The Video Image Loometh: A scene with Karl Bury and Thomas Derrah in Clifford Odets's Paradise Lost at the American Repertory Theater. Photo credit: Marcus Stern

Stick Fly by Lydia Diamond. Directed by Kenny Leon. Presented by the Huntington Theatre Company in collaboration with the Arena Stage at the Virginia Wimberly Theatre at the Boston Center for the Arts, through March 28.

Paradise Lost by Clifford Odets. Directed by Daniel Fish. Staged by the American Repertory Theater at the Loeb Drama Center, Cambridge, MA, through March 20.

The Book of Grace by Suzan-Lori Parks. Directed by James Macdonald. At the Public Theater, New York, NY, through April 4.

Reviewed by Bill Marx

Doing away with a “painted box set” does not necessarily free up our theater artists to provide compelling “visible and audible expression” of the cultural and political spirit of the present day.

In fact, given the depressing dependence on multimedia folderol in both The Book of Grace by Suzan-Lori Parks and director Daniel Fish’s tricked up production of Clifford Odets’s Paradise Lost at the American Repertory Theater (ART), the evidence runs in the opposite direction.

The addition of technology seems to ratchet up a compensatory dramatic hysteria, pumping up a production’s urge to float a bloated Important Message. The sweet modesty of Stick Fly’s comic meditation on race and class, presented in a non-videoized but well-designed set, comes as a funny, perceptive, and reassuring testament to the values of the provisional, on stage and off.

Current attempts to turn the stage into a giant TV screen seem to be part of an effort to reassure theatergoers that theater can be morphed into a new-fangled CGI movie (or into a disco party, The Donkey Show, or into an impressive arts installation, Sleep No More, earlier ART productions under the new “show ‘em its not just theater” leadership of Diane Paulus). The mania for the projected image wreaks havoc on the ART’s staging of Paradise Lost, an Odets epic that had a debilitating case of The Big Statement when it hit Broadway in 1935.

After the critical success of the one-act Waiting for Lefty, Odets was pushed to write more and more ambitious plays, but he lacks the talent for sustained dramatic construction—the lumpy, speechifying Paradise Lost earned Odets his first round of negative reviews, helping to send him away from the theater to Hollywood, where his talent for juicy dialogue and simmering visions of personal and public betrayal fit well (sometimes brilliantly, as in “Sweet Smell of Success”) into pre-fab movie formulas.

Paradise Lost is the de-evolutionary tale of a middle-class, American family, the Gordons. The Depression cleans out its bank account and eventually its home. On the way down, the Gordons grapple with the loss of life as well as with failed dreams of athletic success, artistic accomplishment, brotherly love, and financial security. Clara, the pragmatic wife, plays second banana to delusional merchant hubby Leo, who throughout the descent into poverty maintains his radical faith in the American Dream.

David Chandler, T. Ryder Smith, Jonathan Epstein and giant video spirit in Paradise Lost. Photo: Marcus Stern.

The script’s leftist politics generally serve as talky window dressing: when Odets confronts idealistic Leo with real world complications, such as how to provide better working conditions for the mistreated workers in his shop (we are asked to believe the old line that he didn’t know about the exploitation), the matter is dropped. But that is Odets’s scattershot approach throughout—even the major villain of the piece hasn’t the integrity of his own greed. Odets has him come on guilt-ridden at the end, offering the Gordons blood money just so the family, without a penny to its name, can honorably shame him.

Not content with that feel-good moment, the playwright struggles to provide a mega-inspirational final message: Leo’s oracular response to the nihilistic dressing down of a tramp Marxist. As amusing as it is to hear a ringing defense of Ralph Waldo Emerson (!) in the face of a communist lambasting, the mishmash suggests that the Gordons, despite Odets’s speeches to the contrary, remain out of touch with reality.

The playwright’s jump to Hollywood suggests that he saw the real value of escapism: critic George Jean Nathan opined that Leo delivers “such a lush panegyric to the future bliss of mankind as makes the ordinary happy ending of the commercial Broadway drama look like the finish of Othello.”

Still, Paradise Lost offers some of the crackling energy and slangy dialogue that makes even Odets in ersatz-Chekhovian mode fun to sit through. And the ART production will most likely be the only professional staging of the large cast Paradise Lost we will have the opportunity to see. But, obsessed with making sure the audience sees the “relevance” of the play, director Fish ladles on the giant video shots, TV commercials, hand-held mikes, and electric pianos. The result of the modern airbrushing is to make the play seem more, not less, dated. The abstract set is so barren that it defeats the message of the play: the Gordons have nothing to lose as they sink into terminal debt.

The performances feel under done and earnest, the cast members making too little hay of the roller-coaster rhythms in Odets’s language, the kitschy patter of desires thwarted and dreams denied. The dramatist’s characters may be lost and broken, but their tongues are lively. T. Ryder Smith provides a standout turn as Mr. May, a professional arsonist who offers to set fire to Gordon’s shop for the insurance money—the performer offers a creepily conversational note of unrepentant evil, no preaching but a plain old invitation to despicable action. Jonathan Epstein offers some corrosive moments of capitalist self-hatred as the bedeviled Sam Katz, Leo’s tortured business partner.

The Book of Grace

You don’t have to have lived in the 1930s to write a play that could have crawled out of the didactic depths of the era. Receiving its world premiere at New York’s Public Theater, The Book of Grace is a bewildering paradox—Pulitzer-Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks takes on a fascinating topic, the roots of domestic terrorism, but the script’s allegorical world, populated by cartoony victims and victimizers, turns out to be just as dated as Odets’s soapbox universe, sans philosophical Marxists. Another play sporting a Big Statement collapses under its own portentous weight.

Actress Elizabeth Marvel plays the title character in The Book of Grace. Photo: Walter McBride

Set in South Texas, the simple-minded yarn revolves around the domestic arrangements of a border patrol guard, imaginatively named Vet, who is about to receive a medal for his gung-ho success at keeping illegal aliens out of the U.S. Vet conforms to just about every right-wing brute cliché: he’s xenophobic, violent, narcissistic, authoritarian, and homicidal. Vet abuses his hapless saint of a wife, Grace (a hole in the backyard patiently awaits her dead body once she crosses him once too often) and he believes Buddy, his son (whom he sexually molested, naturally) from his first marriage to be a bad seed. Meanwhile, the artsy Grace is forced to hide under the living room rug her “Book of Grace,” a collection of candied and cutesy observations, down home stories, and opinions, including a shout-out to Barack Obama. The hubby from Hell would not approve.

Buddy comes home after a decade-long absence and, along with trying to curry favor with a suspicious dad, swears (often) that he will have his vengeance. Since Grace and Buddy hook-up carnally on the couch the moment they meet, the inevitability of an explosion is guaranteed. Buddy, who soon nicknames himself Snake after his father, relates his terror plans to a video camera, his anger springing less from political perfidy or the crushing tax burden (though he quotes the U.S. Constitution a lot) than from his tortured relationship with this insane father, whom he wants to please as well as pulverize.

The ambiguity of Parks’s best plays, her lyrical manipulations of myth and the American dream, leaves the audience guessing fruitfully. The characters in The Book of Grace are one-dimensional, liberal tinker toys—will Grace survive among the murderous Snakes in the Texas grass?—so the play doesn’t work as incisive political drama or as compelling domestic saga. The symbolic fate of Grace is left in no prosaic doubt; in fact, it is hard to keep a straight face at the rabbit-out-of-a-hat resolution.

The performers reflect the ambitious fuzziness of the script, with John Doman, as Vet, left with nothing to do but preen militarily and glare with menace—he lives his job. As Grace, Elizabeth Marvel is stuck with a misguided role that calls for her to be an inspirational salt-of-the-earth dishrag. The woman is independent enough to defy Vet with her writings, yet she is unable to conceive of leaving the murderous goon and inanely optimistic that Buddy and Vet will be able to patch up their broken relationship. As Buddy, Amari Cheatom never really evokes the despairing, eruptive center of Buddy— somehow the performer has to be craven, yet threatening at the some time. Cheatom ends up being neither—his plans for domestic terrorism come off as the fruits of a temper tantrum.

Of course, director James Macdonald piles on the video with a vengeance: not only prolonged projections of Buddy’s rants into the camera, but the backdrop of Vet’s manse is a video projection that erupts into flames and other knee-jerk visual reflections of the psychological goings-on. I have admired a number of Parks’s earlier scripts, from The America Play and Topdog/Underdog to Venus, so this play and production, which I saw during previews, was dispiriting. Parks was in the audience taking notes, obviously considering making changes. I wish her luck adding heft to this thin fable of American dysfunction—she will need it.

Stick Fly

Nikkole Salter as Taylor in the Huntington Theatre Company's production of Stick Fly. Photo: Scott Suchman

Perhaps the best way to dramatize American turmoil may be to stay away from the neon-lit (or video-lit) “State of the Union” messages of Paradise Lost and The Book of Grace. Stick Fly by Lydia Diamond explores issues of race and class by reaching back to the 1930s, but she stays well away from the period’s ideals of kinship and public spiritedness espoused with such a heavy touch by Odets and Parks. Instead, she draws on the well-heeled comedy of manners of Philip Barry, cross-fertilizing it with the sprightly social combativeness of Wendy Wasserstein and the one-liner friskiness of TV sitcoms.

The result is a smart, entertaining evening that in its relaxed way does just what Hallie Falangan asks that contemporary drama should do—provide a vibrant picture of “the tempo and psychology of our time,” emphasizing some of the thornier conflicts within the African-American community. Diamond shuffles her clashing characters and their non-stop power plays and verbal confrontations with well-timed dexterity, aided by energetic performances from the cast under the sharp direction of Kenny Leon. At times the proceedings lapse into the lazy predictability of sitcom, but there’s enough observant grit to keep Stick Fly above that level most of the time.

The scene is the Cape Cod vacation home of the wealthy African-American LeVay family. Patriarch Joe is a famed neurosurgeon: he is happy with the career of one son, Flip, a successful plastic surgeon who shares his father’s libertine ways with women; he is much less happy with Kent, who has decided, after much struggle, to become a writer. It is time for the summer family gathering, and both siblings have brought home women for Mom and Dad’s approval: Kent is in love with Taylor, a feisty and brilliant woman who studies flies and, coming from a dysfunctional African-American family, has some painful issues with father figures. Flip is seeing Kimber, a confident white woman who deals with the urban underprivileged.

Matriarch LeVay never shows up at the vacation home, an absence connected with the issues raised by the maid’s daughter, who makes some shocking discoveries while taking over Mom’s duties. The parade of revelations and embarrassments, the charges and counter charges about the entitlements of money and power, the complex relationships between white and black, rich and poor, father and children, reflect a tragicomic vision of insecurity. The characters search for approval of others, but they inevitably end up falling short, sometimes sabotaging themselves in the process.

Amber Iman as Cheryl and Wendell Wright as Joe LeVay in the Huntington Theatre Company's production of Stick Fly

The play’s socio-political approach is closer to Oprah than Odets. The LeVays and visitors do their best to disguise (or to aggressively defend) their vulnerabilities. Even Joe, it turns out, sits uneasily atop the domestic pyramid. Because of their weaknesses, the inklings they have of their own bad faith, Diamond’s characters are rounded rather than squared: the playwright dramatizes the amusing connections between our strengths and weaknesses as perceived by others and ourselves. What’s more, the figures are self-consciousness enough to make fun of themselves, a self-puncturing that Odets and Parks don’t dare allow their balloon figures.

The Huntington Theatre Company (HTC) cast members generally have a heigh-ho time with the various clashing personalities and cultural perspectives, especially Nikkole Salter as Taylor, a spiky outsider who tries so hard to be liked, and Wendell W. Wright, whose Joe rises to the sardonic occasion when he asserts his narrow definition of freedom. David Gallo’s sleek set beautifully serves the needs of the play, including serving up the most wonderfully surreal library shelving I have seen on stage.

Instead of positing a bottom line diagnosis for the neediness among successful African-Americans, Stick Fly skillfully dramatizes its difficult conflicts as works-in-progress, primarily a matter for discussion and self-knowledge rather than justification for flashy proclamations of optimism or doom. Diamond’s play is a useful reminder that the stage can serve as a place for provisional insights rather than prophetic, video-sized statements.

Brendan McNab as Mr. Zero in a scene from the SpeakEasy Stage Company production of Adding Machine: A Musical. Photo: Mark L. Saperstein.

By Bill Marx

1: Becky Shaw by Gina Gionfriddo. Presented by the Huntington Theatre Company (HTC) at the Boston University Theatre, Boston, MA, March 5 through April 4. Another comic update in the perennial battle between the sexes, this one a Pulitzer Prize finalist whose plot revolves around a blind date gone awry. HTC Artistic Director Peter DuBois directs the off-Broadway hit.

2: The Dinosaur Musical Music by Robert Reale. Book and Lyrics by Willie Reale. Directed by Caitlin Lowans. At the Stoneham Theatre, Stoneham, MA, March 5–21. The New England premiere of a tunefest from some of the creators of the musical Johnny Baseball, which is receiving its world premiere via the American Repertory Theatre this May. This show deals with the education of a 14-year-old Tyrannosaurus, who finds out that the only way to ward off extinction is to team up with a Parasaurolophus. Why can’t a Brontosaurus sing a torch song? Note: The Dinosaur Musical is appropriate for all ages, though it is pitched toward children in the 3rd through 6th grade. (Comparable content to “Finding Nemo” or “The Lion King.”)

3: Othello by William Shakespeare. Presented by the Actors’ Shakespeare Project at the Villa Victoria Center for the Arts, 85 West Newton Street, Boston, MA, March 10 through April 4. Another battle of the sexes, though this tale of the “green-eyed monster” is not played for laughs. Veteran Boston director Judy Braha directs a cast of sturdy local performers, including Bobbie Steinbach, Paula Langton, and Ken Cheesesman.

4: Entertaining Mr. Sloane by Joe Orton. Staged by the Publick Theatre at the Boston Center for the Arts, Boston, MA, March 11 through April 3. It will be interesting to see if this once oft-produced play about sexual manipulation still contains any risque zip. Certainly the seamy plotting and counter-plotting is in talented hands, from director Eric Engel to an impressive cast that includes Sandra Shipley and Nigel Gore.

Jason Bowen as Othello and Ken Cheeseman as Iago in the Actors' Shakespeare Project's staging of Othello. Photo Stratton McCrady

5: The Adding Machine: A Musical Original music by Joshua Schmidt. Libretto by Jason Loewith and Joshua Schmidt. Staged by SpeakEasy Stage Company at the Boston Center for the Arts, March 12 through April 10. Based on the play The Adding Machine by Elmer Rice. Directed by Paul Melone. The New England premiere of a musical version of Elmer Rice’s expressionistic 1923 allegory about how the business of American business is homogenization. The play isn’t revived often—this song-filled version won a 2008 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Off-Broadway Musical. Brendan McNab stars as Mr. Zero.

6: Melancholy Play by Sarah Ruhl. Directed by M. Bevin O’Gara. Staged by Holland Productions at the Factory Theater, Boston, MA, March 12–21. Ruhl is a very fashionable playwright at the moment—here is another of her whimsical scripts, this one about “a melancholy young stranger who makes her sorrow so sexy that everyone in her life falls maddeningly in love with her.”

7: Apple by Vern Thiessen. Directed by Greg Maraio. Presented by Phoenix Theatre Artists and Company One at the Boston Center for the Arts, Boston, MA, March 12 through April 3. The New England premiere of a script by an award-winning Canadian playwright: according to The Globe and Mail stage critic, this play is “a fascinating tale of alienation, fear and the need for love.”

8: Opus by Michael Hollinger. Directed by Jim Petosa. Staged by the New Repertory Theatre at the Arsenal Center for the Arts, Mosesian Theater, Watertown, MA, March 28 through April 17. The New England premiere of a drama that revolves around “a celebrated and world-renowned string quartet that is struggling to prepare for their highest-profile performance when their gifted but volatile violist mysteriously disappears.” The cast features stalwart local performers Benjamin Evett and Bates Wilder.

9: From Orchids to Octopi by Melinda Lopez. Directed by Diego Arciniegas. Presented by the Underground Railway Theater and the Catalyst Collaborative@MIT at the Central Square Theatre, Cambridge, MA, March 31 through May 2. Charles Darwin has his say in this world premiere production of Melinda Lopez’s playful meditation—commissioned by the National Institutes of Health to celebrate the 150th anniversary of On the Origin of Species—on how we understand evolution.

Dan (Michael Steven Costello) tries to drink the pain away in In Private Fears in Public Places. Photo by Richard Hall/Silverline Images

Private Fears in Public Places by Alan Ayckbourn. Directed by David J. Miller. Set design by Miller. Staged by the Zeitgeist Stage Company at the Boston Center for the Arts, Boston, MA, through March 6.

Reviewed by Bill Marx

Alan Ayckbourn is a playwright who has grown on me by growing out of himself. At least his most recent plays, such as 2004’s Private Fears in Public Places, represent a refreshingly haikuesque departure from the intricately constructed, large scale semi-farces he is most identified with, such as The Norman Conquests and House & Garden.

Popular as these shows have been here and aboard, they have always struck me, despite their ambition, as thin comic gruel, partly because they fall somewhere in-between farce and sit-com. Private Fears suggests Ayckbourn has left that unsatisfying comic netherworld (perhaps after 70 scripts he has finally exhausted it) and is writing plays that, to their credit, fit neither category.

(Granted, Ayckbourn has stretched his imagination in various ways throughout his long career, from the dank brew of blackmail, murder, and drugs in A Small Family Business to the feminist schizophrenia at the center of Woman in Mind and the futuristic sci-fi of Henceforward . . .)

Judging by Private Fears, Ayckbourn has developed into a mature observer of human disconnection, a comic diagnostician of boredom. I say boredom because a line in the play got me thinking about what makes Ayckbourn’s characters come together and then draw apart. One of the women in the play observes with conviction that she bores herself as well as others. That struck me as a particularly revealing confession about what Ayckbourn is up to now—he lets his figures curdle in the world they create for themselves rather than surrounding them with whiz-bang formal contrivances.

In his earlier plays, Ayckbourn drops his characters into a whirligig comic plot even though his men and women lack the fierce desires for sex and respectability that propel the best examples of slammed-door farce. The hyper-combustibility of free-wheeling desire and the need to maintain an untarnished reputation fuels this kind of extreme comedy: a genius like Ben Jonson takes that conflict further, exploring our fetish for desire itself, the addictive pleasures of wanting to want.

But Ayckbourn’s characters don’t seem very interested in sexuality or power; they are closer to cartoonish sit-com characters, whose mild appetites and vapid dreams are meant to be aroused and satisfied in 30 minutes. In his most popular plays, Ayckbourn plunks his soft-headed, bumbling creatures into the manic machinery of farce—and it amusingly chews them up.

In Private Fears the playwright forgoes the customary armor of ingenuity he builds around his characters, letting us look more closely at the poignant comedy created by people whose isolation appears to be mostly self-generated—they are bored with themselves and thus bore others. At least a self-damning acedia is a plausible (and intriguing) explanation for the play’s touching roundelay of relationship misfires.

Christine Power and Michael Steven Costello in Zeitgeist Stage Company’s production of Private Fears in Public Places. Photo by Richard Hall/Silverline Images

Written in 54 cinematic scenes (the script was made into a fine 2006 film by French director Alan Resnais), the play’s ostensible center is the crumbling relationship of Nicola (Christine Power), a young woman looking for a three bedroom apartment for herself and her husband-to-be, Dan (Michael Steven Costello), an ex-army officer who is determined to remain unemployed. Nicole deals with an inadequate real estate agent Stewart (Robert Bonotto), who finds, to his surprise, that the hardcore Christianity professed by his attractive, young co-worker, Charlotte (Becca A. Lewis), may only be skin deep.

Meanwhile, Charlotte is temporarily looking after the randy and foul-mouthed father (the character remains offstage) of Ambrose (Bill Salem), Dan’s favorite bartender, the friendly but ineffective ear for his customer’s soused self-justifications and trivial complaints. Stewart’s middle-aged sister, Imogen (Shelley Brown), lies to her bro about cruising the bars, fruitlessly, for love.

The Zeitgeist Stage Company production is sensitively directed by David Miller, who generally pulls sturdy performances from his cast. As Dan, Michael Steven Costello could do more to show the flickers of panic behind Dan’s bluster. While compelling, the performer sometimes leans too hard into the character’s faux-bravado.

Becca A. Lewis is impishly amusing as Charlotte, the fundamentalist tease; Robert Bonotto provides nimble deadpan as Stewart, particularly through the weird twists and turns of Charlotte’s temptations. Power and Salem get at the anguished power of their humane characters, the only figures in the play who directly convey a sense of loss.

Charlotte is the play’s duplicitous Eve, a game player who amuses and/or punishes herself by inviting lonely men to contemplate their null state. At one point Ambrose, after taking a gander at the Charlotte’s Bible, gently complains about how harsh the Old Testament is. The script’s satiric treatment of religion—how in Charlotte’s hands it doesn’t give comfort but aids and abets despair—suggests that Ayckbourn is taking aim at more than romantic disconnection, but poking at something closer to the spiritual bone.

Pascal defines boredom as “nullity without realizing it.” Ayckbourn has come up with a mordant comedy rooted in his ironic strengths as a playwright—Private Fears depends on the surfeit, rather than the excess, of desire.

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Sophie Treadwell (Anne Gottlieb) and Mac (Craig Mathers) in Not Enough Air (Photo credit: Elizabeth Stewart)

Not Enough Air by Masha Obolensky. Directed by Melia Bensussen. Set designed by Eric Levenson. Staged by the Nora Theatre Company at the Central Square Theater, Cambridge, MA, through March 14.

Reviewed by Bill Marx

Unsurprisingly, Not Enough Air teems with interrogatives, many of its scenes punctuated with performers proffering staccato Whos, Hows, and Whys. Masha Obolensky’s compelling play explores the evolution of Machinal, the celebrated 1928 expressionist drama by journalist/playwright Sophie Treadwell, which was inspired by questions raised by the notorious Ruth Snyder/Judd Gray murder trial—why did this woman kill? And why the pitiless and sensational media stalking of Snyder, the first woman sentenced to death by electrocution?

Obolensky’s script takes the questions back a few notches: what was the creative and personal challenge for a woman of that day trying to write, with empathy and imagination, about a woman who snapped? What happens when the oxygen of rationality thins in the pursuit of the truth? The response is a rare dramatic specimen—the story of a woman artist heroically grappling with social pressures, inner doubts, health issues, and patriarchal strong-arming to give birth to a feminist answer to an essential question.

Sophie Treadwell (Anne Gottlieb) takes a call. (Photo credit: Elizabeth Stewart)

Before the journey through Treadwell’s unconscious, Obolensky supplies the background to Snyder’s life and trial via short scenes featuring an expressionist parade of characters, from Snyder herself (affectingly played by Ruby Rose Fox as a hard-boiled lost soul) to Treadwell’s fellow reporters, cynical radio announcers, tough police detectives, and her sympathetic spouse Mac. The approach is archly cinematic—the scenes skitter along in a jumpy manner meant to reflect the mounting pressure on the exasperated Treadwell, who covers the trial on her own because her newspaper has sent an opportunistic male colleague in her stead.

Instead of prurient curiosity, Treadwell feels sympathy for Snyder, a secret kinship. The empathy doesn’t only spring from her feeling, despite the pat arguments of others, that Snyder is not getting a fair trial. Both women suffer from neurasthenia, a serious nervous condition (crippling lassitude, anxiety, fatigue) that, as explored in plays such as Susan Sontag’s Alice in Bed, takes female desperation to the point of parody and hallucination—it is the total embrace of dependence in a society that denies women the freedom to live and create.

Thus the urge to rebel, not to “submit,” springs from bottled up anger and frustration, a striking back that takes the nihilistic form of murder in the case of Synder and a constructive grappling with the enemies of female dissent, internal and external, in the case of Treadwell. Like Machinal, Obelensky’s play turns on the modernist metaphor of creation as a form of murder, an order that takes place after destruction.

As dreamed up by Obolensky, Treadwell’s spur to create is an anarchistic demon—a fusion of Treadwell and Snyder, a devilish dynamo necessary to fuel her art. The spirit commands Treadwell to write the play to the point of exhaustion, to embrace isolation, a turn from rationality and domesticity that puts strains on her healthy relationship with her spouse, Mac. Thankfully, Mac is not treated by Obolensky as the stereotypical male enemy, but as a sympathetic lover who may be limited in his understanding of his mate but respectful of her need to create.

The interaction between the demon and Treadwell supplies some of the most memorable scenes in the play (I love the sprite’s primal scream) though inevitably attempts to dramatize the creative process fall short. For me, less historical background and more elaboration on Treadwell’s internal duels, her conflicts with the husband, would have been welcome, but what the dramatist supplies is provocative.

The movie rhythms of the play are apt, given that the famous photo of Snyder’s execution, taken surreptitiously by a Chicago photographer and published on the front page of the New York Daily News, was an important step in the tabloidization of the media. The controversial photo skyrocketed the paper’s circulation, accelerating our embrace of the visual over the textual that continues, with pernicious efficiency, to this day. Ironically, the hysteria whipped up by the Snyder trail contributed to the popular success of Machinal.

James Cagney as the rascally Picture Snatcher

(Those interested in the mass culture sentiments of the period should check out “Picture Snatcher” a 1933 Jimmy Cagney film that Turner Classic Movies shows from time to time. Cagney plays an ambitious photographer based on the guy who snapped the Snyder photo. In the movie the ploy to get the “money” shot is treated as a high stakes adventure, with the police chasing Cagney through the streets of the city, guns drawn, to confiscate the negative and stop the publication of the picture. The curio is the popularist reverse negative of Not Enough Air.)

In an illuminating interview given during the Chicago premiere of the play, Obolensky says that she “tried to create a pressurized environment—one that, like in Machinal, is driven by men, the men are the machine.” The Nora Theatre Company production could use some of the grinding snap, crackle, and pop of the Warner Brothers treatment, the sprightly ra-ta-tat-tat of the old Hollywood newsreels. When Anne Gottlieb, as Treadwell, is not on stage, the action feels a bit slack, the male machine gone soft, cartoonish.

But director Melia Benussen wields a sure hand with her talented leads: Gottlieb supplies an engagingly strong-willed Treadwell, a woman who unites intelligence and compassion. The actress expertly conveys panic at the mounting demands of her imagination—a genuine fear of being sucked under. Marianna Bassham’s sprite of the unconscious gives off frightening vibes, and Craig Mathers, as Mac, pulls off the neat trick of defending sanity without descending into whining or self-righteousness. Not Enough Air draws an impressive portrait of the woman artist as psychological warrior.

Mass Effect 2: The video game is infinitely better and more complex than any space opera out of Hollywood since George Lucas went bonkers

By Justin Marble

Over the centuries the relationship between popularity and artistic merit has been fascinatingly out-of-kilter. James Cameron’s sci-fi epic “Avatar” has smashed every box-office record out there though it’s devoid of any kind of aesthetic or narrative complexity whatsoever. The movie is pretty to look at and even fun to sit through, much like a roller coaster ride. But the story, characters, and themes of the movie leave little for the mind to chew on; for a film that purports to be about a completely new world, everything is familiar, generic, safe, and obvious.

Perhaps this wouldn’t be so troubling if Cameron’s Golden Globe acceptance speech for Best Director didn’t include him reciting the Na’vi aliens’ catchphrase (“I see you”) as if it were some type of philosophical breakthrough.

The truth is that the first space opera since “Star Wars” isn’t in theaters. It’s in Xbox 360s. The game is called “Mass Effect 2,” and it is infinitely better and more complex than any extraterrestrial epic out of Hollywood since George Lucas went bonkers. Am I actually recommending we search for art not on celluloid but in a video game? Yes, yes I am.

Perhaps that’s unfair. Unlike toy-commercial blockbusters like “Transformers” or “GI Joe,” “Avatar” at least attempts to have a theme, even if it was, well, dumb.

The humans in the story, led by a corporate bigwig and a military general (who—brace yourselves—are jerks), want to mine a valuable resource called “unobtanium” (really?) out from under the entrenched, indigenous Na’vi. Our hero, the Generic Soldier, uses new technology that allows him to inhabit a Na’vi body in an attempt to convince them to move. Eventually the heartless general and greedy profit monger grow tired of this and decide they are going to move in with their mechs and destroy the poor Indians—sorry, Na’vi.

A political allegory! Fascinating. Obviously, the humans here are stand-ins for 18th century imperialists, or maybe Manifest Destiny Americans, or, if you’re feeling current and dramatic, Bush. If you’ve seen “Dances With Wolves,” “Pocahontas,” or “Dune,” or have a functioning brain, you can guess what happens next. Generic Soldier falls in love with a native and decides to use his new avatar body to save the Na’vi from destruction. Well, at this point the allegory gets shucked off in favor of some battle scenes.

I don’t want to be the art-house critic who despises anything with a hint of fun or anything that has gained a fair amount of popularity. I can appreciate a good space opera. “Star Wars” was the first time I really began to think about film in a serious way. And I enjoyed the hell out of this summer’s “Star Trek” reboot.

But I must question if we are asking too little from the film experience and, specifically, from the space opera. Some people view movies as a form of escapism, and the space story is the ultimate form of escapism: we literally leave our world behind and see technology and planets that we have yet to discover except in our minds. There’s an innocent beauty to it.

The significance of “Avatar” lies in the technology Cameron invented to help tell the story. It will allow movies to be bigger, shinier, and in three dimensions. But what if that technology is the wrong direction, a dead end? What if we shouldn’t be thinking bigger, but smaller?

For years video games had no stories. There were levels, and at the end you had to save a princess or stop an evil robot, but that was it. They were entertainment, not art. As games began selling more, budgets increased. Game companies began investing in people who knew how to tell stories. Yet these games, appealing to a popular audience, took their cues from Hollywood’s big-budget blockbusters. Today the vast majority of games still do.

But “Mass Effect 2″ takes the storytelling control away from Hollywood, away from the James Camerons of the world. Bioware (the developers of the game) have created an experience that is unique to the individual player. And the implications of this control are far more fascinating than the passive experience of sitting in a dark theater.

The original “Mass Effect” was much like a Hollywood epic. Bioware created a universe set in the 22nd century (like Cameron’s “Avatar”) where the discovery of something called a mass relay (a big teleporter floating in space) allows instant travel to other galaxies. Humanity made contact with aliens, but we were technologically outmatched. Other races had discovered mass relays before us, and we were marginalized in intergalactic politics. Yet when the player’s character discovers an evil alien’s plot to wipe out the galaxy, he saves the day and humanity becomes the dominant race.

It’s pretty silly, like a blockbuster tends to be. But “Mass Effect” was also a role-playing game (known as an RPG to gamers). You chose how your character would respond to certain situations. You could play him as a xenophobic murderer who wanted humans to take over or as an intergalactic peacekeeper who wanted to foster mutual survival and benefit. You could develop relationships with your crew, and your choices could also lead to some of their deaths.

“Mass Effect 2″ carries your unique story into the second game (which is to be the middle entry in a trilogy). The choices you made years ago affect the universe you see in this game. Humanity may have one voice among many on an inter-species ruling council. Or it may be the sole voice. People you helped may return the favor. Or they may be dead. These choices come up again and again, but Bioware introduces a moral and philosophical complexity that goes far beyond “Avatar”’s childish good guys and bad guys.

The ending offers an opportunity to take over an alien base with advanced technology. Yet the post is fueled by human lives—people that have been boiled down to paste. Does the end justify the means? You’ll see your choice, and the consequences, play out. These choices continue to affect the game, crafting a unique story that culminates in a “suicide mission” in which you and your squadmates may not make it out alive.

Avatar: The same old unimaginative story gussied up in 3-D

Everyone knows the scene in the war movie where a wounded soldier sacrifices themselves for the cause. It happens a few times in “Avatar.” Michelle Rodriguez, playing a rogue, human, helicopter pilot, gives her life while fighting the evil general. Yet her character is so very boring, dull, and one-dimensional that we don’t really care. We’ve become desensitized to these types of things because of overuse and poor writing.

Let’s contrast this with Garrus Vakarian, an alien security officer you meet way back in “Mass Effect.” You can talk to him, learn his back story, even shape the way he views the world. He can become bitter and jaded at the bureaucracy and red tape surrounding his job or a force for justice. Over hours and hours of gameplay, he can be by your side, fighting your enemies with you. In my game, during our final mission, he was shot while attempting to do his duty. He was shot because I decided to place him in that situation.

In a beautifully rendered scene, with lighting and camera movement, this artificial, computer-generated model gasped its last breath. Like all great moments in the “Mass Effect” games, my character was allowed to respond how I chose (via a conversation system that allows you to select responses). I was emotionally affected in a way I didn’t think was possible while playing a video game. He doesn’t always have to die. But the choices I made up to that point meant he was a goner.

I regretted those choices. I wished he hadn’t died. It was a stupid game, something I was playing for fun. But I felt a real connection to something completely fake—something animated. Bioware achieved something Cameron didn’t. Games achieved something film didn’t. It was because the story had become my story. I wasn’t being lectured to from on high about the trappings of imperialism, shown things by an all-powerful director, manipulated to feel emotion for a silly-looking, blue alien. Or maybe I was, but because I implicitly participated in it, it resonated more. I’m still not sure.

The end of “Empire Strikes Back” is pretty depressing when you’re 10 years old. Lando betrays his friend. Han Solo is frozen in carbonite. Luke gets his hand cut off, and finds out Vader is his father. The film ends with the main characters looking out into space, a black abyss. It’s art. It takes risks. “Mass Effect 2″ is similar. Your victory is Pyrrhic and small considering the large scope Bioware gives the series. Your friends may have died. The main evil you have faced off against is still out there, still threatening.

“Avatar” takes no risks. Evil is soundly defeated and punished. There’s no moral complexity, nothing to think about it when it’s over. Sure, minor characters die, but their sacrifice is not treated as being significant, and we are unaffected because they are nothing more than devices used to further the all-important plot. At one time (pre-prequels), Lucas understood character. Bioware does too. Cameron does not.

For me, the metaphor for the artistic imagination is space. There is no greater natural blank canvas than the night sky. We don’t know what lies beyond our planet, beyond our system, beyond our galaxy. It is the unknown. A good chunk of the genre of science fiction is based on this premise. Yet we have become passive participants in the death of the imagination, the death of space. A story that has been told many times before, gussied up in 3-D, is the greatest box-office earner of all time. It is only going to change if we create the next stories ourselves.

All My Sons may no longer fit Arthur Miller's demand for relevance in the theater

More than any other art, theater asks for relevance. A play that convinces us that “this is the way it is now” can be excused many shortcomings. At any one moment there is a particular quality of feeling which dominates in human intercourse, a tonality which marks the present from the past, and when this tone is struck on the stage, the theater seems necessary again, like self-knowledge. – Arthur Miller, “What Makes Plays Endure?”

By Bill Marx

Arthur Miller’s notion of relevance in the theater, in light of the recent New York Times (NYT) article on the reluctance of our non-profit theaters to stage new plays by non-brand name playwrights, has been on my mind lately. I have also fielded, offline, a couple of comments from people puzzled by the characterization of Miller’s All My Sons as an “arthritic war horse” in my February theater recommendations.

The questioners want to know what I am talking about. The reviews of the Huntington Theatre Company (HTC) production were generally ecstatic. And what could be timelier than an oft-produced American drama that focuses on the tragic costs of war profiteering?

For Miller, relevance in the theater means that companies have to do the hard work of staging plays by playwrights that convince us that “this is the way it is now.” (An aim that is not limited to realism.) To my mind, Miller’s 1947 play no longer lives up to his own high but fair standard. In an age of Halliburton and Blackwater, it is part of the past, a reassuring morality tale as well as an easy exercise in nostalgia.

The American Repertory Theater’s next production raises issues about theatrical relevance as well: Clifford Odets’s Depression-era epic Paradise Lost is rarely produced and I am very curious to see it, but why must companies go back decades, via Miller and Odets, to deal with present-day American realities? Are there no playwrights writing scripts of merit about life today? I find it hard to accept, given that hundreds of playwrights graduate from American colleges and universities every year, some from the very institutions that are pumping out “bold” productions of Odets and Miller.

New plays don’t have to be perfect. As Miller says, audiences will overlook problems in dramas that earn our attention by making the theater seem necessary again. But fresh scripts are difficult to market, even in an age of Facebook and tweeting. The issue raised by the NYT article is that non-profit theater’s dependence on brand name playwrights and state-of-the-art publicity sidesteps the essential challenge of making the stage seem necessary in a culture where it is increasingly marginalized.

Along with All My Sons I will talk about a few other Boston-area productions over the past few months that courted relevance: Ian Bruce’s South African drama Groundswell at the Lyric Stage, Bread & Puppet Theater’s Tear Open the Door of Heaven, and David Rabe’s exploration of euthanasia in A Question of Mercy, staged by the Boston Center for American Performance at Boston University. All of the shows are closed.

Will Lyman (Joe) and Karen MacDonald (Kate) in the HTC production of All My Sons

In 1947 All My Sons jolted audiences, much to Miller’s surprise because he wrote the play during World War II and felt the script’s message of American moral myopia had already become dated. Manufacturer Joe Keller is exonerated after being charged with shipping damaged airplane cylinder heads out of his factory, inadvertently causing the deaths of 21 pilots. For three and a half years, he has placed the blame on his partner and former neighbor. The truth, which his neighbors and wife Kate know full well, is that Joe is guilty, that he lied his way out of jail.

The far-too-neatly wound Ibsenesque plot (Miller copies the master’s compactness, but shares none of Ibsen’s impatience with the rules) focuses on the issue of the Kellers (Kate, Joe, and son Chris) facing responsibility for their complicity in the murders. The issues are tailored for maximum didactic impact.

This heavy-handed fable of crime and punishment was fine over 50 years ago, but a revamped version of All My Sons should be considerably more complex and troubling, thus more relevant and necessary. Halliburton’s documented cases of war profiteering during the Iraq War were sanctioned (indirectly) by the government as well as protected by the company’s ties with the powerful. Joe Keller is fairly successful, but he’s far from a contemporary mega-millionaire defense contractor who can buy lobbyists and media image-makers by the handful. Today, Joe’s partner would be fully protected—it would be the whistle blower who would be destroyed or pushed aside.

Now Joe’s neighbors would most likely be shareholders in Keller’s company—thus directly implicated in his “blood” money. They would have a financial interest in seeing that Keller was not caught, that the facts about the company’s malfeasance not come out, so that the profits would keep growing. Miller says the play is about how “the chickens come home to roost.” But a present-day All My Sons would have to tackle our increasingly sophisticated, technologically-enhanced allegiance to obfuscating the truth—it is in the interests of the many for the sake of the “brand” that the birds stay far from the coop.

Other once critical aspects of the play are fangless today. Miller’s critical images of Americans hammered by business, of men yearning for freedom from their henpecking wives, carries an antique punch. Aside from the abstract backdrop of the set, the HTC production missed opportunities to freshen up the play, especially concerning the character of Joe. Will Lyman’s Joe was amiable and befuddled—he believed that he covered up his crime for the sake of his family. The actor’s wan characterization emphasized the pathetic, playing up a vulnerability that Miller acknowledged in his plays—his inability to dramatize evil.

James Whitmore: His Joe Keller was a dangerous man

The late James Whitmore came up with the best version of Joe I have seen; the actor combined a steely egotism with a likable folksy quality. Taking his cue from suggestions in the script, Whitmore put up an expert front, which is what it takes to get ahead in America. The actor showed that, beneath the heartland friendliness, Joe seethed with selfish anger, a byproduct of the ruthless drive and corner cutting it took for an immigrant to build a company and become a pillar of the community.

Whitmore’s Joe was a dangerous man. Aristotle says that man’s only way to achieve immortality is through our children. Whitmore’s Joe did what he did not so much out of love or family values, but because this was how he would control his power and name into the future. With a weak Joe and a shouty Chris, the HTC production of All My Sons ambled along on the sturdy back of Karen MacDonald, who gave a rich and nimble performance as Kate, interjecting humor and pathos into the script’s maternal whip hand of denial.

Another attempt to “mark the present from the past,” Groundswell at the Lyric Stage, dealt with standard issues of white guilt in the post-apartheid era. Slackly directed by Daniel Gidron, the predictable, message-heavy drama-thriller by Ian Bruce revolves around two friends, one white and one black, at a beachfront guesthouse in an out-of-the-way South African city. The desperate pair needs money to invest in a diamond-mining venture (a possible scam?) and they see an opportunity for backing from an elderly, white visitor they believe to be wealthy.

Events quickly escalate into threats of violence (this is a play that depends on cut phone lines) that lead to revelations of racial crimes, with the white characters nearly confessing their sins of omission and commission to the audience. Mention of a dark secret and a glimpse of a knife early on suggest just where the play is going to go.

As explorations of white guilt go, this one generates some power by the end, but since the mid-90s a black government has controlled South Africa. It would be fascinating to see a play that focuses on the pressures, political and personal, that leadership and responsibility imposes on blacks during a period of rampant crime and controversies over AIDs, white flight, etc.

Lyric Stage performers Richard McElvain (Smith) and Timothy John Smith (Johan) face off in Groundswell

The Lyric Stage production floundered on Richard McElvain’s mannered performance as the wealthy geezer, Smith. I give a performer two or three physical tics in a role, but McElvain sported half a dozen, kicking the whiny figure into clown territory. As Johan, an alcoholic, former policeman, Timothy John Smith supplied neither the wily charm nor the hostile gusto that the role demands. Jason Bowen provided a skillfully restrained performance as a black man who tells the truth, even with a knife held in front of his face.

Bread and Puppet Theater (BPT) goes after the “brand new papermache religion” in its latest extravaganza, Tear Open the Door to Heaven. The anti-human creed under fire appears to be Judeo-Christian and its delusive and hypocritical promises of deliverance for the weak and downtrodden. At least that’s what I think the group’s lampoon is aimed at—the show mixes playfully surreal antics leveled at capitalist greed with interludes of downright inscrutable rhetoric. Compounding the difficulty: BPT’s artistic maestro Peter Schumann speaks with such a thick German accent that was impossible to make out what he was saying.

The Moslem religion didn’t appear to be one of the targets, even though some of its adherents commit repression and murder in the name of righteousness, suggesting the convenient, knee-jerk partiality of Bread and Puppet’s attack. The West and its allies are the all-purpose boogeymen—apparently not all the doors of heaven need to be kicked in.

Bread and Puppet Theater: Some of those volunteering to tear down the doors of heaven

Still, it was one of the group’s livelier shows of late, offering up vaudeville salutes to socialism and antic raspberries to the free market that would dunk the heart of a tea-bagger in acid. The puppets and drawings were as eye-catching as ever, the Second Line Social Aid and Pleasure Society Brass Band was killer, and there were amusing satiric jabs at high culture (corporate shilling sung to opera), NPR (a ditsy reporter is pushed out of a “cheap art” studio), and some funny dance numbers from the Lubberland National Dance Co., a ragtag group of performers in suits who jitter and slide across the stage. My favorite hoofing was the “Deforestation Dance to Create Parking for the Deforesters.”

The relevance of the show? Foggy, perhaps counterculture retro. But BPT remains, after decades, a radical war horse that hasn’t developed a full-blown case of arthritis yet.

The production that came closest to meeting Miller’s demand for relevance was A Question of Mercy, which tackles the thorny issue of euthanasia. Based on the real life experiences of surgeon and writer Richard Selzer, David Rabe’s 1998 play isn’t perfect by a long shot. The central character, based on Selzer, is left irritatingly underdeveloped (Paula Langton’s shaky performance as Dr. Chapman didn’t help), and the physician’s decision to help a man grievously ill with AIDs commit suicide is left unchallenged. Worse, Rabe unsuccessfully attempts to tap into the figure’s inner life and crippling doubts via a set of uninspired dreams.

But the tale of Anthony and his quest to end his unbearable suffering and die with dignity resonates, setting the power of the state and religion against the free will of the individual, who not only has to deal with his own fears and physical decay, but with the understandable reluctance of his lover and friends to help him. What’s more, the process of dying is not what it used to be. In his program notes, Boston Center for American Performance (BCAP)director Jim Petosa writes that as “the science of technology makes strides . . . our culture has moved little in terms of dealing with so-called ‘end of life issues.’”

This is just the ambiguous territory, the “bloody crossroads” of technology, politics, and freedom where the theater should be if it is to be relevant rather than au courant. When I saw the BCAP production on a weekday in mid-December there were only six people in the audience. One of them was Boston University’s George Annas, an expert in health law, bioethics and human rights, who was there to take part in a post-show talkback. Miller believed that the theater is asked to deal with “the way it is now.” He doesn’t say that audiences will want to face it, but that doesn’t lessen theater’s obligation, though many would like it to. Maybe it was a matter of Rabe’s dramatic approach—perhaps, a la Gatz, a performer should have read Seltzer’s essay, with the performers ingeniously worked into the presentation.

Of course, that would have meant forgoing the production’s most haunting scene. Tim Spears, as Anthony, is on stage alone, trying to commit suicide by taking pills in a strictly prescribed fashion. He thinks that if he fails the doctor will come along and make sure he is dead. He does not know he has been betrayed; the doctor will not live up to her agreement. We see him struggle impatiently with the pills, collapse in agonized frustration, his head striking the coffee table. He falls to the floor, his face smeared in blood and tears. Has he failed on purpose, thinking that death will come nonetheless? Or is it simply that he is no longer able to do what he needs to do? Spears’s Anthony writhed in pain and shame, abandoned, unable to live or die. All my sons, indeed.

By Helen Epstein

Josh Aaron McCabe and Elizabeth Aspenlieder of Shakespeare and Company

Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Christopher Hampton. Adapted from the novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos. Directed by Tina Packer.
Presented by Shakespeare & Company at the Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre, Lenox, MA, through March 21.

Tina Packer has directed the Hampton play based on the epistolary novel of France’s ancien régime by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, said to have been a favorite of Marie Antoinette. Sexual seductions, abuses of power by court and church, obfuscations of truth, paper trails, corsets, fans, and hankies are all part of this costume drama that has been adapted for film and opera as well as for the stage. Shakespeare & Company’s versatile and much-loved Elizabeth Aspenlieder stars as La Marquise de Merteuil opposite Josh Aaron McCabe as Le Vicomte de Valmont.

Helen Epstein is the author of the memoirs Children of the Holocaust and Where She Came From.

By Bill Marx

Let’s face it—the fastest growing segment of non-profit hiring in the arts over the past decade or so, marketing, is now pretty much in the cultural driver’s seat in economic hard times. Thus theaters and hybrid critic/publicists are stuck trying to spin audiences into believing that arthritic dramatic warhorses (“All My Sons”) or trite new plays by brand-name playwrights are “bold” or “must see” fare.

Cast members in the Huntington Theatre Company's upcoming production of "Stick Fly"

Most of what is in The New York Times (NYT) article was not news to anyone who goes to the theater regularly and is struck by the timidity and predictability of the “product.”

Here are a trio of interesting graphs:

Many of the playwrights see the nation’s major nonprofit theater companies as impediments to their work, favoring plays that have few characters to save money on actors’ salaries, for instance, or that have themes appealing to large audiences. Playwrights say artistic directors are obsessed with selling tickets in spite of their nonprofit missions and with pleasing board members by favoring world premieres or playwrights who are already admired by critics.

“We heard from artistic directors who admitted that they’re all going after the same 10 playwrights to produce their work, which is largely about getting prestige in their field,” said Todd London, the chief author of the study and book, Outrageous Fortune: The Life and Times of the New American Play. Mr. London, the artistic director of New Dramatists, a group that helps playwrights, declined to name those artistic directors or playwrights.

Theater leaders and artistic directors, meanwhile, are frustrated by the lack of private and government money available to produce new plays and feel under pressure to balance budgets just to survive, according to the study. These executives also tend to view playwrights as insufficiently savvy about the cold realities of the business and say playwrights harbor misperceptions—that executives are less concerned with audience reaction or controversial subject matter than playwrights assume, for instance.

I can name some of the “blessed circle” of playwrights who regularly receive premieres of mediocre work: David Mamet, Neil LaBute, Sarah Ruhl, and Rebecca Gilman. I have not exhausted the tribe. Those who have names to add to the list of dramatists who get automatic passes because they are best known for being a known “commodity” should send them along to The Arts Fuse.

In my theater selections I do my best to highlight companies that are producing new work or unusual plays from the past. If I overlook a play or production, let me know—I will add it on. And please alert me of links to works and/or productions in the future that challenge the sedate status quo.

A Worthy Cause: The American Repertory Theater, Punchdrunk and the cast of its sold-out production of “Sleep No More” at the Old Lincoln School in Brookline, are organizing a benefit performance of the smash hit “Sleep No More” on Wednesday, Feb. 3, 2010 at 7:30 p.m. Proceeds will benefit Partners In Health’s relief efforts in Haiti. Ticket prices are $100. They can be obtained online or by phone at 617-547-8300.

1: Funnyhouse of a Negro by Adrienne Kennedy. Directed by David R. Gammons. Choreography by Susan Dibble. Staged by the Brandeis Theater Company at the Laurie Theatre, Brandeis University, MA, Feb. 4-14. This one-act play, the Dadaesque tale of a light-skinned black woman who denies her racial heritage to the point of schizophrenia, kicked off the long career of Adrienne Kennedy. It will be interesting to see if the script, which was shocking when it premiered in 1964, remains more than a period piece today.

2: Almost, Maine by John Cariani. Directed by Craig J. Faulkner. Staged by the Seacoast Repertory Theatre, Portsmouth, NH, Feb. 5-28. Given the current cold spell, it is an appropriate time for a contemporary “love in deep freeze” stage experience. “A cold, clear moonless night in the middle of winter,” runs the publicity summary, “all is not quite what it seems in the remote, mythical town of Almost, Maine. Unexpected and hilarious, hearts are broken and mended—almost—in this delightful midwinter night’s dream.”

3: Not Enough Air by Masha Obolensky. Directed by Melia Bensussen. Presented by the Nora Theatre Company at the Central Square Theater, Cambridge, MA, February 11 through March 14. Obolensky is on the theater faculty at The Boston Conservatory and is currently pursuing her MFA in playwriting at Boston University. This is the East Coast premiere of her play, which is inspired by how “famed journalist-turned-playwright” Sophie Treadwell was “drawn into the sensational 1920’s murder trial of Ruth Snyder.” The result: Treadwell’s landmark play, “Machinal.”

4: Black Pearl Sings! by Frank Higgins. Directed by Benny Sato Ambush. Staged by the Merrimack Repertory Theatre (MRT), Lowell, MA, Feb. 11 through March 7. The reviews of the show’s Washington D.C. production are not reassuring, but let’s see what the MRT does with how “the search for lost African-American folk music leads Susannah, an ambitious ’song collector,’ to Pearl, a prisoner with a soulful voice, steely spirit, and an incredible history. Tracing the roots of many beloved American songs, the legacy of the past clashes with hopes for the future, as the two women journey to find their way out of the shadows and into the spotlight.”

5: Private Fears in Public Places by Alan Ayckbourn. Directed by David J. Miller. Staged by the Zeitgeist Stage Company at the Boston Center for the Arts, Black Box Theater, Boston, MA, Feb. 12 through March 6. Ayckbourn’s reputation has grown considerably over the last two decades, with the recognition that he is far more than the scatter-shot farceur of “The Norman Conquests.” He’s a chronicler of urban/suburban angst, a sort of humorous, British version of Raymond Carver. This is one of his more stripped-down excursions into the bleak places of the soul. I haven’t seen this script on stage, but the 2006 film version (”Coeurs”), directed by Alain Resnais, is quite moving.

Dramatist Alan Ayckbourn: the bard of lost souls

6: The New England Russian Theatre Festival. At the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre (BPT), Boston, MA, Feb. 18-21. Our theaters do a lamentable job of producing international drama, so this event sounds promising. But there is very little information on the BPT website aside from the titles of the plays and the suggestion that some of them will be workshop productions. Regis College announced that “‘Woman with the Red Kerchief,’ a play about Leo Tolstoy by Regis College theater professor Wendy Lement and historian Firouzeh Mostashari, now of the University of Iowa, has been chosen to receive a professional production” at the festival, but I don’t see it in the line-up.

7: Stick Fly by Lydia Diamond. Directed by Kenny Leon. Presented by the Huntington Theatre Company in cooperation with Arena Stage at the Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts, Feb. 19 through March 21. “Sparks fly and long-hidden secrets tumble into the open when the LeVay brothers bring their new girlfriends home to Martha’s Vineyard’s world of privilege” in Diamond’s sassy play about race, history, and class.

8: boom by Peter Sinn Nachtrieb. Directed by Bridget Kathleen O’Leary. Presented by the New Repertory Theatre at the Black Box Theater at the Arsenal Center for the Arts, Watertown, MA, Feb. 21 through March 13. The New England premiere of a dark comedy about how the world is a goner unless a mismatched couple decides to procreate. The cast includes Karen MacDonald, fresh from her triumph as Kate in the Huntington Theatre Company production of “All My Sons.”

9: An Evening of Short Plays by Women Playwrights. Presented by Emerson Stage at Emerson College, Semel Theater, Boston, MA, Feb. 25-28. The trio of plays are: “October/November” by Anne Washburn, “The Bluest Eye” (based on the book by Toni Morrison) by Lydia Diamond, and “Vendeta Chrome” by Sally Oswald. Given the production in January of another Diamond script, it appears that the playwright is taking the city by storm.

10: Paradise Lost by Clifford Odets. Directed by Daniel Fish. Staged by the American Repertory Theater at the Loeb Drama Center, Cambridge, MA, Feb. 27 through March 20. On the one hand, the theater antiquarian in me is excited by this production of a heralded Odets play that, most likely because of its huge cast, is rarely produced. I have never seen it. And I am assured by the ART that Fish is a “visionary director,” though they seem to be a dime a dozen over there.

On the other hand, with the NYT article in mind, could it be that there is no new play of merit that deals with the economic troubles we are having in America today? Really? Odets, like Arthur Miller, is a reassuring brand name writing about hard times in very different times. Meanwhile, the next play on the ART docket is a world premiere musical about the Boston Red Sox. In the old days, the adage was to follow the money—today it is to follow the marketing.

4:48 Psychosis by Sarah Kane. Directed by Tony Estrella. Presented by The Gamm Theatre, Pawtucket, RI, through February 7.

Casey Seymour Kim (Woman) in The Gamm Theatre

Reviewed By Caldwell Titcomb

The Gamm Theatre in Pawtucket merits praise for its courage in staging Sarah Kane’s “4:48 Psychosis.” This last of the British playwright’s five plays in a short life is highly unorthodox, being a harrowing portrayal of severe depression on the verge of suicide. It sprang from Kane’s own experience of mental illness. Though there are wisps of humor, the work essentially depicts what the protagonist calls the “rupture of the soul.”

There is no linear plot nor are there specified characters. Gender is not indicated. The play has been done as a monologue and with as many as a dozen performers. The premiere at the Royal Court Theatre in June of 2000 had a cast of two women and one man. Much is left to the discretion of the director. At the Gamm, the artistic director, Tony Estrella, opted for a female patient and a male psychiatrist, whom he labels Woman and Doctor. This is an admirable solution.

We see a hospital bed and a stool. On a raised platform there are an armchair and a coffee mug. Upstage there is a window, through which one glimpses a barren tree and falling snow. We hear a portion of a number from the greatest of all song cycles, Franz Schubert’s “Winterreise” (“Winter Journey”). In the course of the show, the tree and snow give way to a series of helpful projections.

Kane’s text consists of 24 fragments, varying in length from one line to several pages. Some of them are naturalistic dialogue, some are poems, some are unclassifiable. Some are spewed out at maximum speed, some call for Pinteresque pauses (Pinter was a strong booster of Kane when the newspaper critics pilloried her mercilessly). What is remarkable is that Casey Seymour Kim, who plays the depressed patient, gives a virtuoso performance that convinces us that all the varied speeches (she has three-quarters of the lines) and shifting moods come from the same individual.

The 4:48 of the title refers to the time she often wakes up in the morning “when sanity visits” or “when desperation visits I shall hang myself.” She tells us that “my mind is the subject of these bewildered fragments. Nothing can extinguish my anger. And nothing can restore my faith. This is not a world in which I wish to live.”

Casey Seymour Kim (Woman). Background: Tom Gleadow (Doctor). Photo by Peter Goldberg.

Sometimes she is isolated by a spotlight as she talks to herself, sometimes she is conversing with the Doctor (solidly played by Tom Gleadow), and sometimes the house lights come up as she addresses the audience directly. When she utters lists of words or of medications, these are also supplied as projections, as are photos of herself as a child when she thinks back to her earliest years.

Estrella has done a tiny bit of text tweaking. Fragment 4 is just a page of random zigzagging numerals from 100 to seven, the meaning of which is anyone’s guess. In Fragment 20 the Woman is asked to count down from 100 by subtracting seven until she reaches two. Estrella uses Fragment 20 in both places, and the Woman makes mistakes the first time and gets it right the second time. The numeral seven has a host of symbolic meanings, but it’s unclear what Kane intended—it is the symbol of pain, for one thing.

Not only is Kim’s vocal performance remarkable, but it is also highly athletic. She tears around the set and at one point takes refuge by hiding under the bed. She certainly exhibits phenomenal breath control in addition to an amazing memory.

Kane suffered from agonizing depression for some years, and on February 20, 1999, at the age of 28, she hanged herself in a bathroom of London’s King’s College Hospital. Her five plays have posthumously won her a firm place in the theatrical canon.

Bread and Puppet Theater Comes to Town

The coming month offers some unusual examples of theater. Finished with “exploding” Shakespeare, the American Repertory Theater has decided to present the American classics unabridged. Produced by the Elevator Repair Service, “Gatz” is an evening of drama that revolves around a complete reading of “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Political point-scoring via papier-mâché baddies comes in the form of the Bread and Puppet Theater, while the lascivious side of the stage will no doubt be on display in “Carny Knowledge.”

For those who want feel-good at the start of a new decade, “Gee’s Bend” will be suitably inspirational. For those who want to feel guilty early on, head to Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons.”

1: Gatz, an adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” by Elevator Repair Service. Directed by John Collins. Presented by the American Repertory Theater at the Loeb Drama Center, Cambridge, MA, January 7 through February 7, 2010. A challenging idea for an evening of theater that has garnered critical enthusiasm around the world. Text comes back to the word-lite ART with a vengeance. An employee in “a low-rent office” picks up a copy of “The Great Gatsby” and begins reading it aloud. That’s it — he keeps reading the book until the end (there’s a dinner break between halves of the reading). “His coworkers hardly seem to notice, but then strange coincidences start happening in the office, one after another …”

The upshot, according to critic Fintan O’Toole of the “Irish Times,” “is actually a startlingly original piece of theatre, one that makes you think about the nature of performance and narrative, of showing and telling, of the world inside our heads as we read, and the world that goes on around us as we do so.”

2: “All My Sons” by Arthur Miller. Directed by David Esbjornson. Presented by the Huntington Theatre Company at the Boston University Theatre, Boston, MA, January 8 through February 7, 2010. Yes, it is the old worn Miller warhorse about war profiteering, but I have heard that Esbjornson has some interesting ideas about the script that may add some much needed crackle and pop. The cast includes many Boston stalwarts, including Will Lyman, Karen MacDonald, and Dee Nelson.

3: Fabuloso by John Kolvenbach. Directed by Kyle Fabel. Staged by the Merrimack Repertory Theatre, Lowell, MA, January 7 through 31, 2010. Director Fabel insists that this farce, the tale of a staid married couple dealing with a visit from a wild and crazy male/female duo, contains comedy and heart. “Portland Arts Watch” says the play “moves from the madcap to the contemplative, from two-handed sparring to intimate confessions, from the absurd to the downright practical, back and forth, up and down. Swinging, in short.” Dramatist Kolvenbach’s play “Love Story” was nominated for an Oliver Award as “Best New Comedy.”

4: 4:48 Psychosis by Sarah Kane. Directed by Tony Estrella. Staged by the Gamm Theatre at the Pawtucket Armory, Pawtucket, Rhode Island, January 14 through February 7, 2010. Kane’s final play, completed in 1999 and staged posthumously in 2000. Kane’s pain-ridden dream text asks for the company to supply delineated characters, to invent stage directions, and to decide on the number of actors. The risk of all this arty nebulousness is that the production floats off into irritating abstractness. But the considerable pay off is a harrowing vision of hell in what seems to be a psychiatric ward and/or the inside of a poetically disturbed mind.

5: “Gee’s Bend” by Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder. Directed by Hana Sharif. Produced by the Hartford Stage, Hartford, Connecticut, January 14 through February 11, 2010. The feel-good play tells the story of the women of “Gee’s Bend, who quilted their way to economic freedom” and celebrity by way of a national exhibition tour, garnering features in “Newsweek,” “House and Garden” and “Oprah Winfrey’s O Magazine. ” Wilder won the 2008 Elizabeth M. Osborn Award for this play, which has received over 5 regional productions since its world premiere at Alabama Shakespeare Festival in 2007.

Carny Knowledge: Sideshow Performers Silvia Graziano, Nick Thorkelson, & Sylvie Agudelo; photo by Joel Benjamin

6: “The Good Negro” by Tracey Scott Wilson. Directed by Summer L. Williams. Staged by Company One at the Boston Center for the Arts, Boston MA, January 15 through February 6, 2010. The New England premiere of a historical drama that deals with the psychological costs of taking part in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. The plot: “Claudette Sullivan is beaten and arrested for taking her little girl into the “white only” restroom at a department store.” “The New York Times” review assures us that “in hindsight the ultimate triumph of the civil rights movement seems inevitable, the bright sun of enlightenment inevitably burning through clouds of ignorance and injustice. Ms. Wilson reminds us how precarious it seemed at the time, as each day brought new evidence of human fear and cruelty and weakness.”

7: “Indulgences” by Chris Craddock. Directed by Kate Warner. Staged by the New Repertory Theatre at the Arsenal Center for the Arts in the Charles Mosesian Theatre, Watertown, MA, January 17 through February 7, 2010. The New England premiere of a “farcical comedy” by a Canadian playwright. The proceedings take place in “a kingdom somewhere” in which a man “bargains for everyone’s ‘happily ever after.’” The production features a strong local cast, including Steve Barkhimer, Leigh Barrett, and Benjamin Evett.

8: “Tear Open the Door of Heaven” and “Dirt Cheap Money Circus” staged by Bread and Puppet Theater at the Boston Center for the Arts, Boston, MA, January 25 through 31, 2010. The award-winning political theater troupe, with their signature giant papier-mâché puppets, come to town with two new rabble-rousing shows. In the evening (Jan 28-31), “Tear Open the Door of Heaven” takes a didactic look at the power of religion, with six large puppets “representing God, his daughter and stepdaughter, a US president and his war-raging office, mountaintop removal protesters, money printing artists, and stargazers of the North East Kingdom of Vermont.”

“Dirt Cheap Money Circus” (Jan 30-31, family-friendly matinees), presents “the billionaire bonus celebration dance, the logic of the US Healthcare System, the history of humanity and the removal of a mountaintop, interspersed with appearances by Karl Marx.” Nice to see that Marx is still around to save the day.

9: “Carny Knowledge: A Sideshow Extravaganza of Original Plays and Extraordinary Oddities,” presented by the Fort Point Theatre Channel, at the UMCA Theatre, Cambridge, MA, January 29 through February 6, 2010. A round-up of “carnival-inspired plays and carnival-style performances — using new-timey production methods to evoke old-time-y interpretations.” The pieces include “With You or Without You,” video and audio art by Bebe Beard and Lou Cohen, and “Wife of Bobbo” by local playwright M. Lynda Robinson. The hope, I suspect, is that you will have good old new time-y time.

10: NT Live: “Nation”, an adaptation of Terry Pratchett’s novel by Mark Ravenhill. Directed by Melly Still. At the Coolidge Corner Cinema, the Cape Cinema, Dennis, and Memorial Hall, Shelburne Falls, January 30, 2010. London’s National Theatre will broadcast a live performance of the “spectacular family production” via satellite to 350 cinemas worldwide — there are three participating movie houses in Massachusetts.

Next up for a NT Live screening is sure to be on my list: on April 22 there will be a chance to see Alan Bennett’s new play “The Habit of Art” with a cast that includes Richard Griffiths, Alex Jennings and Frances de la Tour.

Hanukkah holiday entertainment: Well-women Vardit Haimi-Cohen and Janet Buchwald trap the courageous Shulamis (Grace Field) during the Yiddish operetta premiering at Harvard University.

The prospect of holiday cheer on stage is pretty depressing to contemplate after the soporific treacle of Paula Vogel’s PC-crazed “A Civil War Christmas: An American Musical Celebration,” which culminates in the unintentionally eye-popping vision of Walt Whitman, dressed as Kris Kringle, visiting a dying Jewish soldier. For those reluctant to take in heaping helpings of “The SantaLand Diaries” and the dwindling flock of “Christmas Carols” (Scrooge once owned this holiday on stage), I have picked a few alternatives, many at universities.

1) A Question of Mercy by David Rabe. Presented by the BCAP (Boston University’s professional performing arts initiative) at the BU Theatre, Stewart F. Lane and Bonnie Comley Studio 210, 264 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA, December 2 through 19, 2009. Ah, a play about euthanasia during the holidays! A timely script given the blather about “death panels” amid increasing evidence that expensive end-of-life treatment is a major contributor to America’s broken health care system. Rabe’s tale revolves around an AIDS patient who, in the last stages of the disease, asks his physician to help him die. It was inspired by “A Question of Mercy,” an essay by Richard Selzer that appeared in “The New York Times Magazine” on September 22, 1991.

2) Shulamis by Avrom Golfaden. Directed by Debra Caplan and Cecilia Raker. At the Agassiz Theater, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, December 2 through 6, 2009. Golfaden’s popular play, “the very last production of interwar Yiddish theatre in Warsaw in 1939,” finds new life as an operetta. The student production features a new English translation by Yiddish translator Nahma Sandrow and a musical score by Folksbiene artistic director Zalmen Mlotek.

The plot deals with the beautiful young Shulamis who, while wandering though the desert, is “rescued by handsome Avsholem, who swears to marry her upon his return from Jerusalem. When Avsholem fails to come for her, Shulamis pretends to go mad in order to keep her vow to him, yearning both for his return and for revenge.”

3) Where the Magic Happens by George Watsky. Directed by Jim Fagan. Presented by SpeakEasy Stage at the Boston Center for the Arts, December 6 and 7, 2009. “Slam poet prodigy George Watsky blends traditional theatrical storytelling and spoken word for a wry look at “anti-social” networking, family and the magic of technology. Using their cell phones, audience members will decide the path this young HBO veteran takes as he explores the ways people interact in the post postmodern age.” So, we are in the “post postmodern age” — does that mean audience members can use technology to tell the performer when they have had enough? Sounds promising … if true.

4) Illyria: The Musical, a musical adaptation of William Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” by Peter C. Mills and Cara Reichel. Directed by Stephen Terrell. Presented by Emerson Stage at the Tufte Performance and Production Center, Semel Theater 3rd floor, 10 Boylston Place, Boston, MA, December 10 through 13, 2009. The current approach to Shakespeare appears to be to take the Bard’s plot and characters but deep-six his language. Seems to me to be a losing proposition, a goes-down-easy approach that will only make Shakespeare less compelling by removing his genius, but so it goes … perhaps, if the cell phone idea catches hold, we can call the director, marketers, and performers and ask for the poetry back.

Shakespeare's star-crossed lovers meet in the Gamm Theatre production

Reviewed by Caldwell Titcomb

To celebrate the start of its 25th season, the Gamm Theatre in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, is offering two Shakespeare plays in repertory: “Romeo and Juliet” and “Much Ado About Nothing.” This is not an easy assignment to bring off, especially with essentially the same cast in both shows, but the Gamm is admirably up to the task. On weekends it is even possible to see both plays on the same day (as I did).

Sara Ossana has designed a versatile unit set – a central ogive and a pair of left and right steps leading up to a second level with more ogives. The basic color is a neutral gray, with rich red hangings for “Romeo” and tan ones for “Much Ado.” A few movable props are sufficient to accommodate the changes of location, abetted by Jen Rock’s varied lighting designs. Many scenes are linked by brief interludes played live on guitar, clarinet, violin and contrabass.

Helming “Romeo” is the company’s artistic director, Tony Estrella. He has given us a highly athletic production, opening with violent brawling between the Montague and Capulet factions before anyone says a word. The time is the late 16th century.

Making his Gamm debut as Romeo is curlyhaired Aaron Rossini, a recent M.F.A. graduate of Brown University/Trinity Rep Consortium. He exhibits a broad vocal range, culminating with a properly shrieked “I defy you, stars!” near the end.

Juliet is supposed to be just shy of her fourteenth birthday, and Amanda Ruggiero captures a teenage girl better than most who tackle the role. She has many delectable moments, and scampers about with giddy ardor. In the famous Balcony Scene, she does not stay aloft but comes down to the ground in order to indulge in a lot of kissing with Romeo, who is barefoot – all of which works convincingly.

Wendy Overly, who is the crown jewel of the permanent company, is magnificent as Juliet’s Nurse, even when she lies prone for a back massage by Juliet. Most of the other players give solid support, especially Kelby T. Akin as a mustachioed Mercutio, and Tom Gleadow as Lord Capulet, who can summon up anger when required. As the Prince, Sam Babbitt was underpowered, but was perhaps saving himself for the greater demands as Leonato in “Much Ado” later in the day.

There is not much one can do about the tedious scene that speaks of Romeo’s banishment some two dozen times in the space of a few lines. But the final Tomb Scene was nicely staged, though it was a novelty to have the company sing and the dead Romeo and Juliet stand up for a farewell tableau.

Swingtime in the Gamm Theatre production of Much Ado About Nothing

The “Much Ado” production was directed by Fred Sullivan Jr., who is one of the Gamm’s three resident directors. He chose to move the time up to 1945. At the outset there is a radio bulletin announcing the end of World War II, which leads to a host of servicemen in military garb celebrating with singing, dancing, playing soccer with balloons, all carried out in front of an unfurled banner reading VICTORY.

Doffing his administrative duties to play the major role of Benedick, Tony Estrella, wearing a batch of merit badges, brings lots of brio to his assumed disdain for a snooty Beatrice (Jeanine Kane), both of whom are tricked into revealing different feelings and an eventual marriage. Estrella has grown a moustache for this show, although at one point he lathers his face and gives himself a shave.

The play is officially assigned to the category of Comedy, and it was the amusing friction between the two sparring leads that composer Hector Berlioz concentrated on in his delightful final opera, “Beatrice and Benedict.” But the script also has its serious subplot, involving the villainous Don John (Kelby Akin), who spreads a false accusation of adultery to destroy the impending wedding of Claudio (Marc Dante Mancini) and Hero (Amanda Ruggiero), which leads to the supposed death of the latter.

The malapropistic constable Dogberry and his cohorts can be a bore, but Tom Gleadow and colleagues manage to make them highly entertaining. One leaves this show with a smile and gratitude to the entire cast.

Remaining performances: “Romeo” plays on Nov. 27 at 8. Both shows play on Nov. 28 at 2 and 8, and on Nov. 29 at 2 and 7. “Much Ado” plays on Nov. 25 at 7, with added performances on Dec. 2 at 7, and on Dec. 3, 4 and 5 at 8.

Reckless by Graig Lucas. Directed by Scott Edmiston. Presented by the SpeakEasy Stage Company at the Boston Center for the Arts through December 12, 2009.

Norton Award-winners Larry Coen and Marianna Bassham in a scene from the SpeakEasy Stage Company production of RECKLESS.

Just in case you haven’t noticed it’s edging on toward Christmas, the SpeakEasy Stage Company unwraps “Reckless,” a bauble of a revival by playwright Craig Lucas, whose work for stage and screen includes “The Light in the Piazza,” “Longtime Companion” and “Prelude to a Kiss.”

“Reckless” is a “dark comedy” first staged in 1985, made into a feature film starring Mia Farrow ten years later, and finally produced in New York in 2004. Slickly staged and acted by an exuberant and expert company who convey their delight in every outrageous scene, this is a play that entertains even as it takes aim at the hypocrisies of the
holiday season.

A contemporary adaptation of “Candide” crossed with “Alice in Wonderland,” “Reckless” starts out on Christmas Eve with Rachel, its manic housewife heroine with logorrhea, being warned by her husband Tom that he has taken out a
contract on her life and that, if she wants to live, she’d better get out — NOW.

“That is the sickest joke,” Rachel declares but, in the fashion of the housewife stereotyped by mainstream gay playwrights — much as sensitive gay men were once stereotyped by straight mainstream playwrights — she follows her desperate husband’s advice and, wearing only her flowered flannel nightgown, exits via the window.

She enters a world where no one is safe from a send-up of political correctness — not homeless people, talk show hosts, criminals, paraplegics, psychotherapists, heads of NGOs — not even deaf mutes. As she makes her way from Springfield, MA to a succession of other Springfields in this best of all possible nations, Rachel finds that life has indeed been “reckless” with many of the people she meets and that they have responded in a variety ofways.

The company of local actors is terrific although Marianna Bassham as Rachel could trust her lines more and attenuate her acting a notch –her Rachel is so irritating that she runs the risk of driving her audience out of the theater as well as her husband to murder and her rescuer to drink. On the other hand, Larry Coen and Kerry A Dowling were entirely convincing in their loopy roles and I especially liked Paula Plum’s witty succession of physicians and psychotherapists.

The sets and costumes are zany and wonderful; the music, evocative; the lighting, enhancing; and the direction smart and elegant. If you’re looking for a light, diverting evening or afternoon of theater, this is it.

Helen Epstein is the author of “Joe Papp: An American Life.”

What is a Judicial Review? It is a fresh approach to creating a conversational, critical space about the arts. The aim is to combine editorial integrity with the community-making power of interactivity. This is our first session.

• Review by Ian Thal
• Review by Timothy Longman
• Review by Peter Cohen
• Artist response by Shawn LaCount
• Summary by Bill Marx

As coverage of the arts in the conventional, mainstream media wanes, critical discussion of the arts online has settled into two extremes: there’s the corporate dream of an omnipotent “Google” reviewer for all and the chaos of opinions fired off in individual blogs of varying quality and intellectual integrity.

My aim with the Judicial Review, of which there will be one a month in the coming year, is to fashion a mid-way between these two unsatisfying polarities — to create a flexible place where professionals and nonprofessionals, artists and amateurs can exchange views and judgments about the arts. This will serve as a model for a civil conversational setting that will invite independent discussion as well as encourage participation in the arts.

First on the docket for Judicial Review: John ADEkoje (Samuel Mizinga), and the cast of The Overwhelming

The inspiration for the Judicial Review is the U.S. Supreme Court. Arts events will be evaluated by local panels of “judges” who will post majority and dissenting opinions in the form of written reviews or via video- or podcasts. The panel will be made up of a combination of professional critics and non-professional observers.

Our goal is to introduce a supervised space for educational, passionate, and incisive conversation about the arts that draws on the strengths of various levels of expertise. By doing so, it is hoped that the judges will learn from each other as well as offer a variety of perspectives that will invite responses that will deepen readers understanding of the arts and the craft of criticism.

In any trial there is a place for a “Friend of the Court” brief. The Judicial Review will include a space for the artists themselves to have their say, to contribute to the respectful exchange. The arts organization under review will be invited to file opinions.

This idea is my response to the considerable challenges and opportunities that the web poses for criticism of the arts, reflecting my belief, after 30 years of writing and reading arts criticism, that a review’s verdict, while essential, is not its most important value. Criticism is at its most vital when it fosters spirited dialogue, when critics help us take the arts seriously by connecting creativity with our thinking and feeling selves.

For that kind of connection to thrive on the web the emphasis must be placed on the value of the collective give-and-take, on generating information and curiosity, on stimulating the slip and slide of reasons and evaluations. We have much to learn from each other. I invite those who would like to take part in this experiment as “judges” to email theartsfuse (staff@theartsfuse.com). I would also like reactions to the idea, suggestions for improvement, directions to take, etc.

Below I summarize the majority opinion of the three judges. Company One director Shawn LaCount then contributes a “Friend of the Court” brief.

— Bill Marx, Editor

==================================================================

The Overwhelming by J. T. Rogers. Directed by Shawn LaCount. Presented by Company One at the Boston Center for the Arts, Boston, through November 21, 2009.

Cedric Lilly (Joseph Gasana),
Doug Bowen-Flynn (Jack Exley) in The Overwhelming

Majority Opinion:

The bottom line decisions of the three judges are pretty much the same: each felt that the production was worth seeing. Company One was praised for staging a script that deals with an international issue of moral and political importance.

Because it leans heavily on the tired notion of Americans as myopic innocents in a strange land (Rwanda in 1994), J. T. Rogers’s play ended up disappointing performer Ian Thal and playwright Peter Cohen. The dramatic set-up didn’t bother Timothy Longman, the Director of the New African Studies Center at Boston University, who was more disturbed that the script reinforces, rather than undercuts, clichés about Rwanda.

Dissenting Opinion: None really, though Peter Cohen strikes the harshest note regarding the Company One performers. He believes they are pitched at too high a decibel level.

Judge # 1

Ian Thal

Any contemporary play that depicts Westerners abroad in the midst of what is euphemistically called a “human rights catastrophe” draws comparisons to Tony Kushner’s “Homebody/Kabul.” Whether or not the latter served as a model, J.T. Rogers’ “The Overwhelming” explores the weeks leading up to the 1994 genocide of Rwanda’s Tutsis through the eyes of visitors from America. In this case, the innocents abroad are the family of Jack Exley (Doug Bowen-Flynn), an academic attempting to track down a Tutsi Doctor and former college roommate played by Cedric Lilly.

To Rogers’s credit, the protagonists encounter a supporting cast of Rwandans, expatriates, and diplomatic workers who pursue their own agendas and seize their own opportunities in a morally bewildering setting. These characters attempt to determine what the Exleys know, what they want the Exleys to know, what the Exleys believe, and what they want to Exleys to believe. These insiders act at cross-purposes to one another to enlist, distract, or shape the perceptions of the outsiders.

Rogers, however, fails to meet Kushner’s challenge: the play is undermined by the author’s reliance on the cliché of naive Americans bumbling far from home. Where Kushner’s Ceiling family is made up of memorable characters, Rogers’ Exley family are barely even stock: back in 1994 the script’s protagonist, a political scientist specializing in international relations and grassroots activism, would not be so foolish as to believe that UN peacekeepers would take action against human rights abuses. For two years running UN troops had already been passively witnessing ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. That Jack studies grass-roots activism yet praises his activist friend to a government official of a rival ethnic group is a ludicrous plot device: Rogers telegraphs to the audience not just the identity of killer and victim, but how the killer will be led to his victim.

Rogers wants it both ways: Jack’s supposed to be a nondescript everyman who serves as an audience surrogate yet also have the intellectual chops to turn up in the wrong place at the wrong time for the sake of a research project. (Rogers could have worked harder to make Jack sound more like a professor who was making a last ditch effort to land tenure.) Actor Bowen-Flynn is unfairly left in the position of having to pump life into a hero who is little more than a container for lazy plot devices.

The other members of the family fare slightly better because their naiveté comes by virtue of being along for the ride. Jack’s wife, Linda (Lyndsay Allyn Cox), is written as a narcissistic writer of creative-nonfiction, a stereotypical self-absorbed idealist blind to the genocidal rhetoric of anyone who promises her a look at The Truth. Ironically, the fact that she clings to her African-American identity blinds her to the encroaching menace. Jack’s teenage son, Geoffrey (Gabe Goodman) at least makes no pretense of understanding Rwanda and is thus the first to grasp what is happening.

Richer opportunities for the actors are found in the supporting cast: the nimble Tory Bullock, who plays Gerard, the porter whom Geofrey befriends, makes good use of the role’s possibilities for physical comedy. Cedric Lilly’s portrayal of the missing activist-doctor embraces both comedic subterfuge and the tragedy of the difficult decisions that have to be made in wartime. Mason Sand and Peter Brown (each in two roles) play a range of foreigners who see the precedents or harbingers of the oncoming genocide but because of world weariness, lack of actionable intelligence, or realpolitik savvy are unable to avert history. Because of Jack and Linda’s ignorance, these telling signs of the time and place are left addressing no one but the audience.

Director Shawn LaCount and stage manager Jillian Levine do an admirable job of keeping “The Overwhelming” running along at a fast pace and, despite the play’s considerable flaws, focused on the important themes that Rogers seeks to explore.

Ian Thal is a mime, commedia dell’arte actor, puppeteer, poet, playwright and teacher in Somerville, MA. His play, “Total War,” holds the dubious distinction of attracting protests despite never having a production.

Judge # 2

Timothy Longman

When I first traveled to Rwanda in 1992, the country was largely unknown in the United States. “Rwanda,” several people asked me before I left for a year of research in the country, “Isn’t that a woman’s name?” Even in the immediate aftermath of the 1994 genocide, the country’s main claim to fame remained Dian Fossey and the movie “Gorillas in the Mist.” For the first several years, when I gave a public lecture about what happened in Rwanda, I was inevitably asked, “What about the gorillas?”

The terrible violence that swept Rwanda in 1994, killing as many as 800,000 people, ultimately caught the attention of the international community. While Burundi’s civil war was longer and Congo’s wars have killed more people, Rwanda has become the rare African tragedy that has garnered widespread notice in the West. A morbid fascination with the intimate nature of Rwanda’s violence has inspired a series of best-selling books, movies, and plays that have elevated the Rwandan genocide to iconic status. The name “Rwanda” has become shorthand for brutal, incomprehensible slaughter.

“The Overwhelming,” currently in a gripping and well-acted production by Company One, represents the most successful play to date about the Rwandan genocide, having been staged at the National Theater in London, the Roundabout in New York, and the Next Theatre in Chicago. The story centers on a naïve and idealistic academic, Jack Exley, who travels to Rwanda with his family in early 1994 to research a book on grassroots activism. Having organized the trip at the last minute at the invitation of an old Rwandan friend, Jack is ill informed and ill prepared for life in a country in the midst of civil war and political transition. Jack, his wife, Linda, and son, Geoffrey, develop friendships with several Rwandans. But none of their new friends are fully truthful, and they all seem to be involving the Exley family in secretive plans.

While “The Overwhelming” takes place in a context of spreading violence, the play itself is a mystery and psychological thriller. Set in the months just prior to the genocide, the play focuses on the mounting tensions in the country and the confusion of outsiders seeking to understand a complex and deteriorating situation. The play poses a series of moral questions. How would you react if confronted with violence? What would you sacrifice to save the life of a friend? Would you have the courage to do what is right when confronted with a life and death situation? How would you even know which choices are right?

Fedna Jacquet (Emiritha),
Gabe Goodman (Geoffery Exley) in The Overwhelming

As a moral parable about the naiveté of foreigners and the ambiguous line between right and wrong, the play’s setting in Rwanda is almost incidental to the story. Yet the fact that the end of the story is known, that the viewers know in advance that one group represented in the play is going to commit genocide against the other, undermines the plays intended mystery. Since we are already predisposed to believe that the Hutu in the play are evil and the Tutsi are victims, the audience is not drawn directly into the moral ambiguity but instead watches from a distance to see if and when the American characters will clue into the truth of the situation.

The final revelation that the Tutsi characters may not be entirely blameless serves as more of a distraction than a complication, since it cannot justify the attempt to annihilate all Tutsi from the face of the earth, as the Hutu Power militias ultimately sought to do.

The danger with fictionalized accounts of this sort is that the audience often focuses less on their artistic truths than on the window that they supposedly provide to an unfamiliar culture. While most have now heard of the Rwandan genocide, many people know only the vaguest details. As an audience talk-back following a recent Company One production demonstrated, many audience members turn to the play not only for inspiration but also for information. The idea that the play has a documentary authenticity is promoted by liner notes and press coverage touting the playwright J.T. Rogers’s research on the topic and travels to Rwanda and the real-life moral crisis he encountered in his own dealings with Rwandan consultants.

Unfortunately, the portrayal of Rwanda in “The Overwhelming” is inaccurate on a number of points. The play nicely captures the reticence of Rwandans, who are generally parsimonious with the truth in order to protect themselves. But Rwandans are also notoriously self possessed, keeping their feelings and true thoughts tightly bottled up. The displays of sharp temper and overt emotion at various points in the play do not ring true.

The factual details about events are also mistaken on several key points. The period in which the play is set was a time of sharply rising ethnic tensions, but there was very little violence, outside a few high-profile assassinations. The idea portrayed in the play that ethnic massacres were gradually spreading seems to suggest a much more random form of violence than the well-planned genocide a few months later actually represented.

Certain decisions in this production tend to emphasize the degree to which Rwanda is more of a symbol than an actual setting for the play. The decision to dress Rwandan actors in distinctly West African garb (a Nigerian Agbada and Ghanian Kente cloth) is jarring to anyone familiar with East Africa, as is the comical North African servant outfit worn by the Exley’s household worker.

These criticisms aside, I quite enjoyed Company One’s production. The story is compelling and the acting quite strong. As an evening of provocative and entertaining theater, I would highly recommend “The Overwhelming.” As a window into understanding Rwanda and its genocide, however, other more accurate sources are available. This play unfortunately does not push beyond the iconic status of Rwanda’s tragedy.

Timothy Longman is director of the African Studies Center at Boston University. He has traveled and researched extensively in Central, Eastern, and Southern Africa. He lived in Rwanda in 1992-93, conducting research for his dissertation, and he returned to Rwanda in 1995 to direct the Human Rights Watch field office. His book, “Christianity and Genocide in Rwanda,” was recently published by Cambridge University Press. He is currently completing the book “Memory, Justice, and Power in Post-Genocide Rwanda,” based on field research he conducted there from 2001 to 2006.

Judge # 3

Peter Cohen

I found “The Overwhelming” a difficult evening of theater that often disappoints but ends quite compellingly.

Most certainly, “The Overwhelming” is not an easy play to produce. And for that alone Company One has my respect. They could have gone for the safe bet, fare that is easy to digest; instead, the troupe chose a story about genocide, set in the African country of Rwanda in 1994.

Given the shape the world is in, at present, this play is not an unreasonable choice - just think of Darfur or Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. Technically, Zimbabwe’s disintegration is not a case of genocide, but the violence that Mugabe and his clique have visited on it comes close.

Obehi Janice (Elise Kayitesi)
and Lyndsay Allyn Cox (Linda White-Keeler) in The Overwhelming

But while I understand the reason for presenting such a play, I have a problem with this particular one. The story is quite contrived; instead of vibrant, engaging dialogue you get speeches and little lectures; and instead of confrontations that reveal who the characters are, and what they struggle for, you get shouting matches. The director could have done more to stage the play in a manner to offset its shortcomings.

And yet the last scenes make up for much of that. All of a sudden you do have conflict - and a truly tragic one at that. And much of the effort that went into the play pays off. I will not reveal the play’s climax, except to say that in those final scenes we get a real sense of what happened at the time in Rwanda - how shockingly easy men (and women) lose their humanity, almost as if they had lost nothing more than an umbrella or a hat. And that what we hold to be enduring and reliable - our institutions, our values, our art - turns out to be of little more protection than a soap bubble’s skin.

The play has a quite large cast and the director, Shawn LaCount, does not always seem to know what to do with them all. But the troupe includes talented actors of African origin (and accent). In particular John Oluwole Adekoje, Tory Bullock, Chima Chikazunga and Obehi Janice - they all have cameo moments that breathe life into the play. But the flat dialogue makes it hard for everyone to shine for too long.

Finally, I wish the set-designer Sean Cote, had given more thought to the fact that the play is set in Central Africa - I missed the colors, the visual chaos of a developing country. Obviously such effects - for a small theater like Company One - are also a question of money. But not just; more could have been done, not with money, but with imagination.

So, again - if you are one of those people for whom the pleasure of going to the theater includes being challenged - go see this show. You will be rewarded with a powerful finish.

Peter Cohen studied at Princeton and Harvard. It was at Harvard, at age thirty-one, that he broke through with the non-fiction novel “The Gospel According to the Harvard Business School,” which became a bestseller. Cohen’s play with music, “A Ship to Zion,” was produced by a Kingston, Jamaica, company. It won its lead actor the Jamaican Oscar for best male actor; the original production was subsequently invited to Zurich, and to the Caracas International Theater Festival.

Some of Cohen’s plays have been produced by prominent European theaters such as: Schauspielhaus Zurich (in cooperation with Swiss National Radio); Kulturfabrik Kampnagel, Hamburg; Hackesches Hof Theater, Berlin; Theaterhaus Gessnerallee, Zurich and Theater Freiburg, Freiburg i.B., Germany.
In May 2009 a new play, “To Pay the Price,” got a full production Off Broadway; Bob Kalfin, a veteran of Broadway, directed.

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Friend of the Court brief:

Director Shawn LaCount

First, I’d like to thank all of you for your thoughtful critiques. It’s great to be part of an ongoing dialogue on theatre, and I hope we’ll have more opportunities to engage like this in the future. I will say that as a founding member of the company dedicated to “changing the face of Boston theatre,” I would love to see some of the diverse faces in the Boston theatre community participating in the discussion.

It’s no surprise that three critics with different areas of expertise found different strengths and weaknesses in Company One’s production of “The Overwhelming,” and all of you have certainly given us a lot to think about. What I found most interesting, though, are the questions of cultural sensitivity and veracity raised by all three, so I think that’s where I’ll focus for this response.

With a play like this, I think we all – cast, crew, director, audience member – have an inclination to try to provide answers: what makes a genocide or a holocaust happen? But I don’t think we’re capable of that. They continue to happen all over the world, time and time again, even though we say we’ll never let them happen again. So at some point in the rehearsal process, we decided to move away from the idea of putting an academic or historical stamp on the events. It felt condescending, in a way – as if we were taking a superior national, cultural, or racial view.

That’s not to say the show doesn’t provide answers, but I think the answers are not political. I think the answers are individual, paralleling the country’s conflict with this family’s conflict, and speaking to how we make our decisions, specifically in the face of our deepest fears. I always think the concept of “fear” makes for good drama.

Like Professor Longman, I was troubled by the idea that the audience is seeking an historical record in this production, and if I can speak for the playwright, J.T. Rogers, I don’t think his recounting of his research is intended to give the piece a documentary authority. Our approach was not to educate, but to illuminate major questions – to put the audience in the shoes of many different characters, all asking, “What would I do?” If anything, “The Overwhelming” emphasizes that the very idea of truth is always subjective, and there is no neutrality when it comes to issues of life and death. I think that’s what makes it such a good story, and one that I wanted to take part in telling.

Reviewed by Caldwell Titcomb

The Jewish presence in the United States goes back to the16th century. In 1584 Sir Walter Raleigh recruited the expert Prague-born Jewish metallurgist and mining engineer Joachim Gans/Gaunse to join him on an expedition to Virginia to establish a permanent settlement. But Gans decided to return to England two years later. In 1654, however, enough Jewish families immigrated from Spain and Portugal (via Brazil) to establish Congregation Shearith Israel in New York, followed in 1658 by Congregation Jeshuat Israel in Newport, Rhode Island, whose Touro synagogue, started in 1759 and dedicated in 1763, is the oldest extant Jewish house of worship.

Four Jewish playwrights were active in the early decades of the 19th century. Isaac Harby (1788-1828) was writing plays already as a teenager, and later became a critic for the “New York Evening Post.” Mordecai Manuel Noah (1785-1851) was a diplomat and journalist as well as a playwright, and was the first native Jew to attain national prominence. He wrote for the stage from 1808 to 1840, and his “She Would Be a Soldier” (1819) made him the first important Jewish American writer. “The Evil Eye” (1831), by Noah’s cousin Jonas B. Phillips (1805-69), was staged throughout the rest of the century. Samuel Benjamin Helbert Judah (1798-1869) – who, incidentally, in 1816 became the first Jewish graduate of Rutgers University – had considerable success with four plays from 1820 to 1823.

It is understandable that these Jewish playwrights avoided Judaism in their writing.When Jewish characters did turn up, it is not surprising that they were unsavory. The first play to have a Jewish character in the cast was apparently “Slaves of Algiers” (1794) by the non-Jewish writer Susanna Haswell Rowson (1762-1824). The Jewish merchant, Ben Hassan (who speaks in heavy dialect), is greedy and repulsive, and converts to the Muslim faith. He also has a half-Jewish daughter, Fetnah. In “The American Captive” (1812), by another non-Jew, James Ellison (whose dates I could not find), Ishmael is a miserly Jew who even starves his own servant.

From this prolegomenon I turn to Julius Novick’s important new book, “Beyond the Golden Door: Jewish American Drama and Jewish American Experience.”

Novick was already writing insightfully about the theater as a Harvard undergraduate, and proceeded to a doctorate at Yale in 1966. In 1968 he published “Beyond Broadway: The Quest for Permanent Theatres,” a still valuable survey of some fifty regional theaters in the United States and Canada. For many years he reviewed theater in diverse publications, and in 1982 won the George Jean Nathan Award for drama criticism. From 1972 to his recent retirement he was a professor of drama at Purchase College of the State University of New York.

Author Julius Novick has thought long and hard about Jewish American drama.

The trickle of Jewish playwrights eventually became a flood following the extensive immigration of Jews in the second half of the 19th century and the early decades of the 20th until restrictions were instituted by the Immigration Act and National Origins Quota of 1924.

Novick does not attempt to be encyclopedic. He acknowledges the absence of David Mamet – and he might have added names like Israel Horovitz and Arthur Kopit – because “other plays by other writers cast a more vivid light on the specific question of what it can mean to be Jewish in America.” And he does not deal with Yiddish theater, which had its heyday from the 1880s to the 1930s.

He focuses on some three dozen plays, from 1908 to 2001. Arthur Miller and Neil Simon each get full chapters as “the two most prominent Jewish American playwrights,” but no other dramatist is represented by more than two works. Early on, Novick quotes the most famous sentence in W.E.B. Du Bois’ 1903 classic, “The Souls of Black Folk”: “One ever feels his two-ness,–an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings.” And he applies it to the Jews a dozen times as the book proceeds – but not monolithically, for he is careful to distinguish between the descendants of German immigrants and those from Eastern Europe and Russia.

In his exploration of Jewish drama he finds a number of recurring themes: “the memory of persecution; the fear of the big Gentile world and the yearning to join it; generational conflict; upward social mobility…the counterpoint of outward success and inward disappointment…the survival of Jewish identity among those indifferent to Jewish religious belief and religious observance.” The umbrella subject is thus “the question of how (or whether) to be Jewish and American at the same time.”

Novick starts off with Israel Zangwill’s “The Melting-Pot,” whose 1908 premiere was attended by an admiring President Theodore Roosevelt. He asserts that it “may well be the most influential play ever written about the Jews and America,” even though it is its title that has survived over the decades. Its protagonist falls in love with a shiksa (non-Jew), which raises the hot-button issue of intermarriage. Actually Zangwill – uniquely among those surveyed – was himself British, not American, and he married a non-Jewish woman while remaining active in Jewish causes all his life.

After a discussion of Aaron Hoffman’s “Welcome Stranger” (1920), in which a virulently anti-Semitic small-town mayor is eventually revealed to have been born Jewish, the protagonist of Samson Raphaelson’s “The Jazz Singer” (1925) is again romantically attracted to a non-Jew (this work is famous for being turned into the first cinema “talkie” two years later).

Novick devotes a chapter to Elmer Rice, who changed his surname from Reizenstein and once said Judaism was “a creed that meant nothing to me.” His “Street Scene” (1929), which won the Pulitzer Prize, presents a multiethnic New York tenement, which houses the Jewish Sam Kaplan, who is, once more, in love with a Gentile upstairs. Novick might have mentioned that this play was in 1947 turned into a highly successful and often revived opera, with lyrics by Langston Hughes and music by Kurt Weill.

Rice’s “Counsellor-at-Law” (1931), Novick tells us, “is one of the few Jewish American plays that depict a Jew as powerful.” At its center is lawyer George Simon – a role that was turned down by Paul Muni and went to John Barrymore, “who gave a smashing, though not at all Jewish, performance.” One can see this performance in the film version (1933), directed by William Wyler. Rice surmised that Muni did not want to be typed as a Jewish actor. Muni had changed his name from Meshilem Weisenfreund – as did a host of other performers such as Bernard Schwartz/Tony Curtis, Fania Borach/Fanny Brice, Emmanuel Goldenberg/Edward G. Robinson, Betty Joan Perske/Lauren Bacall, Leon Jacob/Lee J. Cobb, and Asa Yoelson/Al Jolson.

Clifford Odets, author of one of the most powerful Jewish American plays ever written.

Clifford Odets’ “Awake and Sing!” (1935) is one of the most powerful American plays ever written. Penned at 28, it was the first success for both Odets and the Group Theater for which it was written. Its nine-person cast make up three generations of a Jewish family in the Bronx struggling to survive in the Depression. Novick says that “the Bergers swim in Jewishness without thinking about it,” confronting American values “in several very Jewish manners.”

Novick tells us that Arthur Miller “is manifestly the most eminent Jewish playwright who ever lived,” and his “Death of a Salesman” (1949) “by general agreement Miller’s most important play.” He cites Christopher Bigby, who has written books on Miller, as stating in 1984 that Willy Loman “was not Jewish.” Novick points out, however, that Miller himself in 1999 “explicitly identified the Lomans as Jews – but as Jews who have lost their Jewishness.” Certainly some of the play’s lingo is patently Jewish, as is also true of Miller’s autobiographical “After the Fall” (1964). I recall seeing a London production in which the character patterned on Marilyn Monroe, Miller’s second wife, was magnificently enacted by black actress Josette Simon.

Miller’s “Incident at Vichy” (1964) and “Playing for Time” (1980) both have Jewish content. But Novick cites “The Price”(1968) as having “the first unmistakably, explicitly Jewish American character to appear in a Miller play,” the 89-year-old furniture dealer so memorably originated on Broadway by the late Harold Gary. “Broken Glass” (1994), Novick says, was “his first play to focus explicitly on what it could mean to be Jewish in America.” In it Philip Gellburg “is a brilliant, complex portrait of what Miller himself has been accused of being: a self-hating Jew, yearning to escape his Jewishness, knowing that he never can.”

Neil Simon has often been cited as the most commercially successful playwright in all of history. I must admit that I am not much of a Simon fan. But I do admire the Pulitzer-winning “Lost in Yonkers” (1991) – not the least because it provided, in the tough German-Jewish grandma Kurnitz, a wonderful role for the great Irene Worth, whose performance won her a third Tony Award (she reprised the part in the 1993 film version).

No history of Jewish American drama can ignore the plays of Neil Simon.

Novick accords Simon a long chapter and discusses eight of his plays, several of which are largely autobiographical. Novick concedes that Simon’s work “is often vitiated by glibness, sentimentality, and unearned optimism.” He also discusses another Pulitzer winner concerning a German-Jewish lady and her black chauffeur, in the South this time: Alfred Uhry’s “Driving Miss Daisy” (1987), which has been repeatedly staged – partly, no doubt, because it requires a cast of only three. Uhry acknowledges that it is “a play about my grandmother and her driver.”

Donald Margulies’ “The Loman Family Picnic” (1989) and “Sight Unseen” (1991) both “dramatize different generations of Jewish American unease,” Novick tells us. The former has an eleven-year-old boy who is writing a musical version of “Death of a Salesman,” in an attempt “to cope with the tensions in his own family.” It also has four different endings, played one after another – the last being the “real” ending.

Novick turns from sons to daughters in another chapter, discussing Barbara Lebow’s “A Shayna Maidel” (1985), and Wendy Wasserstein’s “Isn’t It Romantic?”(1981) and “The Sisters Rosensweig” (1992). The last proved a huge hit. Its three sisters are by no means young when they have a reunion in London: Pfeni, 40, is a travel writer; Gorgeous, 46, is a radio talkmeister in Massachusetts; and Sara, 54, is an international banker. They are markedly differentiated, Sara even “on the verge of being a Jewish anti-Semite, or perhaps over the verge.” The playwright, Novick says, “wants us to know that American Jews…can gain strength from their ancestors to live fulfilling lives in the present, even if those lives are not conventionally Jewish.”

Novick moves from straight plays to musicals in one chapter. He could not overlook “Fiddler on the Roof” (1964) – book by Joseph Stein, music by Jerry Bock, lyrics by Sheldon Harnick – which ran on Broadway for seven years and nine months, and has been staged all over the world. Novick calls it “a true ancestral myth for American Jews, celebrating the great founding trauma that was our immigration.” The work, set in 1905, deals with Tevye the milkman and his five daughters who live precariously in a rundown Russian shtetl. When tradition is disrupted, what do we do then? The work is both thoroughly Jewish and universal.

Novick might for comparison have brought in “The Rothchilds” (1970), the last collaboration between Bock and Harnick (book by Sherman Yellen this time). Instead of five daughters, Mayer Rothchild has five sons, who manage to pull the family out of their German ghetto beginnings and become highly prosperous businessmen throughout Europe, eventually being ennobled with the title of baron (this is all true history). The opening music smacks of Gilbert & Sullivan, but the Act I song “Everything” is clearly Jewish.

Joseph Stein, the book writer for “Fiddler” also wrote the book for “Rags” (1986), with music by Charles Strouse and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz. The work is a rarity in that it “focuses directly on the immigrant experience in America….Jewish American playwrights, themselves American-born, are usually too busy working out their struggles with their parents, who are often also American-born, to pay tribute to their immigrant grandparents.” I have never understood why “Rags” flopped on Broadway after only four official performances. Even if you agree with Novick that it is “dramaturgically flawed, with a leaden subplot,” its superb Strouse score should have been enough to keep it running (and luckily a 1991 studio recording is available).

Novick concludes that it “is one of the few works of any stature to present the story of an American Jew as a story of heroic struggle and triumph. ‘Rags’ does honor to my grandmother, who bribed the officials with her wedding ring in order to bring her children to America.”

The last musical dealt with by Novick is William Finn’s “Falsettos” (1992, book by James Lapine), a revision and combination of earlier one-acts. The Jewish Marvin leaves his wife Trina for the half-Jewish Whizzer. His son Jason rebels against having a bar mitzvah. But when Whizzer is dying of AIDS Jason decides he will after all hold the ceremony – in Whizzer’s hospital room. As Novick states, “Among this distinctly secular group of Jews, an unorthodox bar mitzvah becomes the occasion for a boy’s giant step toward maturation in sympathy, in sensitivity, in humanity.”

As an epilogue, Novick speaks briefly about Tony Kushner’s two-part “Angels in America” (1991-92), “the great American play of the 1990s.” Each part won the best-play Tony Award. Novick points out that only two of the seven main characters are Jewish, but he quotes Kushner: “Judaism isn’t what the play is about, but I’m Jewish and it took me by surprise that it wound up being all over the play.” Novick feels, “Today all three major Jewish denominations are moving toward more traditional observance.” How this will all turn out “remains to be seen – and to be dramatized by future playwrights.”

I have not mentioned all the plays and playwrights dealt with in Novick’s book. For that you will simply have to consult the book itself. There is an extended Bibliography, followed by an Index of Playwrights. The ensuing Index of Plays contains titles and page references where they are mentioned; I noticed three works that were overlooked here: “The Adding Machine,” “The Man Who Came to Dinner,” and “Waiting for Lefty,” plus a dozen or so missing page numbers. Finally there is a General Index.

This is a volume that fills a major need in a highly distinguished manner, thanks to one who has thought long and hard about its subject matter.

You could be Shipwrecked! on stage this month.

By Bill Marx

Somewhere an enterprising graduate student is working on a trenchant study of the correlation between holiday stage entertainment and the American economy. When things were looking bright and profitable the shows became cynical and comic, with mischievous elves placing whoopee cushions under our delusions of good cheer. Now that unemployment is high and the future uncertain the rush to supply inspirational sentiment is omnipresent, with only Out on the Edge venturing on the wild side. And don’t get me started on the tragic (?) fall of “A Christmas Carol.”

Lady by Craig Wright. Presented by the Zeitgeist Stage Company at the Boston Center for the Arts through November, 21, 2009. The plot of Wright’s play about the varieties of American “unfaithfulness” sounds like the set-up for an old joke. A liberal, a “hawkishly conservative” Democratic congressman, and a stoner go out on a hunting trip …

Out on the Edge: 18th Annual Queer Theater Festival. Presented by Theater Offensive at the Boston Center for the Arts, November 4 through 14, 2009. A number of shows look appealing for those yearning for an alternative to the lockstep of holiday cheer. There’s the New England premiere of Tim Miller’s monologue “Lay of the Land,” the Boston premiere of Slanty Eye Mama’s “Birth of a nAsian” and finally the American premiere of Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens’ salaciously titled homage to all things wet and green, “Dirty Sex-Ecology or How to Make Love with the Earth.” No doubt the coal industry is an underwriter for the Sprinke and Stephens show (lol). Check website for schedule and ticket prices.

The Salt Girl by John Kuntz. At the Boston Playwrights Theatre, November 5 through 22, 2009. Lauded local playwright and performer John Kuntz stars in his latest script, the tale of “a long-depressed, family black sheep who must now comes to terms with his loneliness or give in to his family’s history.” David R. Gammons directs; be warned, the production “contains nudity.”

The Odyssey, Created and Performed by CWT Co-Directors Jennifer Johnson and John Peitso. Presented by the Charlestown Working Theater, Charlestown, November 6 through 21, 2009. Back by popular demand, this minimal production of Homer’s sweeping epic wowed the local critics with its “inspired” stagecraft and “astonishing beauty.”

A Civil War Christmas by Paula Vogel. Presented by the Huntington Theatre Company at the Boston University Theatre, November 13 through December 13, 2009. In this play with music, Pulitzer prize-winning playwright Paula Vogel comes up with an intriguingly historical take on season’s greeting. Set on Christmas Eve 1864, the production melds together a number of American stories to show us that “the gladness of one’s heart is the greatest gift of all.” Jessica Thebus directs.

A glimpse of A Birth of a nAisan

Tru Grace: Holiday Memoirs, adapted for the stage and directed by Wesley Savick. Presented by the Underground Railway Theater at the Central Square Theater, Cambridge, November 19 through December 27, 2009. Stories by Truman Capote and Grace Paley provide the basis for “the perfect holiday alternative with an intergenerational cast, puppetry, music, and fruitcakes.”

Machinal by Sophie Treadwell. Presented by The Boston Conservatory at Midway Studios, November 20 through 22, 2009. This still powerful 1928 expressionistic play centers on a sensational real life murder case that sent a woman to the electric chair.

Best of Both Worlds. Book & Lyrics by Randy Weiner. Music by Diedre Murray. Co-written and directed by Diane Paulus. Presented by the American Repertory Theater at the Loeb Drama Center, Cambridge, November 21 through January 3, 2010. A revival of “a holiday musical for the whole family” based on William Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale.” Like the other entries in the A.R.T.’s “Shakespeare Exploded” series, this production does away with the Bard’s pesky language, which apparently makes it easier for attendees to “clap your hands, jump out of your seat, and feel the power of love …” (I will post my review of “Sleep No More,” an adaptation of “Macbeth,” soon.)

Note: This production will “feature a rotating roster of Greater Boston’s most celebrated gospel choirs, including community, university, and church choirs.” Local choirs will be in high demand this season — the Huntington Theater Company’s “A Civil War Christmas” also features local choirs. “Community” has become a fashionable word — this will be a big year for area warblers.

Shipwrecked! An Entertainment: The Amazing Adventures of Louis de Ridgemont (as told by himself) by Donald Margulies. Presented by the Lyric Stage Company of Boston, November 27 through December 20, 2009. The New England premiere of an incredible “adventure tale” that revolves around Louis de Rougemont, who leaves his sickbed and London home in order to see the the world. He encounters pearl divers, a typhoon, and eventually finds himself stranded on an island. No doubt director Scott Lafeber will apply lots of theatrical hocus pocus.

Reviewed by Helen Epstein

Jessica D. Turner and Liz Hayes in Dead Man's Cell Phone. Photo Credit: The Lyric Stage Company of Boston

Improbable though it seems these days with multiple requests to turn off electronics before performances, a cell phone went off in the row behind me at a particularly still moment towards the end of Act One and the woman behind me — perhaps imagining that she was in a closed telephone booth of the kind alluded to by a character onstage — took a while explaining to her caller that she was in a theater, and that the play was in progress.

Members of the audiences were infuriated and intermission unleashed animated discussion of a recent Dawn Upshaw concert during which a woman pulled out her cellphone during an encore and instructed her chauffeur to pick her up out front.

Using a cell phone during a performance is always a faux pas, but doing it at the Boston premiere of “Dead Man’s Cell Phone” was a truly mindless act that only provided more evidence — as if any were needed — of the timeliness of dramatist Sarah Ruhl’s intelligent and quirky comedy.

According to one of the useful historical background sheets often provided by the Lyric Stage Company, there were over four billion mobile phones in operation across the globe in 2008, 275 million of them in the United States. Ruhl’s genius is to take this now ubiquitous instrument and transform it into a multi-layered symbol as well as catalyst for dramatic action.

Ruhl is the 35-year-old, highly prolific playwright whose earlier work includes “The Clean House” and “Eurydice” and who has won both a MacArthur Fellowship and Pulitzer Prize. Her forthcoming “In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play)” is set to open on Broadway next week. Her work blends straight drama, comedy and a kind of magical realism in a surrealist style that some critics find persuasive and whimsical; others annoying.

I’m a fan, and the Lyric’s Stage’s sparkling and literate production of “Dead Man’s Cell Phone” perfectly conveys this edgy and unpredictable style using a single glass and steel set. Director Carmel O’Reilly’s excellent design team have collaborated to evoke a variety of venues — cafe, church, luxury apartment, stationary store, airport — heralded by dramatic lighting and sound, and enhanced by striking costumes.

O’Reilly has also chosen a wonderful cast for a rare play that — as I noted with pleasure — features four meaty roles for women and two for men. In this respect alone, “Dead Man’s Cell Phone” is an extraordinary play. As one of the actors remarked at the “Talkback,” she realized one day that she was in a rehearsal with a roomful of women, that she was doing a fight scene with another woman and that she had never been in that situation before.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. “Dead Man’s Cell Phone” starts right off the bat with a dead man, sitting bolt upright in a cafe, facing a nondescript self-effacing, young woman entirely dressed in gray. Her name is Jean. She is a timid soul (after a few non-verbal reactions to the repeated ringing, she creeps up to her fellow diner to query: “Are you ill? Are you deaf” before dialing 911) who evokes the shy female protagonists of Anita Brookner’s novels. Gordon — as the dead man turns out to be named — may have died but his cell phone hasn’t, and, after it rings several times, Jean answers it and is drawn into a stranger’s professional and personal dramas.

I won’t give away the fantastical plot turns or the nutsy yet poignant characters that Ruhl has created and that the cast brings to convincing life. This is a production that entertains but also intrigues, provokes, and engages your mind long after you leave the theater. It addresses classic themes of family drama but brings in new ones such as evolving roles for women, the strange new world of globalization, and the process of our getting adjusted to and becoming addicted to new technologies.

The cast is excellent, especially the four women who seem to revel in their unconventional roles. Liz Hayes as Jean pulls off the trick of making a mousy, recessive heroine take center stage. Beth Gotha, as Mrs.Gottlieb, takes the role of Jewish Mother out of the realm of caricature and into elegance. Bryn Jamison and Jessica D. Turner, as the dead man’s wife and mistress respectively, turn in strong performances. The rapport between the four of them is striking. We feel they are having a wonderful time performing and it is a pleasure to watch their relationships unfold. And it doesn’t hurt that they get to speak lines never before heard in a theater. All in all, a production that makes me want to come back to the Lyric Stage and makes me very curious about the work of Sarah Ruhl.

Helen Epstein is the author of “Joe Papp: An American Life,” “Children of the Holocaust” and a new book of essays on memoir in French titled “Ecrire La Vie.”

October includes the usual line-up of plays by seal-of-approval dramatists, Edward Albee and Conor McPherson, but there’s some welcome new blood, from Punchdrunk’s athletic adaptation of “Macbeth” to “Little Black Dress,” playwright Ronan Noone’s latest salvo at our national psyche, and “The Overwhelming,” the Boston premiere of a critically acclaimed study of Americans blundering in Rwanda.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Edward Albee. Presented by the Publick Theatre at the Boston Center for the Arts, Boston, MA, through October 24. The tantalizing acting team of Shakespeare and Company’s creative monarch Tina Packer and the preternaturally controlled Nigel Gore as the embattled Martha and George may add some zing to this acidic warhorse.

Bash by Neil LaBute. Presented by Theater on Fire at the Charlestown Working Theatre, Charlestown, MA, through October 17. I have been increasingly critical of LaBute’s theater work, but this early collection of monologues centered on Mormons in trouble possessed considerable firepower when I saw a production years ago. It will be interesting to see if it still carries much sacrilegious punch.

Little Black Dress by Ronan Noone. Presented by Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, Boston, MA, through October 25. Local playwright Ronan Noone continues to examine the dark side of America in his latest play, which deals with “the twisted dreams lurking behind the video arcade.”

The cast includes two Elliot Norton Award-winning actors, Jeremiah Kissel and Marianna Bassham, along with newcomers Karl Baker Olson and Alex Pollock. BPT is also serving up an offer that will be hard for some to refuse: Wear your little black dress to the show and receive $5 off a General Admission ticket. Discount applied at the box office.

Everything in the Garden by Edward Albee. Presented by the Brandeis Theatre Company, Laurie Theater, Brandeis University, October 8 through October 18. It is hard not to be curious about this student production of a rarely produced play by Edward Albee. The 1967 script is an adaptation of a 1962 play about desperate suburbanites by Giles Cooper.

Sleep No More, by the British theater company Punchdrunk. Presented by the American Repertory Theatre at The Old Lincoln School, 194 Boylston Street, Brookline, MA, October 8 through 31. The award-winning British theater company Punchdrunk makes its U.S. debut with this no doubt highly combustible (given that the A.R.T.’s fall motif is “Shakespeare Exploded!”) version of “Macbeth” told “through the lens of a Hitchcock thriller.”

Watch your step because you may stumble into “something wicked”: “The audience will have the freedom to roam the environment and experience a sensory journey as they choose what to watch and where to go in this unique theatrical adventure.”

The Seafarer by Conor McPherson. Presented by the Merrimack Repertory Theatre, Lowell, MA, October 15 through November 8. I find most of McPherson’s plays to be top heavy with gab, but this script was nominated for four Tony Awards, including Best Play. And it revolves around a high-stakes poker game well lubricated with alcohol, so maybe this time around the dramatic action will amount to more than talk.

Shooting Stars by Stephen Dietz. Presented by the Trinity Repertory Company, Providence, Rhode Island, October 16 through November 22. The publicity tells us this is a “truly smart romantic comedy”: “A young man and woman fell in love in college, and promised each other they’d change the world. Twenty years later, they meet unexpectedly in a snow-bound airport.” Chances are the world hasn’t changed all that much, but maybe a loving bond is in the offing? Fred Sullivan Jr. directs.

The Overwhelming by J.T. Rogers. Presented by Company One at the Boston Center for the Arts, October 30 through November 21. I was in Chicago last spring and there was considerable buzz about this play, so I am grateful it is receiving its Boston premiere. The plot deals with Americans behaving badly in Rwanda in the early 1990s; Shawn LaCount directs.

Reviewed by Caldwell Titcomb

Cast of AFLTS Fall 2009 King Lear Tour (Left to Right) Caroline Devlin, Richard Neale, Terence Wilton, Dale Rapley, and Rina Mahoney

Shakespeare’s challenging “King Lear” is the vehicle for this year’s fall tour of the troupe called Actors From the London Stage (AFTLS). This project was begun in 1975, and has been flourishing ever since, with impressive results. Wellesley College has brought the AFTLS back for the fourth year in a row (we saw “Hamlet” in 2006, “Macbeth” in 2007, and “The Winter’s Tale” last year). Wellesley is the third stop in a schedule that sees the company visiting ten U.S. campuses for a week each, conducting workshops and seminars with students, and offering several public performances of a Shakespeare play.

Each drama is performed by only five artists (three actors and two actresses) – all experienced and distinguished Shakespeareans from England. That means that each player handles multiple roles, the shifts indicated by a change of diction or of a sash or hat. The five remain on stage throughout, sitting on stools on the sidelines when not speaking. There are no elaborate sets and only minimal props.

Thus the emphasis is on Shakespeare’s spoken words, and much is left to the audience’s imagination. There is no director, and the quintet spend several weeks in London collectively working out the blocking and delivery in rehearsal.

Owing to the renovation of Wellesley’s Alumnae Hall, this year’s performances take place in Houghton Chapel, whose acoustics are less suitable for live theater. But the players make the best of the venue, speaking the Bard’s language as naturally as breathing.

Terence Wilton, on his fifth AFTLS tour, is an admirable Lear, and has several exceptional moments (“Hear me, recreant!,” “O, reason not the need!”). He also plays Lear’s sons-in-law Albany and Cornwall. Rina Mahoney, who acted in the 2005 tour, is back as Lear’s daughters Cordelia and Goneril, and is better with the sweet former than the venomous latter; she also handles Oswald. Caroline Devlin, on her third tour, is both the third daughter Regan and the Fool.

Dale Rapley is fine as the two older gents, Gloucester and Kent. Richard Neale brings intensity to the young brothers, the trusting Edgar and the villainous Edmund; and it is quite a feat when Neale climactically enacts a duel between the two; he also portrays Cordelia’s suitors, France and Burgundy.

All five players wear neutral gray garb. To indicate change of character, they use red, purple or white scarves; wool or tilted caps or a top hat; a pair of glasses. Three movable black cubic boxes denote shift of locale. From time to time sound effects emanate from a large tabor or mouth organ (usually played by Devlin).

The US tour will continue at the following universities around the country:

University of Texas at Austin (Austin, Texas) | September 28 - October 4, 2009
University of Texas at San Antonio (San Antonio, Texas) | October 5-11, 2009
Schreiner University (Kerrville, Texas) | October 12-18, 2009
Butler University (Indianapolis, Indiana) | October 19-25, 2009
Montgomery County Community College (Blue Bell, PA) | October 26 - November 1, 2009
DePauw University (Greencastle, IN) | November 2-8, 2009
Berea College (Berea, Kentucky) | November 9-15, 2009

The choice for the AFTLS’s fall tour next year is “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” followed by “The Tempest” in 2011, “The Merchant of Venice” in 2012, and “Othello” in 2013. The troupe is welcome any time.

There are those who have proclaimed that Christopher Plummer is the greatest classical actor in North America. There is certainly no gainsaying that he has for some time been in the tiny group at the top of the acting profession. Now as he nears the age of 80 he has brought forth “In Spite of Myself: A Memoir” (Alfred Knopf, 648pp.).

This huge autobiography is crammed with details. Plummer must have an extraordinary memory or carefully kept diaries – perhaps both. Hundreds of people, well known and unknown, pop up in these pages briefly or extensively. He does not spare himself, admitting to constant carousing throughout the first half of his life. From what he repeatedly tells us, it is a miracle that he did not succumb to cirrhosis long ago. But the woman who is now his (third) wife issued an ultimatum: she would not date him unless he “cut down on the booze.” Along the way he contracted hepatitis, sciatic paralysis, and pericarditis. But he always made a full recovery.

His many jobs over the years – especially movies – took him to a host of foreign locations, and he is good at describing geographical milieus. A Rachmaninoff piano recital led him to become an ardent pianist. Later he would be a fan of bullfighting in Spain (a passion he shared with drama critic Kenneth Tynan, who wrote a book on the subject).

Although he talks about some of his film and television assignments, he discusses almost all his theater work. Near the book’s end, he says, “No matter what I do between, the stage always beckons and gets me every time.” The Toronto native made his debut at 16 in Mauriac’s “Asmodée” with the Montreal Repertory Theatre, for which he played Oedipus in Cocteau’s “La Machine Infernale” two years later to great praise. And he was on his way.

Donald Wolfit as King Lear

He saw Sir Donald Wolfit (1902-68) play King Lear, and says that he was, “for the first time, in the presence of greatness.” He cherishes being cast in a show with Edward Everett Horton, whose “polish and indisputable mastery of timing were light-years ahead of” other comedians. “The prime lesson…was just how real, natural and true one had to be in order to make comedy the supreme art that he proved it was.”

In 1952 Plummer appeared in seven plays at the Bermuda Repertory Theatre, including “The Royal Family.” The play’s matriarch was the formidable Florence Reed (1883-1967), who “had the deepest, most resonant voice I have ever heard in man, woman or beast – deeper than Paul Robeson’s, I swear.” He’s quite right. I knew Reed, and happened to see this production in Bermuda. (In the 1946 “The Winter’s Tale,” she was the most powerful Paulina I have ever seen, and ran off with the reviews.)

Eva Le Gallienne, “an actress of high intelligence and power,” in 1954 gave Plummer his Broadway debut, in “The Starcross Story,” which opened and closed the same night.

Plummer and Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music

The next year Plummer was Jason to the Medea of Dame Judith Anderson, who was “electrifying…a tragedienne of the first order.” His “first big success” was in Anouilh’s “The Lark” (1955), adapted by Lillian Hellman, who at the time was “certainly the most dominating writer of either gender – the only one to have total casting approval over all her scripts.” The show’s star, Julie Harris, “is, without question, a national treasure and for more than fifty years has continued to illumine, strengthen and hold together what has now become the fragile fabric of our theatre. Anything short of canonization would be a colossal snub.”

It is fascinating to see all the verdicts he has about those in the profession. He has much to say about Jason Robards Jr. (a sometime colleague and drinking buddy), who in “The Iceman Cometh” gave “one of the most dynamic and shattering performances I have ever seen.” (It must have been a special pleasure in 2002 for Plummer to receive the Jason Robards Award.) Katharine Cornell “remained always the same – fine, noble, sympathetic.” Frances Hyland’s Ophelia was “the one that was to attain tragic heights.” Elia Kazan “was certainly the very greatest director of tragic drama I have ever worked with.” “Mr Fair Lady,” he says, “is still, arguably, the most perfect musical ever conceived.” Sir John Gielgud was “perhaps the greatest verse speaker of the last century….and possibly the most modest and least selfish of performers ever to grace our profession.”

Plummer portrayed Pizarro in “The Royal Hunt of the Sun” (1965), which “I still think is the best of Peter Shaffer’s writing” (so do I). “Orson Welles was never one person; he was, quite simply, a crowd.” In 1967 Plummer was Antony to the Cleopatra of Zoe Caldwell, “whose four-octave range could summon up an incredible variety of tones….this performance was to reach greatness.” Sir Anthony Hopkins is “a mimic of sheer genius.”

Plummer agrees with most that Sir Laurence Olivier was “no great shakes as a director.” But as an actor he had everything except pathos. “To have pathos one must be born with it. Ralph Richardson had it in spades; so had Brando and Chaplin; so, I believe, had Chaliapin and the great Salvini.” When Olivier filmed “King Lear” at the end of his life, he told Plummer, “I’m not very good in it, you know. I was so bloody weak they had to lift me onto my horse.” Plummer agrees it is poor. But he termed Olivier “the greatest theatrical animal of the century.”

Plummer as Mike Wallace in The Insider (Photo: Hal Drucker, from HDTV. Touchstone Pictures)

I did not find many factual errors. The Boston tryout of “The Lark” took place at the Plymouth Theatre, not the Colonial. Cherry Jones’ Lady Macduff was not her Broadway debut but her second Broadway role. In “The Oresteia” Plummer’s Clytemnestra was “that powerhouse of lady performers, the statuesque Irene Worth. Irene, who spoke the English tongue with more precision and perfection than most Brits, was, ironically, an American….This had not deterred her from taking out British citizenry and becoming one of England’s very finest classical actresses. Much later she would grace the Honours list as a Dame.” Worth was a dear friend of mine, and this is what ought to have happened. But she never relinquished her American citizenship and was thus ineligible to be created a Dame. The queen, however, did make her an honorary Commander of the British Empire. Plummer asserts that “Macbeth” is “the shortest of all Shakespeare’s plays,” whereas “The Comedy of Errors” is the shortest and “Macbeth” the fifth shortest.

In such a lengthy tome one is not surprised to find a modicum of small slips and typos. Here is a sampling. The violinist Mischa Ellman (p. 35) was Elman. The actor Paul Lucas (120) was Lukas. Alec Guiness (165, 334) was Guinness. Fritz Weaver and Hurd Hatfield did not both play Julius Caesar (173); Weaver’s role was Casca. The Austrian waltz called the Lendler (404) should be Ländler. The wonderful film “Garden of the Fitzi-Continis” (434) should be “Finzi-Continis.” Tennessee Williams’ “Gnadiges Fraulein” (460) needs a pair of umlauts. The noted actor Marc Ryland (487) is Mark Rylance. The celebrated tenor Bjeurling (537) was Björling. Playwright Sam Shepherd (620) is Shepard.

Plummer has appeared on Broadway sixteen times, for which he has received seven best-actor Tony nominations, winning for the musical “Cyrano” (1974) and the one-man “Barrymore” (1997). Over the years he has tackled more than a few Shakespearean roles – including both Mark Antonys, Henry V, Hamlet, Leontes, Benedick, Richard III, Macbeth, Iago, and King Lear.

Plummer as King Lear

Lear, he says, “is not Mount Everest! Perhaps the play is but not the role. Richard III is much more vocally and physically challenging. Hamlet is monstrously more daunting.” (These two are the longest roles in Shakespeare.) After Lear, what is left to do? Plummer mentions Falstaff, Malvolio, Jacques, and “old Prospero, and as a last resort, perhaps [Shaw’s] Methuselah or, God knows, even God.” Since this book was published, it has been announced that Plummer will undertake Prospero at Canada’s Stratford Festival next year.

It should be noted that the book is not restricted to people. An important component is provided by Plummer’s dogs, who are the cause of some of the most moving writing in the tome. It is no accident that four of the five dedicatees are Briggie, Rags, Toadie, and Paddy – remembered “with gratitude and love.”

Plummer as Chang, a Klingon commander in a Star Trek film

The book has one major flaw. There is no index at all. For a writer who has thought about and encountered hundreds and hundreds of persons named in the text, someone should have compiled a thorough index of proper names with page references. I had to attempt fashioning a partial index for my own use. One might compare this with the excellent index provided in the just-published autobiography by Sir Antony Sher, “Beside Myself: An Actor’s Life.”

Another mildly annoying feature of the Plummer book is the absence of specific dates. There are some, to be sure, but not enough. You might think that in a tome of this size Plummer would have stated the exact date of his birth. In fact, there has been some dispute about that date, a number of Canadian sources giving December 13, 1927. Other references indicate December 13, 1929. In such cases, it is usually wise to go with the earlier date. If the claim that Plummer was born on a Friday the13th is true, then the 1929 year would be accurate. I am inclined to go with the later year and allow Plummer to reach and celebrate the big eight-oh this winter.

To end on a laudatory note, I can report that the book is exceedingly generous with illustrations. These include three of the priceless caricatures by Al Hirschfeld, bringing the total to 182. The photos add enormously to the pleasure of going through a tome packed with engrossing material about a career of more than sixty years. Now on to Prospero.