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.
