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October 29, 2004
TT: Twelve noisy stereotypes
I returned to Manhattan, picked up today's Wall Street Journal, and what did I see? Me, writing about the Roundabout Theatre Company's revival of Reginald Rose's Twelve Angry Men and the New Group's production of Michael Murphy's Sin (A Cardinal Deposed).I liked Twelve Angry Men in spite of myself:
For those unfamiliar with the plot (there must be a few of you out there), "Twelve Angry Men" tells how a New York jury decides the fate of a minority-group teenager accused of stabbing his father to death. At first the vote is eleven to one in favor of conviction, but the lone dissenter, played here by Boyd Gaines ("Contact") and in the film by Henry Fonda, is determined to convert his furious colleagues, one at a time. Each of the jurors, who are identified only by numbers, is presented as an ethnic or cultural stereotype--an unintentionally absurd touch, seeing as how the script, in earnest '50s style, seeks to persuade us that the defendant is a helpless victim of circumstances à la Stephen Sondheim's "Gee, Officer Krupke" ("We ain't no delinquents/We're misunderstood/Deep down inside us there is good!")....
Mr. Gaines is admirably understated as the saintly Juror No. 8--not even slightly like Fonda, who milked the good-guy angle for all it was worth and then some, and then some more. (He was even dressed in a white suit!) Philip Bosco's otherwise fine performance as the belligerent Juror No. 3, by contrast, is a shade too reminiscent of Lee J. Cobb, Fonda's nemesis in the film. Everybody else is good or better, and Allen Moyer has reproduced a grubby big-city jury room circa 1954 with eerie exactitude, though I found it a bit cute when the whole set rolled sideways to reveal the men's room.
Needless to say, "Twelve Angry Men" is a feel-righteous period piece, a choice specimen of what I think of as the American version of socialist realism. All its ambiguities are pat, and when the curtain comes down you know exactly what you're supposed to go home thinking. It's as if you've just been worked over by a politically correct masseur who pummels you in all the right places. Fortunately, you don't have to swallow the message to enjoy the massage....
I also liked Sin (A Cardinal Deposed), with some qualifications:
John Cullum plays Cardinal Bernard F. Law, who was forced to resign as archbishop of the diocese of Boston when a pair of civil suits revealed that he had covered up horrific allegations of child abuse by numerous priests in his charge, including the now-notorious John Geoghan and Paul Shanley. The script is derived from the transcripts of a pair of videotaped depositions in which Cardinal Law, who initially blamed the cover-up on his subordinates, was confronted with an avalanche of damning written testimony proving that he was fully aware of the charges--and chose to disregard them.
I tend not to be a fan of documentary plays. For one thing, transcripts aren't theater, as the Culture Project's recent production of "Guantánamo" recently proved at tedious length. Not only do such "plays" tend to be shapeless, but such inherent dramatic power as they may have is too often drowned out by the noisy clatter of the stacking of political decks. I feared that "Sin" might suffer from the latter problem--especially when I saw that the liberal Catholic group Voice of the Faithful was handing out leaflets at its performances--but Mr. Murphy, to his credit, plays it down the center. To be sure, he's edited and reshaped the transcripts extensively, compressing two suits into one and several lawyers into two, but his purpose was to be true to the substance of the proceedings, and so far as I know he has not distorted them in any significant way.
For the most part "Sin" also works as theater, though I think Mr. Murphy has made a big mistake in following Cardinal Law's devastating testimony with a brief epilogue in which one of the victims is allowed to speak--the curtain should fall as the humiliated Cardinal walks slowly out of the room. Otherwise, "Sin" scrupulously avoids pulpit-pounding, instead letting the horrors speak for themselves, which they do....
No link. To read the whole thing, buy a copy of this morning's Journal, or do this.
Posted October 29, 2004 3:17 AM
