Powered by Google
Home
Listings
Editors' Picks
News
Music
Movies
Food
Life
Arts + Books
Rec Room
Moonsigns
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Personals
Adult Personals
Classifieds
Adult Classifieds
- - - - - - - - - - - -
stuff@night
FNX Radio
Band Guide
MassWeb Printing
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About Us
Contact Us
Advertise With Us
Work For Us
Newsletter
RSS Feeds
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Webmaster
Archives



sponsored links
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
PassionShop.com
Sex Toys - Adult  DVDs - Sexy  Lingerie


   
  E-Mail This Article to a Friend

Team play
The Provincetown Theater gets launched by 22 writers
BY CAROLYN CLAY
The Direct Line Play
By Terrence McNally, John Guare, David Rabe, Wendy Wasserstein, Christopher Durang, Meryl Cohn, Diana Son, James Lecesne, Harvey Fierstein, Steven Druckman, Michael Cristofer, Shirley Lauro, Julia Jordan, Lynda Sturner, David Henry Hwang, Sarah Ruhl, Charles Busch, Alice Tuan, Jim Dalglish, Susan Yankowitz, Wendy Kesselman, and Sinan Unel. Directed by Phyllis Newman. Set by Dan Joy. Lighting by Kevin Hardy. With Bob Ari, Tim Babcock, Jeff Biehl, Reed Birney, Anna Chlumsky, Richard M. Davidson, Christopher Innvar, Justin Klosky, Louise Pitre, Paul Ricciardi, Pablo Schreiber, Janelle Sperow, Jane Summerhays, Tim Warmen, Janet Zarish, and Betsy Blair. Presented by Provincetown Repertory Theatre at the Provincetown Theater (closed).


In this day of endless workshops and development, plenty of plays seem to have been written by committee. Usually, however, the committee has to meet. In the case of The Direct Line Play, a staged reading of which inaugurated the new Provincetown Theater last weekend, the script just got passed from hand to hand, with each of 22 playwrights, some of them famous, continuing an increasingly wigged-out tale that featured, among other threads, P-town mythology, gay marriage, and the death and resurrection (as a zombie) of Dick Cheney. By my count, the writing team included three Pulitzer and six Tony winners. Throw in Eugene O’Neill, who is a character in the piece, and you get a Nobel Laureate.

O’Neill, of course, is everywhere in the air as the new Provincetown Theater — the first legitimate stage facility at the tip of the Cape since 1977 — comes into being. It was at a ramshackle Provincetown fishing shack christened the Wharf Theatre that his career began, in 1916. And an exhibit in the lobby of the crisp new 200-seat space (previously the Provincetown Mechanics Building, now home to the Provincetown Rep and Provincetown Theatre Company) featured photographs and text recapping the town’s storied place in American theater history. That history also crept into The Direct Line Play, which takes its name from the line in Terrence McNally’s Master Class where Maria Callas cites the "direct line" she felt, playing Medea, to Euripides et al. Here the connections are a little dishier, but the reach for myth is the same.

McNally starts the ball rolling as a couple of gay men — an artist and his brand new love, a lit professor — dust off the tale of Marlon Brando’s taking a silent walk to Race Point with Tennessee Williams and coming back the anointed Stanley Kowalski of Streetcar. When McNally passes off to John Guare, the ghost of Tennessee himself appears on the beach, demanding, "Mix me a margarita while the evening prepares to drop her velvet cloak of fireflies on the skin of lonely lovers." Williams will be back, but no later playwright captures so hilariously his delicate floridity. And the famously stormy O’Neill, when materialized by David Rabe, is more "fog people" than pickled tempest (though he does talk of booze and pipe dreams and breathing the literary salt-air of Provincetown).

As might be expected of such an effort, The Direct Line Play, which was directed by Tony-winning actress Phyllis Newman, is more of a stunt than a play — and one that, no surprise, goes on too long. Who really expects a participating playwright to limit his or her contribution to a few minutes? And the play’s shelf life will not equal that of a Twinkie, since it’s not only Provincetown-centric but also tied to the political moment. (Dyed-in-the-oilcloth Republicans are not its target audience.)

Still, as gimmicks go, it was a clever way to open a new theater in a spot associated with numerous living as well as dead playwrights. Otherwise, Provincetown Rep would have had to pick one paradise-loving scribe to launch the space. And the dramatists appear to have had fun with the assignment, filling the play with self-referential irony and blithely flouting established plot and even sense. Characters, including the vice-president, his wife, and their gay daughter Mary, are killed off by one writer and then resurrected by another. Christopher Durang brings on a psycho killer to kill the elder Cheneys (who, inspired by the film Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, have come to P-town to force shotgun heterosexual marriages). Steven Druckman deftly morphs the murderer into a dramaturg bent on tightening up the rambling work.

Indeed, Druckman, along with McNally, Guare, and Wendy Wasserstein, contribute the most polished and amusing sections. Given the whiplash turns in the writing, the actors did their best to remain coherent characters, with Richard M. Davidson a convincingly cold Dick Cheney, the Blythe Dannerish Janelle Sperow breezily didactic as Lynne Cheney, and Louise Pitre toughly frazzled as a lesbian single mother of twin babies who, in a surreal moment dreamed by Wendy Kesselman, smash and eat a lobster on the beach. Pitre, the actor with the most incongruous résumé, was the star of Broadway’s Mamma Mia! With so many big-gun playwrights willing to contribute to a burgeoning theater, the Rep might justifiably have thrown in a chorus of "Take a Chance on Me."


Issue Date: July 2 - 8, 2004
Back to the Theater table of contents
  E-Mail This Article to a Friend
 









about the phoenix |  advertising info |  Webmaster |  work for us
Copyright © 2005 Phoenix Media/Communications Group