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….

"Tribes" Shouts Out at the Barrow Street Theatre

Billy’s family is hearing.  Billy is not.  Sylvia’s family is deaf.  Sylvia is not, but she’s getting there.  They meet, and fall in love.  Nina Raine fills out this simple set-up, colors, shapes, and shades it to create Tribes, a remarkable new play at the Barrow Street Theatre.

Tribes has been produced in England at the Royal Court, but this is its American debut, and happily for us and Ms. Raine, it’s directed by David Cromer.  It is precise and clear and works to the smallest detail while retaining a feeling of spontaneity and reality that could, in other hands, lead to chaos.

A creative laundry list of theatrical talent:

-         Scenic design is brilliant, cluttered and a bit dusty, full of life and history, and books, books on every surface. A piano, a typewriter, a kitchen table where people live, not just eat.  Scott Pask is a master.

-         Tristan Raines’ costume design gives the actors lived-in, real clothes that tell us about the people before they even speak.  Or rather, shout.  Hair and makeup design by Leah J. Loukas augment Mr. Raines’ work in character definition.  

-         Clean, clear lighting design is by Keith Parham, and projection design is by Jeff Sugg —when we enter the theatre, the projection is “please turn off your cell phones.” Later it’s used when people are signing.

-         Sound design is by Daniel Kluger.  Sylvia tells Billy that her sister, who preceded her in going deaf, never told her of the noise.  What does a deaf person hear?  According to Mr. Kluger, it’s gray and rumbly.  It’s thick static.  It’s a horror. 

All this supports a fine cast in a brilliant play.  Billy’s well-meaning and very loud, raucous family, determined to treat him as “normal,” not “handicapped” or “other,” have failed in their good intentions.  Of course, their good intentions didn’t take any extra work, like learning to sign would.  Mr. Pask’s design brings us right into the kitchen, part of the action, part of the family, the crudely erudite father’s spittle flying across the table as he bellows at his wife, or his daughter, or his son, almost reaches the surrounding audience.  His wife speaks softly so everyone would need to quiet down to hear her.  Siblings scream at each other and are only nice to brother Billy, the way one is polite to a visitor.  Midway through the play even Billy knows this and explodes, telling his family what they never knew —  that in trying not to make Billy different, to the point of not learning any form of signing, as a family they all left him out of every conversation, every family fight, and every family joke.  For a terribly clever family — in music, literature — they are all socially handicapped. 

The family is in standard 21^st century crisis — all the “children” are grown, and all have moved back into the parents’ home, unable to maintain themselves on their own.  Mare Winningham is Beth, the mother, warm, loving, and insecure next to her erudite and crude husband Christopher — a splendid performance by Jeff Perry.  Christopher harangues everyone and tries to learn Chinese from the computer. Beth is trying to write a novel — possibly a mystery, possibly not.  Billy (Russell Harvard) is a big galumph of a guy, wearing hearing aids behind each ear.  His father yells that he needs new batteries, but what Billy cannot hear, he sees when others do not.  Billy’s sister Ruth (Gayle Rankin) is into music, not words, and wants to sing opera, which seems incongruous and probably is.  Billy’s brother Daniel (Will Brill) is unruly — you can tell by his hair.  He and his sister fight as if they were still 12.  Also, he has a broken heart.  And he hears voices.

Billy goes out and meets a girl.  Her name is Sylvia and she doesn’t initially realize Billy’s deaf because he lip-reads so well.  He doesn’t realize that she’s going deaf, but it’s never far from her mind.  Susan Pourfar is a powerhouse as Sylvia, a fine mix of intellect and emotion, strength and fragility.  Her Sylvia teaches Billy to sign and opens up a different world to him — a world she no longer wishes to be a part of, but is consigned to as her congenital hearing loss progresses. 

When Billy brings Sylvia home to meet the family, they put her under a lens and demand information on signing, on deafness, on the society Christopher sees as a closed one.  A great deal of this rudeness is intellectual curiosity.  They really want to know.  However, from the audience position just outside the kitchen, we are appalled at their thoughtless, cruel badgering.  Sylvia almost wants to run away from the intense scrutiny, but stops short, looking at the upright piano in one corner.  “Who plays?” Sylvia asks.  Daniel tells her, “We all do.  Well, except Billy.”  Without a plaintive note, she says, “I used to play,” and sits at the piano and picks out a tune.  By touch, not tone.  This poignant moment finally silences Billy’s family.  A miracle.  And that’s just the first act.

What a family.  Ruth is better at music than words, Daniel hears voices.  Billy has never heard more than hearing aids allow, his father hears nothing but his own voice, while mother Beth hears all.  And Sylvia hears in past tense.  This is a very smart play about smart people lacking filters, manners, or sense, and two young people at their turning points.

The performances are searing, soaring, tightly wound, and the play tightly paced.  David Cromer has led this fine cast to a marvelous place and brought playwright Nina Raine’s problem play to life at Barrow Street Theatre.  Go to listen, and hear, and be glad of it.

~ Molly Matera, signing off to listen to some piano sonatas.