A Splendid Marin Ireland

The splendid Marin Ireland almost made me love Tennessee Williams with her performance in The Transport Group's "Summer and Smoke" at CSC Rep.  Her Alma, a Southern spinster who harbors feelings for her childhood friend and neighbor John, is staggering.  Perhaps Williams  intended Alma to be as fragile as Amanda in "The Glass Menagerie" or as delusional as Blanche in "Streetcar" but Ireland gives Alma  a strength of character that is lacking in Williams other heroines.  She has some of Stella's groundedness right up to the end when she finally gives in to the despair that she will never have her great love.  I was taken by Nathan Darrow's John whose work I had previously not known.  He was grand and a match for Ireland.  Jack Cummings III, the Transport Groups co-founder and artistic director, directed this jewel of a production. 

It was a long long long "Long Day's Journey Into Night" at the BAM Harvey.  Lesley Manville's morphine-addicted Mary was one note and Rory Kennan's portrayal of Jamie as an ADHD young man barely out of adolescence distracting and annoying.  Matthew Beard as Edmond was less so but seemed to be channeling Edgar G. Robinson and Jimmy Cagney via Martin Scorsese with his accent throughout the play.  I lay the fault for the disjointed performances at the feet of the director Richard Eyre (or SIR Richard Eyre as he is called in the program). Only Jeremy Irons was convincing as the parsimonious patriarch of the family, James Tyrone. And his is a marvelously complex and moving performance.The play is as close to autobiography as O'Neill got.  I would say closer except that O'Neill's older brother had already died of alcohol by the time the events of the play take place.  So taken in historical context Jamie is really a ghost which makes sense since his character never feels fully a part of the play. The string of monologues delivered by each of the characters feels like a tired theatrical device, one I'm sure that O'Neill would have worked out of the play if he had lived to see it produced.  And are standing ovations now de rigueur for having sat through an extremely long play? Baaaah...

On a minor note, while in L.A. earlier this month I caught Amy Herzog's "Belleville" directed by Jenna Worsham at The Pasadena Playhouse. While I was not a huge fan of either "4,000 Miles" or "Mary Jane" at least the latter addressed with great delicacy and understanding the very real dilemna of having a severely handicapped child without unlimited resources.  "Belleville" has little intrinsic value and, in fact,  borders on the absurd. A young American couple in Paris obviously have marital issues but what it turns out to be behind their issues, at least on the husband's side, stretches the imagination.  Although I am admirer of Thomas Sadoski's work (he was brilliant opposite Marin Ireland in Neil LaBute's "reasons to be pretty"), his character as written lacks credibility. Anna Camp is, however, at least to me, a revelation.  She's a fine stage actress lost in a muddled production of a poorly conceived play.  I also liked Moe Jeudy-Lamour who plays the enterprising very young Senegalese-French landlord and though I found the performance of Sharon Pierre-Louis who plays his strict Muslim wife unnecessarily wooden.  A directorial note: If you're going to have a character slash his wrists in the bathroom don't keep tantalizing us with the possibility he will jump off the balcony.

Storms of April

The RSC brings "King Lear" to BAM Harvey director by the RSC Artistic Director Gregory Doran and starring the inimitable Antony Sher in the title role.  Sher's performance is idiosyncratic and engaging but the performance of the night is that of Pappa Essiedu at Edmond, the illegitimate son of the Earl of Gloucester, solidly enacted by David Troughton.  Essiedu is already making a name for himself at the RSC and one can see why here.  His Edmond is a pure evil, a textbook sociopath.  Sexy, smart and soooo laid back, he easily manipulates his father and his naive and trusting brother Edgar.  His seduction of Goneril and Regan is smooth, effortless if you will.  In his performance one can see a callous college frat boy chocking up his wins and sneering at the ease of it. In another stand-out performance, Antony Byrne brings a youthful buoyancy to the part of the older Earl of Kent,  Lear's most loyal  subject and protector.  I wish I could say the same for the rest of the cast.  Mimi Ndieweni's Cordelia is pretty much by the book,  Nia Gwynne's Goneril is weak, Kelly Williams Regan is cartoonish  and Oliver Johnston does not give Edgar/Mad Tom the complexity the role requires.  Graham Turner as Fool also disappoints in a role that is usually a win-win.  His performance is disjointed and one never feels his real despair over the banishment of Cordelia.  But Essiedu's Edmond is more than reason enough to weather through the four hours at The Harvey.

The revival of Caryl Churchill's "Light Shining in Buckinghamshire" at NYTW forty years doesn't come together this time around.  Directed by Rachel Chavkin a NYTW Usual Suspect and whose work I generally admire even when the material falls short, this "Light" fails to shine.  Chavkin has assembled a motley crew of actors of various ability and training and it shows.  An old trouper like Vinie Burrows who was a delight at 89 as Mustard Seed in last summer's Shakespeare in the Park production of A Midsummer Night's Dreams" is not matched in talent or ability by the other cast members with the exception of the height-challenged actor Matthew Jeffers who engages and delights in his various roles. Even Rob Campbell who is a regular in Churchill's plays disappoints.  It feels almost as though he is saying "This is an amateurish production.  What am I doing here?  Why even try?" Evelyn Spahr in particular is appalling as she mugs her way through various roles in this period piece about the Civil War in England in 1642 led by Oliver Cromwell.

"Dance Nation" at Playwright's Horizons and directed by Lee Sunday Evans is Clare Barron's latest and, while I thought that her two previous plays "You Got Older" and "I'll Never Love Again" were superior,  the risks she is willing to take like the cross generational casting of her teenaged protagonists, a devise she used to ever better effect in "I'll Never Love Again," have electrifying results.  The play is searing in addressing the pain of female puberty and how that pain plays out later on in life.  This is where her use of actresses of different ages to play the seven young dancers really clicks.  Lucy Taylor the 40ish actress playing Ashlee alone on stage and spotlit, delivers a devastating monologue that carries her from her 13 year old self to the sexually unsure mature woman she has become. The monologue destroys... But everyone in the cast is excellent from Eboni Booth as the insecure Zuzu who is expected to fulfill her mother's dream to Dina Shihabi's Amina, the star dancer of the company who realizes that she must build a shell around herself if she wants to succeed.   There's a moment at the beginning of the play that that is intentionally reminiscent of "A Chorus Line."  The audience recognizes this and it brilliantly sets the stage for what is to come. Barron has the ability to mine other plays for bits that she makes her own.  I continue to be astounded.