Tag: Play

One of Tennessee Williams’ final plays, A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur, was first produced in 1979, four years before he died.  This piece is rarely revived.  The relatively new company La Femme Theatre has a mission to celebrate and explore the universal female experience.  As an added bonus, one of my favorite performers, the usually hilarious and talented Kristine Nielsen (Hir, Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike) costars.

Creve Coeur is a park located in St. Louis.  The setting is a small working class apartment in 1937.  Bodey (Ms. Nielsen) shares her apartment with Dorothea (Jean Lichty), a high school civics teacher with more than a crush on the school principal.  The play opens with her waiting for a promised phone call from him.  She is classically written in the Blanche DuBois mold; fading beauty and delusional dreamer.  Every Sunday, Bodey packs a lunch to go to Creve Coeur with a not-so-subtle attempt to fix Dorothea up with her slovenly brother.

Despair, desperation and loneliness are key themes in this work.  Miss Gluck (Polly McKie) is the deeply grieving upstairs neighbor who has just lost her mother and is living alone.  The kind-hearted Bodey is consoling her with coffee and crullers every day.  Dorothea cannot deal with Miss Gluck’s depressed countenance, hysterical crying and aggressive ranting in her native German.  Dorothea’s coworker Helena (Annette O’Toole) makes a surprise visit and her haughtiness sparks conflict with Bodey’s calculated kindness and sets the tone for an exercise in verbally eviscerating combat.

A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur is a tragicomedy with four meaty roles for actresses to play.  The meanness of women (especially to each other) is certainly on display here but with added layers of fear, dreams, self-protection and gut instincts.  Everyone is damaged; some have more highly developed coping skills.  The performances are mixed.  Ms. Nielsen’s tragic moments are heart wrenching in their emotional availability.  Her comedic line readings are directly from the “Best of Kristine Nielsen” playbook.  Fans know what that means.  Here it occasionally registers a bit too big but admittedly this play has slow moments to fill.

Ms. Lichty and Ms. McKie nicely inhabit their very different roles despite the nuttiness of the plotlines.  Ms. O’Toole’s characterization of the highfalutin Helena seemed quite starchy for my tastes; too one dimensionally prim for all the harshness written into the role.  The play is unabashedly kooky so these actresses have to traverse massive mood swings.  Creve Coeur is a long one act piece and the tempo dragged a number of times.  Austin Pendleton directed these ladies to play the scenes fairly bluntly.  Oddly the set designer (Harry Feiner) and the director were out of synch.  Sometimes there would be eavesdropping near the imaginary door between rooms.  Other times these women directly confronted each other face to face over furniture where there had recently been an imaginary wall.

There are good reasons to see A Lovely Sunday in Creve Coeur, particularly if you enjoy Tennessee Williams.  Last spring, Classic Stage Company (with the Transport Group) mounted an outstanding version of Summer and Smoke.  His plays are rich with imperfect souls.  If you come to see this production, sit very close to the front.  Some lines were hard to hear in Row A.  I understood why people in the back were complaining on the way out.  For emotionally scarring melodrama to work, it has to be audible.

www.lafemmetheatreprodutions.org

theaterreviewsfrommyseat/summerandsmoke

Lillian Hellman’s second Broadway play was a one week flop titled Days to Come.  It followed her triumphant The Children’s Hour and was staged prior to oft-revived The Little Foxes.  In his 1936 review for the New York Times, famed critic Brooks Atkinson wrote “it is a bitter play, shot through with hatred and written with considerable heat.”  Noted for presenting lost and forgotten works, this play is getting another look at the Mint Theater Company.

Mr. Atkinson did write that this drama was “elusive” and that is certainly the case.  Days to Come is about the wealthy Rodman family in Callom, Ohio, a small town of Cleveland.  They have owned a brush factory for multiple generations.  The workers have gone on strike and the play begins with the hiring of strikebreakers.  Thugs is a proper description.  The weak leader of the clan is Andrew (Larry Bull) who clearly has marital issues with his frequently disappearing wife Julie (Janie Brookshire).

Much of the play seems centered around family dynamics which include spinster sister Cora, played with appropriate jitters and indignation by Mary Bacon.  She collects and rearranges figurines in between belittling the servants.  The family lawyer and Andrew’s lifelong friend and advisor seems to have a hand in everything.  Naturally the thugs spark some predictable drama and tensions in the town escalate.

On the side of the workers is a Leo Whalen (Roderick Hill) who earnestly advises the strikers who are led by family loyalist Thomas Firth (an excellent Chris Henry Coffey).  Back and forth we journey from the factory strike angle to the broader family drama.  The dialogue seemed forced and not quite natural.  At first I thought the uneven acting might be to blame but the play is thematically unfocused so that could be the inherent problem.  What I loved about Days to Come is that Ms. Hellman does not really take a side for or against the family or the strikers.  Everyone sort of loses here and perhaps that is why Mr. Atkinson called her play “bitter.”  I felt the inconclusive gray area to be most interesting aspect of her writing.  Otherwise, this revival is mildly thought provoking and mediocre.

www.mintheater.org

When exiting the theater after Fairview has come to an end, my first reaction was a need for reflection time.  Jackie Sibblies Drury has written a shockingly fascinating big broad comedy that is structurally dissonant (for lack of a better term).  I will not spoil the enjoyment of this play for anyone.  Ms. Drury has serious observations to share on the subject of race.  How we think about race.  How race is used for entertainment.  How race is divisive.  How human beings are all the same underneath a layer of skin.

Fairview begins as an African American family comedy.  It’s Grandma’s birthday and her daughter is throwing a bash at her house.  Her demanding and critical sister arrives.  Her husband is helping her get ready but her stress level is so high she cannot relax.  The family revels in the fact that they are known for dancing.  Dancing does indeed happen and the entire family’s spirit soars together, if only for that moment.  Familial comedies with bite are common.  What makes Fairview so unique are the layers that get added on and then multiply.

Sarah Benson’s direction is assured.  This is a complicated, absorbing piece of theater which respects the audience but forces them to think outside the box.  Raja Feather Kelly choreographed Fairview and her work has a big impact.  The entire cast miraculously balances caricature and farce with layered dimensions of depth and realness.  But the playwriting is the star here.  Ms. Drury has many surprises up her sleeve.  I won’t spoil them and you should not miss them.  This play is a co-production with Berkeley Rep which will present Fairview in October.

www.sohorep.org

www.berkeleyrep.org

At one point during Ivo van Hove’s production of the interestingly creative yet maddeningly tortoise-paced production of The Damned, a crucial line appears in English supertitles.  “The complicity of the German people is the miracle of the Third Reich.”  A headline in today’s New York Times:  “As Trump Struggles With Helsinki’s Fallout, Congress Faces a New Charge:  Complicity.”  A very interesting time for this piece to be showcased in the large Park Avenue Armory space in collaboration with the Comédie-Française who premiered this work at the Avignon Festival in 2016.

The Damned is a renowned 1969 film by Luchino Visconti.  It was nominated for a Best Screenplay Oscar and named Best Foreign Film by the National Board of Review.  The plot centers around the Essenbeck family and their steelworks business as Adolph Hitler is coming to power in 1930’s Germany.  The story is a thinly veiled reference to the Essen-based Krupp family of steel industrialists.  A soap opera that would make the TV show Dynasty blush, The Damned has murders, double crossings, incest, child molestation, a homosexual orgy and a row of coffins placed on the side of a massive set.

The play begins with the 1933 burning of the Reischtag (home of the German parliament) one month after Hitler became Chancellor.  Building on anti-communist hysteria, the event was immediately politicized.  Hitler convinced President Hindenburg to issue a decree suspending most civil liberties including freedoms of expression, the press, the right of public assembly, as well as eliminating the secrecy of the post and the telegraph.  Four months later Hitler carried out a series of political executions in order to consolidate his power.  The subjects of those attacks were the SA (Storm Troopers), millions of whom helped the Nazi’s rise to power since the 1920’s.  The leader of the SA was Ernst Rohm whose brutish behavior, heavy drinking and homosexuality offended conservative elements.  The Night of the Long Knives is portrayed as a stylized orgy scene before turning into a bloody execution.

Using a camera, the play is also projected on a large screen.  There are close-ups and historical footage used effectively to enhance the storytelling.  My reaction was appreciation for creativity rather than a total embrace.  The pacing was deliberately very slow.  The repeating processions to the coffins was visually arresting the first time, with diminished results thereafter.  The orgy scene was indulgent and would have had the same impact in half the time.  If The Damned was a half hour shorter, I believe it would have been just as stylized without also being plodding.

The subject matter, however, is beyond intriguing for today’s audiences.  A politician rising to power attacking established personal freedoms, including the press.  A political party embedding itself with the armament business.  A warning that the complicity of people led to the end of democracy and the rise of the Third Reich.  The play ends spectacularly.  I walked out of the theater pondering how the tale of America at the beginning of the 21st Century will be told eighty years from now.

www.armoryonpark.org