Resident Aliens

Two productions from Ivo van Hove.

(L-R): Richard Hansell, Nicola Walker, Mark Strong, Michael Gould, and Michael Zegen in A View from the Bridge.

The most brilliant piece of scenic design in Ivo van Hove’s production of A View From the Bridge, at the Lyceum, isn’t the colossal cubic structure that rises from the stage to reveal a stark, sterile boxing ring of a set, on which the production unfolds.  No, a much more interesting visual experience is Mark Strong, playing the doomed Eddie Carbone as colossal in more than one way.  Backlit by the same unforgiving white glare that floods the entire production (Jan Versweyveld, van Hove’s partner in life and theater, did the scenic and lighting design), Mr. Strong in profile, his nose like a tomahawk above his near-perpetual sneer, is terrifying, an avenging angel.  When he turns toward the audience, you cower.

Mr. van Hove is a Belgian director who has three productions in New York this year -- this Bridge, Lazarus, and the upcoming Broadway revival of The Crucible, another Miller play about accusations gone horribly wrong.  His signature is treating American classics with the same probing interest most contemporary directors have for Shakespeare -- in his Angels in America, the wings and delicate airs of the Angel are traded for vainglorious abusiveness; in his Rent, Mimi dies.  His idea of a good time is taking the self-regard this country has for its theatrical heroes and stripping away the accoutrements.  That this practice works for the story of Eddie Carbone, a paranoid longshoreman who has no idea of a good time, is not a surprise in itself -- Miller plays, with their unique moral dilemmas and cutting focus, practically invite minimalism -- but that it works so extraordinarily well is a testament to the international theatrical bravery of upending tradition.

The actors playing Americans are European -- from the British Isles, mostly -- and those playing Italians are either British or American.  But for Mr. Strong, whose perfect accent and mannerisms are basically a stupendous audition for The Godfather Part IV, the cast doesn’t focus on dialect. Phoebe Fox, as Eddie’s teenage niece, for whom he harbors unspecified feelings, is only a couple of steps away from an Irish brogue.  Michael Zegen (from New York) and Russell Tovey (from Essex), as the Italian cousins of Eddie’s wife, Beatrice (Nicola Walker), don’t even attempt Sicilian accents.  There is no pretension here.  The actors walk the stage barefoot, cordoned in by a knee-high Plexiglass square -- once you’re in, you don’t come out, as proven by our guilt-ridden narrator, Alfieri (an excellent Michael Gould), who slips off his shoes and reluctantly enters the fray.  Truths and souls will be bared.  The only liar here is Eddie, who can’t decide whether to hide his world-shaking insecurities with violence or sexual aggression.  Mr. Strong, reckless, ruthless, and daring, embodies Eddie as carnal, even monstrous, but never less than a man.  Miller would be shocked but impressed.

Rarely on Broadway has scenic design and staging intersected so directly with the heart and soul of a production.  A View from the Bridge is about a cycle of destruction, the remnants even of the things we hated crumbling to reveal that there was something worse lying beneath all along.  “I am inclined to notice the ruins in things,” Alfieri says, mournfully.  Van Hove begins the play with the actors being showered with water, cleansing themselves of the inequities of their lives.  At the end, from on high, they are doused with blood.

*

At the end of the 1976 film The Man Who Fell to Earth, Rip Torn, as an elder rocket scientist, meets up with David Bowie, as an alien named Thomas Newton, in a cafe.  Newton, who came to Earth looking for water for his people, gripped by drought, has, over a number of years, founded a massive technological empire (using materials, of course, not of this world) and lost it, after a hostile takeover by a mysterious crime organization and a series of brutal scientific experiments designed to root out his space oddities, so to speak, to no avail.  The scientist once worked for Newton; together they devised a rocket ship designed to get Newton back home.  They were young together (or as young as Rip Torn can ever be on screen, anyway).  Now it’s years later, and the scientist is gripped by age.  Newton hasn’t aged a day, and he’s turned to making music that no one can understand (art imitating life) and drinking gin by the bottle.  It’s meant to be a sad ending, but we wonder what comes next.  An alien troubadour played by David Bowie must have some more interesting and bizarre adventures to share, mustn’t he?

Not, it turns out, if he isn’t played by David Bowie.  Newton’s back now, almost forty years later, in the new musical Lazarus, at the New York Theater Workshop, with book by Bowie and Enda Walsh, a score of Bowie hits, and direction by the aforementioned van Hove.  Far from the intriguing figure glimpsed at the end of that great and underappreciated Nicholas Roeg film, equal parts John Lennon and J.J. Gittes, we are given only Michael C. Hall, not even attempting a British accent or the affected reserve that so marked Bowie on screen.  His hair is red and his skin white, but he is as grounded and barrel-chested as a nightclub bouncer; where Bowie was a beanstalk, Hall is a giant. What made Bowie such a phenomenal presence in The Man Who Fell to Earth was the idea that David Bowie, of all people, was working full-time to seem normal, and the result was the man who once praised Hitler in a magazine under the influence of cocaine.  On the other hand, you can see the gears whirring in Hall’s head as he desperately attempts to seem bizarre.  He isn’t out-of-it in an appealing, Bowie-esque way.  He’s just trying to figure out how to approach this whole Lazarus business.

So was I.  Thomas Newton is apparently now a shut-in in an apartment on Second Avenue (despite the fact that, in the film, he notably and permanently renounced New York for the American Southwest), cared for by the obsessive Elly (Cristin Milioti), who keeps putting on his ex-girlfriend’s clothes.  He’s also swigging booze from the bottle every other sentence, which brings on alien hallucinations (one of very few carry-overs from the film) including a teenaged girl (Sophia Anne Caruso) who may or may not be his daughter, and may or may not be a hallucination, and may or may not be a ghost.  Either way, the universe of Man Who Fell to Earth can’t sustain this added level of mythology.  In my mind, the only meaningful thing about this character is that, in a truly inspired bit of ridiculousness by van Hove, she bleeds milk, which may not make her any less annoying but certainly adds to her uses if you ever need a hand topping off your coffee.

The film that now serves as the first part of what I must reluctantly call the Thomas Newton canon worked so well because even those experimental bits of it that existed basically to confuse the audience eventually gave in, with a reluctant sigh, and agreed at least temporarily to transmogrify into a plot.  This libretto will do no such thing.  Everyone seems to be going crazy in this show, perhaps because insanity is the only justification for expressing your innermost thoughts through David Bowie lyrics.  The crux of the dramatic tension appears to be that Newton (or that dead girl, or no one -- I’m not quite sure) is being pursued by a serial killer named Valentine (Michael Esper), who Bowie-as-Newton would’ve snapped in half but Hall-as-Newton, being Dexter, after all, must confront meaningfully.  That Valentine’s spookiest moment of the show involves popping balloons with a dagger is indicative of the hamfistedness that hovers about the book like a listing UFO.  Ms. Walsh and Mr. Bowie seem to come from the Disney Channel school of exposition, as when Elly shouts, literally to the heavens, “I just want to be surrounded by love all the time!” and Valentine replies, wittily, “Me too.”  At one point Caruso’s character recounts the events of the film so simplistically that when, later on, she and her ethereal friends declare, “We’re doing a play based on your life.  It’s biographical,” I was tempted to stand up and correct them on some of the specifics.  Further, I’m not sure what we get out of the extension to Newton’s fictional lifespan apart from confirmation that his co-workers being brutally murdered is a trend rather than a one-time thing.  It’s a discredit to Paul Mayersberg’s screenplay and Walter Tevis’s original novel, on which this production claims to be based.  I hope, sincerely, that the bulk of the script was written by Mr. Bowie, so that both of the parties involved can happily return to their day jobs.

So the question, then, is what Messrs. van Hove and Versweyveld can do with all this.  Not much, I’m afraid, but visual and aural supplementals.  There are subtle musical references to the movie -- “Hello Mary-Lou” by Phillips and Taylor plays on and off throughout -- and brilliant video projections (by Tal Yarden) that bring a modicum of excitement to the proceedings.  As for the scenic design in itself, it’s as simple as A View from the Bridge, if not simpler, but much of its significance seems to hinge on Newton’s fridge being left open, and while I welcome visual metaphor, after a while I became concerned that his milk might spoil.  And wouldn’t you know it, there probably won’t be any ghost girls around just then.

The awkwardness of Lazarus as a whole makes a lot more sense if you see it for what it is, which is a jukebox musical.  All the laziest parts of endeavours like Jersey Boys and Beautiful are summed up in the fact that when Valentine makes his last stand, it’s with a chorus of “Valentine’s Day.”  But it comes harder to incorporate Bowie songs into a narrative than “Oh, What a Night,” because his lyrics are nicer to listen to than to actually examine in context (which is a nice way of saying that they’re for the most part terrible -- come on, tell me "The Laughing Gnome" is Broadway-quality writing).  Pretty much the best it gets is watching a shirtless Milioti, in her extraordinary vocal talent and sexual daring the closest thing this cast has to a Bowie, belt “Changes,” the best song Bowie ever wrote, but even this gets tiresome by its conclusion.  There were no applause breaks after any number, which, depending on how charitable you’re feeling, you could ascribe to how deadly seriously this show seems to take itself or the fact that no one in the audience or the cast seems to be having a particularly good time.  Either way, it leaves a bad taste in your mouth.  By the time Walsh and Bowie are trying to ascribe emotional meaning to “Life on Mars,” one of the most joyfully nonsensical songs in rock’s canon, the whole thing has become viscerally upsetting.

Thomas Newton really was an autobiographical character for Bowie in a sense, which may have been why he was interested in examining him again.  That scene at the end of The Man Who Fell to Earth feels particularly relevant now.  When Rip Torn’s character expresses disappointment with Newton’s recent album, the extraterrestrial party responds, almost snidely, “Well, I didn’t make it for you.”  It’s impossible to say for whom Bowie made Lazarus, but I am sure that it will go over quite well on some other planet.