THE THEATER MIRROR, New England's LIVE Theater Guide
|
MARQUEE | USHER | SEATS |
INTERMISSION | CURTAIN |
16 December '03
Okay, I'm only a day late this week! (How the hell does Alistair Cooke do it?!?!? His weekly "Journal from America" over WBUR via the BBC is a continual delight and always sounds "finished" despite his rigorous deadline. I'm nowhere near as disciplined)
I come to this at 7:45 a m after coming wide awake and realizing I WAS wide awake, and spending time with a two-page review (in last Sunday's N.Y. TIMES Book Review) of five books about the slave-owners who founded America --- and that sent me scurrying to the keypad. It dovetailed perfectly with one of the two plays I saw this week:
11 dec MONTICEL' Boston Playwrights' Theatre
13 dec BACK TO BEFORE Wild Geese Productions BCA'S BLACK BOX
(Let me note that I have been "playing hookie" since early Sunday: I decided to revive the COMING, OPENINGS, and PLAYS pages of The Mirror, so I spent a day and a half transcribing a page and a half of listings from NEW ENGLAND ENTERTAINMENT DIGEST. The full job of filling the COMING ATTRACTIONS page will probably take another four days. It's mindless rote-work, which I love or hate by turns, but no one else since Matt Breton has volunteered to keep it up. Any wonder I look into the mirror some days and see only The Little Red Hen?)
But I digress --- probably to give myself time to think.
Both this week's plays are really unfinished, setting up a perfect "compare and contrast" situation. Dave McLaughlin who wrote "Back to Before" primarily writes for the screen, and some of his actors feature film-work in their bio's. McLaughlin directed his own play, and there is no credited lighting designer (Jenn Hazelton's set design is essentially a living-room), but everything would work better if this stage-play were filmed, preferrably for the smaller goldfish-bowl of television.
McLaughlin designated a pool of light far downstage-right as a "soliloquy-spot" to which every actor dutifully plodded through dim-outs to muse on things or to schmooze directly with the audience. The dead twin-brother about whom everyone in the play talks stares here at himself in a mirror, deciding that his joke about never paying what he owes him should be explained to his hot-headed bookie. His murder, and the revealed who (and why) of it, is the subject of murky clues and the oppressive subtext for all the bantering talk --- clues and subtext that often force the characters to ignore one another. The real surprise in the script is not so much whodunnit, but how two of the characters in the play could blandly blather on while their guilty secrets remain so totally bottled within.
Even the acting here seemed to me fine for television, terrible for the stage. Lines seemed rushed, line-endings swallowed, and everyone waited breathlessly for their cues to "start acting" as they started speaking --- as though waiting for Camera Three's light to go on indicating their close-ups. The supposed problem of whether the California rain would stop in time for them to take in dinner and a Chieftains concert at Hollywood Bowl --- instead of brooding over the St. Patrick's Day anniversary of the murder --- sounded aimlessly irrelevant to a cast all of whom really knew what the play's ending would be. In other words, everything seemed tentative, seemed --- unfinished.
Russell Lees, on the other hand, had a stunning cast (two-thirds of them sporting the Equity asterisk in the program) directed to perfection by Wesley Savick to bring his script (the title pronounced "MontiCHEL'" by the way) startlingly alive. The story's set in the terrifying days of 1800 when a 73-73 split in Electoral Votes tossed the presidency like a loose basketball into the House where Aaron Burr and not Tom Jefferson could come up successor to President John Adams. In fact two men played by Steven Barkhimer and Charles Weinstein are come to Monticel' to persuade or threaten or blackmail Nigel Gore's placidly secure Jefferson to throw the fight "for the good of the Nation."
That brangle --- as snappily and wittily written as anything from Gore Vidal, only better because bitten briefer --- is set aside by domestic matters. The brother of Sally Hemmings --- freed and living in wretched poverty "up North in Philadelphia" --- is back asking for his sister's freedom, so he may either make her his housekeeper or pimp her as a moneymaking whore. Sharifa Johnson Atkins plays Sally as quietly unconcerned, though the cost of freedom would be forsaking the apparently loving bed of the future United States President. In Marked contrast, Vincent E. Siders is a tall powerhouse actor of tornado intensity and subtle suggestion. In a pause or a gesture or even a stance he conveys hogsheads of compelling innuendo. It's a toss-up whether this part is brilliantly written, or brilliantly acted --- or possibly both?
And then, off in a croner all her own, is Jefferson's daughter Patsy --- married to a neurasthenic failure, but prattling about running dad's White House as substitute First-Lady. There is an unwritten tension between Sally and Patsy, and Birgit Huppuch's Patsy is an empty-headed Sothron belle with pretensions where her brains ought to be. Her broken, unfinished sentences eventually imply at bottom a total absence of mind.
Everything here is excellent in detail, from Gail Astrid Buckley's accurate costumes to Richard Chambers' collage-like set to Wesley Savick's carefull direction.
What's unfinished here is Russell Lees' script.
I confess I fell asleep at The Huntington's production of Lees's "Nixon's Nixon" while I was waiting for something interesting to happen on stage. The reverse is true here: the script, from the first pair of startlingly backbiting political sound-bites from the day, is intriguing. There are delicious spates of dialogue here, like the raisins in my cereal-bowl, and he has made characters it must be a joy for actors to inhabit, going at it in crackling-good scenes --- that don't add up to anything but tour-de-force bravura.
In another vein, this was a serendipity-laden week. Coming out of "Back to Before" I ran into Wesley Savick in his act-break from "My Life with The Kringle Kult" for a few moments of chat. And in the act-break of "Monticel'" I struck up a conversation with a lady sitting behind me who remarked that we both thought at least a lot of the play so far as funny. It turned out that, enjoying the entire play though we were, we'd both come initially to see Birgit Huppuch --- I because I find her an intense and chameleon-like actress whose ability to BE onstage is often overlooked by directors and producers --- and she because Birgit is her daughter! I realized in our few moments of conversation that Birgit's taste and insightful intelligence are, probably, genetic...
It's 10:35 a m and I must shower. I'm having lunch with an actress-turning director at Beth Israel (near where she works), where I will leave a phial of blood with the resident vampire and have a conversation I now think may be irrelevant with my Primary Care Practitioner.
Film at eleven....
Love,
===Anon.
( a k a larry stark )