Photos, Top to Bottom: Karen MacDonald as the actress Arkadina and Mickey Solis as her son Konstantin in The Seagull, directed by János Szász. (Photo: K. Mitchell. [http://www.amrep.org/media/seagull/seagull01.html]); Poster for American Repertory Theatre production; Kate Burton and her son Morgan Ritchie; mother and son in The Corn is Green; Kate Burton in the poster shot and on the cover of an issue of American Theatre [www.huntingtontheatre.org].
Well, it's a snowy New Year in Boston and a busy weekend of theatregoing that took me from everything I can't stand about mainstream contemporary theatre practice in a star-driven piece of claptrap at the Huntington Theatre to everything I love about theatre in a radical and stunning revisioning of The Seagull at ART.
Unlike everyone else in this city, it seems, I went to see The Corn is Green because I was interested in the play by Emlyn Williams, not the star of the play, Sir Richard Burton's daughter Kate Burton. I now know that the playwright was godfather to Ms. Burton and a close friend of Sir Richard, which explains a lot for it is a very musty and fusty piece. Williams was a popular playwright, screenwriter and actor in his day, but his name, alas, will not appear on the long list of historical greats of the 20th century I fear, if this is his best-known work. The Corn is Green is apparently a semi-autobiographical play about Williams' escape from the Welsh mines to the halls of Oxford with the assistance of a well-meaning tutor in the guise of a wealthy British spinster, here called Miss Moffat. She arrives in the Welsh home she has inherited as a liberal thinker of the late 19th century, a believer in universal education, including education for Welsh-speaking miners and (good heavens!) women. Moffat brings along her colorful entourage of a reformed thief turned Salvation Army soldier/cook, Mrs. Watty, and Watty's ne'er-do-well daughter Bessie. Miss Moffat sets out immediately on her zealous mission of pulling the local boys out of the mines and into a school that she will found and teach in. One of the boys, Morgan Evans, stuns her with a descriptive essay about being underground (from whence comes the play's title) and her mission becomes focussed on saving him by preparing him for an entry scholarship to Oxford. Along the way, Morgan rebels against Miss Moffat (in a Pygmalion-like showdown), sleeps with Bessie and impregnates her, and wins the scholarship and a new life. The price that must be paid is Miss Moffat agreeing to adopt the illegitimate baby, thus freeing Morgan of his obligations so he can become "a great man of England' and work towards freeing his Welsh compatriots from the drudgery and dangers of mining life.
So that's the synopsis...for my money the play should be called The Corn is Corny. It is filled with stock characters, few surprises and little dramatic tension. Characters change very little, even Morgan's greatest revelation in the play, that there is a world "over the wall" in Oxford that he realizes he longs for, is a bit so-what. His emotional show-down with his mentor is also a tempest in a teacup...he grows to resent her treating him like a machine and demands she see him for himself..and this is interesting how exactly? Clearly, I don't think much of the play, so that leaves the production.
It took me a little while watching the show to realize what was irritating me beyond the banality of the script, until I saw that a follow-spot was on Ms. Burton throughout the entire show. It would require an essay-length treatise for me to outline the multiple ways in which this offends me, but suffice it to say, it does. This is not a Broadway musical, it's a drawing room period drama! Why does she require a follow-spot, does she think we can't see her without one? I am offended by this not just because it speaks to an unbelievable star ego (which is insufferable enough), but even more so on behalf of her fellow actors, as to me this special treatment is an insult to their work. If Ms. Burton were Bette Davis or Katharine Hepburn, I might find the use of a follow-spot forgivable (and only if it were in the time period they performed this role, close to its debut in 1938), but she is not. She is an adequate enough actor, I have seen her on Law and Order and in some supporting roles in film, but she is not Vanessa Redgrave, Fiona Shaw or Kristen Scott-Thomas and her parading her 'star-power' in such a vainglorious way speaks to me of the problems with a theatre system that functions in this shallow, celebrity-driven manner (witness her appearance on the cover of American Theatre). Even worse, her son is not a particularly gifted young actor and I can think of a number of young men who could have brought more intensity, anger and passion to the role. Why were they not cast, and why was he? Don't get me started...
As for the remainder of the show, the Huntington always offers lovely design, as is in evidence here with a full set and costumes and a large acting company. Many of the supporting roles are played well, and I particularly liked the work of Huntington favorite Will LeBow as the local squire, Roderick McLachlan as Mr. Jones (manager of the estate) and Kathy McCafferty as yet another spinster (but a more soft-hearted and lovable version), Miss Ronberry. Kristine Nielsen as Mrs. Watty and Mary Faber as Bessie almost steal the show with their obvious pleasure in their respective roles, with Nielsen mining all the laughs in her part with ease and Faber playing the bad girl with a refreshing lack of conscience that really rings true (although the tight-fitting corsetted ensemble she wears in her final appearance made it hard for me to believe she had given birth 4 weeks earlier!) I also found the use of Welsh music, especially the male choruses, effective throughout.
Final word on The Corn is Green? Read Peter Brook's treatise on 'deadly theatre' and then get back to me.
My experience with Anton Chekhov's The Seagull, newly translated by Paul Schmidt and directed by Jano Szasz, was a polar opposite one to The Corn is Green, and succeeded in completely restoring my faith in the possibility for theatre to wake people up rather than put them to sleep. I love Chekhov's plays, as do most theatre (and even non-theatre!) people, for their vivid characterizations and bitterly truthful dialogue, and for the clear-eyed portrayal of the stultifying life of the minor bourgeoisie in Russia of the late 19th century. They are gems and it is a tragic loss to theatre that Chekhov died of tuberculosis at the age of 44...what other masterpieces might he have left us? That said, I have sat through a number of disappointing Chekov productions that, similar to my experience at the Huntington, felt like visiting a museum, all very precious and cut glass. How exciting it was, then, to walk into the auditorium of the Loeb Theatre and see a set design of a "theatre that's been dormant for thousands of years" (from an interview with the director in the program) designed by Riccardo Hernandez. Banks of broken down rows of theatre seats are scattered across the stage, on casters. The stage space is stripped to the brick walls, painted black, and all the props and lighting instruments are completely visible, as are the ASMs. Hanging over this dark and foreboding space are huge fragments of plastered frescoes of Russian icons by the great artist Andrei Rublev. And I mean huge...each one of the three portraits must be 10 or 15 feet across and they are angled over the playing space such that they hang precariously, almost as though they are in the process of falling onto the floor and are only temporarily frozen in their decay. And on the floor there is water, lots of water, pools of it in all parts of the stage.
When the cast enters in silence at the top of the show they slosh through this water, signifying what a significant element it will be. They sit in a bank of seats facing us for a moment while the deeply troubled protagonist, suicidal young man Konstanin, reads us a snippet of his play-within-a-play that has become the conceptual touchstone for Szasz' revsioning. All actors are in contemporary dress and there is a musical soundtrack of synthesized rock music that underpines a number of scenes throughout, including a full-on version of Guns and Roses' Sweet Child of Mine at the top of Act Two, with Konstanin riffing on the shotgun he will eventually use to blow his brains out, used as an air guitar. Toto, we're not in Kansas anymore, nor are we on the run-down estate of Konstanin's mother (famous actress and neglectful mother Arkadina) and beloved Uncle Sorin.
Instead, we are inside Konstanin's mind in the moments before he pulls the trigger, and the play is fashioned as the "life flashing before his eyes" as he recalls the emotional traumas of the past two years. Konstanin longs only for his mother's love and approval and the love of the girl across the lake, Nina, who loves him back and has agreed to perform in his 'symbolist' drama for his family and friends. Arkadina scoffs at the pretentiousness of this performance and it falls apart with Konstantin exiting in a rage. Nina is very interested in meeting Arkadina's lover, the famous writer Trigorin, as she is dreaming of fame and fortune for herself (as opposed to the idealized life of an artist that Konstanin longs for). So these characters are sent spinning and colliding into each other, fighting and falling for each other in endless combinations of ever-increasing intensity and disaster. Their trials are echoed in the people around them who, as in all of Chekov's plays, suffer varying levels of unrequited love and/or general dissatisfaction with their lives.
The brilliance of Szasz' vision is in how well it works. Suddenly, we see Konstantin's past being performed for him and by him in his own memories, complete with their exaggerations and distortions. The emotional level of intensity becomes unbelievably high throughout (an exhausting show for the company, especially as most of them are sitting onstage observing the action throughout much or all of the nearly three hour running time), with every scene raising the stakes higher than the one before. This approach might quickly become histrionic and absurd, but because we know we're in a construction in Konstanin's mind, that he is therefore the playwright and director of what we're seeing, it makes sense that everything is so high-strung and on the edge. It turns out that Chekhov stripped entirely of any modicum of good or orderly behaviour, in other words, Chekhov reduced to the Id and Ego with the Super-Ego banished offstage, is some pretty potent dramatic potion. Both Arkadina and Nina are in short dresses, bare legs and high-heeled boots (all the better to sexualize you with, my dear!), and when Arkadina has a key scene with Konstanin where she changes his bandages after a first failed suicide attempt, followed by an encounter with Trigorin where she wins him back (temporarily) from his passion for the young and vulnerable Nina, it makes sense that she pulls both men down onto the floor and wraps herself physically around them. It makes sense that Konstanin loses it (often) and throws suitcases all over the stage, ranting and raving in his rage at his mother. The echoes of Hamlet and Gertrude are made loud and clear in this translation and interpretation. And that the play ends with the gunshot, rather than the original ending of Konstanin killing himself offstage and the doctor coming on to whisper the terrible news, so as to spare Arkadina (again, temporarily), we feel that of course it must be like this, how could it be otherwise? The greatest testament I can make to Szasz' work is to say that without a doubt I will never feel about, nor see, Chekhov in the same way again.
Of course this is a hugely demanding show for the actors, who are asked to get soaking wet more than once and to throw themselves about the stage and at each other quite a lot. This version rests so much on Konstantin that a misfire in his casting would be a disaster. Fortunately, Mickey Solis plays the role masterfully, never letting up on the horror-filled self-examination that is the play inside his head. He turns a powerful flashlight on other characters at key moments, struts around in his punk plaid pants and ripped t-shirt and is both empathetic and ridiculous. There is hideous pain that he endures in his scene with Nina near the play's end--where she comes back to see him after 2 years spent with Trigorin, bearing him a child that died, being abandoned by him and reduced to a second-rate theatre career (close to prostitution in those days) that has driven her to the edge of insanity. Witnessing Konstanin rolling around in a pool of water and screaming in agony in the disbelief that Nina still loves Trigorin, makes it easier for us to understand why he welcomes the gun in his mouth. Solis seems born to play this role. ART founding member Karen MacDonald plays Arkadina with all the requisite selfishness and self-centredness required, plus the hyper-sexuality that Szasz layers on. But I have always felt Arkadina to not be a very rewarding riole to play, although it is so prized by older actresses, because she doesn't change at all...nothing moves her from her focus on herself and her needs and she is therefore a tough part to connect with, I imagine. Brian Dykstra does a wonderful job with Trigorin, making of him a kind of nihilist wolf whose disgust at himself and everything around him is palpable...the fact that he turns this disgust into fiction and art is just one of the many levels of commentary on Art made by Chekhov in this play. Another fine performance comes from another ART regular Thomas Derrah as the local doctor Dorn, who is so embittered with his life you can almost taste it. Overall, I feel the men here fare better than the women. The lovesick Masha (daughter of estate-keeper Shamrayev and his wife [who's in love with Dorn] Paulina), played here by ART Institute MFA student Nina Kassa as a goth, seems slightly beyond the actor's capabilities, both vocally and emotionally, although her physical work was nice. And Nina, played by Molly Ward, starts off well but does not go the distance for me. She is a more confident and sexual Nina than I've seen before, all long legs and ready to get down to it with both Konstanin and Trigorin, and she knows what she wants. But her final scene, one of the most challenging to make work that I know (how does one deliver all the "I am a seagull" lines and not make it look silly somehow?), she is not where she needs to be.
That scene does have a lovely directorial moment, though, which I wish Szasz had done more of in the show: At one point Konstanin can't stand hearing Nina anymore and so he picks her up and throws her down onto the stage where she goes immediately limp. He then picks her up again and almost literally throws her offstage, whereupon she turns right back around and enters again, continuing her emotional battering of him. It's like Konstanin wants to erase or destroy this memory, but he can't. And I thought about how that motif might be even more present in this ingenious and thrilling production; to have things repeat themselves, or go into slow motion or even backwards, to make this even more of a dreamscape in Konstanin's mind. I saw a production along these lines in London at the National in 2005, Theatre Complicite's production of Strindberg's Dream Play in a new translation by Caryl Churchill. I've never seen a play like it, the physical mastery and control of that company to take the audience into a dreamscape that sustains itself for 90 minutes nonstop, including whole scenes played forward and in reverse.
And this, finally, is the mark of a great theatre experience; that you begin to riff on it yourself, to imagine where the audacious and bold visions of directors like Szasz (and others) might take you when you consider the dramatic canon as living practice rather than pictures in a museum, frozen in time.
