Okay, okay, here are my thoughts on Clybourne Park (Part 2 of a series)

Work of art or house of mirrors?  The SpeakEasy version of Clybourne Park.  Photo(s): Craig Bailey.

Every single theatre acquaintance I've bumped into over the past month has asked me the same question:

"When are you going to write about Clybourne Park???"

Sometimes people said,  "You are going to write about Clybourne Park, aren't you?" or "You didn't already write about Clybourne Park, did you?" or "I didn't miss it, did I?"

A few emails simply cut to the chase: "Clybourne Park?" was all they said.

But no, you haven't missed it - even though I did already write in depth about Clybourne, in a widely noted review of Trinity Rep's savage production last year.  But I understood that I had to write about it again - people were actually yearning for it.  For one thing, everyone knows I'm the only writer in Boston who dares to write honestly about questions of race in the theatre - plus I'm one of only a few local critics with any insight into dramatic mechanics. Those points were particularly salient because the vast majority of my friends, it seemed, were hesitantly trying to vocalize a common feeling they were hoping I would validate. As one put it:

"It seems like a really good play.  But it really isn't, is it."

And what can I say?  You're all quite right.  Clybourne Park seems like a really good play - but it isn't, not really.  Instead, it is an "important" play - and there's a big difference between an important play and a good play.

Still, the SpeakEasy Stage production (which recently closed) was undeniably a strong one - it honored the work's "importance" in an astutely dignified way, and often - but not always - disguised its flaws. That is what it was designed to do, and it clearly succeeded in its objective.  (It certainly snookered almost all the Boston critics.)  The Trinity Rep production was in a way more intriguing - it cast the play as polemic - in effect a sardonic riposte to Hansberry's text, or at least its comfortable, classic status; and thus it sank its teeth into the dark snark at the core of Bruce Norris's authorial tone.  The trouble was, this led to a dead end, because Norris doesn't really complete any kind of artistic or politic arc in his action, and the buried "secret" driving his plot feels like a complete non sequitur to his racial themes.  Thus after a roaring act-and-a-half, the Trinity Rep version abruptly ran out of steam, and sputtered to a frustrating stop - which led me to wonder whether the mainstream "race play" was already "written out."

But at SpeakEasy Stage, director Bevin O'Gara was - well, cannier in manner and method, although it has crossed my mind that she may have actually been simply disinterested in the script's political particulars.  To her, you felt, Clybourne Park operated as kind of figurehead, like one of those bare-busted ladies on the prow of a ship, for a certain theatrical movement of which she sees herself as avatar; its individual features or flaws were of secondary concern.  Indeed, it was mounted as an indirect companion piece to the simultaneous revival of A Raisin in the Sun (from which its plot is derived) at the Huntington (where O'Gara works as an associate producer). And given that production's rather sentimentalized tone, clearly what counted was that Clybourne convey a vaguely progressive posture despite itself (indeed even though it often feels like a sarcastic shrug of despair).

Thus O'Gara's was a kinder, gentler Clybourne Park -  a transformation which she effected by making it an actor's Clybourne Park, focused on sympathetic, naturalistic detail rather than debate (after all, O'Gara, and SpeakEasy Stage, just don't do debate). This approach was somewhat compromised by the fact that a key role in the production was miscast; but the actor in question, Thomas Derrah, is so technically skillful that this issue, like so many in the script itself, was successfully disguised.

Of course O'Gara's version inevitably stalled, too, like Trinity's - although so much more slowly and subtly that I think many observers never even felt themselves drifting to a stop. Perhaps more importantly, it was pushed into rough alignment with Raisin, its source material  - indeed (in a move that made you wonder about some level of meta-collusion between the two directors) the Huntington's Liesl Tommy brought onstage the ghost of the deceased patriarch whose death kick-starts the plot of Raisin - as if to openly reference the dead son who haunts Clybourne.

But do those particular reflections really make sense (even if they're what Bruce Norris had in mind)? Probably not - indeed, I'd argue Tommy's gentle but forced gesture violated Hansberry's intents, and the suggested parallels with Clybourne were just fuzzy anyway.  Thus inevitably, more discerning theatre-goers left both productions with the troubling sense that they'd been  - well, slightly hoodwinked.  And in a way they had; Raisin and Clybourne are opposed, not parallel, works.  One (Raisin) is far greater than the other, but oddly, the weaker play attempts to undo the optimism of the stronger; and any attempt to suggest that they orbit each other in the way that Norris's two time frames do in Clybourne is (I think) an inherently misguided strategy.

What's past is prologue in Clybourne Park.

Of course perhaps all this is simple coincidence. And to be fair, O'Gara's approach had one great virtue: it drew out the incredible detail that Norris has worked into his mirrored diptych of two eras, and the modes in which racism was and is secretly honored, but officially denied, in each (the approach is neatly summed up in the photoshopped "mirror" of two sets of characters, at left).

Still, this mirroring should really only be a means toward an end - and it's that end, that climax, that's missing from Clybourne Park.  Yes, racism has survived A Raisin in the Sun, and even the Civil Rights Act - but in what form, really, has it done so? That, you feel, is the question that would have pre-occupied Lorraine Hansberry, had she not been taken from us at such an early age - and while Norris nods toward it, he seems unwilling to answer it.  Instead, the playwright lets his many reflections take over, and Clybourne Park becomes a house of mirrors rather than a work of art.

But if Clybourne Park isn't actually a work of art, is it at least an interesting cultural artifact, a kind of unconscious aesthetic symptom? This is an intriguing argument, and one that the rapturous critical reception to O'Gara's production seems to validate.  And which I'll consider more deeply in the third part of this series.

Shining new light on A Raisin in the Sun (Part I of a series)

LeRoy McClain and Ashley Everage in A Raisin in the Sun.  Photo: T. Charles Erickson.

I'm not sure whether the theatre is more obsessed with race these days, or real estate.  But the two topics have certainly been entwined on our stages, in production after production pondering the question of black families moving into white neighborhoods.  Last year saw The Luck of the Irish premiere at the Huntington, after Clybourne Park took its regional bow at Trinity; and right now Clybourne is enjoying a return engagement at SpeakEasy, while the grandmother of the whole genre (and yes, by now it's a genre), Lorraine Hansberry's classic A Raisin in the Sun, has just been revived at the Huntington (through April 7) under the direction of Liesl Tommy.

I'm not really complaining about the sudden intensity of this focus (in fact I think I'm the only local critic to ever call for somebody, anybody, to treat Boston's de facto policy of racial apartheid).  But I'll admit that by now I've become a little concerned about the limits of these texts - I'd like to see more plays like Invisible Man, that treat race without recourse to a realtor.  Still, I'm aware that the theatre is responding in its usual half-baked way to the deep realization that rocked Fox News on election day, i.e. white people don't own the country anymore (they just own Wall Street!).

Of course of these works, Raisin is by far the greatest - and now I'd argue it's the most poignant, too. For seeing it again - particularly after taking in Clybourne Park for the second time - means facing the touching quaintness of its essential optimism.  It's not that the hopes of Hansberry's family (tellingly named the Youngers) are doomed - not exactly.  It's more that they don't quite guess what's ahead, much less how their dreams will be co-opted.

The critical response to the current juxtaposition of Raisin and its derivative satellite, Clybourne, has been enthusiastic but, alas, rather vapid.  Everyone agrees, for instance, that the two works 'have a lot to say to each other,' but precisely what that might be remains unspoken; meanwhile Raisin is lauded (as always) for being "searingly human," "achingly true," etc., etc.

Which it is - but the Huntington revival also reminded me of the play's many flaws.  A Raisin in the Sun was completed by Hansberry at the ripe old age of 28, and it's a young person's play - overlong and overstuffed with thematic tangents.  It's also unevenly structured, as the author juggles a mosaic of rambling scenes that cluster around its central trio (or is it a quartet?) of protagonists.  Indeed, what many recall as the spine of the play - Mrs. Younger's purchase of a home in the all-white neighborhood of (yes) Clybourne Park - is only one of several thematic threads (the debate between assimilation vs. isolation, the tension between the sexes in African-American culture) that bind the play together.

Keona Welch and Kimberly Scott; photo: T Charles Erickson

What also binds the play together, of course, is Hansberry's sheer passion, and her desire to pack into her script everything she knows about being "young, gifted and black" - even if the history of the Younger clan doesn't quite match her own (her family was the first to fight - and win - a battle against race-restrictive covenants, but the Hansberries were far more moneyed and middle-class than their fictional counterparts).

And luckily for us, the author's passion is matched by that of the cast at the Huntington, whose production is sustained by remarkable performances, despite a few odd flourishes from its director.  Tommy has chosen to incorporate the ghost of the family's dead patriarch - whose insurance money is funding their new dreams - directly into the action of the play (Corey Allen stalks the set in age make-up), which alas, feels a bit cinematic and Disney-fied. The set, by Clint Ramos, is likewise slightly problematic; it's a turntable that we can feel is meant to spin with the family as it whirls in indecision; but like the appearances of Ghost-Dad, this sometimes feels forced, and various lighting effects and Tommy's trademarked bursts of extraneous rap are similarly distracting.

But if the director hasn't solved the structural issues in Hansberry's text, and has perhaps even exacerbated some of them here and there, I have to admit that she has also drawn memorable performances from her cast pretty much across the board; so the uplifting, traditional core of Raisin survives the odd accoutrements of this revival.  Perhaps first among equals is LeRoy McClain, whose performance as Walter Lee Younger (the son who squanders much of the family inheritance on a liquor store scheme) is a fluid, fevered marvel of anger, ambition, immaturity, and wounded sensitivity.  He's pretty much matched, however, by the luminous Keona Welch as his very Lorraine-Hansberry-like sister, whose brilliant idealism is tempered by a winningly bemused self-awareness. Meanwhile the formidable Kimberly Scott, as matriarch Lena Younger, was beset by a few memory lapses on opening night, but as these settle down the understated strength of her heart-breaking performance will only become more apparent.  Even subtler than Scott was Ashley Everage, who brought a disappointed (but unbroken) strength to the role of Walter Lee's wife Ruth.  The supporting cast - Jason Bowen, Corey Allen, Maurice E. Parent, and Will McGarrahan - was likewise strong (while the youngest role, of Walter Lee's son Travis, is charmingly handled by either Cory Janvier or Zaire White).  Indeed, the acting alone at the Huntington was enough to give you hope for the future - or at least until you see Bruce Norris's Clybourne Park.  But more about that in the second part of this series.

The scoop on Our Town: yes, it is unforgettable, and yes, it will sell out completely

Therese Plaehn, David Cromer, and Derrick Trumbly in Our Town.  Photo: T. Charles Erickson.

This is just an early warning to fans of the Hub Review regarding the Huntington's re-mounting of David Cromer's celebrated version of Thornton Wilder's Our Town:

Yes, you do want to see it, and yes, it will sell out completely (even though the run has already been extended).  Indeed, since seating is fairly limited in the Roberts Studio Theatre, expect this to be the hottest ticket in town once the reviews drop.

As for my review - well, this one's tricky, as Cromer's production depends on a specific coup de théâtre in the haunting last act that pulls together (with heartbreaking force) a concept that until then slightly mystified at least a few folks in the audience.  I don't believe the impact of this coup completely depends on its surprise - I guessed at its essence, and it still floored me - but I think epiphanies usually work best when they're unexpected, don't you?

Either way, Cromer's gambit is unforgettable, and while it violates Wilder's stage directions, it's actually utterly in consonance with his themes. Indeed, I think it will be hard to imagine Our Town in future without this masterstroke; it will become a touchstone of the play's performance history.

All I'll say is that it reminds you that Wilder's deepest theme is something like "Life is not a rehearsal."  To be honest, perhaps not everyone in the (mostly local) cast was equally at ease with the production concept on opening night - but certainly local lights Nael Nacer, Marianna Bassham, Alex Pollock, and Paul Farwell excelled.

And it's worth noting that director Cromer, in one more meta-theatrical flourish, is himself in the cast, as the Stage Manager (a role the author himself sometimes played, as at left, in Wellesley in 1950) - but only through December 30.

The bottom line is simply that this Our Town is unforgettable.  Beyond that, mum's the word.

Pre-occupied by Occupy, Part I

Our local theaters pretty much ignored Occupy Boston while it lived (it celebrates its first birthday this weekend, btw).  Indeed, the only actor or writer I know to have engaged with the movement directly was Danny Bryck, and his efforts came to a rather ironic end.  But now that Occupy is safely dead (or at least dormant in the U.S.), the Hub's various lefty poseurs (Company One, Central Square Theater, etc.) have come out in force to sing its praises, and most every local company has suddenly become pre-occupied with issues of class.

These efforts have run the gamut from the sweetly oblique (even the Lyric's Mikado found room for slogans from Zuccotti Park) to the well-intended but under-developed (The Civilians' Paris Commune at ArtsEmerson) to something close to self-satire: the high school clique that runs Company One, for instance, actually intimidated Bryck into giving up financial support for his piece on Occupy in exchange for hosting it.  That's right - they abused him financially before they'd produce his show on financial abuse.  It doesn't get much richer than that.

But you know, I'm pretty philosophical by now about the high-mindedness of the theatrical community (and the critics who cover it). For in the end, the theatre's political hypocrisy only reflects that of its audience (if all the people who actually claim to be committed to progress actually put down their programs and did something about our problems, much progress would immediately be achieved - which trust me, ain't gonna happen).

So I'm more interested these days in parsing the spectrum of our theatrical response to the political issues that Occupy exposed, but obviously failed to solve.  And I have to give the laurels in this particular contest (at least so far) to the Huntington, which in a pair of nearly book-ended productions (Kirsten Greenidge's The Luck of the Irish and now David Lindsay-Abaire's Good People) has limned the issues of apartheid - in terms of class as well as race - that have long riven this city in a way that I think no other local theatre has ever dared to do.  (Tellingly, the A.R.T's response to Occupy was the widely-derided Marie Antoinette - more unconscious self-parody!)

Johanna Day suffers The Luck of the Irish in Good People.

I'm a little shocked by this myself, frankly, given that the Huntington is the theatrical behemoth of the local scene.  But perhaps I shouldn't be.  Several years ago I predicted that this company's engagement with its community, along with its general commitment to high-quality, popular theatre, would give it an edge over the other theatrical elephant in the room, Harvard's A.R.T., and make it the leading theatre of the city.  And of course that prediction has come true in spades. I think the Huntington now boasts something like five times as many subscribers as anybody else, and its decision to anchor the nascent BCA expansion several years ago proved the tipping point in the rejuvenation of an entire neighborhood ("the theatre district" is now the South End).

So it's highly appropriate that the Huntington should turn its artistic sights directly on the Hub.  You could even argue that it's high time - how could Boston have boasted (for decades) two major regional theaters that generally ignored their home turf?  Well, because both stages were aligned with the gown, not the town, in this town-and-gown burg, that's why.  Only to be fair, critics of the Huntington I think would be hard pressed to name any major regional company that has thrown on its home team the sustained critical light that Irish and People have together cast on Boston.  Indeed, I'd like to think (or hope!) that this long-overdue attention will only be the start of a trend - if the Huntington's influential development program kept a focus on not just local writers but local stories, I think it could contribute something really essential to the life of the city.

Just a few more lines of praise for this company before I move on to an analysis of Good People.  Now I don't want to pretend the Huntington doesn't have its flaws; it does.  Its artistic director, Peter DuBois, like his evil twin at Harvard, is clearly too focused on his New York career - although you could argue that some of the culture-lite fodder he has generated for Manhattan and the Times girls (like Sons of the Prophet and Becky Shaw) hasn't been all that bad. And unlike you-know-who, DuBois has put together dazzling seasons in absentia by pulling together probably the best roster of outside directors, actors, and artists that the Huntington has ever seen; to his great credit, he differs from his predecessor, the talented Nicky Martin, in that he seems happy to invite his equals (and even betters?) onto the Huntington stage.

Now I know we've also suffered through the likes of A Civil War Christmas, Before I Leave You, and Captors during DuBois' tenure - yikes!  But every theatre strikes out sometimes, and every company occasionally panders to segments of its audience.  You could also argue that formal experimentation has always been slighted at the Huntington - but I'd argue back that by now the millennials have given formal experimentation a very bad name.  More troubling is the large gap that still lingers around the greatest classics (sorry, but the Propeller frat boys, fun as they are, don't really deliver the Shakespearean goods, and where are Chekhov and Ibsen, not to mention Socrates and Shaw?).

But I have to weigh all that against a truly dazzling series of successes, at least after DuBois' wobbly debut season: not only have we enjoyed masterpieces like Candide, but we've also seen remarkable productions of All My Sons, Stick Fly, Bus Stop, and Private Lives, and worthy versions of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Ruined, The Luck of the Irish, Circle Mirror Transformation, Educating Rita, Fences, and now Good People.  That's a long list - a lengthier stretch of sustained, large-scale artistic success than I think I could credit to any other local theatre in the thirty years I've lived here.

Of course the question is - can they keep it up?  I'd argue that Good People implies they can, as I'll explain in the second half of this series.

August Wilson's bottom line

August Wilson was a playwright absorbed in his people's history; and now, of course, he himself is a part of that history (he passed away in 2005).  This melancholy fact, coupled with the knowledge that Ma Rainey's Black Bottom represents (roughly) the starting point of the playwright's life work, his ten-play saga now known as the "Century Cycle," brings a poignant emotional weight to bear on the production currently on the boards of the Huntington (but only through this weekend).

The fact that this Ma Rainey also represents the completion of the Huntington's own commitment to staging Wilson's entire cycle only seems to up the artistic ante.  Watching the close of this production is like watching the curtain of time descend on ten different plays and nearly twenty-six years of effort (the theatre staged its first Wilson play, Lloyd Richards' production of Joe Turner's Come and Gone, in 1986; I remember it well, but were some of the stars of the current show even born then?).

So let's just say that watching this new version of Ma Rainey put me in mind of what my father used to call the Long View - and it also re-enforces the impression that at the end of vast artistic endeavors, you sometimes end up precisely where you started.  That is if you haven't actually lost some ground.  For has anyone come along to take up August Wilson's mantle?  Do we have a young black playwright - or a young playwright of any color or gender - of Wilson's size, scope, or sympathy?

Oh, let's be honest - we don't [although local playwright Kirsten Greenidge will take her shot next week with Luck of the Irish].  I don't mean to make exorbitant claims for Wilson; the familiar rap against him is one I agree with (in fact it's one I've helped shape): he was never much for structure, perhaps not even for story, particularly as he aged; his plays became ever more digressive and discursive; in some of the late ones, in fact, all you can count on are a few stretches of spectacular oratory.  Since Ma Rainey is at or near the beginning of this arc, it's more coherent than some of the cycle - which probably peaks in the middle  period of Joe Turner and The Piano Lesson - but you can feel here, at the very beginning, the buds of the flaws that would eventually fully flower by the cycle's end.


Still, in that mysterious way that a great dramatic voice somehow makes itself known despite its own failings, in Ma Rainey, Wilson's writing slowly coalesces into a deeply moving statement.  The play has little forward drive, it's true - it's a meandering look at a group of black musicians conjured around the real-life "Ma Rainey," (who did have a hit with the song "Black Bottom" - although she only had supporting vocals on the record - and was a notable figure in gay history as well as black history due to her open lesbianism, which Wilson treats matter-of-factly).  Ma and her long-suffering band are attempting to make a blues record for a white recording company, although this proves a daunting task, given the demands of the recording studio and Ma's own penchant for drama.  Thus the play is a tapestry of racist humiliations, large and small, as well as private conversations and debates, petty power plays and exploitations - and one shocking outburst of violence.  But remember Stephen Dedalus' conceited claim that "in the smithy of his soul" he would forge "the uncreated conscience of his race"?  Well, August Wilson seems to have gone Joyce one better, I'd argue.  For from the panoply of voices arguing in Ma Rainey, a mosaic of communal frustration and consternation does slowly emerge; a vision of a race unshackled, but still in chains, and furious at both its oppressors and itself for its desperate condition.  Yes, the title of the play is a naughty double entendre, but it's a deeper pun as well - what exactly, August Wilson asks, is the bottom line for my race, my people?

Jason Bowen in a break-out performance .

And it's here, I think, that the playwright towers over today's polemicists in the ongoing wars of identity politics.  His characters struggle not only with their victimization but also with their seeming impotence before it; they interrogate themselves as well as the power structure.  This, of course, is terribly incorrect to today's P.C. mandarins; but it's one of the means by which Wilson transcends politics and achieves the status of art instead.

I'm not sure, actually, that the current production always understands that - well, I'm sure the actors do; but director Liesl Tommy has framed the action with odd flourishes, in which rap blares from the sound system, and the cast briefly stares at us in contemporary dress.  I wasn't sure how to take these asides - but of course what leaps out at you from them is how black music - like the rest of pop music! - has collapsed catastrophically in quality, falling from the free, sweet lyricism of jazz, gospel and the blues to our current modes of squalid crudeness.  In a way, of course, Wilson predicted this; his characters muse that as racist power structures harden and age, the resulting anger from the black community will slowly poison, even strangle, our popular culture.  So perhaps Tommy intends her framing as mournful acknowledgment of Wilson's prescience - I don't know.

But I don't feel that elsewhere Tommy has cast Wilson in the best light possible - even though in its richness and maturity this production marks a return to form for the Huntington (after two recent misfires).  Still, here we feel the clunk of just about every bump in Wilson's script (when a director like Lloyd Richards might have disguised the smaller gaps - maybe Tommy's not all that great at structure either).  The director's most troubling misstep is her seeming lack of attention to the slowly burning fuse that does, eventually, ignite at the play's conclusion.  But she has drawn highly detailed performances from almost everyone in her superb cast, and she has coaxed a star turn from our own Jason Bowen, who here joins the ranks of local actors who have made the jump from local stages to the big time in a splashily convincing way (another reason why the Huntington is our leading theatre, and remains so valuable).

And those performances are reason enough to catch Ma Rainey before it closes.  Yvette Freeman makes a formidable Ma - she perfectly captures the mix of resentment, defeated realism, and diva-worthy theatrics that Wilson intends; and though she doesn't sing in quite the cadence of her historical namesake, she still lights up "Black Bottom" with a frisky, earthy joy.  (The music here, though synched to taped performances, is highly convincing.) And while Jason Bowen may provide the fireworks for the musicians' backstage scenes, he never obscures the fine detail of the performances around him, from the distinguished trio of G. Valmont Thomas, Charles Weldon, and Glenn Turner.  Newcomers Joneice Abott-Pratt and Corey Allen likewise shine as very different members of Ma's entourage - one her slinky latest squeeze, the other a stammering nephew who Ma poignantly insists (with some raw symbolism) deserves a place on her record.  Meanwhile, as the racist record producer Sturdyvant, Thomas Derrah all but disappears into his role, and made me completely forget about his recent preening in Red.  I was surprised that only Will LeBow seemed to lack specificity as Ma's manager Irvin; he was adequate, but there is, I think, far more to this role than he has yet found (at least by opening night).  But overall, there's a richness to this ensemble that you won't find anywhere else in town right now.

So if you can't tell, I left Ma Rainey's Black Bottom once again moved by August Wilson's achievement.  I certainly hope this final installment of the "Century Cycle" won't be the Huntington's farewell to this great playwright - because frankly I think we need him now more than ever.

Glenn Turner, Will LeBow, G. Valmont Thomas, Jason Bowen, and Charles Weldon await Ma Rainey.

A lost opportunity at the Huntington

The cast of Before I Leave You.

Okay, I'm just going to say this fast, because there's no nice way to say it. The Huntington's latest show, Before I Leave You, by Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro, is a huge disappointment.  My dismay over its failure is all the more piercing because the production marks a late-career breakthrough for the 72-year-old author, a Cambridge resident, who (it is plain from her writing) is a lovely person who knows her milieu, and has something worthwhile - if perhaps not terribly original - to say.

But the bottom line is that this script isn't ready for a professional production.  Instead, right now it feels like it's ready for a first reading, perhaps, with a substantial rewrite to follow.  That the play's theme revolves around the passage of time, and the need to grab the main chance while you still have the chance, only makes this gap in quality all the more poignant, I know.

The gap nevertheless still looms. Ms. Alfaro seems to have intended to pen a rueful essay on love at the end of life, and the issues that plague a failing marriage; in her opening scene, an aging Cambridge writer, Jeremy (Ross Bickell) suffers a choking episode that makes him realize he may not have much time left among the living.  And we glean from stolen glances and other asides that he has long carried a torch (silently) for Emily (Kippy Goldfarb), the wife of a narcissistic best friend and colleague, Koji (Glenn Kubota).

So far, so good; we fully expect Ms. Alfaro to gear up for a meditation on late-September romance, with all its emotional (and here moral) pitfalls.  Think Brief Encounter crossed with Love Among the Ruins set just off Brattle Street.  Will Jeremy make his move, we wonder?  Will Emily respond?  Will she make a clean break with her husband or will the lovers slink along on the down low?  We sense Ms. Alfaro's script could move in any number of interesting, complex directions.

Instead, it runs in circles - to the smoky melody of Kurt Weill's "September Song," which would be the perfect accompaniment to the play Ms. Alfaro seems to think she's writing, but doesn't get around to until the very last minute.  In the meantime we're distracted repeatedly by subplots which the author can't seem to integrate into her main action - Emily and Koji's troubled son becomes the focus of the first act, for instance (while Jeremy takes a back seat!) even though his plotline is all but dropped after intermission.  And Koji (himself an adulterer, we quickly realize) is lavished with stage time, even though Alfaro doesn't develop his character so much as repeat the broad strokes of her initial sketch.  Meanwhile Jeremy stays passive, Emily remains a cipher, and the play becomes increasingly episodic - scenes end repeatedly well before they should, sometimes before their implicit conflicts have even come clear.

How did this happen?  I'm not sure, as the question here isn't adventurous plotting or structure, it's a simple lack thereof.  I perceived sometimes the effects of last-minute rewrites - in the wrong direction, probably (the old pros in the cast were a little unsteady on their lines, and even their blocking).  But whatever the reason for its failure, the production casts a poor light on the Huntington's new play program, which has never been strong on instilling structure in its offerings, but this time around seems to have completely blown what was a truly inspiring opportunity.  To be blunt, I feel Ms. Alfaro's nascent script, which even now boasts some clever jokes and a few touching exchanges, deserved far more vigorous and focused guidance than it has received.  Fixing it isn't rocket science; it's just hard work.

And for what it's worth, Allen Moyer's scenic design - a kind of cityscape of bookshelves - is apt, but Jonathan Silverstein's direction feels aimless; perhaps he was hamstrung, however, by a flat central performance from Glenn Kubota, who brings little depth or complexity to the irritating Koji.  The other actors fare better, even if they sometimes look a bit uncertain of how to proceed.  I got the feeling Bickell and Goldfarb were simply holding back from the inchoate material, but the reliable Karen MacDonald, bless her, just dives right in - sometimes she's all but sweating bullets, you can see her working so hard to fill in moments and keep things moving.  And she's appealing - she always is - but in the end she can only draw focus (she's a supporting character); she can't actually push the production forward.  Only the author can do that - and I hope, actually, that someday and somehow Ms. Alfaro does return to this material.  Her initial idea was a good one; it just has yet to take effective dramatic form.

The best of all possible Candides

Geoff Packard and Lauren Molina in a touching reunion from Candide.

Sometimes the theatrical gods smile upon folly, and they're all but beaming right now at the Huntington, where Mary Zimmerman's improbable renovation of Candide is unfurling in a surprising burst of glory.  For the history of this musical has, in fact, been almost a mirror of the tale it tells; the adaptation of Voltaire's classic for the Broadway stage has been a long peregrination beset by disaster more often than triumph.

In its first incarnation, this spry satire of faith in "the best of all possible worlds" was sunk by Lillian Hellman's leaden book, although Leonard Bernstein's music (and Richard Wilbur's lyrics) were immediately acclaimed; indeed, the score was soon legend, and "fixing" Candide became an ongoing project of the Broadway smart set (even Stephen Sondheim lent a hand at one point).  Hugh Wheeler and Harold Prince condensed the musical by half in the 70's, and gave the whole thing a carnival spin that made it a hit (something like this version is still in the City Opera repertory, if the City Opera still exists, that is).  Bernstein wasn't so thrilled by this truncation, however - even after Prince and Wheeler later expanded it - and countered with a "definitive" symphonic version that attempted to recall from the bathos of farce the sense of romantic satire that had been his original aim.

Since then, Candide has bounced about in form and format, with everyone usually agreeing that the score hadn't yet been done justice (the crass New York concert revival in 2005 was a particular low).   But how to adapt Voltaire's rambling pamphlet without condensing it into farce remained a mystery - as did a method for reconciling the script's singularly skeptical tone with the lush panoply provided by its musical genius, Bernstein.  At its core, Candide was a contradiction.  Yet rather like Voltaire's deluded characters, people remained stubbornly optimistic that somehow, someday, the dream of uniting its two creative pole-stars could come true.

Well, now the Midwestern MacArthur "genius" Mary Zimmerman has turned her prodigious talents to this long-standing challenge.  And to my mind, she has indeed come up with the best of all possible Candides.  Or at least the best one we are likely to see in our lifetimes.  Yet suitably enough, the path of her production has been a wayward one.  It endured mysteriously mixed reviews at its Chicago opening, but as it has toured the country it has garnered awards, and its reputation has steadily built; I hear it has been tightened slightly, and surely the lead performances (Geoff Packard, Lauren Molina, and Larry Yando have been with it from the start) have all deepened.  Still, those initial notices seem bizarre at this point; this is one of those productions whose greatness you feel in your bones; and I don't think I'm alone in feeling that way - at the curtain call some of the people around me were all but screaming their approval, and my partner shouted himself hoarse.  The last time I felt this way at the Huntington was at All My Sons; and as I did with that production, I'm telling you if you miss this one, you will be missing a legend.

Packard and Molina  - one great performance, and one for the history books.  Photos: T. Charles Erickson

But musical purists, take note: the score may be the reason Candide has lasted, but ironically enough, Zimmerman has structured her version around Voltaire, not Bernstein (and she has cut one or two songs, while emphasizing others); the original orchestral forces have been reduced, and she has pulled the vocals back from the opera house and into the music hall (her leads have great pop voices, but they're not opera singers - not even Cunegonde).  So this Candide is no longer a great score with a musical attached; it's now back to being a musical with a great score attached.

Perhaps that new emphasis was the key to unlocking the tricky heart of the script; I don't know - but the irony is that while Zimmerman has put the spotlight back on Voltaire, she has found a supple emotional tone that matches Bernstein's score, too.  The book is still credited to Hugh Wheeler, but Zimmerman lists herself as adapter - and while this version has something of Wheeler's circusy touch, and more than a few broad jokes, Zimmerman's take is nevertheless deeper, longer, and richer than Wheeler's.  And her script no longer ridicules poor Candide and Cunegonde for their folly - a good choice, I think, for Voltaire's ultimate aim was to hold the mirror up to us all, not just Liebniz; thus Zimmerman has dispensed with a single, Voltairian narrator (instead the whole cast fills us in on background), and the musical's famously arch last line ("Any questions?") has gone missing.  Perhaps as a result, this is the only Candide I've ever seen that brought me close to tears (Molina and Packard had a lot to do with this, too).  Zimmerman even pulls off the novel trick of hanging onto some sense of unity as the action wanders back and forth across the globe.  Perhaps most importantly, she taps into the feeling, as one character puts it, that despite everything, we nevertheless "love life!"  That strange optimism which survives the death of "optimism" is, in the end, what powers the buoyant Candide.

And Zimmerman's direction, if anything, is even more inspired than her adaptation.  This Candide is studded with images that you'll never forget - chief among them the shocking moment when the comforting canvas of the ancien régime collapses, and poor Candide is left in a giant, empty room: Voltaire's godless universe in a paneled nutshell (the endlessly inventive scenic design is by Daniel Ostling). Elsewhere clever story-theatre tricks convey an earthquake, a battle at sea, and even the Seven Years' War (done up in a slow-motion ballet, with cannonballs whizzing by on fishing poles).  There are other wonders - the re-discovery of Cunegonde, for instance, (at top) is a small marvel of emotional choreography, and the final tableau of "Make Our Garden Grow" - with flowers pushing their way up from the stage floor - is a masterstroke.

Cheryl Stern, in a classic phrase, is "easily assimilated" as the Old Lady in Candide.

Still, none of this could work without a startlingly strong ensemble.  Again, Zimmerman's central trio - Geoff Packard (Candide), Lauren Molina (Cunegonde), and Larry Yando (Pangloss) - are all triple threats who have been perfectly cast.  Perhaps musical purists will note Molina isn't utterly secure pitch-wise at the top of her (enormous) range - but it's impossible to remember that when you're faced with the triumph of her portrayal; "Glitter and Be Gay" (again with brilliant help from Zimmerman) is a comic masterpiece, yet Molina also leaves the goofiness behind to bring off Cunegonde's ruin with the nuanced assurance of a tragedian; this is a performance for the history books.  And the handsome Packard, who has not only the looks for the part but also a beautifully light, fluid tenor, is convincingly sweet and undefiled to the end - while subtly insinuating a deepening world-weariness into Candide's picaresque profile.

Meanwhile Larry Yando makes a delightful Pangloss - again, the vocals are strong if not distinctive, but I could just watch this crafty talent all day, he tickles me so.  And I also can't forget Erik Lochtefeld's hilariously too-gay Maximilian, or Cheryl Stern's battered but worldly-wise Old Lady (Stern wasn't in strong voice on opening night, but made up for it with smoldering attitude).  Other stand-outs in the wide cast were Tom Aulino, Jesse J. Perez, Rebecca Finnegan, and our own McCaela Donovan and Timothy John Smith (who perhaps via his Huntington performances may be about to jump onto a larger theatrical wheel, as Nancy Carroll did before him).  But then praise is due to the entire cast, who all but leap through the many set-pieces Zimmerman and choreographer Daniel Pelzig have dreamt up for them, singing their hearts out all the while.

A few more musical caveats.  I wasn't always sold on music director Doug Peck's tempi, and the woodwinds' entrances were occasionally ragged during the brilliant overture on opening night.  They warmed up, though, and once I got used to the instrumental reduction here (the strings sounded slightly boosted by amplification to even things out), I appreciated its resourcefulness; you leave the production feeling you have indeed heard Candide.  I only sighed, I confess, at the a cappella finale of "Make Our Garden Grow," which can only be done full justice, I think, by a full chorus.  But perhaps even in the best of all possible productions you can't have absolutely everything.


(This animation to the famous overture isn't in the Huntington production, but it's so great I had to share it with you.)

The Huntington opens a classic Candide

It doesn't get much better than this.

Expectations were high for the Huntington Theatre's 30th season opener, Mary Zimmerman's production of Bernstein's Candide.  This is just a quick note to let you know that those expectations were met, actually more than met, tonight; I'm still on a post-show high, in fact.  Zimmerman's Candide may not be a transformative production, but it's a classic one - maybe even a definitive one for this eternally shape-shifting musical.  The score - one of the best of the past century, and the reason people keep trying to work out the kinks in the surrounding book - is handled well here (in a reduced version), and the leading trio - Geoff Packard, Lauren Molina, and Larry Yando - are each absolutely perfect for their roles; meanwhile the supporting musical ensemble is one of the strongest we've seen in Boston since the Huntington's own She Loves Me a few years back.  The design is consistently striking, and Zimmerman's action, often studded with memorable tableaux, is always imaginative - and melds seamlessly with Daniel Pelzig's clever choreography.  Even more importantly, the director brings the musical to a more moving close than I would have thought possible.  I think I can promise you that you will never see a stronger version of this brilliant show, and it will loom over the coming season, and maybe even the coming years.  I'll have caveats and the fine print in a later review, but don't wait for the reviews to come out, get the good seats while you can.

Un-sentimental education

Jane Pfitsch and Andrew Long attempt to educate each other.

Education is Boston's big business.  Or at least one of the biggest businesses we've got left - and our newer industries, like high- and bio-tech, are tightly linked to our powerhouse universities.

Yet education is something we almost never treat on our stages.  Then again - perhaps that's inevitable in these parts.  Somebody famous once said theatre holds the mirror up to nature; but Boston theatre most often holds the mirror up to someone else's nature.  Our stages prefer to produce plays about racism in Alabama or South Africa, for example, rather than in Southie or Charlestown.  And when we do hold the mirror up to ourselves, we only gaze through rose-colored glasses: at the ART, for instance, production after production celebrates youthful rebellion, because that's what Harvard's customers - the professors and the students - want to hear about themselves.

So it's slightly shocking that the Huntington would dare to stage Educating Rita - a kind of Pygmalion update about a crusty professor and his sweet, swinging student - which turns out to be not very sweet at all; indeed, Educating Rita slowly reveals a shockingly bitter dissection of the academy.  Or at least the not-so-distant academy - humanities professors have moved on a bit from the style of pedagogy portrayed in Rita ("critical thinking" and "new perspectives" are now the rage).  But the essential contradiction at the heart of liberal education remains the same: its goal is meant to be intellectual freedom; yet inevitably it results in the codification of a class.  In short, one kind of class breeds another (maybe that's why we use the same word for both).  "Liberal" education leads not to true liberty but to new totems and taboos.  Perhaps that's why, when the professor in Rita surveys his confident new creation, he muses not on Pygmalion but on Frankenstein.  And perhaps that's what makes Educating Rita in some ways the most radical play I've seen on a major stage this season.

How odd, then, that on its surface it's so conventional - indeed, playwright Willy Russell has disguised his critique in a "well-made" two-hander that's really a kind of bourgeois Trojan horse.  Rita is designed to "pass" as a bright pop valentine to - well, half the movies and plays of its time and place (Britain in the late 60s and early 70s).  The playwright's inspiration was the "Open University" initiative of that era - an attempt to crack open the class carapace of British universities by admitting almost anyone to a basic studies program.  In Russell's script, that "anyone" is the eponymous Rita, a saucy hairdresser in Liverpool who shows up for tutoring - in a fabulously "mod" wardrobe - at the door of the rumpled, unshaven, nearly-alcoholic "Frank" (note the name), a battle-scarred poet-professor who has only taken on tutoring for extra cash.

From the opening moments, we sense the seeming derivativeness of the material - perky Rita (at left) desperately wants a better life, and unsurprisingly, Frank desperately needs a spiritual recharge.  Thus we fully expect (as we pat back a yawn) to watch Rita blossom into her own confident woman as Frank finds a renewed faith in himself.  Or something like that.  But even as the familiar tropes of a zillion well-made plays float by, we begin to sense that something very different is afoot in the subtext of Educating Rita.  In fact, from the outset there's a sweet confusion in Rita about her aims - and even her identity.  Her real name isn't actually Rita, for instance (it's Susan) - she has re-christened herself because she yearns to find a true identity, by "learning everything;" yet these idealistic yearnings slide all too easily into naked social ambition.   And needless to say, as the play progresses, that ambition quietly, but inexorably, takes over her life.

Russell makes it immediately clear that Rita's got intellectual chops - she offers a wicked critique of the Titian on Frank's wall, for instance, that precisely sums up the problem of the erotic in art.  And later, when she sees her first production of Macbeth, she's completely bowled over.  But Frank tells Rita that instinct isn't enough; indeed, subjectivity itself is something to be avoided and suppressed in the critique of art. "There are rules," he explains, "and you must observe them."

But as Rita masters the rules of the university game (deftly communicated by costume designer Nancy Brennan through a series of ever-more-sophisticated ensembles) we can feel the spontaneity that Rita brought to Frank's stuffy office slowly leak out of her.  As for Frank, as he watches his tutelage dismantle Rita's originality - a dismantling she's only too happy to accelerate - he hardly finds a renewed faith in himself; instead he sinks all the faster.  The climax to their relationship comes when he offers Rita his latest sheaf of poems - which he knows are a desperate conglomeration of allusions and references - and she responds as if they were truly inspired.  He gazes at her then with a look that tells you he not only knows he has created a monster, but also knows he has killed Rita's skeptical spark - and that he is finished in his profession, and may be staring at his own replacement.  No surprise then that he soon decamps (for Australia!), and that as a farewell gift, Rita offers him a long-needed haircut - after all, she was once a hairdresser; but even this innocent gesture inevitably recalls a similar favor that Delilah once did for Samson.

The trouble with Educating Rita, however, is that while Russell certainly communicates his dramatic intentions, he never quite makes good on them.  Or rather he refuses to let his themes really break through the play's pop surface, and this ends up limiting their impact.  Things never quite fall apart as they should, and Russell moves on from each well-crafted point as quickly as he has made it.  In a way, he's slightly undone by his own subterfuge.

But thoughtful viewers will perceive his argument anyway, I think, partly because director Maria Aitkin limns it with a subtle hand (even as she keeps the comedy bubbling along), and partly because we simply couldn't ask for better actors to put it over.  It would be easy for Rita's happy bounce to read as cliché, for instance, but Jane Pfitsch (above left) keeps it remarkably fresh - although her accent is a shade too thick (and perhaps her final scene isn't quite conflicted enough).  Meanwhile, as Frank, Andrew Long (at right) proves a revelation.  I felt the first stirrings of his internal disgust weren't quite accurately calibrated, but Long proves just about peerless in his second-half collapse; he's clearly one of the best classically-trained actors to play Boston in quite some time, and his performance only made me long for the Huntington to bring him back in Shakespeare or Shaw.

As usual, the set - by Allen Moyer - is a handsomely appointed giant, but I confess I always dig these beautifully-detailed behemoths; I guess I'm just a size queen.  My one quibble with the production was its lighting; designer Joel E. Silver, together with projections designer Seághan McKay, poetically conjures a dozen passing times of day (and season) through the set's office windows; but then all is often sacrificed to the glare of the fluorescent lights of the office itself. While I understood the rationale for this, I slowly began to resent it; less, please.  But as for everything else: just right.

Lynn Nottage's civil war of the sexes

The damaged women of Ruined.

I've been dragging my feet over reviewing Ruined (now at the Huntington Theatre) because . . . well, because the horror of the situation it accurately presents made me feel a little guilty about not liking it more. Plus even I'm getting a little tired of my pointing out the artistic flaws in shows that everybody else has decided are awesome.  And what's the use of analyzing Ruined at this point, anyhow?  It's already won just about every prize there is to win (although how it nabbed a Pulitzer, which is supposedly reserved for plays 'about American life,' I've no idea). [Correction! It turns out the Pulitzer rules state it is meant for plays "preferably about American life."]  And I have to admit that the play is big, and complicated - and undeniably powerful, at least in a sensational way.  To most critics, that makes it a slam-dunk.

I'll even admit that Ruined marks a big step up in terms of craft for its playwright, Lynn Nottage - at least when compared to Intimate Apparel (the only other script of hers I can recall playing in Boston) which was blunt and simplistic by comparison.  In Ruined, Nottage juggles far more characters (if not all that deftly), but more importantly, introduces far more complexity into her victimhood politics. There's some credible back and forth about situational ethics, and her central character, Mama Nadi, a madam who services both sides of the ongoing strife in the Congo, is treated with some irony - or at least, not unmixed sympathy.  She's nothing compared to Brecht's Mother Courage (her supposed model), but by millennial playwriting standards, she's of some interest.  This is more than enough to convince most theatrical observers that Nottage has graduated from P.C. agitprop to genuine art.

But alas, a little voice somewhere in my head tells me that Ruined is still P.C. agitprop; Nottage's simulation of actual art is often so artful, however, that the difference may be meaningless - and probably only a handful of people in Boston would appreciate such a distinction anyhow (there certainly aren't enough of us to fill a house the size of the Huntington; hence, the theatre's dilemma).  What troubles me most about the play, though - even as agitprop - is that Nottage doesn't really bring to life the specific hell that is the Congo, because she seems unable to draw convincing male characters (she's kind of like the black, female David Mamet; the opposite sex is a threatening mystery to her).  Thus the opposing forces sweeping through Mama Nadi's bordello are largely undifferentiated (although we see lots of sparring and jockeying for power between them).  And when and if the playwright allows a male character to break from the pack (as she does once or twice), and actively resist the horrible things that Men do, she seems unable to give him any convincing lines to explain himself.

Now certainly Men do horrible things.  But what has been going on in the Congo is SO horrible - even by masculine standards - that it cries out for some kind of explanation, or at least investigation.  When a playwright conjures scenes (which I trust are accurate) of men chaining women to trees and gang-raping them, or "ruining" their genitals with sabers, I expect some sort of treatment of this behavior beyond the victim wailing "WHY ARE MEN THIS WAY?" (which is all that Nottage seems to have to say on the subject).

For is the kind of blood bath the Congo has endured really an expression of the essential truth about men?  Put another way - is rape in time of war a revelation of man's true nature, or a revelation of an aberration from it? Before you decide, imagine  for a moment a play about Nazi Germany that ended with the cry, "WHY ARE ALL EUROPEANS THIS WAY?" and you'll begin to appreciate the problem I have with Ruined; we don't think of the history of the concentration camps (or, say, the genocide in Rwanda), as telling us the basic truth about mankind - so why should we feel differently about the Congo?   In a word, the horrors there are embedded in some kind of context that Nottage never makes clear - the men there may not "be" this way, but got this way, somehow; yet neither her women nor her men ever explicitly ponder their political or moral circumstances (again, this ain't Brecht).

But to be honest, I'm not sure Nottage is really all that interested in the Congo per se, or the ethics of war, either - and at any rate, she seems pretty disinterested in the atrocities that have been endured by the men of the region. Indeed, we get the distinct impression that for Nottage, the suffering of women counts more than that of men - and that the savagery reigning in the Congo simply offered her a chance to pound home her thesis that rape is the masculine norm with a more intense palette than usual.

And Nottage certainly knows from intense.  She's the kind of playwright who tops herself in a scene in which a scimitar is about to be thrust into a struggling woman's vagina by having another woman, pouring blood, stumble onto the scene after a botched self-abortion.  (You're glad she stopped there, just short of Bret Easton Ellis, in the vaginal-torture sweepstakes.)  But oddly, Nottage also seems to want to show the audience a good time (Hey, we want to sell some tickets here!, you can almost hear her thinking) - so the mayhem is often interrupted by dances and songs, and she wraps the show with an improbable shot of uplift.  I have to admit, however, the audience seemed to like this curious format; they seemed to appreciate the fact that although the point of the show was that sexual violence was the norm for men, at least that wasn't like a total downer.

If you haven't guessed by now that I found the whole extravaganza rather strange - well, I found the whole extravaganza rather strange.  BUT, if even one person who sees it becomes sensitized to the ongoing trauma in Africa, then Lynn Nottage has done some good.  And you can't argue with the quality of the Huntington's production (mounted in cooperation with the La Jolla Playhouse and Berkeley Rep). Liesl Tommy's direction was taught yet detailed, and Tonye Patano delivered an award-worthy performance as the hearty, hard-bargaining, Mama Nadi.  She was matched, however, by the trio of women playing her demoralized (or mutilated) charges: the sweet-voiced Carla Duren, the heartbroken Pascale Armand, and particularly the live-wire Zainab Jah (who I believe has the makings of Cleopatra in her) were all just about note-perfect.  The men, as noted, had far less to work with, but at least Oberon K.A. Adjepong (at right, with Patano), skillfully managed, as one of the rare sympathetic Y-chromosome bearers on stage, to make his part more believable than perhaps the playwright deserved.

Vengeance is the bored's

The Horvaths come home for the holidays at the Huntington.

Reviewers have generally been vengeful toward Bob Glaudini's Vengeance is the Lord's, at the Huntington through Dec. 12. Even local sweetheart Joyce Kulhawik piled on, although the Globe's resident nicenik, Don Aucoin, was one of the few hold-outs, insisting that Glaudini's script had proved "utterly absorbing."

If only - although the production's failure really is too bad, because the playwright does take on large themes, and actually has something like his own voice (a cross between Mamet and Miller, with a shot of Shepard on the side). Indeed, Glaudini's got ambition to burn - but alas, not the commitment to craft to go with it (he has even admitted in interviews that he largely wings it). This shortfall actually makes you long at times for Annie Baker, whom Glaudini sort of orbits as antithesis, the way Count Chocula did Frankenberry; Baker, who styles herself a millennial Jane Austen, cuts cameos that make her two inches of thematic ivory glint with hints of surprising depth; meanwhile Glaudini attacks huge swaths of moral psychology with a sloppy brush, and then pretty much gives up on his overall design anyway about halfway through.

Oh, well - as if to compensate, the Huntington rolls out one of its wicked-killah sets - a spinning gothic homestead straight outta Dorchestah by Eugene Lee. Trouble is, something about this turntable keeps reminding you of what's wrong with the play - as the set spins its wheels, so does the script. Even though half the cast (mostly the younger half) does its best to keep things rolling forward, rather than in circles.


Things start off strongly enough, at the Thanksgiving dinner of the Horvath family. Mom (Roberta Wallach) and Dad (Larry Pine) may be divorced, but their extended clan still shares a deep, if complicated, bond - a kind of criminal bond, in fact. The Horvaths are tough characters who operate at the fringe of "legitimate" society; they run shady bars where the whiskey's watered down and auto shops where stolen cars have been known to be stripped. Still, they have their own codes of behavior - and we quickly sense Glaudini has his finger on the pulse of something in American mores we rarely like to acknowledge: the happy co-existence in the land of the free of familial loyalty and civic dishonesty.

The Horvaths are bound, however, by an even deeper tie - the decade-old rape and murder of their daughter. Dad is still bent on revenge, his trigger finger itching for the moment the perp might make parole; Mom, meanwhile, who is eaten up with ailments (perhaps psychosomatic ones), has begun to reconsider her internalized fury - and just might be the one whose testimony makes that parole a reality, should she see at his review, as she says, that "something has changed in his eyes."

This is a neatly paradoxical moral dynamic, and though Glaudini's focus tends to wander through his exposition, we can sense a profound dramatic conflict taking shape in his first act. Then the playwright throws in a twist that promises to bring everything to a boil when another bereaved parent (Johnny Lee Davenport) staggers to the Horvaths' front door.

- SPOILER ALERT -

It seems one of the thieves who service the clan has stolen the wrong car - it belonged to a local politician - so the police, usually happily on the take, had to take note of the  situation this time. In the ensuing arrest and mêlée, the youth made another wrong move (grabbing a cell the cops took for a gun) and was accidentally shot dead.

So the Horvaths, who have been stewing for years over the death of a daughter, suddenly find they have been instrumental in the killing of someone else's son. But the exquisite hypocrisy of their position only deeply registers with their sensitive youngest boy (Karl Baker Olson), who seems to have wandered in from "Shirley, Vermont," anyway. What's more, Dad and number one son (Lee Tergesen) quickly make the calculus that this particular grieving father has to meet with an unfortunate accident - or his heartbreaking testimony might deep-six the family's various plots.

But it's here that Glaudini deep-sixes his own play by simply killing off this powerful complication - leaving Olson and Tergesen without a real conflict to explore, and the whole script without a rudder: for if the Horvaths can so calmly calculate and execute murder, then we really can't be on the hook about their possible redemption (they're already damned). Later complications likewise go nowhere - when daughter Roanne (Katie Kreisler) begins dating a cop, we sense a whole new subplot in the offing, but this too never materializes. It's as if Glaudini kept worrying his structure might get too schematic, so he decided not to have one. But without a reliable engine driving the plot, the audience begins to check out; by the time the play reaches its inevitably-ironic coda, we really couldn't care less about the Horvaths - the holidays may change (the script works its way from Thanksgiving to Easter), but they basically don't.

Clearly, the script needs more development - and rather obviously, that process should not have included a full-scale try-out in Boston, with New York actors (Pine and Wallach) who seem, at times, to be slumming because they're out of town (Broadway vet Pine in particular stumbled repeatedly over his lines, and even fumbled important emotional beats). At least the younger New Yorkers held up their end of this sinking ship (under Peter DuBois's appropriately unobtrusive direction) - the sexy Tergesen was believably murderous, and Kreisler nicely underplayed her character's emotional survival strategies. Meanwhile Davenport was intensely gripping (when will somebody cast this guy as Othello?) and local-boy-made-good Olson (an early winner of the Hubbie Award) made the most of his big-stage debut, even though he was saddled with lines like "But what about truth and justice??" Yeah - and what about the second act, Bob? I think Vengeance actually has the potential to be a powerful play, someday - but not until Glaudini takes a hatchet to half his script and is as ruthless about building a dramatic structure as his characters are about their lives of crime.  Vengeance marks the first real stumble of the season for the Huntington; I'm hoping it's the last.

Baker's Plays

I think it occurred to me the second time I found myself listening to the air conditioner run (above) in Annie Baker's Circle Mirror Transformation (produced by the Huntington at the Caldwell Pavilion through November 14):

At what point does mumblecore become inaudible?

Now by that I don't mean to suggest this up-and-coming young playwright has nothing to say; far from it, in fact. She's a very intelligent and thoughtful - although perhaps not all that original - dramatist. My friend Art Hennessey has already admonished me, "Now don't go all Sarah Ruhl on Annie Baker's ass, Tom, she's a real playwright!" And she is a real playwright - whether she warrants a three-play retrospective here in Beantown I'm not yet sure, but I'll keep an open mind.

Certainly she has been given a superb production by the Huntington. Director Melia Bensussen is almost too attuned to Baker's don't-say-anything-aloud-that-would-like-not-be-cool aesthetic, and has capably drawn from Circle's circle of actors a suite of performances that are just about perfect in their nuanced indirection. I'm actually in awe of how much was suggested, vs. how little was stated, in this show; only a mime troupe could have said less. And, as with mime, we're suddenly impressed when we perceive - or rather piece together - the shape of dramatic incident moving behind the play's utterly nondescript surface.

This, of course, is an old trick. It's basically the same ploy as Chekhov's gambit of having someone's life smashed up casually, over breakfast; although to be honest, Baker more often reminded me (wait for it) of William Inge - indeed, Circle Mirror Transformation is essentially Bus Stop redux, set in a rehearsal room instead of a snowbound diner: a group of ordinary characters are thrust together (here, in a community drama class) and over time we learn everything about their emotional and sexual lives. Baker's gimmick is that we discover almost all of this "inadvertently," through theatre games the class repetitively plays.

Again, this is hardly a new idea. But Baker has a very precise ear, so we often enjoy hearing old tropes updated into the precise hesitations of millennial newspeak. When one of Baker's characters says a line like "Oh, yeah - no. Yeah. No," the context has been so carefully set up (and the performances here are so specific) that we know exactly what she means. And when the characters "play" each other, or trade "secrets" in class, we get to read two sets of tea leaves (at least) - both what the characters understand at this point about each other, and what they don't: in short, whether they're ahead of or behind us as their own audience.

Of course it helps in appreciating all this (as it did with The Method Gun) if you're a theatre geek; otherwise you may wonder sometimes what's going on - when the class launched into the "counting" exercise for the umpteenth time, for instance, my partner whispered to me, "What the HELL are these people doing???" Even he, however, began to get into the mumblecore groove, as Baker's poignant hidden drama made itself steadily clearer. Lives are, indeed, smashed up casually in Circle Mirror Transformation, and this is inevitably moving.

Still, it's worth pointing out, I think, that in the end this is elevated melodrama - indeed, Baker's script is at least as melodramatic as Bus Stop, it's just at infinite pains to disguise that fact. Not that there's anything wrong with that.  And if I like Inge, I should therefore like Baker too, right?

Well, maybe.  I was certainly touched by Circle Mirror Transformation, but doubts still gnawed at me about its author. She's certainly better than Sarah Ruhl, but she's also being "launched" in much the same way, and by some of the same people.  And Baker's smart, but she's hardly Chekhov, and sometimes I felt the reverent subtlety of this production was designed to fool me into thinking she is. And I found myself working hard to feel any sense of real discovery about the fictional New-Age Grover's Corners (dubbed "Shirley, VT," although it's no secret it's actually "Amherst, MA") in which her shy young slips of plays occur. I felt shocks of emotion whenever one of the sad arcs Baker's characters trace came clear; but then I quickly realized, "Oh, yeah - I already like, um, knew that, Annie. Yeah; no.  Yeah."

And there's a certain lack of self-awareness in the play's seeming confidence that the drama-school techniques it depends on "make you a better actor;" certainly as the theatre games grow more and more personal, it strikes us that Baker's crunchy class leader should know better than to play with the kind of emotional fire that's only appropriate to committed actors (don't try these tricks at home!).  In a way, the problem with the play is summed up unwittingly by the authorial factotum Baker places within it - the smart but withdrawn "Lauren" constantly, if self-consciously, questions the madness of the class's method ("Are we going to like do any real acting?" she finally asks).   It slowly dawns on us, though, that Lauren kind of serves as an inadvertent metaphor for the play she's in; like it, she draws attention to herself by struggling to disappear into the woodwork.  Yet  she comes around in the end; in a sweet, flash-forward coda (expertly limned by Marie Polizzano, in a performance that steals scene after scene from this polished ensemble) Lauren admits she now sees the light about the awesomeness of the class and how, like, everything changed but in the end everything turned out for the best, you know?  Hmmm. I'm not sure a great playwright would be so sure; in the end, Circle Mirror Transformation seems to validate rather than challenge its audience's quirky world view.  But I'll soon get two more chances to adjust that opinion.

Sex and Kansas City

For a gay man, seeing a play by William Inge is like stepping into the Way-Back Machine and coming out into a world in which gay culture was completely encoded into straight culture: Inge's vision of the empty sexual plains of the Midwest - into which a horny drifter suddenly intrudes (sometimes when we're lucky it's Paul Newman, at left) - is as gay as anything Tennessee Williams ever wrote, but it's also more closeted (like the playwright himself), and so embedded in the myths of the American heartland that it reads like some unconscious prequel to Brokeback Mountain.

Of course it says something about the American heartland that it pulled this playwright and his output so close to its hairy chest; indeed, Inge was so influential that his style sparked a cottage industry of hunk-at-large movies and plays (indeed, where would Newman, or William Holden, or Burt Lancaster, have been without him?).  At the same time, of course, gay culture all but took over the American arts scene - Inge orbited just outside a secret bi-coastal world that included not only Tennessee Williams but also Truman Capote, Thornton Wilder, James Baldwin, Frank O'Hara, John Cheever, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jerome Robbins, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Philip Johnson - who wasn't gay in American high culture in the 50's?

Naked in the closet in John Cheever's "The Swimmer."

But it's no surprise that, as the closet door squeaked open, and the straight world grappled with gay liberation in the 60's and 70's, Inge wound up being discarded, and his work fell into contempt - he read, like Rock Hudson, as a form of dishonest camp. (Tragically, he committed suicide in 1973.)  But neither is it surprising that now, at least in the civilized portions of the world (where gay rights are kind of a done deal, so Inge's sexuality isn't such a big deal), this long-overlooked playwright is beginning to edge back into our good graces.

Because this minor American master is actually quite a bit better than Brokeback Mountain - although what's striking about Inge today is how he captured the identity not of the American gay male but the American woman (with whom I guess you could say he identified), caught between economic needs and sexual ones in a hard-scrabble world poised to punish any kind of pleasure.  Indeed, having just suffered through Mamet's Boston Marriage and Sarah Ruhl's In the Next Room, I was struck at how effortlessly in Bus Stop (now at the Huntington Theatre) Inge conjures living and breathing female characters seemngly at will, while Mamet could only construct Edwardian drag queens, and Ruhl psycho-sexual treatises.  Oddly, in Inge, it's actually the studs who seem a bit objectified and generic; the women feel drawn directly from life.  And while yes, they in some ways serve as vehicles for his own frustrated sex fantasies, they also exist independently of him, in a way that Blanche and Laura and Maggie are hard to separate from Tennessee Williams. Inge's women, like Balzac's and Flaubert's,  have histories, and homes, and even, we get the impression, salaries.  His may be the most realistic gallery of American women to ever hold the American stage.

Or perhaps I'm waxing euphorically about Inge because I've just seen a Nicholas Martin production of him.  Yes, the master is back, and pretty much at the height of his powers in Bus Stop, subtly drawing from the play a surprising emotional complexity, while coaxing superb performances from every member of a large cast, which gets to inhabit a big, beautifully rendered set (by James Noone, below) that's impeccable in its detail.  We can confidently add Bus Stop to the shelf of Martin masterpieces, like She Loves Me, Present Laughter, and Love's Labour's Lost, that the Huntington has acquired over the years (let's hope there's room for a few more).

Of course Bus Stop lands right in what I think of as the artistic sweet spot for Martin, where commercial craft edges into art.  So theatre-goers should not be surprised to find Inge's fifty-year-old hit has an audience-friendly melodramatic spine, with an opening stretch of bald exposition, plenty of sex, and a gallery of American archetypes (or maybe stereotypes): the cowboy, the hooker with a heart of gold, the smart kid sister, and the fatherly sheriff all make their respective appearances here, in some form or other; this was a play made not to win awards but make some money.  Inge's great achievement, however, is his orchestration of these characters' interactions over the night they spend stranded in a Kansas snowstorm; miraculously, from conflicts that seem almost pre-fab, he conjures a precisely-observed comedy of melancholy that hints at what you might call, for lack of a better term, the tragedy of the everyday.

Martin, as always, leavens all this with a light comic touch, and I'd argue his shunning of cheap pathos gives Inge's moroseness a needed shot of tonic.  Still, there are a few pastels in this production's palette that should be a shade darker: Cherie, for instance, the famous "chan-tooz" whose entanglement with Bo (that stereotypical cowboy) comprises the central plot, must be a touch more damaged and vulnerable than she appears here (given a sexual history that began at age 14!).  But in general, the tough love of Martin's direction suggests the pathos of these characters without wallowing in it (after all, they don't wallow in it, either).  He even treads lightly on the sexuality of the only person in the play to be literally "left out in the cold" at the close - Bo's quiet, Brokeback-esque sidekick - even though, post mortem (as it were), Inge's closing gambit is an obvious, heartbreaking nod to his own desperate isolation.

And luckily for us, Martin has assembled the kind of cast that will inevitably end up on the "best ensemble" lists for the year - but it seemed to me that first among equals were Nicole Rodenburg as that hardy, basically happy Cherie, Elma Duckworth as the smart, lovelorn young thing, and Noah Bean as the cowboy who mixes everything up.  All trade on a formidable level of technique - Bean's performance in particular is almost a dance of precise physical quirks - but all infuse their work with genuine feeling, so even if they tiptoe up to the edge of caricature here and there, they never cross that fatal line.

More committed, detailed work came from Huntington newcomers Henry Stram, as a seedily elegant professor with a penchant for young girls (another disguised self-portrait by Inge?),  Adam LeFevre as that gentle giant of a sheriff, and the poignantly taciturn Stephen Lee Anderson as the cowboy loner-to-end-all-loners. I don't think I need to tell you that local star Karen MacDonald is excellent (with perhaps the show's most lived-in accent) as the lonesome proprietress of that snowbound diner, or that the skillful Will Lebow, arguably miscast as her crude bus-driver beau, nevertheless makes the role work on his own terms.

What else is there - oh, there seemed to be a little trouble with the downstage light levels in the first act, but that was remedied by Act II.  The rest was pretty much pure pleasure.  We'll never see a better production in Boston of this American classic - or at least not for another fifty years.