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November 19, 2004
TT: Talking shops
Time again for my Wall Street Journal drama column. The Broadway previews are coming hot and heavy this month and next, and today I wrote about three high-profile shows, none of which knocked me out, though my unenthusiastic review of Democracy cut sharply and (for me, anyway) unexpectedly against the conventional wisdom:Once or twice a season, Broadway makes room for a play, usually an import, that gets tagged by the press as egghead-friendly. Last spring it was "Jumpers," and now it's Michael Frayn's "Democracy," which opened last night at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre. A huge hit in London, "Democracy" has been transplanted to New York in Michael Blakemore's original National Theatre production, but with a new, all-American cast led by James Naughton and Richard Thomas. It is, as advertised, smart and thoughtful, and if good intentions counted for anything in the theater, "Democracy" would be a great play. But they don't, and it isn't.
Like Mr. Frayn's "Copenhagen," "Democracy" is a fictionalized docudrama. It tells how Willy Brandt (Mr. Naughton), the first left-wing chancellor of West Germany, was forced out of office when it was disclosed that Günter Guillaume (Mr. Thomas), his personal assistant, was in fact an East German secret agent. The play is about the complex relationship between the two men, but since Mr. Frayn has chosen to give it a real-life setting, we also hear from Guillaume's Stasi controller (Michael Cumpsty) and seven of Brandt's colleagues, who discuss the ins and outs of West German politics at squirm-making length. In addition, Guillaume spends far too much time speaking directly to his controller, often switching hats in mid-sentence. The results are at once cluttered and static: Everybody talks, but nothing happens....
Nor was I much impressed with The Good Body:
Eve Ensler, the author of "The Vagina Monologues," is moving up in the world: Her new play is about stomachs.
"The Good Body," which runs through Jan. 16 at the Booth Theatre, is a monologue about Ms. Ensler's midriff and how she learned to live with it, just as you can live with yours, assuming you're a woman who hates the way she thinks she looks...
The real trouble with her show is twofold. In the first place, it's not exactly stop-press news that lots of women are neurotic about their bodies, meaning that long stretches of "The Good Body" sound like "Bridget Jones' Diary" recycled. Furthermore, Ms. Ensler, who identifies herself as a "radical feminist" on the second page of the script, spends the next hour and a half whining à la Woody Allen about her own neuroses. Only at the very end does she assure us--unconvincingly--that she's finally succeeded in raising her own consciousness to the point of accepting her stomach as "the goodest part of me." (It looks perfectly normal, by the way.) Somehow that doesn't strike me as a compelling argument for radical feminism....
Not even Edie Falco, whom I normally adore, was capable of ringing my bell with her performance in the new revival of Marsha Norman's Pulitzer-winning 'night, Mother:
Ms. Falco plays a depressed, epileptic small-town Midwesterner who spends virtually the whole of the play explaining to her mother (Brenda Blethlyn) why her life is no longer worth living ("Maybe if there was something I really liked, like maybe if I really liked rice pudding or cornflakes for breakfast or something, that might be enough"), then locks herself in her bedroom and blows her brains out. Even if I found this scenario plausible, I'd expect the women in question to be presented with at least a moderate amount of subtlety, whereas Ms. Falco and Ms. Blethlyn play their parts flatly and uninvolvingly, accents and all. When first-class actors are so far off the mark, chances are that the director is to blame, and the track record of Michael Mayer, most recently seen on Broadway as the perpetrator-in-chief of the Roundabout Theatre Company's's atrocious revival of "After the Fall," doesn't inspire confidence....
No link, so if you've a mind to read the whole thing, go buy a paper, or (much better yet) go here to subscribe to the online edition of The Wall Street Journal, one of the best bargains in newspaperdom.
Posted November 19, 2004 9:30 AM
