Ink Effluens
Jun. 18th, 2003 01:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tmcgWe saw Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night at the Plymouth Theatre last Thursday. Vanessa Redgrave, Brian Dennehy, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Robert Sean Leonard, Fiana Toibin. Not all it was cracked up to be? Or am I just resistant to portraits of crackups?
I was expecting a powerful experience, like the one I had at The Iceman Cometh a couple of years ago, something to make me go "Wo..." as I left. I regret my own expectations. If I'd gone in with the open mind-set I bring to most plays, I might have liked it better. I wanted to be blown away by aesthetic, artistic, emotional intensity. Instead I sat appreciating a high level of craftsmanship: the excellent acting, the masterly playwriting (what a wonderfully executed dance of pairs and trios! like a series of two-hand and three-hand Irish reels, changing partners till everyone's danced their set), the quality of design and lighting. The blocking seemed stiff and artificial at times, and, perversely, some bits of business were too good (they knocked you out of the moment by making you think Hey, what a nice bit of business...), but otherwise Robert Falls's direction was transparent in the right ways. All in all, an impressive production, the peak of professional. But nothing beyond that. No spark of genius, of greatness--in players or play, with some exceptions in Vanessa Redgrave's case. It was a piece of architecture so well designed and built as to be beautiful...but no more than that. Not transcendent. Not transporting.
Was I just cranky, or what? Was I just in the wrong frame of mind? Others, including some of the acquaintances I sat with, left the theatre harrowed, silenced and exhausted. Still others left the theatre subdued by awe, judging from stray comments I caught as we shuffled out; maybe, I thought, they need to feel awed, maybe they need to feel that they experienced a profound theatrical event, and any less would leave them gypped. Me, I felt I'd seen a play tailor-made to the culture of therapy and perfectly adapted, perfectly timed, for a reality-TV audience. Outstanding workmanship couldn't save it from being one long wallow. Seeing myself all too clearly in some of the characters couldn't make a revelation of it. To connoisseurs of schadenfreude, delicious. To me, a remarkable and courageous piece of autobiography--fine work, worthy indeed of the Pulitzer, worthy of the accolades...but nothing more. And what more can there be than Pulitzers and accolades?
As I felt the tugs and shoves of ordinary tensions in my own family relationships this week, I thought about how difficult it would be to portray their subtle, powerful shifts and currents and nuances in fiction. For example, my dad was a charming, idiosyncratic, flawed man I would love to model a character on, but I'm completely inadequate to the task. O'Neill rose to it. He deserves the posthumous cries of "Masterpiece!" I ache for the tears and blood he shed to write his play. But I think I just wasn't in the mood to roll around in his bodily fluids.
On the other hand, from two intermissions' worth of musing on the Plymouth and the history it's steeped in, and from some private disagreement with overheard audience comments at the end, I got an intriguing story idea. And these lines, the way Redgrave delivered them, the way the house fell silent and the light on her face went beyond luminosity, the way they resonated and yet were suspect as all her statements were resonant and suspect, the way they burned into memory as one teardrop moment, made the whole evening worthwhile:
Oddly, Matthew Murray reviewed the play I expected to see, and reading his review I almost feel as though I did. Nice job.
I was expecting a powerful experience, like the one I had at The Iceman Cometh a couple of years ago, something to make me go "Wo..." as I left. I regret my own expectations. If I'd gone in with the open mind-set I bring to most plays, I might have liked it better. I wanted to be blown away by aesthetic, artistic, emotional intensity. Instead I sat appreciating a high level of craftsmanship: the excellent acting, the masterly playwriting (what a wonderfully executed dance of pairs and trios! like a series of two-hand and three-hand Irish reels, changing partners till everyone's danced their set), the quality of design and lighting. The blocking seemed stiff and artificial at times, and, perversely, some bits of business were too good (they knocked you out of the moment by making you think Hey, what a nice bit of business...), but otherwise Robert Falls's direction was transparent in the right ways. All in all, an impressive production, the peak of professional. But nothing beyond that. No spark of genius, of greatness--in players or play, with some exceptions in Vanessa Redgrave's case. It was a piece of architecture so well designed and built as to be beautiful...but no more than that. Not transcendent. Not transporting.
Was I just cranky, or what? Was I just in the wrong frame of mind? Others, including some of the acquaintances I sat with, left the theatre harrowed, silenced and exhausted. Still others left the theatre subdued by awe, judging from stray comments I caught as we shuffled out; maybe, I thought, they need to feel awed, maybe they need to feel that they experienced a profound theatrical event, and any less would leave them gypped. Me, I felt I'd seen a play tailor-made to the culture of therapy and perfectly adapted, perfectly timed, for a reality-TV audience. Outstanding workmanship couldn't save it from being one long wallow. Seeing myself all too clearly in some of the characters couldn't make a revelation of it. To connoisseurs of schadenfreude, delicious. To me, a remarkable and courageous piece of autobiography--fine work, worthy indeed of the Pulitzer, worthy of the accolades...but nothing more. And what more can there be than Pulitzers and accolades?
As I felt the tugs and shoves of ordinary tensions in my own family relationships this week, I thought about how difficult it would be to portray their subtle, powerful shifts and currents and nuances in fiction. For example, my dad was a charming, idiosyncratic, flawed man I would love to model a character on, but I'm completely inadequate to the task. O'Neill rose to it. He deserves the posthumous cries of "Masterpiece!" I ache for the tears and blood he shed to write his play. But I think I just wasn't in the mood to roll around in his bodily fluids.
On the other hand, from two intermissions' worth of musing on the Plymouth and the history it's steeped in, and from some private disagreement with overheard audience comments at the end, I got an intriguing story idea. And these lines, the way Redgrave delivered them, the way the house fell silent and the light on her face went beyond luminosity, the way they resonated and yet were suspect as all her statements were resonant and suspect, the way they burned into memory as one teardrop moment, made the whole evening worthwhile:
MARY: None of us can help the things life has done to us.
They're done before you realize it, and once they're done
they make you do other things until at last everything comes
between you and what you'd like to be, and you've lost your
true self forever.
Oddly, Matthew Murray reviewed the play I expected to see, and reading his review I almost feel as though I did. Nice job.
