Category: Theater

A Prayer for Owen Meany

Plays that trade on the theme of Marilyn Monroe (Oates’s Miss Golden Dreams, Russell’s Blood Brothers) are rarely successful, though I can’t articulate why. Perhaps they mistake icon for import. Simon Bent’s adaptation of John Irving’s novel A Prayer for Owen Meany likewise fails to impress.

Despite some highly theatrical technical elements—a flying actor; basketballs dropping from the sky; and an overwhelming set piece in the third act that involves revealing the back wall of the theater, painted as the Stars and Stripes three stories high while Vietnam War dead are delivered home by forklift—Irving’s black comedy of faith leaves us wondering why this story had to be told. It is the story of diminutive Owen, a “boy with a wrecked voice” who has premonitions of his own death and a heroic sacrifice. In a setting of New England grotesques out of Thornton Wilder, and told in tightly cued overlapping scenes, preternaturally spiritual Owen takes on the role of a wise child. The trouble is that Irving, Bent, director Blake Robison, and actor Matthew Detmer have given Owen a comically squeaky voice more appropriate to Burr Tillstom and Fran Allison’s clown puppet Ollie. Owen’s pronouncements of wisdom against the tradition-bound clerics of his hometown are flat and trite; he comes off as a grating smartass more at home on Saturday morning television. Maybe the idea worked better in the book.

The play picks up some momentum in the third act with an unsettling visitation by Lenny Bruce and Owen goes off to war. Too little, too late.

  • A Prayer for Owen Meany, novel by John Irving, adapted by Simon Bent, directed by Blake Robison, Round House Theatre, Bethesda, Maryland

Yes and no

Washington Theater Review interviews Washington Post critic Peter Marks:

WTR: Do you feel like the popularity of movie reviewers such as Siskel & Ebert has made people view critics and criticism as more of a “thumbs up/thumbs down” concept?

PM: There’s a sea change in what the world expects, not only because of Siskel & Ebert, but because of the internet, the bloggers. There’s a thumbs up/thumbs down mentality in this country but it goes beyond criticism. We are that way about people’s careers, their lives. It’s who’s up and who’s down. We make lists about everything. Who’s hot this year; who’s not. You’re in, you’re out. And if you’re in now, you are going to be out. You can’t stay in. We are constantly metering everything that way. So the natural thing is it’s going to bleed over into the arts.

When critics have to thumbs up/thumbs down — and the marketing departments of movies, theaters, and art museums all use those measures as well — it certainly dampens down the amount of nuance and subtlety in criticism. People want to know yes or no.

Most of the time the answer isn’t yes or no, most of the time it’s ‘OK’ or ‘Well, I don’t know if I would spend the money,’ or ‘That was sort of interesting in the second act.’ Those issues are hard to balance with the demands an audience has for yes or no. By some measure, the audience does want nuance and subtlety. I try and fight against the thumbs up/thumbs down mentality as much as I can. With some critics you’ll read a review, and you can’t tell what a person thinks. That’s not good either. Even if it’s 60% in favor, you have to leave a person with an impression of whether or not this is worthwhile. I work at a newspaper. I’m not at the ‘Journal of Internal Technical Lighting Skills’ or something like that. I am at a newspaper, and I have to abide by that service aspect.

Everybody dance

Ringing mobile phones, simultaneous audio interpretation for slow-on-the-uptake audience members, rackety cleaning equipment upstairs, booming HVAC gear—these are all part of the background rumble of sonic disruptions that have punctuated performances I’ve given or heard. At Woolly Mammoth’s old Church Street venue, the sound of police sirens just outside the door was so common that I’d begun to assume the sound designer had specified them as part of the plot. I’ve had building fire alarms go off twice, once in the middle of my first day room scene in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. When order was restored about 20 minutes later, our Nurse Ratched (Megan) picked up the scene with a “Now, as I was saying before we were interrupted…” Five minutes of Maura and Ted’s performance of Perfectly Good Airplanes in Geneva earlier this year was played over an insistent, strident alarm, one that was intended to alert every volunteer firefighter in Ontario County. It wouldn’t have been so bad, but the BEEEEP BEEEEP BEEEEP BEEEEP would cut out for half a minute at a time, making us think that the coast was clear and that the Chinese invasion had been called off, before resuming.

The most recent unfortunate sonic event took place Saturday, at a staged reading of several short plays, part of the Kennedy Center’s Page to Stage play development program. The Center packs professional companies into every possible small playing space, who present previews of their upcoming seasons as well as material still in development—sort of a fringe festival with book in hand. Every possible playing space: the two Millennium Stages, the Terrace, even the Theatre Lab gets used as a lab instead of a bordello for the moneyspinner Shear Madness. We were in the South Atrium Foyer (the foyer? I had to check a map to find it), with one set of doors separating us from the lobby of the rooftop restaurant, which had been rented out for a Cambodian wedding. (Are you getting the idea that Labor Day weekend is a slow time at the Center?) When the RATTA TATTA TATTA TATTA of the lion dance began, to celebrate the happy couple (think taiko drums with more attitude), several of us thought that small arms fire was being exchanged.

Moving uptown

Via ArtsJournal, I am gratified to read that the New York revival of The Fantasticks in the Snapple Theater Center at Broadway and 50th Street will capture much of the ambience of the old Sullivan Street venue. The new space puts the audience on three sides, as in the original, using 199 seats recycled from a cinema. But there are some improvements onstage and back-:

The Snapple Theater Center boasts full dressing rooms backstage for the entire cast, not just a show curtain around the one female cast member’s changing area as at Sullivan Street.

* * *

This revival also uses two key props rescued from the original run: the China silk curtain, on which [composer Harvey] Schmidt painted the show’s logo in his distinctive spiky handwriting, and the plywood disc that has a moon painted on one side and a sun on the other, which is used to suggest the two themes of Act I and Act II.

Contemporary American Theater Festival, 2006

This year’s festival includes a pair of memory plays, both of them premieres, Kim Merrill’s Sex, Death, and the Beach Baby and Keith Glover’s Jazzland. Merrill tells of a young woman haunted by a betrayal and death by drowning off the Jersey shore, while Glover riffs on the tensions between jazz and rock and roll. In Jazzland, a young jazz trumpeter, Roderigo, in recovery from an automobile accident, pieces the story of his own life back together as well as that of his father, Ram, an alto saxophonist who, following popular sentiment, began playing rock gigs. Questions of artistic integrity and faithfulness to an idiom are raised, but the play’s high-flying abstractions leave us with characters not fully realized. The most inventive material in the piece, as well as the most successful, is the recreation of the gigs played by Roderigo, Ram, and Ram’s partner Twist. Rather than demand expert musicianship from his actors, Glover gives them spoken-word pieces that they perform over a recorded-music background: the air crackles when Ram (the rich-voiced Joseph Adams) and Miles-like trumpeter Twist (the electric Scott Whitehurst) start trading eights.

Christopher Durang’s student Noah Haidle brings us the published Mr. Marmalade, a twisted comic fantasy told through the eyes of four-year-old Lucy, played by the full-grown Anne Marie Nest. Lucy’s single-parented life is rather grim, so it’s not surprising that her imaginary friend, Mr. Marmalade, is as likely to smack her around or take cellphone calls during Tea Party as he is to take her ballroom dancing or cruising to Mexico. Sara Kathryn Bakker steals her scene as Sunflower, imaginary friend or Lucy’s new real-world friend, dweeby Larry (dressed hysterically by Margaret A. McKowen).

CATF veterans Carolyn Swift, Andy Prosky, and Kaci Gober return in the best show of the festival, Richard Dresser’s new Augusta. Dresser’s latest satire of life on the fringes of the corporate world has his signature dangerous bite: imagine chewing on a live electrical cord. Prosky’s middle manager Jimmy is in charge of teams of house cleaners, including the pair formed by just-hanging-on Molly (Swift) and just-getting-started Claire (Gober). Jimmy’s glad-handing smile, so disconnected from the small-minded manipulations going on behind it, is frightening. Swift’s Molly, ever blasted by life, has a posture when she’s being chewed out by Jimmy that looks like she’s being blown through a wind tunnel without Swift moving a muscle. Shaun L. Motley’s clever three-level set serves as the mansion that Claire and Molly clean, several restaurants and hotel rooms, and Jimmy’s office. The set cantilevers beds and divans into empty space, and its half-height floors remind us of the tilted world of Being John Malkovich. At the end of this play, proposed as the first of a trilogy on happiness (?!), after he is hoist by his own petty schemes, Jimmy is philosophical: “In this line of work, you learn to take the bad with the really bad.”

  • Sex, Death, and the Beach Baby, by Kim Merrill, directed by Karen Carpenter
  • Mr. Marmalade, by Noah Haidle, directed by Ed Herendeen
  • Jazzland, by Keith Glover, directed by Ed Herendeen
  • Augusta, by Richard Dresser, directed by Lucie Tiberghien
  • Contemporary American Theater Festival at Shepherd University, Shepherdstown, W. Va.

No indicating here

Ben Brantley catches us up with what’s going on in London theater:

In a season rich with A-list actors giving bright external life to the shadows of the human mind, it is often—more than anything that is actually done or even said—the thought that counts.

Consider, for example, the supremely articulate silence of Michael Gambon, who never utters a word in Atom Egoyan’s production of Samuel Beckett’s Eh Joe at the Duke of York’s Theater, a half-hour production that seems to last both a lifetime and a nanosecond.