Cheaters Never Win

Betrayal at the Pinter Theatre in London.

(L-R): Charlie Cox and Tom Hiddleston in Betrayal.

Tom Hiddleston makes a steely and terrifying jilted husband in the West End revival of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, running through June 8th at the Pinter in London.  Wielding a jagged smile like a switchblade, Hiddleston’s Robert Downs is the standout feature in Jamie Lloyd’s production of the 1978 play, a tale of infidelity that plays out in reverse over seven years.  Charlie Cox of Netflix’s Daredevil is his best friend, Jerry, who carried out a years-long affair with Robert’s wife, Emma (Zawe Ashton).  Beginning with the revelation that Robert has known about the affair for four years and moving backward to Jerry and Emma’s first drunken kiss in the back room of a party, Betrayal is Pinter’s strongest and most efficiently economical play, and Lloyd’s triumphantly minimalistic staging more than gives it its due.

Most of Betrayal’s tension plays on the audience’s knowing that Robert knows everything even as Emma and Jerry dissemble.  (Thus those deathly smiles.)  That’s why it works so well that all three powerhouse actors are on-stage together almost throughout the run of the play – even in scenes when Emma and Jerry are alone, Robert looms in the background, leaning stiffly against a wall and watching.  It’s a play full of Pinter’s trademarked pauses, and much of its strength rests on what isn’t said; Hiddleston, again, makes the most of this, with his set jaw and wounded eyes, and feels dynamic even though most of his scenes are played sitting down and unmoving.

 Lloyd choreographs his three leads in a sinuous ballet with two interlocking turntables (always moving – you guessed it – counterclockwise) against Soutra Gilmour’s stark, faux-marble set.  Three walls expand and contract to create the restaurants, secret apartments, and family parties where the affair is played out, and the terrace in Venice where, in a hair-raising scene, it is uncovered.  It’s a simple staging that reveals what’s elemental about the play.  Jerry, Emma, and Robert bandy about banalities about books and squash, but there’s something dark and terrifying pulsating under the surface.  The strength of this production is that you can always feel that dark secret straining to burst through. 

Among the most haunting moments in the play is the second scene, in which Robert smoothly informs Jerry he’s planning on divorcing Emma.  Lost and befuddled, Jerry mutters, “We used to like each other,” to which Robert coolly replies, “We still do.”  When Jerry begs to know how Robert can be so unconcerned, Hiddleston replies, in molasses tones, “You don’t seem to understand.  I don’t give a shit about any of this.”  Neither Lloyd nor Pinter hint about the territory Robert has traversed to come to this point, but leaving it to the audience to guess is, if anything, more affecting.  The horror of moving from the human to the unfeeling is the ultimate betrayal of self, which is the betrayal this play and production ultimately seeks to depict.

Brotherly Love

True West at the American Airlines Theatre.

Ethan Hawke and Paul Dano in True West.

            True West, Sam Shepherd’s 1980 play, inevitably plays out as a vying for supremacy between two great actors.  The original production starred Gary Sinise and John Malkovich, but the most famous one remains the 2000 Broadway revival starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly; Reilly and Hoffman switched between the roles of screenwriter Austin and his brother, drifter Lee, nightly.  It made dramatic sense – Shepherd’s angry, fiery story switches the reins of the proverbial Cain between the two estranged brothers so quickly it’s meant to seem as if they’re blending into one another.

            No one could make that mistake watching the new Broadway production, a Roundabout staging directed by James Macdonald and starring Ethan Hawke and Paul Dano.  In the first act, Lee (Hawke) arrives at the Los Angeles ranch house belonging to their absent mother (Marylouise Burke), the better to menace Austin (Dano), who’s struggling to close a screenplay deal with the smooth-as-a-manikin producer Saul Kimmer (Gary Wilmes).  I was bowled over by Hawke’s performance, earlier this year, in the film First Reformed, in which he plays a moon-faced preacher overcome by the horrors of climate change, and the promise of seeing Hawke as something of a human knife, slicing through the conventions of Hollywood, was exciting.  Unfortunately, at least in the first act, Hawke, opposite Dano in his usual milquetoast mode (as in 2007’s There Will Be Blood), isn’t so much a threat as deeply annoying, lobbing whiney complaints across the room and lounging thoughtlessly on the carpet.  When Lee sidles up to Austin and whisperingly reminds him of the statistical frequency of fratricide, you’re tempted to go, “Yeah, yeah.”  This True West lacks the requisite edge that gives Shepherd’s writing its sting.

            Dano is the saving grace.  Halfway through the second act, after Lee has conned Kimmer into dropping Austin’s script for a Western tale of Lee’s own devising, Austin loses it and gets drunk, and the production suddenly becomes halfway-brilliant.  Dano, whose interests in the past few years have tended more in the writerly direction (see this year’s Wildlife), has imbibed the screaming-maniac wisdom of Daniel Day-Lewis, his co-star in Blood, and much of Act Two could be called an extended re-enactment of the “I drink your milkshake” speech from that film.  He roars with the prehistoric furor of a dinosaur; he squeaks and squeals and lords his newfound liberation from sanity over his now-cowering brother.  He validates the entire exercise, even making Hawke better by pure force of energy.  What comes across most strongly is their shared sense of themselves as pathetic, as worthless in the face of their circumstances.  Lee begs Austin for help with his newfound role as a screenwriter.  Austin begs Lee to take him to live in the desert.  And round and round it goes.

            The production spends too much time in its enervated, Hawke-focused haze for it to be entirely worth one’s time, but its pleasures are real.  Burke has a brief, scene-stealing cameo in which she squeaks out her bemused maternal commentary like a cross between a Golden Girl and a chew toy.  Jane Cox’s lighting design, filmic, blinding, and centered around the flare of a candle beside Austin’s typewriter, is genius, and it complements Mimi Lien’s competent scenic design (and its surprise transformation in the final seconds of the play).  But Macdonald, a British veteran making his Broadway debut, lacks the skill to marshal all of these disparate accomplishments into a combination that packs too much of a punch.  Most disappointing, Hawke and Dano never seem close to the role-swapping that so defines the piece, mostly because they seem to be acting in different plays.

Legal Eagles

To Kill a Mockingbird at the Shubert Theatre.

          

           What you notice first is Atticus Finch’s accent.  Where Gregory Peck, in Robert Mulligan’s 1962 film of To Kill a Mockingbird, spoke with the rarefied airs of a mid-Atlantic maven plunked into rural Alabama, Jeff Daniels, in Aaron Sorkin’s new stage adaptation, is a southerner through and through, idioms and all.  Funnily enough, that alone makes Daniels much more tolerable than his crisp, side-of-the-mouth diction usually allows (his bombastic turn in Sorkin’s The Newsroom, on HBO, very much included), and it’s one of the many touches that makes this the greatest turn of Daniels’ career.

            Director Bartlett Sher’s production of this whip-smart play made headlines this year when the estate of Harper Lee, who wrote the 1960 novel on which the film and the play are based, dragged Scott Rudin and his associate producers into court over alleged departures from Lee’s intent.  But they needn’t have worried.  The greatest achievement of the new Mockingbird, despite its very occasional stolidity and flourishes of directorial obviousness, is its balancing of Lee’s moral uplift and well-rounded characters with Sorkin’s language and themes.  Nothing in the story of Finch, the heroic lawyer Lee based on her father, or the wounded humanity Tom Robinson (Gbenga Akinnagbe), his defendant, is betrayed.  But the jokes are all classic Sorkinese.  Note where prosecutor Horace Gilmer (Stark Sands), who’s trying Tom for rape, asks if Tom’s testimony can be considered sworn if the hand he rests on the Bible is crippled.  Quoth the presiding officer of the court, Judge Taylor (Dakin Matthews), “The court is speechless.”  And Sorkin’s lifelong interest in the courtroom – his first Broadway play was 1989’s A Few Good Men – lends itself to the newly trial-focused structure with which the play approaches the story.

            That structure is up-front here, perhaps more so than the well-trodden story itself.  The play functions as a reconstruction of the events leading to the death of the virulent racist Bob Ewell (Frederick Weller), whose daughter (Erin Wilhelmi) is Tom’s accuser.  Those doing the reconstruction are Atticus’s children, Jem (Will Pullen) and Scout (Celia Keenan-Bolger), our Lee substitute, and their friend Dill (Gideon Glick).  Choosing adults for the roles of the story’s famously innocent juvenile roles is an unexpected but excellent choice by Sher and Sorkin.  It refuses to allow the story to become cute, but in their half-present roles as narrators, the children individuate from their peers on-stage, becoming conduits for the audience.  Keenan-Bolger is especially good.

            The major change is the expanded role of Calpurnia (a strong LaTanya Richardson Jackson), the Finches’ maid, who here functions as a challenge to Atticus’s insistence that even the most unapologetic bigots of his hometown are still his “friends and neighbors.”  The pacifistic Atticus ends the play promising Jem that “I’ll do the fighting from now on.”  It’s a smart change, an update from the days when tolerance meant acceptance even of the intolerant, without disrespecting Atticus’s inherent goodness, which is never undermined as it was in Lee’s prequel novel, 2015’s Go Set a Watchman.  The downside is that the portions of the play after the end of the trial can feel even more tacked-on than usual.  Danny Wolohan, as Boo Radley, doesn’t register the way Robert Duvall did, in the film.  As compared with the power of the trial scenes – Akinnagbe’s wounded pride, Keenan-Bolger’s fierceness, Daniels’ wisecracking, earthy humanity – anything thereafter is less a subplot than an addendum.

            But that’s merely a testament to the play’s genuine power, its throbbing undercurrent – an appeal to truth in the face of unthinking hatred.  Sorkin’s genius here is his recognition that those optimists who believe in the truth have always had to undergo an emotional journey when it comes to their relations with their fellow men – First, we believe its victory is assured, then, we recognizes it will take a struggle, then, we begin that struggle.  The play ends with an old favorite psalm of Sorkin’s (he quotes it in a 2002 episode of The West Wing) – “Joy Cometh in the Morning.”  As Calpurnia rightly notes, it’s a long time coming, but the first thing is to believe it eventually comes.

Love Songs

Carmen Jones at the Classic Stage Company

 Clifton Duncan and Anika Noni Rose in Carmen Jones.

            There isn’t much scenery in John Doyle’s new production of Carmen Jones, opening June 27^th at the Classic Stage Company, but then there doesn’t need to be.  It’s not that the spare, factory-style scenic design necessarily suggests a pavilion, or a boxing ring, or even really a factory – it’s the music, so enormous, substantial, and rewarding it dwarfs everything else.  In 1943 Oscar Hammerstein II adapted Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen to the contemporary American South and populated it with black servicemen and factory workers, thus providing the deftest-yet translation of Bizet’s French lyrics into any language or idiom, and introducing Bizet’s genius to a new generation.  And what genius!  The music is richer than anything on Broadway – perhaps anything that’s ever been on Broadway – and it is, in this incarnation, impeccably sung.

            One’s experience of this Carmen Jones, the first major production in New York since the original, seventy-five years ago, will probably depend on one’s tolerance for opera.  Because, though populated by musical theater performers – notably the smoldering Anika Noni Rose (perfect) and the massively charismatic Clifton Duncan (singing brilliantly but falling just short of his usual acting standards) – the emotions are as heightened and the arias as overwrought as anything at the Met.  For the musical theater audiences who will likely be coming to see it, it will take getting used to – especially in the last half-hour of this ninety-five-minute compression of the opera, when the more familiar tunes (“Beat Out Dat Rhythm on a Drum,” “Stan’ Up and Fight,” and that glorious overture) have passed.

            But that’s because operas are simple – and luckily director Doyle (also the Classic Stage’s artistic director) does simple better than anyone else.  His pared-down productions of Sweeney Todd and The Color Purple did boffo business on Broadway, and his recent Pacific Overtures (also at the Classic Stage) came close to the divine.  Here, with a cast of ten and an orchestra of six, he delineates with a surgeon’s care the fundamental concern of the piece – prophecy.  In Hammerstein’s magnificent translation of the Habanera, “Dat’s Love,” Carmen (Rose) sings, “If I chase you, then you gets caught / And once I got you, I go my way… Don’t say I didn’t tell you true.”  The poor aspiring airman who she chases in this case, Joe (Duncan), proceeds to ignore the warning entirely.  Carmen, on the other hand, sees a tarot card predicting her own death and steels for it with something close to dignity.  This is an opera, that most eminently predictable of genres, and yet, fascinatingly, the ending hinges on which of the characters are able to see it coming.

            This Carmen Jones is slightly wooden and slightly dusty, and succumbs to a few of the plotted oddities that Hammerstein presumably found it difficult to avoid in his transposition.  (Where exactly, in the Chicago of 1943, was there a swanky country club exclusively for black patrons?)  But at its best, like in Rose’s strikingly sensual “Dat’s Love” and Soara-Joye Ross’s infectious, audience-invading “Beat Out Dat Rhythm on a Drum,” it’s also fun.  Since the show is done in the round, one can watch the faces of the audience as the tunes that have permeated the world’s collective consciousness begin, and it’s as if an ear-to-ear grin passes over the face of the theater itself.  This production manages to sustain that smile for at least a solid hour, and that’s not nothing.

            The real joy, as always in this 199-seat theater, is the discovery that any production, no matter how high-minded, can be made intimate, and gloriously so.  To use a cliché, one truly feels part of the action: Factory workers call over the audience’s heads.  In dance numbers, the cast members murmuringly and glowingly encourage one another: “Yeah,” “That’s it.”  As the cast were setting up scenery at the performance I saw, Justin Keyes (who plays a boxer’s manager) slipped; Ross called “I saw that,” and he responded, saucily, “Saw what?”  You see more of this ten-person ensemble than you can hope to see of the dozens on a Broadway stage, and just as Doyle made his Pacific Overtures a showcase for New York Asian stage actors, so he does here with superbly talented African-Americans who never miss a note or a cue.  The original Carmen Jones was a haven for black stage talent who weren’t being cast elsewhere; this Carmen Jones is much the same.  Oscar Hammerstein, wherever he is, probably just got a burst of pride; Georges Bizet, rightly so, is probably already proud enough.