Let'sTalk Off-Broadway

Oleanna by David Mamet, directed by Doug Hughes, with Bill Pullman and Julia Stiles

     ... he said, she said ...

Oleanna is a parable of social revolution along the lines of Bonfire of the Vanities or Animal Farm.  It doesn't have the internal consistency that's made those a kind of starting point for thinking, but still, it resonates. 

What first hits one is the glamorous set, a vast and luxurious professor's office beyond anything in the Ivy League, let alone an office for an untenured college prof at Oleanna.  It's used to underline the power and class disparities between the Professor and the student but spells, "this isn't real." 

Carol, a college student in danger of failing a course visits her Professor, John, in that office to understand why she's not doing better and get him to give her another chance.

Each is under pressure, Carol not to fail, and John because he's currently under consideration for tenure.  Mamet ups the stakes for John:  betting on a post-promotion raise, he's settling on a bigger and better house ahead of time (what's the rush?  I doubted he'd be that foolish.)  Carol doesn't "get" what John tries to explain about her academic weaknesses and John becomes frustrated and over-excited about that and everything else.  Mamet sure knows how to set up a conflict and write peppery dialogue to go with it, complete with naturalistic interrupted sentences, and these fine actors have perfect timing.

The script begins its slide into unbelievability, though, about those academic weaknesses.  The sentence John reads aloud from her paper is illogical, but no liberal arts student who attends all classes, listens attentively, takes copious notes, checks in with the teacher in his office for more clarification, who is from a lower class background, and who really tries like Carol, fails courses because of her writing -- certainly not in recent history.  (If they did, who'd be left in class?)

John's hyper state leads him to do several things not quite right for a Professor dealing with a student.  He reveals too much emotional intensity about personal and professional topics, from problems closing on the house and the too constant phone calls to the ideas in his book (of course required reading).  He tries too hard to get Carol to understand not only her academic difficulties but his professional opinions and mind set.  Once or twice he sits on the same sofa:  watching, one can see not great judgment but nothing truly out of hand.  Carol, meanwhile, seems quite unintelligent, her responses so off the point we wonder how she could have pulled together even a badly written paper.

After a time, Carol returns to the office, having filed complaints with the tenure committee about John on several points, raising John's level of tension.  She visits again, and then again, each time having raised the ante from complaints about his teaching to more sensational charges, from the tenure committee to the courts.  Their power arcs intersect as intensifying threats send John downward toward fear and despair and Carol upward on an impact surge.  With the speed of light, Carol changes from being verbally weak to throwing off sophisticated, politicized arguments about gender and class with astonishing fluency.  

We know he didn't do much of what she claims to get him into big trouble, but that she's turned emotionally driven phrases and gestures into hard-edged errors and crimes in order to destroy him.  Since it's just her word against his, however, he's helpless, or so we're to think.

Oleanna is most effective in its open-ended exploration of its secondary theme, class conflicts in the academic context.  Carol, who "has worked really hard to get here," is enraged that her college professor has written about education, the very system that pays him and lets him live better than anything she ever knew, in a sarcastic and dismissive way.  She has a point.

To punch home his main political argument, however, Mamet forswears the consistent character development of his Speed-the-Plow, off-Broadway last year, and American Buffalo, reviewed here below.  Oleanna is written with dramatic power, but it would be a more compelling exploration of victimization through untestable sexual harassment charges, and generally of determining guilt without witnesses, if the thought "that's not real," didn't keep intruding. 

Oleanna plays at the Golden Theatre, 45th Street West of Broadway, NYC.

Yvonne Korshak

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Shakespeare's Hamlet starring Jude Law, directed by Michael Grandage

 

... a two man show ...

Sometimes theater goers will say of classic plays, "I sawThe Seagull -- or A Doll's House -- or Hamlet -- recently, I'm just not ready to see another one".  Fair enough, but Jude Law puts such a distinctive mark on Hamlet that, believe me, you haven't seen this, ever.

His Hamlet is a younger man than most seem to be (regardless of the actor's age).  His performance is athletic, unquestionably charismatic (the audience applauds after every great scene like after an aria in an opera), and openly vulnerable.  He listens to others intensely, and his words, thoughts and actions come as genuine responses flowing from within -- the script falls away and Shakespeare's character emerges as a real, conflicted, engaged man.  He's all over the stage.  He gives himself completely, with a great actor's generosity, to the performance.

Law does full justice to the astonishing poetry without any archaic distance to separate us from the language -- we hear the way he talks.  In this he's helped by the production's unobtrusive modern dress that underscores the play's timelessness.  You hardly notice whether the actors are wearing Elizabethan costumes or not.

The youthfulness of this Hamlet lays an interesting slant on his tangled involvement with his mother, his father, and the saturated sexuality of his mother's new marriage to his murdered father's brother.  "Why doesn't he kill Claudius?"  "What's his problem?"  To the many answers to that central puzzle, Law brings what seems to me a new take -- though a man physically, he's still somehow a boy living at home caught up in youthful conflicts.  The care with which he listens to others and himself suggests he's still formative.  He's not yet ready for the burden that's placed on him. 

If only the rest of the actors were as good as Law!  They are uniformly routine stereotypes in the way they play their characters (Claudius, Gertrude), some seem to be thinking about something else (Horatio), some are strained (Ophelia) and some are downright dull (Laertes).  They mostly spring from London's Donmar Warehouse theater that has a big reputation, simply not lived up to in this production.

All the weight of the play is on two men's shoulders -- Jude Law and Shakespeare.  Luckily they're both in brilliant form! 

Hamlet plays at the Broadhurst Theater, 44th Street West of Broadway, through December 6. 

p.s.  How interesting that two film actors created two outstanding Shakespearean characters this year -- Jude Law as Hamlet and Philip Seymour Hoffman as Iago in Othello, reviewed here below.

  Yvonne Korshak

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Exit The King by Eugene Ionesco, starring Geoffrey Rush and Susan Sarandon

                                                    ... everything theater ...

Exit the King is a hilarious parable, transported to the other worldly by marvelous music, dazzlingly written, with profundity hidden behind the comic mask.  It's everything theater should be -- including outstanding performers and a brilliantly intelligent production.  You could not have a better time than at Exit the King.

Aristophanes lives on in Ionesco's wild tale where anything can and does happen because that's how life is.

The set is dominated by vast, "kingly" but drooping drapery -- with Goyaesque drawings, like a Metropolitan Opera set making way for a new production.  Everything about this play is about endings.  King Berenger, played by Geoffrey Rush in one of the greatest performances I've seen, is dying.  (Rush is so good you just don't want it to ever end.)  We're told that the King will be dead by the end of the performance -- the characters check their watches now and again to see how much time he has left.

Queen Marguerite seems wryly, even coldly, willing to let things take their course -- she's a puzzle we don't understand fully until the end -- in contrast to Queen Marie, his second and younger wife, a frail vessel of those pesky human emotions of love, grief, and resistance to the inevitable.  The King, a classic clown with German Expressionist smears of face paint, does not want to die, and his rationales, explanations and feints are those we all share -- talk about "universal."  Only he's so funny.

From the start we know it's not only the King who's dying.  The clock's ticking also on his once enormous kingdom, greatly reduced in size and power because of his neglect, to the point where now the pond is lapping at the fence posts.  One thinks of polar bears puzzling it out on a melting block of ice.  The play is prescient, written in 1962.

An individual dies and an entire world vanishes -- we often think that narcissistic union (or confusion) of microcosm and macrocosm is peculiar to humans and for much of the play that seems to be the topic.  But toward the end meanings crescendo and masks fall away.  Susan Sarandon -- regally -- removes her Queen's cloak to reveal fully her vibrant green gown.  Nature herself, there she is!  The inevitable, the truth!  Muse-like -- there's so much that's Classical about this zany, "absurdist" play -- she leads the King to where he must go.  Her role swells and the shrinking Kingdom shows its true face.  It's not only Berenger's:  it's the human kingdom, our world -- the big one -- that we've neglected, muddied, handed over to entropy without a fight ... and now beyond recall.

Early on, railing frantically against inevitability, the King comes up with an argument from nature:  "Death's not natural.  That's why nobody wants to do it."  Only death, it turns out, is natural.  If we've had any doubts, by the end we've heard it from Nature herself.

Exit the King plays at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, Broadway, NYC, through June 30th.

                                                                                       Yvonne Korshak

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On Broadway -- Schiller's Mary Stuart, a new version by Peter Oswald, starring Janet McTeer and Harriet Walter

                                                          ...  whose history ? ...     

The situation of Mary Stuart is that Elizabeth I, the Protestant daughter of Henry VIII (see here below), is Queen of England and Mary, formerly Queen of the Scots, a devout Catholic, is in prison in London for murdering her husband and plotting against the English throne.  Egged on by various plotters and courtly connivers, the two engage in contest of wills:  Mary seeks to be freed, while Elizabeth hesitates to execute her for ethical reasons and to avoid turning her into a martyr for the Catholic cause.  Mary is finally executed, Elizabeth claiming it was done without her specific bidding.

How then does Friedrich Schiller turn this into a play in which the beheaded Mary is seen as victorious and Elizabeth, who in fact goes on to reign as a great Queen, as vanquished?  Good writing, professional production and excellent acting mask the fundamental nonsense. 

Mary has quite a resume.  She has murdered her husband, married his murderer, been thrown out by the Scots as their Queen and engaged in several murderous plots.  Yet Schiller, and Oswald, envision her as spiritually superior to ElizabethI, a beloved Queen who strengthened the arts, crafts and commerce of her nation, prepared it militarily to ward off threats from powerful enemies, and fostered the great flowering of Elizabethan England. 

This play has been called "revisionist" but it's just biased.

The two go hair to hair.  At the end Mary, who is purged of all her sins in a lengthy confession while bathed in a heavenly light, goes toward the execution block calmly, gorgeously dressed and magnificently coiffed with a gold hair net.  Elizabeth, on the contrary, comes onstage irascible, then isolated and forlorn, and without her elaborately braided costume wig -- her short underneath hair looks as if it had been chopped with a hedge shears.  How interesting, a purposeful twisting of fact by the playwrights to shaft Elizabeth, since Mary's lost wig was the one that really figured in this execution.  According to the accounts, when the executioner held up Mary's severed head, her glamorous auburn wig fell off, revealing her gray hair.  That's not my idea of how to come out a-head.  :-)

Mary Stuart was first produced in Germany in 1800.  Schiller, in this revolutionary period, fired by romantic aspirations, was inspired to write an anti-monarchical account of Elizabeth ... but Mary Queen of Scots is no standard bearer for liberation. 

Mary Stuart plays at the Broadhurst Theatre in NYC through August 16th.

                                                                                       Yvonne Korshak

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Lets Talk Off-Broadway -- New Thoughts on A Man For All Seasons ... on Broadway and in film ...

note:  We are happy and grateful -- and fascinated -- to have received a guest blog with new information on A Man For All Seasons.  For the review of the production this blog is responding to, see LetsTalkOff-Broadway -- here below.  It helps me understand why the production seemed somewhat flat to me ... how about you? YK

                          ... once the script leaves the playwright's hands ...

The original play had a character in it called "The Common Man" who showed up in various different disguises, such as a river boatman, etc., and constantly commented on More's impeccable and self-sacrificing conduct with words that basically expressed the thought, "Yeah, right, but still I  gotta go home and feed the missus and walk the dog, so I gotta do what I can do to earn a living!" and such.  This character was cut from the movie script, and for some reason the people who presented the new production at Roundabout decided to keep that cut in place.  In my opinion they made a great mistake, and I would not have allowed it, were it up to me -- which it was not.  I guess they all thought he was irrelevant -- leave the audience to think that -- but he wasn't.  This character kept saying everything you and I -- and the audience was thinking:  things like "Like man, give them what they want and go home to that great woman who is waiting for you!"  In my opinion they cut out, in effect, the catalytic character who made the play work!

                                                                                                          Art Asher

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Of related interest, see reviews here of A Man for All Seasons, and Vivat Rex! Exhibition Commemorating 500 Year Anniveresary of the Accession of Henry VIII, here above.

Lets Talk Off-Broadway -- Dividing the Estate by Horton Foote, Directed by Michael Wilson, at the Booth Theatre

Dividing the Estateis a tv sitcom elevated to Broadway.  A south Texas family gathers at the family manse to tussle over the large farming estate pinched by encroaching urbanism, a bow to Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard.  No one in this family is rich any more, some are nearly destitute, and all at one time or another are pushing for Mother to divide the estate so they can get theirs.  The Matriarch dominates the dining table and the children, servants, and significant others take their places in equally expectable ways.  Even the deaths that occur are totally predictable, as are the jokes.

Why are these characters so involved in irritating one another?  References to past relationships are vague:  a brief conversation about who Mother and Father may have loved most is blown off.  We never understand the roots of the peculiarities of their hostilities, as we do, say, in August: Osage County, so in spite of a few thin laughs one can squeeze from human foibles, all that's left is type characters squabbling over money.  Lacking rich material, the fine cast, headed by Elizabeth Ashley as Stella, the Mother, seem driven to mugging and rolling their eyes a lot in order to keep things going. 

Dividing the Estate is presented by Lincoln Center Theater, by arrangement with Primary Stages.

                                                                                                              Yvonne Korshak

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Lets Talk Off-Broadway -- American Buffalo by David Mamet with Cedric the Entertainer, John Leguizamo and Haley Josel Osment at the Belasco Theatre

                                    ... Creative Transformation ...

Van Gogh, in his painting The Night Cafe turns a down and outers' bar into a Church, recreating its denizens in the process.  In David Mamet's American Buffalo, we come to see a low-life junk shop as a home and its loser occupants gain a big win -- a family.

This play is in many ways the opposite of A Man for All Seasons, recently reviewed below.  Instead of men in hgh positions loftily debating issues of Universal Importance, it's about three at the bottom of the ladder planning a heist with profanity peppered language.  These men have vast failings but genuine feelings they don't themselves know until the hot circumstances and cause and effect of the failed heist bring them deeper understanding.

"Teach," played brilliantly by John Leguizamo, is violent, bitter and clutchy for love.  Bobby, played by Haley Joel Osment, is just a kid but already, we assume, tossed around by life and dropped down on a path of crime.  Donny Dubrow, played by Cedric the Entertainer is the stable, though opportunistically criminal, owner of the wonderously cuttered junk shop -- an alter ego of the rich clutter of lived lives.  They seem like losers but when, through a series of torturous misfires they come to understand the love that keeps them together, sublimity enters.  They're in a new place -- though it's still Donny's junkshop. 

It's too bad this play has a limited run and is closing tomorrow, November 23 but, having just seen it, I'm reviewing it because there'll be other chances to see it.  Like the object of desire in the play, the American Buffalo nickel, it's an American Classic.

                                                                              Yvonne Korshak

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Lets Talk Off-Broadway -- A Man for All Seasons by Robert Bolt, Starring Frank Langella as Sir Thomas More, Roundabout Theatre Company

                                        .... A mixed bag ....

A Man for All Seasons is founded on a topic of great inherent power:  the collision of individual conviction and state power.  The play is well written, well constructed, and given every advantage in the fine acting of Frank Langella and the excellent production by Roundabout Theatre.

Why then does it fall flat?

Because Sir Thomas More has all the virtues while his enemies have all the vices.  That's not human nature nor history and so, as drama, it doesn't ring true.

King Henry VIII and his lieutenant, Cromwell, override the opposition of Thomas More and others to wrest an independent Church of England free from the grasp of the Roman Catholic Church.  The historical context is highly ambiguous in terms of "right" and "wrong."  Yet More in this play is all high minded, personal conviction, the King is a callow youth and libertine devoid of political purpose -- a vast oversimplification of this empire builder -- and the passionate Protestant Thomas Cromwell is a conniving, power hungry Iago -- though not endowed with Shakespearian charisma.

The play recounts More's fall from royal grace to poverty, imprisonment and execution because of his principled stand -- his refusal to sanction the King's divorce from his wife of nineteen years who had not borne him a son, and his marriage to Anne Boleyn, the very acts that catalyzed the King's leap for his nation's independence from the Roman Catholic Church.  At the play's end, More is beheaded for his refusal -- "I will not bend" -- to sign the Act of Supremacy that made Henry VIII the Supreme Head of the Church of England.

You'd never guess that Cromwell, who some see as the originator of the English Reformation, was as devoted to his vision of a sovereign England as More was in his loyalty to Rome.  History tells us that More persecuted Protestants and was not opposed to burning at the stake for heretics, although he tolerated his Lutheran son-in-law.  Evidently he was a mixed bag, like everyone else.  Outstanding theatrical experience and skills at play in this production can't mask the strain of covering up the overly simplistic view of A Man for All Seasons.

It's interesting that so far this Fall there have been four plays that focus on the conflict between individual conscience and the power of the state -- A Man for All Seasons, The Grand Inquisitor, Galileo, and Antigone, all discussed in posts here below.  Three of them focus in one way or another on the Inquisition.  Is this a category?  Theater of the Inquisition?

A Man for All Seasons is playing at American Airlines Theatre on West 42nd Street in New York City.

Of related interest, see New thoughts on A Man For All Seasons in post above, and Vivat Rex! Exhibition Commemorating the 500th Anniversary of the Accession of Henry VIII in post above.

                                                                                      Yvonne Korshak

               

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