There Are Two Kinds of People

Skylight at the Golden Theatre

(L-R): Bill Nighy and Carey Mulligan in Skylight.

            The revival of Skylight, the 1996 David Hare play, currently running at the Golden Theatre through June 21^st, is an extraordinary production of an extraordinary play.  It is exceedingly well-written, well-staged, and astonishingly well-acted.  It is deeply sad, frequently funny, and enormously significant.  Besides all that, it is thoroughly, deliciously British, which is just icing on the cake.

            Mr. Hare, known as the most socially conscious of the playwrights to emerge from the Thatcher era, is of course at his best here with the story of a schoolteacher, Kyra (Carey Mulligan) in a blighted area of London who is visited in quick succession on a snowy night by the adolescent son, Edward (Matthew Beard) of her former lover and employer and then by that lover himself, Tom (Bill Nighy).  Tom’s a wealthy restaurateur who plucked Kyra from obscurity almost fifteen years earlier and made her something of his personal ward.  Kyra began living with Tom’s family and, eventually, carrying on an affair with Tom that lasted six years until Tom’s wife, Alice, found out, resulting in Kyra’s tearful and seemingly permanent exit from the good life.  Now Alice is dead of cancer, and Tom, depressed and uncertain, is looking for reconciliation.  Kyra, for a number of reasons, is not so sure.

            Director Stephen Daldry (also represented this season with The Audience) is the patron saint of the London transfer, and he does not disappoint here.  Before a Wes Andersonian Cornell box of a set designed by the greatest scenic designer alive, Bob Crowley, he utilizes movement to a degree rarely seen in such a talky play.  Mr. Daldry is, clearly, an actors’ director, and he is instrumental in bringing out the beauty in their performance of Mr. Hare’s impeccable lines.

            It’s a gorgeous script, important not just for its 99% vs. 1% social implications but for the unceasing, beautiful flow of its language, whose Albeean conversation-play influences are clear and wonderfully implemented.  The best kind of plays that erupt in arguments (as this one does, quite frequently) give equally verifiable positions to all parties involved, and Skylight does so in spades.  As quickly as Kyra comments surgically on Tom’s callous behavior during his wife’s illness, he fires back about Kyra’s inability to develop personal relationships.  After one of Ms. Mulligan’s longer speeches, in which Kyra pillories the cowardice of conservatives who criticize social workers, the audience applauded, but they don’t get the point of the play.  Tom’s viewpoint is not villainous, it’s just different from Kyra’s.  This play doesn’t exist purely to make a political statement, it entertains, too, by juxtaposing two wounded souls and forcing us to ask ourselves whether love truly does conquer all.  In this arena Mr. Hare is, clearly, a master.

            The reality of the characters created by all three actors (all Tony-nominated) is staggering.  Matthew Beard, who made his stage debut in this London production of Skylight before it transferred, seems at first ungainly and overly loud, but he quickly makes it clear he belongs firmly in the class of promising young British actors captained by the dynamo Alex Sharp, of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.  Both are mobile and intelligent, and both dominate their scenes—Mr. Beard has only two, one at the very beginning and the other at the very end, but he makes the most of them.

Carey Mulligan makes the earthbound, alternately maternal and venomous Kyra a vibrant and real presence.  You can see why Tom fell in love with her.  Mr. Hare has a tendency of making the women in his scripts less people than symbols, and he doesn’t entirely escape it here, but Ms. Mulligan, in an earth-shattering performance, never seems anything less than as truly vulnerable and lonely as Kyra herself must be.

            Mr. Nighy, meanwhile, steals the show as far as it can be stolen, with an exact, exacting performance as a man drowning in his own unhappiness.  It reminded me of nothing, strangely, so much as Michael Cera’s turn earlier this year as Warren Straub in This is Our Youth—another portrait of a neurotic, lonely rich man who does something drastic in looking for love.  Like Mr. Cera’s, Mr. Nighy’s performance doesn’t just capture the important bits of Tom’s soul (though this it does brilliantly—when Tom begins to cry, the collective heart of the audience breaks instantly), it also captures the little, less noticeable ones; namely, the tics that make up a person’s character.  Tom kicks his chair incessantly, wipes his knee with his elbow, smooths back his hair and rubs the corners of his mouth—the actions of a man desperately trying to maintain cleanliness and order in the face of the dirty, chaotic world of grief and uncertainty that awaits him outside Kyra’s apartment.  The compliment I would most like to give to Mr. Nighy, Mr. Beard, Ms. Mulligan, and Mr. Hare himself is that on that stage, Tom, Edward, and Kyra are not characters; they are real people.  And as simple as that may seem to achieve on the stage, take my word for it—it’s the hardest thing in the world.

The Eye in the Sky

Grounded at the Public Theater

Anne Hathaway in Grounded.

            In Grounded, a play by David Grant now playing at the Public Theater through May 24^th, Anne Hathaway plays a fighter pilot whose jargon and cockiness is almost irritating (although maybe that’s just Anne Hathaway).  Unusually for one-woman shows that don’t have the words “My So-Called Life” or “And I’m in Therapy” in the title, Hathaway’s character—identified only as “The Pilot”—seems almost to be aware of being watched by an audience.  She tries from the very beginning to put on a show about her worthiness as a bomber in the Air Force, a job in which, apparently, the bombing itself seems almost to be a side note.  The real allure is “the blue,” as she calls it (a little too often), the freedom and solitude of the sky.  The “boom,” when Iraqi troops and facilities are blasted off the face of the earth below her, comes later, when she’s already far, far away.

            The Pilot is a country girl, Wyoming born and bred, and she likes to “knock back a beer” with her “boys”—other Air Force.  One night, while this is in process, she’s approached by a hardware store manager named Eric, who finds her suit and her job as appealing as she does.  They copulate, then fall in love, possibly in that order, though the Pilot is so self-involved it’s almost difficult to tell.

            Just when the Pilot’s brassy cocksure attitude is beginning to grate, she finds herself pregnant with Eric’s child, and is summarily grounded by her commander.  She and Eric marry, but she gets restless and needs to go back to the “blue” again.  But when she reports for duty, it’s revealed she’s been reassigned—to what pilots call the “Chair Force,” or the drone pilots who serve twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week, in trailers at the Creech Air Force Base in Nevada.  Plucked from the sky she loves, she, Eric, and their daughter Sam pull up roots, and suddenly, she’s a drone pilot, with all the psychological contradictions that entails.  Things begin to get interesting.

            The play is a masterpiece, which is difficult to say of any one-person show because they’re so inherently subjective and in dialogue with their audience, and so can’t exist as paragons of creativity on their own.  But as a piece of writing, a 75-minute monologue that perfectly captures this country’s attitudes toward war while simultaneously existing as a diverting, deliciously ambiguous play, Grounded cements Mr. Grant as a talent to watch.  His foreshadowing, in hindsight, is crystalline in its perfection, and the story barrels forward with all the freedom of an F-16.

            The trouble with Anne Hathaway as an actress—I like her fine, but she’s widely and almost reflexively reviled—is that her acting style is that of a first-year drama student who’s desperately trying to act as if she’s coming up with the script off the top of her head.  She stutters where there need be no stutters, gets quieter and louder without any discernible reason for doing so, trails off during innocuous sentences, and has a habit of throwing back her hands like Billy Crystal at the Oscars, or Roy Scheider in All That Jazz.  And these characteristics, which are distracting but not, frankly, entirely unpleasant, are indeed prevalent in the run-up to the Pilot’s assignment to Creech.  But the layers of Hathaway’s performance are many and varied, and the shading of the Pilot’s descent into psychosis while trailing a terrorist leader called “Number 2” is exquisitely rendered.  She is in full control—always active, never boring.  Ms. Hathaway is not perfect for this role, but she inhabits it so totally that she realizes a three-dimensional world behind her character.  There aren’t many performances, especially not in a show like this one, that can do that successfully.

Can Ms. Hathaway sustain a one-woman show?  Absolutely.  But it hardly seems a one-woman show at all thanks to Julie Taymor, the brilliant director of The Lion King, who here rejects the notion of “small-scale” to create a fully functioning, sleek, new-age marvel of a production in the Public’s 272-seat Anspacher Theater.  Ms. Taymor achieves things here that cannot even be explained in words, with the help of two standouts on her production team, scenic designer Riccardo Hernandez (who creates a miniature desert that serves too many symbolic purposes to name) and projection designer Peter Nigrini (who coalesces the world of the play in even a more tactile manner than Finn Ross on The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time).  Grounded has been staged before in New York (in a more pared-down production at Page 73 in January 2014), and it’s easy to see based on the projections alone how enormously Ms. Taymor and her team have improved this play.  During the drone-piloting scenes, the video of what the Pilot’s seeing—projected on the sandy floor and reflected by an enormous mirror behind the Pilot, which, like her, watches from above—makes us feel the gray dispassion of the pursuit in a way evocation could never have done.

Ms. Taymor has created a filmic production, using Ms. Hathaway as a geometric center around whom to stage gorgeous shots of which no other theater director active today would be capable, and from whom to absorb nervous energy which, like the Hellfire missiles the Pilot speaks of almost lovingly, will eventually explode.  But the collaboration between Mr. Grant and Ms. Taymor, besides resulting in a production of astounding literary and visual beauty, is politically and historically important such that it feels it could only be produced right here, right now.  It reaches into the life of a warrior of the future who repeatedly calls herself a god and draws out something both uniquely modern and deeply human.  This is what the Public, and indeed the theater, is all about.

I Hear a Bouzouki

Zorba at City Center Encores!

John Turturro (center) as Alexis Zorba in Zorba.

            In the years between Cabaret and Chicago, the two best musicals written since 1960, composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb wrote three musicals, none of which ran longer than ten months on Broadway.  The second of these, Zorba, based on the 1952 novel Zorba the Greek and the subsequent 1964 film of the same name starring Anthony Quinn, is now playing at City Center as part of an Encores! production through May 10^th.  It is in many ways perfect fare for the series, revived only once in 1983 and an example of a stellar composing team struggling to make sense of a task that was never fully going to come together.  The ambitious plan to musicalize one of the darker novels of the period with an orchestra consisting mostly of Greek instruments could be seen as parallel to Lerner and Loewe’s attempt to reinvigorate the Western musical with Paint Your Wagon, an earlier production at Encores! this season.  Both are great fun if you know where to look, and they have enormous potential.  But Paint Your Wagon is not My Fair Lady, as unfair as that comparison may seem.  And Zorba is nowhere close to Chicago, though its theatrical experimentation earns it favorable comparisons with that musical.

            For example--Harold Prince approached Kander and Ebb with the idea to adapt Zorba (the story of an older, gregarious Greek ladies’ man who develops a relationship with a young American English teacher on Crete which is touched by tragedy), and suggested the idea of a Greek chorus of sorts to narrate the proceedings.  The chorus is either under- or over-utilized depending on how you look at it, and definitely unnecessary.  But it makes for some fascinating choral arrangements led by Marin Mazzie as the Leader, including the opening number, “Life Is,” whose bleak lyrics contrast splendidly with its near-celebratory tune.

            But the ensemble is almost comically large, and the choreography, by Josh Rhodes (2011’s Company) is uncontrolled and slightly awkward.  So the show doesn’t come alive during the opening number, and only spreads its wings upon the entrance of John Turturro as Zorba himself. 

Mr. Turturro is so ebullient and endearing that you can forgive him for not being much of a singer, or a dancer either (dancing is meant to be Zorba’s strong suit, but on Mr. Turturro it never seems anything less than effortful).  The best number in the score, far and away, is Zorba’s introductory song, “The First Time,” which features some of the most creative structural work ever done by Kander as a composer and marvelously expressive lyrics by Ebb.  Mr. Turturro has a limited range (this is his first musical theater performance), but he performs the number so well, inhabits the lovable, hedonistic character so deeply, it’s practically a showstopper.  This is an accurate descriptor of Mr. Turturro’s performance throughout.  He isn’t entirely right for the part, but there is something hypnotizing about him as an actor that keeps the show watchable.  Aside from a lyric flub near the end of the performance I saw that was so hard to watch I’m almost loath to mention it, he seems at home on stage.  It also helps that the book, written by Joseph Stein (who also wrote the libretto to Fiddler on the Roof, whose influence is evident here) seems to match perfectly with Mr. Turturro’s sensibility as a performer.  Much like Turturro himself, it’s sweet, but never cloyingly so, and often very funny.

            There are numerous other famous names in the production (like Adam Chanler-Berat, Santino Fontana, and Zoe Wanamaker—who can’t sing either but is lots of fun).  Musical director Rob Berman is still at the top of his game, bringing out the mysterious beauty in Kander’s brilliant orchestral music—the high point of the show is a purely musical interlude at the beginning of act two.  But there’s no throughline of achievement to touch on in this show, maybe because Encores! this season hasn’t touched, as it has in past seasons, on shows that are unjustly un-revived, but rather shows that are un-revived, period. 

            Though the production is absolutely enjoyable and Mr. Turturro’s turn is memorable, it’s very difficult to describe the way I enjoyed this show because it’s objectively not a great show; it scrambles a little with the darker material, and let’s just say not all the numbers can match up to “The First Time.”  Much like many of the musicals unseen on Broadway for a long time (perhaps for a good reason), the best one can say about Zorba the musical is that it’s perfectly good enough.  And that certainly wouldn’t be enough for Zorba the character.