Tennessee Williams | The Glass Menagerie / 2010

rise and shine

by Douglas Messserli

 

Tennessee Williams The Glass Menagerie / this production premiered March 24, 2010 at the Laura Pels Theatre, New York / the performance I saw of this production was on October 17, 2010 at the Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles

 

Although Williams' wondrous The Glass Menagerie is a seemingly simple play, it is one of the most difficult to perform because it depends almost entirely upon the actors' interpretations and, most particularly, on tone. If the characters, particularly the dominant mother, Amanda, are too harsh we lose much of the author's comedy; I agree with Frank Dwyer's statement in the theater program, that Williams is a comic writer. Yet Amanda cannot be simply a comic figure or the audience will not be able to comprehend her son Tom's desperation and his final act of leaving his mother and sister to fend for themselves.

    Laura must be shy, almost invisible, yet be able to stir up one's sympathy and even love. Finally, the right balance between these three figures is extraordinarily difficult to attain, a problem I perceived as early as 1966 when I saw a production—also proclaimed as a comic portrayal—at the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre.

     After a successful run in New Haven at the Long Wharf Theater and rave reviews from New York critics for its performances at Roundabout's Laura Pels Theatre, I looked forward to its reincarnation in Los Angeles. Judith Ivey's Amanda Wingfield had been described as a performance of a lifetime, and few, if any, critics found fault with the whole.

     Ivey is quite remarkable in her role as the imperious, scheming, prompting, praising, condemning and, at times, simply silly mother who keeps her children close, out of both worry over her daughter's fate and her own neediness. She is a monster, but, as Ivey makes clear, for the most part she is a hilarious one. Her incessant greeting to each morning, "Rise and Shine," may cause Tom to crawl deeper into the covers, but it is also a desperate command for him to match her pact to make the best of life, despite the fact that she has had little with which to work. It is almost a prayer for her children to live up to their potentialities—for Tom's sexual and creative awakening and for Laura's ability to charm and, hopefully, socially engage, even if it is only in the reflection of her glass figurines.

     Tom is at best a dreamer, at worst a slacker, a man, who like his father, is soon to desert her. Laura is nearly agoraphobic, so shy that she can hardly communicate; accordingly, there no hope that she can ever land a husband or a job. As Tom repeats throughout the play, she does nothing but play old records and care for her little glass treasures, made up mostly of small animals which her mother describes as her "glass menagerie."

     It is a miracle, accordingly, that despite the fact that things—including her children—have a "way of turning out so badly," that Amanda meets each day with the humor she does. Ivey captures both her determination and her almost girlish delight in living with a great gusto. If you cannot exactly call her performance naturalistic or even natural—the continual dropping of words at the end of sentences and long pauses in those same sentences often make her art feel affected—we nonetheless believe her acting, and we come to comprehend the woman behind.

     Yet this play is far from a perfect rendition of Williams' great art. In my estimation several aspects of director Gordon Edelstein's production take the work in a wrong direction from the very first instant of the play. Whereas most of the action of Williams' reading version of his work occurs in the Wingfield house, Edelstein begins it in a hotel room where Tom, now a budding young writer, attempts to type out the play's first passages. We recognize the autobiographical details in Williams' published version of the play, but by exaggerating these, by insisting that what we are witnessing what was written by Tom, he moves the play away from its dream-like quality and puts it into the mundane world of script writing. In the published version of the play, Tom is dressed in this first scene as a Merchant Seaman, not as an aspiring author. The fusing of the hotel room and a livable house, moreover, distracts from what I see as the focal point of the play, family life.

     At the same time, Edelstein and set designer Michael Yeargan have abandoned Williams' suggestion for a screen or scrim on which words and images appear, announcing each scene, which parallels Tom's nightly activity of attending the movies, and further takes us into the delusional world of the Wingfields. The screen also adds another dimension of humor to the play.

     Having determined that Tom is a young Tennessee, actor Patch Darragh, as if channeling Williams, twangs away in high southern, slightly effeminate voice that I found rather irritating. In my reading, Tom, in some respects, is as dreamy as his sister, despite the fact that he is the narrator. It is, after all, described by the author as a "dream play," in the manner of Strindberg.

     But in this version Tom doggedly dukes it out with his mother, stretching his gentler memories, at times, into one-liners as if he were playing vaudeville. While there is no doubt that in his dreadful imprisonment in the Wingfield home he has learned how to turn his spleen into verbal wit, Tom must remain likeable if we are to endure his ultimate act of abandonment. Along with his whining invective, at times I longed for Tom, like his father, to fall in love with "long distance" quick. As unendurable as life with Amanda Wingfield might be, I'd give anything for her to call me with a sympathetic plea that I resubscribe to a magazine.

     While in the earlier scenes, Keira Keeley found a good balance between Laura's severe shyness and the gradual revelation of an inner life, in the important scene of "The Gentleman Caller," Keeley seemed to transform her character into a borderline histrionic, which turned that important breakthrough encounter into an even more painful experience.

     The hyped-up energy of Ben McKenzie's Gentleman caller did not help. Yes, in Williams' original, he does stretch his body out in shadow upon the wall, but need he turn the act into a series of jumping jacks to make his point? Not only did we fear that he might break Laura's glass collection but, in his vigorous antics, that he might crush her as well. That scene is all about two young people discovering and sharing a certain affectionate gentleness that family life has never before offered—at least to Laura. He may indeed have another woman to whom he is engaged, but for the moment all his intentions are focused on the young woman in front of him, who comes momentarily alive; it is perhaps the only moment of potential sexuality that she will have in her life. If she is to psychically survive she must carry this moment in her imagination. But in his energetic portrayal of the young man with a future she can never have, McKenzie drew our attention away from Laura at the very moment when Keeley nearly buried her character in her portrayal of clinical "avoidant personality disorder."

     It is utterly amazing that the play did still survive somewhat intact, and strongly moved its audience. Ivey clearly kept the play alive simply by her captivating acting, embodying the comical survivor—equal almost to Beckett's Vladimir and Estragon—Williams created.

 

Los Angeles, Halloween 2010

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (November 2010).

 

Murray Mednick | Mayakovsky and Stalin / 2018

white lace and red poetry

by Douglas Messerli

 

Murray Mednick (author and director) Mayakovsky and Stalin / Los Angeles, Lounge Theatre / I saw the production with Pablo Capra on July 22, 2018

 

The legendary Murray Mednick’s most recent play, Mayakovsky and Stalin, which I attended yesterday with my editor Pablo Capra, might be described as less a traditional drama than as a kind of “parade” of figures in the early decades of Stalin’s long and brutish rule of Russia. Indeed, except for brief interchanges between the dictator (Maury Sterling) and his wife, Nadya (Casey McKinnon) and between the poet Mayakovsky (Daniel Dorr) and his married lover, Lilya (Laura Liguori), the characters—aligned in chairs with red-colored seats along the back of the small theater stage—come forward one by one to speak out about their values and ideas. Rhetoric rather than dialogue dominates this work, as each attempts to explain in a series of short speeches who they are and why they are driven to act the way they do.

 

    That is not to say there is no heart or emotional energy to the work. The great Soviet poet is impassioned with his homeland in Georgia, with language, with—to a certain extent—with the Communist Party, and his love of Lilya, as well as his friendship with her complaisant husband, Osip (Andy Hirsch). And Mayakovsky, despite his belief in the party, is also doubtful of the ability of his fellow countrymen to make the necessary changes and, like everyone else, is quite terrified by Stalin and his henchman. After all, even though Mednick’s play does not represent this, Stalin would eventually kill and destroy almost all of the early believers in Communism who worked as writers, artists, dancers, and in theater (as Mayakovsky himself did). 

       The poet’s cynicism, voiced several times in this work, is perhaps best expressed in a comic poem which I, myself, translated several years ago:

 

                      the tale of the little red hat

 

                      Once upon a time there was a Cadet*

                      a little Cadet who had a red hat.

 

                      But apart from that hat that capped

                      his head there was in him no shred of red.

 

                      But quick as revolution began

                      the Cadet ran home to get his red

 

                      tam. They all lived happily—

                      brother, father and Cadet granddad—

 

                      as they had until one day a wind blew

                      right through his hair to tear the red

 

                      hat from his head and reveal his black

                      roots. The revolting red wolf got his licks

 

                      of the boots and ate his way up to that Cadet’s

                      knees but was still so starved he carved

 

                      up to the heart. So please when you’re about to start

                      politics don’t forget how that Cadet got et.

 

*Cadet was the nickname for the Constitutional Democrats, the part of the political center.

 

As Maykovsky notes in Mednick’s play, he likes to rhyme.

 

    Stalin’s shuttered wife, Nadya, is represented by the playwright as a parallel version of Mayakovsky. An intelligent and sophisticated woman raised herself in a Communist family, Nadya might like better to live the sexual openly and more feminist-oriented Lilya Brik. But, of course, as the wife of the supreme leader, she is now allowed such choices; either she joins him in his social forays or lives only as a dedicated mother to his children, Vasiliy and Svetlana (the latter of whom later emigrated to the West). Closeted in a world of lace collected by Stalin’s first wife, who died under mysterious circumstances, Nadya increasing displays her dissatisfaction, not only with her personal life but with the various purges of individuals (doctors, artists, etc.) by her husband. She is aided by her trusted servant, Masha (Ann Colby Stocking), who is a true-believer in religion of the Orthodox school. But like Mayakovsky, she increasingly is given over to bouts of despair and disbelief.

 

    And then, of course, there is Stalin, a crude and rude dictator who sees himself as the representative of history itself. Like all such leaders his entire life is given over the great “cause” he believes he represents. There must be someone at the top, he declares, to make sure the Party progresses and moves forward in its intended path—even though Mednick makes clear that that “path” is something that is constantly shifting under the feet of the would-be believers. Sound familiar? (At least our current leader has only a made a “killing,” to our knowledge, in the marketplace; although his has bragged that nobody would take him to account if he might gun someone down in the street). Fortunately, Mednick does not milk the slight similarities, and centers his work on the subject at hand.

      Serving as a kind of chorus and, one might argue, as a cabaret host to these harangues and interchanges is Max Faugno, a Russian Jew who was born years later in the US of figures who left the Soviet Union to escape Stalin’s endless wrath. Mednick, however, gives him wide range to speak in the present and the future, commenting on and connecting the “parade” of figures he puts before us.

      Obviously in such a culture, the center cannot hold. Mayakovsky takes a gun to his heart in an apparent suicide in 1930—although some claimed that they heard two gunshots, and many suspected that it was Stalin’s thugs who oversaw his “suicide.”

      In the 1932, Nadya took the same kind of gun and shot herself in the heart as well, a self-admitted victim to her husband’s reign.

      In short, these two very different figures suffered similarly through that period as brave and talented individuals whose very names were, at least temporarily wiped from history’s slate. After his wife’s death, Stalin never spoke her name; and only in 1988 did Mikhail Shatrov write in the Soviet press about what had happened, even though in the US several had commented on the truth long before.

    Mayakovsky’s great poems and plays were banned until Lilya wrote Stalin (also, incidentally a Georgian by birth) asking him to redeem the poet’s career. Amazingly, he did, declaring him the only great poet of the revolution.

     If Mednick’s work, accordingly, is somewhat static in the telling of this complex series of tales, it is centered upon matters of the heart, a work about people who had given their hearts to Communism, Stalinism, and their comrades, all of whom, in turn, broke their hearts before they were driven to explicitly demonstrate that in their desperate actions.

   With projected photographs (some of them, such as Mayakovsky’s body after his death, quite amazing) and a wonderful cast, Mednick has taken history and brought it to life through the telling rather than the showing. How can you “show,” after all, such broken hearts?

 

Los Angeles, July 23, 2018

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera and Performance (July 2018).

 

J. B. Priestley | An Inspector Calls / 2019

the circle of time

by Douglas Messerli

 

J. B. Priestley An Inspector Calls / directed by Stephen Daldry for The National Theatre of Great Britain’s Landmark / the production I saw was with Howard Fox at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, Bram Goldsmith Theater on January 26, 2019

 

J. B. Priestley’s 1945 “thriller,” An Inspector Calls—at least as represented by director Stephen Daldry in The National Theatre of Great Britain’s Landmark production—begins with a young street boy moving quickly down the aisle of the theater onto the apron the stage, trying to make his entry into this play. Given the heavy, seemingly velvet red curtains of the old style of British theaters, however, he cannot enter. He is excluded from the reality of the world the socialist Priestley represents as surely as all the other figures of the day, the young men spinning off into World War I—the time of the play is just prior to the First World War, and by extension the soldiers of World War II, during which this play was first performed in the USSR before it finally reached the stages of war-time England. By the time it reached the American stage in October 1947, the war had ended—the year I was born, but still with some significant resonance. The play was selected as one of the 10 best works of that year by the renowned Burns Mantle historical annuals of plays of the American stage.

       When the curtains do, rather dottily rise, the young boy is immediately shooed off by the maid for the Birling family, who in a rather elegant corner-place house, are celebrating a seemingly regal dinner, announcing the marriage between the Berling’s daughter, Sheila (Lianne Harvey) and the son of the competitor of the father of the Berling clan, Arthur (Andrew Maclin). Arthur is particularly delighted by the new alliance, as is his wife, Sybil (Christine Kavanagh), who together perceive the new relationship will surely help Arthur to achieve knighthood, possibly providing even greater wealth to their already well-endowed lives.

       Beautifully performed in a narrow, cornered doll-house in a rather frightful and claustrophobic conception of an elegant British townhouse, these characters, we can even perceive through the windows, are convinced of their entitlement, even though when they come to the balcony to look out over the world they believe they control, they must crouch down in order to move out—the perfect metaphor that Daldry’s brilliant set designer, Ian MacNeil, created to help us perceive their ridiculous pretensions. Despite their industrial power, they are as removed from the real world as the young boy and other fleeting street figures are from theirs.

      Quite stunningly, Priestley has recreated a world so close to the just-post-World War I world of masterwork of George Bernard Shaw’s 1920 play Heartbreak House, that it almost convinces you that it might be as witty. Indeed, Harvey had previously played, in England, in a production that great play.

      Unfortunately, An Inspector Calls is not as truly a clever play except in its sort of well-made-play conceits. Enter Inspect Goole (Liam Brennan), a Scottish version of Hercule Poirot, who seems always to know more about the figures he is interlocuting than they know about themselves. Reminding each member of the family of Eva Smith, late Daisy Renton, by showing them photographs of the young girl, who, he claims, has just committed suicide by swallowing an entire bottle of disinfectant—one imagines the only way she might have been able to cleanse herself of this family’s behavior to her—he spins an incredible tale wherein the patron the family first fired her from her job in his factory when she, along with other union members, argued for slightly higher wages; followed by the sterling young Sheila, who demanded she be fired from a local dress shop “on a whim,” since the beautiful woman seemed to smile when the wealthy girl suddenly perceived herself as not looking good in a dress.

      It appears that even her fiancé, Croft, had an affair with her, a young woman he felt sorry for when he encountered her in a bar. Mrs. Berling, the head of a local charity denied any money for Daisy Renton, now impregnated with their son, Eric’s child (Hamish Riddle). If there were ever a better case for the idea of a family circle squaring off against the working-class world, whether or not Eva/Daisy represents many or simply one woman, I cannot imagine it.

      So, we perceive, this family, the Burlings are truly representative of the evils of social strata which helped create World War I—and by implication World War II as well. Case closed.

      But Priestley’s play, oddly enough, has yet more on its mind, which truly does make this work a much darker condemnation of the social order of things. Despite the total destruction of their household—literally played out in the crash of the entire contents of the house upon the stage with their supposedly precious dinnerware spilled across the stage—they suddenly regain a strange sense of possibility when Croft returns to say that, in fact, there is no Inspector Goole. He has checked it out, and he is not on the force. What’s more, after a phone call, they discover, no suicide has been reported for weeks. No one has died. The entire “inspection” has been a fraud.

      Croft and the elders celebrate their redemption, yet Eric and his sister, the youth of this play cannot embrace this shift in sensibility. They truly embrace their guilt, recognizing their own involvement in a world of horror their elders have created. It is a horrible moment, a recognition, as in our own time, that the only hope of true redemption can come from our youth. 

     As the elders nearly dance in joy to what they perceive as a celebration of their righteousness, the phone rings again, this time reporting that indeed a young girl has just been found dead after swallowing an entire bottle of disinfectant; the inspector is on his way.

      Like J. W. Dunne, by whom he was influenced, Priestley believed in a sense of precognitive time, suggesting that time was in fact “serial,” and that what we often saw might happen, in dreams and perceptions, before it occurred. Investigating dreams of many of the English population both Priestley and Dunne were convinced that we often perceived things before they might happen. If nothing else, however, we might perceive that Inspector Goole in this play, a “ghoul” or a “ghost”—who also keeps disappearing off stage at moments in the production of the play—is a figure who is both reminding the family of their sins and warning them of their fates as in a Greek drama.

      The War (I and II) was there already, and their doll-house of reality had been destroyed, just as the German’s strafe of the wealthy, lit-up mansion of the family in Heartbreak House. And just as in the Shaw play, if they are saved for the moment, they will be faced soon after for the failures of their lives. Fate may be circular after all.

 

Los Angeles, January 28, 2019

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (January 2019).

Taylor Mac | Hir / 2019

hey jude

by Douglas Messerli

 

Taylor Mac Hir / Los Angeles, Odyssey Theatre Ensemble / Howard Fox and I attended the matinee performance on Sunday, January 27, 2019

 

Don't carry the world upon your shoulder

 

For well you know that it's a fool

 

Who plays it cool

By making his world a little colder

Na na na naa-naa

 

The noted playwright and performance artist Taylor Mac—who last year appeared in Los Angeles at the Ace Theatre in his delirious A 24-Decade History of Popular Music and more recently in a performance at UCLA, has now brought his play (previously performed at San Francisco’s Magic Theatre and in New York) to Los Angeles’ excellent Odyssey Theatre for the occasion of their 50th anniversary.

       Mac (who prefers the sexual signification of judy) does not herself appear in this production, but clearly represents the playwright/performer’s sensibility. Yet, in this play, as director Bart DeLorenzo argues, begins in a small home kitchen that might almost be in Death of a Salesman or A Raisin in the Sun. Frankly, I disagree. This is neither a home set in New York area or in the Chicago black projects. Mac grew up in Stockton, and his set is quite precisely a suburban tract-houses of California, which truly does make a vast difference. And the play, about a returning dishonorably charged veteran, Isaac Connor (Zack Gearing), for doing cocaine. His job, one of worst one can possibly imagine, was piecing together body parts of blown-up soldiers in Afghanistan. Is it any wonder that he is not quite ready to come home into a world that has blown up all gender differences and created a total havoc of family life that he never before experienced?

      His formerly toxic masculine father, Arnold (Ron Bottitta), while he has been away, has suffered a serious stroke, which has allowed his formerly abused wife, Paige (Cynthia Kania)—who has previously had to deal with her husband’s sexual philandering, particularly with her own hairdresser cutting away the wife’s hair to make her look as unappealing as she might, and with spousal rape—now aided by the fact that her previous daughter, Maxine, is now transitioning to the role of a male, Max (played by the real transgender actor Puppett).

      This world is not of the modernist conception but is closer to a strange mash-up of Frank Gilroy’s 1964 tearful drama, The Subject Was Roses and Sam Shepard’s Buried Child—both plays about soldiers returning home to broken families—along with a heavy dash of British playwright Enda Walsh. No, Dorothy, we are no longer in mid-century modernist kitchen dramas.

       The kitchen, including the entire house, has been totally thrown into chaos by Paige, who now refuses to do normal housework and who suddenly has been completely freed from any responsibility of housewifery duties. She, finally, has been able to humiliate her half-dead husband in the way he previously dominated her, forcing him to wear a frilly dress and clown-makeup, while she and Max take in cultivating trips of imagination to Europe and the world of museums, which she hopes, now that he has returned, Isaac might join in.

       What she can’t comprehend is that her soldier boy has not transitioned into her new world, but still desires the normative patterns of the past, the clean piles of clothes she spent years washing and ironing, the disinfected counter and table tops, a father who might even be able to demand his rights.

       Mac joyfully and quite humorously opposes the old world with the “new,” mocking both. The audience, mostly orderly West Side Angelenos surely appreciate the orderliness he recreates in his mother and “brother’s” absence, but also cannot help but celebrate the redemptive chaos Paige has now created.

       Yet, we also know that she and Max are truly headed for doom, having sold the house on a kind reverse mortgage condition (centered upon the death of the father) they will surely soon be totally homeless, living out their crazy dreams of total freedom on the streets.

 

      In this play, however, it is the returning soldier Isaac who is sent out to live on the streets after he angrily and violently lashes out against what he perceives as the totally absurd actions of his mother and his clearly selfish now brother, who can talk only about “his” transition and masturbatory love of men.

         Each of these family members, as Mac has hinted, is a kind of Trumpian figure, who cannot allow anyone else to define what they believe to be the truth. In a world of hurt and pain there can be no subjective and agreed upon reality. These family figures live each in a world of their own definitions. No one even has time, in this vision of the family unit, to even clear up the piss fallen to the floor from the diapered father, who no longer can comprehend his family role or his previous sins. The family “circle” has become a series of standoffs.

      There is no “right” here, all are trapped in worlds of their own making, without any way to rejoin what was previously, at least, a failed family unit. Present/past, order/chaos are terms of war against which any shared empathy has no chance in Hir, one of the pronouns that Max has chosen for “ze” self. Love has clearly lost in the process and each of these family members attempt to transition into a world they have not yet quite imagined might allow all of them to coexist.

      If this play is often very funny, it’s also quite terrifying, after just seeing the 1945 drama An Inspector Calls, at just how similar the family breakdown in this contemporary drama is to that of the figures who led us to both World Wars. There is no right “hir,” only a terribly loneliness that will lead them all into a corner from which they may never escape.

 

Los Angeles, January 29, 2019

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (January 2019).