September 2018
In the wake of personal obligations, it took me quite a while to prepare for a return edition of Aisle Say, and
inevitably I wrote some reviews I was not able to upload before the
productions closed. Not to let the work go to waste, and in case anyone
should be curious, here are my thoughts on some ecent departures …
A
family drama with an unusually complex structure and equally complex characters
is the new Craig Lucas play, I Was Most Alive with You at Playwrights Horizons. Blending the
conditions of familial and romantic love with the conditions of being of the
hearing world and being deaf, in a flashback framework created by TV writers
plumbing a mutual experience for a pitch, which may leave what actually
happened open for interpretation, it’s performed simultaneously by a
speaking cast and an ASL cast on an upper level. It deserves especial attention as a worthy challenge to any regional theatre
bold enough to take it on. In the sense of being multi-layered, with an
unusually active plot for a family drama, it’s rewardingly dense stuff.
I’m not sure the all-star off-Broadway revival of George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House is entirely narratively coherent. I’ll explain that ambiguity: An idiosyncrasy of my steady theatregoing life—that started when I began attending on my own steam, unaccompanied by parents or a group, at about the age of 15—is that I’ve only infrequently, outside of academic requirement, actually read classic plays before I saw them in production. I might research them a bit—prior to attending one by the Bard, for example, I’d whip out the brilliant Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare (or rather lug out; it was originally published as two volumes, and the budget omnibus edition is a doorstopper), to read dear Isaac’s synopsis-essays, so I’d never fail to understand a given play’s archaic language constructions or historical context and references…but since I’d be going to see the plays, written to be performed after all, what better way to discover them?
There is, however, a double edge to this: On the one hand, yes, a live theatre introduction to a classic; on the other hand, subject to interpretation by a director and actors. Even with a fairly straight-ahead delivery, things like tone, choice, theme, and personality could create so distinctive an alchemical mix that when I went to see the same play again, some years later, in a completely different iteration, I might experience it as if seeing it for the first time, if the production POV were different enough. On rare occasion, I might even have forgotten that I’d seen the play before. (Bear in mind, I see maybe 200 a year, sometimes more.)
I’ve been doing this for 45 years, and it can still happen.
I was having fun watching the all-star cast of Heartbreak House—including the likes of Tom Hewitt, Alison Fraser, Lenny Wolpe and Karen Ziemba—in its new adaptation by director David Staller, which has an interpolated period actors in a period era framework, setting up permission for a few theatrical shortcuts, such as locale implied by available stuff at hand, and one actor playing three distinct roles…right up until the point where I wasn’t having fun; the point at which the Shavian dialectic seemed repetitive; the point at which the play seemed to end…and continue…and end…and continue…and end…and—
Well, thought I, this is likely why Heartbreak House is so rarely performed. Then, while preparing for this review, I looked up a synopsis of the play for clarity and…Oh, wait, I thought, I’ve seen this before. Twelve years ago. And it made more sense to me when I did.
I looked up the review I’d written—a capsule within a round-up—and it said that the play had been “rather a disappointment for me, and I don't know if it was [the director’s] production or the George Bernard Shaw play itself—but for all its being a metaphor about the upper classes being feckless and oblivious despite political upheaval all around them, a metaphor that theoretically should speak to the condition of America under right wing leadership, I found it only admirable, never involving. Its romantic entanglements also—and I think this is in the writing—are about alliance and philosophy more than attraction and sex—and that, to me, also leant the play a feeling of unreality. The actors—a stalwart group …—all invest in their roles with dignity and conviction, yet there is (or was, again, for me) a passionless feeling at the core, that no amount of A+ work was able to eradicate.”
And I find I have nothing of any consequence to add…
In his previously unproduced 2003 play Spin Off, the late Bernard Pomerance demonstrated that his interest in the kind of metaphorical theatricality he exhibited in The Elephant Man (the play for which he is best, and to most people exclusively, known), remained a constant thread; but in The Elephant Man, he had the benefit of a constantly forward-moving story and growing relationships within to keep the theatricality exciting. In Spin-Off, once the central conceit is established, the play devolves into a spectacularly overwritten and repetitive what-is-reality dialectic. All hands, actors and director Ron Canada, are solidly professional and seem to be operating with admirable competence, but it’s hard to assess much more than that, because what they can do is limited by the narrow scope of the situation and characters.
If I seem to be coy, it’s because describing the premise, to my sensibility anyway, amounts to a spoiler of fairly large proportions, if you decide to attend the show “cold.” So for those who might decide to experience one more by Pomerance, despite my disappointment, stop reading here and skip the italicized paragraphs below. For those who can bear not being surprised, read on.
A cop finds himself in a session with a department shrink over the fatal shooting of a hooker. He is agitated and there are key details he can’t remember. It gradually becomes clearer that the details he can’t remember are the details that weren’t written for him; for you see, he is a character from a TV show. And as it turns out, the hooker isn’t quite dead either, because the show is now in reruns, and the shooting can happen again and again. But somehow this cycle is different, and the characters have enough self-awareness to contemplate discovering their own unwritten backstories and breaking free into the real world. The play, according to a program note from the director, was borne of Pomerance’s fascination with, and addiction to, Steven Bochco’s TV series N.Y.P.D. Blue, plus his, Pomerance’s, willingness to invest in its characters as real, and his sense of profound loss when the series finally ended its run. Being about the existence of non-existent beings, the discussion is very…well…existential. It’s a little bit Pirandello (Six Characters in Search of an Author), a little bit Serling by way of Pirandello (The Twilight Zone: “Five Characters in Search of an Exit”) and a little bit Shaw by way of cop show. Alas, the ground-rules that govern this hybrid storytelling universe are vague (in part because the characters are figuring them out as they go, in part because Pomerance hasn’t figured them out) and very little of it is as entertaining as it means to be.
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