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.