performing iconic theater
by
Douglas Messerli
Samuel
Beckett Happy Days / Los Angeles,
Mark Taper Forum / the performance I saw with
Deborah Meadows on May 22, 2019
Tennessee
Williams A Streetcar Named Desire /
Dance On Productions at the Odyssey Theatre /
the performance I saw was with Thérèse
Bachand on May 25, 2019
This
past week I saw two famed plays each at opposite ends of Los Angeles, downtown
and on the west side, that reminded me just how difficult it is to do iconic
plays—works so memorable through previous productions or movie versions of them
that it forces a knowledgeable theater-goer to compare them with what has come
before them. Both Samuel Beckett’s Happy
Days (performed at the distinguished Mark Taper Forum, the play directed by
James Bundy) and Tennessee Williams’ A
Streetcar Named Desire (at one of the most prestigious LA independent
multiplex theaters, Odyssey Theatre Company, this production produced by Dance
on Productions, directed by Jack Heller) recalled similar problems I had recently
had with a local production of Long Day’s
Journey into the Night, wherein, unfortunately, I kept comparing the actors
to the impressive movie production, starring Kathleen Hepburn, Ralph
Richardson, Jason Robards, Jr., and Dean Stockwell, directed by Sidney Lumet.
Fortunately, the case of Happy Days, the central actor was the
remarkable Dianne Wiest, one of my favorite actresses on both stage and screen.
Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending upon your perspective) I was too young
to have seen the famed Ruth White performance of 1961. But I did, in 2014, see
a quite marvelous production of this play in Pasadena’s Boston Court with
Brooke Adams as Winnie, and her husband Tony Shalhoub playing a the one-line roll
of Willie.
Whereas Wiest sped through her role,
making the partially buried Winne a bit like a train wreck that has left her in
the chasm from which she cannot escape, bringing into focus all of Beckett’s
hilariously absurd lines—the Taper audience was clearly alert to even the subtlest
of the author’s humorous jabs—Adams had performed the play in a kind of slow-mode,
revealing the endless repetitions, a bit like Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, of a daily life performed while waiting to die,
or to be buried alive.
Similarly, Michael Rudko as the Taper’s
Willie, is a wonderfully comic figure, popping up from his hole just often
enough to make Winne believe she is not truly speaking only to herself. And in
the second scene with Winnie buried up to her neck, particularly, Weist and he
came into their own, finally gently confronting one another and their fears. Weist’s
attempt to encourage Willie to come near her so that she can better see him is
a touching moment of love and utter frustration, which adds a dimension to her
character that almost redeems what I had felt previously as her lack of voiced
modulation. And that, in the end, have been the major problem for me: Weist is
a genius when in comes to certain roles that demand a kind of one-level type of
character: the Woody Allen wide-eyed and somewhat innocent woman or in the role
of Honey in Who’s Afraid of Virginia
Woolf? or even the wide-eyed Emily of Our
Town; but although Winnie may be a Candide-like figure, she is also a salty
pragmatist who has perhaps driven her husband and herself into their tapped
lives. I never felt I heard in her voice the full dimensions of these two
extremes.
Any company who might bravely present a
new production of the great Williams’ masterpiece has my approval. And the
Dance On group—with Susan Priver playing Blanche DuBois, the handsome Max E.
Williams as Stanley Kowalski, Melissa Sullivan as Stella, and Christopher
Parker as Mitch—has nothing but my admiration.
Surely they know that with legendary
figures such as Marlon Brando, Jessica Tandy, Vivien Leigh, Kim Hunter, and
others having literally defined their roles, that any revival can only compared
in the minds of a mature audience. And the actors and director here actually
gave homage, in part, to these figures, as well as the great original director
of both the stage play and film Elia Kazan.
If the actor Williams can never quite hope
to match the sort of humorous lowlife of Brando’s Stanley, he certainly looks
better with his buff body than the more feminine-looking Brando. In this case,
you can truly comprehend why Stella has stayed with him; he’s like a stupid-minded
body that you can’t keep your eyes off. Stella, in this production is obviously
addicted, just as her sister, to sex—without any of the good-girl Mississippi
pretensions.
If Blanche, at heart, is all about desire,
Stella with Stanley make such desires obviously apparent. And while I’ve always
thought Kim Hunter’s Stella’s was a little slow-minded, Sullivan’s portrayal represents
a lusty, level-headedness that demonstrates how she might be a good lover and
mother for the rest of her life.
Director Jack Heller perceived from his
other Williams’ plays such as Kingdom of
Earth, just how much actress Priver was a figure perfect for the
playwright, and here she gives a rather credible rendition of the Vivien Leigh
figure, a woman on the way out who would like to pretend—and is deluded enough
to try to pretend—that she is still a woman whom men might want.
Indeed, this production has all the
hallmarks of Kazan’s style. But in the process of paying homage, it misses much
of the point of the playwright himself. Rumor has it that in the original
Broadway production, the playwright sat in the back rows sniggering through the
whole production. I believe it, but even if it weren’t true, it should be. For A Streetcar Named Desire is really a
very funny play, with the “dumb Pollack” Stanley, with his ridiculous
pretensions of the paternalistic Napoleonic Law squaring off with a totally
delusional “whore” (she has, after all, lured even a 17 year old male student into
her bedroom and perhaps has slept with every passing soldier and salesman that
every passed through Laurel, Mississippi, all of this after, in her youth,
having mistakenly married a handsome homosexual boy whose death she triggered) who
now demands that the hard-working momma’s boy, Mitch, attend to her with
chivalrous demeanor of a knight-in-waiting. She wants magic, while Stanley
wants realism. It’s a truly hilarious dance, with poor Stella, the star come
down to earth, caught in between.
And that is the problem with this
production. If Wiest plays Winnie primarily for the laughs, this Streetcar plays out as a kind of dirge
for a woman terrified—after an entire life of desire—of death in almost a Wagnerian
fashion. But that isn’t Williams really. Anyone who could write lines such “The
blind leading the blind,” or, even better, “I have always depended upon the
kindness of strangers,” is also suggesting a kind of pre-Sontag notion of camp.
Blanche is one of the campiest figures who has ever been put upon the stage, I’d
argue. And this company makes it all so very, very serious, the way Kazan perceived
it.
At least Heller doesn’t make poor Stella
run with her baby up the stairs to her neighbor’s apartment. Instead, as
Blanche meets the people from the insane asylum, this director sort of shuffles
Stella and her neighbor off to the side, apparently on the street. But why cut
the truly beautiful last encounter between her rapist husband and his wife
which appears in Williams’ original version, which almost redeems both of them
as human beings?: “Now, honey. Now, love. Now, now, love. Now, now love. Now,
love....” This is perhaps the most tender moment that Stanley has in the entire
play.
Once again, the standing-room audience loved
the production, as with Happy Days,
applauding the company’s opening night with a standing ovation—perhaps as they
should have. I may just be, in the end, a grumpy critic who has seen too many
productions of these works and can’t get the comparisons out of my head.
Yet, I won’t stop attending to these works
and many other such iconic plays, hoping to find a production that makes me
completely forget what came before it. Memory can be a dangerous thing, as well
as a blessing; how I would love to see these works afresh.
Los Angeles, May 26,
2019
Reprinted
from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (May
2019).
