at the theatre: who’s afraid of virginia woolf?

For anyone with even a passing knowledge of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? the ghosts of Burton and Taylor loom large. Not necessarily because their performances in Mike Nichols’ terrifying noir exorcism are good per se – though they are superlative – but because they have been committed to celluloid, which has become our culture’s lingua franca. (Arguing about the superiority of Uta Hagen’s Martha in Alan Schneider’s original staging is a bit like the arguments made for Laurette Taylor’s turn in Williams’ The Glass Menagerie:  you had to be there. The legacy of the ephemeral artist evaporates with time.) Which is one of the reasons why Tracy Letts – the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of August: Osage County – is so successful as the male half of Albee’s dynamic duo in the Steppenwolf Theatre production of Woolf which opened at the Booth Theatre exactly 50 years after the original Broadway opening. Letts gives a tightly controlled, calibrated impersonation of Richard Burton as George. Like a floor show playing out in front of a movie screen it’s familiar, if not entirely authentic. With crisp enunciation, Letts’ muscular, musical delivery, is at once stylized and powerful but there’s something ineffable missing here: the humanity  On the flip side Amy Morton’s Martha is all too human, throwing off the balance of this marital cage match. You get what the actress is after: trying to get as far away as possible from Taylor’s lasciviously boozy floozy. As admirable as it is to see this fine actress stretch to find Martha’s desperate depths beneath the bluster, Woolf is not a realistic drama; it’s a Walpurgisnacht, as Albee himself titled the second of the play’s three acts: a highly stylized – dare I say theatrical? – transfigured night. Morton expends so much Chekovian energy being miserable that when she finally confesses to Nick  – who, along with Honey, is a virtual non-entity in this outing – that George is the only man who ever made her happy, it rings false. Nothing could make this woman happy – except perhaps a train to Moscow.

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at the theatre: clybourne park

Two years after it’s premiere at Playwrights Horizons, Bruce Norris’ acid-washed Pulitzer Prize winning diptych about real estate and race relations, Clybourne Park, has made it to Broadway. It was touch and go there for a while after lead producer Scott Rudin beat a hasty retreat when a dispute with the playwright over an unrelated acting gig turned into an exercise in vindictiveness. Jujamcyn president Jordan Roth managed to save the day (and the limited run of the play) and the critics for the most part have lined up like good little soldiers to heap hosannas on the one that almost got away. Pam McKinnon directs the original off-Broadway company with a sure hand and everybody is uniformly top-notch, equally milking every outre moment for did-they-really-just-say-that laughs mixed with I-can’t-believe-they-said-that gasps. That said, the only real weakness lies in Norris’s too-clever script, which begins (and ends) with an interesting conceit: act one takes place in 1959, as a white community frets about the African-American family about to move in next door; act two flashes forward fifty years and the same house represents very different demographics, with gentrification now knocking on the neighborhood’s door. Climbing through the looking-glass of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, the characters navigate the play’s shifts from political correctness to racial resentment, revealing how far our ideas of race and gentrification have changed. Or have they? Duh. Despite the gentleman in the Oval Office - or maybe because of him – we know the answer to that question all too clearly as of late. So sitting though Norris’s play, I’m sorry to say, is a bit like being forced to watch a special (funnier) two-hour episode of Thirtysomething. He’s preaching to the converted, yes. But does he need to be so painfully obvious about it?

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back to basics

Remember when the primary purview of this website was travel? Lately it seems as though I’ve done little more than eat myself silly and go to the theater. Well, next week it’s back to basics: I’m off to one of my favorite parts of Ireland, the wild and wooly coast of Co. Clare. Until then, however, it’s back to the trough – not to mention another op’nin’ of another show.

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at the theatre: end of the rainbow

Judy Garland’s life was stranger than fiction. An international star since the age of twelve, the arc of her professional success and personal pain is a study of a life lived in extremis. Accolades and addictions went hand in hand. Triumph and tribulation, too. Could there be a story better suited to the stage?  I think not. Though her life has seen its share of … how shall we say? … creative adaptations – Adrienne Barbeau as Judy in The Property Known As Garland will go down in my personal theatergoing history as a camp classic par excellence – Peter Quilter’s award-winning 2005 play End of the Rainbow focuses on the legend as she prepares for what would amount to a final career comeback at London’s Talk of the Town, just three scant months before a fatal overdose. After successful runs in Australia and the UK, the play finally lands on Broadway with a jolt of electricity I can only describe as seismic. It’s not so much the quality of the play that kept me riveted to the edge of my seat but the roof-raising, star-making performance of Tracie Bennett as the singular Garland. I won’t mince words, this could easily have turned into a catastrophic exercise in caricature (see Barbeau, above). Yet Bennett transcends mere mimicry and fully invests the woman with an excruciating vulnerability that’s at times almost too painful to witness. Emotionally this Garland is like a cat skinned alive, at the end of her tether and tenaciously struggling with inner demons both inspiring and all-consuming. As her adoring (gay) accompanist Anthony, Michael Cumpsty is an adept, if occasional, foil along with Tom Pelphrey as musician Mickey Deans, the final fiancée who both orchestrated her comeback and enabled its demise. But let’s be honest, the men in Garland’s life were little more than extravagant accessories and the same holds true here. The truly spine-tingling moments take place when Bennett is left alone on stage, performing a handful of Garland’s most memorable songs with show-stopping humor and gusto. It’s like stepping through a looking-glass: you’re in London, 1969, and one of the 20th century’s greatest artists is giving you everything she’s got – and then some. Try and remember the last time you saw a play where the audience roared for an encore. Now hightail it to the Belasco, where it happens nightly – and the audience only exits the theater reluctantly.

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at the theatre: carrie, the musical

Let me state the obvious: Carrie is a curious subject for a musical. (Full disclosure: I spent close to seven years developing a musical called The Screams of Kitty Genovese, so I consider myself somewhat of an authority on curious source materials.) Yet director Stafford Arima, along with the crackerjack producing team behind MCC, presciently understood that the recent explosion of bullies as a cultural phenomena – along with the slow simmer of religious fanaticism dancing on the lip of a Republican primary race – made the basic premise of Broadway’s most famous flop more than just current. It was suddenly, dare I say, about to be very relevant. Perhaps the time had come to give Carrie her due; perhaps the time for a revisit was now? All of which begs the question: was telekinetic Carrie ahead of her time? To be quick, No – but not for want of trying. The much revised and structurally re-imagined take on Stephen King’s first novel is no lost masterpiece but neither is it destined to remain the butt of so many Broadway-insider jokes. Strangely enough, where it fails is in not going far enough into the extreme: Carrie has all the trappings of an oddly modern Wagnerian opera: religious myths, animal sacrifice, lots of blood, the creation and destruction of the world. In fact a few times I heard what I thought were musical snippets of another bloody opera-disguised-as-a-musical, Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd. That said Michael Gore’s score is less the finale of Gotterdammerung than a simplified Spooky Mormon Hell Dream. Despite a handful of powerful musical duets afforded to Carrie and her mother, Margaret, there is noticeably a lack of specific writing for supporting characters. It’s in this miasma of 80’s soft rock that Carrie’s camp quotient is eternally mired. Lawrence D. Cohen’s book is the antithesis: taut and clear, finding the heroic within the quotidian lives of small town America and making the 40-year old story more relevant than ever. Where he stumbles is in framing the evening with a clumsy inquisition of the solitary survivor from the prom. Sure, it provides a wedge into the story while imparting a volume of background but it’s a far from elegant trick, delivered by actress Christy Altomare with all the histrionics of a waterboarding at Gitmo. The rest of the ensemble is fine – if smaller than it should be. Marin Mazzie is in good voice, finding a well of sympathetic depths in Carrie’s lonely zealot of a mother. Molly Ranson might look like a refuge from HBO’s Big Love, but her Carrie White is solid, sensitive, and ultimately sad. It’s enough to make me wish the authors got around to fixing the scene at the prom. After everything Ms. Ranson has been called upon to suffer through, she - and we – deserves her big Brunnhilde moment. Still, despite any misgiving about this particular production I have to tip my hat to Michael Gore, Dean Pitchford and Lawrence D. Cohen for their risk-taking spirit in revisiting a project some 20 years on: there is hope, after all, in honest error.

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charles dickens, theatrical

Charles Dickens was Britain’s first true literary superstar. In his time, he attracted international acclaim and adulation, while many of his books became instant classics. Today, his popularity continues unabated, and his work remains not only widely read but also widely adapted for stage and screen. Celebrating the bicentennial of the writer’s birth, The Morgan Library & Museum is taking pains to also reveal the polymath behind the fiction. Yes, the museum’s famous manuscript of A Christmas Carol is on display – & available to view online HERE – but more interesting are his exceptionally brilliant and entertaining letters, which track not only his work as a novelist but also his reading tours across the United States, his philanthropic pursuits, and his lesser-known experiments with mesmerism, a precursor to hypnotherapy. Of particular interest to me is the ephemera of Dickens’ theatrical pursuits. Together with playwright Wilkie Collins, Dickens produced amateur theatricals at Tavistock House, his family home. On display are a handful of leaflets promoting these evenings, advising the audience – largely made up of friends, members of Parliament, judges, and various government ministers – at what time their carriages home should be ordered, as well as God Save the Queen! Most amusing is a broadsheet for the Theatre Royal, Adelphi, promoting the only dramatic version of A Christmas Carol sanctioned by Dickens. It goes into great detail summarizing the events of the story before advertising the theater’s subsequent offerings. Lastly it offers a tease of what’s on the horizon: Anthony & Cleopatra, Married & Settled. I’d like to see Dickens tackle that one.

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at the theatre: jesus christ superstar

The problem with Jesus Christ Superstar struck me at La Jolla Playhouse during intermission: like Ibsen’s Peer Gynt it’s meant to be heard and not necessarily seen. Originally created as a concept album, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s score is by and large pop-rock music. Fun to hear and even more fun to sing along with it’s not necessarily dramatic in the way music in the theater needs to be in order to hold the interest of the viewer and create a continuity of story. The contemporary pop-rock song by tradition dwells in a single emotion for three minutes; the theater song, when successful, takes character and listener on a journey which moves the story forward. In listening to an album we can make great jumps of time, space, and logic without a second thought – in the theater it falls upon the musical’s director to take over the role of our imagination and somehow make a cohesive omelette from so many scrambled eggs. For Des McAnuff, the Tony-winning director and former Artistic Director at La Jolla, that clarity comes mostly in the form of a “modern” conceptualization of mixed metaphors that somehow think a dinky news zipper and a handful of projections will somehow put the viewer in the mind of Tahir Square, or any of the social media-driven uprisings that grabbed our attention in 2011. Jesus as leader of a flash mob? I dont think so. The cast of amateurs doesn’t help matters. With the exception of Josh Young and Jeremy Kushnier as a morally conflicted Judas and Pontius Pilate, respectively, the cast acts as though they wandered in off a tour of Godspell. Then again, Judas and Pilate are the only characters given anything resembling a journey – each trying to do the right thing - so of course they come off a bit more successfully. Poor Jesus, he has nothing to do but look holy until his big 11 o’clock number with God – I mean Dad. In the title role Paul Nolan does an admirable job of staring vacantly into space. Let’s just say I left the theater humming – but vastly underwhelmed by the lack of cohesion. I expect it’ll always be so until a production comes along where the director’s imagination allows me to retain mine. In fact, the one and only successful Superstar I’ve seen was put on a few years ago with the singer Peaches. Talk about radical: it was a bare stage with just her and a piano, trusting the audience to fill in all the blanks. She sang the whole show on her own – just like I’ve been known to do in the shower or basement – before being joined onstage by the a handful of dancers to revel in the title number. It was perfection.

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at the theatre: stick fly

If I’m learning anything at all this theatre season it’s that a play needn’t be empirically good to be highly enjoyable. Lydia Diamond’s Stick Fly, presented by the singer Alicia Keys at Broadway’s Court Theater, is a sterling example. I had almost left at intermission. My date had bailed on me; I was miles ahead of everyone onstage and far from engrossed when the first act curtain rang down. Yet something kept me in my seat. Complacency maybe? Inertia? Whatever it was, I’m thankful because the comic pleasures of Diamond’s play – and there are many – don’t fully reveal themselves until the second act. Act one is all set up as the sons LeVay arrive at the family’s country house to introduce Mom and Dad to their respective girlfriends. Flip is a doctor – just like his father. His girl will be along later and yes, she’s …. Italian. Spoon is the stumbling younger son, played with charming empathy by Dule Hill. His fiancee Taylor – the vivacious Tracie Thoms – is an entomologist who’s chosen career seems to be garner mention for the sole purpose of including a second act story that explains the play’s title. Dad shows up late.  Mom’s mysteriously nowhere to be found. And the family maid, Miss Ellie, has fallen ill, so she’s sent her daughter Cheryl (Condola Rashad, in a performance that is sure to be much ballyhooed) to look after the family this weekend.  What’s interesting here is that if you read the above with taking in the names of the actors you’d in no way know that this play is about an African-American family. In fact, the LeVays are the oldest blacks on Martha’s Vineyard outside of Oak Bluffs. Three generations ago their great-grandfather was given this land in exchange for a little shipping – shipping what, well, we don’t talk about that dear. This is a family of extreme privilege. And though David Gallo’s expansive set lets you in on the fact as soon as you enter the theater, it’s only as the first act progresses that you discover how casually cruel people insulated by great wealth can be – regardless of race. That’s not to say race doesn’t come into play. Taylor is light-skinned, and Flip’s girlfriend Kimber isn’t really Italian, she’s white – as well as rich. There’s a tendency when concentrating so much privilege in one room to try to keep the bonhomie effervescent but the playwright forces her characters into constraints that seem inauthentic at times. Too often it feels like everyone would rather be down the block, trading Coward’s quips in Private Lives. And while we’re at it, where was the dramaturge on this play? It has come through two of our best regional theaters:  the McCarter and the Huntington, both established organizations with regarded dramaturgical staffs. Yet there are cavernous jumps of logic in this play as well as some truly lazy writing where we are supposed to fill in gaps of plot with the arched eyebrow of a sassy maid.  For a playwright who seems to take such pleasure in expounding on the dynamics of race and the socio-economic paradigm, she is startling light on connecting the dots when it comes to constructing her plot. For an audience raised on the television sitcom, however, this is exactly how life plays out: in close-up and with a gesture. Which must be why everyone around me seem to more than take it in stride, they ate it up. I won’t spoil the big act two reveals but suffice it so say that if you make it that far, the play finally finds its rhythm and hits its comedic stride, leaving a pleasant aftertaste that lingers. Aristotle would have walked out aghast at the intermission. And he’d’ve missed all the fun, too.

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at the theater: follies & private lives

Broadway’s got me feeling awfully nostalgic this week. Stephen Sondheim and James Goldman Follies arrived at the Marquis Theatre in a production that originated at Washington DC’s more-miss-than-hit Kennedy Center. Having sat through my share of half-baked Follies follies I’ll admit to being less than enthused at the prospect of yet another aborted summit attempt. Yet the lure of Bernadette Peters and Jan Maxwell as a pair of chorines whose lives diverged in the snowy woods of showbiz proved too alluring.  Plus, how ironic that the musical set in a theater soon to be demolished for the sake of another parking lot would take up in a hotel built atop the early graves of two of the Rialto’s most elegant theaters, the Helen Hayes and Morosco. Limited expectations turn out to be a boon to this production, only intermittently directed by Eric Schaeffer. Still, I wish the director had a point of view – or at least a sure hand. Too often he lets his company do their own thing to deleterious effect. Case in point, the wonderfully miscast Elaine Paige, who delivers an oddly vigorous – and strangely accented – rendition of what is perhaps one of the most famous 11 o’clock numbers in musical theater history, I’m Still Here. Teri White and Jane Houdyshell fare much better with the mirror number, Who’s That Woman, and Broadway Baby, respectively, but fun as they are, this isn’t a show about the pastiche of secondary roles; it’s about a mismatched quartet of chorus girls and stage door johnnies and the roads they failed to take. “Never look back” may be the fatal watch cry spun into gossamer strands of wistful regret by Rosalind Elias as the ghost of her younger self joins the elderly diva in the evening’s most affecting and poignant duet but Ben and Phyllis and Buddy and Sally can’t seem to help themselves – they think they’re still young and they want a second act, Fitzgerald be damned.  Boy, oh boy do they get it. In what can only be described as a musical exploration of the human psyche, each of the quartet performs a follies number straight out of Freudian analysis.  Follies is the first – and last – musical I know of to end with a nervous breakdown and yet, somehow it works. On some subatomic level it is deeply affecting to see these desperately unhappy people come apart at the seams. What ultimately redeems them is the Beckettian impulse to pick themselves up and keep going forward: the past is past and they’re not looking back anymore. Down the block Noel Coward is taking quite the different tack. Go back, go back, go back he seems to say; you got it right the first time. (At least as far as marriage is concerned.) Unfortunately the champagne fizz of Elyot and Amanda’s badinage comes over as flat as day-old ginger ale in Richard Eyre’s cheap as chips production imported from London via Toronto. Ostensibly the main attraction is Samantha, I mean, Kim Cattrall – but the lady has all the period style of a fruit crate fallen off an errant truck. She’s not terrible, but she’s by no means good either, doing little service to what is already a tenuously written reality overly dependent on style over substance. Paul Gross’ Elyot has style to spare – and substance, too, come to think of it.  If only some of it rubbed off on the rest of the (mis) cast I might believe the folly of Coward’s happily unhappy ending.

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park avenue shakespeare

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at the theatre: houston’s alley

Who’d’ have thunk my little trip to Houston would turn into such a cultural orgasm?  I had few expectations coming down here and most of them revolved around craft beer and indoor shopping -  so far I’ve had neither.  What I have had is a feast of fine art. Now it’s finally time to take in some performing arts.  My friend is at the Alley Theater performing George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, which I’ve never actually seen on stage before. (the Wendy Hiller film, yes; Lerner and Loewe’s musical adaptation, My Fair Lady, many times, of course, including a brief stint playing Colonel Pickering in the 9th grade.) What is oddly made crystal clear to me while watching the Alley’s entertainingly lush production is just how perfect a musical adaptation My Fair Lady really is.  Sure, it cheats a little for the sake of a happy ending but ultimately it doesn’t simply add songs to Shaw’s play, it augments the discourse on English class structure and the emancipation of women while packaging it up as romantic entertainment. Those subversive underpinnings are what this production nails quite strikingly: Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle are both fools,  mutually dependent and inextricably linked. Perhaps that’s why modern audiences always seem to yearn for them to go off into the sunset together. Touched as he was by his own lackluster love life, Shaw railed vigorously against the implausible success of the couple’s Romantic love, yet he, too, got it all wrong: Henry and Eliza do belong together, if for different reasons. It would take another forty years – and the arrival of both Rex Harrison and Sartre – for us to figure out exactly why.

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i know what you’re thinking

“Houston?!?!?” Well, trust me, I’m as surprised and bemused as you are to suddenly find myself in Texas, a state I’ve pretty much boycotted since Karla Faye Tucker got the lethal needle back in 1998. Yet when I discovered that a good friend of mine would be performing in a play at Houston’s respected Alley Theater, I thought a long weekend jaunt to a place I’ve never had any desire to visit would be a great excuse to continue a tradition begun last month in San Diego – exploring cities I know little to nothing about because friends happen to be there acting in plays. It’s as good a reason as a toss of the I-Ching or a dart thrown at a map, I reckon. Plus, as you can tell from the photos: Houston’s South of the Border bona fides means I won’t go wanting for an honest plate of ceviche (or fish tacos!) anytime soon.  Hale and hearty Houston, seat of Harris County, Texas and fourth largest city in America, I come without a map – or a clue for that matter. I’m unarmed and eager for a weekend’s worth of honest exploration.

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at the theatre: priscilla, queen of the desert

The night before Sunday’s Tony Awards I felt a need, a compulsion, really, to see Priscilla, Queen of the Desert for myriad reasons: I am a big fan of the film; a friend’s ex did the sets; and duh, not since Judy and Liza played the Palace has there been a greater gay quotient on Broadway. Plus, of all this season’s nominated productions Priscilla was the lone holdout – the missing Playbill in my commemorative 2010/11 collection. Let me be blunt, however:  this was not a case of saving the best for last. Belabored would be more apt. Australia is not a country known for its grasp of subtlety. That’s not a put down by any means. Much like America and our own cultural export, what’s so appealing about Oz is its naive and unabashed cultural optimism. It speaks in wide, earnest brush strokes, appealing to the broadest possible constituency. What’s hinted at on entering the lobby at the Palace Theater and soon becomes abundantly clear in the first five minutes of the show is that Priscilla, the intimate and affecting little film was a storytelling anomaly. Priscilla, the musical is determined to reinforce the Australian national zeitgeist – and it has all the trappings of a drunken hen weekend in Brisbane. Now let me go ahead and contradict myself:  for all the self-conscious tackiness on display, the – God, help me – audience participation, the musical numbers that elicit unintentional laughs due to lyrics that just don’t fit, it’s hard to truly hate Priscilla. At its heart the story is a journey of recognizing and accepting the basic human decency that exists inside us all, despite what external appearances might project. To turn one’s nose up at that seems so unseemly, so cynical. Yet I can’t help but still wish that those theatrical wizards from Down Under put as much effort into telling the tale as they did in figuring out how to replace the ABBA songs which were so central to the film – and currently enjoying exclusive use down the street at Mamma Mia – with ones by Madonna. Hats off to Tony Sheldon, who deserved a Tony for Best Supporting Actor, not Leading as he was mistakenly nominated. Every time Priscilla comes perilously close to completely losing her soul – and its often, trust me – Sheldon brings it back to earth as Bernadette, the transsexual with a heart made of Marmite. Miscast in the central role of Tick, Will Swenson does what he can but his voice is not right and his shoulders are not wide enough to carry the show. On the other hand Nick Adams’ shoulders are not only wide, but sculpted – as is every other inch of him. His Felicia not only subverts the entire drag conceit with a well-displayed chiseled physique, but with his wide-eyed optimism and Mickey and Judy attitude, he seems to have dropped in from an altogether different – and vastly more appealing – land of Oz.

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at the theater: the old globe

One of my chief excuses for trekking out west to San Diego was the opportunity to see a friend of mine onstage in Tracy Letts’ Pulitzer-winning drama August: Osage County at The Old Globe – one of the California’s premier regional theaters. As expected it was a spirited and superlative production of an epic play about the secrets and lies infesting an American family on the Great Plains. It was also a not-so-subtle reminder that great theater exists (and inspires) all across America – not just on Broadway or in New York.

 

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at the theatre: one arm

Most unproduced scripts remain so for a good reason: they stink. Though on rare occasion a worthwhile or revelatory story falls victim to the passing zeitgeist – or even something as mundane and random as “scheduling difficulties” – coming to light only in an author’s afterlife thanks to the random diggings of an academic or biographer, more often than not the majority of aborted dramas remain squirreled away in the proverbial bottom desk drawer because they’re efforts unworthy of the author who either cannot let go of them for some intimate reasons known only to them or because they have been rightfully forgotten, not because they are misunderstood masterpieces awaiting post-millenial redemption. I’m afraid that One Arm, adapted and directed for the stage by Moises Kaufman for The New Group from an unproduced screenplay by Tennessee Williams, falls firmly in the category of one those bottom drawer curiosities best left undisturbed. Thematically, it’s vintage Williams: regret and redemption in the seedy underbelly of the Vieux Carre; however, this story of a champion boxer who loses one arm only to quickly descend into the lonely world of hustling – and ultimately murder – doesn’t hang together dramatically.  One has to blame Kaufman, who makes a fatal error in creating a god-awful framing device that only serves to keep the audience at arms length. “One Arm, an unproduced screenplay by Tennessee Williams,” intones the narrator/writer at the curtain’s rise.  It sets the audience up to be spectators, disconcerted voyeurs even, but it also shuts us out as participants. About all we can do is ogle the story of Ollie Olson, all-American hustler, as he suffers one moral degradation after another.  What we can’t do is identify – something that’s crucial to making Williams’ heightened lyricism work. On the eve of his execution, a stranger’s visit causes Ollie to realize just how many lives he has touched. Facing down death, the protective shell cracks: his arm may be mangled but Ollie still feels things. His final moments are a desperate grasp at connection with this stranger; a thwarted need to receive love.  It’s the kind of moment any lover of Williams aches to believe – the moment of the metaphor made flesh.  What’s heartbreaking is that in Kaufman’s production it comes off as half-baked. Or rather, er, one-armed.

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