What B'way doesn't Desire

Partly because I'm planning my wedding & covering the awards season for Metromix, I've been lazy about blogging. Which is too bad: I've seen some great shows. Generally I'm bored by plays about suburbia, but Next to Normal hit me hard. I'm a sucker for stories about mental illness, & this one didn't compromise with a happy ending (unlike Distracted, whose flip finale undermined a funny look at ADHD). Normal also left Lady Hotspur in tears, & she's not easily moved.

But I especially want to take note of Desire Under the Elms, which closes this weekend. I'm not surprised at this news (Lady H. called it “the worst play I've ever seen on Broadway”), but I am disappointed. It's not arid or anodyne like most legit drama. Director Robert Falls has cut away about half of Eugene O'Neill's script & replaced it with bold theatrical gestures. It stumbles and it misfires, but it's not boring.

This show fits on a Broadway stage, which I can't say about most modern drama. A good show is conceived to a specific type of space, & O'Neill belongs on a huge stage like the St. James. Desire is bold melodrama: its personalities are fervent and its emotions are grandiose. Desire gets a lot of its energy from an Oedipal triangle, with a Yankee kid stealing the farm and third wife from his father. That young wife is a gorgon of sexual desire (thus the title--O'Neill, like Strindberg, finds women horrifying).

Desire is bizarre, which Falls accepts. That's why I like the show, and probably why it couldn't find an audience. Falls replaces O'Neill's elaborate & over-explicit dialogue with expressionistic dialogue-free scenes backed by raggedy Bob Dylan. Stars Pablo Schreiber and Carla Gugino, accustomed to realistic emotional arcs, look skittish or dumbstruck. Yeah, Falls should've coached them better, but they just don't have the acting skill set. And a Broadway crowd has the same problem: they don't know how to interpret such a strange, unconventional show.

O'Neill's lurid tale of adultery and infanticide sounds like he based it on a 19th-century newspaper clipping. It's from the era when rural folks visited the circus tent on Saturday and the revival tent Sunday, and the railroad line led straight to damnation. Robert Falls' Desire is set in that folktale America, a long ways from the clean crossroads of Times Square. I can't imagine a Broadway where this show could be a blockbuster, but it's a more interesting one than ours.

Pretty Theft / Desire Under the Elms

I've been pushing my writing by conducting more interviews recently. Last week, Metromix published my best so far, a phone conversation with Stephin Merritt of Magnetic Fields, who's writing music for a stage adaptation of Coraline. My piece turned out well, mainly because Merritt's so charming & articulate but also I'm finally figuring out how to interview. I also caught a pair of shows last week: Desire Under the Elms on Broadway and Pretty Theft off-off. I'd like to write Desire up for Metromix, but here's a quickie for you:

I loved Desire, but Lady Hotspur called it “the worst show I've ever seen on Broadway.” Director Bob Falls takes a big risk by editing a Eugene O'Neill drama down to 100 minutes. It interferes with the natural narrative flow, which turns the play's arc into a series of weird, almost expressionistic events. Carla Gugino & Pablo Schreiber, trying to play it realistic, couldn't find a through-line, but Brian Dennehy nailed his role. Add a crazy set (boulders & a 19th c. farmhouse hanging above the stage) & you've got the weirdest show I've ever seen on B'way. I loved it, but I can see why it's not for most tastes.

After the grandiosity of Desire, I found Pretty Theft refreshing. I'm only 34, but I'm probably older than anyone in the show. Generally when that happens, I figure (rightly or not) that the young company is just damned hungry to do theater wherever & however they can. That the show's on the 4th floor of a Chinatown walk-up only reinforces that impression. The Flux Theatre Ensemble has created one of those no-budget productions where the artistic director tears your ticket & the lighting is mostly on an overhead track. Pretty Theft has a few bum notes, but its mistakes are those of youth -- which I easily forgive.

The play involves an autistic ward, a father's death, the kind of friend your mother warned you about, and the kind of stranger your mother *really* warned you about. But playwright Adam Szymkowicz balances those heavy elements with a zany tone and oddball characters. His protagonist is Allegra, a nice-looking naïf who's spending the summer before college volunteering at a hospice. Possessing a warmth way beyond her years (a trait matched superbly by Marnie Schulenburg), she makes a connection with an autistic man.

However, the show (& Allegra's boyfriend) are stolen by the sidekick, a bad girl named Suzy. Both in Szymkowicz's writing and in Maria Portman Kelly's performance, Suzy is the type of girl who compensates for low self-esteem by throwing herself at boys & stealing lipstick from drugstores. Both Suzy and Allegra are warm, vital characters; that Szymkowicz mines laughs from their neuroses suggests he'd be great at sex comedy. The show's high point, where Suzy seduces Allegra's moronic boyfriend at the movie theater, had me hoping Pretty Theft would be a teenaged screwball comedy. No such luck, but the direction it takes is so different and unexpected, I didn't mind. The girls go on the run, Thelma-and-Louise style, eventually meeting that dark stranger in one of the more chilling scenes I've seen recently.

But there's those problems I mentioned come up. Director Angela Astle gets good perfs from her actors, but she doesn't have a good eye for stage composition (yet). I found my eye focusing on the “wrong” spot: the heroines often get upstaged by secondary or tertiary characters. Astle and Szymkowicz also indulge in not one but two expressionist scenes to illustrate the autistic man's mental collapse. On their own, they're effective enough. But they steal narrative focus away from Allegra & Suzy, & slow the show down when it should be ramping up (whereas a scene depicting Allegra's dream builds her psyche while offering a break from the play's realism).

Structure is one of the hardest devices to master, & anyway I believe we live in an era of sloppy construction. But in the future, Szymkowicz should be cunning and vicious with his editing, and Astle should be confident, even merciless with her playwrights. They, and the entire company, have got enough vim & talent that they can afford to take the collaborative risk. Pretty Theft runs for two more weeks.

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photo credits: (1) Liz Lauren (2) Isaiah Tanenbaum

Mourning Becomes Electra

I caught the New Group's production of Mourning Becomes Electra last night, & I'll have a review up on Metromix tomorrow. For now, you can read my review of CSC's Uncle Vanya. You'll read me focusing on Maggie Gyllenhaal & her partner Peter Sarsgaard. Well, that's what gets the page-hits. And tomorrow's review of Mourning will also be frothier than I'd like. So here's a few thoughts about Eugene O'Neill's play.

One thing I enjoy about O'Neill is that he defined American drama as intrinsically experimental. Okay, the man's final works (esp. the great Long Day's Journey… & Iceman Cometh) are dramatically conservative. And arguably a lot of his experiments fail (see the '28 Pulitzer-winner Strange Interlude – or rather, don't). But he was always testing new dramatic forms and ideas. He gives me the impression of a man on a quest: “How can I make a truly American tragedy?” Even if he doesn't meet that goal in Mourning (first performed in 1931), what he does succeed at is thrilling.

This may be a great play because of its failures as well as despite them. In Mourning, O'Neill cribs from Greek tragedy, setting Aeschylus's Oresteia in Reconstruction-era New England. An adulterous matriarch murders her husband; in turn she's driven to suicide by her children Orin (who's plagued by a guilty conscience) and Lavinia (who isn't). O'Neill fills that Greek plot out with then-fashionable Freudianism. So when the play sees Orin expressing his desire to fuck Lavinia, it's painfully broad but so heady and fun!

Still, I admire what O'Neill's doing: appropriating Freud's theories to bring his characters as fully to life as he possibly can. I can almost see him striving to make these characters as deep, complex, and contradictory as real humans are. And to his credit, he eventually does. The first 150 minutes are exposition, exploration, and experiment. But slowly, the siblings break away from O'Neill and become autonomous. Not coincidentally, it's around the same time that the action frees itself from the Greek plot (there's no deus ex machina to protect this Orestes).

By the final part (Mourning is a three-part drama of five acts each!), Lavinia is a gorgon, driving first her mother then her brother to suicide, and beginning to corrupt her fiance too. She's a great role, due to this strange power. At her core is an ambiguous experience she has after their parents' deaths. Visiting a South Sea island with Orin, she witnessed an aboriginal ceremony. She later offers a few versions of what happened, including a claim, immediately disavowed, that she screwed one of the natives. She says that the event, whatever it was, emancipated her psyche, a statement that Orin (and, I think, O'Neill) believes and is horrified by. Whatever the actress makes of that moment is the key to her character.

Lavinia is O'Neill's major artistic success in Mourning Becomes Electra. Orin also has his moments though. He's a febrile worm at the mercy of his mother and sister, a bit of reductive Freudianism. But when Orin gets talking about his military service, sounding like a shell-shocked WW1 doughboy, he ironically comes to life. Over his father's bier, he describes his nightmare on the battlefield:

There was a thick mist and it was so still you could hear the fog seeping into the ground. I met a Reb crawling toward our lines. His face drifted out of the mist toward mine. I shortened my sword and let him have the point under the ear. He stared at me with an idiotic look as if he'd sat on a tack--and his eyes dimmed and went out … Before I'd gotten back I had to kill another in the same way. It was like murdering the same man twice. I had a queer feeling that war meant murdering the same man over and over, and that in the end I would discover the man was myself! Their faces keep coming back in dreams—and they change to Father's face—or to mine.

There's more neurosis in that speech than any of the Freudian schema that O'Neill grafts onto Greek tragedy.

But as I said, Mourning Becomes Electra is a failure as a tragedy. O'Neill is too pessimistic to find transcendence through suffering. To him, suffering, like death, is a curse. Lavinia and her mother are villains who deserve their fates; Orin and his father are their victims. And when you see the universe as rigidly moral like that, you're writing a melodrama. That's no knock on O'Neill though: it's great melodrama.