Time Dragging at the Roundabout

J.B. Priestly’s An Inspector Calls has tension and mystery, causing anxiety.

J.B. Priestly’s Time and the Conways has not.

The Roundabout’s production of Time and the Conways at the American Airlines Theatre on 42^nd Street is beautifully produced and cleverly staged.  Costuming, furnishing, sound, lights, it has all that.  And perfectly competent, often more than competent, performances by the actors.

What it doesn’t have are interesting characters.  Or, barring interesting, at least likeable characters.  All these people worry about is money they do not earn.  They’re boring.  They’re unpleasant.  Some are downright nasty.  By the end of the play, we wonder if Mrs. Conway’s late husband, who died some time before the play began, deliberately drowned himself to get away from her bad mothering.

Downton Abbey (constantly brought to mind in the production’s advertising because of Elizabeth McGovern’s presence as the matriarch and the television series’ vastly superior depiction of a family with a certain stature in the beginning of the 20^th century undergoing a massive change in society in the decades that follow the first world war) worked because we had time to give a damn, to know even the villains, to watch the girls grow up.  In the three scenes of this play, the fine acting shows us a good deal but not enough to make us care. 

At least not me.

What’s most surprising here is that this production is smoothly directed by the splendid Rebecca Taichmann yet it has no life.  It is a set piece of another time, instead of being about time as Priestly apparently intended.  To read about a play and be told the author’s intent is not the same thing as getting it by watching and listening. 

The players and designers of this production gave it their all, so the problem was not with them: 

 

Elizabeth McGovern, Anna Camp, and Charlotte Parry.  Photo by Jeremy Daniel.

·         Anna Camp is bubbly as Hazel, the pretty one, at least to people like herself.  She is mean to her working class suitor, and predictably marries him so that she fades into a wan imitation of herself19 years later.

·         Anna Baryshnikov is excellent as the sweet Carol, the favorite who died young

·         Gabriel Ebert does fine work as Alan, the eldest son, who appears an unambitious doofus but is surprisingly wise

·         Brooke Bloom is strident and then heartbreaking as Madge the socialist daughter in a sad depiction from youthful hope to the bitter submission of age.

·         Charlotte Parry gracefully plays Kay the young writer who broke free of the family, and, despite her disappointed sadness, at least has dignity

·         Cara Ricketts as family friend Joan, obviously enamored of young Robin.  Like Hazel’s romance, this doesn’t work out too well.  Perhaps Priestley was really writing about sad upper class marriages.

·         Matthew James Thomas smartly played Robin, the pretty son who will quite obviously be a useless bounder.  Perhaps I’ve read/seen too many stories of English society between the wars, but that too was terribly predictable. 

·         Alfredo Narciso did excellent work as Gerald Thornton — the nice young man who’s not family but grows up to be the family solicitor.  He had nice moments of clear silent emotion and repression.

·         Steven Boyer was excellently unpleasant as Ernest Beevers, who creeps into a family gathering in the first scene practically stalking Hazel, returning as her husband in the later time period.  A dislikeable character, Boyer is of the working class, and while we empathize with his position, we wish he could rise above the nasty upper class family he married into.

The production has fine design work, clever and marvelous set design by Neil Patel, and his usual excellent lighting by Christopher Akerlind, and fine costumes by Paloma Young (with hair and wig design by Leah J. Loukas), respectively.

Finally, I must note the fascinating inclusion of “Hands On,” sign interpreters of the play who discreetly but clearly signed the entire performance house left.  

~ Molly Matera, looking for something more pleasing as the Roundabout season continues.

What's In A Name?

Oscar Wilde’s utterly delightful and perhaps most accessible play, “The Importance of Being Earnest,” has been playing to great acclaim at the Roundabout Theatre Company, earnings its director/star Brian Bedford accolades of all sorts. Not having seen the live production, I went for what I thought would be the next best thing, a filming in HD of a live performance.


Let us bear in mind that I don’t know that a camera can capture “The Importance of Being Earnest” even when it’s staged for film. Despite what had seemed like a dream cast for the 2002 film – Rupert Everett, Colin Firth, Dame Judi Dench – the final product was dreary and slow. Perhaps cameras just ain’t got rhythm, and Oscar Wilde’s words require, of all things, rhythm. As long as each actor individually and all the actors together are in synch, theatergoers will happily journey to the heights of absurdity with them.

To film live theatre is a challenge. In the past often there was a camera merely filming the two-dimensional rectangle that is a proscenium stage. Others zoom in and have a bunch of close-ups. The National Theatre took the filming of a live performance to a new level of artistry with their recent production of “Frankenstein” (http://mollyismusing.blogspot.com/2011/04/not-your-grandmothers-frankenstein.html) where the cameras gave the filmgoers a view from the auditorium, from the wings, from the flies. Viewers were intimately involved in the story, seeing things the live audience in the theatre could not see, perhaps as fair a trade off as can be had for those unable to be present in the theatre.

Spatial relations matter onstage and cannot be seen in a close shot. I can only state this was not a problem in the “Live HD” filming at the National, so I cannot be sure which partner in the tri-party effort dropped the ball with “Earnest.” The three companies that produced the “Live HD” film of the production -- Roundabout Theatre Company, LA Theatre Works and BY Experience – missed the mark, even though BY Experience also worked with the National. “Direction” of the filming is attributed to David Stern. I hope not to see his name again. Although the director allegedly filmed three performances of the play with seven cameras and picked the best, it appeared more like he had merely read the script with the blocking marked out, and set up his shots based on something other than an understanding and passion for the play and players. His choices and pacing of close ups to longer shots showed a complete lack of rhythm, and there were too many close-ups for a play. He clearly loved Brian Bedford’s Lady Bracknell – and who wouldn’t – but instead of getting the cast’s response to Lady B, he kept doing close-ups of her/his/her face. A boring camera director cannot do justice to the work of a stage director.

As for the play itself: Brian Bedford directed this production and played the luscious role of Lady Bracknell. When asked what he thought about playing an extraordinary female role, Bedford said it was someone else’s idea that he’d initially thought a silly one. But then he’d just done Lear, and what does an actor do when he’s done Lear? Happily Bedford chose not to go camp and rather to play it straight – if I may use the term.

It’s my belief that an actor (male or female) directing himself on film may accomplish both his directing and acting jobs efficiently without diminishing one or the other; but that same actor (male or female) directing him/herself on stage is likely to diminish the accomplishment of one or the other work. After all, if he’s up there onstage acting, he’s not giving 100% of himself to the directing, and if he’s onstage directing the others, he’s not giving 100% as an actor. A dilemma. Mr. Bedford’s performance is marvelous, but this production did not seem up to his level as an actor.

That Brian Bedford’s Lady Bracknell is a delicious delight deserves repeating any number of times. He is haughty, he is stern, he is ridiculous, a perfectly marvelous Lady Bracknell.

Opposite styles are played by the two gentlemen in the play, Jack Worthing (David Furr playing it straight and stolid) and Algernon Moncrief (Santino Fontana mugging and milking). For the first time, and I’m quite familiar with the play, I wondered why the two men were friends. The point is that no one should think while watching Oscar Wilde, so clearly their disparate styles did not work well together in Act I, although they were much better in the second half of the evening, when Jack had the opportunity to be a little nuttier and Algy pulled back a bit, having met his mad match in Cecily.

As Lady Bracknell’s daughter Gwendolen, Sara Topham is upright, uptight, and prissy and, as happens in this play, perhaps a little mad, not to mention magnificently dressed. The always interesting Dana Ivey opens the second act in a state of high dudgeon, but then her Miss Prism seems always to be in that state. She is rather too broad in relation to Paxton Whitehead’s more naturalistic Dr. Chasuble. Paxton’s reverend was not a stuffy or stern churchman, but a sweet, oddly dressed, kind and practically sane character. Charlotte Parry as Cecily Cardew is right on, walking that wiggly line between absurdity and madness, believing everything she does and says makes perfect sense. Which it does, of course, in her world. She graciously invites others to join her because she’s been brought up so well.

Act I did not open auspiciously. The set (by Desmond Heeley, who also designed the gorgeous costumes) was witty and swell, a play within a play, a jolly game of a stage set as a stage set. But manservant Lane and his employer Algernon Moncrief started off in a rather effete fashion, playing caricatures of old theatrical types. Then on came Jack Worthing playing it straight. Once Lady Bracknell and Gwendolen arrived, the actors caught up with themselves and the timing began to work, as if the director’s entrance was necessary to shake or stir the other actors into the same mixture. This is a matter of style, and the director must choose one universe for all to inhabit, even the crazy people. This was not evident in Act I, but Acts II and III were very much better.

Two extremely difficult scenes are very well played here – the young ladies’ tea scene and the young gentlemen’s muffin scene. This is Wilde at his most hilarious, making mountains of molehills, character revelations out of muffins and teacakes. Timing is everything, and each duo – Topham as Gwendolen and Parry as Cecily; Furr as Jack and Fontana as Algernon – performed a perfect pas de deux.

Without the distraction of camera choices, the play may have appeared more pulled together. As it was, there was one more problem with the results on film – the play was not acted naturalistically (for the most part), or in a low-key manner. It’s high farce, and on film that comes off as rather loud and overacted. Mr. Bedford’s production is lots of fun but far from perfect, yet doubtless much better than the “film” of it attests.

~ Molly Matera, signing off on a beautiful Sunday afternoon, with miles to go before I .... see another film!