The Normal Heart

Photo: Joan Marcus

Larry Kramer’s 1985 play The Normal Heart, currently in revival at the Golden Theater, is about as subtle and gentle as an angry camel. The characters are all spitting mad, ready to stop dead in their tracks and commence screaming into the void at the drop of a hat. The fact that what they often scream about are statistics—how much money is being spent, how much research is being done, how many men are dying painful, horrifically undignified deaths—is one of the reasons that this play is so important, but also so potentially anesthetizing. In less skilled hands, the characters could have easily become flat, and the talky, polemical dialogue less powerful than merely preachy. Yet the characters in The Normal Heart were all real people who struggled and died during the earliest years of the AIDS crisis, and whom Kramer organized with, argued with, alienated, but also loved deeply. The real grace of his play lies, then, in the careful balance he strikes between facts and feelings: this is a man who is chronicling an important history, but who experienced that history first-hand by watching his friends and lovers die terrifying, inexplicable deaths while doctors wrung their hands, politicians turned their backs, and the media focused their concerns elsewhere. The personal is never not political for Kramer, and vice-versa, and one never gets to take precedent over the other. 

The brilliance of this stellar revival lies in the sum of its parts. The set, which initially looks almost offensively nondescript—the most boring staffroom in the most maddeningly drab, bureaucratic institution you can think of—takes on a touching, increasingly meaningful life of its own. The ever-growing list of AIDS victims’ names, projected between scenes, begins with a list, in large letters, of 41 names on the backdrop at the first blackout. The lettering gets smaller and the list gets longer, and when it takes over the entire theater by the end, you know well that it’s coming, but it delivers like a two-by-four square in the face nonetheless. The direction has actors sitting in darkness watching the action taking place center-stage: ghostly memories and departed souls never stop haunting the living.

The cast has clearly worked hard to follow Kramer’s lead, and thus the actors—all of whom are terrific—strike a careful, respectful balance between the play’s politics and the people who have found themselves mired in it. Individual actors spout exposition or lurch suddenly into lengthy diatribe with regularity in this production, but never at the expense of their characters’ complexity. These people are angry, desperate and real, and the actors never forget that. While I admire Joe Mantello as a director, his interpretation of Ned Weeks makes me realize how much I’ve missed him as an actor: no one can play irritable, irritating, and endearing in quite the way that Mantello can. His habit, here, of keeping one hand jammed in his army-jacket pocket—as if he were afraid of what might happen were he to suddenly release all of the anger he holds so tightly in his fist—was a particularly effective touch. The rest of the cast is equally as strong, but the real revelation for me was John Benjamin Hickey, who, as Ned’s partner, Felix, exhibits a sexy swagger that fades slowly and excruciatingly as time passes, and eventually runs out.

Jerusalem

Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem, currently playing at the Music Box Theater, takes its name from a hymn that, according to director Ian Rickson, is held dear by the English people. “Its words,” Rickson writes in the director’s notes, “have helped form an idyllic sense of aspired Englishness.” It is quite fitting that none of the characters can remember the song, which is on the tips of their tongues until near the very end of this sweeping, insidious play. Jerusalem is about English people, yes, but it is also about a whole mess of cultural ambiguities that relate not just to England but, really, to the human condition.

Themes that run through Jerusalem are not neat or tidy; they frequently clash and sometimes directly contradict one another: The state of the nation is strong; the nation is in decline. You can’t go home again; you can’t run from your past. Same shit, different day; if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. We are a highly sophisticated species; we are, in the end, animals. Technology helps us; technology has made us emotionally disconnected idiots. See the world; there is no place like home. Cultural messages are messy, and so is Jerusalem, but in increasingly profound ways.

The central character is, like the themes of the play itself, a tangled mess of contradictions. A middle-aged, black-out drunk who has long lived illegally in a trailer on a small clearing in the woods in Wiltshire, England, Johnny “Rooster” Byron (played with scenery-chewing awesomeness by Mark Rylance) is the kind of perpetual adolescent that both English and American culture has long been fascinated with: he is equal parts Peter Pan, Stanley Kowalski, that self-destructive, brilliant guy that Kevin Bacon played in the 1982 film Diner, and that self-destructive, benignly predatory guy that Matthew McConaughey played in the 1993 film Dazed and Confused (“That’s what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age.”).

Rooster spends his days drinking, partying, and creating a nuisance. As the town around him becomes more and more upscale, a growing number of locals voice their desire for Rooster to simply go away; the local government would prefer this, too, since there are plans to develop his patch of woods into a housing development. All this doesn’t stop many of the locals from buying drugs from Rooster, whose trailer has for decades been a place where local teens hang out, get high, and listen to Rooster’s tall-tales. The fact that most of the kids who kill time gobbling drugs and guzzling booze with Rooster are safer with him than they are in their own homes is just one more of the many contradictions this play toys with.

Another is the characters’ tortured relationships with both the past and the future. Rooster’s tall-tales are the only things that make the past interesting for many of these characters, whose lives all exhibit a deadening sameness that is clearly never going to change. Rooster has done nothing but swagger around his trailer since the early 1980s; his behavior is beginning to catch up with him, but he’s utterly incapable of changing into anyone else, except perhaps, eventually, The Professor (Alan David, hilarious and terrifying), a senile, alcoholic professor emeritus who wanders frequently through Rooster’s woods in a blithely befuddled search for Mary, who might be a dog, or his long-dead wife. Ginger (Mackenzie Crook, also hilarious and terrifying), a man in his early 20s, is as close as one can be to Rooster, which is not very close at all; Ginger is clearly a Rooster-in-training, and while Rooster is well aware of this fact, Ginger is not.

The rest of Rooster’s entourage consists of a group of stubbornly provincial teenagers, who don’t hesitate to mock him behind his back. Like Ginger, they have no intention of admitting to themselves that they, too, will be Rooster one day, and ridiculing him helps them keep such realizations at a distance. While many of the kids, like Davey (Danny Kirrane, very good), never question their humdrum, lackluster lives, a few, like Lee (John Gallagher, Jr., fine, but could use a few more sessions with his dialect coach), dream of leaving home to seek adventure on their own. There are plenty of girls around to party with and, occasionally, to fuck; alas, I would have liked to have heard more from at least one of them.

Butterworth never dashes his characters’ chances of making changes, but always makes absolutely clear just how hard real change can be. This is especially the case when complacency is, if boring, also so comfortable, and the past—at least as reinvented by Rooster—so awesome and powerful. Rooster’s actual past—which has resulted in a young son that he’s utterly incapable of caring for or even relating to, and at least one ex-lover, the boy’s mother (Geraldine Hughes, heartbreaking), who views Rooster with contemptuous disappointment—is pathetic, and very much his fault. So he takes refuge in tall-tales, which take on a growing desperation as the future closes in on him.

Butterworth doesn’t tie up all the loose ends at the end of Jerusalem. Which is as it should be: how can one solve a nation’s identity crisis, resolve the human condition, untangle the mess of cultural baggage, and explain the appeal of suspended adolescence in a mere three-plus hours?

ITBA AWARD NOMINATIONS 2011

The Patrick Lee Internet Theater Bloggers Association award nominations have been announced. Here they are:

OUTSTANDING NEW BROADWAY MUSICAL

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson
Catch Me If You Can
The Book of Mormon
The Scottsboro Boys
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

 

OUTSTANDING NEW BROADWAY PLAY
Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo
Brief Encounter
Good People
Jerusalem
War Horse

OUTSTANDING BROADWAY MUSICAL REVIVAL
Anything Goes
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying

OUTSTANDING BROADWAY PLAY REVIVAL
Arcadia
Born Yesterday
The Importance of Being Earnest
The Merchant of Venice
The Normal Heart

OUTSTANDING NEW OFF-BROADWAY PLAY
Gatz
Other Desert Cities
Peter and the Starcatcher
The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity
The Metal Children

OUTSTANDING NEW OFF-BROADWAY MUSICAL
Freckleface Strawberry
In Transit
The Burnt Part Boys
The Kid
We the People: America Rocks!

OUTSTANDING OFF-BROADWAY REVIVAL (PLAY OR MUSICAL)
Angels in America Part 1: Millennium Approaches
Angels in America Part 2: Perestroika
Hello Again
The Little Foxes
Three Sisters

OUTSTANDING SOLO SHOW/PERFORMANCE
(ALL VENUE CATEGORIES)
Kimberly Faye Greenberg, One Night with Fanny Brice
John Leguizamo, Ghetto Klown
Michael Shannon, Mistakes Were Made
Mike Birbiglia, My Girlfriend's Boyfriend
Tim Watts, Alvin Sputnik: Deep Sea Explorer

OUTSTANDING OFF-OFF-BROADWAY SHOW
Belarus Free Theater's Discover Love
Black Watch
Dog Act
Feeder: A Love Story
Invasion!
Reefer Madness, The Gallery Players
ReWrite
The Caucasian Chalk Circle
Treasure Island

Follies: Kennedy Center

What haunts most about any production of Follies is not the chorus of ghosts that infiltrate the stage, the unfulfilled dreams or festered regrets infecting the wings, or even the bookends of youth and truth slammed into wrinkled reflection. What haunts, what thrills in a full-blown production are far more personal demons that tickle and torture when stirred and sickened by its score-borne virus. Follies is arguably the most likely musical to shame your dreams as it shipwrecks them upon the rocks and swells and troughs of its nearly three-hour tour. (Running time is actually 2 hours and 30 minutes--Gilligan be damned!)

For any demon-plagued theatre lover, particularly one particular to this score, there is no greater gift than sitting in a grand house (like the Kennedy Center), first row (audience right on the first night and left the following), feet away from legends and a 28-piece orchestra, connected by soaring moments and flashes of brilliance to a sea of strangers, collectively awash with Sondheim. The experience cannot be captured or replicated by media. It exists only for those who are there. It almost doesn't matter how perfect, im or otherwise, the production (Follies is terminally shelved between impossible and impractical), it dies by breaths; and if you don't show up for its life, yours may accumulate another regret.

Taken as a whole, this is the most beautifully sung production I have ever heard, even if it is not the best acted and is possibly the worst directed. Eric Schaeffer neglects a few fundamentals: most notably tempo, timing, and traffic management. Follies, on the page, is a collection of zigs and zags in need of a zip, something to bring and hold it together. He seems to have treed every scripted dictate without much consideration for the forest. But Follies, to further abuse metaphors, is a buffet, not completely dependant on chef-directed courses--many tastes, a hyper-sensory feast, well-seasoned. And this cast is, by and large, well-seasoned, some aged beyond perfection for their assigned roles, yet uniquely savory and luscious.

Bernadette Peters, as the weakly-hinged, Sally, sings the role beautifully. Flat out beautifully. The first night, though, I left the theater wondering if she could act a single unscored phrase. Her journey was the equivalent of standing still. Fortunately, one can stand still in the middle of oncoming traffic and create quite a commotion. She hit the major emotions but missed many of the feelings. The touch of her life's unrequited love registered no response. Sally refers to herself as fat (Ms. Peters is most assuredly not, and her clingy red dress didn't betray a single calorie), but there was no hint of insecurity. And when she delivered the momentous directive for Ben to kiss her lest she die, sounding like she was requesting the fifth ingredient to be retrieved from the woods, it was a bit ridiculous (What is she doing up there? She's in the wrong story!) Her "Losing My Mind" was the evening's greatest disappointment. I've seen her perform that song to devastating effect on a half-dozen concert occasions. Curious that context drained the life from it. Regardless, she was ultimately greatly satisfying and significantly better on Sunday evening.

Jan Maxwell, as Phyllis, was the most successful of the four leads. Her performance was textured and acheful. She has a powerful voice, less lush than the singers she sparred, but her dancing was like a terrorist--lethal arms and passion, not well controlled. She was saddled with an ill-fitting, too-long dress that she had to lift up at every turn to keep from falling; but she navigated with a sequined death grip. Her reward was a second, ill-fitting dress for "The Story of Lucy and Jessie." (Overall, the designer created stunning costumes. . . for the ghosts. The living fared less well.) And the porn hair, while beautiful, felt inappropriately tousled for the period and the character. Ms. Maxwell could have been more hostile, but Ron Raines had taken that emotion hostage. As a matter of fact, he had such a hold on hostility he seemed to forget that Ben is a man successful in both women and politics and requires a charm not obvious on the page. He, too, sang his role beautifully; but he never scratched beneath the surface of this thin-skinned character so Ben's inherent, emotional wavering and subsequent collateral damage came across more as affect than effect, just angry salt on a bitter wound. His end-of-show breakdown was powerful but could have been devastating had he expressed even fleeting likeability.

Danny Burstein, as Buddy, was too young in every way. While realistic for the part with younger co-stars or in a concert version, his energy, form, and salesmanship lacked, well, seasoning. His singing was lovely, and he played the emotions by the book. Perhaps he needs to stew in his own juices for a while or siphon off a little bitterness from Mr. Raines, something to marinate or wry-age those emotions a bit.

It pains me to say that Elaine Paige, my favorite performer of musicals, was an uninspired Carlotta. Oddly enough, it may have been her success and talent that undermined her most. As the "First Lady of British Musical Theater" (said so right there in her bio), she seems a long way from alternating good times and bum times. Sure, everyone has them, but Carlotta's life and livelihood rode astride those highs and lows. It is hard to believe that Ms. Paige has dined on pretzels and beer by necessity in recent memory. Not that she is thereby disqualified from playing the role, but every actor takes stage draped in perceptual assets and liabilities (as in life, as do we all). Her success proves both here. That said, I've never heard "I'm Still Here" sung better. She finishes the song with such full-throttled power that you can't help but celebrate the accomplishment. But it isn't a song that requires much singing, and the celebration should be for her endurance not her diaphragm. She is further undone by staging that is stupid and inconsiderate. On the first night, one of the actors blocked her face for the first half of the song. The woman is 4'11" at full stretch, and she was sitting down. For Heaven's sake, the conducter was at eye level at that point, so you don't stick an obstacle, in this case a completely superfluous actor with big hair, down stage. While Bernadette Peters was all emotional generalities, Elaine Paige was all specifics, almost to the point of pantomiming the words. The easiest and possibly worst sin in Sondheim is to not trust the song and simply tell the story. I would suggest she get on her knees and beg forgiveness, but we might lose sight of her entirely. Ms. Paige has everything it takes to blow the rafters off, but all she really needed to do was pull back the curtains.

One of the greatest joys of this show is the cameos, jewel-encrusted cameos--great numbers not bound by plot or concept. Linda Lavin as Hattie is dynamic and dynamite. She is not the smoky-throated broad of Ethel Shutta or Elaine Stritch, nor the fiesty but frail flower of Betty Garrett (from the 2001 Broadway revival). All were delightful as have been a parade of others. Ms. Lavin was like none of them. She is not playing to the jokes, she's in on the joke; but neither is she the joke. No old lady absurdly reliving the birth of a Broadway Baby, she is a Broadway Baby who's still got it, baby.

Terri White is outstanding as Stella. Mirror, Mirror is one of my favorite numbers ever. It is a powerhouse song made even more thrilling by all the ladies joining in, only muscle memory and menopause to get them through. Then, their younger selves appear, dancing perfectly; and we see what they all once were, the bookends to what could have been. Well, that's how the number usually is. This version was choreographed by Boggle--a fluster cluck of old hens about to be taken out by their own shadows. It is a testament to how good the song is and how amazing Terri White is that the number deservedly received the greatest ovation of the evening. Knowing Ms. White's history, while not necessary, only adds to the thrill.

The remaining performances were functional--although Regine's Solange was messier than the ruins of Rome. It was also interesting to see that a cast of universally unspectacular youngers, mere shadowns of their later selves, literally and figuratively, made the main action even more compelling.

This is not the definitive Follies, but it was definitely worth seeing--twice.

Be a Good Little Widow

Jill Eikenberry, Wrenn Schmidt (photo: Ben Arons)

There are no new stories. This fact challenges every playwright (and novelist and screenwriter). Take, for example, the following three scenarios: a newly married couple learns to make their day-to-day relationship work; a wife realizes she will never be able to please her mother-in-law; people who don't get along have to interact when a mutual loved one dies. Faced with any of these scenarios, one could easily guess how the rest of a play would unfold--that is, unless it were written by a top-notch playwright with an original imagination and deep empathy for human foibles. Bekah Brunstetter is such a playwright.

Brunstetter's play, Be a Good Little Widow, combines the three scenarios described above, yet it is surprising, multidimensional, and moving. The new wife and the judgmental mother-in-law--and the other two characters--are specific, living people. The play mixes humor and heartbreak, all richly earned. It is a deeply satisfying show.

Director Stephen Brackett supports Brunstetter's writing with clean, clear direction. The four-person cast shines. The two men, in smaller roles, are solid and believable. Jill Eikenberry is perfectly cast as the mother-in-law, and she gives a performance that is uncompromising yet compassionate, dignified yet nakedly vulnerable. As the not-so-good little widow Melody, Wrenn Schmidt combines staggering depth, truthfulness, and physicality. During the show's 90 or so minutes, there is not a molecule of her body that is not Melody.

Many of the people involved in this show--in particular, Brunstetter and Schmidt--are quite young. I am looking forward to their work over the next decades.

Lisa Howard: Songs of Innocence and Experience (CD Review)

There are wonderful moments in theatre when you suddenly realize that you are in the presence of someone special. The first time I heard Lisa Howard sing was one of those moments. It was an evening of William Finn songs at Merkin Hall in 2004. Betty Buckley performed, as did Stephen DeRosa, Jerry Dixon, Raul Esparza, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, and Janet Metz. Howard was a student of Finn's, if I remember correctly, and she spent a lot of time in the background. And then came time for her solo. The second she started singing, I sat up a little straighter and listened a little harder. Her voice was strong and clear and beautiful, and she knew what to do with it. Although the other performers were better known and had more experience, she was among peers. (In his brief essay in the CD booklet, Finn refers to that evening as well, saying, "When Lisa finished singing. . . , the great Betty Buckley, who was sitting next to her, rose and bowed deeply.")

I've since seen Howard's wonderful performance in Spelling Bee (and also saw her be terribly underutilized in 9 to 5 and South Pacific). And now she has released a solo CD called Songs of Innocence and Experience (Ghostlight Records), which is a collection of songs by William Finn. Although I don't think the CD is a home run, there is much to like about it. Howard's voice remains beautiful, and her interpretations are well worth many listens. Particular highlights include "When the Earth Stopped Turning" from Elegies and "Bad Boy," "Listen to the Beat," and "I Don't Know Why I Love You" (a duet with Derrick Baskin) from The Royal Family of Broadway.

But, and this is a fairly large but, Finn's songs don't offer enough variety for a solo CD. Mind you, I love Finn's work. March of the Falsettos changed my life. Spelling Bee is amazing. I hope that The Royal Family makes it to New York. But (1) his songs are mostly character-driven and can be awkward when taken out of context, (2) some of his music has a sameness to it, and (3) his awkward and odd rhymes, while charming and funny in his shows, can become annoying on the multiple listens that a good CD deserves.

However, the CD's strengths far outweigh its weaknesses. The 14-person band is a treat, and the orchestrations by Carmel Dean, Eugene Gwozdz, and Michael Starobin, among others, are excellent. And while there is a sameness to some of the songs, there is great texture and variety to Howard's singing.

When I like a CD, I listen to it over and over without interruption. This CD won't get that treatment. However, I am sure that I will pull it out again and again over the years and always be pleased.

(Reviewer CD)