Mostly Mozart at the New Rep

Tim Spears as Mozart reacts to Salieri's machinations.  Photos: Andrew Brilliant.

Peter Shaffer's biggest hit, Amadeus (now at the New Rep through May 19), a highly fictionalized account of the relationship between composers Antonio Salieri and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, is oft described as a battle royale between genius (Mozart) and mediocrity (Salieri).

Which is good enough, I suppose, as far as it goes.  But it leaves out one crucial fact.  

Which is that playwright Peter Shaffer himself is - well, something of a mediocrity.  Smart but not insightful, learned but rarely wise, Shaffer made a career out of seemingly criticizing small-mindedness while all the time indulging it.

Thus Shaffer's play works as a kind of pseudo-intellectual stand-up, but never really gets anywhere as drama - for his Salieri is all bitter one-liners; he's a tragic character sans anagnorisis (that is, epiphany); and his Mozart remains clueless to the end, too. Indeed, once the playwright lays out his mildly clever premise (that the jealously aloof Salieri poisoned brilliant-but-boorish Mozart as some sort of cosmic revenge on God), he can only work more and more tedious variations on his set-up, and never really digs beneath his own assumptions. In a way, it's as if Shaffer has constructed one of those Nabokovian follies, like Pale Fire, in which the lead character is unaware he is creating a devastating self-critique - but unfortunately Shaffer leaves the audience in the dark about it, too.

That gap has not prevented the play from being popular, though - people love its heavy irony, its Man-for-All-Seasons-level theology, and the way it gives them credit for artistic insights they wouldn't really have had on their own. But then the music of Salieri once wowed the crowds as well (although what that says about Shaffer's blockbuster I think the playwright may have never pondered).

Not that Amadeus isn't snarky fun. It is - for a while, at least (alas, the second act treads water). And certainly the New Rep has pulled out all the stops to put this middlebrow magnum opus over; they've mustered a large cast, a bold set, sumptuous costumes - the works.  

But even at its best, the play is only a vehicle - a tandem vehicle, perhaps, festooned with Broadway bells and whistles (and to be fair, many witty references to Mozart's oeuvre) but still a vehicle. As Salieri never develops into more than a stick figure, and Mozart remains a clown, the success of Amadeus boils down to its casting.  Essentially, if you have charismatic actors who are perfect for these roles, and can keep burrowing into them for three hours, a production can coast to the finish line on their star power.

But the New Rep hasn't been quite that lucky.  They're halfway home with Tim Spears' Mozart; he doesn't push the role's scatological jokes, and generally conveys a touchingly innocent, if infantile, vulnerability.  I have seen at least one Mozart who conjured from scraps in the script a growing awareness that God was basically as cold to him as he was to Salieri; but that was an exceptional case.  Spears is the best reason to see this show.

As Salieri, local star Benjamin Evett isn't as compelling, but this is almost an accident of casting - Thomas Derrah, a better fit for the role, reportedly withdrew from the production, and Evett graciously stepped in.  But Evett's easy-going, roguish stage presence is almost the opposite of what you'd want in Salieri (which is intended as a compliment); Evett has always been at his best playing confident, cocky dudes; if anything he should be playing Mozart, too.

Benjamin Evett comes to grips with Mozart's genius.

But he's stuck with the lead (left), and he does make a go of it in the play's stronger first half, which also contains most of Shaffer's best set-pieces, such as the moment Mozart makes mincemeat of a trudging Salieri march  (just btw, Salieri wasn't all that bad - judge for yourself). In short, Evett can do indignation.  He has more trouble with envy - but the secret handshake between envy and piety is essentially the sine qua non of the part. Particularly as Salieri seems so block-headed.

At the very top, the composer is clueless enough to offer God a deal (while God, as I recall, only makes deals on his own terms): in exchange for a pious life of Christian decorum, Salieri expects to be accorded fame (note he doesn't ask for talent). And God does grant him celebrity - He keeps his end of the bargain - but He also gives him Mozart, talented beyond measure, despite flaunting all the proprieties that Salieri staked his soul on. It's a pretty obvious life-lesson, but the scales never fall from Salieri's eyes.  Instead, actually insulted, he embarks on a "war" with Jehovah (guess who wins?).

And so Shaffer's script devolves into a tedious chess game in which Salieri is always one move behind the Almighty. But imagine how interesting Amadeus might have been if the emotionally crippled court composer changed his mind (after all, he's destroying the source of the music he adores, even fetishizes) - yet was unable to stop the cruel wheels he had set in motion?  Or what if Salieri began to appreciate his own evil, began to worry for his own soul (given his faith in God's presence, this seems all but inevitable?). In any number of ways, Amadeus could grip us to the end.

But no such luck. Schaffer tends to rigidly replicate a certain template (basically, a conventional bureaucrat destroys an ecstatic), and he elaborates that trope here, but can't transcend it.  So the cast at the New Rep does its best to pretend that we're still interested in the latest iteration of Salieri's hopeless battle royale (it's a bit like watching a Roadrunner cartoon in powdered wigs that runs for three hours).

Still, certainly there's plenty of talent on the stage, and director Jim Petosa keeps things moving with flair, although again, subtle casting issues sometimes undermine everyone's best efforts. The lovely and talented McCaela Donovan, for instance, looks far too elegant in Frances Nelson McSherry's gowns for us to believe she'd ever go slumming with the likes of Mozart. It's likewise a pleasure to see the gorgeous Esme Allen on stage again, but she's actually far too good for the part she's got.  On the plus side, Paula Langton makes an impression as one of Schaffer's gossips, as do Paul Farwell and Jeffries Thaiss as various over-dressed courtiers. And Russell Garrett puts an amusingly precise spin on the stupidity of Joseph II.

So there is always someone to watch on stage - and you can even admire the stage itself, too.  The costuming, as I've mentioned, is lavish, while Mary Ellen Stebbins' lighting is always imaginative.  And Cristina Todesco's set is quite brilliant: it features a central oculus - God's eye, literally - from which Mozart tumbles like a mote, and from which emanates the music of the spheres (its lid even turns out to be a cathedral's rose window).  I wish Shaffer's play was worth the efforts of all these talented people. But apparently that wasn't God's plan.

A class in Callas-ness

Amelia Broome channels the divine Maria.

Theatre is about dreaming.  Dreaming big.

But there are limits.  And I think everyone involved in Master Class at the New Rep was dreaming just a little too big.  I am certainly a fan of its star, Amelia Broome, and I've generally admired the work of its intelligent director, Antonio Campo-Guzman - but neither seem to have faced the bottom line about Terrence McNally's valentine (or is it a raspberry?) to the great Maria Callas, undeniably the most fascinating diva of the twentieth century.

And that bottom line is: this show is nothing without an actress/panther who can prowl the stage with the same ferocity and neediness as Callas herself.  The role can't be a stretch.  It can't be an exploration.  It only exists as an apotheosis.  

But Amelia Broome, talented as she is, is much more pussycat than panther; indeed, she's known for projecting a gracious, maternal warmth.

Now, for all I know, Callas might have projected gracious warmth as well. But that's not what Terrence McNally has written; his Master Class is hardly a portrait of Callas in all her complexity - it's not even an accurate transcript of Callas as pedagogue (there are videos of her classes available which bear no resemblance to McNally's script).  It is, instead, a naïve sketch of Callas as drag queen, a kind of gay fantasia on operatic themes in which Callas-the-queer-icon always trumps Callas-the-actual-person. This is, shall we say, rather a narrow perspective, and without a galvanizing presence to animate McNally's puppet diva, his conceits grow repetitive, and long stretches of the script read as vulgar or simplistic.


Callas in mid-flight - Norma in 1957.

So this is not Terrence McNally's strongest play (yet it still won a Tony - sigh, only in New York!). Still, his conceit has some resonance, because there's a reason gay men revere Callas the way they do - and it all has to do with the braided power and vulnerability that come with self-transformation.

Maria Callas was born Sophia Cecelia Kalos (in Manhattan, not Greece) to an overbearing mother and weak father, who adored her older, slimmer sister (check, check and check on the gay-cliché crib sheet, btw).  She began her singing career as a somewhat chubby contralto - probably.  Frankly, nobody dares classify Callas's voice anymore, because she steadily pushed her range up to mezzo, then soprano, then coloratura territory seemingly through sheer force of will - rather as certain gay men tweeze and corset their way into out-sized visions of femininity. What's more, Callas drove herself into the most punishing vocal territory, mixing and matching roles that would make any voice teacher faint (in one famous season, she swung from Wagner's Brünnhilde to Bellini's Elvira in a matter of days).

Broome attempts to cast Callas' spell.

In the end, the voice was sui generis - indeed, Callas seemed to have several voices, including a strong baritone (she could sing from F below middle C up almost three octaves). But intriguingly, there was no clear line between any of these modes, and for her, the traditional "break" between head and chest voice didn't really exist (just as binary gender doesn't exist in drag). What's more, her sound was somehow inhumanly pure, and yet at the same time subtly unstable; what gave her performances a special thrill was the sense that the whole vocal edifice might topple off its heels at any moment.

And indeed, Callas ultimately destroyed her instrument; some claim her dramatic weight loss (she starved herself down to a glamorous sylph) was what, shall we say, tipped the scales; others claim the devastating end of her affair with Aristotle Onassis (who moved on from one trophy "wife" to another, Jacqueline Kennedy) was what sent her into a personal and artistic tailspin. But whatever the reason, her soprano began to collapse when she was in her late 40's (which is what makes the idea of her giving a master class rather ironic).

So it's no surprise that McNally couldn't resist sending the divine Callas, musically mute but in eternal high dudgeon, stalking through a heterosexual voice class like some diva-saurus rex. And there's fun to be had for a while, it's true, as she lays waste to the clueless fashion disasters who wander into her lair. But in the end, the vulnerability of her sense of self (and will), and her subsequently cruel "instruction," is all McNally has up his sleeve in dramatic terms - and it's enough for a sharp little one-act, but hardly a full evening.

Still, Broome does her best, and is generally diverting, if never entirely convincing (you can almost feel her suppressing her true self); she does fail, however, to make the swooning psychological breaks McNally has written into the play work.  But these are really the nadir of the script anyway; indeed, as Callas growls about Onassis' "uncircumcised Greek cock," whatever distance still exists between McNally's fantasies and the diva herself is erased, and we wonder whether she's staggering through memories of La Scala or the Ramrod.  But elsewhere in the cast the news is good, and so is the singing. The standout was tenor Darren Anderson's powerful turn, but Lindsay Conrad and Erica Spyres also acquitted themselves well.  (Spyres is a known quantity, of course; the surprise was Conrad's bumptiously amusing stage presence.)  Meanwhile Brendon Shapiro all but embodied the classic self-effacing rehearsal pianist, while the exasperated Michael Caminiti made every walk-on count.  Still, in the end, this was hardly a masterly Master Class - indeed, it made you wonder whether without a diva on hand to match Callas, this script is worth reviving.

Baby's breath

Liz Hayes and Nael Nacer take a breather.  Photo: Andrew Brilliant.

One thing is clear about Lungs.

You have to have amazing lung power to perform it.

Particularly if, like the talented Liz Hayes (above, with the equally gifted Nael Nacer), you're trying to put over the nameless "W," who comprises only half the cast of Duncan Macmillan's two-hander (through March 10 at the New Rep), but who is talking for something like 90% of the script.  "W" talks and talks.  And talks.  She banters, she barters, she barks; she harries and harangues, badgers and berates, accosts and accuses.  She never shuts up.

And this causes problems for Hayes, and Macmillan's play, too.  It's not just that Lungs never gives its leading lady a chance to catch her breath; it's that her character's annoying volubility keeps drawing focus from what appears to be Macmillan's theme.  The playwright seems to be attempting a kind of wry black comedy about the way millennial morals bleed into narcissism - for when "M" innocently suggests to "W" that they think about having a baby (he pops the question in IKEA, no less), she erupts not with happy surprise but instead with every save-the-planet cliché in the Whole Earth Catalogue (remember that?), as well as every insecure accusation she can think of.  Indeed, unlike just about every other professional woman with an eye on the biological clock, "W" seems determined to find every and any excuse not to have a child.

But therein lies the rub.  As "W" rants on about her carbon footprint (so why not stop talking?) and her doubts about her partner - he smokes (!), he needs a better job - we begin to realize that all her criticism isn't going anywhere constructive.  There's no plan for the future in the offing, and the possibility of adoption is never investigated - the conversation is just a cascade of her own issues; indeed, "W" sucks up so much oxygen that we begin to wonder why anyone in his right mind would want a child with her; for a gay man, watching these scenes is like peering into the seventh circle of some special heterosexual hell.

(Spoilers ahead!)

Such a neurotic display also forces us to consider these two constructs as characters, but Macmillan denudes them of all specifics (indeed, the stage is supposed to be completely bare, although the New Rep sneaks in a backdrop of what might be a bronchial tree).  Thus this pair never really looks in the mirror; we suffer through all their symptoms, but we're denied a diagnosis.  So while "M" and "W" are presented as archetypes, they're hard to fathom; but then (surprise!) the playwright yanks the rug out from under us with a plot twist that not only renders his conflicted couple poignantly ridiculous, but also guarantees them a fund of audience sympathy.

But wait!  There's yet another twist - and a corresponding shift in tone - that pulls M&W back onto the road to parenthood, which this time they accept with no questions asked.  And yet there's more.  Suddenly Macmillan accelerates into a fast-forward play-by-play that lands one of his characters in a nursing home, and the other in the grave.  Ta-da!  The end.

So where are we now?  It's hard to say.  I'd argue that Macmillan has meant for the breezy irony of his final scenes to blow through the entire play - he's calling bullshit on an entire latte-sucking generation.  But director Bridget Kathleen O'Leary's forte is perceptive empathy - so there's a built-in conflict, and a kind of funny hinge, in her production; halfway through, she seems to just give up and let the characters she has been trying to build up ever-so-carefully suddenly slip on Macmillan's biological banana peel and go splat.  

Although frankly, the performers looked a little relieved.  And for the record, Liz Hayes does hang onto something like our sympathy through everything; this actress is such an open and likable presence that she's often cast to take the edge off obnoxious roles, and that helps her here; plus she has done her usual careful homework on the part, and beat by beat she's impeccable.  Hayes may actually be slightly upstaged by Nacer, though, who seems to always be at his best when he's just silently emoting (The Aliens, Our Town); here he manages to be adorable even when he's haltingly confessing to what amounts to adultery.  Indeed, the real (if unintentional) question raised by this production may be, Who wouldn't want to have this guy's baby?

Side bi Side by Sondheim

Phil Tayler and Erica Spyres in Marry Me a Little.  I think they're both heterosexual here.

You know what's great about Boston theatre right now?  The talent pool has gotten so deep that even when shows don't really work, they somehow kind of work anyway.

Take Stephen Sondheim's Marry Me a Little (at the New Rep through January 27). Director Ilyse Robbins has decided to experiment with this intimate little revue, which was conjured after the triumph of Sweeney Todd to showcase the "trunk songs" cut from previous Sondheim efforts.

Now back in 1980, the original creative team (Craig Lucas and Norman René) teased from the melancholy of this material a winsome tale of two singles singing to themselves of love when the only thing keeping them apart was the common wall of their respective apartments.  (The kicker was that in the end, they didn't even meet!)

Revivals have since toyed with that concept - one recent version ditched the original's hetero beard completely and featured two gay men.  But Robbins has instead doubled the initial couple to a quartet, and turned some (but not all) of these numbers into same-sex torch songs.  (Which, let's be honest, they probably were when old Stevie first hummed them to himself!)  So now I guess the revue could be called "Gay-Marry Me a Little."

Ba-doom-boom!  All right, settle down, I know I shouldn't snicker.  But the thing is - well, a funny thing happened on the way to the millennium.  Being gay got a little boring to a lot of people.  Even some gay people.  Maybe even to a few fundamentalists!

So somehow Robbins' innovative new take . . . well, it seems designed for middle-aged straights who are, you know, all "down with the gays."  Not that there's anything wrong with that!  And it is a sweet gesture.  But us actual gays, I think, are gonna be wondering, "So - are they all like in a bisexual bathhouse, or what?"  Because one minute the guys are singing to girls, and the next they're singing to other guys, and then they're back singing to the girls again (who are sometimes singing to each other). Are they different characters from song to song?, we wonder vaguely - or are they just jumping the fence over and over?  (I mean I had a boyfriend like that back in college, and things did not work out!)

Still, props to Robbins and the New Rep for you know, being down with us queers - and it doesn't really matter if the concept is a little confusing; the performers make it work song by song. Which brings me back to my first point - once again I've found myself watching a cast that easily negotiated issues and funny twists that would have sent Boston's best pros spinning only a decade ago. The quartet here - Aimee Doherty, Phil Tayler, Erica Spyres and newcomer Brad Daniel Peloquin - all have delightful voices and acting chops to spare.  Peloquin, often perched on the top level of a sprawling set, sometimes had projection issues (the actors were wearing mikes, but the amplification, if it was there at all, was blessedly subtle) - but in general the singing was wonderful, and the vignettes accompanying the songs ran the gamut from haunting to hilarious.

Boston's most fabulous leading lady? Photo(s) by Andrew Brilliant.

Doherty (at left) was in particularly fine form throughout; this lovely lady has matured into our most confidently fabulous musical comedy star. She has it all - a glorious belt, sparkling top notes, and a delicious comic swagger - plus a special kind of girlfriend-sympathy with director Robbins' witty but broad gags.  Thus her take on "Saturday Night" (from the early Sondheim opus of the same name) was a poignant and priceless delight.

But if Doherty was all bright, polished brass, then Spyres was pure gold, once more delivering a kind of glowing sweetness in her vocals (when she wasn't accompanying the rest of the cast on violin!). She perhaps shone brightest in the heart-breaking "Rainbows," a duet she shared with musical-comedy soulmate Phil Tayler, who now has worked opposite her in three shows in a row, and who is also an astonishingly sincere and versatile performer.  This is (if anyone's counting) the fourth riveting performance from Tayler within a year; here he almost whispers a few songs, a move that would be daring if he didn't have the kind of presence that can focus the attention of an entire house.  As I mentioned, Peloquin seemed the least technically assured of the quartet - but if anything he was actually closest to the Sondheim "type," and when he found his vocal power, his delicate, flexible tenor was beautifully pure.  All four found accomplished support in the double-piano accompaniment of David McGory and Todd C. Gordon, who seemed to be playing away in their own apartments (in a clever stroke, their neighbors would occasionally bang on the walls when things got too loud).

The songs themselves, of course, will fascinate the composer's fans, but also appeal to those less familiar with the arc of his achievement. Tunes like "Happily Ever After" tease the Sondheim specialist with their echoes of hits like "Being Alive;" meanwhile curiosities like "Pour le Sport" remind us of just how quirky his lyrics could become.  But numbers laced with double entendres, like "Can That Boy F-oxtrot!" are a kind of universal musical-theatre language, and I think Sondheim's torch songs smolder for everybody.  In the end, that's Robbins' point: heartbreak feels the same whoever is the cause.

Still hanging on the telephone

Photo: Robert Lorino

The New Rep has a tradition of turning over their downstairs space to Boston's best performers, in pieces that sometimes amount to little more than vehicles - like the recent Chesapeake - but which still offer our local actors (or more often actresses) to show the community just what they can do.

Fully Committed (through Dec. 30) is perhaps the first time, however, that the New Rep has showcased a performance that originated elsewhere.  As I recall, it's more than two years since the versatile Gabriel Kuttner (at left) first performed the role of "Sam," the hapless actor manning the phones in Becky Mode's acid sketch of the reservation list at a chic Manhattan eatery (the now-forgotten Bouley, where Mode worked in the 90's). Kuttner won an IRNE for that performance - which included not only his take on Sam, but more than 30 different callers, with more than 30 different accents; so his turn at the New Rep counts as something of a victory lap.

And it's still an amazing round-the-world tour, with the voices popping in from Wisconsin all the way to Tokyo.  And Kuttner not only renders all these accents with amazing accuracy; he captures the speakers' tone and presence as well - perhaps even their psyches.  It's an astonishingly nimble tour-de-force, in which Kuttner dazzles not only with his acting chops and timing, but astonishes with a voice that may be the most flexible and resonant in Boston.

I have only one complaint with Kuttner (and it's the one I had regarding his previous version, too) -  Sam's own arc remains a bit flat, even though before he learns to develop his "sense of entitlement," and work those phones for all they're worth, he sinks to the bottom of the restaurant's own pecking order, and ends up cleaning the toilet. Kuttner has wisely made Sam a low-key, even-keeled kind of guy (to throw into higher relief the bullies trying to claw their way into Bouley), but this doesn't mean he isn't on a personal roller coaster through much of Fully Committed, and as yet, under the direction of Bridget Kathleen O'Leary, Kuttner isn't giving us either Sam's highest highs or lowest lows.

But this is easy to forget whenever Kuttner launches into another vocal cameo, whether it be the cockney accent of a chef who sounds like Michael Caine at the bottom of a sewer, or the anxious treble of Naomi Campbell's personal assistant, or the gentle twang of a brother who unconsciously echoes his father (whom we've also heard).  In the end, I think what makes Fully Committed so dramatically full is Kuttner's complete commitment to that kind of telling detail.

Speak, Memories

Adrianne Krstansky and Michael John Ciszewski revel in the holiday memories.  Photo: Andrew Brilliant.

The traditional "Christmas show" has loosened its grip (somewhat) on the Boston theatre scene of late; these days A Christmas Carol can find itself rubbing shoulders against the astringent likes of Ch'inglish.  And the "Christmas show" itself has begun to, well, diversify into a holiday platter of alternative offerings.  Last year, for instance, the New Rep rolled out a sturdy version of Jean Shepherd's A Christmas Story, and this year they have mounted a double bill of two classic tales by Truman Capote, "The Thanksgiving Visitor" and "A Christmas Memory," under the joint rubric of Holiday Memories.

Together they make for a perfectly fine Christmas show, although the New Rep only taps into a modicum of the poignant whimsy that originally made these classics - well, classics.  Capote's memoirs revolve around his relationship, as an essentially abandoned child, with his elderly, but child-like, maiden aunt (or cousin?), "Miss Sook."  The stories are like dispatches from a lost, private world of shared gentleness (and shared weakness); little happens in them (Sook and Truman, or "Buddy," gather ingredients for fruitcakes, or invite guests over for Thanksgiving dinner), but much is made clear about their little corner of the world (Monroeville, Alabama, in the 30's - a milieu which also cradled Harper Lee, who grew up to write To Kill a Mockingbird, in which Capote figures as a character).

What distinguishes both stories, of course, is Capote's inimitable voice, and the resonant perfection with which his small-scaled prose matches his small-scaled (but gimlet-eyed) perspective.  Here, for instance, is one familiar stretch from his description of Miss Sook:

I am seven; she is sixty-something, We are cousins, very distant ones, and we have lived together—well, as long as I can remember. Other people inhabit the house, relatives; and though they have power over us, and frequently make us cry, we are not, on the whole, too much aware of them. We are each other's best friend. She calls me Buddy, in memory of a boy who was formerly her best friend. The other Buddy died in the 1880's, when she was still a child. She is still a child.

It seems so sweet, simple and direct, this poetic reverie - but it's also pregnant with a sophisticated self-awareness that oscillates between the child-like and the adult.  (Like Miss Sook, Truman Capote was a bit of both).  Detail after detail falls into place like gems in a diamond setting (Miss Sook's eyes, for instance, are "sherry-colored and timid"); the prose itself gives the slight story a quiet, unforgettable drama.

So perhaps unsurprisingly, whenever that original prose is quoted in Russell Vandenbroucke's adaptation, Holiday Memories suddenly resonates.  Elsewhere, however, director Michael Hammond sometimes bulldozes the delicate atmosphere with a rambunctiousness that doesn't really feel true to Capote's tone.  As you can see above, his Truman and Miss Sook are prone to triumphant "YESS!" gestures, as well as other presentational quirks.  Both actors - New Rep mainstay Adrianne Krstansky, and newcomer Michael John Ciszewski - are appealing talents, however, so they generally make the material work on Hammond's broad terms, if not Capote's subtle ones.  They're aided by a charming memory-attic of a set by Jon Savage, and a series of funny turns by supporting players Jesse Hinson and Elizabeth Anne Rimar, who pitch the antics of the outside world at about the right level of farce (against which Truman and Miss Sook's world should cut a delicate contrast).

Still, the production does tap into the nostalgia - and sometimes the moral vision - that suffuse both stories.  Perhaps its finest moment occurs at the climax of Capote's Thanksgiving memory (rather than his better-known Christmas vignette).  Here the author's gentle but devastating statement regarding "deliberate cruelty" had all the force one could wish for - which, in the end, made Holiday Memories memorable.

Mixed Blessing

The talented Georgia Lyman finds her way through Lee Blessing's shaggy dog story.

Years ago, at the height of the cultural war that inspired Lee Blessing's Chesapeake (at the New Rep through Dec. 16), I was bemoaning said battle over lunch with a friend of mine - a nice, smart, educated lady who happened to be Jewish.

She was (as many were at the time) railing against the Christian Right, who had pulled the plug on the "NEA Four" (i.e., performance artists Karen Finley, Tim Miller, John Fleck and Holly Hughes), and who were attempting to pull the plug on the agency as a whole, too.

She was most outraged, however, by the controversy surrounding Andres Serrano's photograph Piss Christ (below right), which had been partly funded by the NEA, and which depicted a plastic crucifix submerged in the artist's urine.

To her, the outcry against Serrano amounted to censorship (although an ex post facto kind of "censorship," surely). Still, I wondered if she might appreciate the special political problems presented by federal funding of art that was all but designed to offend the religious sensibilities of many (if not most) voters.

Andres Serrano's Piss Christ

"So how would you feel, " I innocently ventured, in the spirit of playing devil's advocate, "about an Andres Serrano photograph of a Star of David submerged in a jar of urine?"

I remember she actually dropped her fork.  A deadly silence descended; she stared at me in horror, as if I'd grown a second head.

"I can't believe you said that," she whispered.  "A Star of David - in a jar of urine??"  She let the terrible gravity of such an act sink in for another moment.  "No real artist would ever do that!" she declared.  "Because that would be offensive!"

You see the problem.  The folks who generally bang the drum the loudest for artists like Serrano and Finley are often the blindest regarding their own biases.  Clearly it would have been extremely easy for the NEA to fund "art" that would have offended my enlightened friend; indeed, if Serrano had simply pissed on a Jewish symbol instead of a Christian one, she'd have been on the barricades, screaming for NEA blood.

And it didn't take long before outside observers (at the late, lamented Spy magazine and elsewhere) were taking note of political groupthink at the NEA, and had begun decrying a log-rolling conspiracy among the organization's judges that promoted politically controversial art with obvious conceptual and formal weaknesses - as long, that is, as it mapped to the accepted ideologies of the academy, the art world, and the audience that David Brooks (in one of his few moments of insight) had memorably dubbed "the bohemian bourgeoisie."

Karen Finley on the Hershey highway in the 80's.

A similar blindness runs through Chesapeake - even though, to be fair, playwright Blessing makes bemused, affectionate fun of the naive "offenses" of the NEA Four (while skirting their edgier, sometimes anal, antics). Blessing clearly has lesbian performer Holly Hughes, and the notorious provocateur Karen Finley (at left) most in mind in his tale of "Kerr" (Georgia Lyman), a performance artist who babbles that art is a form of "domination," and whose greatest claim to fame is a little number in which she recites the "Song of Solomon" as she is disrobed by members of her audience.

No, Kerr, doesn't shove "yams up her ass," as Finley famously did, so she seems sexually anodyne  - still, she's deep into the kind of lefty sloganeering that powered the nude harangues of the 80's, but which has slowly dwindled into the mild-mannered "background" of ironic burlesques like The Slutcracker and The Donkey Show.  (Designer Adrienne Carlile has clothed Lyman in several removable layers, so we wonder whether we might be in for a reprise of Kerr's seven-veils schtick; alas, to the disappointment of the heterosexual male reviewers on hand, this proved just a tease.)

But if we don't get any skin in Chesapeake, we're also stuck with a play that's skin-deep.  Indeed, what Blessing misses entirely is the psychological damage evident in many of "NEA Four" and their ilk.  Karen Finley and Holly Hughes may not have made real art, but they channeled real pain, and during the 80's, a benighted age of sexual plague and official denial, their self-degradations substituted (perhaps in an autistic rather than artistic way) for the political dialogue the commercial theatre was dodging.  Their work may not have been art, but at least it was authentic, and it's hard to think of any performers today who take the kind of personal risks that they did.

Indeed, playwright Blessing is hardly interested in risk at all; Chesapeake substitutes knowing giggles for gasps (intriguingly, although it is styled as a wry tribute to the NEA Four, it probably represents the final triumph of self-awareness over their brand of "edge").  Needless to say, Kerr runs afoul of a tub-thumping Bible Belter, Senator "Therm Pooley" (who sounds like Strom Thurmond crossed with a heat exchanger), and once her funding has been cut, she decides to enact her revenge as a performance: she'll kidnap the senator's beloved Chesapeake Bay retriever - who operates as a living symbol of his white-bread wholesomeness - and record the whole process, thereby wresting back from him the political dialogue.

Frankly, this gambit feels at best oblique, and the first half of Chesapeake is only mildly amusing  - everything's a little too canned and familiar to be gripping, even if the talented Lyman's smokily casual delivery makes a good impression from the start.   Still, Lyman, like the playwright, and even director Doug Lockwood, seems to have forgotten the intensity of the NEA Four (well, Lyman is too young to remember it).  Hence at intermission, my partner could only smile bemusedly and remark, "Well, I had a nice nap . . ."

Luckily, the play gets friskier in its second half, after the dog-napping goes wrong, and in a Freaky-Friday style twist, "Kerr" finds herself transformed into a literal "cur" - she's re-incarnated as Senator Pooley's next canine companion. This means that if anything, the play gets even cuter (and it joins that strange little theatrical club featuring grown women imitating dogs). But her new identity gives Lyman something to throw herself into, and her drily witty canine impressions (and obsessions) are consistently hilarious; you wind up liking the show a little more. Of course by the finish, Kerr has learned something, and Blessing has doggedly (sorry) gotten even more sentimental.  And we have been reminded that "failed art is better than no art at all."  Hmmmm.  Given that Blessing has himself received funding from the NEA, if you called that a moment of unconscious self-critique, I don't think I'd argue.

David Mamet, the art of the con, and the M.V. (Part 2)

Ken Cheeseman and Cliff Odle wonder if they're up to the eightieth page yet at the New Rep.

I can tell you precisely the moment I gave up on David Mamet's Race; it's the moment when one character describes a hot night in Bermuda as like being "inside a big black c--nt."

You could almost hear Mamet giggling over that one; he got to say the c-word!  (Jeez, Mom would kill him if she knew!)

But all I could think was, "Why not go for it, Dave?  Why not n--gg--r c--nt, too?  Hmmm?"

After a moment, however, I realized - no, Mr. Mamet had chosen precisely the slur he wanted; he wasn't really interested in a double whammy.  For Race, despite its moniker, isn't really about racism - not his own, not his audience's, not anybody's. It's about sexism.  Or rather - it is sexism, kind of "personified," if you will.  It is the thing itself.

Oh, I know, everyone huffs and puffs throughout the play about racial grievances; much of the script - like so many these days! - is basically a lecture delivered by the playwright through transparent mouthpieces: two law partners, one white and one black, who've seen it all and want to tell the walls (or at least the fourth wall) all about it.  But what do these two really have to say?  Not much; indeed, near the top of the script, Mamet admits "a white man has nothing to tell a black man about race" (a paraphrase).  And he seems to mean it.  Okay - so why are you still talking, white man?


Well, so he can grind his axe yet again about political correctness (as opposed to racism) to his putative audience onstage: a wealthy, older, white client who has been accused of raping a black woman.  Needless to say, he's willing to listen to Mamet's tired "liberalism is a con" rant, but he's also pretty creepy in general - still, he might be innocent.  By that I hardly mean the sex in question was "consensual" in the usual meaning of the term: money, or favors, or something was changing hands, in one way or another, we imagine - and as the assault occurred in a hotel room, with the victim clothed in a red-sequined dress - well, let's just say the lawyers have quite a bit to work with when it comes to defense strategy.

They protest otherwise, of course.  To them, racial sensitivities have made this case an open-and-shut loser.  And many would agree that political correctness has made battling this kind of accusation an uphill battle.  The tables have turned to some degree, in some arenas, on those in the ruling class.   The fix used to be in one way, now it's in another.

Still, this case hardly seems hopeless; and many a lawyer would be drawn to its challenges simply because they touch on so many political fault lines, and revolve around such a high-profile client.  Win or lose, this is the kind of case from which a skillful lawyer can emerge as a freshly-minted media player.  After all, Dominique Strauss-Kahn beat the charges against him - for it turned out he may have been set up (his horrifying behaviors quickly tripped him up again, of course).  And I didn't see any lawyers running from that case.  So the reluctance of Mamet's lawyers to take the job hardly seems realistic, much less up-to-the-minute.

But then Race isn't set in reality, it's set in Mametland, where the island of Bermuda is "in the Caribbean" (?), and postcards zip through the mails with the c-word printed on them (back in the 80's, no less!). What's more, this artificial construct (I won't  call it a play) is about as concerned with what is usually called "plot" as it is with reality: we never even meet the alleged victim, the scene of the crime is barely described, and there's nothing like an investigation of the facts of the case.  After all, that would mean Mamet would have to conjure more characters, develop a structure - so much work!  Who has that kind of time?

Luckily, once again the "Magic Vagina" (that's "M.V." from now on) comes to Mamet's rescue!   We've met the Mamet M.V. before - in Speed-the-Plow, Oleanna and elsewhere - and as I detailed in the previous post of this series, she not only serves as a projection of the playwright's paranoia, but also saves him most of the time and effort of actually writing a play.  She makes no sense at all as a "character" - with a consistent back-story, interior life, and arc - but as a plot device, she can't be beat.  If the play needs one more twist, the M.V. is happy to connive for no apparent reason; when it requires a climactic confrontation, she will return conveniently to the scene of the crime; when the dénouement demands a confession, she suddenly supplies it!  Whew!  The M.V. is basically the Ronco Pocket Plot-O-Matic for lazy playwrights!

The only problem with this sphinx-like crazy lady is that she's just not convincing as she drives the action with her covert actions (while the putative "plot" is hashed and re-hashed on stage).  Take the M.V. of Race, for instance, who is named Susan (not that it matters; she could be named "X") - a young black woman of few words from an Ivy League law school, who clearly has a chip on her shoulder about, you know, race and stuff, but clearly is suppressing it for the sake of her career.   From this we expect her to be smart, subtle, and always under control.

And yet, over the course of the play she basically commits professional suicide by undermining and destroying her client's case in a manner that begins with the improbable (she tricks her partners into taking his case) and quickly lifts off into the purest fantasy (she tampers with evidence, and divulges the firm's strategy to the D.A.).  Now trust me, I know the P.C. crowd - and I agree Mamet's right to call them out for ignoring facts and bulldozing the discourse - BUT - and this is key - they always do it to their own advantage.  They are careerists, not martyrs.

Ken Cheeseman tries to talk sense to Mamet's puppet (Miranda Craigwell).  Photos by Andrew Brilliant.

Susan, however, commits professional suicide without a second thought.  Yes, I know, Mamet floats a flimsy legal shield for her behavior - the firm investigated her background when she applied, which they didn't do to white applicants; so Susan could threaten a lawsuit if they retaliate for her actions.  But this is hardly enough to cover her you-know-what from all the professional fall-out of her betrayals.  Her partners may not fire or sue her, but lawyers do talk - and then there's the D.A.'s office . . . by the curtain, basically she's toast as a practicing attorney.

Of course Susan makes no sense internally anyhow, so it's pointless to wonder at her motives; but as a puppet, she has her function: she is designed as the Outsider, the Other, who attacks, and is then rejected by, Mamet's masculine community (so ironically enough, even as Mamet imagines he is skewering P.C. orthodoxy, he is actually unconsciously validating it, as he dramatizes women almost as a Nazi might dramatize a Jew).  Thus in Race, the testosterone brotherhood is able to resolve its differences and atone for its sins - partners Jack and Henry, after all, are now joined at the hip, and utterly loyal; and together, in a pivotal scene, they make Charles, their client, realize that he has, indeed, behaved in a patronizingly racist way to another man - to a brother.

But as for the sisters - well, Susan circles this heart-to-heart like a vulture, but cannot enter it; indeed, we realize later she has actually already engineered Charles's downfall - or at least his self-immolation.  For once the scales have fallen from his eyes, he trots right over to the D.A. and confesses, in a sudden spasm of expiation.

We never learn, though, whether he actually committed the crime he has "confessed" to - just as we never learn what could be driving Susan to ruin her own career.  Just as we never learn what made the other woman in question - the victim - accuse Charles in the first place.  We never really learn anything, in fact, except that David Mamet has now written eighty pages, and so the curtain must fall.

I will say, however, that even given the limits of this script (its appeal is confined to some pretty good race-based stand-up early on), the New Rep cast, under the direction of Robert Walsh, didn't get as far as they might have (with one big exception).  The Broadway cast was famously restricted by Mamet's stated intent to flatten their performances (I'm not kidding), but lead James Spader at least managed to sneak some intriguing subtexts into his big scenes.  The New Rep version, by comparison, is far more expressive and flamboyant, but arguably more superficial (although the sleek stage design, by Janie E. Howland, was quite a bit better than Santo Loquasto's boring set on Broadway).  As lead lawyer Jack, Ken Cheeseman nailed all his laughs like a pro - and that's nothing to sneeze at - but never suggested any real sexual (or racial) tensions with Susan; meanwhile, as best bud Henry, Cliff Odle was likewise funny, but didn't manage to suggest any sense of scarred history with his partner.  Meanwhile poor Miranda Craigwell did what she could with Susan, but in the end came off as a poised and intelligent actress saddled with a terrible part.

The surprise here was Patrick Shea as Charles, that client from hell.  Mr. Shea has been acting in Boston since forever in Shear Madness, which has generally kept him off our other stages.  And more's the pity; he brings a complexity - even a twisted sympathy - to Charles that isn't even in the script.  For evidence that a great actor can transform a mediocre role, you need look no further than this production.  With all due respect to Madness, let's hope this isn't the last time we see Mr. Shea outside of a hair salon!

David Mamet, the art of the con, and the magic vagina, Part 1

So when do we speed-the-play?  The cast of Race at the New Rep.

It's hard to remember, as you watch Race (at the New Rep through November 4), that David Mamet was once a great playwright.  Admittedly, he was always a reactionary - a masculine reactionary, need I point out; even back in the 70's, the days of The Duck Variations and Sexual Perversity in Chicago, Mamet's men were flawed, but basically lovable, while his women were opaque and treacherous.  At the time, however, feminism had flummoxed many American boys - and when Mamet avoided female characters entirely, in plays like American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross, his talent burned bright indeed - so the sexist streak at the heart of this tough guy seemed easy to forget (or forgive).

It's harder to forgive it now, though - particularly as the playwright peaked in achievement almost thirty years ago, and the man himself has apparently devolved into a conservative crank (you only have to flip through his screed The Secret Knowledge to realize he really should be wearing a tinfoil hat).  Indeed, what may be tragic about David Mamet (and he is much given to musing on tragedy) is that he has by now thoroughly undermined his own early achievement; it's as if he has been determined to deconstruct his own success, and reveal the shriveled sensibility lurking within it.

To be honest, this behavior suggests the classic pathology of the idée fixe, the mental preoccupation which over time slowly dominates a psyche.  In fact it's my conviction that the playwright suffers from a double (if not triple) dose of this mania.  For Mamet has also always been obsessed with the art of the con; all his major (and most of his minor) plays have revolved around deceptions of one stripe or other.  But as long as these swindles were perpetrated by men on other men - as in Buffalo and Glengarry - Mamet was able to generate true drama from his obsession, as sexism, his second idée fixe, didn't prevent him from developing complex portraits of his villains.

When his two obsessions converged, however - probably around the time of Speed-the-Plow and Oleanna - Mamet's standing as a serious artist was suddenly compromised.  For ever since, his plots have repeatedly been dumbed down to turn on crude, predictable treachery, and his women (with the exception of the betrayed mother in The Cryptogram, which could serve as a poignant demonstration of his inability to forge a true vision from his psychological history) have long since hardened into mechanical villains.  Like the famous "magical negroes" whose special powers hurry along sentimental white narratives, Mamet's women have become "magic vaginas," figures - I won't call them characters - who are denuded of actual personality, and who implausibly speed-the-play by attempting to crucify the leading man whenever the playwright wants to wrap things up in 90 minutes (or less).

Meanwhile Mamet's men have morphed into totems of victimology - tragic phalli who are buddies at heart, and who would all love each other if they could only forget their damned competitive instincts! Indeed, one of the very weirdest aspects of Mamet, particularly in his later stages, is his apparent yearning to be homosexual. (If only he knew!)

Thus the once-great playwright has become a kind of theatrical in-joke - which, to be fair, he seems to realize himself, at some level; why else would he now coat his work with a sheen of sitcom-level one-liners? But then he's a smart businessman, and no doubt knows that his flattering of conservative guilt, along with the tension between the form of sitcom-fodder and the "outrageous" content he's allowed to fill it with on stage, are what keep him in commercial clover.

David Mamet- busy writing his own tragedy.

But on to Race - which I've had the misfortune to see twice (I also caught the Broadway run a year or two ago). And what can I say - it's not the kind of play that rewards repeated viewings.  The funny lines fly thick and fast the first time, I admit; but the second time around, you realize that not just two, but three polluted rivers in Mamet's mentality have converged in this poisonous little potboiler.

For even as his dramaturgy congealed into formula, Mamet's politics slowly became infected with his paranoid monomania, too.  The "art of the con" became the prism through which he began to see society at large, and "liberalism" in particular - which I guess he views as the equivalent of the non-existent destination called "Glengarry Glen Ross" in the play of the same name (as I recall, "Oleanna" was a  mythical locale, too). Thus in an embarrassing series of op-eds, articles, and books, Mamet has recently crowed that he is no longer a "brain-dead liberal," and has relentlessly excoriated those on the left - particularly those comfortably ensconced in the academy, Hollywood and the chattering classes - for hypocrisy, duplicity, and a host of other sins; in the world according to Mamet, they're all swindlers and crooks.

Now I could never argue that many liberals aren't hypocrites - I've said precisely the same thing, so I'd be a huge hypocrite myself if I did!  But in these screeds Mamet usually rambles far beyond that highly defensible position to a bizarre vision of a white, Christian nation devoted to the occupation of the West Bank (??),  and of course sorry for its past sins, but beset and besieged by liberal "cons" like affirmative action, sexual harassment suits, and sympathy for the Palestinians.  Mamet never actually engages with the questions of historical justice behind liberal positions (for that would completely complicate their status as "cons"!).  He simply asserts, essentially, that any attempt to rectify the wrongs of history (except in the case of Israel, that's different!) only creates some new kind of swindle because - well, just because, okay?

Well, at least the Palestinians don't appear in Race (although I'm sure Mamet tried to work them in). But we do get just about all his other hobbyhorses, piled atop each other - the sublimated homosexual buddies, the magic vagina (ahem, "m.v." from now on), the twin evils of feminism and affirmative action - this isn't a political play, it's a psychological case study penned by the patient himself from within his rubber room.

Beyond these appalling psychological dimensions, however, lies the script's appalling lack of craft. But we'll consider that more fully in the second part of this series.

Little Shop, re-planted and in bloom

Bill Mootos has a gas as Blake Pfeil looks on.  Photos: Andrew Brilliant.

When it comes to Little Shop of Horrors, the doo-wop musical based on the cult Roger Corman film of the same name, I've always felt something like what the show's characters evince toward "Audrey II," the blood-thirsty plant at the center of the show's action: I'm not really sure how or why it ever came to exist.

But then in a way, the sheer improbability of its existence is its raison d'être; in fact librettist Howard Ashman and composer Alan Menken sometimes opined that they were purposefully looking for the strangest source material available when they decided to adapt it.  And even for the early days of quirk, they hit solid cult gold with Little Shop, which tells the strange tale of sad-sack florist assistant Seymour, his winsome lady love, Audrey, and her sadistic dentist boyfriend, along with Seymour's man-eating alien plant, Audrey II - who eventually grows to the size of a house and devours the entire cast.

Yes, you read that right, that's the plot - and no, it does not make much sense (some of the characters' actions, in fact, are totally inexplicable).  But then the script was thrown together on the fly by Roger Corman and his auteurs (and shot in two and a half days) purely to take advantage of some pre-existing sets and an opportunity to squeeze out one more movie before new union rules on residuals went into effect.



Yet people have found Little Shop of Horros amusing from the start (original movie trailer above), and it has proved enduring - indeed, believe it or not, it's thirty years old.  (Next time you doubt my thesis that the pace of pop culture has slowed to a crawl, remember that - and the source movie is fifty years old.) So it certainly has historical significance; it probably marks the moment when Manhattan's gay, downtown sensibility (which was wreaking havoc in the Village with far more ferocious satires, like Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, at the time of Little Shop's debut) first made a splash - in watered-down form - in the mainstream theatre.  Indeed, its success vaulted Ashman and Menken into the arms of Disney, which they quickly gay-ified, too, prior to Ashman's tragic death from AIDS ( to which Audrey II, I've always thought, bears more than a passing symbolic resemblance).

Seymour and his two Audreys.

But back to the New Rep, where Little Shop seems like more of a nostalgia trip than ever, as director Russell Garrett is apparently intent on approximating what you might call the standard version of the show.  True, this time around two of the trio of girls (named Chiffon, Crystal, and Ronette) who sing a running commentary on the action are white - that's new, I suppose, but I don't think it's supposed to mean anything (hey, the Ronettes were from Spanish Harlem, anyway).  Likewise Audrey II, who is traditionally viewed as "black" - kinda like Othello, I guess - is here voiced by the talented Timothy John Smith, a white guy.  But again, I don't think that's supposed to "mean" anything, either.  Unless it's an unconscious admission that the once hip, outsider kitsch of Little Shop is by now kinda "white," too.

But let's leave that crazy talk to Company One, shall we?  Most everybody in the New Rep's Little Shop is quite talented and deserves to be onstage, and that's what counts.  I was perhaps most taken with Susan Molloy's sweetly fetching Audrey I (although she did muff a few lines on opening night), but Blake Pfeil made a nicely nerdy swain out of Seymour, and these two were surrounded by smart, strong character work from Paul Farwell and particularly Bill Mootos, who etched a witty gallery of skid-row rogues (his sadistic dentist, in the production's one clever new wrinkle, seemed to die from helium, not nitrous oxide).  Meanwhile Timothy John Smith made a hearty, hungry Audrey II (her skillful puppeteer was Timothy P. Hoover), and Lovely Hoffman, Jennifer Fogarty and Ceit McCaleb Zweil sang like nightingales and cracked mighty wise as those diversified Chiffons/Crystals/Ronettes.

So in the end, this is basically Little Shop as you remember it; the production was a little shaggy on opening night (the sound balance was off in the first half, a few lighting cues were too fast, and at times we could see the wheels on Audrey II), but I have a feeling all that has been ironed out by now.  If you're looking for a trip down memory lane, to one of first Broadway avatars of "hip," this is your show.

Long Day's Journey proves a long night, too

Will Lyman and Karen MacDonald channel the doomed Tyrones. Photos: Andrew Brilliant.

I confess I'm on the fence about the New Rep's current version of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night. It's hardly a great production of this difficult (though deeply rewarding) play - it features several of Boston's best actors, but they're slightly miscast, and the direction, by Scott Edmiston, isn't up to the demands of the text. Nevertheless, it's not a bad production, either; I doubted Edmiston could handle O'Neill's thorniest tragedy - and I count myself vindicated - but he did do better than I thought he would.  And his leads, Will Lyman and the great Karen MacDonald, have moments of piercing intensity and insight (as above) in two of the greatest roles O'Neill ever created, James Tyrone and his doomed wife Mary (who were modeled on O'Neill's own tormented, emotionally dishonest parents).  Thus, if you've never seen this drama, what I call the "Vanya on 42nd Street" effect may pay off for you; there's enough raw power here, in sporadic bursts, to allow the uninitiated to sense the intensity of the play.



If you're an O'Neill aficionado, I doubt you'll be as impressed - even though I don't quite count myself as one. I've taken a half-dozen Journeys - one of which was unforgettable - and in the end, I'd probably rate this almost precisely at the middle of the pack; it's certainly better than the boring Katharine Hepburn movie (or the disaster at the A.R.T. back in the nineties); and it's slightly better overall than the Gloucester Stage version some five years ago (although Sandra Shipley in that production was the best Mary Tyrone I've ever seen).

And thankfully Edmiston has mostly reined in his penchant for tidying up the script - mostly, that is; but he's still underlining things with his virtual directorial highlighter.  Janie E. Howland's set is heavy-handedly metaphoric, for instance; it's a pale ghost of a real house (everybody's haunted, get it?), and there are spooky sound-effects here and there that are sometimes a bit much; yes, it's all pretty clever, but it's also a little too pretty; we're aware of the design when we shouldn't be.  Still, the set does allow for one genuinely evocative bit of stage business, in which Mary, lost in a fog of morphine, passes like a blur back and forth behind a frosted door.  But on second thought, transforming young Edmund Tyrone literally into Eugene O'Neill - mustache and all - is, well, far too obvious (we know this script is autobiographical, we've read the program).  So if you tallied up the wins and misses here, you might come to a draw;  compared with Edmiston's various sins against authors in the past, though, I suppose you could count all these directorial flourishes as relatively minor.

But what Long Day's Journey inevitably highlights, I'm afraid, is that beneath his decorative skills, Edmiston is simply too superficial for O'Neill.  He arranges the play quite well, I admit; actors are set up for their solos, the pacing slows here and there but never quite comes to a stop, and the blocking is well-balanced, etc. - still, no sense of real ensemble develops over the course of the production.

And this is because Edmiston hasn't really dug into the play and worked out a coordinated emotional vision for the actors.  And that's what Long Day's Journey Into Night is all about; it's a tragic web, in which the usual "lead" is replaced by an entire family, operating as both hero and accusatory chorus.  The Tyrones are in sad shape - patriarch James is at the tail-end of a matinee-idol career which brought him riches but never cured him of his innate cheapness, or his inability to actually connect with other people.  Only now, in the twilight of his life, is he realizing that his sons are both wrecks, and that his wife is - well, Mary is slipping back into the morphine addiction she developed when a hack doctor (the only one her husband would pay for) prescribed the drug for her as a painkiller.

Lewis Wheeler does his best to hate Nicholas Dillenburg.

What's more, she's backsliding largely because she can't face the fact that her youngest, Edmund, may himself be slipping into tuberculosis (an added twist of the knife comes from the fact that it was Edmund's birth that first pushed Mary to seek pain relief).  Meanwhile elder brother Jamie surveys the deepening collapse around him with a cynical scowl - that is when he's not drowning his self-hatred in booze, brooding on his personal failures, or indulging in jealousy of his younger brother (another infant - tellingly called "Eugene" - died of measles contracted from, yes, Jamie; the real Eugene O'Neill had a baby brother named Edmund who died in the same way).

Whew.  Are we having fun yet?  Well, while I can't pretend that Long Day's Journey is a grand night out, I can argue that it is great art - one of the greatest portraits of familial dysfunction in literature, in fact.  And what makes it all the more piercing is that O'Neill understood above all that deep, familial ties are bent, but rarely broken, by betrayal and disappointment; yes, despite the tangled skein of their mutual guilt, the Tyrones still love each other, which makes the poignance of their predicament all but unbearable.

Needless to say, limning this lattice of recrimination and loyalty requires a strategy, but Edmiston doesn't seem to have one, so you keep feeling that the actors are largely doing their best on their own.  MacDonald and Lyman have worked together before, of course (in the by-now-legendary production of All My Sons at the Huntington), so they trust each other, and sometimes connect at the level O'Neill intends.  But they're actually reversed in terms of type - MacDonald has the broader, louder presence of a possible matinee idol, while Lyman often has an aura of elegant introspection, so their relationship never quite has the deep resonance it should.  Still, Lyman is sometimes touchingly puzzled, and MacDonald simulates porcelain as best she can, and in fact is often riveting (she knows all the notes she should hit) - the performance is just slightly scattershot; and we don't feel that at bottom Mary is essentially deceptive, as we really should.

But then we don't feel that about anyone; what used to be called 'actor intent' is largely missing from this production, even though everybody in Long Day's Journey is basically attempting to deceive someone (or everyone).   And this means that Edmiston has missed the motor of the play, which is why the production slowly begins to drift, and makes you feel every minute of its three-and-a-half-hour running time (a hint to future directors of O'Neill: shave ten minutes off the second act of this baby).  The gap is most apparent in the performances of the troubled Tyrone siblings; as Jamie, Lewis Wheeler actually has the only fully-worked-out portrayal to be found in the cast, but at least as of opening night it was still an intellectual exercise; he hadn't internalized it yet.  To be fair, this may have been partly due to the fact that as Edmund, newcomer Nicholas Dillenburg was a handsome blank, so Wheeler didn't have anything to work against.  Edmund often seems to be the weak point of this script; the role, I think, is underwritten, perhaps because the other characters are largely seen from his vantage point; still, there's much for Dillenburg to play that he hasn't yet figured out - most importantly, his own efforts to hide his deteriorating health, and not face the terrible moment in which he must see that his own mother (like his father!) is unavailable to him in his time of need.

Still, all things considered - if you've never had any contact with this play, you should probably see this production.  It is a worthy introduction to this dramatist, if not too much more.  And at the very least, in Karen MacDonald's performance you will sometimes see the muse of tragedy peek out from behind her mask; and in these slick, superficial days, that's something to treasure.

Bakersfield Mist at the New Rep

An authentic Jackson Pollock, Lavender Mist

Bakersfield Mist, the new play by Stephen Sachs, currently in a "rolling" national premiere at the New Rep, is a long meditation on a single painting - a canvas which is possibly a newfound Jackson Pollock, or possibly just a piece of junk from a tag sale. Sachs has based his script on a the strange-but-true story of one Teri Horton (here "Maude Gutman"), a former long-haul truck driver who "bought the ugliest painting she could find" at a tag sale, only to discover a mysterious fingerprint on it that matched those of, yes, you-know-who.  The painting's general look and size likewise made the Pollock connection at least a possibility, and  Teri's long quest to have her artwork authenticated (and so instantly become worth tens of millions of dollars) is detailed in the amusing movie "Who the Fuck is Jackson Pollock?" (reportedly Teri's first response to hearing of her purchase's possible provenance).

Now, I don't know whether Ms. Horton (at left, with her painting) has "the real thing" or not - although from a cursory glance, her painting looks a good deal more convincing than the obviously phony "Matter Pollocks," which actually had a showing at Boston College a few years back, and fooled several local critics (at the Arts Fuse and elsewhere) before being debunked by paint analysis.

I was vociferous in my opposition to the Matter Pollocks, of course, but I think I'll hang back on the authenticity of Teri's acquisition, even if I have my doubts; the painting's no worse than a few Pollocks (indeed, some feel it's suspiciously similar to one in particular, No. 5, 1948, although a different painting, Lavender Mist, is referenced in the play's title).  And if Horton does become a zillionaire, she has probably earned it, one way or another.  Still, Ms. Horton - I think it's worth noting - has had some association with a well-known art forger (an issue which this play succinctly deletes), and those supposed fingerprints on her painting have come under skeptical scrutiny; I'd say the question of her acquisition's authenticity is at best still an open one.

The issue that occupies me as a drama critic, however, does parallel the play's theme; in brief -

Is Bakersfield Mist a "real" play?

And I'm afraid the answer to that question is rather obviously "no" - it's not nearly a real play - even though I'd rank it fairly high in the new genre of simulated plays that clutter our stages thanks to the "development" community.  We must have new playwrights, you know, to justify the developers' existence, and hence half the theatrical season is essentially devoted to their product rather than art.  And there are so many stakeholders in that community now!  So many artistic directors and heads of drama departments and playwriting coaches - all patiently waiting for their turn at bat!  Thus our seasons of "new voices" have essentially devolved into the sound of a cottage industry talking to itself - it's a miracle we ever hear from a playwright who hasn't bought into the scene via tuition, or tenure, or connections.

Needless to say, Sachs is deep in the development community himself - he's one of the artistic directors of L.A.'s Fountain Theatre - and so he knows his way around this kind of thing, and how to make something like Bakersfield Mist happen.  Not that he has no skill; he's certainly a deft weaver of exposition, I'll grant him that, and has worked up a heady metaphoric meringue around his central theme of authenticity. Sachs has also done his art-scene homework, even if he has piled just about every recent trend or scandal at the Met or Getty into the biography of his fictional "Lionel Percy," the art expert who arrives at Maude Gutman's trailer to assess her find.

Still, what's wrong with Bakersfield Mist is so obvious - and moreover so easily fixed - that it kind of makes you throw up your hands at the whole development gang; if they can't get this right, then they really are of no use whatsoever.  In short, Sachs gives us a diverting tour of various arty controversies, and he even diagrams a conflict for his leads - Maude wants her painting authenticated (even if she herself prefers sad clowns to Pollock, as below), but Percy's "gut" tells him her find's a fake.  The problem is that establishing a conflict is just square one in the dramaturgical game; you have to then hit on an action by which the conflict can be developed.

Paula Langton and Ken Cheeseman ponder the meaning of art.

And here Bakersfield Mist stumbles and flails, even though there's an obvious mode of dramatic action to hand - Maude's potential seduction of Lionel.  What's strange is that Sachs actually loads his characters up with just the right metaphoric baggage to make this seduction his seeming point - but then he never gets around to it.  For Maude's scrambled biography makes her a kind of Jackson Pollock in human form; her life has been a jumble of misdirected, self-destructive energy.  Her trailer reflects that - it's an explosion of American kitsch.  Her son even died in a car crash much like the one that took Pollock's own life.  In short, she's the real thing, whether or not her Pollock is.

The audience can't help but perceive this - Sachs underlines it for us like a diligent student teacher - but for some reason, Lionel remains in the dark.  And if only he began to fall under Maude's sway (and I don't mean just her sexual sway) how brightly the exposition of Bakersfield Mist might suddenly burn, and how the play might suddenly swing from patronizing comedy to cutting-edge satire!  For what is Lionel's "gut" but a subconsciously class-driven mindset?  And if his inherent patronization of Maude were chipped away - if he began to perceive that she actually personified the artistic content he has devoted his professional life to  - who knows where the character might find himself wandering, or where the play might suddenly rocket?

But alas, no such luck.  As with the similarly pedagogical Red, Bakersfield Mist is little more than a potted art-history lesson for college-educated people who aren't, actually, educated (i.e., probably the vast majority of college-educated people).  Although for the record, I think the New Rep does an okay job by it (if only because I'm not sure what more you could do with it).  Local theatre stalwarts Paula Langton and Ken Cheeseman are both amusing, but they sometimes look a bit awkward in their blocking, and only Langton gets beneath the skin of her character.  Cheeseman does have one comic aria which he nails physically - but nevertheless, his "Lionel Percy" never emerges from beneath the weight of Sachs' pre-fabricated psychological cliches.  And even Langton makes some rather obvious acting gaffes; a supposed alcoholic, her Maude nevertheless gasps in shock whenever she knocks back a shot of Jack (??), and she generally handles her million-dollar prize as if it were, indeed, only tag-sale booty.  And I'm afraid in his first local outing, director Jeff Zinn only makes a perfunctory impression - this show makes you wonder what all the fuss over his Cape Cod theatre has been about.

Oh, well!  Like Red, Bakersfield Mist will satisfy a lot of people; after all, it has been designed to do that.  I think my irritation with it stems in part from the fact that Teri Horton, whether or not she's a grifter, is obviously a great American character, and she deserves far more than development fodder like this.  What's most telling about the play is that in the end Sachs seems to have no idea why Maude won't abandon her quixotic quest, even when (like, I believe, the real Teri Horton) she is plied by offers in the low millions - a fraction of what the painting could eventually be worth, true, but still a vast fortune to her.  Clearly Maude wants to be vindicated - she wants to be seen as authentic (a deeply romantic impulse in the present day).  Too bad Bakersfield Mist, and Stephen Sachs, seem unable to honor her with an authentic play.