Richards, if you are too young to remember, first came to national
attention at the 1988 Democratic Convention, beginning with the comment that
she is glad to be speaking there on that evening because “after listening all
these years to George Bush, I figured you needed to hear what a real Texas
accent sounds like.” “Twelve years ago Barbara Jordon, another Texas woman,”
Richards continued, “also gave the keynote address to this convention, and I
figure two women in 160 years is about par for the course. But if you give us a
chance, we can perform. After all Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire
did, but she did it backwards and in high heels.”
USTheater is devoted to plays, operas, and performances, American and international, performed and published in the United States. We also are open to new plays by playwrights. All materials are copyrighted as noted. The blog is edited and much of it written by Douglas Messerli
Friday, June 26, 2020
Douglas Messerli | "Ann, the Fast-Taking Texas Broad" on Benjamin Ensley Klein's play Ann
ann, the fast-talking texas broad
by
Douglas Messerli
Benjamin
Endsley Klein (with contributions by Holland Taylor, writer and stage director), David S. Wolfson (director) Ann / 2020 [TV PBS "Great Performances" series]
Were
it not for the topnotch acting of Holland Taylor—dressed in a handsome Chanel white
suit, a bowl-like wig of gray curled hair planted upon her head, with a
continual application of bright red lipstick—Ann, the one-woman
play written and directed by Benjamin Endsley Klein (augmented by stories
told to Taylor by friends of the woman she portrays, Texas Governor Ann Richards)
might have several times lost its energy as this work moves from Richards
supposedly giving a Commencement speech to graduating college students, to a
discussion of her life as a child, her marriage and its failure, her attempt to
be a perfect wife and growing alcoholism, and her first political role as a
local commissioner of Travis, Texas—all before we’re made privy to what a full
day might have been like during her tenure as Governor of Texas. Fortunately Taylor
doesn’t let the action and the play’s one-liners lose momentum for one moment,
except perhaps for the very last scene where she preaches the importance of not
perceiving government as an issue of “them” and “us,” insisting that, each in
our own ways, all should become involved with the government.
Howard and I were there through a
live-television broadcast which almost immediately made every Democrat in the
country fall in love with her.
Playing this larger-than-life figure
with uncanny preciseness—as The New York Times reviewer Charles
Isherwood put it, “If you can spy even a crack of daylight between actor and
character in this performance, you’ve got better eyes than I do.”—hardly
missing a beat between her clear adoration of her towering (6 some feet) father—who
took her on regular fishing trips as well as to the local town storefronts,
where, as one of the “good ‘ole boys,” he lovingly allowed to enter his world,
and her impossible to please mother, who after attending one of Richards’ most
famous speeches, gushed her pleasure not over her daughter’s words, but the
fact that she had been able to meet the local weatherman.
Ann was clearly blessed, so she felt, by
her marriage to the noted Civil Rights lawyer, Dave Richards, quickly
attempting to become the more-than-perfect-wife, celebrating and hosting his
many friends with large family dinners, as well as helping with his several law
cases. Her reward for all this activity, as she recounts, was a few vodka
martinis at the end of each of her long days.
By the time her friends got around to
telling her that after a few martinis she was a different woman, encouraging
her to join AA, her marriage was also beginning to fall apart. As she humorously
summarizes her experience: “I musta drunk eleven hundred thousand martinis by
the time I landed in A.A. — and by then, I was this big ol’ county
commissioner! So I like to think I broke a barrier for politicians with an
addiction in their past. And nowadays, hell, you can’t hardly even get into a
primary unless you’ve done time in rehab.”
When she, despite these issues, was
elected as Governor, we are treated to a set imitating her office in the State
Capitol where, for nearly an hour of the play, she barks orders to her off-stage
secretary and speaks on her phone to a wide range of figures, including Bill
Clinton, to whom she attempts to pitch a successful program, started in Texas,
for Federal implementation; blows up at her financial advisor who, afraid of
even visiting her office, must tell her that he has improperly vetted a
supporter who has flown her on his airplane to a Texas event—meaning she will
have pay the $8,700 some bill out of pocket (as she bemoans, that’s more than I
get paid for two months); cajoles her children to attend a planned family
dinner, assigning them each a ham, pies, and a turkey (when that youngest son
seems leery of even attending since at the last such event, his older brother
has assigned him the near-impossible, to act out Rob Lowe’s sexually orgy for a
game of charades) which ends her belting out “All right, I’ll bake the turkey!”;
insistently berating a female aide for never being in her office; and ordering
up cowboy boots for her entire staff and other friends as gifts of appreciation—all
the while signing requested autographs, planning for that evening’s speech she
is to deliver in El Paso, while a quick return so that she might meet with her lawyer
after she is determined to grant a murderer on death row a stay.
When she is defeated for a second term
by George W. Bush—primarily over the issue of whether or not Texans can carry
concealed arms (at another time, not presented in the play, Richards berated
the younger Bush as “having been born with a silver foot in his mouth.”)
Without any money to speak of, and no
obvious source of future income, she is fearful that she will end up in a trailer
in her daughter’s driveway. But suddenly, she brightens, just as I was about to
buy a bait and tackle shop, people began to invite me to lecture, and a large
group of Democratic politics ask her to join them in New York, for they had
causes while I had all the addresses.
Even with a less-than-perfect ending,
this play is a delight throughout, as Taylor takes
her wise-talking hero on a walk through the past she so much deserves.
Richards died of cancer in 2006, but through
her still many living friends and acquaintances, her larger than life persona,
the fast-talking political diva came alive at the Vivien Beaumont Theatre in
New York and in the numerous theaters in other cities throughout the country
where Ann was performed. Even as a reviewer, I could not get tickets
when it ran at the Pasadena Playhouse.
Los
Angeles, June 25, 2020
Reprinted
from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (June 2020).
Thursday, June 18, 2020
Douglas Messerli | "Dancing with a Dead Man" (on O'Neill's A Moon for the Misbegotten"
dancing with a dead man
by Douglas Messerli
Eugene O’Neill (author), José Quintero and Gordon Rigsby (directors) A Moon for the Misbegotten 1973 [TV]
As
some critics, over the years, have commented, Eugene O’Neill’s last play, a
kind of sequel to the then (A Moon for the Misbegotten premiered in
1947) unproduced Long Day’s Journey into Night, is a fragile work that
needs a near-perfect cast to bring it to life, reiterated, almost, by the
various lengths of the play’s runs.
The original Broadway production, directed
by Carmen Capalbo, despite some first-rate actors in Franchot Tone and Wendy
Hiller, lasted only 68 performances, a flop by any definition. Its failure also
meant the playwright’s break with the Theatre Guild, who had previously
produced a great many of his works.
The Off-Broadway revival of 1968 by the Circle
in the Square Theatre, directed by Theodore Mann and starring Salome Jens as
Josie, ran for less than a week.
The second Broadway revival of this play
at the Cort Theatre, directed by David Leveaux, in 1984. Kate Nelligan, as
Jocie, was nominated for a Tony, but it ran only for 40 performances, even less
that the original production.
The third revival, directed by Daniel
Sullivan in 2000 at the Walter Kerr Theatre, with Cherry Jones as Jocie, lasted
a bit longer at 120 performances. Perhaps by that time audiences had grown
somewhat more accustomed to O’Neill’s longish monologues, the tough-and-rough
language of Jocie and her father, and the long pauses in the rhythm of the
play.
In 2007 there was yet a 4th revival at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre—starring the wonderful Eve Best as
Jocie—which lasted for 2 ½ months, after a 112-performance run at London’s Old
Vic.
As dreary as these figures are, however,
there was one extremely important exception, revealing the effectiveness of
this play.
In 1973, José Quintero directed three
actors with long careers and life-long devotion to O’Neill works: Colleen
Dewhust, Jason Robards, Jr.,—who later performed the same character, at a
younger age, in the 1962 film version directed by Sidney Lumet.
For the acting in this production both
Dewhurst and Ed Flanders as her father, won Tony awards, as the play when on to
run for 314 performances (a solid run for a serious Broadway drama), and is
pretty much recognized now by most critics as the definitive production.
That version, after its Broadway run, went
on to be performed at Washington D.C.’s The Kennedy Center, where, amazingly,
Howard and I saw it also in 1973.
Yet, I remember little of it, only
perceiving it fully in the ABC taping of the same production, which I saw
yesterday. The film received 5 Emmy nominations, with Ed Sanders winning the
award for Supporting Actor.
O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten in
terms of plot, is hardly complex. The work begins with with the farmer Hogan’s
(Flanders) third son, Mike, escaping the hard work and abuse from his father he
has had to endure for most of his life to live with his two other brothers. His
sister Jocie, abets that escape, even producing the boy with a few dollars she
has stolen from her father’s money box.
She remains in good stead with the now
furious father through her bluster, her quick-witted tongue, and a large stick
she holds onto so that her father can feel justified for his inability to beat
her for her participation in the betrayal.
Their hardscrabble farm is owned by Jamie,
now spoken of as Jim and Jimmy, whose father, the noted actor James Tyrone, Sr.
one day inexplicably purchased it. The younger James is a regular visitor to
the farm, loving to chat with her father, and secretly in love with Jocie, who
also has the reputation of being the nearby town’s whore, a moniker she seems herself
to encourage.
Yet James realizes the lie of that boast,
perceiving her (correctly) still as a virgin, and finding her tall, somewhat
imposing stature (She describes herself “a cow of a woman”) as a thing of
beauty.
If in the early scenes there is a great
deal of coming and going, James paying them a visit to announce that their
wealthy, pompous neighbor Steadman Harder will soon be paying them a visit to
protest the fact that Hogan’s pigs occasionally escape their pen and slip into
Harder’s pristine pond.
But the major events occur in the second
act in a series of non-events surrounding the central two figures. We first
glimpse Jocie, attired in her best dress, including socks and shoes—throughout
most of the play this Amazon is barefooted—awaiting the would-be lover who is
now several hours late.
Furious, she pulls off her stockings and
shoes, as her father finally returns from the same nearby bar where he has gone
with James.
Under the cover of drunkenness, he angrily
complains to his daughter that they can no longer trust James, since at the bar
their landlord has agreed to the now outrageous price for their worthless farm
for $10,000, enough surely that Jim might return to New York and his “Broadway
tarts.”
Still furious for being stood up, and now
hearing what she believes as the truth, Jocie plots revenge. If her father will
bring James to her, she will drink with him (she is a near teetotaler), getting
him drunk before carrying him in her bed, while her father and others he brings
with him at daybreak will attest to sexual misconduct, allowing the Hogans to get
back the $10,000 which they know he will pay out of guilt.
Hogan goes off, but James, hours late,
finally does finally show up, while Jocie attempts to get him soused. Knowing
her as well as he does (he has long perceived the lie of her sexual
indiscretions), he refuses to allow her to drink.
And as they two talk in the moonlight, she
gradually uncovers the truth, that the offer from Harder was verbally accepted
only so that the next day he can again refuse him, bedeviling the vile, rich
neighbor.
Recognizing his honesty, Jocie nearly
swoons over a couple of kisses between the two of them and his frenzied head
buried on her lap, as he alternates between coherent banter and almost shrill drunken
memories that continue to haunt him.
Allowing herself to be taken in love, she
brings him into her bed, where he quickly, again in his drunken state of mind,
attempts to rape her, she running from the room declaring that she is not a “whore.”
He apologizes but also suggests it may be
good that she has seen him like that, his real self who would totally destroy
her if they become more romantically entwined.
Finally, he drunkenly mumbles out the terrible
story of how, upon his mother’s death and, with her coffin in baggage, during
his voyage to her final burial he called each night for a $56 dollar whore with
whom he had sex. He was so drunk by the time they reached their destination
that he missed his mother’s final funeral.
Jocie is shocked, but ultimately forgives
him, and realizes that he has told her something he had told no other. She
allows him to rest on her lap for the rest of night, only awakening him with
the sunrise.
The result is obvious since James is off
to New York by the end of the week, probate on the family home finally coming
to an end.
Not only has Jocie realized the truths of
his private confession, but accepts it as an unconditional offering of love,
while still perceiving that the man whom she loves are actually, like his entire
family except Edmond (O’Neill) who is extremely ill, ghosts.
What most fascinates me about this dance
with a dead man is Jocie’s—and to a certain extent James’— constant effort to
pull and push away from one another while at the very same moment they entice
each other back into embrace. It is truly a kind of dance with death punctuated
with fearful hope and utter disgust. By the exhausting end of this “dance,”
Jocie can hardly walk, so tied up in knots are her legs for holding and
protecting him all night.
But by the daylight, when her father
returns, claiming it was all scheme, not for the money, but to bring the two of
them together, his daughter has grown strong knowing that once in her life she
did possess love, even if it was delivered from the dead of the Tyrone family.
She threatens to finally leave her father, but by the end of the play remains
with him.
And it is, ultimately, this alternating
sense of love and rejection which makes O’Neill’s work so very brilliant—even if
it takes only great actors to achieve it on stage.
Los
Angeles, June 18, 2020
Reprinted
from USTheater, Opera, and Performance
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