Orphans
Written by Lyle Kessler; directed by Daniel
Sullivan
Performances through June 30, 2013
Schoenfeld Theatre, 236 West 45th
Street, New York, NY
orphansonbroadway.com
The Nance
Written by Douglas Carter Beane;
directed by Jack O’Brien
Performances through June 16, 2013
Lyceum Theatre, 149 West 45th
Street, New York, NY
lct.org
The Big Knife
Written by Clifford Odets; directed by Doug
Hughes
Performances through June 2, 2013
American Airlines Theatre, 227 West 42nd
Street, New York, NY
roundabouttheatre.org
The Assembled Parties
Written by Richard Greenberg; directed
by Lynne Meadow
Performances through June 16, 2013
Friedman Theatre, 261 West 47th
Street, New York, NY
manhattantheatreclub.com
.jpg) |
| Sturridge, Baldwin and Foster in Orphans (photo: Joan Marcus) |
The trio we meet in a shabby
Philly apartment in Lyle Kessler’s obvious Orphans—tough guy Treat, his autistic
brother Philip and their shady victim Harold, who shares the place with them
after foiling Treat’s kidnaping attempt—charts a predictable path from the
get-go.
It opens with Treat returning
from a day of petty thievery and showing his meager wares to Philip, too scared
to leave the house by Treat’s warning that he’ll die in the outside world: he’s
content to eat tuna sandwiches with mayo and watch reruns of old movies on TV. When
Treat brings home and ties up Harold—drunken, dapper, with a briefcase—the
dynamics unsurprisingly shift. After untying the ropes, Harold ingratiates
himself with Philip then Treat; soon Harold (also an orphan, he says) becomes a
father surrogate to the parentless pair.
The solid 1987 movie version, directed
by Alan Pakula, comprised a strong ensemble in Albert Finney (Harold), Matthew
Modine (Treat) and Kevin Anderson (Philip). On Broadway, Daniel Sullivan
directs with a veteran hand on John Lee Beatty’s authentically dilapidated set,
while the three actors—Alec Baldwin (a poised Harold), Ben Foster (a
wishy-washy Treat) and Jim Sturridge (an astonishingly gymnastic Philip)—never
find the right rhythms to keep this crudely metaphorical drama together for two
hours.
.jpg) |
| Nathan Lane in The Nance (photo: Joan Marcus) |
The Nance, Douglas Carter
Beane’s best idea yet for a play, is an alternately hard-edged and corny study
of a “nance,” a vaudeville/burlesque-era performer whose blatant swishiness
onstage belied his offstage heterosexuality—usually.
This is the 1930s, when “deviant”
love dared not speak its name. Beane introduces Chauncey, a famous nance and
self-hating right-winger, in an automat, where—as is his custom—he picks up
willing young men for a rendezvous. Whom he meets, however—just off the bus
from Buffalo—is studly Ned, and their anonymous tryst becomes a live-in
relationship, something Chauncey has studiously avoided, to avoid unneeded
questions about his personal life, until now.
Labor strife and New York police crackdowns
make life miserable for Chauncey and his co-performers: his onstage partner/boss
Efram and dancers Carmen, Joan and Sylvie, the last with whom he jousts
repeatedly over her Communist talk and his staunchly anti-FDR/New Deal position.
The drama comes to a head when Chauncey refuses to be cowed by police threats
and is hauled off to jail after he camps it up onstage with an in-their-face defiance.
Despite dramatic clunkiness, Beane
adroitly mixes backstage, offstage and onstage happenings, with Chauncey and
pals’ routines played out in their entirety—sometimes too much of a (not
always) good thing. Despite its ungainliness, director Jack O’Brien cannily makes
The Nance Broadway’s most entertaining
new show by mixing Nathan Lane’s naturally hammy Chauncey with grounded
supporting performances (except Jonny Orsini’s lunkheaded boytoy Ned). Add in the
clean efficiency in sets, costumes, lighting and music and The Nance is a more accomplished as a spectacle than as a semi-serious
drama.
.jpg) |
| Ireland and Cannavale in The Big Knife (photo: Joan Marcus) |
The recent Golden Boy revival showed there’s still life in Clifford Odets’
plays—earnestly hard-nosed morality tales—provided there’s a pitch-perfect
production. The return of The Big Knife—written in 1948, long
after seminal works like Golden Boy,
Waiting for Lefty and Awake and Sing!—proves
that Odets doesn’t work when the staging isn’t on his wavelength.
The play concerns Charlie Castle,
a studio system star—living the high life in a gorgeous Hollywood home (John
Lee Beatty’s magnificent set is the best I’ve seen in awhile)—who decides he no
longer wants to be chained to Marcus Hoff and Hoff Studios. He’s also dealing
with his estranged wife Marion, gofer Buddy Bliss (whose flirty wife Connie
Charlie has a fling with), agent Nat Danzinger, ingénue Dixie Evans and Hoff’s
right-hand man Smiley Coy (what a name!), always around to fix the messes
Charlie gets into.
Odets’ dialogue oscillates
between poetic epiphanies and pretentious platitudes, often in the same speech.
His heart is in the right place, but by making the far-from-innocent Charlie a
bastion of integrity, Odets stumbles trying to find a dramatically satisfying
conclusion to his hero’s murderously messy situation. Emotions and tempers
flare but remain on the surface.
Doug Hughes’ soporific staging
leaves his actors flailing. Richard Kind’s blustering Marcus and Reg Rogers’s rat-like
Smiley are too loud, the women—Marin Ireland’s schoolmarmish Marion, Ana
Reeder’s lummox-like Connie, Rachel Brosnahan’s perky Dixie—can’t escape caricature,
and Bobby Cannavale—the endlessly resourceful actor from The Motherfucker with the Hat—is unable to inject needed humanity into
Charlie, a protagonist who remains flat and uninteresting.
.jpg) |
| The cast of The Assembled Parties (photo: Joan Marcus) |
Richard Greenberg’s The
Assembled Parties follows a Jewish family, the Bascovs, at Christmas parties
20 years apart—in 1980 (dawn of Reagan) and 2000 (beginning of George W. Bush).
If that doesn’t underline its overly schematic approach, let me add that this
family—the members of which are nearly all witty wisecrackers—is as much a maze
as its gigantic 14-room Central Park West apartment (in which family members
who have visited for years get lost).
The play revolves around matriarch
Julie, sister-in-law Faye and Jeff, friend of Julie’s college-age son Scotty,
leaving in the dust Julie’s husband Ben, Faye’s husband Mort and daughter Shelley,
and Julie and Ben’s young son Tim—who at least grows up and appears in 2000. (Greenberg
relegates Shelley to an Act II phone call and kills off Ben, Mort and Scotty, resorting
to mumbles about shady doings and AIDS, none of which is explained or explored
compellingly enough: perhaps an earlier draft fleshed out what now remains as
unconvincing melodrama.)
Although the second act nods
toward major revelations and insights, none is forthcoming: instead, improbable
one-liners keep going, stale Reagan jokes morph into stale Dubya jokes (all natural
crowd-pleasers) and Greenberg, unable to become our new Bernard Shaw, must
settle for being our new Neil Simon.
Jessica Hecht’s now-standard
mannered line readings—also annoying in last season’s Harvey—prevent Julie from becoming the towering heroine Greenberg has
written her as, while the always amusing Judith Light trots out similarly drunken
witticisms for Faye that served the actress far better in Jon Robin Baitz’s
superior Other Desert Cities.
Jeremy Shamos makes Jeff a
sympathetic figure, but Mark Blum, Jonathan Walker and Jake Silberman do little
as the other underwritten men. Santo Loquasto’s stylishly plush set unerringly
recreates the place such families live in, but Lynne Meadow’s straightforward
direction does this overstuffed but undernourished play no favors.
Orphans
Schoenfeld Theatre, 236 West 45th
Street, New York, NY
orphansonbroadway.com
The Nance
Lyceum Theatre, 149 West 45th
Street, New York, NY
lct.org
The Big Knife
American Airlines Theatre, 227 West 42nd
Street, New York, NY
roundabouttheatre.org
The Assembled Parties
Friedman Theatre, 261 West 47th
Street, New York, NY
manhattantheatreclub.com
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