Driving there was a major headache, with some particularly annoying driving observed from a bunch of cars with Quebec plates (waving towels at each other and at one point pulling next to each other and trying to pass food between the cars) and a Quebec truck driver that basically pulled behind me without waiting for the lane to clear. I still don't understand how he didn't squash the car behind me.
There will be very minor SPOILERS hereafter, though nothing that isn't in the other reviews or indeed in the program.
The play opens with a very short shout out to Shaw's Major Barbara. Pill, the homosexual son of Gus, is describing a play that he saw in Minneapolis (perhaps at the Guthrie) and then launches into a set piece about how he is glad he isn't an actor who has to deal with the terrible rude cyborgs who can't turn their cell phones off. Cathartic for both author and actor, I am sure, but a bit dramatically inept. Anyway, audience learns within a minute or two of this rant, that Gus tried to commit suicide a year ago and that he is most likely going to do it again. The play mostly consists of his family trying to understand why he actually did it and to try to talk him out of it. While there is a lot else going on, mostly arguments over politics and some of the crazy family dynamics that one sees in a show like Modern Family,* that is the essence of the play.
The pall of the suicide of the patriarch hangs over the play, just as in Tracy Lett's August: Osage County (which may be an unacknowledged influence), though this patriarch is very much alive, even though determined to shuffle off the mortal coil.
What Kushner does here, much as in Angels in America, is to have people talk just as seriously about politics, particularly the politics of the left, as they do about family matters. Indeed, Gus is basically quite unreconstructed and admits not believing the work his daughter does is valid, since it simply (somewhat) ameliorates the problems with capitalism and thus forestalls revolution. Though how an intelligent person could look out over American history and expect communist revolution is completely beyond me. I guess there are certain pockets of insulated leftists, particularly in New York, that still hold out these hopes. Certainly there are plenty of progressive social scientists who think things will get better, though I don't believe any of them are actually hoping for a communist take-over...
What I did not like, however, is how he sets up a few scenes with just too much going on, so that even a fairly well-trained theatre-goer cannot track the multi-layered dialogue. Gus often talks over his children, but there is one scene towards the end of Act II where there are literally 4 centers of attention, all competing against each other. I find this completely unfair and a bit maddening. Kushner even cheats a bit by having Sooze say, above the crowd, doesn't anyone want to know what is in the suitcase. Of course we all do, though it isn't revealed until Act III. Anyway, it is clearly a stylistic choice to make things unintelligible (and this happened with some frequency in Top Girls, though normally it was only two competing conversations, not 4), but it is not one I appreciate at all.
One thing, which you find out in the program notes is that Pill is older than his husband, Paul. They met at U Michigan where Pill was a grad. student and his husband was a sophomore. That sort of thing could happen in the somewhat repressed 80s and 90s but now in the increasingly codified systems we have today would probably lead to charges against Pill. I don't quite understand why the worst, most puritanical aspects of the progressives (i.e. their desire to remove power imbalances from sexual relationships) have been the most politically "successful," but it is downright depressing. Kushner doesn't touch on that at all. I will say that, for me, Pill was a pretty unpleasant character, weak and selfish, and basically unrepentant over how he spent so much of his sister's money on a hustler, who turns back up during the course of the play. I suspect only a gay author could have gotten away with writing about such a flawed gay character.
Pill is played by Steven Sutcliffe, and I was pretty sure I had seen him before, but I wasn't sure in what.** It turns out he has played quite a few gay characters, such as the closeted Vanya in Durang's Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, but he played a much more rewarding role as Ned in Findley's Elizabeth Rex. I'd say that is probably the role I thought he was best in, even though I didn't recall it immediately as I was watching him in this play.
I did recognize Fiona Reid as being cast in Durang's play as well. However, as is typical, in that play she and Sutcliffe were roughly the same age, and here she is Sutcliffe's aunt... Ah well. She has some great moments as she recalls her experiences being a nun and then being involved with the Shining Path in Peru. (Clearly, the whole family is a bit unhinged.)
It is a bit difficult to think about the play as a whole. There is a bit too much of everything -- too much political talk, too many crazy family dynamics, too much selfishness -- and generally not enough love. I certainly didn't get the feeling that Gus cared that much for his family, since he was on the edge of committing suicide again; his political ideals mattered more. I never really felt what it was that Pill felt for Paul. It wasn't really believable to me that he loved him whole-heartedly. It was more that he was in love with the idea that he was a gay man who could be faithful to Paul, even though it was so evident just how weak Pill was. (I truly think Kushner needs to give Pill more redeeming qualities, 'cause the way he is written now he is pathetic.)
So I think it is an interesting play and one well worth seeing, though I don't think it is a masterpiece on par with Angels in America, which seems to be the view of the Toronto Star reviewer. (I do find it amusing that he kind of digs at the Shaw Festival, saying this is one of only a handful of truly great productions he has seen there. Perhaps he hates the drive down just as much as I do. I do think this may well have been my last visit to Niagara-on-the-Lake.) Again, everyone's perspective is different. This reviewer liked the cacophony at the end of Act II, whereas the only thing I liked about that scene was when somebody shouts "I bought the cherry orchard." (I guess you had to be there -- and you have until Oct. 10 to do so.)
I should have mentioned earlier that the set is quite nice. The stage shows the dining room of a Brooklyn brownstone and then a somewhat obscured bedroom upstairs. There are sliding panels that look like the sides of freight rail cars, which dockworkers would have loaded and unloaded. (When the panels slid closed that indicated that the setting had shifted somewhere else than the brownstone.) The central panels had an image of the Brooklyn Bridge inspired by Joseph Stella's paintings. Again, quite apropos of Gus's working class background.
 |
| Joseph Stella, The Brooklyn Bridge: Variation on an Old Theme, 1939 |
* I do wonder if Pill is just a bit of a shout-out to Phil of Modern Family. Similar to that show, there is multi-ethnic casting with Pill's partner being African-American and V (the youngest son) having an Asian wife.
** Interestingly, both Sutcliffe and the actor playing the hustler had both been in a Shaw production of Major Barbara, which they discuss early in Kushner's play, though I hadn't seen that particular production. In fact, if I have seen Major Barbara it would have been a long, long time ago, perhaps in Ann Arbor, so I might look into seeing it some day, though not in Niagara-on-the-Lake.
No comments:
Post a Comment