E-Mail This Article to a Friend Berkshire bafflements Williamstown’s The Stillborn Lover, BTF’s Landscape of the Body BY STEVE VINEBERG
	The Stillborn Lover By Timothy Findley. Directed by Martin Rabbett. Set by Michael Downs. Costumes by David Murin. Lighting by Fabrice Kebour. With Richard Chamberlain, Keir Dullea, Lois Nettleton, Jessica Walter, Jennifer Van Dyck, Robert Emmet Lunney, and Kaleo Griffith. At the Berkshire Theatre Festival, Stockbridge, through July 26. Landscape of the Body Book, music, and lyrics by John Guare. Directed by Michael Greif. Musical direction by Michael Friedman. Set by Allen Moyer. Costumes by Candice Donnelly. Lighting by Kenneth Posner. With Lili Taylor, Sherie René Scott, Michael Gaston, Joseph Cross, José Zuniga, Jonathan Fried, and Gabriel Millman. At Williamstown Theatre Festival through July 20.

Two rarely performed plays are on offer in the Berkshires — John Guare’s 1977 Landscape of the Body at Williamstown and, at the Berkshire Theatre Festival, a rare dramatic text by the late Canadian novelist Timothy Findley, the decade-old The Stillborn Lover. Both turn out to be fairly baffling — and, it seems, to have baffled their directors.

The Stillborn Lover is set in the mid ’70s, at a safe house in Ottawa to which the Canadian ambassador to the Soviet Union, Harry Raymond (Richard Chamberlain), has been summoned, along with wife Marion (Lois Nettleton) and daughter Diana (Jennifer Van Dyck). Harry’s been recalled from Russia at the behest of his closest friend, Mike Riordan (Keir Dullea), the minister of External Affairs, because Misha, a young Russian somehow known to the Raymonds, has turned up murdered in Moscow. The ailing prime minister is stepping down at the end of his term; Mike intends to succeed him, and he fears that the scandal will hurt his chances. So he has an RCMP superintendent (Robert Emmet Lunney) conduct a private investigation into the possibility that Harry was involved in the murder and/or compromised by the KGB — who, we learn, bought Misha’s services. After much speculation about whether Misha slept with Marion, Harry reveals to his family, at the end of act one, that Misha was his lover.

That curtain line is clearly meant as a shocker — and it might have been in, say, 1953. But it’s hard to imagine anyone in the BTF audience’s failing to connect the dots, especially when Chamberlain chose to play this role right around the time he began coming out in magazine interviews. That’s not Findley’s fault, of course, but still, the script is a real creaker, with characters who speak almost exclusively in epigrams. "It was always the thought of you, Father, that kept me going when other men battered me with their lies," Diana protests when she learns that the papa she looked up to has concealed his true self from her all these years. And he responds, "Come down from your hurt place and your privilege of pain." He also counsels, "Silence is no hiding place" — not once but twice.

Are flesh-and-blood actors supposed to be able to get their mouths around this dialogue? The cast of the BTF production wander around the stage looking stiff and a little bewildered — a state of affairs that’s exacerbated by Martin Rabbett’s awkward staging. Never having read the script, I wondered whether Rabbett or Findley had made the terrible decision to keep most of the cast (which includes Jessica Walter as Mike’s wife and Kaleo Griffith as an RCMP corporal) on stage throughout the action. Poor Lois Nettleton — whose character, for no apparent dramatic reason, is in the early stage of Alzheimer’s — is stuck downstage for unconscionably long periods, miming distraction and psychic distress. And did Findley demand a set that looks like a Japanese home in the country, or was that designer Michael Downs’s invention? Aside from a brief flashback set in Nagasaki (a much earlier posting of the Raymonds’), Japan plays no role in the story, and neither the architecture nor the natural setting suggests an imaginable location anywhere near Ottawa.

But then, nothing in The Stillborn Lover makes much sense, including the RCMP corporal’s tendency to jog around the grounds in sheer running shorts and strip off his T-shirt at regular intervals — apparently at the urging of his superintendent, in an effort to tempt Harry. Does he think the ambassador’s overworked libido will weaken him into confessing? I did believe Dullea as a man who’s willing to leave his best friend twisting in the wind in order to satisfy his own ambition (at least, until their final, indecipherable encounter). That’s because Dullea, who has aged into a far more human performer than he was in his Hollywood youth, plays the role with admirable clarity. Nothing else on stage registers as even momentarily plausible.

Unlike The Stillborn Lover, Landscape of the Body was familiar to me, but only on the page, where its tone is elusive and it feels more theoretical than dramatic — an ingenious series of literary riffs on the notion of the body. Guare likes to work in this outwardly spiraling way, but when he does it elsewhere (in Bosoms and Neglect, for example, another play where the meanings of the title accumulate as the drama unfolds), it’s easier to locate the center of the spiral. Landscape is narrated (more or less) by a dead woman, the sister of the protagonist, and it has a nutty flashbacks-within-a-flashback structure. On a ferry to Nantucket, Betty (Lili Taylor) meets Holahan (Michael Gaston), who a year earlier, in Manhattan, subjected her to a brutal grilling after the decapitated body of her teenage son Bert (Jonathan Cross) washed ashore.

Betty and Bert had shown up in Greenwich Village 18 months earlier to persuade her sister Rosalie (Sherie RenŽ Scott) to come home to Bangor, Maine. But Rosalie wound up dead, crushed into a store window by a speeding bicyclist — all the deaths in this play, dramatized or just discussed, are particularly gruesome — and Betty stayed to work out her sister’s porno-film contract with the mob. She replaced Rosalie in her day job, too, at a scam travel agency operated by a Cuban ŽmigrŽ named Raulito (JosŽ Zuniga). Meanwhile, the adolescent Bert became increasingly adrift in New York. He and his friend Donny (Gabriel Millman) worked a scheme to lure gay men up to Bert’s apartment while his mother was away; there Donny would clock them with a monkey wrench and Bert would roll them and steal their wristwatches.

If there’s a way to make this screwball musical thriller work — yes, it has songs, too, like some of Guare’s other early plays (The House of Blue Leaves, Rich and Famous) — director Michael Greif hasn’t found it. He stages the piece as an expressionistic musical, with broad effects and, for the most part, highly self-conscious acting. I sensed from the opening exchange between Taylor and Gaston that the show wasn’t going to work: her accent is cartoon New Englandese, and he’s in stand-up mode. The cast never find a collective style, and neither do they meld with the visual style of the production. And even that’s hard to identify: it’s part Brecht, part nightclub revue, part downtown rock musical. (Greif is best known as the director of Rent.)

The show could use some winding down; it’s hyper, frantic. I appreciated the moment at the top of act two when Cross sings a ballad: his amateurishness — he lacks musicality, he doesn’t know what to do with his arms — underlines the vulnerability of this boy who’s moments away from the end of his life. For just this brief interlude, the show doesn’t seem to be spinning out of control. Apart from Stephen DeRosa doing a brief, revue-style bit as a character known only as the Dope King of Providence, Rhode Island, the only performer whose choices all seem absolutely right — inspired, in fact — is Jonathan Fried as Durwood Peach. Durwood is a loony who descends upon Betty’s life unexpectedly. He knew her and Rosalie as kids — he peddled street ice cream in their neighborhood — and now he shows up at her door claiming he’s always loved her and promising her an idyllic life on a South Carolina plantation, with the signed approval of his wife and his shrink. Durwood is a quintessential Guare creation — a man driven to extreme behavior by the fervency of his unrealized dreams — and Fried plays him as a teddy bear in an old-fashioned sportcoat with a voice like warm cocoa. He’s comforting and frightening by turns, like an oversized stuffed animal come to life.

Unfortunately, Durwood has two scenes at the end of act one and doesn’t reappear. What Fried provides turns out to be a temporary distraction from the effort of trying to work out what the hell we’re supposed to be watching. I saw Landscape of the Body with six friends, three of whom work professionally in the theater, all of whom were all coming to the play for the first time, and when it was over not one of us had a clue what it was about. Greif’s production makes an opaque play indecipherable.