You know how earthbound the stage version of The Graduate will be from the moment the curtain goes up on Jason Biggs’s Benjamin Braddock as he sits on a bed in his scuba-diving suit. If he’s smart, he’s having a sinking feeling, but water has nothing to do with it. There will be no floating or drowning or leaping from a cool pool onto the hot, hoary flesh of Mrs. Robinson here. Just a shocked, geeky guy trying to get out of his wetsuit and into his khakis before he’s sexually throttled by a big, boozy broad who comes on like a drag queen but is in fact Kathleen Turner.
Turner is reprising the role made famous by Paul Simon, Art Garfunkel, and Anne Bancroft and first assayed by herself in London in 2000 in English writer/director Terry Johnson’s stage adaptation of the Charles Webb novel that was the basis for the iconic 1967 film. The play, its star power made multi-generational by the additions of American Pie throb Biggs and Clueless star Alicia Silverstone, is now hurtling toward Broadway, breaking box-office records as it goes. Although enthusiastically received by its press-night audience in Boston, it made me want to award Mike Nichols another Oscar for making a memorable film out of such a thin and preposterous sexual odyssey.
Benjamin Braddock tells his bewildered, affluent parents that they and their kind are " grotesque. " In fact, Johnson’s The Graduate is less a portrait of grotesquerie than a cartoon, with Turner transferring her Jessica Rabbit persona into a more formidable beast. The play seems intended as the sort of winkingly titillating sex farce of which the British are historically fond. As has been widely noted, Turner appears nude, looking much better in dim light and the altogether than she does in her unflattering costumes. And the vigorous simulated sex, albeit conducted under moving sheets that look like something out of Mummenschanz, seems meant to shock us.
Webb’s tale of a bored, disaffected young man just graduated from an Eastern college and seeing his California roots with jaundiced eyes, who is seduced by an older woman and then falls in love with her daughter, struck a note with ’60s youth bent on rejecting false values and rending a greater generation gap. Johnson seems primarily interested in exploiting the story’s broad comic and titillation possibilities. Here Benjamin is a clean-cut innocent briefly transmogrified into a studmuffin. (Elaine identifies him as " an intellectual, " yet he never says anything remotely smart.) His parents are early-1960s caricatures, a dimwitted stay-at-home mom and a threatening dad. Elaine comes across as a squeaky Barbie. And Mrs. Robinson is a ghoul with none of Bancroft’s sad-eyed sympathy, albeit intermittently salvaged by Turner’s booming sultriness and drop-dead timing. (When Elaine tries to explain to Benjamin that her parents are afraid he will ruin her life and he asks how, Turner explains, tersely and scathingly, " By being in it, Benjamin. " )
That this Graduate is so hamfisted is not the fault of the actors or the designers or even director Johnson. who throws in some entertaining fillips along with the tawdriness. Certainly for a play with so many locales, set designer Rob Howell’s solution, borrowed from the blinds and louvers of the film’s Taft Hotel, proves workable: a towering blond-wood collection of doors and panels, it swims nicely with Hugh Vanstone’s impressionistic lighting effects.
Neither are Biggs and Silverstone teen-movie faves without stage-acting chops. Biggs, who made his Broadway debut at 13 in Conversations with My Father, exudes an apt boyish bravado. But the play’s Benjamin is a naive cipher to be steamrolled by Mrs. Robinson. Silverstone, who trained with the Lenox-based Shakespeare & Company (its actor training is not for sissies), was slyly charming in Clueless and creditable in Kenneth Branagh’s Love’s Labour’s Lost but here seems to be going for early Goldie Hawn.
As for Turner, it’s not because she isn’t good at it that she has made a specialty of boozy, vamping sexual predators, from Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to the bourbon-voiced Bankhead of Sandra Ryan Heyward’s Tallulah. It is hard to fathom, though, why the actress makes her brutally frank Mrs. Robinson so masculine, from her own trademark growl to the footballer’s stride she adopts. Goodness knows, stomping on in a big-shouldered gold suit in the disrupted-wedding scene, she appears to present a greater physical threat to Biggs’s Benjamin than does Victor Slezak’s Mr. Robinson, who hacks through one of the set’s multitudinous louvers bearing an ax and a boutonnière. Forget the kid, Mr. Robinson; take the ax to the script.
