On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage Kings and Commoners By Stefan Kanfer For the last 20 years August Wilson has been at work on the most ambitious oeuvre in the history of American theater. When completed,...
...Bill (Tate Donovan) is a streetwise, beribboned veteran...
...He is crazy for Dawn, and in an indiscreet moment— for Jeff, life is composed of such moments—lets her know that Bill keeps stopping off at the building for a purpose...
...Dawn rises, jealousy turns to zealotry, and soon everyone is in trouble...
...Russell makes a fierce 20th century Iago...
...Both men are besotted with Gilda, who liberally distributes her favors between them...
...Tonya has already experiencedmotherhood...
...The star was given precious little aid from Nelson, who has made the mistake of directing his own script...
...In a very minor part as factotum, Jenny Sterlin was funny without being vulgar...
...When she was onstage in several encounters, Weigert not only stole the scene but the play...
...Carl gratefully attended her every mot...
...Before, between and after them came scores of other books, theater pieces and movies dealing with the same subject...
...Marion McClinton has directed his cast with flair—and yet he leaves the distinct impression of a man in awe of a playwright...
...Zut alors, what is a woman to do...
...Let's win Out in Spite of the angiy crowd And if the simile's allowed Be bloody but unbowed...
...The sexual initiation was a cultural one as well...
...Like the works that went before it, Hedley features a luminous cast and an irresistible story...
...This is a work that needs revision, a King that lacks the regal stature of its lineage...
...This is too thin a line to sustain Wilson's three-hour drama, and he does not offer much in the way of incident...
...And what of the Captain's bogus alibi for his brother...
...to Paris...
...This time out, however, Wilson has provided some stumbling blocks that even he cannot vault successfully...
...And it operates in the land of Yoruba myth and religions, which is the hardest one to actualize, but the one that gave the play its bed to ground it...
...Or was there, as Ruby hints, another progenitor from the days when she took more than one lover at a time...
...Although David Gallo's set is less convincing than the players, Toni-Leslie James' costumes maintain their authenticity to the last thread...
...Robert Brill's oversize sets were works of art in themselves, but called attention to the paltry action within them...
...Stool Pigeon (Stephen McKinley Henderson...
...Bill is suddenly loathed by Dawn, who plans to tell the police brass what the married officer has been doing with his evenings...
...In their lively, guilt-tinged chatter the next day, Claudie spoke of the Kama Sutra—but also of literature, art, jazz...
...its shortcomings cannot be ignored simply because the author has done important work before, and no doubt will again—perhaps when the story of Hedley III is told...
...The late King Hedley I was an angry, uncontrollable figure who committed murder...
...The image of barbed wire that King puts around the garden could be a crown of thorns or a circle of iron...
...Watching the four actors is like attending aperformance of the Budapest String Quartet: They make the old seem new, and commit no errors en route...
...In Richard Nelson's memory play, Madame Melville, it was again the fixture...
...The play takes place in the 1930s...
...Noël Coward once vowed that despite, or perhaps because of, his humble beginnings, "I will strive to travel in first class...
...To begin with, two of the central roles were miscast...
...He needs an alibi, and William can provide it by telling the investigating detectives a lie...
...Let's live boisterously boisterously roisterously Let's lead the moralists the devil of a dance...
...That self-mocking bravura was wholly lost in the smug, tittering production at the American Airlines Theater...
...Probe and plumb To find a new sensation...
...as a visiting couple of ugly Americans, Marisa Berenson and T. Scott Cunningham were exactly the opposite...
...That prophetic madman comments on the proceedings, spouting quotations from the Bible and from the out-of-date newspapers he can never bear to throw away...
...She gave birth to a daughter at the age of 17, and that girl is now a single mother herself, repeating the cycle of poverty and despair...
...To add to the excruciating tone, he was caparisoned like a drag queen, complete with bleached hair, an eyebrow ring and lipstick...
...Holy mackerel, what's a boy to do...
...But the lovers have argued recently, and here is this nice young man asking for an overnight at her flat...
...What was written as a ditsy expatriate became a hilarious and poignant turn as Ruth commented on the April and September affair before her astonished eyes, recalled the suburban life she left behind in America, and detailed her panicky pursuit of a musical career in Paris...
...So pardon thephrase...
...Meantime, two cops have taken to dropping into the lobby at odd times...
...One thing leads to another, the hour grows late, and before the two of them know it the other pupils have gone and the last metro has departed...
...Am reading more of Oscar Wilde," he noted in his diary on July 14,1946...
...The youth this time was the 15-yearold Carl (Macaulay Culkin), introduced by his unseen fiftysomething self...
...But when it came time for the Off-Broadway production of his Lobby Hero, the playwright stepped aside for Mark Brokaw...
...Emotionally as well as physically disfigured, Hedley returns to Pittsburgh resolved to keep his temper in check and make an honest living sometime—but not just yet...
...Lonergan's ending is a bit too tricky but, as in You Can Count On Me, the going is the goal...
...Nevertheless, the real hero of Hero is Lonergan...
...Here he carried on as if it were but a step from Berlin to Britain, overacting and mugging at every turn...
...King won't hear of it...
...Bill is both an arrogant jerk and a courageous officer...
...In a recent interview in the New York Times, director Marion McClinton listed the attributes of Hedley II: "It operates in the language of August Wilson, the blues idiom, the gospel idiom, the idiom of the black church, it operates out of classic Western theater—the Greeks, in particular Oedipus...
...Then something happens...
...But this is his flesh and blood...
...It was a wise move...
...How they fit into this whole story is awkwardly, with much backing and filling and irrelevancies...
...he even essayed a little poetry of his own...
...Both works made admirable and profitable films...
...Leo (Dominic West) is a playwright...
...Jeff, who could easily have been a stick figure, turns out to be a man of considerable depth, not only goofy but self-deprecatingly witty...
...For one thing, many of the characters in the new play are carryovers from Guitars, produced seven years ago...
...When he designed Design in 1932, Coward made certain that his ménage a trois (enacted by the author, Lynn Fontanne and her husband Alfred Lunt) would not be misunderstood as two gay men and a straight woman...
...I can't let the season just ending pass without commenting on the now closed production of Noël Coward's Design For Living...
...His ear for New York dialogue remains flawless, and his sense of character puts him in the highest rank of contemporary writers...
...The cost turns out to be the robbery of a jewelry store, a theft with dire consequences...
...For another, the principals tend to delivermonologues rather than engage in conversation...
...this loser is never going to be an adman...
...We are wallet-deep in the Ronald Reagan era, when supply-side economics has failed to "trickle down" a drop of support, employment is drying up, and poor folk are all but invisible to the world outside the ghetto...
...In the title role, Mitchell displays a combination of fury and intelligence gone wrong...
...Cumming made his name a few years back as the garish emcee in Cabaret...
...Why, ask if he might stay at Madame Melville's apartment, of course...
...The playwright occasionally winked at the public (although "Mad About the Boy" was sung by a woman, London insiders knew it was an oblique reference to amale relationship...
...You will see it on Broadway and Hollywood billboards for the next few decades of this millennium...
...As if this were not enough, Jeff also speaks about the Captain's dilemma...
...Gilda replies...
...An audience can hardly be expected to remember the traits of those ghetto dwellers...
...Life, one feels, might continue like this for the next 30 or 40 years...
...In his late 20s, washed out of the Navy and still living with his folks, Jeff reads the New York Post, dreams about getting a job in advertising, and tries to sleep on the job without getting caught by his righteous boss, Captain William (Dion Graham...
...For the comedy/drama at the John Houseman Theater undergoes a dozen shifts of mood and tempo, and only an experienced director could sustain the tension and evoke the laughter without losing a beat...
...Who should be a faculty member of that institution but Claudie Melville (Joely Richardson), an attractive, willowy French woman in her mid-30s...
...While these speeches are effectively written and performed, they often bring the action to a halt...
...Some things never go out of style...
...In the uncreditedpart of Carl's father, Steve Todar had a late, powerful scene just before the curtain...
...Alas, this time out he was assigned to steerage...
...Why, say yes and, for lagniappe, go to bed with him...
...Its attitude was reflected in a song the playwright wrote for his revue Words and Music: Let's live dangerously dangerously dangerously, Let's all glory in the bludgeonings of chance...
...Carl's parents are too preoccupied with work and social life to give the boy much quality time...
...Though he could easily pass for 15, Culkin was an implausible teenager...
...Brown is alternately hilarious and threatening...
...Rage may run in the family: We meet Hedley II (Brian Stokes Mitchell) right after he has been released from jail for killing the youth who slashed him in a knife fight...
...Remember the name...
...Only West, who played it straight in every sense of the word, and Cunningham, who was all comic bewilderment, invested their characters with any panache...
...The two women in his life, his once promiscuous mother Ruby (Leslie Uggams) and his pregnant, no-nonsense wife Tonya (Viola Davis), let him know the foolishness of this self-deception...
...He was repulsed, however, by effeminate or in-your-face attitudes...
...And so saying, she rejoins the gentlemen to cock a snoot at society's conventions and live happily ever after in sinful intimacy...
...Dawn is a yammering fool and a budding beauty...
...Most playwrights need someone with a fresh eye for nuance— and for an appropriate leading man...
...Michael Krass' costumes and Allen Moyer's set are perfection...
...Its ambitions and occasional lyricism are to be lauded...
...The great disappointment here was, of all people, Culkin...
...But without prior knowledge about their backgrounds and personalities, no ticket holder can fully understand them ortheirtribulations...
...In a dreamy manner, Hedley speaks of using the profits to go legit—to open and operate a video store, for example...
...Thomas Lynch's set was bright enough and Susan Hilferty's costumes were right enough...
...William gets word that his brother has been involved in a capital crime...
...Hedley palavers about his garden, a piece of dirt placed center stage where some symbolic greenery sprouts, only to die young...
...When the policeman takes the elevator to 22 J he is not "going to see his old friend Jim," he is calling on a call girl during his tour of duty...
...Richardson, alternately playful and melancholy as she realized how easy her seduction had been, was nearly as effective in a clichéd part...
...And Stool Pigeon spouts portentous phrases: "People got to know the whole story, how they fit into it...
...That action begins in Pittsburgh's segregated Hill District during the 1980s...
...Within days he and a boyhood friend, Mister (Monté Russell), become involved in a scheme to sell stolen refrigerators...
...Tare Kenneth Lonergan, for example...
...Tonya editorializes about raising a child in such hazardous times...
...Into this budding affair steps the doorman with hobnail boots...
...The offstage narrator began by recollecting the year of 1966 when his father, a prosperous businessman, was transferred from the U.S...
...After a short time Gilda's attempt at respectability fails, and she casts out her husband while her two ex-lovers look on...
...After a school outing the youth contrives to lag behind his classmates, allegedly to ask his instructor some academic questions...
...You're a mad woman again," remarks the delighted Ernest...
...Then there is the problem of his unborn child...
...He wrote and directed last year's terrific film, You Can Count On Me...
...Gilda (Jennifer Ehle), an interior decorator...
...morality, truth, living life by the Book, mean everything to him...
...Complicating matters are Ruby's aging beau Elmore (Charles Brown), a sly professional gambler with a few intrigues of his own, and the eccentric next door...
...I've been sane and still for two years...
...Moral and intellectual instruction is left to the masters at the posh American school...
...Bruce Pask's costumes became an echo of Joe Mantello's direction, cheapening what should have been elegant, and causing smirks where they should have been provoking smiles...
...If she does, will Jeff have to testify in court...
...Hedley II should have been cut by a third, and its lengthy speeches hammered into dialogue...
...Instead, he fills the time with expository speeches...
...In particular, we looked at the story of Ogun, the god of iron...
...There are few more durable stories than the one about the youth whose introduction to life is made by an older woman...
...Five years ago he left the screen and only now resurfaced at the age of 20...
...He makes the mistake of confiding in Jeff...
...Nevertheless, in the version at the Roundabout Theater it could not have been interpreted any other way...
...he wants an heir and namesake at any cost...
...And William is a man whose probity and dignity go to war with his deepest feelings...
...Dawn (Heather Burns) is a clueless rookie with a crush on her partner...
...But eventually, driven to distraction by the sharp points of the triangle, she decides to marry Ernest (John Cunningham), a stuffy businessman...
...One day, he warns, Jeff will wake up and find himself a "doddering useless old unemployed doorman," condemned to be called Pops by all and sundry...
...Otto (Alan Cumming), a painter...
...What is on display at the Virginia Theater should rightly be labeled a great bad play...
...Design is not one of Coward's best works, but the comedy had sparkling moments and sharp exchanges...
...Thirty years later it provided the central theme of Robert Anderson's melodrama Tea and Sympathy...
...The Captain is torn...
...The title refers to Jeff (Glenn Fitzgerald), a so-called security specialist (read night doorman) at a Manhattan apartment house...
...When completed, his 10-play cycle will offer a vast panorama of African-American life, decade by decade, from its dawn to the new millennium...
...As for the women: Davis projects a sad strength, and Uggams seems to get more convincing and attractive with each part...
...The starOf Home Alone was widely acknowledged as the best (and best paid) child actor in Hollywood...
...All this would have been glutinous and overfamiliar were it not for visits by Claudie's next door neighbor, Ruth (Robin Weigert...
...Where we'll end up Nobody can tell...
...That classic formula was the basis of Raymond Radiguet's 1923 novel Devil in the Flesh...
...Why shouldn't I be a mad woman...
...But William is onto his deputy...
...Whatatiresome, affected sod...
...We mean to be raising hell...
...Will Dawn turn him in to the investigators...
...So he did...
...Dawn, in turn, is threatened by Bill, who plans to tell the police brass that she is incompetent...
...Beginning with the first entry, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, through such dramas as the The Piano Lesson and Seven Guitars to the eighth and newest, King Hedley ?, Wilson's sense of place, and his ear for black speech, have been extraordinary...
...Let's succumb Completely to temptation...
...As always, Wilson's work attracts some of the finest American performers...
...And who should be her star pupil but the innocent, curious Carl...
...Speaking with studied andunconvincinghesitance, selfconscious about playing self-consciousness, he suggested a novice at acting rather than at life itself...
...This would have been too much symbolic cargo for a shelf full of Eugene O'Neill epics, and this Wilson play all but collapses under the weight That said, the actors cannot be faulted...
...she is Madamoiselle Melville, an overheated number who is having it on with a married faculty member...
...Ehle is an excellent actress, but her robust, full-bodied presence worked against the crisp, post-flapper feminist she was supposed to represent...
...Tonya seeks to break that cycle with an abortion...
...Actually, Madame is a courtesy title...
...Among them are doubts about his parentage: Was Hedley I his real father...
...Meantime, the two men find much to admire in each other, even going so far as to share apair of pajamas...
...Many miseries beset the protagonist...
...Henderson turns the bromidic role of Wise Fool into an unforgettable comic figure...
Vol. 84 • July 2001 • No. 4
