Seventeenth-century Paris. A tennis court at the Hotel de Bourgogne, where a different kind of sport is going on: the tennis court has been converted into a theatre, and, before the play itself begins, a number of audience members and merchants are making a show of themselves: a saucy girl selling cakes flirts with, then runs away from, some wolves dressed as men; a drunk spectator enters and puts his heart on display. If life’s not a play, it’s a cabaret. But most of those assembled, in Jamie Lloyd’s revival of “Cyrano de Bergerac” (a Roundabout Theatre Company production, at the American Airlines), are waiting for one man in particular to join them: Cyrano de Bergerac (Douglas Hodge), the poet and cadet, wit and gentleman. You likely already know something about Edmond Rostand’s most famous creation: he has a large, almost disfiguring nose; he’s in love, though he doesn’t admit it, with his cousin Roxane (Clémence Poésy), who confides in him that she loves the hopeless but cute Christian (Kyle Soller), a self-regarding, inarticulate man, for whom Cyrano ends up acting as a kind of beard. Standing in the shadows beneath Roxane’s balcony, Cyrano, masquerading as Christian, offers up the language of love that wins Roxane’s heart—a kind of linguistic promise ring.
“Cyrano” is a big play that wears its importance lightly; it alternates between spectacle (the opening, for instance, includes an elaborate sword fight) and nuanced, character-driven scenes. Both are difficult to invest with directorial imagination that goes beyond Rostand’s brief stage directions. For the most part, Lloyd does just fine with the task at hand, and he is helped immeasurably by the lighting designer, Japhy Weideman, who unifies the disparate scenes with a style that’s heavily indebted to Georges de La Tour. But the production itself is hampered both by a strange translation of the script, by Ranjit Bolt, whose numerous deletions and general tin-eared pedantry make one long for the original French, and by the unevenness of the performances, which range from terrific to negligible.
Hodge, a British actor, is like Hugh Jackman without the legs: he can do anything. But it’s during the slower, more contemplative scenes that his superiority as an actor really shines forth, like a jewel that’s mysteriously lit from within (a quality that also marked his Tony Award-winning performance in “La Cage aux Folles,” in 2010). You can almost feel the gravitational pull that separates him from the other people onstage, whose commitment to the play seems less honest. Poésy, for example, relies too much on her yé-yé voice and her bombe atomique eyes and figure to get her—and the men in the audience—through. Hodge, in response, delves even deeper into Cyrano’s fundamental humility. His near-religious faith in the character reminded me that Cyrano was a paradigm for so many of the conflicted, self-effacing yet principled heroes of our own time.
Great Britain, 2006. Uxbridge and Manchester, to be precise. Harper Regan (Mary McCann), the heroine of Simon Stephens’s nearly pointless play “Harper Regan” (at the Atlantic Theatre Company’s Linda Gross, under the direction of Gaye Taylor Upchurch), is a forty-something office worker, blond, neat in appearance, and disinclined to stand up for herself. She’d never want to look as if she were contradicting male authority, but that’s how her boss, Elwood Barnes (Jordan Lage), perceives her request for some time off to visit her ailing father. “If you go, I don’t think you should come back,” he says straight away, establishing not only a forced dramatic tension but Stephens’s debt to Harold Pinter: Elwood. Is. Menacing. Harper. Is. Being. Victimized. And. This. Scene. Feels. Sexual. Too. Harper leaves the office, goes to the Grand Union Canal. There she comes on to a young black man (Stephen Tyrone Williams) before returning home, momentarily, to see her daughter, Sarah, who is played by Madeleine Martin, the loudest actress I have ever seen on the American stage. (Imagine Lucille Ball with a peevish English accent.) Soon, Harper sets out for her parents’ house, taking a lengthy—days-long—detour on the way, in order to discover who she is. By far the most interesting scene in her wanderings takes place in a pub, where she meets a cantankerous, violent anti-Semite (Peter Scanavino). Scanavino is such a good actor, and so insistent on finding the reality in this drivel, that, once Harper moves on from him, we definitively move on from her.
America, 2003. A dark house in a New England town. Another ailing father is upstairs. His daughter, Pauline Randolph (Hallie Foote), a thin middle-aged woman, is in the kitchen with her younger brother, Henry (Tim Hopper). They’re both drunk and laughing a little too hard. They’re starved for laughter, among other things. Pauline knocks a lamp to the floor. Damn. If her other brother, Farley (Adam LeFevre), would just put things back where they belonged, stuff wouldn’t get broken, and Pauline wouldn’t be reminded (yet again) of the long list of things she can’t afford to get fixed—a list that would include her and her brothers if she had that kind of insight. But money won’t cure the spiritual poverty that afflicts the Randolph family, in Daisy Foote’s unusual and strong new play “Him” (a Primary Stages production, directed by Evan Yionoulis, at 59E59). And, in a way, deprivation suits Pauline. After giving birth to a stillborn baby some years ago, she basically shut down and focussed only on what she could handle: taking care of Farley, who is mentally challenged, and her father—the eponymous “Him”—and running the family convenience store, which, like Him, is dying a slow death.
Although the play is structured conventionally, Foote messes with the audience’s expectations through a series of monologues, spoken by Pauline and her brothers, but told from the point of view of Him (whom we never see) and referring to his children in the third person. When it comes to expressing their emotions, the Randolph children—particularly Pauline and Henry—seem to speak in the third person, too. Henry is gay, but he pins his dreams of romance, like a wilted boutonniere, on a straight man; like his sister, he has shut himself off from genuine risk. In exploring the connection between these two, Daisy Foote delivers something that is rarely seen onstage with such naturalism: a relationship between a heterosexual woman and a gay family member that’s devoid of camp.
After the father dies, and his children come into an inheritance that could change their lives, Pauline’s sudden avarice doesn’t so much alienate Henry as add to his general bewilderment; he recedes deeper into himself, an instinct that has no doubt helped him survive both his sister’s temperament and his brother’s need. We intuit this thanks to Hopper’s clarity as an actor. Hallie Foote, however, has too many engines racing at once. By the time Pauline finally stops bustling around in an angry funk and tries to tell us something about the future that she envisions for herself, we can barely listen; she has distracted us from the subtleties of the script. Actors tend to whip themselves into this kind of frenzy when they feel either that a play is underwritten or that they can’t do justice to great material. In “Him,” Daisy Foote has great material, interrupted by too much plot.
An unnamed city in the eastern United States, sometime in the future. A lounge with a bar. An American flag. Images of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln on the wall. Bright contemporary gospel music piped in. The music fades as we watch Mark (Tommy Crawford), a young man in uniform, set up a computer, arrange magazines on a table, and put out a vase of fake flowers. He is preparing for visitors: a couple in their late forties, Joe (Steve Mellor) and Mary (Annette O’Toole), who are in distress. Their eldest son has been arrested for no good reason, or for reasons that remain largely unclear for the ninety minutes that it takes A. R. Gurney’s “Heresy” (directed by Jim Simpson, at the Flea) to run its course.
The couple have come to this oddly impersonal space—Mark calls it “the Liberty Lounge”—to ask Ponty (short for Pontius), an old Army buddy of Joe’s, to help them get their son released. Ponty (Reg E. Cathey) is a prefect in what Gurney calls “the New America,” where government-subsidized social programs have been abolished for so long that kids like Mark have never heard of them. Ponty and his wife, Phyllis (Kathy Najimy), look like someone’s hackneyed dream of political glory: shiny boots and epaulets on him; on her, flashy rings and a red satin top that fails to conceal an ample bosom. Not that the boozy Phyllis has any real interest in being modest: she likes being married to power and its perks. Enter another woman, a bottle blonde named Lena (Ariel Woodiwiss), dressed in silver, her muscular legs nicely enhanced by a pair of platform shoes. Lena has news of Joe and Mary’s son: he may have been gay in the past, but he’s her lover now.
Thus established, these characters have nowhere to go, despite the actors’ commanding efforts. Joe and Mary: Is their son Jesus? Is Lena Mary Magdalene? And is Ponty the Pontius Pilate, being given a chance to reverse his fatal decision and set Mary and Joe’s boy free? I haven’t the foggiest. It’s not especially surprising that Gurney, whose fifty-odd plays span a nearly forty-five-year career, should set his new piece in the future. At some point, most of the playwrights of his generation have written futuristic plays—perhaps feeling a need to rejuvenate themselves as artists by creating an alternate reality. But even alternate realities have to borrow from this reality in order to be comprehensible. The characters in “Heresy” live less in the future than in a half-world constructed of tired symbols, cardboard jokes, and dull pontifications. ♦
