Old Times and No Man's Land - A Theater Review and a Festival Wrap Up

Harold Pinter

The Pinter Festival at ACT has been everything a theater festival should be:

• It was grand in scale : producing three full main stage productions almost simultaneously; hosting numerous auxiliary events including readings, classes and film screenings. 
• It was focused : if you didn't know what Pinter was about at the start of the festival, you certainly did by the end. 
• It was courageous : produced with all local talent; taking on a serious often misunderstood playwright and producing his plays for an indoor festival in Seattle's warmest time of the year.
• It was uneven : the  productions were extremely varied in their effectiveness. 
• It was addictive : even after the most disatisfying of the shows, you wanted to come back and see the rest; you even hoped that this will be only the first of possibly a few Pinter Festival's that may come over the next handful of years.

Overall, the festival felt like a gift to the city, and I was thrilled to be able to witness it unfold.

I saw The Dumb Waiter and Celebration at the beginning of the festival and wrote about them here. This past week I was able to catch performances of No Man's Land  and Old Times.

Jeffery Frace, Cheyenne Casebier and Anne Allgood in Old Times

Old Times might be my new favorite Pinter play. A married couple, Deeley and Kate, entertain an old friend of Kate's, Anna, in their country house. Soon, however, Deeley and Anna's efforts to each claim Kate as their own escalate the evening's visit into a desperate and brutal journey into all the characters' pasts that leaves no one unscathed. I had read it before but never had seen it performed. I always loved the wonderfully obscure tension that bounced back and forth between the characters like a diabolical three way tennis match. But never had I imagined the breadth of humor that could be mined from the power plays amongst the characters. Under Victor Pappas' ultra-focused and confident direction the three extremely talented performers  (Jeffery Frace (Deeley), Cheyenne Casebier (Kate) and Anne Allgood (Anna)) deliver a surprisingly laugh out loud funny take on the script that manages to hit so much unexpected comedy in the play while still slowly building the extreme discomfort that rests at the core of the piece.

Frace brings just the right combination of casual aloofness and barbed sarcasm to Deeley that allows him to embody both the simplistic empathy and haunting unreliability that makes him the perfect host to this most unusual of evenings. Casebier as Kate is almost Zen-like in her stillness and silence during Anna and Deeley's power struggle which keeps her an important and well heard character even in long stretches where she has no lines (many an actor fail miserably in such a role where they seemingly have nothing active to do). Allgood is both poised charm and striking venom as the evening's questionably intentioned guest from the past. There was a brief glimpse of Allgood's range and affinity for Pinter in Celebration, but here we really get to see an assured, multilayered and memorable performance. 

With these strong performances at its center, what works so well in this production is it ability to take Pinter off the page and deliver it in a lively, unexpected and unsettling way to its audience. Director Pappas, with his actors and design team (Robert Dahlstrom's set is flawless in its simplicity, utilitarianism and elegance, and Rick Paulsen's lighting assists in producing some unforgettable images on the stage), make many subtle but bold choices with the script that give it a broad, tangible and recognizable life that many Pinter productions are too reverential or too intimidated to ever reach. If the Pinter Festival was a great success, Old Times was its crowning achievement (The Dumb Waiter was excellent as well, but I believe Old Times to be a richer and more nuanced play to begin with).

Moore, Crook, Corrado and Harris in No Man's Land

While Old Times surprised in its life off the page, No Man's Land never seemed to get far from a table reading. In this play we have two men, Hirst and Spooner, visiting at the home of the wealthier of the two, Hirst, after having met earlier in the evening at a local pub.Supposed strangers, these men soon find some odd common ground. Their relationship is further strained by two young men, Briggs and Foster, who are sort of assistants to Hirst, whose motives to protect their benefactor and themselves begin to quickly turn all of our assumptions about who these people are and what we are watching upside down.

Frank Corrado as Hirst and Randy Moore as Spooner seem, along with director  Penelope Cherns, to be trying to be following Pinter's script as a piece of music, as if the language is so strong that all you need to do is hop on, deliver it well and let you take it for a ride. The result is a pretty uneven production that produces a handful of interesting moments but doesn't really hold together. By the time Benjamin Harris as Foster and Peter Crook as Briggs arrive, each bringing a bit more of a pointed and welcomed energy to the production, the tone has been set and the proceeding action feels disconnected from what has come before. The problem is most pronounced during the play's handful of extremely long monologues almost all of which are delivered almost as if there is no one else on stage and subsequently, the rest of the life on stage dies. Cherns says in her program notes that "Pinter demands a light touch." It feels here that she touched way too lightly and didn't make the bolder choices that would have given the audience the more visceral experience that this play is designed to deliver.

A testament to the power of this festival is that despite my feelings about No Man's Land I felt even more compelled to see Old Times afterwards. Having seen them both now, along with the initial two one acts of the festival, I wish I had been able to make it to some of the auxiliary events around these shows. I do hope ACT is happy with the results of this experiment and feel  moved to bring us another wave of Pinter works in the future.

The Pinter Festival  plays at ACT through August 26. Tickets here.

Afterthoughts

Accents : In a festival like this, where a number of Pinter plays are being tackled by the same ensemble at once, I would have loved to see one show done without British accents. Clearly many of Pinter's plays are set in specific locales in England and use language that is distinct to British culture. Yet a number of his plays are unrealistic and non-naturalistic enough that I believe they could weather a true relocation across the pond and have our American actors speak the words with their own domestic accents. We do Shakespeare without accents all the time. Beckett, it could be argued, actually brings a different nuance when done with an Irish accent, but he still holds up marvelously when done with unadorned American accents. In these plays, Celebration, seems to be the play where accents mattered the least. In No Man's Land, I would argue that the accents almost got in the way. It felt like Corrado and Moore sort of fell in love with their accents and played the delivery of their lines more than the action of the play.

Design : While I found the costumes, lights and sets for The Dumb Waiter and Old Times  to be wonderfully effective and visually striking, I felt that the design elements in both Celebration and No Man's Land to be severely judgmental of  the plays' characters. The color choices in both were unappetizing palates with what seemed to be purposefully ill-fitting costumes that pulled the audience even further away from any kind of empathy with the characters. Just as the set of Celebration  didn't read as a fancy restaurant, the set of No Man's Land simply didn't read as the rich house it was supposed to be. Instead of a wall of books and a separate bar, both were crammed into a single unit. The exit door which is supposed to lead to the rest of the house, read more like it lead to a small bathroom or the narrow hallway of a nursing home (I actually thought that Hirsh, when he crawls out of the room having fallen down drunk, was exiting into a bathroom to vomit, not to make his way slowly toward his bedroom elsewhere in the house). Maybe in an attempt to keep the four plays looking dramatically different visually, the design team went a bit too far with No Man's Land in finding a disjointed and claustrophobic counter balance to the cleanly orchestrated and Old Times.

Corliolanus - Theater Review

When my kids were in preschool, there was an open house once a year where parent were invited. That event was called "soup night." To prepare for soup night every family was asked to choose a vegetable, dice it and have their child bring it to school. Then the teacher would take all the little baggies of vegetables and throw them in a pot and make vegetable soup out of them. The soup was served at the open house.

What was the result? Well, it was certainly food. It was edible. But, of course, it was a mess. It was a well intentioned exercise to bring cohesiveness to a group, to provide a tangible product that symbolized our community and to emphasize the shared role we have in helping to raise all of our children. It was a fine vision with a misguided method to accomplish it.

I thought about this bad soup as I was leaving the Seattle Shakespeare Company's latest production of Coriolanus. Not to belabor the metaphor, but the vision here was not bad and there were certainly plenty of good vegetables that were used in the making, but the final dish we were served was ultimately flawed.

I have to say I was a little shocked at how bad this production was. It began with what was one of the worst stage fight/battle sequences I have ever seen. It looked like it might have been closer to a symbolic pantomime ballet where we weren't supposed to even venture the mildest belief that these people could actually be hitting each other. But such a ballet would be graceful even in its brutishness and certainly not have the grunting and histrionics associated with professional wrestling. It would certainly not climax with a cliched giant silhouette of Caius Martius (later Coriolanus) back lit like a foreboding villain in a cartoon.

The overacting of the players engaged in battle was so extreme that during an early scene shift, after a moment of quiet, when I heard a clearly fake, pretend, unauthentic, actor-ly growl coming from off stage, I almost groaned to myself that we were about to endure another round of horrifically stage-y stage combat. Yet, to my surprise, the sound was not coming from one of the posturing men who had just left the scene, but a young boy (Jack Taylor) playing Young Martius (Coriolanus's son). The boy was entering the scene pretending to fight off invisible make-believe enemies.

This may have been the most demonstrative display of the difference between good acting and bad acting I have seen on the same stage in a long time. The boy's action was to pretend. So he did. He grunted and howled, thrust his wooden sword and charged his foes. It sounded and looked perfectly like a boy pretending. He was perfect. Yet it also looked just like the men  who had been on stage before him. But they weren't supposed to be pretending. They were supposed to have been fighting a life or death battle. Unfortunately the audience didn't see a life or death battle. The audience saw a mediocre version of an event akin to an amateur Renaissance fair.

The juxtaposition between the young Jack Taylor's acting and the rest of the cast is not the only inconsistency. Both Peter Jacobs as Menenius Agrippa and Therese Diekhans as Volumnia, each who had some of my favorite moments in the play, seemed to be struggling to slow down and be clear in their actions and speech in what was an otherwise a noisy, cluttered and unnecessarily messy production.

The design of the show was unbalanced throughout and certainly did not help guide the actors or the audience through the story. The costumes were the worst kind of undefined eclectic mishmash of periods and styles that the apocalyptic film The Road Warrior made popular and dramatically acceptable. But the combination of Home Depot purchased knee pads with authentic looking Roman Helmets made some of the cast look ridiculously comical in scenes that called for gravity. The washed out paper-mache  look to the set did not do anything to evoke time, place, mood or feel (sets need to do one of these at minimum). The stark white light that was used on many scenes, casting large awkward shadows on black walls that were clearly painted black so as not to be part of the set and illuminating elements of costume and set design that are better left a little mysterious to the audience, was a continual "last call" alert on a play that had hardly even got going.

All this, of course, to me, points to a lack of clear and focused direction. The director, David Quicksall, clearly had some big ideas with this production. His use of the crowd scenes to reflect contemporary urban unrest as we have seen in the last year with the "Occupy" movements, seems on the surface like a sound idea. Yet the scenes he created on stage did not contain a fraction of the intensity, seriousness, silliness, audacity, charm, or absurdity of the events that happened during Occupy Seattle. Instead these actors looked like a predictably unified unthinking mob who cared more about making intense facial expressions than changing the world around them.

I will grant that there was one moment of directorial genius in the evening. As the conclusion of an fight between Coriolanus (still Martius at this moment of the play) and Tullus Aufidious draws the two fighting actors upstage, we suddenly have Volumnia (Coriolanus's mother) and Young Martius (his son) run slowly across the stage in a playful mock sword fight, while the two men continue their more savage battle upstage. It is a beautiful piece of stage juxtaposition and even more interesting in adding some theatrical nuance to the fact that Volumnia made Coriolanus into the brutal warrior that he is. Here, then, even while the elder Martius fights for his life in a battle that will eventually lead to his exile, his young son is at home, playfully being taught the same lessons by the same mother.

Unfortunately, this moment was a but that, quick, fleeting and not to be repeated or matched for the rest of the evening.

I labored over writing this review. I want to support and help strengthen our local theater scene, not tear it down. Yet, there must be a place, besides whispered conversations at a late night bar, where dissatisfaction with our local theaters can be expressed. I was not satisfied with this production of Coriolanus. It represented to me why live theater is not more popular and why Shakespeare, in particular, is often avoided. Seattle Shakespeare Company can do and has done much better. I look forward to returning to their theater to have a markedly different experience next time and writing a very different review.

Drama by John Lithgow - A Book Review

This is the audio book that, for the past month, has made the effort of daily transportation around Seattle much more bearable and entertaining. In general I am a bit skeptical of actor memoirs. As fun as some of the famous name dropping can be, it rarely sustains for a whole book. Plus, acting and writing are such different skills that the prose in most books of this kind lays pretty flat on the page.

Fortunately, these problems are well avoided here. First, John Lithgow's heartfelt, honest and lively memoir spends most of its time in his years leading up to his film and TV career that he is mostly know for now. The book's subtitle, "An Actor's Education," is very fitting. This is the story of how Lithgow grew into acting. There certainly are some great anecdotes late in the book about his ten years in the 1970's on Broadway and his encounters with a young Meryl Streep, an inspiring Mike Nichols and a passionate Jose Quintero. But the heart of the book is the young Lithgow's immersion in the theater, mainly through the work of his father, Arthur Lithgow, a tireless director, actor and producer of theater, mainly Shakespeare, that had his son John in and around the stage constantly from a very early age.

Malcolm Gladwell could easily have used Lithgow's story as an example for his book about success, Outliers. One of Gladwell's points in that book is that anyone who becomes a stand out expert in their field, an outlier, has somehow accumulated 10,000 hours of practice at it to do so. Based on young John's exposure to his father's Shakespeare festivals and his eventual roles in those shows, my guess is he logged half of those 10,000 hours before he even went to college.

This brings us to the other reason why this memoir rises above most other celebrity books of its kind. Before Lithgow had entered college, he had not only acted in a ridiculous number of shows, many of them by Shakespeare, but had seen productions of almost every play in the Shakespearean canon, and many of them in multiple productions. This exposure, amongst others I am sure, has given John Lithgow a tremendous respect for and sensitivity to language. He has written a number of children's books, all of which are robust in their poetry. Here, not a single person, play or event gets mentioned without an elegantly distilled portrait being painted for the reader. For those who choose to have the book read to them in the audio version by the author himself, as I did, are in for an even bigger treat, in that the actor's delightful expressiveness adds an intimate layer to the already engaging story. Its like having John Lithgow over for a glass of wine. Each time he takes a sip, you immediately say "and then what happened?"

Anna Christie with Liv Ullmann 1977

I personally could have done without the chapter late in the book that describes his affair with Liv Ullmann that brought his first marriage to an end. Yet it does help round out the picture of his life on and off the stage that probably would have seemed to perfect had this brutally painful episode not been included.


That aside, the book, which is based on a one person play the author did a few years back, is a love letter not only to his father but to the world of the theater. Anyone who has worked on the stage will find a kindred spirit in Lithgow. His love for the art is moving and inspiring and will charm and win-over even the most cynical of thespians.