On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage Summer in the Rearview Mirror By Stefan Kanfer The end of summer marks the start of a new theater season, so an aura of anticipation hangs over Broadway and Off-Broadway. But...
...Moving Bodies profiled the eccentric physicist and Nobel Prize-winner Richard Feynman...
...Is her admirer genuinely interested, or is he a latter-day version of Morris Townsend, the fortune-hunter in Henry James' Washington Square...
...When Robert vanishes, Catherine is left alone on that porch, contemplating a blank and lonely future...
...Turnbo (Stephen McKinley Henderson) is the neighborhood gossip, a man of gentle demeanor and malicious tongue...
...Released, he has come home to start life anew...
...Today, working with the aid of computers, mathematicians still remain puzzled by the problem of how to stay creative when they leave their 20s...
...These were abandoned when, as a 20year-old, she decided to get married...
...Both have a practical side...
...The amount of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is perfectly scandalous...
...Doub (Barry Shabaka Henley) is a quiet sort, a loner with a "back story" that extends to some horrific Army experiences...
...The place: Becker's Jitney Service, supplying taxi rides to the residents of Pittsburgh's black Hill District...
...He was not alone in his frustration...
...He is, in fact, one of our greatest playwrights, period...
...and Day as the cold, unfulfilled woman Catherine might have been if she had slipped the family ties...
...But before the new plays are assayed, a handful of older ones deserve a last look...
...Long ago she had ambitions to learn new skills and seek new paths...
...If the lower orders don't set us an example, what on earth is the use of them...
...It made his name, and guaranteed him tenure at the University of Chicago...
...Auburn keeps his audienee guessing from the opening scene to the final minutes...
...He is a whiz with automobiles, for example, and intends to open his own garage...
...Warren has two friends his own age...
...At that point the eldest daughter, Claire (Johanna Day), opted out, fleeing to New York to pursue a vocation in banking...
...Within them may lie the answer to an elusive math problem that could revive Robert's reputation and make a new one for Hal...
...Nothing extraordinary about that—except that Robert is dead...
...But all this infighting may come to nothing, for the city of Pittsburgh has just announced that every building on the street has been condemned...
...The next day Booster sought her out and shot her down...
...At times, Catherine appears to be her father's daughter: prodigious, agitated, unstable...
...But as it turns out, that work is not Robert's...
...Shealy (Willis Burks II) is a hanger-on who runs numbers in the 'hood...
...Turnbo spreads an untrue rumor that Youngblood has been cheating on his inamorata Rena (Michole Briana White), making everyone miserable...
...A man should always have an occupation of some kind...
...The resultant churning edges toward soap opera, but Daisy Foote wisely understates the various dilemmas and miseries...
...Wilde's writingis witty and his people are irresistible...
...In essence, it carries on the work that Horton pioneered—small intense tales written in a minor key about New Englanders living lives of inquiet desperation...
...In this project he is immensely aided by Parker as a young, unsocialized woman tripping over her own talents...
...John Lee Beatty's set not only suggests a Chicago porch but the city itself...
...Asa, too young to be so mired in middle age, has the capacity to change—at least a little, to accommodate Rita's yearnings...
...When they refuse, she reacts by abandoning her home and running off with Jimmy...
...to lose both looks like carelessness...
...He cannot forgive the crime and the wrecked promise, or the fact that his beloved wife died shortly after hearing that her boy was sentenced to death...
...Rita is a careworn New Hampshire resident of 40...
...Jimmy (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) is a jugeared slacker who dotes on Rita's cooking, cadging free meals whenever possible...
...Done properly, as in Proof, it all adds up...
...Is she as brilliant as in earlier days, before she left college to tend her ailing father...
...Her hair has turned quite gold from grief...
...All three Footes (Feet...
...My generation of blacks knew very little about the past of our parents," he was to recall...
...Such internalized people would not seem a fit subject for drama, but David Auburn has found a way to make the struggle as compelling as any Eugene O'Neill melodrama...
...On the porch of a neglected house in Chicago, 25-year-old Catherine (MaryLouise Parker) converses with her father, Robert (Larry Bryggman), a famous mathematics professor...
...Youngblood (Russell Andrews) lives up to his name: At twentysomething he is the youth of the group, and the one with the shortest fuse...
...Jitney arrived fully equipped and ready to roll...
...The old-fashioned respect for the young is dying out...
...The performers never utter a false note, either in their articulation of New Hampshire dialect or in their confrontations and capitulations...
...Daniel Sullivan's direction is, as always, crisp and beautifully timed...
...and Rob Milburn's soundtrack, a mix of harsh funk and lyrical blues, perfectly echoes the happenings onstage...
...I never travel without my diary...
...August Wilson's works tend to be ghettoized even while they are celebrated with Pulitzer Prizes, Tony Awards, Guggenheim fellowships, and critical hosannas...
...The romancer finds Catherine attractive —or so he claims...
...Donald Holder's chiaroscuro lighting and David Gallo's steely set, complete with three cars and a looming city scape, evoke Pittsburgh in the days before the factories shut down...
...And Rita knows that she has to make the best of her abraded but still intact marriage...
...Things did not go smoothly thereafter...
...The play was written by Daisy B. Foote, directed by her father Horton Foote, and stars her sister, Hallie Foote, in the title role...
...The incorrigible Fielding has been warned that one more drink will finish him at Becker's...
...Wren's book got many laughs, but thejokes were all written 100 years ago...
...And his direction tended to be a bit too merry—the best of all possible farces is best played with the straightest of all possible faces...
...You smoke...
...His crowded lyrics paid far too much attention to W.S...
...The unworldly Catherine falls for him and allows Hal access to her father's files...
...In the game, uneven cast at the Jose Quintero Theater, only Brian Bartley as Algernon Moncrieff and Chris Bock as Jack Worthing were worth the price of admission...
...Catherine decided to stay with her father, at the sacrifice of her own future...
...have contributed mightily to this understated evening, aided by Marks, Bennett, MossBachrach, and White...
...The time: 1977...
...Jess Goldstein's costumes and Pat Collins' lighting complete the extraordinary full-length picture...
...I am glad to hear it...
...When They Speak of Rita, at the Primary Stages Theater, is a family affair in every sense of the words...
...It is Catherine's— or so she claims...
...Rare is the article or review that fails to describe him as one of America's greatest black playwrights...
...The couple have one child, 19-yearold Warren (Jamie Bennett), who has more ambition than Asa and more gifts...
...Hal finds what he has been looking for...
...Many composers and lyricists have tried to adapt Oscar Wilde's best-crafted comedy, The Importance of Being Earnest...
...When Youngblood socks Turnbo for his vicious tongue, the older man pulls a gun on him and gives notice that another blow will mean a bullet in the head...
...neither will be a Xerox of their elders...
...The romance grew serious until the moment her father discovered the pair in flagrante and threatened to cut the girl off without a cent...
...She responded by suddenly claiming she had never seen Booster before— that he had kidnapped and raped her that very night...
...The drivers will soon be forced out of the place, and could soon be out of work...
...when they speak of Rita they speak of a promising author and a production worthy of her efforts...
...Will the men stand together and fight City Hall...
...The drama at the Manhattan Theater Club is one of a group of current plays about the human dimensions of science...
...Robert faced two prospects: an institution or home care...
...At other times she seems an opportunistic liar, trying to take credit for another's work...
...The men are a motley crew indeed...
...At the Second Stage Theater it has been given an authorial polish, an invigorated cast and a new life...
...Each call signals another assignment, a few more dollars to get them through the week...
...Fielding (Anthony Chisholm) was a tailor to jazz stars before he got lost in a bottle...
...Or will they seek to improve themselves...
...The trouble is, no one can possibly be more skillful than the playwright...
...nonetheless he got married and stayed married, produced two daughters, remained at the university and went on filling notebooks with theorems, trying to prove that his brightness had not diminished...
...A secretive boozer, he is still in mourning for the wife who left him 22 years ago...
...Now the gap is narrowing every day, thanks to such works...
...The playwright's goal has been to excavate the sorrow, the pity and the richness of the black experience, decade by decade, from the '20s onward...
...A generation ago C.P...
...Gayden Wren and Vance Lehmkuhl were the latest to do so with their experimental musical, Ernest...
...These questions enliven Proof, a play about the fragile membranes separating madness and genius, reality and deception...
...For reasons no one quite understands, great mathematicians have usually done their most significant work before the age of 30...
...Ideology, history, humor, remorse, paternalism in the literal and business sense —all these and more are in Wilson's convincing dialogue and hypnotic storytelling...
...Will they go on the unemployment line or welfare...
...I can understand why they, and all those who preceded them, made the attempt...
...Looking at her husband Asa (Ken Marks), Rita wonders what she ever saw in him...
...He was condemned to die in the electric chair, a sentence later commuted to imprisonment for two decades...
...Copenhagen, for example, discusses the history and morality of physics...
...I dislike arguments...
...Audiences have made this play a sleeper...
...One should always have something sensational to read on the train...
...But Becker wants no part of the 39-year-old ex-convict...
...Wilson's skill is rarely evidenced in tongueand-groove plotting...
...Snow suggested that there were two intellectual societies, the sciences and the arts, and that their practitioners rarely crossed the divide...
...Jeff Cowie's minimalist set design works well with Debra Stein's plain, effective costumes...
...The boy who grew to manhood in a Pittsburgh ghetto felt that he had been denied something more than material goods: He had been cut off from AfricanAmerican history...
...Under Marion McClinton's taut direction, a series of solos mesh into an ensemble brimming with personality and verve...
...Who could top these lines, taken at random from the original...
...Bryggman as a mixture of intellect and pathos...
...Jimmy, for all his foolish appetites, is not destined to remain a moonstruck Oedipal child for long...
...His son Booster (Carl Lumbly), a brilliant high school student, was on his way to scholarships and recognition when he took up with a wealthy white girl...
...She sees Jeannie repeating her own mistake and begs both young people to reconsider...
...Lehmkuhl's music had the timbre and triviality of fin-de-siècle England...
...The civil rights struggle, though, has begun to empower black folks...
...Or has she succumbed to his disease, a debilitating depression punctuated with brief periods of febrile scribbling...
...They shielded us from the indignities they suffered...
...As father and son take the measure of each other, various subplots swirl around them...
...The nerd lives on numbers, strives for an academic job, and begs Catherine for the opportunity to ransack his old professor's notebooks...
...Some 20 years earlier he received the worst possible blow...
...Has she inherited Robert's talent, or is she merely a disturbed soul, seeking compensation for the years she sacrificed to keep the old man from a straitjacket...
...Into this tableau comes an outsider, Hal Dobbs (Ben Shenkman), a graduate student who is 50 per cent nerd, 50 per cent suitor...
...From the beginning, he has been an impressionist dependent on atmosphere, cadences of speech— particularly African-American speech— and detailed character studies...
...Then a newcomer, known only as the "California Man," outpointed him in an election...
...Shenkman as a calculating young math whiz...
...It is washing one's clean linen in public...
...Jeannie (Margot White) is a pretty young thing, stuck on Warren—so stuck that she forsakes college when she becomes pregnant by him, content to help him start his own business and his own family...
...After a lifetime of studying, even the brilliant logician Alfred North Whitehead confessed that, with age, mathematics, "like the ghost of Hamlet's father, eludes the efforts of our mental weapons to grasp it...
...In the recognition that followed those dramas his earliest play, Jitney, was almost forgotten...
...As it turns out, Warren and Jeannie are not as senseless as they seem...
...Susan Hilferty's costumes are accurate down to Booster's out-of-prison suit...
...Then, in rapid succession, his wife died, his career grew stale, and madness seized him...
...Though he occasionally dips into the sentimental, forthe most part his work is as cerebral and elegant as the equations of higher mathematics...
...Gilbert and not enough to Oscar Wilde...
...The youth who once seemed so full of energy had settled for a small life in a small town, eking out a living as the county road agent...
...These conflicts provoke scenes of power and complexity...
...Today she cleans houses and marks time by piling up regrets...
...at that point, it appears, the queen of sciences becomes coy and elusive...
...Becker is the most upright of these men—and the most flawed...
...Early on, he solved a famously difficult math problem...
...Usually, a writer's debut piece shows promise rather than proficiency...
...Supervised by the large, tough-talking Becker (Paul Butler), a group of drivers wait for the phone to ring...
...From time to time he materializes in Catherine's mind as she fondly recalls their discussing mathematics the way others might talk about the weather...
...The trauma of all this is too much for Rita...
...To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune...
...They are always vulgar, and often convincing...
...Works such as Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Fences, The Piano Lesson, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, depicted a vanished world of tragic bias and epic striving, punctuated by scenes of incomparable comic relief...
...During the moments when Robert appears, his biography is told in rambling monologues and terse exchanges...
...In the right hands, no field of study is too recondite for the stage—even higher mathematics...
...As a result, Asa became crestfallen and rudderless, a poor excuse for a man, a husband and a father...
Vol. 83 • September 2000 • No. 4
