Re-collected stories

Liz Hayes and Bobbie Steinbach in Collected Stories.  Photo: Andrew Brilliant

Donald Margulies chose an old, simple tale for the spine of his two-hander Collected Stories. Perhaps you've heard it before - it goes something like:

Mother nurtures daughter; daughter betrays mother.  Mother decides to murder daughter.

I know; it's not the kind of thing you'd put on a Hallmark card.  But matricide and filicide (as well as plain old sororicide), savage as they may be, are always highly theatrical; they make you sit up and pay attention (just ask the Greeks).

But that savage edge is precisely what's missing from an otherwise thoughtful, finely shaded version of Collected Stories now playing at the New Rep.  So we're never quite on the edge of our seats.  The production has been directed subtly by Bridget Kathleen O'Leary, and features nuanced turns from local stars Bobbie Steinbach and Liz Hayes; and its physical production is superb.  But it's almost too nuanced; O'Leary doesn't seem to want the script to shake us; she wants instead to remind us that life is complicated, that everyone has his (or her) reasons, that our motives are never wholly good or wholly bad, etc. - the whole creative-writing-class how-to-create-a-complex-character lesson plan.

And these are all worthwhile strategies, of course.  Usually.  Certainly they have their place in any production of Collected Stories, which is rife with knowing details of Manhattan's boho literary set - right down to a reading at the 92nd St. Y.  But at bottom - and it's not so very far down - Collected Stories is a stripped-down saga of betrayal and revenge; it's a David Mamet 90-minute wonder set in the rumpled, humanist precincts of those addicted to the Sunday Times - and with an inscrutable lady villain straight outta Speed-the-Plow who this time is after one of her own gender.

The set-up sometimes feels almost too familiar, in fact.  Lisa Morrison (Hayes), an insecure (but talented!) undergraduate mouse, invades the book-lined lair of literary lion Ruth Steiner (Steinbach), who is such a grand old dame she actually writes at a manual typewriter (why not with a quill?).  Lisa is timorously seeking advice on her budding career as an author; and Ruth is only too happy to give it, as long as it comes couched in an extended self-performance of growls, scratches, roars - and eventually, purrs.  During the ensuing tutelage, the women become intimates, and their emotional lives become entwined - but as Lisa runs out of personal material by the end of her first book of (yes) collected stories, where else is she to turn for her first novel's plot but to her own mentor's colorful past?

A past laden with obvious symbolism, by the way.  It turns out that Steiner herself gained fame as the lover of a more famous older writer - an actual writer, the literary manqué of mid-century Jewish New York, Delmore Schwartz - who of course launched his own career by plundering his parents' troubled marriage for his breakout story, "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities." Ironically enough, Schwartz is also the thinly-veiled protagonist of Saul Bellow's novel Humboldt's Gift - and Schwartz-esque figures decorate the oeuvres of Robert Lowell, John Berryman, and even Lou Reed!  So the question of art imitating life is wrapped so tightly around his biography - Schwartz has been fodder for up-and-coming writers for so long, and his tragedy a stepping-stone for so many - that you sense Margulies has aimed a very cold spear right at the heart of his own tribe, even as you kind of wonder how Ruth could be so very shocked to discover her connection to Schwartz has been plundered by her own protégée (who, it may be worth noting, is not Jewish but a WASP).

But there's a reason why Ruth herself never pulled a Bellow or Lowell on Delmore - why she never "appropriated" their affair for her own purposes; at the climax of Collected Stories, we discover their love was hollow; Schwartz, ruined by years of psychological torment and alcohol abuse, was impotent.  So her life story - and hence the story of Lisa's novel, too - are indeed fictions.  This is Margulies's last twist of the literary knife, I suppose - but that final spin operates in many directions, to say the least (far too many to go into here).

In purely theatrical terms, however, the revelation only ups the emotional ante for Ruth - by the play's final scene, she has been transfigured into not only a wronged, vengeful mother but a humiliated lover as well.  Thus as she tears about her apartment, and into the stricken, treasonous Lisa, there should be blood all over the floor (at least metaphorically).  Yet where ferocity is demanded, I'm afraid Bobbie Steinbach can only offer feistiness, which - even though she is loved for it locally - is hardly the same thing.  So Margulies' intended climax only partially comes off.  Still, Steinbach is fine in the more mournful registers of the play (she conveys eloquently Ruth's mixed feelings at watching a younger woman enjoy the success she remembers so well), and she's as witty as ever; this is two-thirds of a great performance.

And you feel that if Steinbach had only come through, then Hayes would have, too; this talented young actress is becoming known for detailed, committed performances that are always compelling on the surface, but don't always fully resonate further down.  Here she's really in finer form than Steinbach throughout - she nails the innocent guile of the ambitious young literary thing, without ever turning the part into a venal caricature; as she should, Hayes keeps some of Lisa's secrets to herself.  In the end, however, I felt the actress lacked the desperate, furtive drive that must power the character (and make her sit through all of Ruth's tiresome histrionics), and sensed that neither Steinbach nor Hayes ever quite tapped into the competitive mother-daughter messiness that Margulies indicates is the core of their rapport.

Still, Collected Stories is largely well-told, and the emotional and moral questions it poses partly come through; it's certainly a pleasurable and sophisticated evening out.  The production simply could be so much more - if only O'Leary and company could develop a taste for theatrical blood.

The occidental tourist

The rambling title of Shipwrecked! An Entertainment — The Amazing Adventures of Louis de Rougemont (as told by himself) lets you know it's a shaggy dog story - as told by a salty old dog, and featuring, yes, a literal shaggy dog (Daniel Berger-Jones, at left, with Angie Jepson and Allyn Burrows). So far, so self-conscious - although the title really should include a second parenthesis, "(as re-told by Yale professor of literature Donald Margulies)," just so you'd know precisely what stripe of literate postmodernism you were in for.

Because questions of truth, narrative, and how human nature twists one into the other have long figured in Margulies's writing - so we know better than to trust his "Louis de Rougemont" (a.k.a. Henri Louis Grin) or his tales of South Sea adventure. Although the real-life de Rougemont/Grin was certainly an adventurer in his own way - he spent his life knocking about as a global jack-of-all-trades (and something of a scoundrel, as he abandoned a wife in Australia) before re-inventing himself in the pages of "The Wide World Magazine" as a latter-day Robinson Crusoe who had battled giant octopi, swum with sea turtles, and shared romantic idylls with buxom island girls. Of course the turn-of-the-century (meaning the last century) public was not yet familiar with modes of meta-narrative, and so fell for this whale of a tale hook, line and sinker, even as criticism from experts on the fauna of the South Pacific made it sound pretty fishy. Eventually, of course, some last straw or other broke the back of de Rougemont's credibility, and the dissimulator fell into disgrace, swearing, however, to the very end that every word of his story was true.

Now in Shipwrecked!, the playwright includes both sides of this narrative false coin, and so clearly means to seduce us into round-eyed acceptance of a fantastic piece of fabulism, then force the scales from our eyes and confront us with the sad, small confidence man behind the larger-than-life figure. And the current Lyric Stage production almost succeeds at both tasks - only not quite. And that's largely because the author himself almost succeeds at both tasks - only not quite. The yarn that de Rougemont spins is smoothly rendered, but not richly colored, so its magic is rather mild. And its eventual deflation reveals - well, nothing much: de Rougemont remains a cipher, with the motives for both his deception and its enthusiastic reception remaining unexplored as a South Sea island. I suppose that's the whole idea, that behind our shared fabulisms there's nothing but the void - still, we get the impression that we're supposed to simply nod to ourselves at the end and think, "Ah, yes - postmodernism!" and go home happy.

So what happens when meta goes meta, and we realize the postmodernist behind the fabulist is something of a fraud, too? Oh, dear, I think I'm getting a little dizzy, so I'd better stop thinking about that. Certainly the Lyric hasn't given it much thought; they've basically styled Shipwrecked! as a children's show with an odd finale, as if Dorothy woke up at the end of The Wizard of Oz in a graduate seminar at Yale. And honestly - that's probably the way to go.

Still, director Scott LaFeber might have teased a little more mysterious resonance out of the material: we should sense more clearly, for instance, that the children's stories read by his mother are the source of de Rougemont's own tall tales. And at the same time, LaFeber seems not to have keyed into the odd notes of alienation that dot all the ongoing monologue: when actor Allyn Burrows narrates a line like "I laughed with bitter irony," for instance, the ensuing chuckle doesn't echo as curiously as it should.

Perhaps, of course, this is the fault of the actor rather than director, as the talented Burrows gives us an elegant, almost melancholy de Rougemont that prefigures too obviously the ruin to come: there's no bombastic spark of Barnum, no internal tingle to either the narrative or literal acrobatics of this born con man, so we don't feel the poignance of his eventual collapse as keenly as we should. Nor do we catch any glimpse at the finish of the dissatisfied, perhaps sickly self that must have been driving all his legerdermain (de Rougemont's not very far from Robert Louis Stevenson, after all). Burrows does convincingly capture the strange vibe of one particular meta-moment, when the play itself stops dead and the actors drop character, but this should operate as a contrast to the dramatic action, not an outgrowth of it, and at any rate it's hardly enough insight to hang an evening on.

Still, the production is gently entertaining, and kids who couldn't care less about Donald Margulies will probably get a kick out of its first two-thirds. And the old story-theatre tricks of showing us the quotidian means by which evocative effects are achieved (via shadowplay, cheap-but-clever props, etc.) still have some kick left in them. The chief reason to see the show, however, is the tireless work of Burrows's co-stars, Angie Jepson and Daniel Berger-Jones, who between them cover everything - and every accent - from Buckingham Palace to Pago Pago. Jepson is her usual forceful, detailed self, but it's Berger-Jones who really gets a chance to spread out in a series of sharply-rendered comic miniatures. Oddly, as de Rougemont's fibs catch up with him, and his story darkens, the show itself lightens up, as these two get to strut more and more of their stuff. And that's no lie.