Blown Glass

Tom and Laura seem as dismayed by this production as I was.

It's hard to think of two sensibilities more opposed than those of Tennessee Williams and Trinity Rep's Fred Sullivan, Jr., so it's no surprise that nearly everything in Sullivan's production of The Glass Menagerie, which closed last weekend at Pawtucket's Gamm Theatre, felt subtly, but deeply, wrong. Sullivan (who just wrapped a riotous turn as Sir Toby Belch at Trinity) is all about smart, funny, cynical insights - he's the kind of guy who would immediately tear away the silk shades that Blanche DuBois slides over the lightbulbs in A Streetcar Named Desire. But while Williams is all about insight too - like every other great playwright - he's nevertheless quite attached to those silks; he identifies with Blanche, not her attackers.

Of course in The Glass Menagerie, the playwright himself - or rather his factotum, "Tom" (Tennessee's given name) both conjures and destroys the haunted reverie that protects his female protagonists, the fragile, self-conscious Laura Wingfield (Diana Buirski), and her notoriously overbearing, but equally fragile, mother Amanda (Wendy Overly). But do I really have to go into the story of The Glass Menagerie? Don't we all know it by now?

Well, apparently Sullivan doesn't, because in his version, Mom is a kind of drill sergeant and it's son Tom (Marc Dante Mancini) who's so delicate he practically jumps out of his skin whenever she barks an order. Their ongoing war, which should be recalled so ruefully by Tom as he narrates his "memory play," is here sketched as a bitter mother-son battle royale like the one in Awake and Sing! (which, perhaps uncoincidentally, was Sullivan's last directing assignment at the Gamm).

Sullivan's apparent attempt to pound the template from that play onto this one is frustrating in more than one respect, because Wendy Overly brings a high level of detail to Amanda's harangues - this could have been a great performance if it had been pitched at a more graceful, vulnerable angle. But as she bustles about Patrick Lynch's period set (the only aspect of the production that feels right), we never catch a hint of the fact that she, too, is living in a kind of dream designed to ward off reality (Laura and Tom are very much her children). The rest of the cast is likewise prone to pushing things a little too far, and in the wrong key. Mancini overemotes like mad, while Buirski, though certainly a passable Laura, relies too much on technical tricks to simulate the character's famous quiet luminousness. Kelby T. Akin is a bit better as the "Gentleman Caller" who briefly seems to woo her - at least once he calms down after some opening broadness that, like so much else in the production, seems pitched to some nonexistent upper balcony.

There are a few "twists" in the production that I suppose are worth mentioning. Sullivan has decided to break the role of Tom in two, so we get the much-older author, in the person of actor Sam Babbitt (who looks nothing like Mancini) occasionally delivering the lines that sail across the fourth wall - although mostly Babbitt just hangs out on the sofa, watching the action with an air of "been there, done that, found a pill for it." This turns out to be not quite as irritating as it sounds, but it does undermine the play's mysterious atmosphere, and Babbitt's jaded, bemused look doesn't exactly jive with the tone of his lines. (When he sighs that he's been more faithful to Laura than he ever intended, we don't believe him for a second.) Meanwhile the issue of Tom's (and Tennessee's) homosexuality is made clear with a brief tryst on the play's iconic fire escape. This Tom was played as such a nervous nelly that the scene was by and large superfluous, but strangely enough, in its reticence it was probably the subtlest moment in the whole production.

And I-I-I-I will always love this

This is just so wonderful in so many ways. Meet the talented Lin Chu Yun, the Asian answer to Susan Boyle, who has taken the Taiwanese talent show Super Star Avenue by storm. Feel free to skip ahead to the 1:10 mark (unless you speak Taiwanese Hokkien), where you will discover that if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then flattery can be the most innocent form of parody. (Hat tip to Gawker.)

Love on the run

They'll always have Paris; Jack Weatherall and Rae C. Wright count the hours as Mickey and Jean. Photo by Meghan Moore.

When a playwright leans on the laugh lines, and blows his characters up into caricatures, it usually means that he or she is desperate, because there's really no underlying conflict in the script's set-up, or no believable story arc, or its internal structure is a mess.

But what's striking about Richard Dresser's The Last Days of Mickey and Jean, the much-drubbed new comedy wrapping up its run at the Merrimack Rep, is that none of these things are true. The playwright has a bead on the central conflict of his eponymous pair, and has thought up a classic triangle through which to explore it. And his scenes actually track something close to a traditional sense of development, with a long sequence of what should be bruising revelations leading to a climactic dilemma. Indeed, if anything, Mickey and Jean has a better internal structure than the playwright's far-superior View of the Harbor, which premiered at Merrimack last year, and it's certainly more coherent than, say, such recent hits as the Nora's Not Enough Air or the Huntington's Becky Shaw.

Yet Dresser pushes the surface of his script relentlessly toward farce, and forced farce at that. Which is all the stranger because in a haunting coda, he suddenly does a 180 and delivers one of the best, most evocative stretches of new dramatic writing I've heard all year. Too bad it's only a few pages long!

So what went wrong? Why didn't the mature, autumnal mood of those last five minutes pervade, or at least inform, the previous 90?

Sorry, I wish I had an answer to that one, but I don't; my only guess is that Mr. Dresser is rather pressed for time these days - he's also writing the book for the higher-profile Red Sox musical at the A.R.T., and somehow I get the feeling that the Merrimack, which has spent the last few years developing his career, may have suddenly gotten the short end of the stick now that he's in the major leagues, as it were. Certainly Dresser's script gives the impression of having been thoughtfully structured, but finished at high speed, and "punched up" to hide the resulting holes in its dialogue.

The play's premise, in case you haven't heard, is intended to be a wicked riff on the last days of former Southie kingpin Whitey (a.k.a. James J.) Bulger and longtime girlfriend Catherine Greig, who have been eluding the law now for something like fifteen years (at left, a recent photo claimed to be of the pair in Italy). Bulger's career, which encompassed at least 18 murders, multiple robberies, a thriving cocaine business as well as the usual Southie rackets, and a famously close relationship with both the State House (through little brother Billy) and the FBI, has by now spawned an entire genre of crime fiction and film. Add to that his rumored sexual escapades with both men and women, as well as various sightings at drag bars, and you have a truly protean cultural figure.

Maybe too protean - there's simply more crime in Bulger's past than can be neatly tucked into the ninety minutes or so that Dresser alots himself, especially given the blackly comic spins the playwright gives the mobster's current plight and our fascination with it (the feds may not be able to track Whitey/Mickey down, but in one of the play's funnier gambits, the AARP still manages to). Dresser smartly perceives, however, that the dramatic essence of Bulger's story isn't his life of depravity but his talent for betrayal, the way he managed to stay afloat for decades by playing one criminal or governmental faction against another (even in his final escape, Whitey dumped his common-law wife for his mistress at the last minute). Thus the tantalizing question hovering over The Last Days of Mickey and Jean - will Jean betray Mickey? - is precisely the right one. And the script's bleakly satiric tone is likewise just right for the couple's isolated, pathetically paranoid existence, dashing from one safe deposit box to another in locale after locale (the play's set in a nameless hotel room in Paris). Dresser even provides them with the perfect foil - a nondescript, seemingly decent gent at the hotel bar who could offer Jean something like an escape hatch.

But the playwright errs in submerging Mickey's pathology beneath a standard sitcom persona of weary husbandry, even as he inflates Jean into a blowsy, too-needy whiner. And he fumbles the revelations which complicate both her own and her beau's back stories. The result is that Dresser never actually gets to the real comic drama he has set up for himself - we can almost feel it floating just out of reach as he busies himself with failed nods to Whitey's more outré escapades (such as the sudden appearance of a drag queen straight out of Jacques).

And alas, director Charles Towers actually exacerbates Dresser's mistakes by running with them. Thus the usually reliable Jack Weatherall almost makes no impression as Mickey, and the talented Rae C. Wright wears out her welcome as an over-the-top Jean (who comes equipped with an accent that hovers over the Boston area without ever landing in any particular neighborhood). And third wheel Christopher McHale seems to be totally thrown by that drag get-up, and never recovers in his final scenes.

But oddly enough, I hope that we actually haven't seen the last days of Mickey and Jean; the ideas behind it are just too good to be buried with this irritating first iteration. Several reviewers have remarked that the production felt more like a workshop than a finished production; my secret wish is that the script does, indeed, go back into development. Certainly the Boston area (if not Whitey Bulger) deserves better. And who knows, maybe in a year or two, once Dresser has gotten it into shape, we'll see it again at the A.R.T.

Mumble that again?

Ben Stiller takes a time-out in Greenberg.

Noah Baumbach's Greenberg may be an awful movie, but at least it's awful in an interesting way: watching it is like watching its genre, "mumblecore," self-destruct before your eyes.

Of course you could argue that Baumbach's never been an avatar of true mumblecore, that millennial mode christened by Andrew Bujalski's sound engineer, in which aimless twentysomethings mutter and fidget over their delayed maturation for roughly 90 minutes before taking a baby step in something like the right life direction. There's not much to the mode, as you might guess from that summary, largely because it was generated by filmmakers with little money or means. Thus mumblecore is usually limited to little conversations in grad-student digs with bean bag chairs, spiced with the occasional hesitant hook-up; the biggest "crowd" scenes occur in basement clubs, in which lead characters make wan attempts at rock vocals before supportive gaggles of their friends (there's just such a scene, that reads like a gentle nod to a kabuki-like convention, in Greenberg).

Within these confines, the genre still often manages to charm in its precise character observations and accurate sense of social detail. But what it can't do is go deep, almost by definition - and this often leads mumblecore to drift through its own benign, immature haze when it comes to human nature. The gentle souls of mumblecore have their flaws and failings, of course, but these usually orbit around forgivable fears and insecurities, or at most, self-centeredness; the classic mumblecore villain is the guy who just wants to bag the lead babe without really digging her (eek!). Indeed, the title of Bujalski's second feature, Mutual Admiration, pretty much sums up the genre.

Noah Baumbach, however, has always scratched at the mild self-adulation at the core of the form; he tries to drag it toward the slightly-edgier School of Quirk founded by best bud Wes Anderson. Baumbach movies like Kicking and Screaming and The Squid and the Whale featured people who weren't all that easy to admire - they weren't merely self-absorbed, they were obvious narcissists obsessed with their own status, and weren't above lying or cheating or plagiarizing to get their own way. They actually did bad things sometimes. What kept Baumbach's films within shouting distance of mumblecore, however, was their odd sense of forgiving distance - and the sense that almost everyone in them gave as good as they got.

But the director has never brought anyone to the screen quite like the eponymous Greenberg (Ben Stiller, above), an aging (of course) narcissist knocking around the L.A. home of his equally-dyspeptic, but far more successful, brother. As was the case with the father in The Squid and the Whale, we sense that Greenberg's prickly personality serves as protection for an ego that can't really face up to reality, but this time around, there's something else kicking and screaming in the narcissistic mix, too - something colder, and nearly malicious. Of course, unlike Dad in Squid, or the entitled whiners of K&S, Greenberg is pretty obviously a failure. He led a band years ago, but it broke up (largely over his own orneriness), and since then he has suffered a vague "breakdown" after a stint in New York as a carpenter. He no longer drives, and can't even swim - two gaps that serve as both obvious metaphors and running punchlines amid the pools and freeways of L.A.

So unlike the usual denizens of mumblecore, Greenberg isn't really hanging back from adult choices; instead, he's recovering from adult failures - failures that he himself seems to have caused. Thus the aimlessness that is Baumbach's specialty has a far different cast than it had in his earlier films. Greenberg isn't just procastinating; he's marinating in his own bad juices. And left to his own devices, without real prospects or plans, he nurses his grudges almost maniacally (another running "joke" is that he's constantly penning letters of complaint).

Of course all this only makes Greenberg not a very nice person. But in mumblecore terms, he reads as something close to a serial killer, as one critic opined - because Baumbach sticks closely to genre conventions when it comes to his second lead, Florence (Greta Gerwig), who floats through the movie in a standard-issue mumblecore fog of abstracted indeterminacy. Florence, who's gentle and kind and pretty, and smarter and more competent than she herself realizes, takes care of the house which Greenberg is haunting, and soon she's taking care of Greenberg, too. He responds by taking advantage of her sexually, and in every other way as well.

What follows, we surmise, is supposed to strike us as a kind of mumblecore screwball comedy, in which Greenberg slowly awakens to his own fallen nature and earns his way into Florence's good graces. She, meanwhile, holds true to a faith that Greenberg is just "different" in some worthwhile way that involves integrity and art, or something like that. Only the movie actually plays more like a horror movie in which a child is sent to play next to a powerful piece of machinery; think Funny Ha Ha meets Saw, in which tiny chances and whimsical coincidences draw a naïf into the orbit of a maniac.

Thus we cringe at the closing moments of the picture - we can only imagine what kind of grief lies ahead for poor Florence. True, Greenberg has had something of an epiphany - after partying somewhat pathetically with a mob of drunken, self-contented millennials (who listen to Korn, for chrissakes), he has realized he is both no longer young, and simply can't be "young" as it's now understood. But beyond that, little about him seems to have changed. He has made the tiny move toward maturity required of mumblecore heroes and heroines at their respective fade-outs; only this time around, his issues totally eclipse said gesture (so much so that I wondered if Baumbach might be indulging in a particularly bitter strain of parody).

To be fair, Greenberg is studded with tiny, telling moments; its L.A. is smoggy yet bleached-out, and populated by (as Greenberg notes) men who dress like teenagers and kids who dress as superheroes. But beyond the accuracy of his micro-critiques of la-la land, little is revealed about Greenberg himself to counteract our impression that he's a needy, vindictive jerk. We never get to hear any of his music, for instance, and in his final confrontation with that posse of imperturbably mediocre millennials, Baumbach can't quite tease out what Greenberg has that they don't. But then again, to do so would require a sense of history, palpable artistic ambitions, and something like a dramatic arc - all of which are hard to sustain when you're mumbling.

Voice of the prophet

The BSO - and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus - raised Elijah from the dead last weekend.

Incredibly, this weekend's BSO performances of Mendelssohn's Elijah (above) marked only the third time the orchestra has mounted the work. Actually, maybe that's not so incredible: it's a huge undertaking - and not nearly as interesting as, say, The Trojans or Moses and Aaron, no? (Har de har, that was just my little philistine joke.) What's more, even these performances almost didn't happen: first James Levine was sidelined by ongoing back problems, then tenor Aleksandrs Antonenko withdrew due to a throat infection. But in a pair of miracles that would have done the prophet himself proud, the BSO came up with worthy replacements in both cases: the much-loved Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos picked up Levine's baton, and the Grammy-winning Anthony Dean Griffey stepped into the roles of Obadiah and Ahab.

So the show went on, and proved to be, well, if not revelatory, then still pretty terrific in a satisfyingly old-fashioned way. Needless to say, if Elijah has been neglected over the years by the BSO, it's still utterly familiar (in piecemeal fashion) to anyone who cares about choral music, or, for that matter, most anyone who goes to church: several of its ravishing numbers are staples of the Sunday morning repertoire. Still, it's rare that one gets a chance to hear Mendelssohn's grand tribute to Bach (and great precursor to Wagner, ironically enough) at full size, as it were. Chorally speaking, I'm kind of a secret size queen, I admit, and as the Tanglewood Festival Chorus (all 150 of them) filed onto the Symphony Hall stage, I felt myself getting - well, a little excited. And I wasn't alone (I find again and again that most straight people are secret size queens, too). Not that I don't adore our smaller, professional chorales, like the brilliantly nimble Boston Baroque and Handel and Haydn choruses. But ya know, they're kind of - well, not small or anything, but . . . well . . . hmmmm. Maybe I should stop there.

Anyway, what's wonderful about huge choruses isn't really the size of their sound but its depth. This is a hard quality to explain in the abstract, but as they say, you know it when you hear it. Of course the trouble with such choruses is that to get that depth, you often have to sacrifice clarity - the voices in large groups aren't always uniform in quality, and their diction can get blurry, and even the singing itself can be a little ragged around the edges. (Just you try to get 150 people to start and stop on a dime.) The BSO's secret weapon, however, is John Oliver, founder and long-time director of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, who sculpted the chorale's gigantic sound with nearly unbelievable precision. Even though they were singing from memory. In German. We were impressed.

Given the virtuosity of the chorale, the rest of the performance sometimes seemed like almost an afterthought. But it must be said that Frühbeck de Burgos demonstrated once again why he's the BSO's go-to-man in times of crisis - he seems to be able to pull most of the Western repertoire out of his hat at short notice. His Elijah boasted no deep insights or sense of new conception, it's true - but then, you don't really go to the BSO to hear musical ideas; even James Levine doesn't really have any original ideas. You go to the BSO to hear a top-drawer rendition of the conventional wisdom about this or that piece, and in the case of Elijah, that's probably enough. Frühbeck de Burgos clearly knows and understands the work, somehow conveyed a sense of its structure, and drew both sensitive playing from the orchestra as well as palpable dramatic attack throughout the oratorio's two-hour-plus playing time. And simply watching him throw himself into the musical climaxes, sawing the air and literally leaping against the podium, was like watching a maestro capably ride a colossal tiger.

What he didn't get, however, was a similar sense of drama from his soloists, although musically, soprano Christine Brewer and mezzo Stephanie Blythe were exquisite - and actually both were fine dramatically in their stand-alone moments (Brewer made a very moving Widow, and Blythe soared as the Angel). Tenor Anthony Dean Griffey was almost in their league, but not quite - perhaps because he was a last-minute draft, as it were. Griffey certainly has a gorgeously rich timbre, and sang with fluidity and grace - but he wobbled here and there in his sustained notes, and didn't really have the same general sense of clarity that the women displayed. There was lovely work from the secondary soloists, who joined the group for some beautifully blended quartets, and a charming turn from young treble Ryan Williams (last seen in The Turn of the Screw) in the famous "rain" recitative that closes Part I. The only real gap in the performance, however, came, unfortunately, in the role of Elijah himself. Bass-baritone Shenyang certainly had the pipes for the part, but he was stiff and dramatically unconvincing, and seemed to imagine that he was singing - and emoting - all by himself. It's a tribute to the rest of the many moving parts of this performance that a gap in the lead role hardly seemed to slow it down.

Which leads me to return to a point that infuriated a lot of BSO fans when I brought it up the first time - the disparities in pay that are evident on the Symphony Hall stage. The star of Elijah was clearly the Tanglewood Festival Chorus - only its members were paid not a dime for their efforts. Local blogger Matthew Guerreri once scoffed at my raising the question of why BSO unionized players were paid so much more than session players (and, well, just about any other performer of classical music in Boston). In Guerrieri's circular logic (and to be fair, in the opinion of many others), BSO players were hardly overpaid at all, because players in other metropolitan areas were overpaid at precisely the same level. I wonder, though, whether the fact that the instrumentalists onstage at Elijah were looking at salaries of, say, from $130,000-$200,000 a year, while the singers were looking at annual incomes of - well, ZERO - gives him any pause. Of course perhaps the symphony choruses in Chicago and L.A. are likewise expected to donate their time - but is that as it should be? Does Guerrieri agree that their artistry is, at least in the coin of the realm, literally worthless?

Girl fight

Ken Cheeseman and Jason Bowen look to the Goddess in Othello. Photo by Stratton McCrady.

These days the Actors' Shakespeare Project finds itself in the rather unusual position of having disproved its own founding thesis. The group coalesced around a sensible reaction to the pretentious, director-driven theatre of the A.R.T. (from which its founder, Benjamin Evett, was downsized); the idea was to emulate the conditions of Shakespeare's own troupe, which somehow did pretty well all on its own without the likes of Peter Sellars, et. al., swooping in, kimono aflutter, to teach us all about ecology. Let "regietheater" rage on in Europe and New York, went the ASP mantra - Shakespeare is sourced in the actor, so us actors will just burrow down with the texts and do it our way. We'll even do it without our own theatre (ASP wanders gypsy-like through various impromptu theatre spaces across the city; Mike Daisey would no doubt approve).

A great deal of grant money went chasing after this proposition (ASP raised something like $300,000 its first year), and the troupe has certainly found an audience among the crunchier collegiate types. But steady artistic success has eluded them, and most acute Shakespeare fans secretly consider them something of a noble failure.

Because it turned out that sourcing things in the actor had its downsides, too. ASP seems to make most of its decisions via insider consensus - and I mean all its decisions: play choice, director choice, even casting. And unsurprisingly, this mindset of art-by-committee (or clique) has led to a mushy convergence of attitudes, stances, and political trade-offs that never seems to quite cohere into a vision. Bizarre casting is by now a staple of the troupe (because, you know, actors want to grow - somehow always into lead roles that are wrong for them), and issues of contemporary identity politics tend to obscure the deeper meanings of the plays. Most troubling is the obvious fact that the ASP actors aren't, actually, growing, at least not technically; nobody could argue that their verse-speaking is top-notch (to be fair, it's been announced they'll be working on that next season), and few of them have really learned how to handle a foil or sword (even though they're heavy on fight choreography); nobody seems to know how to dance (and almost all the comedies, and, incredibly, perhaps even the tragedies, "should" end with a dance); and as for singing, or general musicianship - again, fuhgeddaboudit, and listen to the recorded soundscape instead. In short, even though ASP is supposedly devoted to Shakespearean acting, they've pretty much off-loaded all the technical accomplishments that used to justify the prestige of that endeavor.

What we get instead is something people like to call "edge," or "intensity," but which usually means gonzo identity politics - which usually, for ASP, means feminism. Of course Shakespeare is both catnip and poison to feminists, because while he's pretty much the source template in our culture for women's rights, he also flouts those rights repeatedly in the surface of his plays. Thus women are relentlessly drawn to him, because, let's face it, most of the greatest roles ever written for them are to be found in his work, but then they're driven crazy by the subsidiary political roles he forces those great characters into.

I myself long ago made peace with the fact that Shakespeare wasn't only not a "progressive," but may have actually been a monarchist, so I don't look to him for specific advice on whom to vote for, or what to think about this or that public policy. What I look to him for are his thoughts on what it means to be human, and on that score he never fails me. That the overarching message of his work is about freedom and dignity for everyone seems too obvious to require comment. That his plays were the popular art of his day, and thus operated within the sexist and racist conventions of his era, and likewise reflect his own masculine flaws and foibles, also seems too obvious for words.

And yet that second issue seems to obsess many of his modern interpreters. At the ASP, for instance, there's almost a mania for powerful women stomping about (usually in literal boots) making a great show of the fact that they're essentially flailing away at a text that, in the end, they cannot change (or improve). In this Othello, even Desdemona prefers boots, or at least booties, and she's surrounded by female power-brokers: her father "Brabantio" has been transformed into her mother, "Brabantia," who appeals not to the Duke of Venice but the Duchess, whose honor guard seems to be largely women, and whose ambassador is not Ludovico but Ludovica. Who knew Venice was actually run by Hillary and a squad of Amazons? You'd think, given the preponderance of estrogen at the top of the pecking order, that Desdemona might stand more of a chance against her masculine accusers, but no such luck; the power grrls of Venice and Cyprus seem to be down with doing it old-boy as well as old-school. And the fact that Desdemona seems somehow content within her subjection - indeed, that she trades a father's dominance for a husband's - is a troubling facet of her character that doesn't seem to have entered anybody's head.

But then director Judy Braha doesn't really try to put together an interpretation to explain her production's ass-backward gender politics; the girls are just there, dressed in "near future" duds that hint at African sources, but sometimes seem to have drifted in from an old Star Trek episode on some arid, styrofoam planet. Just to confuse things further, the set looks vaguely Islamic, and features a set of guide-wires stretching from its center that might be a symbol for Iago's tangled web, but then again - might not. Add to this unwieldy mix the unlikely casting of Ken Cheeseman as Iago, and what you have, at least for the production's first half, is a recipe for a slowly-unfolding artistic disaster.

I was seriously considering bailing at intermission, in fact, when suddenly something in the show turned around. I could pinpoint the line, in fact (Othello's "All my fond love thus do I blow to heaven,") and the following Lady-Macbeth-like incantation, in which the Moor attempts to convert all his love for Desdemona into hate. Up until then, Jason Bowen had seemed too young, and too inexperienced, for the role of the Moor; his exotic accent had intrigued, but he had neither constructed the weary carapace of the professional soldier, nor the hints of hidden psychological fissures beneath it, that mark a truly great Othello. What's more, he didn't seem to understand that that was what he was supposed to be doing (Othello is one of the few jealous males in Shakespeare who is not a portrait of callowness).

Nevertheless, once Bowen threw himself headlong into the Moor's fits of misogyny, the entire production became compelling. It's true that Othello's appalling behavior toward Desdemona almost always gives productions a creepy, Act-Four kick, but this time the presence of a powerless white-female power structure - along with Bowen's weird confidence in his abuse, and Braha's emphasis on Iago's own jealous delusions - turned the piece into a strange meditation on the oft-commented-on "emasculation" of the "gangsta" ethos, with its insistence that women are either "bitches" or "ho's."

Now I suppose you can't really argue with a contemporary sexual-racial gambit like this one, particularly one that rivets an audience - and Bowen was memorably intense until the terrible finale. Still, I think you can quibble. I wished, for instance, that Bowen could have suggested what Shakespeare intended - that Othello was not a factotum for frustrated gangsta attitude, but rather a deeply flawed soul in torment, suffering himself even as he abused the woman he loved most. I mean how, really, can you connect "bitches and ho's" with the brooding, insane depth of lines like "It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul. Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars!" You can't. Because what rapper could have written that? None; it comes to us from springs and sources that pop culture no longer can tap.

And beyond the question of the interpretation of Othello, there was the problem of Ken Cheeseman's Iago. As noted, actor and director seemed to have settled on Iago's own jealous delusion (that his wife Emilia had betrayed him with the Moor) as the "explanation" of his malice, which is certainly a telling point about the character, and sets up a neat parallel between villain and victim. But at the same time, it reduces one of Shakespeare's greatest villains, who by now, after centuries of critical exegesis, looms as a kind of totem of inexplicable evil. There is simply so much more to reveal about Iago than seems to be dream't of in this production's philosophy. Likewise Paula Langton made rather a weepy stick-figure of the usually protean Emilia (to be fair, she was far better as the pant-suited "Duchess" of Venice). Other ASP stalwarts like Michael Forden Walker and Doug Lockwood did rather indifferent work, I thought, and newcomer Brooke Hardman seemed a bit lost as Desdemona - although she's certainly an appealing and resourceful actress, whom I hope to see in other roles (she's a natural Beatrice or Rosaline). There was one sudden burst of acting interest late in the production, in Denise Marie's passionate turn as Bianca. Ms. Marie, who somehow survived training at the A.R.T., has been little seen on local stages (she's been on Broadway instead, in The Lion King). Let's hope that changes soon.

Musical chairs

The "Lazara" String Quartet at work in Opus. Photo by Andrew Brilliant.

Michael Hollinger's Opus (now at the New Rep through April 17) is the kind of solid new(ish) play that's just good enough that you wish it were better. What's more, you can't understand why it's not better. Hollinger is clearly a natural craftsman; he has an ear for nestling revelations in naturalistic dialogue, and a neat feel for how to punch up a scene. And he clearly knows the milieu of his play, the world of the world-class string quartet (Hollinger was trained as a violist before he turned to the theatre).

But why is his play nearly thirty minutes shorter than it should be (an unusual complaint, surely)? Why does the playwright pick up, then drop, a slightly-pointless framing device (now we're in a documentary/now we're not)? And why are the various hot political potatoes of the current classical music scene gingerly touched on, but never really grappled with?

You could argue that it's not fair to see through the pretty-good play that Opus actually is to the nearly-great play that it could have been (and feeling slightly cheated as a result). But I'm afraid that's kind of how the show went down for me, particularly given the drama's ridiculous conclusion (which turns on a rather unlikely bit of virtuosic versatility on the part of one musician, and in which another musician does something patently unthinkable). And I'm afraid that perception is precisely the kind of criticism the playwright should hear - because in Opus, he has played everything far too safe. Indeed, the PBS-style documentary that keeps intruding on his action only reminds us repeatedly of the audience he's tailoring his vision to (if he'd had Alan Alda pop in for a few bits of crinkly "wisdom," Hollinger might have achieved something like brilliant self-parody, but alas, no such luck).

To be blunt, in Opus we're basically stuck with a view of classical music designed for the Antiques Roadshow crowd (Hollinger has, in fact, written repeatedly for PBS). Thus the play touches on such questions as why so many gay classical musicians remain closeted, or how female players negotiate their seemingly-inevitable sexual objectification, without ever really probing the issues involved; these conflicts seem to operate like little suburban cultural touchstones (Oh, yes, gay people! And women!), with no actual salience or edge. And I really wonder why. After all, Hollinger is writing about a pretentiously "liberal" world in which women have to audition behind screens to get a job, and multi-millionaire conductors won't, or can't, discuss their obvious sexual preferences (and the success of a performer of color counts as a kind of cultural event). Opus toys with these and other explosive issues, but never really lights a fuse under any of them.

But you know, it's all good, I guess - or at least that's the feeling we get from the placid veneer of Opus, a feeling that we sense Hollinger has done a lot of clipping and pruning of his action to achieve. Thus, though the script is consistently absorbing, it's also pretty schematic. Hollinger has floated the excuse that this is because he has structured his play musically rather than dramatically, which I suppose someone with no real understanding of musical structure could possibly fall for. But viewers with more musical sophistication will find little more than a crude version of the "theme and variations" Hollinger promises, much less anything like sonata form (or any other kind of form). The script's just choppy, period.

That the individual scenes often work well, however, can't be denied, and the proto-stories that float behind the action are intriguing (and could be compelling if Hollinger gave any of them a real chance). The "Lazara" String Quartet (named for a mythical Strad-like violin-and-viola set played by its leads) is in crisis, as its violist has disappeared just weeks before a high-stakes appearance at the White House. The all-male group re-groups, however, with a new female member, who gradually discerns that her predecessor was the lead violinist's gay lover. And that he's not exactly no longer a player when it comes to the quartet's future. Meanwhile the group's lone horn dog begins to make his moves on her, while the remaining member discovers his long-dormant cancer may have returned (the quartet, as you can see, is alotted one dramatic crisis apiece).

These subplots don't so much interlace as collide, and the whole piece ends in a crash (literally), but the handsome production at the New Rep distracts us from these deficiencies with a sleek look and generally strong performances. Benjamin Evett, who was so hilarious last month in Indulgences, here essays the vanished violist of the "Lazara," a gay bad boy (named "Dorian" - get it?) who's not only a genius but also crazy, and chemically dependent (and probably something else clichéd, too). Evett does what he can, and is clearly up for anything, but Hollinger doesn't give him much that's specific to work with, and so he tends to lean on generic gay affectations and druggy, "buggy" tics. As Dorian's better (or arguably worse) half, the appealing Michael Kaye is in something like Evett's over-determined but underwritten boat, but perhaps hasn't realized he has to row it a little harder if he's going to make the script's big hairpin reversal credible. Better are Bates Wilder and Shelley Bolman as the cancer victim and the horn dog, respectively; Wilder wisely underplays his character's slow boil, while Bolman is surprisingly subtle as the group's sex-addicted, but self-aware, second fiddle. Perhaps the only nearly-weak link on this team is Becky Webber, as the quartet's female draft pick; but again, Hollinger has given her little to work with beyond generic naiveté and uncertainty. Meanwhile director Jim Petosa provides the production with a smooth sense of forward propulsion, and has drawn true ensemble playing from his quintet of actors. And the show looks smashing on Cristina Tedesco's elegant unit set.

Still, a sense of dissatisfaction lingers after the curtain falls. I'm certainly eager to hear more from Mr. Hollinger - with "more" being the operative word here. I hope in his next play this talented dramatist won't be afraid of an intermission, and won't "develop" his text into quite so polished a shell. I hope he follows his characters wherever they make take him (and us). The results may not be as publicity-friendly as Opus - but they just might make some beautiful music.