Pulling out all the comic stops on She Stoops

Kristine Nielsen and Jeremy Webb in She Stoops to Conquer.

I haven't caught much theatre in Boston of late, I'm sorry to say - I'm afraid other destinations have just proven too tempting. How could I pass up Nicky Martin's version of She Stoops to Conquer, for instance? Oliver Goldsmith's masterpiece is rarely done, and I don't think there's anything by Martin on the horizon at the Huntington this season (more's the pity). So I had to get up to Williamstown last weekend to catch its last performances.

And I was glad I did, even though this production wasn't quite top-drawer Martin. His distinctive signature - and he's one of the few directors we see locally who really has one - was still in evidence, though: that familiar mix of sophisticated, balanced ensemble, witty sympathy, and a sense of working within, and extending, a still-kicking tradition of literate theatre. By now Martin can also summon many of the best comic actors in the country, and so She Stoops was brimming with them: there were wonderfully funny turns here from Paxton Whitehead, Jon Patrick Walker, Jeremy Webb, Brooks Ashmanskas, and particularly Kristine Nielsen (at top, with Webb).

The trouble is that Martin has gotten very chummy - even indulgent - with the stars he now calls his "family." Thus he gets hilarious, but slightly superficial, work out of most of them, and he lets a few (Brooks Ashmanskas, this means you) get away with a level of schtick that can actually obscure character (Ashmanskas's familiar, fey zaniness is as lightning-quick as ever, but it's all wrong for the crude, if clever, Tony Lumpkin).

So on the one hand She Stoops to Conquer proved a splendid evening (complete with a grand set from David Korins); but on the other hand, you left feeling that you hadn't really seen She Stoops to Conquer; instead, you'd seen a clever gloss on it. Which is too bad, because Goldsmith's one stage classic (he died shortly after completing it) takes on a subject which vexes us much these days: class. And how it intersects with sex.

For Goldsmith's main gambit in She Stoops is to convert the usual comic contrivance of mistaken identity into a blunt meditation on status; his characters don't "recognize" each other in their comic encounters not because they're in drag or disguise but because they imagine they're of different social classes (this theme makes it all the way into Goldsmith's title, btw). Scene after scene deals with social climbing, the grasping after inheritance and legacy, and fashion as a denominator of status. But the sequences that modern audiences have the most trouble with are the ones in which we discover that the romantic hero, Marlow, though socially incapacitated around women of his own station, is something of a wolf among women with less power and prestige than himself.

These days, of course, we're quite uncomfortable with this basic truth of human (not just masculine) nature - even though many, if not most, of us behave much like Goldsmith's hero; we observe different moral and social standards with people above and below us in the food chain (and this tendency is probably increasing; hence, perhaps, our elaborate chagrin at its prevalence!). What's funniest about She Stoops to Conquer, however, is that not only are we offended the playwright should be so forthright about his characters, but also that he should be so forthright about us - for structuring his gags the way he does implies a straightforward understanding of how they'll be received by the audience. This play does, indeed, hold the mirror up to nature - only we're none too pleased by what we find there!

Worse still, Goldsmith is utterly forgiving of his characters' foibles - even when they edge beyond callous seduction toward actual larceny. (Another irony of the recent critical response to She Stoops is that most critics seem to miss that the play's most problematic villain is a woman - the grasping Mrs. Hardcastle.) The playwright does punish his wrongdoers - Marlow gets quite the comeuppance, in fact - but his fiancee blithely forgives him (as does Mrs. Hardcastle's husband) and does anyone really "learn" or change? Probably not; Goldsmith's too much of a realist for that. (It also may be worth mentioning that the Shakespearean comedy dealing most realistically with class - All's Well that Ends Well, currently on the Common - is also considered a "problem play.")

Mrs. Hardcastle to the rescue!

Martin's (welcome) attitude toward all this is a blithe and worldly one; still, he mostly glides over these issues without truly investigating them. Thus Goldsmith's deeper themes - about the compatibility of natural, if amoral, desire with social hierarchy - largely go missing. And as no one in this production is allowed real claws (or teeth), not much is ever really at stake. Yet oddly, given the generally breezy atmosphere, Martin doesn't give Marlow the usual excuse for his seductive moves (which is that he's an immature pup); thus Jon Patrick Walker's performance may be a brilliant piece of physical comedy - and I mean brilliant - but he's not quite as sympathetic as he might be. Still, Walker and co-star Jeremy Webb both made a case for themselves as classical actors as skilled as anyone I saw at the Royal Shakespeare Company. Meanwhile Paxton Whitehead was, if anything, even better; with his double-bass voice and exquisitely perplexed timing, his turn as the good-hearted Mr. Hardcastle was, simply put, a joy. Still, his scenes were generally stolen - if charmingly - by Kristine Nielsen, whose ditzy Mrs. Hardcastle was well over the top (to match her wild frock, I suppose), and yet somehow always convincingly so; Nielsen fully inhabited even her wildest pratfalls. Alas, you couldn't say the same for Brooks Ashmanskas, though his preening hijinks were as funny as they always are - still, he missed both Tony Lumpkin's brutish smarts and his smothered, unhappy resentment of his mother (both of which are important to Goldsmith's thematic scheme). And alas, the other women in the cast may have been satisfactory, but weren't nearly in the same league as the men - in particular Mia Barron, the "she" who stoops to conquer, wasn't nearly mischievous enough to power her scenes; she essentially let the whole play be stolen away from her.  But then perhaps Nicky Martin simply forgot to tell her that she needed to kick things up a notch rather than stoop if she wanted to conquer this talented crew.

Classic Martin

Emily and George get lost in the stars in Our Town.

Not so long ago, Boston was home to three great directors - Nicholas Martin, Robert Woodruff, and Charles Towers. These days, only Towers remains (at the Merrimack), but we still get occasional visits from the other two, and this season you have (or had) the chance to see a double header from Martin - Our Town just closed at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, while the Huntington will open its fall season with his production of Bus Stop.

Both seem like "naturals" for Nicky, as he's universally known, but of course Our Town is the deeper play, and I had high hopes that the Williamstown production might prove as perfect as his best work at the Huntington (She Loves Me, Present Laughter). Alas, it doesn't quite reach that pinnacle, due to two of its central performances, but it's still easily the best production of Our Town I've seen, and will certainly be remembered fondly (I didn't catch the most recent Broadway revival, but this is surely superior to the Paul Newman version of several years ago). And for fans of meta-theatre, you can't get much more meta than this version, which is being performed only an hour or two from Peterborough, upon which Thornton Wilder modeled the eponymous "Grover's Corners" from his cottage at the MacDowell Colony. (As a little nod to that fact, Martin has cast an actual local professor as his lecturer on the region.)

This doesn't, however, make the production much more resonant than usual (most of the actors are from New York, after all), and one walks away from this rendition musing on the way that, perhaps unintentionally, it highlights one of the inherent difficulties of the director's craft. Like his recent The Corn is Green, Our Town showcases Martin's superb directorial intelligence - there's a subtle flow to the blocking, and moment after moment of insight and clarity in the shape and construction of the scenes; and the design work, by David Korins and Kenneth Posner, toys with Wilder's famously bare stage just enough but not too much.

But the production also reveals that when an actor doesn't have quite the emotional depths for his or her role, or is cast just a hairsbreadth away from the ideal - well, all the directorial craft in the world can never quite disguise that gap, particularly when (as in Martin's case), the director is by instinct attuned to questions of balance and proportion rather than "intensity" or shock.

And this Our Town is, I'm afraid, complicated by the fact that the versatile Campbell Scott's Stage Manager fails to grow from folksy irony to slightly-chilling stature (as he should). And as Emily Webb, the beautiful Brie Larson conveys tomboyish innocence perfectly but only seems partly able to access the role's streams of deeper feeling. Compensating for these slight gaps, however, are masterfully low-key performances from John Rubinstein and (especially) Dylan Baker as Doc Gibbs and Mr. Webb, respectively, and a delightfully awkward turn from Will Rogers as young George. There were also memorable cameos from Jon Patrick Walker as Simon Stimson and Emma Rosenthal as Rebecca Gibbs - and it was fun to catch local star Nancy Carroll in a short, but funny, stint as the gossipy Mrs. Soames.

And Martin does, in the end, convey the great emotional verities of the play, which still, I'm glad to report, communicates the terrible truth that life slips away from us before we appreciate it with a power all the more piercing because it's so unassuming. (How this play got a reputation for sentimentality remains a mystery.) This production in particular, it seemed to me, drew out the author's (at right, in his commemorative stamp) absorption with death in a subtle, but matter-of-fact, style (Emily's demise in childbirth often comes as a shock, but here Martin gently highlights the many hints of mortality that come before it). This didn't stop many in the audience from openly weeping at the climax nonetheless. And I confess I found it hard not to join in.

The Torch-Bearers doesn't quite burn bright

Ham on wry: Katie Finneran, Edward Herrmann, and Andrea Martin bring down the house (literally) in The Torch-Bearers.

The second Williamstown Theatre Festival offering I caught last weekend was George Kelly's The Torch-Bearers, which was clearly meant as the festival's summer crowd-pleaser - a neglected minor classic that recalls such seasonal favorites as You Can't Take It With You and Hay Fever, but still boasts its own wry (even cynical) insights and charms.

The crowd at the Williamstown Main Stage, however, was not entirely pleased, even though adapter/director Dylan Baker had streamlined the text, and cast such stars as Andrea Martin and Edward Herrmann as the amateur thespians at the center of the script. It turned out that star power, however, wasn't quite enough to get the production to gel; what was required was a certain technical directorial intelligence, the kind that can fill every second of stage time with a building sense of wit. In short, the show needed someone like Nicky Martin in the driver's seat, or perhaps the director of last year's Feydeau, John Rando, who could have constructed a gleaming perpetual-motion machine out of Kelly's keen-eyed satire. But while Mr. Baker has some skill (and he's actually directed Torch-Bearers before), he isn't in the same league as Martin or Rando, and it shows; the comedy's central set-piece, for instance - a saga of backstage calamity that should cascade, like Noises Off (a clear descendant) into something like chaos - never got any momentum going, despite some hilarious moments. And there were subtle, but persistent, problems in the ensemble: dropped lines and flubbed physical bits surfaced on more than one occasion, and in a parody of amateur theatricals, that's not a good thing.

To be fair to Mr. Baker, however, time and circumstance may have prevented the production from reaching a high polish: it lost two cast members over the course of the summer (rather like its production-within-a-production). And in subsequent performances, some loose ends will surely be sewn up: cues will tighten and the slapstick will brighten. The show already boasts a smart comic turn from Katie Finneran (as a particularly wooden would-be starlet), and an even better dramatic one from John Rubinstein, who lightly sketches both affection and something like contempt into his portrayal of a husband so appalled by his wife's emoting that he actually succumbs to apoplexy. Meanwhile, in the central role of Mrs. J. Druro Pampinelli, the solemn high priestess of the eternal mysteries of community theatre, Katherine McGrath has what it takes to be fine once she's steady on her lines.

But other performances are slightly disappointing. The lovable Andrea Martin (a late addition to the cast) nails her laughs, of course - because she's a great pro who understands where all her jokes should land; but she hasn't yet internalized a character for her character (a prompter who pulls focus by always needing prompting). Likewise Edward Herrmann hasn't come to full flower as the troupe's flamboyant star, Huxley Hossefrosse (although to be fair, he has his moments; his entrance through the flats during that central star-crossed performance may alone be worth the price of admission). Alas, other supporting performances feel muddled (Yusef Bulos), unclear (James Waterston) or just bizarre (Jessica Hecht). And in the role of that atrociously-acting wife, Becky Ann Baker (wife of the director) was sweet but muted, and unresponsive to the happy, intimate chemistry Rubinstein was all but pouring in her direction; thus the domestic comedy threaded through the script (which also foreshadows many an I Love Lucy episode) never took flight. Perhaps this was due to the perceived sexism of the nearly-century-old text; after her disastrous debut, our leading lady is patted back into her domestic role, it's true (and there are other hints that an unspoken battle of the sexes is being waged on the bohemian boards). But the way to deal with this issue dramatically is to make her character stronger, not weaker - and certainly not dazedly submissive. And able to realize that yes, she's terrible onstage (this important arc was all but missing from the final act).

If that sounds like a lot to fix - well, it is; but productions have had rougher opening weekends and nevertheless come together (as I know from experience). Williamstown has at least done the show up right; David Korins's set is accurately crafted (if not quite inspired), and Ilona Somogyi's costumes rightly mix bourgeois propriety, art-nouveau mysticism, and happy flapperdom. And certainly The Torch-Bearers bears reviving; its witty take on the innocent egotism of self-appointed artistic avatars (who are "bearing the torch" of dramatic art into the darkness of the suburbs) is as deadly accurate as ever. So here's hoping over its run at Williamstown this flickering production really catches fire.

Sophomore slump

Wendie Malick and Betty Gilpin in another Noah Haidle opus that hasn't come to term.

Last summer marked Nicholas Martin's first season as Artistic Director of the Williamstown Theatre Festival, and it proved a brilliant one (anchored by his sparkling Huntington production of She Loves Me). So perhaps it's understandable that his sophomore year should have been marked by a slump, according to many critics; maybe there was nowhere to go but down, at least in the short term. Still, I was keeping my hopes up as I ventured west to catch both What is the Cause of Thunder?, Noah Haidle's latest, and a revival of George Kelly's unfairly-forgotten comedy of theatrical manners, The Torch-Bearers.

Unfortunately, however, I discovered the negative reviews have been pretty accurate - and sometimes very succinct: an audience member summed up What is the Cause of Thunder? by wondering "What is the cause of this blunder?" in the lobby after the show. And I suppose the answer is, in a word, Martin's ongoing sponsorship of Haidle (he produced the disappointing Persephone at the Huntington two years ago, and before being struck by a stroke last fall - from which he has recovered - he was helming Haidle's Saturn Returns at Lincoln Center). Now I understand young playwrights need ongoing support, even through the inevitable misstep - thus Haidle's been getting a whole lotta love from the theatre community since the success of Mr. Marmalade some years ago (the lionized Bartlett Sher wrapped up Saturn Returns when Martin fell ill).

But Haidle hasn't returned the love with deeper, better-crafted plays. Indeed, so far he hasn't matched his first success, Mr. Marmalade, which may have been effective and original, but was hardly a masterpiece - thus, the thinking went, with attention and support from the literary departments of major theatres, and more money behind his productions, he might deliver something like a major work. But things haven't turned out that way - Haidle's scripts have instead been growing self-consciously pretentious in conception yet hopelessly slack in execution; What is the Cause of Thunder?, like Persephone before it, is a rambling tease derived from an interesting idea that might, with luck, have formed the basis of a surreally satiric one-act.

To be fair, that interesting idea does look like fun at first: we meet self-involved soap actress Ada (Wendie Malick, of TV's Just Shoot Me) as she's interrupted from prayer by a troubled nun who lets us know in no short order that the zoo animals have escaped, the priests have been fondling "the wee ones" (even Blind Thomas!), and God himself has died, His last words being "What did I do?" - a neat little book-end to Christ's penultimate lines on the cross. Immediately the stage is set for a smart Catholic comedy along the lines of Christopher Durang (another Martin favorite, btw), and at first Haidle seems to know exactly what he's doing. His ideas are hardly new, but they're sturdy - they're a skewed update of the realizations of undergraduates everywhere - and we sense his soap-opera conceit could prove fertile dramatic ground for the kind of horror-comedy that Christian theology always devolves into onstage. For as Ada herself points out, soap opera may revel in the wackiest evil imaginable, and be obsessed with sin, suffering, and redemption, but its victims always live on to suffer another day, and its villains are always forgiven: unlike in real life, nobody ever dies on a soap.

But then Haidle starts up with Ada's homelife, and we sense a growing lack of dramatic focus fueled by structural meta-shenanigans. Ada's pregnant daughter Ophelia - and indeed everyone else in her life, as well as on the soap - is played by the same actress (the versatile and resourceful Betty Gilpin), and her living room looks slightly surreal, as if it might be - wait for it - a mental, rather than physical, construct. Meanwhile Ophelia complains that Ada's always confusing her with her TV daughters, good and evil twins Bathsheba (who's prone to quoting Hamlet) and Harper (who tends to slip in and out of a coma). And just in case we've missed the point, she also sighs that "everyone thinks I'm a metaphor."

Indeed we do. That palindromic first name for our leading lady also raises a symbolic red flag - along with memories of the back-and-forth structure of Nabokov's Ada, which Haidle loosely apes. Clearly Ada's soap and her life are just two sides of an ongoing psychological complex, that kicks into high gear when management decides that yes, they're going to kill her off on the soap. But there's so much other cultural flotsam in this stew - a brief summary would include not only King Lear (the source of the title phrase), Hamlet and Ada but also Oedipus Rex and The Killing of Sister George - that we soon lose track of any coherent symbolic matrix or throughline, and so does Haidle. Does the "thunder" of the title represent God's death, or Ada's death, or just "death" - or perhaps birth? (Haidle tacks that one on at the last minute, when Ophelia's water breaks, onstage.) We can't tell, and we don't care - and even though Malick and Gilpin keep us laughing, intermittently, we know all the protacted goings-on are just another half-baked metaphor for our collective denial of both physical and moral reality, or something like that.

Which, pardon me, is hardly an original hook for a new play. Indeed, the problem with recent Haidle is that he becomes so involved in half-working out his fanciful paradoxes and parallel universes that he doesn't attend to the one thing we really care about - a tightly crafted, novel structure to convey his fun-but-familiar themes. What is the Cause of Thunder? plays like a rough draft, and of course it's the third Haidle play to surface in two years - so maybe it's time to hold off on the high production values evidenced here (the convolutions of Alexander Dodge's endlessly-morphing set hold us more than the writing does). When Haidle has actually finished another script - say, maybe two years from now - he may deserve another high-profile production. But right now, what I'd tell Noah is "Three strikes and you're out."

Next: a Torch-Bearers that sometimes shines, but more often flickers.

What I saw in Williamstown

Mark Harelik and Brooks Ashmanskas prepare to carve some ham in A Flea in Her Ear.

The partner unit and I spent last weekend out in the Berkshires, hopping among the museums and "cottages" before settling in Williamstown to take in the theatre festival, where Nicholas Martin landed after departing the Huntington. And the news is good from his premiere season - even my hosts at the charming Blackinton Manor (where you should stay if you're in the area, as it's lovely, and placed neatly between Williamstown and MassMOCA) had noticed a jump in the quality of the festival.

And no wonder - they were lucky enough to have caught the reprise of the Huntington production of She Loves Me, and had just been treated to a broad, but bright, rendition of Feydeau's A Flea in Her Ear. On the smaller Nikos stage I also caught the opening of a small-scaled but still compelling new play, Not Waving, by the promising Ellen Melaver. Three hits in one summer is nothing to sneaze at - indeed, they were almost enough to make me go back to catch David Storey's Home this weekend (but my wallet dissuaded me).

I'll comment briefly on Flea, even though it's already closed, as it did offer almost a textbook study of the pitfalls of Feydeau. Director John Rando painted with a broad brush, but the central male stars - Mark Harelik, Brooks Ashmanskas, David Pittu, and Carson Elrod - were able to slip from caricature to character and back like chameleons, and generally exuded just about the right air of exasperated propriety. Yes, Ashmanskas added his usual applique of physical clowning - but frankly, the precision of his schtick is always a kick, and was here also only the wrapper on an intriguingly perverse characterization. The leading women, Mia Barron and Kathryn Meisle, worked in a more staightforward mode of heightened naturalism, with strong, if not scene-stealing results. Alas, elsewhere there were gaps in the ensemble - both Tom McGowan and Debra Jo Rupp, TV stars with Broadway credits, worked in miniature, and weren't able to keep up with their co-stars (who were all natives of the living, breathing stage), and Feydeau is pretty democratic in his gags; everybody has to be in formation for the farce to really fly.

Yet I have to admit I've begun to wonder if Feydeau really does fly. Flea, which has better writing than most of his work (and was here translated with witty freedom by David Ives), as well as some genuine psychological insights, still falls victim to the same syndrome I've seen afflict every Feydeau farce I've ever seen: there's a fun build-up (here the opening scenes went swimmingly), and then a sense of anticlimax, and finally faint boredom, as the gears of the coincidental machine laid out in the first act go through their paces in the second. The lengthy "climax" of Flea - which takes place in a bordello outfitted with rotating beds - is hectic but slightly leaden, probably because the author pretty much dumps all the psychology of his characters and simply accelerates the pace of their games of hide-and-seek. Tellingly, he relies on look-a-likes for many of his jokes, only never dreams of exploring their character in the way that Shakespeare explores the psychologies of his twins. Instead the playwright keeps pounding out the same joke, over and over again (in itself a form of insanity): the first time the bed spins to reveal someone in their undies, it's funny - not so much the seventh time, or the seventeenth. A production's best bet is to either trim the sails of the ongoing mêlée, or carefully chart a descent from sneaky decorum to something near to madness. Only director Rando had set the performances at such a pitch from the outset that the cast really had nowhere to go. The academic literature would have you believe that Feydeau achieves some kind of anarchic, Freudian catharsis in the bathos he engineers (and apparently, from his program note, Ives does too), but all I can say is, somehow this version of anarchic bathos looks pretty bloody predictable.

Still, the show regained its footing in its final act, when it returns to something close to bourgeois reality (which in Alexander Dodge's set meant chintz, chandeliers, and pagodas of china - the bordello, meanwhile, was a gaping maw of vaginal pink). The machinery of farce receded slightly, and the actors had a little room to breathe, and they quickly won back my admiration. Would someone please cast Messrs. Harelik, Pittu, and Elrod in something in Boston as soon as possible? (It doesn't really matter what.)


This happy couple, Maria Dizzia and Nate Corddry, are secretly at sea in Not Waving.

Meanwhile, on the Nikos Stage, the Festival shifted gears to small-scale naturalism with Not Waving, by Ellen Melaver, which demonstrated (as other critics have also quipped) that even a day at the beach is really no day at the beach. Especially when said beach - here beautifully evoked by designer David Korins - has no lifeguard, and is known for a fierce riptide that recently drowned a man. Thus, perhaps, the title, derived from Stevie Smith's famous poem - you know, the one about the dead man who "was too far out all my life, and not waving but drowning" - a potent metaphor which the playwright teased out into variations on connection and disconnection, with the shadow of mortality playing over each.

Melaver's three couples - a mother and son, a husband and wife, and boyfriend and girlfriend - are each negotiating the currents of life, and facing major decisions - and each is putting up a brave show of contentment, security, what have you, in the face of some serious emotional undertows. But are they waving, or drowning? Can the young couple face another shot at pregnancy after two miscarriages? Can the teenaged couple weather their first bout of infidelity? Can the son convince himself (and his mother) that he's marrying for the right reasons?

The playwright teases out these issues with astute indirection, and at just about the right pace - what's more, she manages three convincing sets of voices, as each of her "couples" is from a different age and lifestyle. The script at first feels a bit cable-TV-light, in the manner of, say, Theresa Rebeck, but grows steadily more engrossing (and affecting) as it progresses. It helps that the show is so well cast, and acted with such convincing detail. The standouts are probably Maria Dizzia, as the wife quietly trying to survive the deepest of disappointments; Dashiell Eaves, as the son who doesn't realize his mother has actually transcended the issues he thinks bind them; Sarah Steele, as the rosy, sturdy young girl on the cusp of commitment; and Will Rogers as the goofy skaterboy who's far better at boarding than he is at talking to his girl (he builds a half-pipe rather than a castle in the sand). The rest of the cast is solid, if not perhaps quite as compelling. In what could count as the "lead" - the mother working through issues with her son - Harriet Harris offers a charming half-characterization: we see her immediately as the free spirit she has struggled to become, with little residue of the emotional control she once deployed against her offspring. This is of course a defensible strategy, but it leaves the early mother-son exchanges hanging in space (admittedly, conjuring the echo of the woman she once was would have been a trick). This single gap, along with a slightly contrived, affirmative ending, perhaps hold the play back from small-classic status, but aren't enough to to curb our enthusiasm for a more expansive work from Ms. Melaver. More, please.