Mamet's masterpiece lights up Merrimack

David Adkins, Todd Licea and Joel Colodner in Glengarry Glen Ross.  Photo: Meghan Moore.

The Merrimack Rep is perhaps our leading example of a great theatre constrained by its budget. They consistently operate in the black, and enjoy a great deal of support from their community (indeed, up in Merrimack you feel an extraordinary bond between the theatre and its audience, closer and more trusting than just about anywhere else).  But you can also feel in their season, which is typically devoted to small-cast plays, a sense of financial (and hence to some degree artistic) limits. This perception is particularly acute given the fact that their "big" play each season is so reliably terrific. One guesses that with only a little more funding, Merrimack could mount seasons that would consistently rival, and possibly eclipse, the best being done on the regional landscape.

Certainly Glengarry Glen Ross (through this weekend only) is the most powerful show currently on the local boards.  It's true I've never seen David Mamet's balls-out potboiler fail; given a competent cast, its nasty mix of coiled masculine anxiety, frustration, and aggression always grips.  After all, it's practically an X-ray of the power dynamics of the locker room, where the stakes are always high, and the men always naked (at least metaphorically).

What's more, alas, the script also makes one reminisce for the days before Mamet lost his mind to the sort of political and sexual paranoias one would associate with a denizen of one of his shark tanks. For Glengarry is not only perhaps this playwright's greatest play, it's also his last great play; in his next major effort, Speed-the-Plow, he crossed over from sympathy with his bad boys to literal identification with them. Women became the Enemy, and thus the ironic finale of Glengarry, which dashes any hope of honor among his masculine thieves, would prove the last of its kind in the playwright's oeuvre.

But at least we have director Charles Towers, and the cast at Merrimack (which is far better than competent), to remind us how electrifying the playwright once was. You could argue, I suppose, that this Glengarry plays everything by the book - but to my mind that only underlines the fact that, as the culture really moves so slowly these days, the play's constructs still feel up-to-the-minute. Mamet's men are stripped of any connection to society at large, much less the other sex. They seem to exist in a vacuum, and even their sales prowess is somehow evanescent; it's a skill - or a potency - that has no physical basis (it can evaporate at a customer's whim). Thus these men are only men when they believe they're men, and so their emotional predicament in a way feels timeless (even if the sums of money in play clearly date the script).

David Adkins and Will Lebow make a deal.  Photo: Meghan Moore.

They are, of course, not only near-tragic figures but snakes-in-the-swampgrass as well. As mentioned earlier, part of what makes Glengarry so much more bracing than later Mamet is that it's so unsentimental about the dishonesty and back-stabbing moving behind the solemn cult of masculinity. Mamet's real estate gods - so seemingly concerned with admiration and trust - are constantly cheating on the down low; their very livelihood, in fact, is based on proverbial Florida swampland. (Which may be why the play was at first misinterpreted as a critique of capitalism.)

Fortunately the cast at Merrimack is all but expert at floating between these opposed identities and moral poles - and their command of the famously staccato "Mamet-speak" (here at its hilarious height) is virtuosic.  As cocky top salesdog Ricky Roma, Todd Licea exudes a more open sense of predatory Las-Vegas charisma than usual, but he so smoothly manipulates each and every social transaction that his sales success is utterly convincing.  Ditto for Will LeBow's desperate Shelly Levene, a kind of lizard on his last legs who alternates between claims of prowess (he was once known as "The Machine") and pathetically low compromises, deals - and even thefts.

These two superb actors supply the engine of Mamet's own machine, but there are several remarkable performances elsewhere in the production. Merrimack mainstay David Adkins gives his Williamson (the shop boss, in effect) a stronger shot of alienation than callow slime, but he's intriguing all the same. Meanwhile Jeremiah Wiggins is just about perfect as the shop's latest mark, and Jim Ortlieb makes the aging, bumbling Aaronow a figure of true pathos.  I was only dissatisfied with Charlie Kevin's Moss, who had less of a hidden edge than I think the character demands - but after the play's opening gambit, his is a minor role.

In its look and feel, the physical production is likewise just right - from the blood-red backdrop of the Chinese restaurant to the cheap, off-white gypsum board of the burgled office (thank you, designer Bill Clarke).  All in all, Towers and company have practically built a time machine on the Merrimack stage (even the salesmen's 80's-era ethnic slurs have been preserved, along with the c-word, and a deluge of other profanity).  It all brings us back to the days when Mamet was a playwright of promise, and still had the talent (and self-awareness) to grip you by the lapels - and not let go.

Painting the town Red - again

Mark Zeisler and Ryan Barry see red in Red.  Photo: Meghan Moore.

Bostonians rarely get a chance to see a new script from two different perspectives - but we're enjoying just such a chance right now, as Merrimack Rep presents John Logan's Red (through this weekend), which SpeakEasy Stage produced in town only about a year ago.

I was probably the lone voice questioning the success of that earlier production (partly because I have a special place in my heart for the play's subject, Mark Rothko).  And to my mind the Merrimack version - helmed by its incisive artistic director, Charles Towers - is more serious and satisfying than the SpeakEasy model, which I found far too slick and manipulative.  Indeed, it was so devoted to flattering its audience that it almost became an unconscious travesty of Rothko's ideals, as the artist famously dedicated himself to a lonely mode of transcendence in his luminous, abstract "multiforms."

But you know - I have to admit that the show-bizzy calculations of SpeakEasy weren't entirely in the wrong.  For it eventually becomes apparent at Merrimack that there's only so far even a forceful theatrical intellect like Charles Towers can take this particular vehicle; there's greatness in Rothko, yes, but in the last analysis, Red is only a slick little play about that greatness.  The SpeakEasy boys may not have known from Mark Rothko - but they did know from John Logan.

So it would take a great philosopher to accurately weigh these two approaches in the balance - but me, I'd go with the Towers version any day, which at least gives us a Rothko to reckon with (the man himself at left)  in actor Mark Zeisler, who brings to the role a sense of tragic scale and barely-contained ferocity.  Zeisler not only resembles Rothko (although the artist was taller than the actor), he also conjures a credibly macho aesthetic lion, roaring in sad defeat before the lavender tide of irony that washed over Manhattan in the late 50's and 60's, and pushed Abstract Expressionism into the shadows (seemingly forever).

Does that sound homophobic? Sorry, but that's the historical subtext; Rothko's generation were he-men who spattered, shot, and ejaculated their art all over the canvas (or in the later case of Richard Serra, all over the room) - the symbolism was really that crude; but in contrast, Warhol's generation packaged and marketed their imagery - which was, of course, largely about packaging and marketing.  Logan seems on the surface to treat this divide - his script revolves around Rothko's commission to decorate the Four Seasons, a modernist temple to consumption designed by Philip Johnson, who wasn't only queer but also a Nazi (and Rothko was Jewish!).  The ironies here couldn't be more intense, but Logan basically tiptoes around them. Still, even within the script's limits, I felt actor Ryan Barry, who is playing an amalgam of Rothko's assistants (as well as the only other character in the play) could have teased a bit more unspoken sexual dimension from his role.  (Again, at SpeakEasy this was something of a given - in fact the trouble was that Rothko and his assistant both seemed gay!)

But when I think about it, no production of this slim script I've seen (and this is no. 3 for me) has fully limned the only purely dramatic interest I think Logan's conceit has: the tentative, frustrated attempt at connection between the essentially lonely Rothko and probably the only person he dealt with all day long.  But this hinges on another factor that Logan barely develops: the insecurities lurking beneath  the artist's magisterial mask.  For he was a man with plenty to be insecure about: a Russian who left Russia, a Jew who elided his Jewishness, a Surrealist who had dropped surrealism - Rothko needed an identity, hence his imperious insistence that he had synthesized half of Western culture into  totemic - but non-specific - panels of color (which in Kevin Frazier's subtle lighting design, glow just as they should).

But how could actor Mark Zeisler get beneath the polemics of Logan's play (largely stitched together from Rothko's own statements) to the psyche lurking beneath them?  I'm not sure; Logan gives him little help - although Zeisler does pull off some impressive meltdowns (his voice is a resonant wonder), and he invests the finale (which seeks to conflate Rothko's decline of the Four Seasons offer with his eventual suicide) with a poignant resonance.

But in the end we keep bumping into the play itself.  Logan patches the holes in his text with obvious filler (poor Ryan Barry is saddled with an entirely disposable back story), and the central relationship is only barely developed; but Logan can ride a long way on Rothko's own fierce rhetoric.  And with Mark Zeisler delivering those lines, maybe that's enough.

Meet the Beats

Merrimack Rep takes the Kerouac legend off-road with Beat Generation.

Last weekend Merrimack Rep played host to a minor - maybe even a major - literary event: the world premiere of Lowell homeboy Jack Kerouac's only play, Beat Generation, in a staged reading directed by artistic director Charles Towers, and performed in concert with a Kerouac conference at UMass Lowell.

And it proved an intriguing evening - although to answer what I assume is your big question: is Beat Generation dramatically viable?  Alas, no; it's of biographic and academic interest only - clearly a first draft abandoned in a drawer as soon as the mood that spawned it had waned.  But its very tossed-off quality enhances its cinéma vérité atmosphere (you can spot just about every player in the Kerouac posse in its thinly disguised cast of characters), and it provides a touching corrective to the hip, outlaw image of Kerouac that has slowly replaced in our consciousness the alienated, tormented man himself.

In short, you won't recognize Kerouac in this play - well, you might if you were perceptive enough to appreciate the passivity of his authorial presence (as opposed to voice) in On the Road (I haven't read the other books).  In Beat Generation, tellingly enough it's Neal Cassady, the man whose charisma pulled Kerouac onto that eponymous highway, who appropriates the novel's voice, getting all the jazzy riffs, and rattling on in an endless, spontaneous cadence identical to that of the famous "scroll" from which Kerouac derived his magnum opus.  Kerouac, for his part, mostly just listens.  It's almost enough to make you wonder - just who is really narrating On the Road, anyway?

It must also be admitted, however, that Beat Generation hardly cracks the code of Cassady's personal aura (a nimbus that the team at Merrimack was unable to conjure either).  Cassady, of course, looms behind much hipster culture like a kind of ghost - or silent, bisexual god; he inspired not only Kerouac's masterpiece, but also figured in the oeuvre of Allen Ginsberg, and later mixed it up with Ken Kesey and Timothy Leary - in the meantime inspiring a range of golden American cowboys with homoerotic subtexts, ranging from the buddies of Route 66 to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

A drifter blessed with intense physical charisma (you can feel it in the photo below) who struggled intermittently to be a family man, Cassady related to Kerouac in some strange mode that oscillated between brotherly love, disinterest, and sexual obsession (at least on Kerouac's part; Cassady thought nothing of dumping Jack when he felt like it, which is in effect how On the Road sputters to a stop).  I think it's worth noting here that the poet Allen Ginsberg (the openly gay member of this particular posse) penned paeans to Cassady's penis, and even Kerouac was in awe of his buddy's "enormous dangle" - while Cassady's artsier girlfriends sometimes sketched portraits of it (I'm not kidding).  What can I say, it must have been something special - as you might expect, as it basically sired the entire Beat generation.

Timothy Leary and Neal Cassady, in a photo by Allen Ginsberg from the Electric Kool-Aid Acid days.

But like many a libertine, Cassady was intensely self-destructive, and he paid for his pleasures by dying at the early age of 41 - slipping into a coma while wandering along a Mexican railway (Kerouac died from alcohol only a year later, in 1969, at age 47).  They had long since drifted apart, anyhow - and Beat Generation could possibly mark the beginning of that rift, for it traces a kind of "Long Day's Journey into Beat," during which Kerouac (or "Buck," played by Tony Crane) trails after Cassady (or "Milo," played by Joey Collins), just as he did in On the Road, from a friend's apartment to the racetrack - and then finally back to Milo/Cassady's home, where among the wife and kids Cassady's hipster mask suddenly drops, and Kerouac is left out in the yard in his sleeping bag, abandoned again.

It could be a poignant story of an alcoholic little-boy-lost, but Kerouac clearly had few skills as a dramatist, and with minimal rehearsal time, Towers and company managed minimal theatrical shaping until the last act (more on that in a minute).  And as Kerouac/Buck, actor Tony Crane proved an intriguing presence, but seemed more interested in impersonating a sexy icon (Kerouac was a looker, too, as you can see below) than actually limning any of the tensions that surfaced in the script (when Cassady demands that Kerouac shine his shoe, for instance, Crane simply did so with a happy smile).  Meanwhile, as Cassady, actor Joey Collins seemed overwhelmed by the sheer torrents of verbiage he was required to deliver about karmic cats and moonbeams and such; with little happening as subtext to these harangues, it was hard to imagine him attracting any disciples.

Hey, Jack Kerouac - the man himself.

Still, things edged up hill over the first two acts - the second, at the race track, clearly has some potential.  And then suddenly the last scene was weirdly compelling - its centerpiece an interview with some kind of Transylvanian bishop that came off here as a sketch penned by Harold Pinter and directed by Roman Polanski.  Suddenly I was reminded of much that has been forgotten about Kerouac - he was no Buddhist hipster, but a devout Catholic, for instance.  And the scene is one of the few instances of dramatic writing I can think of that powerfully distills what it's like to be drugged, and perceiving social interactions in a warped way.

The whole thing played like a hallucination, to be honest, anchored by one of the most bizarre performances I have ever seen, from actor Seumas Sargent, as the innocently vampiric bishop.  And the whole cast suddenly seemed to pull itself into top form, perhaps because nobody had any long soliloquies to deliver - even as actor Ari Butler did a clever little comic cameo as an amusingly heterosexual Allen Ginsberg.  The mood was still far too straight in general, I suppose - but the scene seemed to get at something strange, and damaged, and deeply personal for Kerouac; his lines ached with a kind of yearning for any kind of meaning that might be available, anywhere, anyhow.   As the curtain fell on Kerouac once more alone, gazing up at the stars, I felt I had, at least for that scene, had the chance to meet the Beats.

The Ghost-Writer at Merrimack Rep

Dan Kremer and Rebecca Harris in The Ghost-Writer.

We've all heard of the "ghost in the machine," that famous tag for one of philosophy's central conundrums, the mind-body problem.

But now, in The Ghost-Writer (at the Merrimack Rep through May 13), playwright Michael Hollinger offers us the ghost in the type-writing machine: in this elegant three-hander, Hollinger conjures a late author who (perhaps) can still dictate from the great beyond, to the devoted secretary who has survived him, but has yet to complete his final novel - although she's working on it.  Even if the jealous widow of her beloved is utterly determined that their illicit - spiritual collaboration, shall we say? - will never see the light of day.

This is, of course, the kind of basically-silly, but irresistibly-romantic conceit that can open out onstage into something deliciously evocative - in the right hands.  And it's in almost the right hands at Merrimack.  Director Charles Towers is clearly hoping to spark something like the spooky fire that made last season's thriller Tryst such a hit - and with the help of brilliant lighting designer Dan Kotlowitz, he does conjure a dozen different dramatic moods, each worthy of holding a séance by.  Indeed, it's hard not to believe in ghosts - the hair all but stands up on the nape of your neck - when you're confronted by any of the louring dusks with which Kotlowitz has washed the nearly-bare Merrimack stage.  (In fact I'd say next year's IRNE lighting design award already has a front-runner.)

Photos: Meghan Moore

And odd as it may sound, the script is almost as good as the lighting; Hollinger has crafted a compellingly cool draught of a play that should go down in one delicious pour.  But I'm afraid it has a hidden flaw - or perhaps booby trap might be the better word.  The playwright has sculpted a series of meticulous exchanges over grammar and punctuation which essentially serve as the mating song of his two utterly repressed lovebirds.  (Thus even that hyphen in the author's title is, I think, important.)

The trouble is that, at least for a time, director Charles Towers, and actors Dan Kremer and Rebecca Harris, have taken Hollinger's precisely clipped words a little too much at their word, attending obsessively to the elocution of the text, while only nodding in the general direction of the emotions rising beneath it. Indeed, we only realize in retrospect that love has bloomed, and that Harris is now essentially Kremer's muse - or that at least she imagines she is.

Still, once love is indeed in the spectral air, there are several delicious shivers to be had in the play's final scenes - thanks largely to the perfectly pitched performance of Maureen Garrett as that not-so-grieving widow, who was always pleased to imagine that she was her famous husband's muse.  And Hollinger does manage to tease a few amusingly ambiguous vibrations from the plight of his lonely amanuensis, her pale fingers poised over her dark keyboard as if it were a Ouija board, while one ear remains cocked to the spiritual plane.  Is she indeed (as she believes) taking dictation from the dead?  Or is she only indulging a delusion designed to stave off the painful reality of her passion's passing?  Or - or - has her long collaboration with her virtual lover endowed her own imagination with something like his voice?

Even if these mild mind games fail to intrigue you - and even if you find Hollinger's meditations on artistic collaboration (he also wrote Opus, the popular tale of a struggling string quartet) fall flat - it's still hard not to be moved by the spooky stylishness of this production.  Leaving it, you may discover a certain chill has filled your heart as you gaze at the setting sun . . . and is that just the wind in the chimney, or the echo of a howl from the great beyond?  Is that only the scratch of a tree-branch at your windowpane?  Or is it a dead voice whispering its lonely secrets in your ear . . ?

The Seafarer returns, and Towers towers

The cast of The Seafarer. Production photos by Meghan Moore.

Within the last two years I've seen three productions of Conor McPherson's The Seafarer, so I'm beginning to feel like something of an expert on it. One of these was the author's own, which played like a bare-knuckled brawl between lost souls; what was startling about that version, and what I think has made the play so widely produced (along with McPherson's grimly lyrical monologues), was the surprise of its final sense of salvation, when those souls were revealed as not quite beyond hope after all. The script seemed far less potent, however, in a weak showing at SpeakEasy last fall; I blamed the gap largely on that production's superficiality and over-earnestness.

So I was glad to hear the Merrimack had taken it up again; that theatre's artistic director, Charles Towers, is certainly the most serious (and I'd argue the most talented) theatre-maker in town, and he does it old-school, without the props of "concept" or "updating" or what-have-you. With Towers, you know you'll get the play, without apology, and indeed with pride - because he knows that in the end, the play's the thing. And The Seafarer - probably the best new drama of the past few years - deserved a truly rich and resonant New England production.

But at first I was surprised to discover how far Towers had wandered from McPherson's own vision; this is a much darker and more ruminative version than I think the playwright imagined himself. It's also not flawless - the set feels slightly self-conscious, and I'd argue the director has made one major mistake in his casting. But damnit if Towers doesn't in the end work his familiar magic, and even perhaps surpasses the playwright in his vision of the play. This isn't merely the darkest Seafarer I've seen; it's also the deepest, and perhaps the best.

McPherson was inspired to pen the script by an Old English poem of the same name, which begins (in loose translation):

This tale is true, and mine.
It tells
How the sea took me, swept me back
And forth in sorrow and fear and pain;
Showed me suffering in a hundred ships,
In a thousand ports,
and in me.

In those lines one senses immediately a correspondence with McPherson's own voice; no wonder he was drawn to the arc of this lonely song (recorded in the Exeter Book, at left), that moves slowly but inexorably not toward man but toward God, and a final affirming Amen.

Of course (in case you've never encountered the play, or the playwright), McPherson's sea is one of alcohol, and his seafarers are all very hard cases, lurching drunkenly toward a defiantly "merry," but actually deeply desolate, Christmas Eve in a chilly rowhouse basement. Actually, there's a lone holdout among McPherson's revelers: Sharky, his lead, who is trying to keep the bottle at bay, as he has realized at last the mess it has made of his life. It's hard to be a teetotaler on Christmas, however, and harder still when not St. Nick but Old Nick himself shows up at your front door, in some dark Gaelic variation on A Christmas Carol.

Stranger still, Old Scratch has shown up equipped with a deck of cards, and a line about something Sharky promised him long ago, at yet another low point in the dark valley of his life; and by dawn the two are battling through a fateful game of poker, with our hero's immortal soul as the stakes. But on this simple, spooky premise McPherson has woven a skein of image and symbol that impresses me more every time I hear it. Is the Devil simply a living symbol for the bottle - or for the cold self-absorption that so often attends it? Or does Old Nick represent the long bill of reckoning that Sharky has been tallying his whole life? Fortunately, McPherson never settles on a single, simple metaphor to "explain" his set-up; instead, he allows his central situation to ramify into a complex meditation on temptation, and the inevitable loneliness of the fall from grace.

It's that sense of solitary descent that Towers captures with particular assurance and insight. His Sharky, David Adkins, registers with palpable pain every blow that circumstance delivers - he's lost his wife, his home, his last job, and even his car - just about everything but his blind, irascible brother, Richard (Gordon Joseph Weiss), whose angry brand of merriment is hardly a comfort. To be honest, the director doesn't quite capture the sodden sparks that Richard's bitter camaraderie, desparate as it may be, should send off. And he's made one obvious mistake in the casting of his drinking buddy, the hopelessly hapless Ivan. Played with the proper touch of looniness, the character brings a welcome touch of whimsy to the proceedings, but Towers has cast a "straight man" in the part - Jim Frangione, a likable but low-key journeyman who only brings Ivan partly to life (and only partly bothers with his accent, too).

This misstep is made up for by the rest of the cast, however. As the blind Richard (vision is another symbol woven subtly through the play), Gordon Joseph Weiss deploys the same crackling comic chops he displayed in last year's Moon for the Misbegotten, mixed this time with hints of a secret, rueful insight (my only caveat is that Richard should look far greasier than Weiss right now appears). Weiss was ably abetted by local stalwart Allyn Burrows, who I thought brought almost too much heft to the lightweight Nicky Giblin, the other Christmas visitor who's now bedding Sharky's wife; but I'm not sure I can really criticize an actor for bringing too much depth to a role! Especially when Mark Zeisler (at left, with Adkins) brought the same sense of solidity to Old Nick - here styling himself as "Mr. Lockhart," in a dark new suit and sleek camel hair coat. Zeisler was convincingly menacing, indeed at times ferocious, yet also drew real pathos from Lucifer's sense of his loss of God, and memorably essayed his heart-freezing vision of Hell. My only quibble with the performance was that I missed the strange sense of the alien that Ciaran Hinds brought to the role on Broadway; when Hinds gazed down at his arms and marveled at "this insect body," you got a sense that some very weird angel indeed had alighted onstage.

In the end what made the production special (and what makes the Merrimack so often so fine) was watching these performances click together, like so many gears, into a finely-tuned ensemble. This is one of the great joys of live theatre, and you simply don't see it much anymore, not at the deep level Towers produces; but I'd take it in a minute over a zillion booty calls or haunted houses at Harvard. By now, the Merrimack's track record is unparalleled locally - in just the last few years, they've produced A Delicate Balance, Skylight, Moon for the Misbegotten, and now The Seafarer, all of them close to masterpieces, and almost all directed by Towers, whose magic I admit is a bit mysterious, as he's certainly not the cleverest or most ingenious manager of stage business around. He simply seems to trust the quality of his material more than anybody else, and digs further than anybody else.

And anyone who has sat with an audience at Merrimack - a crowd that's usually quietly absorbed and attentive in a way you almost never see in Boston - understands immediately what the pay-off is for this kind of work. If only more of a pay-off were coming from the foundations and funds that are supposed to be supporting theatre but would rather be supporting trends and social work! Merrimack is actually doing fine financially - but only, of course, by carefully limiting the plays it does to small (or even single-person) casts. To be honest, however, Charles Towers is the local director who most deserves a wider canvas. If there's anyone local to whom we could entrust the classics, much less large-scale new works like The Coast of Utopia, it would be him. But will the powers-that-be ever wake up and realize that?