|
|
|
|
|
![[Theater reviews]](/images/boston/arts/theater_header.gif){kind=small}
Street Scene and The Smell of the Kill BY CAROLYN CLAY
Street Scene
Extreme temperatures prevail in the Berkshires this week. At the Williamstown Theatre Festival, where Obie winner Michael Greif is engineering a revival of Elmer Rice’s panoramic Street Scene, not even record-breaking heat can melt what’s in the melting pot of a 1928 New York tenement. And at the Berkshire Theatre Festival, where Obie winner Christopher Ashley is directing Obie winner Claudia Shear and Emmy winner Kristen Johnston in Michele Lowe’s The Smell of the Kill, cold storage and cold blood combine to turn what at first seems a tart suburban sit-com deliciously black. Both the sprawling old play, which won a Pulitzer Prize, and the merciless new one, which for a comedy about husband murder won an alarming number of matinee ladies’ hearts, are nicely turned out. But as a study in scale, Lowe’s three-character kitchen-sink black comedy and Greif’s 60-actor rendition of Rice’s social-minded melodrama are like Art and Jurassic Park. Not that Street Scene is a dinosaur, exactly — though the large-scale serious play on Broadway has certainly gone the way of the dodo. The Williamstown Theatre Festival has taken as one of its missions to offer another look at the unwieldy if then-important dramas of the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s that have grown too expensive for commercial revival. And director Greif is no stranger to a New York venue of operatic sweep, having helmed Jonathan Larson’s 1990s East Village rewrite of La bohème, Rent. Here his production, mixing period realism with portraiture, moves like a dance, up, down, before, and within Allen Moyer’s muscular several-story setting, a maze of frame, stairs, railings, and projections that looms over a coppery vestibule and realistic stoop. Set before a brownstone " in a mean quarter of New York " and on the bottom rung of the middle class, Rice’s play, though famous, isn’t great. But whereas the lawyer/playwright’s German Expressionist–influenced The Adding Machine was ahead of its time, Street Scene was praised for authentically representing its time and place. Even now, its nonstop urban bustle and vivid clashing-immigrant characters are more notable than its plot, which turns on neighborhood gossip, a nipped romance, and a marital melodrama you can see coming like a train. At the tail end of a hot summer day, the residents of the apartment building pass in and out and sprawl outside, their basic distrust simmering like the weather as they bandy " Is it hot enough for you? " in accents from Italian to Swedish to Yiddish to plain New Yawk. Anna Maurrant, the sensitive wife of an iron-fisted union stagehand, is having a blatant affair with " the collector for the milk company. " Her pretty daughter, Rose, whose struggle to figure life out is at the center of the piece, is being tempted by an older, married man who wants to set her up in show business — and a love nest. Meanwhile, intense, Walt Whitman–quoting young collegiate Sam Kaplan, who lives with his sacrificing schoolteacher sister and Jewish-radical papa, is over the moon for Rose, whose affection for him fosters anxiety on all sides regarding the mixing of cultures. In the course of 24 hours and three acts (here compressed into two), a baby is had, a heart is broken, a violent crime is committed, and a hard-drinking family man who " just went clean off me nut " is hauled off to the electric chair. Famed as a teeming sketch of neighborhood life complete with icemen and floozies and nursemaids and eviction agents, Street Scene offers plenty of socialist speechifying. Like Sidney Kingsley in Dead End, Rice means to make a villain of a hostile, dehumanizing environment — which Rose, taking along street-tough-in-the-making brother Willie, vows to escape. It’s appropriate, then, that the play’s hard-edged setting looms over its sharply etched if stereotypical characters, who alternately flex their prejudices and their natural human friendliness. Greif’s respectful production, though it can’t knock off all the linguistic mothballs, weaves together Street Scene’s melodrama (complete with red-lit, near-stylized climax), earnest young romance, and stoopside chat. By including tableaux within the house frame, the director creates a three-dimensional and always moving stage picture. Ilona Somogyi’s numerous costumes are evocative of the period. Mary Catherine Garrison brings an old-time innocence and pert look to Rose, and Thomas Sadoski conveys both Sam’s intellectual pretensions and his romantic suffering. Among the army of supporting characters, Rocco Sisto, as musician Filippo Fiorentino, conveys a cheerful yet palpable ache for Italy in a pizza-commercial accent. Nothing so benignly tasty as pizza is on the menu at the Berkshire Theatre Festival, though Michele Lowe’s play is set in a kitchen. There Nicky, Debra, and Molly clean up after dinner as their occasionally bellowing but unseen spouses, buddies since high school, practice their putting strokes in an off-stage dining room. That is, until a freak occurrence supplies the ladies with an unexpected opportunity to follow dinner with just deserts. It seems the boys have left off golf to explore the hunter host’s new basement meat locker and gotten locked in. So what’ll it be? A timely rescue or Bastards by Birdseye? Even in the era of the 90-minute intermissionless theater piece, The Smell of the Kill, which clocks in at 65 minutes, is more like a sniff. I couldn’t help wondering whether Lowe might write a 30-minute curtain raiser to give us a closer look at those boorish-sounding guys — though making them any more substantial might play havoc with Smell’s realistic-on-the-surface but actually quite surreal trajectory. The irreality is hinted at in David Gallo’s clever set, an exercise in exaggerated perspective that turns the upscale suburban kitchen into a sort of dollhouse cartoon. But Ashley’s production is as crisp as a cracker. And the performances are as crystalline as their characters — diverse women thrown together once a month for 20 years, and bonding only when confronted with an unforeseen chance to put their less than satisfactory hubbies on ice. The Smell of the Kill premiered at the Cleveland Playhouse in 1999, and the BTF production has its eye on New York. Lowe was inspired to write the piece, she says, by evenings in her childhood, when her father’s old frat buddies and their wives came over and men and women divided into separate camps. " I’d sit on the stairs, without them knowing, and wonder what the women were talking about, " she told the Berkshire Eagle. Despite its up-to-the-minute setting, the play’s basic situation does seem more redolent of the 1960s than the present. Be that as it may, Smell’s combination of comedy and perversity is very much a post-Quentin-Tarantino-and-Martin-McDonagh thing. And this production even achieves some poignancy, as the women — particularly Shear’s fiercely loyal, slightly frumpy Debra — come to terms with their root honest desires. Some of the comic writing is a tad formulaic. " The python has finally found a house she likes, " says Debra of her realtor husband’s girlfriend. " " So what? " " It’s my house. " But most of the talk is pretty slick, with the women moving from cattiness to a leonine empowerment once they get that icy whiff of liberation. 3rd Rock from the Sun star Johnston brings exquisite timing and hauteur to Nicky, whose husband has just been indicted. Profoundly disaffected and toting a gun, her editor/new mom shoots holes in her kitchen to mark her turf when it starts to look unfamiliar. Katie Finneran is full of surprises as the baby-wanting Molly, whose doting, asexual spouse is driving her nuttier than Debra’s philanderer might. Here again, though, the actress injects a note of despair into her character’s generally ditzy song. Asked what she does all day, she replies that she takes care of her children. " But you don’t have children. " " Then, " she says sadly, " I don’t do anything. " Shear is best known for Dirty Blond, the Broadway play she both wrote and acted in, part of the time as a strutting Mae West. There’s little Mae in the seemingly straightforward Debra, who’s allowed her louse of a husband to suck the self right out of her. But Shear’s Debra puts up an impressive defense of the lie that is her lovely life. The Smell of the Kill is short but it isn’t sweet. And in the end the vibe it gives off is, like its preferred method of spouse removal, chilling. Issue Date: August 9 - 16, 2001 |
|
|