As promised, here I am again, just in time for the weekly Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser. Today I review Horton Foote’s The Trip to Bountiful and Eugene O’Neill’s A Touch of the Poet, one of which I liked much more than the other:
Mr. Foote’s play is an American classic, albeit one not generally recognized as such (it hasn’t been performed in New York in 45 years). Yet “The Trip to Bountiful” is fully as worthy of regular revival as “Our Town” or “The Glass Menagerie,” and this Off Broadway production, directed by Harris Yulin and acted with quiet skill by the best ensemble cast in town, leaves no doubt of its special quality….
The Peter Norton Space is small enough that the rest of the run, which ends Feb. 19, is likely to sell out very quickly, and while I have yet to hear any buzz about a transfer, this production clearly belongs on Broadway. My guess is that it has the potential to become a sleeper hit, just like “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” and “Doubt.”…
Eugene O’Neill is one of those Great American Authors whose work leaves me cold. It doesn’t help that the difference in quality between his best and worst plays is vast, but even at his occasional best, I usually find him exhaustingly long-winded. As for his worst, well, there’s “A Touch of the Poet,” a 19th-century costume piece written between 1935 and 1942 as part of an unfinished 11-play cycle and newly revived by the Roundabout Theatre Company at Studio 54 as a vehicle for Gabriel Byrne…
Mr. Byrne plays Con Melody, a Byron-spouting soldier turned drunken innkeeper who has squandered the whole of his life pretending to a gentility he doesn’t possess by birth, sacrificing the happiness of his stage-Irish wife (Dearbhla Molloy) and hatchet-tongued daughter (Emily Bergl) to his pitiable pretensions. It’s a promising situation, but O’Neill smothers it in superfluous exposition–you could cut the whole first act and scarcely notice it was gone…
Two footnotes on The Trip to Bountiful:
(1) Here’s how moved I was by the play and production: Horton Foote was sitting three rows behind me. I wanted to say something to him after the show, but was so choked up that I didn’t trust myself to speak.
(2) This is the Signature Theatre Company’s fifteenth-anniversary season, and thanks to a generous subsidy from Time Warner, all tickets for all performances of all anniversary-season productions cost just $15 each. In this case, that’s an amazing deal.
No link, so if you want to read the whole thing, pick up a copy of today’s Journal, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you instant access to the complete text of my review (along with lots of other art-related stories).