Tag: Play

Produced off-Broadway in 1991 and later made into a film with Meryl Streep, Diane Keaton and Leonardo DiCaprio, Marvin’s Room has been exhumed (or buried for good) by the Roundabout Theater on Broadway this summer.  Here are the essentials:  Marvin, unseen throughout, is dying and his daughter Bessie (Lili Taylor) has chosen to live in Florida to take care of him and his wife for the last twenty years.  She now has leukemia.  An estranged sister and her kids take a trip to see if there is a bone marrow match.  Who did the right thing and who did the wrong thing?  All of this is framed in sort of an absurdist comedy that includes a wisecracking doctor and mostly unfunny one liners.

A small, intimate character play thrust on a large stage does not help at all.  The actors are lost amidst the space.  I was in Orchestra Row F and had to concentrate hard to hear what they were saying despite the fact that much of the time the cast is downstage.  On the way out, people were talking about not being able to hear key speeches.  The set was oddly spacious with a turntable that sometimes moved chairs and benches two or three feet during scenes for no discernible reason at all.  When you notice how many times the actor’s faces are not lit because another person is in the way, it’s hard to praise the lighting design.

The only performance I enjoyed was the troubled son Hank, played by Jack DiFalco who at least developed a full character, one who is in a mental institution for burning the family house down.  (Yes, really.)  The principles were just milling about and, in many cases, mumbling.  The New York Times review of Janeane Garofalo’s performance called her “such a brilliant underplayer that I could hardly tell the difference between Lee’s awfulness and her kindness.”  Bullshit.  The only possible way this play could work is for everyone to be ACTING, in capital letters.  This is not subtle stuff.   This is a play where a costumed animal character rescues Bessie when she faints at Disney World.   (Yes, really.)

The blame for this production of Marvin’s Room has to lie firmly with the director, Anne Kauffman, who has done fine, if not exceptional, work in past seasons that I enjoyed;  Marjorie Prime, Detroit, Sundown Yellow Moon and Belleville.  An unfortunate Broadway directorial debut in a production that can only be graded as poor.

www.roundabouttheater.org

From Wikipedia:  “Nineteen eighty-four, often published as 1984, is a dystopian novel published in 1949 by English author George Orwell.  The novel is set in Airstrip One (formerly known as Great Britain), a province of the superstate Oceania in a world of perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance and public manipulation.”

Adapted and directed by Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan, 1984 lands on Broadway after it debuted in the West End in 2013.  The play has received a lot of press, noting that it’s making theatergoers faint, vomit, scream at the actors from their seats, and get in fights.  I saw none of that but I will add that a young lady turned to her mom after it was over and said, “sorry, I thought this was a musical.”  1984 does include rough scenes, albeit brilliantly executed and unforgettable.

An inherently violent and disturbing book has been brought to three dimensional life and the result is incredibly theatrical, uncannily in the present time and, yes, uncomfortable.  Adventurous types will be rewarded by watching a knockout performance by Tom Sturridge as Winston, the cautious rebel at the center of this story.  On Saturdays, 1984 is performed at 5:00 and 9:00.  Hard to imagine pulling this role off eight times a week, no less twice in one evening.  Bravo.

Olivia Wilde (Julia) and Reed Birney (O’Brien) co-star in this production, both inhabiting this world and their characters with restrained intensity.  I enjoyed watching the entire cast, with Wayne Duvall (Parsons) and Michael Potts (Charrington) as particular standouts.  The set design, use of projections and lighting is top drawer.

The publication of 1984 popularized the adjective Orwellian, which describes official deception, secret surveillance and manipulation of recorded history by a totalitarian or authoritarian state.  Winston’s job, as a matter of fact, is to rewrite the historical record so that it always supports the party line. Written in 1948, George Orwell brought us the phrase “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.”   The time for this exceptional play is now.  Run.

www.thehudsonbroadway.com

The Little Foxes first opened on Broadway in 1939 with Tallulah Bankhead as Regina Hubbard Giddens, the woman at the center of this story which takes place in a small Alabama town in 1900.  The play is a rich feast of family dysfunction and greed set in the south when times and fortunes had changed after the Civil War.  Other actresses who played this juicy role on Broadway included Anne Bancroft, Elizabeth Taylor and Stockard Channing.  Bette Davis did the movie.  I had never seen the play or the film until now.

This Manhattan Theater Club production stars Laura Linney and Cynthia Nixon who alternate the role of strong-willed Regina with her fragile sister-in-law Birdie in different performances.  I saw Ms. Linney as Regina and Ms. Nixon as Birdie in their Tony Award nominated roles.

The Little Foxes deserves its status as a classic.  The good versus bad morality tale is a bit obvious but who cares when the actors have such interesting characters to play, fantastic confrontations and, especially in the case of Birdie, heart-breaking self-revelations.  My Cynthia Nixon theater experiences have been mixed in the past:  Rabbit Hole (enjoyed) and Wit (not so much).  Ms. Nixon was simply awesome here, fully disappearing into the character of Birdie with every big moment perfectly realized.  She won the Tony against an extremely strong group of nominees from Sweat and A Doll’s House, Part 2.    Having seen them all now, it’s hard to argue.

Regina’s husband, Horace Giddens, was played by Richard Thomas, also Tony nominated.  At the start of the play, Horace is sick and away from the family.  When he returns in Act II, Mr. Thomas plays a convincing head of household with a seriously troubling illness.  Regina’s brothers, played by Michael McKean and Darren Goldstein, were perfectly inky.  A very strong cast overall in a play that is a period piece but still has a lot to say about how people are treated and how greed drives our culture and relationships.  Still topical today.

I did not love Ms. Linney’s Regina but she was fine in the part.  I felt there needed to be more edge to this beast of a woman.  Plus, and this happens for me with some actors, you can see the acting and not the character.  That said, this play was a superb revival and a great opportunity to understand why Lillian Hellman’s work remains a classic of the theater.

littlefoxesbroadway.com

In 1991, I saw the original Broadway production of Six Degrees of Separation with Stockard Channing and Courtney Vance.  At the time, it felt like a very important cultural moment play.  The acting was superb and the concept that we are all connected to everyone in the world through a chain of not more than six people became part of our vernacular.  How would the play hold up?  Do I need to revisit it?  I let the reviews sway me and I caught Six Degrees this week on the day it posted an early closing notice.  Too bad.  The play holds up extremely well; I had feared it might have dated itself by this point.

The play is based on a real life story of a con man and robber who claimed to be Sidney Poitier’s son.  The playwright, John Guare, had a friend who told him the personal encounter that later became the basis for this play.  Set in New York in the 1990, the privileged class is in full exposure.  The plot is quickly set in motion when a Harvard college friend of Ouisa and Flan’s children (Allison Janney and John Benjamin Hickey) drops by their apartment with minor stab wounds from an attempted mugging.  Paul (Corey Hawkins) happens to be in town because his father is producing a film version of Cats.  I had forgotten how much abuse is heaped on Cats in this play – and the fact that is again running on Broadway at the same time is perfect.

I enjoyed all of the leading performers and also the over-the-top spoiled brattiness of their children.  It should be mentioned that there are 18 characters in this play, adding depth and helping to define the world surrounding Ouisa, Flan and Paul.  A couple of choices made, such as the elongated nude scene, were not necessarily for the better.  However, the play is rich and complex.  We get further and further inside Ouisa’s mind as she comes to term with the events that have shaken their Kandinsky world.  I thoroughly enjoyed this revisit to a classic.

Indecent is the true story of a Yiddish play, God of Vengeance, which was written in 1907.  Following the play’s successes in Europe, it is translated into English, opens on Broadway in 1923 where the entire cast is arrested for indecency.  At the core, a lesbian relationship.  Dreamlike staging and imagery only add to the thought provoking frankness of the characters’ Jewish heritage at that particular moment when both immigration restrictions and anti-Semitism prevailed.  I loved how the story proceeded along, with pieces of the original play interspersed with the history of the actors and the musical interludes which firmly establish a mood and a people.  The payoff by the end is both glorious and riveting.  The cast is uniformly excellent, especially Katrina Lenk and Adina Verson as the ladies at the center of the controversy.  Go see this.  It speaks to the importance of theater and history in helping us shape the direction of the world we want to live in.

indecentbroadway.com