TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/040290/0402410.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.9 KB | 152 lines

                                                                                THEATER, Page 71

Just What the Doctor Ordered


Broadway looks robust with three powerful dramas

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III


    There's nothing wrong with Broadway, an old adage holds,
that three hit shows can't cure. Actually, not much has been
wrong this season anyway. Blockbuster survivors from prior
years were joined last fall by four musicals and three plays
that all seem securely established, and major new works by
Andrew Lloyd Webber, Neil Simon and August Wilson are still to
come. But in a five-day span leading into this week, the
proverbial three hit shows materialized nonetheless, one after
another, gladdening the Great White Way's chronic curmudgeons.


    THE GRAPES OF WRATH

    John Steinbeck was haunted by the almost biblical travail
of the Dust Bowl farmers, uprooted from their homesteads by
bank foreclosures, trekking by the tens of thousands to the
promised land of California, only to face brute exploitation
as field hands. After two failed novels, he finally got it
right on his third try, and after two years of developmental
productions, Chicago's Steppenwolf troupe has finally succeeded
in adapting his epic tale for the stage. The best measure of
this portrait of a family in agony and dissolution is that it
is actually better -- less sentimental and truer -- than the
landmark 1940 film version.

    The clearest instances of this newfound grit are the two
most famous speeches. When Lois Smith, giving the finest
performance of a great stage career, says as Ma Joad that she
knows "the people" will endure, she offers none of the
reassuring faith of Jane Darwell in the film. Her words are
instead the hollow attempt of a frightened peasant to calm
herself and to reassure a son she expects never to see again.
When Gary Sinise as Tom Joad tells her that wherever people
are organizing for freedom and a better day, he will be there,
he does not ooze nature's-aristocrat nobility like Henry Fonda
on celluloid. His is the tough, nervy attempt of a frightened
man facing imprisonment or death to assert that his struggle
has had some meaning.

    Despite the grimness, director-adapter Frank Galati finds
many small moments of decency, charity, humor and hope. He
moves the 35 performers with cinematic grace and achieves great
variety during a middle hour consisting largely of moving a
rattletrap truck back and forth. The ordeal of the Joads
remains evocative of its era, yet Steinbeck's themes prove
contemporary: the vulnerability of unskilled labor, the
soul-destroying impact of poverty and homelessness, the ease
with which the rich and powerful subvert law enforcement to
their own ends. The Joads pride themselves on being scrappers,
but in this conflict they never have a chance.

    LETTICE AND LOVAGE

    Lettice Douffet is a sometime actress reduced to working as
a rather fanciful tour guide in an ugly and, truth to tell
(which she rarely  does), unimportant English mansion called
Fustian House. Faced with the unpleasant fact that hardly
anything consequential or colorful ever happened there, she
makes things up. To her, this is putting history to the best
possible use, as inspirational contrast to what she sees as the
grayness of modern life. Her employers at a preservation trust
naturally disagree, and she is tossed out on her ear.

    As she goes, however, a once horrified supervisor begins to
be intrigued by her willful residence in a world of myth and
melodrama and soon joins in exotic games -- such as acting out
the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, except for the fatal
bits. Lettice and her friend strive for what all history-minded
tourists seek, the moment when one senses this is what it must
have felt like.

    Peter Shaffer (Equus, Amadeus) wrote this as a showcase for
Dame Maggie Smith, the two-time Oscar winner who was last seen
on Broadway in Tom Stoppard's Night and Day in 1979. All her
trademark mannerisms are in evidence, from the nasal drawl of
contempt to the wounded-crow flutter of arms and hands. So is
the open-wound vulnerability that brings her fey lunacy back
to earth. She takes a character who is mostly an idea, a
conceit -- a person for whom pretending is more real than
reality -- and invests her with poignancy and pride. In spirit
Lettice is a one-woman show. But Smith gets splendid support
from Margaret Tyzack in the thankless, stereotypical role of her
clumping comrade Lotte Schoen and obliquely from Britain's
Prince Charles, whose marginally less dotty tirades against
contemporary architecture render Lettice's eccentricities
almost trendy.

    CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF

    There are plenty of reasons to stage a major Broadway
revival of Tennessee Williams' most erotic, bedroom-centered
play -- the power and vinegar of its language, the timelessness
of its obsession with money, the candor and subtlety of its
homosexual subtheme -- but only one reason why it actually
happened. The vital factor was the availability of Kathleen
Turner, steamiest of movie queens, to play Maggie the "cat,"
steamiest of Williams heroines. Turner's name is billed alone
above the title; her solo portrait (in a slip) graces the
program cover; her presence has drawn the $2 million advance
sale. Thus the crucial question is whether Turner, who debuted
on Broadway in the lighthearted Gemini in 1978 and has not been
back since, can handle the role. The answer is an emphatic yes.
What's more, the production around her is a robust yet nuanced
reading of the play.

    Director Howard Davies, who staged Les Liaisons Dangereuses
on Broadway, is British and, perhaps as a result, the accents
are from Mars. Otherwise there is nothing to fault, from
William Dudley's pillow-strewn, louvered-door set to Mark
Henderson's offstage fireworks. Film veteran Charles Durning
brings beguiling malice to Big Daddy, capturing the crass
vitality of this aging self-made entrepreneur, while Polly
Holliday, Flo on CBS-TV's erstwhile Alice, is all fluttering
and giggles and connivance as his soon-to-be widow.

    The center of the story is their younger son Brick, a
football hero turned alcoholic who is mourning his lost youth,
the fading of his athletic prowess and, above all, the death
of his best friend Skipper, whose devotion to Brick was deeply,
if never explicitly, sexual. In some interpretations, Brick is
unquestionably homosexual himself. In others, his rage at his
wife Maggie stems from her having forced him to confront an
uncomfortable truth about his friend. Daniel Hugh Kelly splits
the difference. His Brick unmistakably was capable of physical
love with Skipper; just as unmistakably, he remains capable of
physical love with Maggie in what is played as an altogether
redemptive final scene. Turner's fierce and shameless yearning
for him ignites the play. Her understanding and tenderness warm
the last long topple into bed.