Two at Second Stage

In the past couple months, I’ve seen two plays at the Second Stage Theater Company:  Mary Page Marlowe and Straight White Men.  Both were interesting, by and large well-acted, yet neither fully succeeded, for different reasons.

In Mary Page Marlowe, deep character development with no end but death was made more interesting by having multiple actors playing the eponymous woman at various ages — and not in chronological order.  By and by we saw her life, one scene after another adding to our understanding, just not in order so that, perhaps, we could understand her better than people who knew her all her life — in order.  And since it’s so very well done, it almost worked.

Straight White Men, however, is flawed. Again, interesting character relationships, but to no resolution.  Is this why the playwright/director/producer decided to blame it on the audience during the pre-show by blasting electronic percussion at an offensively high decibel level, then making a theatre curtain out of a glitter ball to flash strobe lights at the audience?  At least last year’s exceedingly unpleasant production of 1984 forewarned the audience that there’d be migraine-inducing effects.  But the audience of Straight White Men was assured that they were being abused to make a point:  That some LBGTW+, as explained by two pointless characters, often felt as uncomfortable as the audience did just by being in non-LGBTW+ society.  The relief at the end of that 30-odd minutes was so great we were bound to be glad of the play, right?  Talk about hitting the audience over the head with a baseball bat to send a message. Which, by the way, does not appear to be the point of the play at all.

Mary Page Marlowe by Tracy Letts, directed by Lila Neugebauer.  Hereafter “MPM.”

MPM was largely about one woman’s life of not dealing with her alcohol and sex addictions.  We first meet her as her first marriage is coming apart.  It takes a while, with this not chronological play, to learn something about why.  When we meet her mother (passionately brittle work by Grace Gummer) and father (sympathetically portrayed by Nick Dillenburg), we feel the gap between these young marrieds just after WWII.  When we meet the mother again distancing herself from her 12-year-old daughter with alcohol and a sharp tongue, we see the beginning of Mary’s rugged road.

Mary is played by six excellent actors:

·         Mia Sinclair Jenness at the age of 12

·         Emma Geer at the age of 19

·         Tatiana Maslany at the ages of 27 and 36

·         Susan Pourfar in her 40s

·         Kellie Overbey at 50

·         And Blair Brown in her 60s-70s.

Geer and Brown were the only Marys who got to smile.  The 19-year-old (Ms. Geer) in hope of a different life from that of her mother, and Ms. Brown at having made it through to sobriety and her third and favorite husband, Andy, sweetly played by Brian Kerwin.

·         Tatiana Maslany is so good that her lack of theatrical experience was negligible.  Already broken, her Mary is tough, aloof, and protective.

·       Susan Pourfar is a New York actor I have followed for some time, from a far off Broadway production of Turn of the Screw, to Tribes and most recently Mary Jane at New York Theatre Workshop.  She never disappoints. Here her Intensity disguises her pain and perplexity.

 

Kaylie Carter, Ryan Foust, and Susan Pourfar as Mary Page Marlowe

·         The harshest scene in the play and probably in Mary Page Marlowe’s life, was the aftermath of a particularly dreadful time when Mary hit rock bottom, presumably precipitating the end of her second marriage.  Kellie Overbey is devastating, first in her quiet acceptance of her guilt and just deserts, and finally in her fury.  Her husband, very well played by David Aaron Baker, cannot deal with this Mary and his floundering marriage.

·         Blair Brown’s Mary, having survived her life and three marriages, is the only Mary with a real smile. 

·         Kayli Carter is excellent as MPM’s daughter Wendy, a put-upon (and she really is!) teenager and a concerned young adult losing patience with her alcoholic mother. 

All in all, MPM offers good direction, good acting, good design, and a just slightly off script by the always interesting Mr. Letts.

Straight White Men by Young Jean Lee, directed by Anna D. Shapiro. Hereafter “SWM.”

The Premise:  The father, Ed, has his grown boys over for the Christmas holidays, harking back to the days of the boys’ youth, while their mother was still alive. 

Entertaining as SWM sometimes was, with some very nice ensemble work and an excellent scenic design by Todd Rosenthal, it didn’t seem to know where it was going.  Witness the pre-show, which we were told was part of the play.

The Players:

·         Armie Hammer is the youngest brother, Drew.  He is tall and handsome and OK, but this actor’s lack of theatrical experience shows.  Without an editor to cut away, Mr. Hammer did not flow from one scene to the next, even though the play, unlike Mary Page Marlowe, was in chronological order.  Not that he made mistakes, or if he did I was unaware.  Unfortunately, he was not alive on stage.

·         Josh Charles is excellent as middle brother Jake, unctuous to cruel, living in the moment as well as in the past, frequently “fighting” with his younger brother Drew. 

·         Paul Schneider as the eldest brother Matt was quietly full of surprises and quite marvelous. I am not familiar with this subtle actor’s work but will be paying attention in future.

·         Stephen Payne as Ed, the father, seemed a little uncertain of his lines early on (as the third actor to play this role in rehearsal and previews), but strengthened as the evening wore on. Mind you, his final scene was quite unbelievable, but that’s the fault of the writer, not the actor.

 

Payne, Charles, Hammer, Schneider.  Photo by Sara Krulwich.

Matt is presently underemployed and living with the father, who is happy to have his company.  While the others leave their messes behind, Matt cleans up after everyone.  He says more than once, “I just want to be helpful.”  That he does a great deal of work to make everyone else comfortable, things his mother would have been doing had she been alive, was barely noticed and not meaningful to his brothers or even his father.  This of course is insulting to the boys’ mother, and all mothers.  Matt’s brothers wonder why, with his brains and college degrees, he’s not doing more with his life.  They don’t get him at all.  He is not behaving like their notion of a privileged straight white male.

Strong relationships of a lifetime between the brothers are powerful and hilarious.  If one says something unforgivable and others leave the room, somehow they come back to dance it off in delightful choreography by Faye Driscoll.  After all, family is family and it seems they’ll always get along in the end.  Until they don’t and the ‘different’ one, with unaccustomed ideas and conclusions, is left out in the cold.  These three sons have no resemblance to “My Three Sons” of 1960s television. 

By the end it seemed to me that the play had moved on to gender issues.  Matt started being what he considered truly useful when the mother died, and he took care of the youngest brother the way the mother would have — talked him down from hysteria, encouraged him to take a shower (you’ll feel better) and then to have a sandwich (ditto).  Throughout Matt played the mother’s role of feeding the men and cleaning up after them.  Her loss, which clearly affected each man, made Matt step into her place.  And none of the other men in the family had any respect for what he was doing — to them Matt had become a loser if he lacked ambition and didn’t use his intelligence and training to do something “bigger.”

Since that was the most interesting thing to come out of the play, I do not understand why the writer and director decided to disguise this by implying in the obnoxious pre-show that the play was about LGBTQ+ issues and punishing the (largely white) audience with overly loud electronic muzak and glaring strobe lights. 

Theatre and politics go together, but this pairing ended in a nasty divorce.

Note regarding a truly annoying and unfair trend in Playbills:  In the (not so distant) past, the cast list was in order of the actors’ appearances, making it easier for the audience to figure out who played what if they didn’t already recognize the players.  Lately the listing has been alphabetical by the performer’s last name, which means that if you didn’t already know the actor’s name, you won’t learn it from the program.  For instance, in MPM, there are six men in the cast.  One male character had a full name listed, so was easily identifiable as the father of the main character.  All other male character names showed just a first name, so if you missed a mention from the stage in each man’s sole appearance, you were out of luck.  I recognized Brian Kerwin as MPM’s third husband, therefore spotted him in the program as “Andy.”  For the first two I have no clue, and there were three non-husband male characters.  If we’re not identifying characters by “married lover” or “guy at the dry cleaners” in the character list, how can we know the actor name?  Until Playbill goes back to listing characters in order of their appearance so we can figure out those actors we don’t already recognize, I will continue to complain about this to all and sundry.

It’s been a while since Molly spoke her mind.  I will try to catch up this summer, as I did last summer, and fill you in on theatre-going not mentioned since April (!) of this year.

~ Molly Matera, signing off to search for scraps of paper on which she scribbled her thoughts about other plays….

The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Raised From the Sixties

I always remembered the TV series The Man From U.N.C.L.E. being in black and white.  Apparently that was just because we had a black-and-white television set at the time.  Well now, it’s the wonderful world of color.

Guy Ritchie’s signature style works well in the fashionable 1960s European haunts in his film The Man From U.N.C.L.E.  It’s snazzy, it’s sharp, it’s brisk.  Still clever, still violent.  And surprisingly good, so long as you accept the genre — which is what, you may ask.  It’s not “tongue in cheek” espionage like the original Casino Royale.  It’s not Americanized tongue in cheek like the original TV series that was for adults but American adults so politically childlike.  It’s rather as if Guy Ritchie and Lionel Wigram couldn’t quite make up their minds whether to do a comedy or an espionage thriller.  They’re leaning quite heavily toward comedy, except when the implied violence goes too far… I mean, sure, they blew up Dr. Watson in the first Sherlock Holmes film in Ritchie’s franchise (and the good doctor should have been dead), so we can see how little Ritchie cares about realism.

Nevertheless, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (in case you’ve forgotten, or never knew, United Network Command for Law and Enforcement) was a lot of fun.  But it’s flawed, and although I’d like to see the franchise with the nuclear acting family continue, some pondering is in order for Ritchie & Wigram.  For now, let’s break this down:

Musically:  From the moment the music started I knew I wanted the soundtrack.

Visuals:  Oliver Scholl's production design and John Mathieson's cinematography are on the mark.  Their visions are in accord, presenting a film fine-tuned to seduce our senses.  We are fooled into believing it all works together.

As to the Story:  Screenplay by Guy Ritchie and Lionel Wigram was fast-moving entertainment.  What does fast-moving mean?  Don’t think.  John Kennedy is president, the Cuban Missile Crisis is past, the Berlin Wall is up and East Germans are shooting their own people who try to get over said Wall.  American agent Napoleon Solo’s backstory seems to be more like Alexander Mundy, the thief turned spy in “It Takes A Thief,” yet another 1960s television program.  But I digress.  Solo is trying to get a cute East German girl mechanic over the Berlin Wall to help the U.S. recapture their asset, the girl’s father, a Nazi scientist who has worked for the U.S. since the end of World War II.  On the other side, Russian agent Illya Kuryakin’s orders are to keep the girl in East Germany.  Guess who wins.  And guess who the best driver is:  the girl!   

Cavill as Napoleon Solo and Alicia Vikander as Gaby

Once in Western Europe, the antagonists are forced to work together for the same goal:  keeping a possible nuclear weapon out of the hands of neo Nazis.  Where in Western Europe?  L’Italia.  Perfetto for spectacular vistas and style.

Cavill as Solo and Debicki as Victoria

Things roll along nicely with betrayals, tantalizing sexual innuendo, shenanigans and silly plot twists.  It’s just when we get to the torture scene that it stumbles off track.  It’s not easy to balance serious subjects and funny style, and Ritchie and co-writer Wigram do well most of the time.  But when Solo is strapped into the comfy chair with the crazy Nazi war criminal, well, he wouldn’t have survived. 

This sequence would have worked on “Archer” because that actually is a cartoon.  This might have looked OK in storyboards or on the panel of a comic book, but once you put it into a colorful spy live-action dramedy, it veers into a different chromatic scale which could work but did not, even when crazy Nazi doctor said the photographic record of this torture would be in Kodachrome instead of black and white.  The whole bit broke the spell, if only for a little while.

The Cast:

• Henry Cavill as Napoleon Solo, charming, smooth without being oily, very cool, dapper. Having read the list of potential casting, I am here to say they picked the right guy.
• Armie Hammer as Illya Kuryakin grew a foot, and is not the Illya I recall from the television series, but I enjoyed him.  Clearly he’s the deadpan straight man and Cavill the wit, and they play off one another very nicely.

  

  Cavill as Solo and Hammer as Kuryakin

• Jared Harris with his strange American accent is comic book tough as CIA guy Sanders, said the same things into Solo’s ear as Misha Kuznetsov as Oleg, Harris’ counterpart in the Soviet Union, was saying to Kuryakin. More fun.
• Alicia Vikander as Gaby Teller, the East German mechanic who is sought by all as a means of finding her (former Nazi?) scientist father.  Vikander is a wonderful actor, playing for laughs here and achieving them.  She is dressed by men, of course, as is Elizabeth Debicki, in the paper doll cut-out style of the Sixties.  Vikander is Goldie Hawn, while Debicki is wearing Twiggy’s clothes fashioned for Monica Vitti.
• Elizabeth Debicki is not merely tall and young and lovely as Victoria, the sultry Italian mastermind.  She is elegantly evil, sinuous, sultry, and classily dangerous.  She is the essence of chic, just Napoleon Solo’s type.

  

  A match made in Mary Quant

• Luca Calvani is attractive as Victoria’s husband Alexander, an heir to fantastic wealth that cannot have been come by honestly, whom we meet for the first time as a playboy in a racecar.  Shades of Tony Stark, but not as clever.
• Sylvester Groth as the gross Uncle Rudi is appropriately creepy in a Marvel comic book way.
• A charming Hugh Grant sneaks in as Alexander Waverly — his spiffy line from the trailer loses its thrust in the film, which is clearly the director’s error, not Grant’s. 

Admit it, Hugh Grant is cuter than Leo  G. Carroll

Absurd events compound upon others, then all ends neatly making us hope the franchise continues as the end implies it will.  Because it was fun. 

And, as is standard with Ritchie films, it isn’t over just because the credits are rolling.  They are fantastic, sketched across a band of red, with 60s style dossiers, black and white snapshots, essentially some back story in pictures.  Terrifically stylish stuff.

Yes, more style than substance, but it is still summer, after all.

~ Molly Matera, signing off to watch some black-and-white Solo, Kuryakin, and Waverly on MeTV.