlock) demands that Sam provide sanitation services...
...in early middle age he has become a burned-out case, far more interested in booze than in Broadway...
...And so do the guys...
...The comedy of this situation derives from raucous arguments between the two grotesques: the outspoken Mother Earth of a daughter who seems to attract men the way a magnet pulls in iron filings, and her wily, unwashed father, who encourages a marriage of convenience between the ill-matched James and Josie...
...Astrov, and Vanya's depressed mother (Rita Gam...
...During the proceedings, members of the cast step out of the story and, with aching archness, introduce themselves to the audience...
...Escorting her coffin on a train bound from California to the East, he imbibed constantly, located a prostitute and spent the rest of the trip in her arms, scarcely giving a thought to his mother's corpse in the baggage car ahead...
...This tragicomedy came late inO'Neill's career (1952), and reviewers treated it as a very minor part of the oeuvre...
...Here is a typical solo...
...His deterioration has continued from that day to this...
...Take Elaine May's Taller Than a Dwarf at the Longacre Theater...
...So is Howard's later complaint about his disappointments in life and work: "But I did everything right...
...Sam's rival for a part in a Lincoln Center production has received a callback, and crows about it in detail...
...You can't blame them...
...The directions are the playwright's: "Tyrone: You can take the truth Josie—from me...
...His crowded, slovenly workplace is in direct contrast to the luxurious rooms overhead, catering to snobs, celebrities, epicures, and Mafiosi...
...Or can he...
...and 42nd Street to such furiously original dramas as Look Back in Anger and Marat/Sade, he snarled at actors, challenged directors and regarded newspapers as his natural enemies unless they published rave reviews...
...Bill of fare: Delicious...
...Their landlord is James Tyrone Jr...
...But Mode, in collaboration with Setlock, who suggested some of the characters, has also provided plots and subplots, humor and even a touch of poignance...
...No exotic meals, no hyssop oil, no bed of wild ramps for him...
...The action is interior, and the excitement is in the events that don't occur— the affairs that go unconsummated, the yearning to break free from provincial life, the anger andjealousy that lurkbelow the surface of conversations...
...Gabriel Byrne), scion of a theatrical family...
...Whether it's the bottom of a bottle, or a South Sea Island, we'd find our own ghosts there waiting to greet us— 'sleepless with pale commemorative eyes,' Rossetti wrote...
...James Noone's set, Frances Aronson's lighting and Bruce Ellman's sound design augment this achievement, and Nicholas Martin's direction remains sure-handed from appetizer to dessert...
...Jones is hardly the giantess required by ?'Neill ("More powerful than any but an exceptionally strong man...
...Still, the physician makes no complaint about these useless house calls...
...and Tyrone's, that his sins cannot dissolve in alcohol—work well...
...Despite the continual palaver about her beautiful breasts, she is not endowed with a lavish poitrine, nor has the wardrobe department bothered to pad her out...
...They give him new chances to sigh for Yelena, even though he knows he can never have her love...
...The playwright preferred impudence to awe, and the production at the Brooks Atkinson Theater, with all its quirkiness and flaws, provides a truly Chekhovian evening...
...Their identities hardly matter...
...There he mans the telephones, taking reservations for the next several weeks...
...May has gone on to direct one of Hollywood's most disastrous flops, Ishtar (unmentioned in the program), and to write many amusing sketches plus several forgettable plays, including the recent and tedious Mr...
...Irritated at critics who had panned his musical Subways Are for Sleeping, for example, Merrick found ordinary citizens with names identical to the first-string critics, supplied them with encomia, and ran the "money quotes" in an ad featuring the false Walter Kerr, Richard Watts, etc...
...Worse still, Sam is too overburdened to take a lunch break...
...In fact, Chekhov considered Uncle Vanya a comedy (his great director, Konstantin Stanislavsky, vigorously disagreed, and fashioned the lugubrious andante style that has characterized too many productions of the play since its debut in 1899...
...Not Sam (Mark Setlock...
...Staff: Small but ingratiating...
...Today, given the parlous state of Broadway and the paucity of important playwrights, Misbegotten is being treated as a neglected masterpiece...
...If Murray seems a bit too plummy as Serebryakov, he never fails to amuse...
Vol. 83 • July 2000 • No. 3
