Can we all stop pretending about Ryan Landry now?

You did have to be a little cuckoo to believe the hype. Photo(s): T. Charles Erickson.

Okay - we've all sat through "Ryan Landry's M" now.  And we've all seen that the Huntington made a big bet, blew the bank on it, and gave Landry everything he wanted.

And we also know by now that the show is no good.

So - can we stop pretending Ryan Landry is a playwright?

Please?

I'm not sure how this whole thing got started - although I'd say old Louise Kennedy (remember her?) basically got the ball rolling. And in a way, I admit if I didn't have a personal dislike for this particular auteur, I could find something poignant in the whole build-up-and-bust cycle we've just witnessed.  Or at least, I could find something touching in Landry's own apparent awareness that he's out of his league and over his head at the Huntington; the guy actually turns his anxiety over being unable to come up with a real play into an organizing motif of - well, whatever the hell "Ryan Landry's M" is.

But first - the (by now ritual) full disclosure. Something like four years ago, when this blog was still young, I asked Landry's troupe, the Gold Dust Orphans, for press tickets - and was refused on the grounds that I was not "a legitimate reviewer."  I mentioned this on the blog.

First came a direct threat from Landry's own email account:

"Give me one more reason to react to your bullshit... just one ... and you'll sincerely wish you didn't."

Then came a barrage of abuse from other Orphans and their fans:

"I will find you and hurt you . . . We hope you get AIDS and die . . . YOU SUCK!!!! . . . what would your boss say if he knew about your blog . . . "

It went on and on - dozens of emails - climaxing with another missive from Landry himself that closed with - well, you can read it here.

Now I'm a big boy, and I've hardly spent the last few years looking over my shoulder, dreading the sight of a giant drag queen armed with a clog. But at the same time, pathetic as his outbursts may have been, I haven't forgotten what I'd learned about Ryan Landry  - so I was quite loathe to drag myself to this queen's big premiere.  It seemed like a lose/lose - I doubted M would be any good, but that probably meant setting off another series of flaming email attacks; and if it was good - well, it would have been pretty depressing having to write a rave for this jerk.

But the Huntington kept asking, people kept wondering if I'd write about it, it was obviously going to be an "event."  So in the end I went (I admit I was mildly curious about it myself).

Fifteen minutes in, though, I was breathing a sigh of relief; I would be spared having to pen a positive notice, much less a rave! Even though, at first, "Ryan Landry's M" is a punchy, dirty little skit  (although certainly toned down from his usual fare). Which only reminded me that what Landry does best is write strings of gags. Which he drapes over existing scripts. The results are, in my opinion, hit-or-miss; but there's always at least one boffo moment in a Landry sketch. It helps that his design team provides all sorts of witty stage business on the fly - and on the cheap, which is important in that it resonates with the anything-goes, improvised tone of the show as a whole (if you ask me, the guys on his production team are the real geniuses over at the Gold Dust Orphans, and the Huntington's glossier, more "professional" work in M feels wrong somehow).

It also helps, of course, that Landry suffers from sexual tunnel vision in an amusingly childish way (a typical Landry "play" is basically a kiddie show with dildos). And his audience is reliably in a let's-make-mudpies kind of mood, so the scene over at Machine (his habitual haunt) usually has a giddy vibe of mutually infantile re-inforcement.

Which is fun as far as it goes, and I know it gives the repressed, middle-aged reporters at the Globe a thrill, but again - there are only so many ways you can goose the usual suspects. When Landry's targets are wide ones - fatuous or self-serious, or in denial, or simply dishonest - then his tawdry punches land, the inflated icon is punctured, and the skits really sing.

Karen MacDonald as Peter Lorre, kind of.

But when it comes to Fritz Lang's classic M - well, M isn't fatuous, self-serious, in denial, or at all dishonest.  There's no diva concealed in it, no sentimentality, no grandiosity - it's far more self-aware and cooler in its irony than anything Ryan Landry has ever written (or ever will). Indeed, Lang's vision of a tormented child-killer, and the cruelly amoral society that hunts him down, is one of the most devastating social critiques ever put to film. The movie already skewers rigid social and sexual norms; it already deflates moral sanctimony.  Basically Lang is way ahead of Ryan Landry, and in M he dryly undermines not only everything the Gold Dust Orphans attack, but also everything they are about.  Next to M, it's Landry who looks fatuous and in denial, which may be why his version of M tends to de-fang it, and sand down its subversive edge.  He actually tries to make M look bourgeois.

Lang's classic is also, just btw, one of the most innovative movies ever made, and although it certainly has its longeurs, much of its imagery (the child's balloon caught in power lines, the leitmotif of "In the Hall of the Mountain King," the tracking shots of the killer marked with the letter "M") remains indelible. Such masterstrokes are, of course, hard to parody - so generally Landry simply lifts them, in half-homage.

But there's a further problem - to Landry's usual audience (and the Huntington's, too), M is obscure. Its influence has been pervasive, but only cinephiles watch it now; its references are too deeply buried in the culture for Landry's techniques to reach. (Which may be why the stage design relies quite a bit on The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and why the soundtrack borrows cues from Hitchcock.)

What all this means, in the end, is that for much of M, Ryan Landry is on his own. He has to write a play. I suppose he painted himself into this corner intentionally; he may have chosen M precisely because he sensed it would set him up for either triumph or disaster.

Well, what happened was disaster, although one alleviated by occasional laughs, as his skitmaster side sometimes leavens his own pretensions with a few raspberries. Landry fills stage time with all sorts of dated fourth-wall antics; he throws constant wrenches into Lang's action, or tosses in quotes from The Blue Angel (by now another obscurity) to slow things down; he conjures out of nowhere a screwball comedy couple (the capable Ellen Adair and Paul Melendy) to charm us with open-ended questions about what they're doing on stage anyhow (yet Landry wrings nothing from the culture clash he thinks he has set up). Or he just drags in good old Orphan alumnus Larry Coen, or new comrade-in-arms David Drake, both capable comedians, to work the crowd for awhile.

Through all this you can all but hear the clock ticking toward 90 minutes, when we know the whole debacle can end. But weirdly, there is a good, if half-baked, idea banging around in M. Landry seems to identify with the Lorre character (this only re-activates creepy ideas about gay people, if you ask me, but whatever), and so turns his child-killer into an auteur - indeed, into a playwright within the play, who can actually adjust the script at will.

Now this could have led somewhere interesting, I admit. We do wonder why the hunted criminal can't simply re-write himself a happy ending on the spot, of course - but we're willing to ignore such contradictions if the play can get at something about how this villain/victim might rationalize to himself his own triumph (or his own defeat). What do society's outlaws tell themselves about themselves if and when they can get away with their crimes? It's an intriguing theme.

Adair and Drake in The Blue M

But alas, Landry only uses his one good idea as a pretext for more dramatic delay and  obstruction. Karen MacDonald gives the role her all (it's actually her most intense work in some time) but she's investing herself in something that leads her nowhere. Don't worry, she sends herself to hell at the finale (remember what I said about the script being bourgeois), but her decision is barely dramatized, and how it actually maps to the rest of M remains a mystery.

Of course it's no mystery why the Huntington programmed this bomb - Landry comes with a built-in audience (indeed, before the bad reviews dropped, they'd added performances to the run).  No doubt the company hopes Landry could become a cash cow for them, à la Harvard's Donkey Show. But how about we all wait till he has actually written a play before we hand him over a theatre again?  Just a thought.

Keeping faith with Pinter

Gretchen Egolf and Alan Cox in Betrayal.  Photos: T. Charles Erickson.

A year or two ago, after several failed Pinter productions at the ART and elsewhere, I wondered aloud, "Is Pinter still possible?"  It seemed to me then that pop culture's absorption of this playwright's menacing comic tone had fatally undermined his dramatic impact - or rather, had swallowed up his acid irony in the new, glib, millennial mode of "irony."

Since then, however, I've seen one or two productions (all by women) which have demonstrated that the famous Pinter pause can still conjure something of its old power - just in a new, more poignant key; and that the playwright's disturbing ellipses can still unsettle even a millennial audience that is quite sure it has all the answers.  In short, the chill may be gone, but the thrill can still be there.

Or at least that's what fascinates about the new Huntington production of Betrayal, as subtly directed by Maria Aitken.  It's probably the warmest piece of Pinter I've ever seen; and yet it delivers in spades on the playwright's questing, unstable subtext.  Indeed, for once, during it the Huntington audience was clearly at sea - in a good way: you could feel them trying to piece something together that wasn't at all what it appeared to be on the surface.  Thus the theatre grew more and more quiet as the drama progressed (or rather regressed; it mostly moves backward in time) - only this was the silence of mental absorption, not boredom.  It has been said that art is supposed to be about questions, not answers; it was nice to see the Huntington had realized this concern lies at the very heart of Pinter.

A word more about Aitken; we've seen a lot of her work at the Huntington - and I'm quite, quite glad.  After a false start with the clever but superficial 39 Steps, she revealed sudden interpretive depths with Educating Rita (of all things), and since then has only gone from strength to strength with two more British dramas (a wonderful Private Lives preceded Betrayal).  Three stylish, fully imagined productions in a row - there may be no other Boston director who can currently make that claim.

But I want to note something special about Aitken and her oeuvre - it has mostly been composed of works with lead roles she has already performed herself (in a distinguished acting career), or by authors with whom she has had a working relationship (like Pinter).  There's nothing at all wrong with this - indeed, it's a type of directorial career I very much admire (the great Brian Bedford, up in Canada, has had a similar artistic trajectory).  I call these folks legacy directors - they clearly mean to hand the torch on to the next generation, while the academy (which should be doing that job, of course) fusses with this or that -ism or trend. Would there were more like Ms. Aitken!

The betrayers of Betrayal - Pinter and Joan Bakewell.

Which isn't to say that her Betrayal doesn't have an intriguing and original spin.  As I mentioned, it's far warmer than most; it's clearly sourced from within the experience of its female protagonist, "Emma" (here played by the luminous Gretchen Egolf).  This is in and of itself actually remarkable, as Pinter-land has long been assumed to be a masculine province.  But Pinter's no Mamet: great female roles exist in his work, and now Aitken has demonstrated that Betrayal (along with, I'd argue, Old Times and The Homecoming) is open to a fresh, feminine perspective.

The tale the playwright tells, of course, is one he knows from experience: Betrayal delineates one of the adulteries (with Joan Bakewell, interviewing the author above left, during their long relationship) that he was notorious for during his marriage to the actress Vivien Merchant - who, we seem to have forgotten, did not actually survive her husband's infidelities: after her divorce from Pinter she sank into alcoholism, and was dead within two years, at age 53 (their son, Daniel, disavowed his father and even changed his name after his mother's death; you can still see the wonderful Merchant, btw, in the film version of The Homecoming, and Hitchcock's Frenzy).

But Betrayal was written during the emergence of another Pinter affair (with Lady Antonia Fraser, whom he eventually married), the one that "officially" broke up his marriage, and became "permanent."  Thus it's quite apropos that broken dreams of domesticity and commitment - the ghost of what Joan Bakewell might have been, if you will - should haunt the play; although the sturdy and very successful Ms. Bakewell is still very much with us, in case you're wondering, and seems to have been hardly crushed by the collapse of this particular romance -indeed, she has even consulted on productions of the script, as you can read here.

The betrayals mount in Betrayal - Gretchen Egolf and Mark H. Dold

So the ruefulness and emotional wreckage that Betrayal charts are probably Pinter's, and not his paramour's.  No matter; Ms. Egolf eloquently channels the devastation (whoever experienced it in real life) as the various betrayals - of love, of friendship, even of adultery itself - are revealed in Pinter's haunting, back-and-forth narrative. And she's almost matched by Mark H. Dold as her cuckolded (but himself unfaithful) husband, "Robert"; Dold has the right hawk-like demeanor for the part, and hints, particularly in the famous "Torcello" scene (above), at a ruthlessly suppressed tragic depth.  My one caveat about his performance - and perhaps about the production generally - is that the edge of cruelty I feel Pinter intends for Robert is never quite made forceful enough (he "jokes" in one scene about actually striking his wife, and we should feel somehow that's no joke).

Perhaps a small step further behind is Alan Cox's adulterous "Jerry"(who betrays not only his wife but his best friend), even though Cox is experienced at Pinter; but even his is a skillful, if perhaps too light, performance, and closes with a memorable outburst of true feeling and affection - which we realize, in a brilliant coup de théâtre conjured by Aitken and designer Allen Moyer - will prove the font of all the heartbreak to follow.  But then that may be what is most mature about this late Pinter opus (the last - and frankly perhaps the least - of his "great" plays): its adult awareness of the way in which the better and lesser angels of our nature often fly hand-in-hand.

One last note on the striking design of the production (this is a play which is quite a challenge in design terms, btw).  The Huntington's stellar sets have actually become, in some circles, almost a kind of aesthetic albatross flapping around its neck (as in "Oh, of course the set was wonderful, they always do incredible sets at the Huntington, but as for the production itself . . . ").  But Mr. Moyer's design is one example of a set that does not merely dazzle, but works as metaphor for both the themes and history of the play.  A lynchpin of Pinter's technique is the telling detail (even if it's merely a sudden silence), and its relation to an unstable, or unknowable, power struggle, or past life; thus at the Huntington, scenes end with scrims "closing down," like the iris of a lens, on a single facet of the set - and the settings themselves float in a kind of pale studio, a twilight zone whose true nature and location remains forever unknown (and which inevitably recalls the television studios where Bakewell and Pinter first met).  Frankly these brilliant strokes, like so much else in this remarkable production, seem absolutely perfect for Pinter.

It's too late for Now or Later

Grant MacDermott looks for a way out.  Of this script.

Just last month, with David Lindsay-Abaire's Good People, the Huntington showed us how to do a political play. 

And now, with Christopher Shinn's Now or Later, they've shown us how not to do one.

Actually, I suppose Shinn himself did that - or at least he demonstrated how not to write a political play.

Or did he simply confuse "play" with "polemic"?  For Now or Later is a very cleverly devised polemic (and one I often agreed with). It's just never convincing as, you know, human drama, basically because no one but a debate club president (or maybe Andrew Sullivan) would ever behave like Shinn's hero, and no one but his shrink could ever buy his version of his own motives.

And without any believable emotional resonance, Now or Later boils down to a duel between educated narcissists, over equally-justifiable neoliberal stances. All the point-counter-point I admit is mildly diverting at times; and all the "no-that's-not-what-I-really-said" dialogue is sold well by most of the cast (and very well by one actress in particular).  Still, we keep waiting for the real show to start - thus even though it's short, Now or Later is also (like Shakespeare's Pyramus and Thisbe) tediously brief.

Here's the set-up: photos of the president-elect's gay son have surfaced in which, while dressed as the prophet Mohammed no less, he fellated a dildo at a "naked party" on campus (naked parties are, for those out of the loop, a pseudo-transgressive Ivy League tradition - even the "hot" Bush twin was caught at one). Now, believe it or not, Shinn's entire play turns on whether or not "John, Jr." (son of "John, Sr.") should issue a statement of apology for depicting the spiritual leader of a large portion of the planet as a - well, you know - that word they call guys who fellate other guys.  (I'm not interested in a fatwah either, thanks all the same Chris!)


Yes, that's really the play.  I admit the subject is "brave" in a strangely pointless way, in that it constructs elaborate thought experiments around actions no sane person would ever contemplate - which means, I'm afraid, that as a depiction of what counts as "conflict" for a normal human being, it's really just a deep pile of p.c. doo-doo.  And then there's the unfortunate fact that current events have overtaken Shinn's hypothetical script and demonstrated with such violence the folly of his hero's position.  So of course John Jr. will apologize.  Of course he won't instigate assaults on our embassies and possibly the murder of an ambassador (or even a terrorist attack back home), over some dumb ironic gay shock joke at a naked party at Yale.

Seriously.

Yet it seems to take a very long time to get to that "of course" - Shinn milks a whole play out of this slim premise! But there's only one way to make such a ride dramatically interesting: there has to be some sort of buried, intense grievance causing Junior to hold out so long on Senior.  In essence the dramatic (as opposed to political) premise of the play has to be: why does Sonny hate Daddy so much?

But after about eighty minutes of tease, the big father-son show-down fizzles, because Dad doesn't want anything unreasonable; he doesn't want John Jr. to hop into the closet, for instance - he just wants him to honor his campaign, and keep Americans safe.  And it turns out the playwright doesn't have any other back-story tricks up his sleeve; indeed, he coughs up nothing like a wound or trauma sufficient to explain John's Jr.'s disloyalty and delay. Johnny is, apparently, not only relentlessly politically correct, but also really, really sensitive - read: narcissistic.  Just like his father, yes I know, but - big deal.

There would be, I think, one way to make this premise work like a charm - as black comedy; I got the impression the cast at the Huntington could have had a field day with that, but it would have required Shinn to admit he's really writing about privilege rather than politics.  As things stand, given the weakness of the material as earnest drama, it's a wonder that Michael Wilson's production ever holds us at all - which it does, intermittently, and especially when the talented Adriane Lenox is around, as a seen-it-all aide who not only cracks pretty wise but is also pretty wise.  There are other moments here and there, but the basic problem is that local cutie Grant MacDermott, who seems talented, can't quite make us sympathize with John Jr.'s elaborate circumlocutions (but then who could; MacDermott does, at least, get us to follow them, in itself no small feat).  Michael Goldsmith manages a bit better as John, Jr.'s self-effacing best bud - but then he gets punchier lines. I also admit I was impressed to varying degrees by the rest of the cast: Ryan King, Alexandra Neil, and Tom Nelis (a believable ringer for MacDermott as John, Sr.) are all talented actors.  Now let's bring them back in a real play.

Is Good People only good, or is it actually great? (Pre-occupied by Occupy, Part 2)

At home in Southie with Lindsay-Abaire's Good People. . .  Photos: T. Charles Erickson.

Craft is such a rare thing in a new play that whenever it appears, I feel (to quote a certain highly relevant author) that attention must be paid.  And I can't think of a better-crafted new play - at least in the past few years - than David Lindsay-Abaire's Good People, which completes its run at the Huntington this weekend.  The drama's quality is slightly muted, I think, by a flawed production helmed (somewhat underwhelmingly) by Kate Whoriskey, whose P.C. pedigree (ART Institute, Lynn Nottage, et al.) probably explains her fumbling of Lindsay-Abaire's satiric valentine to the battered souls of Southie (whose denizens are his eponymous good people). Actually, for half the play Whoriskey can coast on the talent and experience of two of our best local actresses, who deliver an expert and fully-realized vision of the Southie sisterhood; it's when Lindsay-Abaire shifts his sights toward the western 'burbs that Whoriskey stumbles (she's from Harvard by way of Acton, a wealthy exurb with a median household income roughly twice Boston's).  Still, the dazzle of the Huntington's production values (and Alexander Dodge's deadly-accurate set) put over the second act for the most part, and perhaps even highlight some of the script's less-obvious strengths.

Among these qualities (pardon me if I sound like I'm purring) are memorable characters and a realistic, recognizable milieu; a theme (remember those?); and what's more, a refreshingly current political resonance. That Lindsay-Abaire clearly intends his play as a political statement - and what's more an accessible, up-to-the-minute political statement that you don't need an advanced degree to decipher - seems to have given a few critics pause, however.  Not that they have advanced degrees themselves (please!), but they seem uncertain how to broach the delicate question of class, and how it maps to education, in a town that is always denying it even while relying on it to oppress the locals.

For let's be honest about the Athens of America - it's really the Athens of Apartheid, where clear demarcations - often simple streets, like Huntington, Mass, or Dot Ave. - function as virtual Mason-Dixon lines defining a topology of race, class, and educational achievement as clearly and cleanly as the East River cleaves Manhattan from Queens.


What's more, within the ramparts of our ethnic fiefs a deep-rooted class trauma often simmers (and is savored), while dueling cults of authenticity duke it out in the pages of the press and those few arenas where our warring tribes must cross paths (and where the Great Famine unconsciously competes with slavery, for example, which in turn goes head-to-head with the Holocaust).

Or is that quite accurate - do we really think of the Irish Famine as a holocaust, as a British-engineered  genocide-by-other-means?  Indeed, perhaps that strange gap in the sympathies of the local anglophile academy goes a long way to explaining the strange, resentful history of the Irish in Boston: even their holocaust doesn't get any respect (it certainly didn't get a decent memorial!).

Sorry for the digression, but such thoughts inevitably occur while watching Good People.  You can tell Lindsay-Abaire has Southie in his bones, and so renders a panorama of his hometown's defeated dysfunction that's almost resplendent in its detail.  When we meet his heroine, for instance, she is desperately attempting to talk her way out of being fired from her job at a dollar store.  The pretty but weather-beaten Margie (a touchingly grim Johanna Day) has her deadpan street wiles, of course, and an excuse for every lapse - not to mention the beyond-bitter wit of worldly endurance.  But it's all no use; her up-and-coming, baby-faced manager lets her go, even though he's from the neighborhood, too - and so knows only too well what a 50-something Southie girl with a high school education is up against in the globalized economy: essentially, at the dollar store she was already clinging to its bottom rung.

But then things have been going wrong for Margie for a long time, and Lindsay-Abaire details with calm accuracy her cascade of misfortunes: she has a mentally challenged adult daughter at home, no husband, an unreliable baby-sitter, bills from dental work - the kinds of setbacks that the better-heeled can take in stride, but which easily morph into a perfect financial storm for those living sans a safety net.

In a series of poignant, hilariously pointed scenes, however - that rumble on and off a giant loading dock, appropriately enough for Southie - Margie's longtime "frenemies" Jean (Karen MacDonald, never better in an aging-rock-chick wig) and her feckless landlady, the appropriately-nicknamed "Dottie" (Nancy E. Carroll, ditto) suggest a possible lifeline - an old flame of Margie's named Mike fought his way out of Southie years ago, and is now a successful doctor with a trophy wife in Chestnut Hill.  Surely he must know of some low level job somewhere for someone like Margie - and after all, isn't he still "good people," as the Southie loyalists like to call their own?

But does Mike still count as "good people"?  That's the question Lindsay-Abaire probes with a colder and sharper scalpel as the play progresses.  At first Mike's and Margie's encounters only amount to a sad comedy of her cluelessness in the new professional class (she drops awkward f-bombs, and imagines that Mike hires his own cleaning staff); but slowly the playwright closes in on a curious twist in this former Southie boy's psyche: he, too, wants to believe he's "good people," that inside he's still authentic, still Southie, that he can still be counted on.

But can you still be authentically Southie if you live in Chestnut Hill?  Is it possible to be true to blue-collar roots while chasing a white-collar paycheck?  A lot of people don't see that contradiction as a conflict, frankly - as I've noted before, outspoken conservative avatars like David Brooks, and even Republican hacks like Chris Christie, are huge Bruce Springsteen fans, for instance. Indeed, Lindsay-Abaire has probably pinned a particularly delusional breed of boomer on the point of his playwriting quill in Good People.

So with this challenge to his "authenticity," Margie has Mike - well, perhaps not just where she wants him, true; but he also has trouble struggling off this particular social hook, and soon enough Margie finds herself invited to a party at his deluxe digs that she otherwise would never have been asked to.

 . . . and at home with the not-so-good people in Chestnut Hill.

Of course, you could argue she invited herself - indeed, when Mike cancels the party for the sake of his ill daughter, Margie takes this as a transparent ruse to ditch her, and shows up at his front door anyway.  Only it wasn't a ruse, and so she finds herself alone in Alexander's Dodge's wickedly rendered, white-and-taupe temple to yuppie chic (above) - along with Mike's young wife (who is black, as Margie flatly notes), nibbling at a full party's worth of cheese and red wine, and mulling whether or not to reveal certain secrets about her host's Southie past that might undo forever his hard-won upper-class status.

It's here that, admittedly, the production loses focus, largely because thespians Michael Laurence and Rachael Holmes (good actors both) are simply miscast as Mike and his wife Kate - and obviously miscast, at that.  Laurence struggles to convey the Southie boy within Mike's gleaming yuppie shell, and Holmes seems to take at happy face value a character who must, at some level, be rather bitterly self-aware.  And director Whoriskey not only misses much of the scene's sarcasm toward the educated classes (something that, btw, Kirsten Greenidge missed as well in The Luck of the Irish), but seems utterly blind to the deeper undertow of Lindsay-Abaire's second-act action.  For as Margie toys with unveiling exactly how her former flame spent his misspent youth, we can sense instinctively something of the ugly Southie street fighter should rise again in Mike (for it's clear he hasn't really left the old neighborhood behind - can anyone, ever?).  Indeed, by the end of the act, I'd argue the cozy Chestnut Hill nest of Mike and Kate should be in shambles - and revealed as something of a sham, just as Mike's libertarian self-image is; for it turns out Mike was only able to scramble up the collegiate ladder thanks to certain acts (and certain attitudes) being forgotten, or forgiven, long ago.  In a pungent line, Margie explains, Mike "always had someone looking out the window for him."  Margie herself was not so lucky, of course - so now while she and Mike both have a sick daughter upstairs, they're on opposite sides of the class divide.

That is only one of many parallels and subtle contrasts in Lindsay-Abaire's clever structure (and don't worry, he does eventually reveal who counts as "good people," and who does not).  Indeed, sometimes I worried that his play was almost schematic in places (just as occasionally it dawdles a bit here and there in local arcana).  But then again, at this point I'm not about to look a gift horse in the mouth; years ago, Good People would have counted as merely a good play; today, it feels border-line great. Which makes me wonder just how far Lindsay-Abaire can go.  The Pulitzer he won for his previous opus, Rabbit Hole, struck many as premature - but I'd argue he has earned it retro-actively with this particular script.  Perhaps, I admit, his drama deserved better than Whoriskey's production - but that doesn't stop me from hoping he has another like this one in his back drawer, or perhaps in the works, even as we speak.

A classic classic at the Huntington

Waterston and Amato arm for their next lovers' quarrel. Photo(s): Paul Marotta.

If you haven't noticed (and why should you have?), the debate over new plays vs. classics has once again coughed to life in the blogosphere.  Of course the usual suspects (i.e., under-talented climbers) have piped up with the familiar arguments against producing the great plays - when, as everyone knows, their actual argument is that if classics once again are allowed pride of place on the stage, young playwrights will be forced to reckon with their standard (which is something they quite desperately do not want to do).

But don't worry - I'm not about to make an argument in favor of the classic theatre; instead I'm going to let the Huntington's current production of Noël Coward's Private Lives make it for me. Just see it and you'll understand what I mean; the heady buzz that it leaves the audience in tells you that a classic done right is its own argument - indeed, it simply levels the opposition.

But before you speed-dial Parabasis, I don't mean by this that theatres should abandon new work (far from it!).  The Huntington does both, after all (The Luck of the Irish was their most recent new-play success), and while artistic director Peter DuBois seems, well, disinterested in the classics, he has been careful to hire great outside directors to carry on that half of his theatre's mandate.  Hence we have recently enjoyed unforgettable productions of plays like Candide and All My Sons.

Perhaps somewhere DuBois understands that without the frame of the classics, new work has no context, or rather its context becomes television (which may be why so many new plays have begun to resemble cable).  Indeed, context is part of the reason classics continue to be central to every other art form; symphony orchestras, for instance, play Beethoven and Mozart because they define the reach - and limits - of their medium (at least so far).  When an orchestra launches into Beethoven, it is in effect stating "This is what we're aiming for; this what it's all about; this is what you can do with an orchestra." When a ballet company takes the stage in Balanchine, it is making the same kind of declaration. Theatres should do classic plays for precisely the same reason - and what's more, new playwrights should welcome the challenge and inspiration they provide.

Now mind you - after all those claims, I'm going to have to admit that Private Lives isn't actually a great classic; it's a minor classic (if a highly entertaining one).  And this isn't even quite a great production - it's only a very, very good production; and oddly, one that doesn't attempt to "re-invent" or "update" the text, but plays everything absolutely straight; in other words, this is a classic version of a classic. And yet everyone is celebrating!  It has critics doing handsprings, and on opening night, people were as bubbly as the champagne flowing through half the show as they surged into the night after the final curtain.  That's how powerful classics - even minor ones - can truly be.

The originals in the original production.

Although okay, I admit it - I do adore Private Lives.  Coward churned out many plays, songs, and entertainments over the course of his life - some of them only serviceable, some of them even dross, but a handful that may well live forever - or at any rate deserve to.  And Private Lives is one of those happy few.

Like most of classic Coward, it's a confession disguised as a cabaret act; and it is immortal because almost unconsciously, beneath all the sparkling quips and flip bon mots, the author reveals more than he ever meant to about his own heart - and certain conditions plaguing it that are probably universal.  He himself, of course, played lead Elyot Chase in the 1930 premiere, opposite muse Gertrude Lawrence as Amanda (he directed as well, and cast a rising young actor named Laurence Olivier as Amanda's new husband, Victor).  You get some idea of how perfectly matched Coward and Lawrence were as the warring old flames at the center of Coward's comedy from the following legend: when Lawrence first read the play, she immediately cabled "There's nothing wrong with it that can't be fixed!"  Coward cabled back at once that her own performance was the only thing that he thought would need fixing.

Ever since, Private Lives has been catnip to actors, but few have captured precisely the elusive chemistry that Coward and Lawrence brought to the roles.  And at the Huntington, I'm afraid, the trend still holds true: James Waterston (yes, son of Sam) is obviously miscast as Elyot; he lacks the sense of cheeky chic, the easy gloss of fabulousness, that we expect of a Coward hero.  Plus he seems heterosexual, when of course Coward was one of those male orchids of the 20's and 30's (Cary Grant was another) whose allure seemed to soar onto some higher plane, and make questions of ultimate orientation irrelevant (Lawrence had something of the same aura, and let's not get started on Olivier!).

Luckily, however, Waterston is a smart and accomplished actor, and he makes the wit work in his own appealingly spoiled way - and he makes us believe (and this is crucial) that arch as he may be, his love for Amanda is real.  And at any rate, his costar supplies enough luxe for both of them; Bianca Amato (at right) is practically the perfect Amanda - très amusante and yet a little world-weary too; more self-aware than Elyot but also more impulsive and exasperating; with a streak of the gamine in her soul, and a hint of boyishness as well (which would, in a more perfect world, balance Elyot's feminine hauteur).  What's more, she warbles (and Charlestons) like a dream.  I've seen several Lives - and one that cohered slightly more than this one, with both a brighter gleam and deeper shadows, too; but I've never seen a better Amanda, and I don't expect to; Amato is Amanda.

Together these two - with the help of director Maria Aitken (who herself once played Amanda) - exquisitely limn Coward's great theme (almost his only theme); the folly of living for, and to, the siren call of infatuation.  Elyot and Amanda are the type who can neither live with nor without each other; already divorced, we bump into them when they bump into each other, on their respective honeymoons with innocent new spouses.  Needless to say, their spark is rekindled (for who else could be more attractive?), they ditch the new bride and groom, and the rest of the play follows their impulsively renewed affair as it flares brightly, in a cocoon of delicious intimacy, then eventually (and inevitably) crashes and burns.

But before Coward lets you wag the finger, he brings those conventional, outraged spouses onto the scene, to play out their own emotional arc (from which, as usual for this playwright, the heroes simply escape again).  The joke, of course, is that this proves what is true of Elyot and Amanda is true, to some degree, of everybody; but the surprise here is how complex at least one of these figures becomes.  Autumn Hurlbert is perfectly good as the chirpy Sibyl, Elyot's spurned spouse; but Jeremy Webb (below, with Amato) makes something extraordinary out of Victor, who's generally cast as a quietly pompous prig.  Webb teases so much sophisticated, even noble, color from his final scenes with Amanda, however, that you leave almost wishing he'd been playing Elyot.  I've seen Mr. Webb before - and been impressed before, too; indeed, after this performance I have the feeling he may be one of the most gifted classical actors in America.  May the casting gods bring him our way again, and soon.

Well - do you really need to know more, or do you have your tickets yet?  The scenic and costume design, by Allen Moyer and Candice Donnelly, respectively, are quite smashing (as you can tell from these photos - the  scrims after Dufy are also just right, and the Parisian apartment, knowingly graced with a huge mirror, is particularly expert).  On the sidelines, local light Paula Plum does a droll turn - and nails a convincing accent - as Amanda's put-upon maid.  Meanwhile director Maria Aitken, whose subtle and intelligent work has become a staple at the Huntington, perhaps glides over the darker notes that Coward (almost unwittingly) strikes, but she doesn't try to obscure them, either; she clearly knows this play inside and out, and she lets you figure some things out for yourself.  Nor does Aitken make too much fuss over the slap Elyot delivers to Amanda (just after she has struck him over the head with a phonograph record); she conveys that no, this is not acceptable behavior, while acknowledging that with someone as essentially childish as Elyot, it's not so unexpected, either.

So you leave bemused by these people, but hardly morally impressed; and that's as it should be, too.  You may even find yourself teased by a certain trace of sympathy for this pampered pair - poor, divine Elyot and Amanda!  How barren their gorgeous lives must be!  And if you're like me, you may even want to spend more time with them.  For yes, I admit I'm paying this production my highest compliment: I'm paying to see it a second time.

Meeting Mrs. Donovan at the Huntington

Shalita Grant and Francesca Choy-Kee in The Luck of the Irish. Photos: T. Charles Erickson.

Over a year ago, I wished in a widely noted post that Boston theatres, rather than relying on Athol Fugard or some other proxy when attempting to engage with race, would instead produce plays that treated our own city's vexed racial history.

Well, playwright Kirsten Greenidge was already working on a play along those very lines, and thus we now have the Huntington premiere of The Luck of the Irish (at the BCA through May 6).  And I have to say - Kirsten and I had a great idea (although I think she thought of it first)!  For The Luck of the Irish turns out to be not only a rich and satisfying drama on its own terms, but also, perhaps, a small inch forward in the limited racial dialogue we will allow ourselves on the sadly polarized millennial stage.

Perhaps this is because The Luck of the Irish plays like an eloquent riposte to the cynical Clybourne Park, Bruce Norris's bitter, whiter-than-white prequel/sequel to A Raisin in the Sun, in which the races were portrayed as locked in an endless cycle of mutual contempt.  In contrast, Greenidge's script, though it too echoes Raisin and its concerns, is something quite different: a testament drawn from lived experience rather than from some playwriting echo chamber, The Luck of the Irish treats racism almost matter-of-factly - and perhaps more strikingly, it is calm and clear-eyed about the way class intersects with race.  Indeed, by her dénouement, Greenidge has even offered something like an olive branch of sympathy across the color bar.

Pay particular attention to that "lived experience" part, btw - a rarity, it seems, in millennial playwriting. Greenidge drew her inspiration from her own family's history: back in the 50's, her grandparents - here "the Taylors" - slipped into the all-white environs of Arlington (here "Bellington") by way of a "ghost buyer," who (for a fee) would purchase a property for an "undesirable" buyer before transferring the deed to the true purchaser's name in secret.  In Greenidge's script, however, the actual transfer of that deed remains an open question till the final scene, as her fictive ghost buyers, the Donovans (particularly the missus) - return to haunt the Taylors' heirs (granddaughters Nessa and Hannah) nearly fifty years after the purchase of their home, claiming that the property in question "really" belongs to them.

Now we've all known Mrs. Donovan.  She's a classic Boston type - the hard-bitten, hatchet-faced Irish dowager, the (often literally) battered madonna of a tribe that almost cherishes the memory of its own oppression, while clinging to the bottom rung of the middle class (or the top rung of the lower class), obsessed with the defense of hard-won turf while blighted by a toxic mix of ignorance, corruption, and Catholicism.

And needless to say, the Mrs. Donovans of the world were one of the last bastions of open racism in Boston.  Not the cloaked, genteel racism of Arlington and Newton, but the bare-knuckled race-hate of Southie and Charlestown - that at the very least (they were proud to growl, if you dared to ask) was unapologetic and authentic.

Yes, Mrs. Donovan has loomed behind Boston culture for so long that it's slightly strange she has never received any serious dramatic treatment.  Then again, perhaps it's not so strange; the actual politics of Boston remain largely terra incognita on our city's stages.  Even The Luck of the Irish offers us only a carefully controlled glimpse in the (rear-view) mirror, for this is a city locked in a peculiar mode of self-denial regarding its own culture and mores.

Richard McElvain and Nancy E. Carroll.

Indeed, I remember how that culture shocked me when I first arrived, now a little over thirty years ago; I never expected how baldly Boston's liberal veneer would be contradicted by its obvious policy of apartheid.  I was coming from the South, so I was used to a system of open, but declining, racism - which my family had always opposed, btw.  We were hardly heroes, much less martyrs, but we nevertheless received a fair amount of intimidation for our various stands on civil rights - slashed tires, rocks thrown at our house, anonymous small threats and aggressions meant to rattle you and get you to back down, that kind of thing.  I knew plenty of people who went through more; in fact my brother-in-law's father once spent a night, Atticus-Finch-like, on the porch of a threatened black family with a loaded shotgun in his lap - just in case there were any unfriendly visitors.

Yet oddly, when integration came to Houston, my home town, it came with less strife than anyone expected - partly because the races had always actually mixed, I suppose. And I went to an inner-city high school and had plenty of friends "of color," as we say now, and at eighteen naively imagined that a process had begun that would eventually lead to some more equitable social order.

Boston, of course, put an end to those illusions.  The city was obviously a war zone under an uneasy cease fire, with various avenues operating as virtual Maginot Lines, and liberal hypocrisy hovering over the landscape like so much acrid smoke.  The city wasn't really a city, anyhow; it was a pile of of ghettos masquerading as a metropolis, with Roxbury at the bottom of the heap, far beneath the city's Anglican and academic overlords, who were elegantly detached from the scruff and scuffle of the street.  The Irish in particular were huddled in neighborhoods they regarded as Masada-like redoubts, where they nursed memories of their persecution as well as resentments of the Episcopal ruling class, which after the World War had begun to disavow its long-standing gentleman's agreements regarding African-Americans and Jews - thus denying the working class their few irrefutable claims to respect: Christianity, and whiteness.

It would be a lot to expect a single play to encompass all this blight and hypocrisy, I know.  But The Luck of the Irish is at least a start - indeed, it's so quietly good that you keep hoping Kirsten Greenidge can squeeze more of the story in than would be humanly possible.  She does, I think, get a certain kind of Mrs. Donovan just right - the kind that was not actually virulently racist, but was nevertheless trapped in a racist, underachieving milieu, and knew that she was falling ever further behind even as better-educated black folks got ahead under the new dispensation.  And who, needless to say, forever clung to the vengeful dream of clawing her own back, one way or another.  Greenidge knows this type through and through, and gazes at her with an understanding that verges on sympathy.  And she captures her best character in a dozen small but telling details, as when Mrs. Donovan jealously imagines that the black Mrs. Taylor has a set of genuine Waterford crystal, an emblem of Irish status (it's actually fake).

Other aspects of Irish are if anything even more intriguing, though perhaps less fully realized.  We do wonder, for instance - why has Mrs. Taylor invested in that set of fake Waterford?  And what does it mean for an African-American family to tear itself up from its own neighborhood and transplant itself to the hostile turf of a different race (particularly given that "black flight" is seen by some as a persistent socio-economic problem?).

Playwright Greenidge is clearly aware of these quandaries, but only seems able to circle them, eloquently, without ever quite bringing them to a dramatic climax.  Her second generation of "Bellington" Taylors are haunted by a sense of dislocation, and a persistent anxiety that despite the passage of time, they're still being "profiled" by their neighbors.  Granddaughter Hannah in particular is worried that her rambunctious son is not only being stereotyped but also being goaded into a stereotype - he's both perceived as violent by his teachers, and yet is also egged on by his white chums to be the athlete, or the comedian - stereotypical "black" roles - rather than just the good student.  She longs for him to forge his own identity - but what is that identity? We sometimes feel the Taylors are relying on their house to provide that which they themselves are unsure of.

Reaching across the color bar - Nikkole Salter and McCaleb Burnett in The Luck of the Irish.

Although perhaps Melia Bensussen's solid, but slightly uneven, production is somewhat at fault here.  I consistently felt that Greenidge was willing to explore more complex psychological territory than Bensussen was.  The playwright's portrait of her grandmother, for instance, includes a persistent shop-lifting habit (which ends up providing her grand-daughters a kind of ironic legacy).  This idea - that Ms. Taylor perhaps knew somewhere that she had "gotten away" with something, that she even half-understood Mrs. Donovan's point of view - is quite intriguing, but right now there's little of this complexity in the lovely Nikkole Salter's portrayal, who gives us much the same mix of brains, beauty, and poise she offered last season in Stick Fly, but without the subtly unstable sense of alienation that I think Greenidge is hinting at.  You can feel something like the same diffidence in the reliable Marianna Bassham's turn as Mrs. Donovan; she seems nervous about nailing a character whose political significance is so intensely fraught.

But elsewhere there is very strong work indeed from Francesca Choy-Kee, Curtis McClarin, McCaleb Burnett, Richard McElvain and especially Shalita Grant - and Greenidge's calmly insightful voice seems to somehow sustain her action despite a slow start and a few static dramatic eddies (or conceptual gambits, such as people of different eras inhabiting the playing space at the same time, that don't quite come off).  In my analysis of Clybourne Park, I wondered whether the "race play" wasn't played out - and I still feel that when it comes to polemic, the "race play" is played out.   But Kirsten Greenidge proves that plays from life itself are never played out - and that perhaps in that context, our ongoing drama of race relations has only just begun to be written.

Hello, God? It's me, Carnage

Christy Pusz gets in touch with God.  Photo: T. Clark Erickson.

There's a telling moment in Yasmina Reza's God of Carnage (at the Huntington through Feb. 5) in which Alan, an alpha-male asshole if ever there was one, admits his pet-name for his wife Annette is "Woof-Woof."

That's right.  Annette is a pet literally - in fact, she's Alan's dog.

Actually, to get really specific about it - she's his bitch.

I know - cold.  But that's the kind of nasty chill that should run through this cynical four-hander, which charts the descent of four seemingly-civilized adults into a childish orgy of destruction.  Reza's set-up couldn't be simpler: the parents of two children who have tangled on the playground meet to mediate the resulting claims of injury (one kid - Alan's, of course - has actually knocked out two of the other kid's teeth).  We know minutes into the first scene, however, that the veneer of sophisticated parlay these two couples have been trained to deploy with each other will soon be torn away, and that "the god of carnage" (as Alan puts it) will inevitably declare total war across the designer furniture and vases of tulips "just shipped in today" from that peaceable kingdom, the Netherlands.

At the Huntington, however, the cold edge of Reza's schema feels slightly blunted, which is too bad, because honestly, without razor-sharp execution, the glibness of her theme begins to weigh on the repetitive action, and her (admirably) unlikable characters become a tad tiresome even as her tone starts to curdle.  It's not that this production falls apart - it's snarkily enjoyable for the most part, and certainly counts as a big step up from the likes of Captors and Before I Leave You.  But it's never quite as much mean-spirited fun as you want it to be, and that's because director Daniel Goldstein hasn't really nailed his casting - and that's because he hasn't really understood his play.

And that's because Goldstein seems to imagine (as many reviewers have) that this is merely a superficial satire of haute bourgeois manners.  Which, yes, it is; this particular God has only dark secrets, not deep ones.  But Reza's targets are far more varied than is at first apparent; like Ben Jonson, she's a kind of monomaniac who stretches a single theme over the entire world.  The only real interest in her play, in fact, lies in the way it works its gimmick ("Surprise!  The God of Carnage!") through a strikingly wide variety of permutations.  First we get the expected couple-on-couple coup d'etat; but Reza then unfurls a whole panoply of battle royales: we get gender-on-gender, conservative-on-liberal, and husband-on-wife; even (metaphorically) gay-on-straight (and top-on-bottom!).  Enemies morph into allies, but then switch back again - soon these yuppies are all but dashing back and forth across the battle lines.  And Reza goes global, too, balancing cynical exploitation of a pharmaceutical scandal with self-serving concerns over starvation in Darfur (discussed over tasty clafoutis); by the finale, we're surprised the tulips haven't taken sides.   Thus the script is rather like that paper-fortune-teller game kids used to play (appropriately enough) on the playground; Reza keeps folding and unfolding her basic quartet into different combinations, but an angry id pops out every time, erupting from the characters like so much projectile vomit (yes, be warned).

Limning all the tiny fissures that will crack open into all those open conflicts, however, requires very precise casting, and a very agile set of farceurs (for in the end this is a farce, based on anger, or maybe disgust, rather than sex).  We have to feel in our bones precisely how these husbands and wives are oppressing each other, as well as how they're oppressing the world at large - and how they both deny that; and then we need a team of actors who can physically deliver a mounting sense of chaos with glittering precision.

And there's just enough imprecision in this casting, and just a few too many mis-steps in the acting, for the Huntington version to not quite gleam as it should.  We sense immediately, for instance, that Brooks Ashmanskas (Alan) and Christy Pusz (Annette) are gifted  physical comedians (well, we already knew that in the case of Ashmankas, but don't worry, he's quite disciplined here) -  and, alas, that Johanna Day and Stephen Bogardus, as their antagonists, Veronica and Michael, are not.  Strangely, however, it's Day who gives the best, most carefully-thought-through performance; if there were just a slightly-sharper comic twist to her wounded, pseudo-concerned presence, Day would be in clover (as it is, she carries the show anyway).  In an intriguing contrast, Pusz and Ashmanskas are physically far wittier, and all but beam with satiric energy, giving everything they do a delicious spin; but their relationship just doesn't have the sexist (dare I say Gallic?) cast that it should have (which is to say I think Annette should be sickened for reasons beyond Veronica's hypocritical clafoutis).  The slight class differences between the two couples are likewise not precisely defined (no, they're not exactly on the same level, and they got where they are in very different ways), and Stephen Bogardus's rather weakly acted Michael simply isn't as whipped as he should at first appear (sorry, that's Reza's intent), so his later explosion into Neanderthalism doesn't have the sense of release required to make us laugh.  In short, these couples should orbit each other like ironic mirrors - and so far, they don't.

Taken together, such gaps mean the show feels muzzled somehow, and so we get a little bored, and begin to ponder the other gods that govern human nature, in addition to that of carnage (like the god of porcelain, whom the characters occasionally worship).  Reza does nod to such deities here and there, it's true; in fact, perhaps the play's most touching moment occurs when loutish, "honest" Alan, abashed at last, silently begins to pick up after himself for the first time.  If only Reza had ventured a little further down these thematic by-roads, she might have written a major play, instead of what amounts to a smart little circus act.  Which may explain the production's color scheme; Dane Laffrey's yellow atrium seems meant as a wicked ref to Parisian moderne (Reza's original text was in French, and premiered in Paris), but alas, this doesn't map to the Cobble Hill, Brooklyn neighborhood-amalgam that Christopher Hampton's apt translation conjures.  But then director Goldstein's productions rarely look good; another reason why I left wondering whether the Huntington should be in a hurry to invite him back.  With so much of this show almost in place, I think you have to look in his direction to explain why in the end this God isn't quite divine.

All about Becky

Victim or victimizer? Eli James and Wendy Hoopes work it out in Becky Shaw. Photos by T. Charles Erickson.

Reviewers seem to be confused about Becky Shaw (now at the Huntington through April 4). Gina Gionfriddo's New York hit is funny, they admit - but is it actually any good? People aren't sure about that.

And to tell true, the New York reviews were all over the map, too (the show's hit status derived largely from the NYT's Charles Isherwood, who liked it). But all the critical uncertainty is understandable. Becky Shaw has a solid idea at its center, but its meandering dramatic structure muddles and muddies its themes - so much so that some people haven't been able to perceive said themes at all. What's more, we sense that the muddle isn't accidental; it's intentional. This is a play that wants to keep its big idea a secret.

And why?

To answer that question, we'd have to ponder the current state of American academic playwriting in greater depth than would be wise for any healthy person to do. Suffice to say, however, that Becky Shaw simultaneously reflects, refracts and subverts the dominant mode of How We Write Now.

Or perhaps I should say "How They Write at Brown," as Gionfriddo studied playwriting at Brown University, set Becky Shaw in and around its environs (the eponymous Becky is even a dropout from the school), and devised its themes around the opposition between the mores of sensitive, politically-correct campus life and those of "the real world." Gionfriddo even gets out the old yellow highliter in the last act in case we don't get her point, with characters openly taking aim at what many consider the most liberal school in the Ivy League.

It would seem that the academic-theatrical complex I've often discussed is beginning to go meta, or at least get alarmingly self-conscious. Of course not only Gionfriddo but her director, the Huntington's Peter DuBois, went to Brown, and trendy alumni of the playwriting program once run by Paula Vogel (whose Civil War Christmas also ran at the Huntington) today seem to dominate new play production. Indeed, a kind of "Brown school of playwriting" is much in evidence these days, with an emphasis on feminist or identity politics, loose structures, and a preponderance of quirk and/or whimsical flights of fancy. Some people (myself included) find the School of Brown a little tiresome (to us it's immature, self-indulgent and vapid); a like-minded friend of mine even once opined that "If it's from Brown, flush it down!"

I wouldn't go that far, but it's good to see somebody a bit more hard-headed than Sarah Ruhl emerge from the school's playwriting program. Gionfriddo is clear-eyed about the narcissism of the Brown house style - and of the feminized Brown culture in general - but is also, to be honest, likewise clear-eyed about the brutal, male-dominated Real World. The conflict between these two universes - and the similarity between the forces that drive them - is the heart of both Becky Shaw the character and Becky Shaw the play. And to go a bit further, if I had to guess which side Gionfriddo actually sympathized with in this ongoing culture war, my bet would be on that brutal Real World.

Hence the playwright's muddled structure, I think; Gionfriddo somehow feels she has to hide something from teacher, even as she pokes fun at her school. Or maybe it's that very obsession with being funny that muddies the thematic water - like other Brown playwriting stars, Gionfriddo is better at surface than structure, and sometimes goes to great lengths to work in a good wisecrack; in Becky Shaw, she even devotes a whole character to witty epigrams, which does a lot for the yuk factor but kind of fucks up the play's flow.

That flow comes and goes, through so many odd little eddies, that it takes quite a while before the central quartet of Gionfriddo's play has established itself on stage, and we've understood the theme of the work is their underlying correspondence, rather than their opposition. First, there's Max, the self-possessed young financial manager, who's been adopted by the wealthy family of Suzanna (Keira Naughton), the Slaters, whose patriarch has just dropped dead, leaving them in sharply reduced circumstances. Meanwhile Suzanna's mom, Susan (Maureen Anderman), is digging herself into an even deeper hole with the help of a new boyfriend. Poor Suzanna is, understandably enough, distraught by both her father's death and her new-found debts. Max, however, is brusque and almost brutally efficient, a classic class-A asshole with a motormouth, a taste for porn, and a seemingly bottomless reservoir of tough-guy aphorisms. In short, a real guy's guy's guy's guy. Mom, meanwhile, seems to have checked out in some basic way from having to deal with anything or anyone. Before the first act is over, however, something a little weird has gone down between Suzanna and Max that we can't quite understand - a bit of quirky grief-sex that, though not, I suppose, technically perverse (they're not actually brother and sister, after all), still lets us know that stranger revelations about these two are in the offing.

But before Gionfriddo gets to that, she fast-forwards a few months to Suzanna's new husband, Andrew (Eli James), whom she married in a whirlwind courtship that seems to have been based on mercy sex, too. Next comes the eponymous Becky herself, a blind date set up for Max, who turns out not to be the hard-bodied bad girl we imagine would be right for him, but rather an aging waif in a demurely frilly dress ("You look like a piece of cake," Max snarls), who despite her seeming insecurity lets slip some coolly acute appraisals of the world around her. As with Max and Suzanna, we soon realize that All Is Not As It Seems with Becky.

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

Got all that? Good, because it's a rather complicated set-up you need to track what comes next: the Date from Hell, and the ensuing Fall-Out. Max and Becky are robbed on their Big Night (at gunpoint), which traumatizes Becky so badly that she begs for more contact with Max, to get to "closure," as she puts it. But Max, despite a brief post-mugging tryst with his date, has dropped her like a rock, and intends to leave her that way. Enter Andrew, the New Age husband, a guy so sensitive he actually cries at porn, who begins to minister to the seemingly stricken victim. And thus threatens his marriage to Suzanna. Who may be more into Max, anyhow.

Got all that? If so, you may have begun to piece together the playwright's amusing theme: that the same selfishness and longing for love are driving both Max's master-of-the-universe act and Becky's victimhood. They're both desperate to be loved, preferably by someone above them in the social register, but they go about it through opposed strategies: Max takes utter care of the Slaters, while declaiming constantly on his own heartlessness; meanwhile Becky lets everyone know how broken and needy she is, all while plotting her next move on the same family. Most amusingly, she understands precisely how to manipulate to her own advantage the kind of college-bred sensitivities rampant at Brown; she's both a victim and a subtle victimizer, and Max alone immediately recognizes her as a predator in his own league. Becky's name reminds us of Becky Sharp, the scheming antiheroine of Vanity Fair who capitalized on her beauty and feminine wiles, and it's amusing to watch Gionfriddo work up a parallel vixen for the age of identity politics - one who ensnares people not with her looks but her lack of looks (Becky always dresses badly, in a klutzily over-feminine way), and not with her charm but instead her vulnerability.


The shock of recognition: the cast of Becky Shaw.

Thackeray, of course, lavished his sardonic attention on Becky Sharp, while Becky Shaw moves mostly behind a veil of mystery which makes us see her as more device than character. Neverthless, this cracked quartet does set up an amusing satire of contemporary mores. The trouble is that Gionfriddo has to rely on a kind of emotional deus ex machina to resolve her plot - she has hubby Andrew make a sudden leap into maturity which isn't really believable, and even happens off-stage. Perhaps it has to, because the playwright has meanwhile become re-involved with Mom, who spouts postmodern epigrams worthy of Wilde (if he had written for Showtime, that is), and whose self-centered wisdom brings down the house, but only re-iterates (instead of further developing) the themes of the play.

Then again, Gionfriddo's real aim may be to simply reveal her underlying correspondences rather than develop them. So what we get is Becky Shaw - a flawed but funny look at the current cult of victimhood that closes just as it gets really interesting (and Becky is left alone with her true double - and target - the icily nasty Max). Your mileage may vary with this production as well as this play, however, because even though everyone in the company is talented, director Peter DuBois hasn't quite teased out the right performances from them to really make the text sing, or sting. Seth Fisher's Max, for instance, is far too cool a customer to really hook us in that mysterious first act; he's definitely hilarious, but his carapace of competence is almost bland - he needs to be a bit more of a hothead, a bit more poisonously male, to truly set off his odd liaison with Suzanna and make us wonder what's really going on beneath his gleaming, powerful hood. Keira Naughton's Suzanna is likewise a bit too calm and collected at first; and thus we find the news that she has married in just a few short months utterly unbelievable. Eli James is a better match to hubby Andrew's crunchy profile, and Wendy Hoopes also manages to somehow put over the weird hiddenness of Becky, even if their big scene together is the oddest in the play. And Huntington vet Maureen Anderman knows just how to serve the hilarious ham Gionfriddo has sliced for Mom - it's simply too bad the character is so obviously peripheral.

It's such flaws that make the Pulitzer Prize nomination for Becky Shaw seem - well, like a reach. Still, I suppose the money question is the following: is Gina Gionfriddo better than Sarah Ruhl? In a word, yes. Becky Shaw may be awkward, but it does come together in its own way, and nobody in it leaps into a parallel universe or builds a house of string. Even though it's from Brown, it may still be a keeper.

Streaming in New York

Finally, the production of Streamers (at left) that played at the Huntington last season has opened in New York, at the Roundabout. The Times gives it something close to a rave, as I did a year ago. Yet another case (Mauritius comes to mind) in which Boston's print reviewers have been in disagreement with those in the Big Apple. It's hard to ignore, however, the fact that reviewer Charles Isherwood is a gay male (and Streamers deals with gays in the military), while the reviewers who put the production down in Boston were all women. Tellingly, one of the Huntington production's other major supporters was Art Hennessey, a straight guy who's spent time in the military. So can only people with a stake in this particular conflict perceive the power of this play? Perhaps; but I'd hate to diss an entire gender because of the performance of two or three of its members (I've talked to other women who perceived the power of Streamers, and of course, former drama critic Bill Marx sniffed at the production, too).

I'd also like to think that I'm able to perceive the difference between strong shows about women (In the Continuum) and weak ones (Martha Mitchell Calling) based on their artistic rather than political attributes. And indeed, the political content of Streamers ranked high in the Boston reviewers' remarks - in that they felt its politics were passé. Louise Kennedy wrote: "What struck an earlier audience as stark and powerful drama may leave us shaking our heads at its stereotypes and melodrama - just as, no doubt, some acclaimed works of our own time will come to seem like risible cliches . . . this play, in this production, at this time, simply does not work." I'm laughing as I re-read that; did Kennedy really imply that Streamers was a "risible cliché"? Apparently gay men and military men don't think so (and maybe certain married couples in California wouldn't think so, either).

Of course there is an argument against Streamers (which, to be fair, Marx half-made in his usual pissy way); it's structured poorly, its speeches are sometimes overwritten, and its coda needs editing. But a lot of durable plays have their technical weaknesses (even Hamlet is among them, and don't get me started on Tennessee Williams). Let's hope New York can perceive what Boston's reviewers could not, and gives Streamers the attention it deserves.

What should an academic theatre be?

After a reportedly troubled search that lasted something like a year, the ART finally settled on Diane Paulus (left), a Harvard grad and Obie-award winner, as its choice for Artistic Director. The good news is that the search is over, of course, and that we're now free of Gideon Lester's attempts to replicate past ART seasons. The downside of Diane, however, is that her résumé almost reads like parody. It's thick with pop-music adaptations of Shakespeare (The Donkey Show transported Midsummer Night's Dream to a disco and The Karaoke Show set The Comedy of Errors in a karaoke bar, while The Winter's Tale got a "gospel/R&B" treatment), and includes a pitstop in just about every ditzy directorial trend of the last twenty years: Mozart's Figaro got an update, of fucking course, as well as all three Monteverdi operas (they made it to BAM, naturally), which mixed with the likes of David Lynch (Lost Highway) and even Disney (The Golden Mickeys, whatever that was). Meanwhile her résumé lists no Chekhov, no Ibsen or Shaw, no Sophocles, no Marivaux, no Williams or O'Neill or Miller or Kushner, no Beckett or Brecht or - well, no anybody. Maybe she's done them, but she's certainly not advertising it - when it comes to classic texts, besides the Shakespeare travesties, she only lists Strindberg's phantasmagorical A Dream Play.


Titania goes clubbing in The Donkey Show.

You wonder, in short, if her career might have been devised by some imp at the Harvard Lampoon. It's hard not to get the impression of a very bright, very attractive careerist who read her "mentors" like a book and colored relentlessly within the postmodern lines. And note among all the disco and the Disney that there are few, if any, honest productions of interesting new plays by great playwrights; no, Diane was far too focused to do anything as silly that. That would have required, like, slavish obeisance to a text, dude! It would have blown the whole orgy of signifiers - not to mention the scene!


A scene from Paulus's Brutal Imagination, although it might be from any number of past ART productions.

So it's obvious (if you doubt me, check out the photographs of her work) that her artistic directorship will represent more of the same old, same old from the ART, where the late-70's Village never died (or rather, where it went to die). Indeed, it's hard to imagine how the Harvard search committee could have made a more conservative choice. One guesses the ART will remain mired in yesterday's critical theories, and grow more and more isolated from its community, aside from the Dresden Dolls' fan base, which is probably doing handsprings (along with the Dolls themselves, of course).

Sigh. But will the Huntington do much better? Will Peter DuBois, their incoming artistic director (who arrived after a far more smoothly managed search), actually connect with theatre, and with Boston, the way Harvard seems unable to? Maybe. He's done real plays - Chekhov, Shakespeare, and Beckett, as well as Churchill, Kushner, and others (including, yes, politically-correct lesser talents like Suzan-Lori Parks). DuBois has also, it's good to point out, run a theatre - in Juneau, Alaska, of all places (I'm not making that up), and he's been a mucky-muck at New York's Public, certainly a highly-pressured, high-profile perch. Needless to say, he's also acquainted with the New York (and Hollywood) stars that the Huntington, under Nicholas Martin, began to rely on to boost audience interest in their seasons.

All this, I think, bodes rather well - in case you can't tell, I care far less for postmodern theory and rock-n-roll than I do for theatre. And I'm hoping that DuBois will not only continue the policy of engagement with the city that Nicholas Martin was known for, but will also improve upon it. But what, in the end, should DuBois set as his goals? What should an academic theatre be? In Boston, unlike almost anywhere else in the U.S., we've got two of them, and yet their roles and responsibilities have been a topic of almost no public discussion whatsoever. They are perceived as simply adjuncts of the power bases their respective universities represent; local critics seem to think it's almost rude, somehow, to question the assumptions and goals under which they operate (and under which they gobble down public dollars). But in my next post in this doubleheader, I'll ponder what, exactly, should be expected of an academy that begins to operate as an arts practitioner.