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November 10, 2006
TT: Dirty laundry
It's time for the Friday Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser, which is a bit jaundiced this week. I reviewed three shows--the New York premiere of The Clean House, the Broadway transfer of Grey Gardens, and a Seattle production of Steve Martin's The Underpants--and didn't like any of 'em:Sarah Ruhl is officially trendy. Not only did the 32-year-old playwright just win a MacArthur "genius grant," but she's making a high-profile New York debut: "The Clean House," which has been staged at the Yale Repertory Theatre and numerous other top regional houses and was a Pulitzer finalist last year, has now come to town in a glossy production starring Blair Brown and Jill Clayburgh. As if that weren't enough buzz for one human being to generate, Ms. Ruhl says she's working on a new play about the history of...the vibrator.
If I sound skeptical about Ms. Ruhl, there's a reason. It's possible to be both trendy and talented, and I suppose it might be possible to write a good play about vibrators, too. I can even think of a few genuine geniuses who've won MacArthurs. But when all these suspicious-looking items turned up on the same resume, the red light on my Faux-O-Meter started blinking, which is why I wasn't surprised when "The Clean House" failed to live up to its own hype. It's clever--too clever by at least half--but scrape away the postmodern trickery and it's nothing more than a soap opera for pseudointellectuals....
"Grey Gardens," the cultiest show of the 2005-06 season, has transferred to Broadway, and though it's been tweaked and tightened, I don't like it any better now than when it opened Off Broadway at Playwrights Horizons back in March.
In case you missed it the first time around, "Grey Gardens" is a musical version of the 1975 cinéma-vérité film documentary about Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter "Little" Edie, two impoverished but spunky high-society ladies who spent their declining years holed up in a decaying Long Island summer house. The cast is exemplary, especially Christine Ebersole, and the direction of Michael Greif and Jeff Calhoun is very fine, but the show itself doesn't add up to much....
When not making movies, Steve Martin writes plays. "The Underpants," his adaptation of "Die Hose," a six-character, one-set farce written in 1911 by the German playwright Carl Sternheim, was produced Off Broadway in 2002 and has since been making the regional rounds. I caught up with "The Underpants" in Seattle, where ACT Theatre is giving it a noisy production whose hard-working actors do their best to obscure the fact that Mr. Martin is no farceur....
No free link. To read the whole thing, pick up a copy of today's morning's Journal and turn to the "Weekend Journal" section. Alternatively, go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you immediate access to the complete text of my review, plus lots of other good stuff. (If you're already a subscriber, the review is here.)
Posted November 10, 2006 12:00 PM
