{"id":83615,"date":"2014-12-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-12-01T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/crowded-house\/"},"modified":"2024-03-22T08:54:50","modified_gmt":"2024-03-22T12:54:50","slug":"crowded-house","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/crowded-house\/","title":{"rendered":"Crowded house"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\tA scene from The Country House<\/em>. via<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

\tI<\/font>n the days before the Second Vatican Council, the ordinary practice for Catholic priests celebrating Mass was to stand with their backs to the congregation, facing the altar, the idea being that the priest was not putting on a show for an audience but leading a community in worship. When that changed, and priests fell into the habit of facing the congregation, the act of worship was transformed into an act of theater\u2014the folk guitars and interpretative dance and horrible sub-\u201cKumbaya\u201d hymns were subsequently inevitable. A strangely inverted version of that process has been at work in the theater for some time: The old joke in Christian churches was that the congregation was there to \u201cpray, pay, and obey.\u201d The contemporary theater is two-thirds of the way there: That the audience is there to pay goes without saying, though getting them to obey is not always easy. And as playwrights, directors, and producers have turned their backs on the audience\u2014the role which is either incidental or economic\u2014they have turned to face that which passes for the Divine in their world: themselves.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\tThe Country House<\/i> is not a bad play; in fact, it is a reasonably well written and tastefully staged play\u2014and I could not wait for it to be over. It is partly a piece of stunt writing by Donald Margulies, an attempt to synthesize something new from two of Chekhov\u2019s country-house plays, The Seagull <\/i>and Uncle Vanya<\/i>. It is partly a Freudian family romance that plays upon the similarities between unrequited sexual love and unsatisfactory family relationships. But it is mainly a long meditation on the subject of how fascinating theater people are that ends up being a very convincing demonstration of how fascinating theater people aren\u2019t. Perhaps mine is a minority view: After warning that such \u201cbackstage plays\u201d tend toward self-indulgence, the estimable Terry Teachout of The<\/i> Wall Street Journal<\/i> argues that The Country House <\/i>\u201cis one of the most disciplined and satisfying new American plays to reach Broadway in the past decade.\u201d Disciplined, perhaps; satisfying, no.<\/p>\n

\n\t\tThe dramatic center of the play is Blythe Danner\u2019s Anna, an aging theatrical actress in professional and mental decline. Desperate to stay in the game, she is setting up housekeeping with her extended family, most of them theater veterans of varying degrees of success, in her family\u2019s summer home in Williamstown, where she is playing the titular madam in Mrs. Warren\u2019s Profession<\/i>. Both Mr. Margulies\u2019s writing of the character and Ms. Danner\u2019s performance carry about themselves more than a little brimstone whiff of Gloria Swanson\u2019s Norma Desmond, punctuated by deliberate attempts to deflate Anna before she descends into melodrama. The effect is manic-depressive: Anna enters the first scene with a sort of Cruella de Vil flourish, insisting: \u201cI am not one whose entrances go unnoticed.\u201d A once-famous actress playing a once-famous actress comments upon the dramatic quality of her entrances while making a dramatic entrance: That sort of meta-joke might have been fresh in 1978, but in 2014 it feels like the paint-by-numbers version of writing a play. I half-expected some opera-style supertitle to appear above the stage, reading: \u201cLOOK HOW CLEVER DONALD MARGULIES IS!\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\tOffering one of her several homilies about the declining quality and relevance of the theater, Anna once again descends into half-clever meta-commentary. \u201cThere are no more Broadway stars,\u201d she insists. \u201cThere are stars on Broadway, but there are no Broadway stars.\u201d That modern celebrity should be deprecated vis-\u00e0-vis some imagined golden age of stardom is a completely understandable sentiment coming from the mouth of an actress who was herself once a household name but who today is known mainly for being the mother of Gwyneth Paltrow, whose form of celebrity is a particularly loathsome and detestable one.<\/p>\n

\n\t\tW<\/font>hat happens in The Country House <\/i>is this: Anna convenes the extended family to keep her company and to help her study up for Mrs. Warren\u2019s Profession<\/i>; the one member of the family who is not directly involved in theater, her granddaughter, Susie (Sarah Steele), cracks wise and makes easy jokes about undergraduate life at Yale; Anna\u2019s sad-sack son, Elliott (Eric Lange), gets drunk, complains about his lack of success, and makes everybody uncomfortable; the former son-in-law, Walter (David Rasche), the widower of Anna\u2019s late daughter, Kathy, and father to Susie, has a raging midlife crisis complete with a convertible Porsche and a much younger new girlfriend, Nell (Kate Jennings Grant), whom he is, in a fit of extraordinarily bad taste, introducing to his daughter and the rest of the family over the course of a weekend informally organized around marking the one-year anniversary of the death of his wife. Complicating matters, the handsome television star Michael (Daniel Sunjata), who abandoned serious theater to get rich making dopey television series, is staying with the family while performing a summer\u2019s worth of artistic penance on stage at the Williamstown Theater Festival.<\/p>\n

\n\t\tThe interplay between doing what is imagined to be high art and doing what is necessary to make a living provides much of the play\u2019s humor. Elliott rages at Walter for getting rich making lowbrow teen movies (Truck Stop <\/i>IV<\/i> is the auteur\u2019s latest effort) and at Michael, who plays a star-trekking physician in a science-fiction franchise. Elliott himself has never had enough artistic success to sell out or enough commercial success to feel guilty about it. To make things worse, he is still nursing an ancient crush on the woman who is now Walter\u2019s girlfriend (soon to be fianc\u00e9e) and is convinced that his mother neither loved him as much as she did his late sister nor respects him as much as she does Walter, a sometime professional collaborator. He bemoans his own state in life: \u201cI\u2019m ready to give up acting. Well, that\u2019s not entirely accurate. In order to give up acting I have to have been<\/i> acting. But announcing that I\u2019m ready to give up auditioning doesn\u2019t have quite the same impact.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\tThe second source of drama is Michael\u2019s effect on the women in the play. Anna and her granddaughter both throw themselves at him, and an almost consummated flirtation with Nell sends the family\u2019s emotional simmer into full boil. Not content with seducing the living, Michael also turns out to be an ex-lover of the late Kathy.<\/p>\n

\n\t\tMuch of the writing is drearily predictable; echoing the old Hollywood joke that there are only two roles for women\u2014the sex kitten and the district attorney\u2014Nell complains that she has graduated \u201cfrom the hot neighbor to the single mother practically overnight.\u201d The acting is capable, and the production, under the direction of Daniel Sullivan, is remarkable in that there is practically nothing upon which to remark. The country-house setting is conventionally constructed, with stairs and multiple doorways used for conventional dramatic purposes. Conventional theater often provides a refreshing break from the self-indulgence and pointlessly voguish experimentation of the self-proclaimed avant garde. What The Country House<\/i> lacks is not innovation but imagination. We are meant to laugh at Michael\u2019s space doctor, but to cling to fascinations so close to home, as so many playwrights have before, is a bit like camping in one\u2019s own back yard. Mr. Margulies did not necessarily need to go where no man has gone before, but to go where so many men have gone before, with so little distinction, is a bit like a trip to Mrs. Warren\u2019s establishment: Buy the ticket, enjoy the performance\u2014but the performance is such that one never imagines it to be anything more than that. When Walter responds to Elliott\u2019s criticism of his commercial endeavors, he scoffs at the belief that \u201cone form of make-believe is better than another.\u201d But some forms of make believe really are better than others: Some are more imaginative, more moving, more insightful, more powerful.<\/p>\n

\n\t\tAnd less self-involved.<\/p>\n

\n\t\tT<\/font>here is a play-within-the-play element to Tom Stoppard\u2019s 1982 exploration of marital infidelity, The Real Thing<\/i>, recently revived by the Roundabout Theatre Company with a cast full of those stars-on-Broadway-but-not-Broadway-stars we heard about in The Country House<\/i>: Ewan McGregor, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Cynthia Nixon, and Josh Hamilton\u2014that\u2019s Star Wars<\/i>, Batman<\/i>, Sex and the City<\/i>, and American Horror Story<\/i>, respectively. Yes, yes, all fine actors\u2014Ms. Nixon (Mrs. Christine Marinoni? What exactly is the protocol?) was surprisingly powerful in a recent production of Wit <\/i>(The New Criterion<\/i>, April 2012) and famously starred in a 1983 production of this very play while simultaneously acting in Hurlyburly<\/i>, both shows under the direction of Mike Nichols. In 1983, Ms. Nixon played the younger woman, Debbie, the role currently occupied by Madeline Weinstein; like Al Pacino graduating from young hotshot Ricky Roma to beaten-down has-been Shelly Levine in Glengarry Glen Ross<\/i>, Ms. Nixon in the role of Charlotte is making if not the most then whatever she can out of pitiless age. The play itself is cruel on the subject of age, characterizing Annie (Ms. Gyllenhaal) as a woman \u201cvery much like the woman Charlotte has ceased to be.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\tThe director Sam Gold and the set designer David Zinn invest the play with an intriguing mid-century aesthetic, from the modish furniture to the old-style turntables and speakers from which our hero, the playwright Henry (Mr. McGregor) derives what appears to be the only non-romantic joy in his life, listening to old bubblegum pop music from the 1950s and 1960s. For Henry, the height of musical seriousness is Buddy Holly, whom he idly compares to Beethoven: \u201cIf Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at 22, the history of music would have been very different. As would the history of aviation, of course.\u201d It feels like a slightly easy laugh for the cerebral Tom Stoppard.<\/p>\n

\n\t\tThe play opens with Charlotte (Ms. Nixon) coming home to her bitter, biting husband, Max (Josh Hamilton), who has learned that she is being unfaithful to him. With a relentless and dramatic display of wit, he disassembles her story about having been abroad on business for the weekend bit-by-bit, until she storms out. In the second scene, Charlotte is not married to Max but to Henry, and Max is a mutual friend of the couple, as is his wife, Annie (Ms. Gyllenhaal). The first scene turns out to be from a play that Henry is writing\u2014a play that Charlotte thinks very little of, dismissing it as being so enraptured with the mental workings of its male protagonist that it never satisfactorily answers the question of why, or even if, adultery was in fact afoot. And that of course is because in the real world, Henry and Annie are the adulterers, and Charlotte probably is one, too, though not the hapless Max. Henry and Annie soon throw over their respective spouses, casting them aside like old newspapers, with Annie wondering, almost innocently, at the fact that her happiness requires Max\u2019s misery. Mr. Stoppard is too intelligent to allow this silly sentiment to pass as though it were an observation of a natural law.<\/p>\n

\n\t\tThat two people whose sexual attachment began in mutual adultery should settle into a domestic peace that is necessarily uneasy is not exactly uncharted dramatic territory, but Mr. Stoppard is one of the most gifted playwrights of his time, and he limns the story gracefully. I am in general not much of an admirer of Mr. McGregor or of Ms. Gyllenhaal, but both performances are excellent. Henry, as it turns out, is a romantic in the classical model\u2014even with his own experience of adultery and betrayal, he believes in the possibility of fidelity and exclusivity, that the world can in fact be reduced to two categories of people: the beloved, and everybody else. Ms. Gyllenhaal, famous for her dark sexual appeal in spite of her not being conventionally attractive, is an interesting and highly effective choice for Annie. Approaching forty, she is not an ing\u00e9nue, trivially younger than Mr. McGregor though very fresh in comparison to Ms. Nixon, who here gives the impression of being considerably older than her forty-eight years. There is something slippery about Ms. Gyllenhaal\u2014even when she\u2019s playing a solid citizen, there is something about her that would make one hesitate to lend her money or let her drive your car. When Annie takes an interest in the \u201cpolitical prisoner\u201d Brodie (Alex Breaux)\u2014who has been jailed for vandalism after setting fire to a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier\u2014the potential sexual aspect of the relationship can be assumed.<\/p>\n

\n\t\tHenry is soon reduced to the worst sort of cuckold. He is writing popular television scripts for money, but he has failed to write a play about his love for Annie, unable to make something sufficiently dramatic out of the prosaic material of his domestic and sexual satisfaction. Annie, meanwhile, is having an open affair with Billy (Ronan Raftery), an actor who is playing a character based on Brodie in a play (or a play-shaped pile of words) the semi-literate young vandal has written about himself. Making things worse, Annie insists that Brodie\u2019s story has some sort of merit that transcends literary or dramatic value, and so she prevails upon Henry to rework it into something that can be presented to the public. When the much-heard-about-but-unseen Brodie finally appears on the scene, he scoffs at Henry\u2019s editorial improvements on the play, as though illiteracy were a form of authenticity\u2014as though English were not his native language. In the predictable pattern of thuggish young radicals everywhere, he reviles the liberal intellectuals who would be his advocates and patrons.<\/p>\n

\n\t\tA<\/font>s I have argued before in these pages, stories about adultery are, in these debased days, a hard sell. Conjuring up a world in which monogamous marriage is a going concern and in which infidelity must be hidden and justified rather than proclaimed as a means of self-actualization is not quite so mighty a feat of imagination as putting one\u2019s self in the world of the Bacchae or Cuchulain, but it feels increasingly similar. Marital monogamy is a bit like Henry\u2019s beloved vinyl collection\u2014connoisseurs appreciate the superiority of the high-fidelity medium, but the masses have moved on to file-sharing.<\/p>\n

\n\t\tTo Mr. McGregor\u2019s credit, Henry\u2019s final agony struck me as being as near to a fully expressed depiction of a genuine, specific, identifiable human emotion as I can remember having seen on stage in many years, in contrast to Elliott\u2019s similar scene at the climax of The Country House<\/i>, which seemed to me alien and inexplicable. Likewise, Mr. Stoppard\u2019s dramatic constructions are an architecture as splendidly austere as a Richard Meier building. But there is something about them that feels beside the point.<\/p>\n

\n\t\tIn fact, these plays-within-plays and theater about theater increasingly strike me as being categorically sterile. Big-time theater seems to be evolving into two distinct species: Shallow, popular spectacle along the lines of Wicked<\/i> and Beautiful<\/i> on the one hand, and wallowing, self-referential introspection into theater per se<\/i> on the other. Given the modest intellectual and artistic ambitions at work in the theater at large, it is understandable that in the case of something such as The Book of Mormon<\/i>, the merely clever can masquerade as the spectacular. The Country House<\/i> is competent, but nothing more, and The Real Thing <\/i>is interesting mainly in its ability to relate the aesthetic of a particular period to its ethic, which must be of limited interest to those who do not share my taste for the period in question. If there is a big idea lurking backstage somewhere, a fresh and revealing dramatic sensibility waiting to present itself, I have seen very little evidence of it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n\t\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviews of The Country House<\/i> & The Real Thing<\/i>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1671,"featured_media":0,"template":"","tags":[670],"department_id":[556],"issue":[2963],"section":[],"acf":{"participants":{"simple_value_formatted":"","value_formatted":null,"value":null,"field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_65fd9fbaa0408","label":"Authors","name":"participants","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"user","value":null,"menu_order":0,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_647e2b3c6941d","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"role":"","return_format":"array","multiple":1,"allow_null":0,"bidirectional":0,"bidirectional_target":[],"_name":"participants","_valid":1}},"page_number":{"simple_value_formatted":47,"value_formatted":47,"value":"47","field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_647e2bc0c860c","label":"Page Number","name":"page_number","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"number","value":null,"menu_order":1,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_647e2b3c6941d","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"default_value":"","min":"","max":"","placeholder":"","step":"","prepend":"","append":"","_name":"page_number","_valid":1}},"featured_image_credits":{"simple_value_formatted":"","value_formatted":"","value":"","field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_651b519e4fcb7","label":"Featured Image Credits","name":"featured_image_credits","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"wysiwyg","value":null,"menu_order":2,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_647e2b3c6941d","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"default_value":"","tabs":"all","toolbar":"basic","media_upload":0,"delay":0,"_name":"featured_image_credits","_valid":1}},"enable_paywall":{"simple_value_formatted":"Yes","value_formatted":true,"value":"1","field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_651d8874dce6f","label":"Enable Paywall","name":"enable_paywall","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"true_false","value":null,"menu_order":3,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_647e2b3c6941d","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"message":"","default_value":1,"ui":0,"ui_on_text":"","ui_off_text":"","_name":"enable_paywall","_valid":1}},"set_paywall_at":{"simple_value_formatted":null,"value_formatted":null,"value":null,"field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_66032c7fbb6f0","label":"Set Paywall At","name":"set_paywall_at","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"date_time_picker","value":null,"menu_order":4,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_647e2b3c6941d","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"display_format":"d\/m\/Y g:i a","return_format":"d\/m\/Y g:i a","first_day":1,"_name":"set_paywall_at","_valid":1}},"overlay_banner":{"simple_value_formatted":"","value_formatted":"","value":"","field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_66196a3de1de4","label":"Overlay Banner","name":"overlay_banner","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"text","value":null,"menu_order":5,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_647e2b3c6941d","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"default_value":"","maxlength":"","placeholder":"","prepend":"","append":"","_name":"overlay_banner","_valid":1}}},"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"featured_img":false,"coauthors":[],"author_meta":{"author_link":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/author\/kevin-d-williamson\/","display_name":"Kevin D. Williamson"},"relative_dates":{"created":"Posted 9 years ago","modified":"Updated 2 months ago"},"absolute_dates":{"created":"Posted on December 1, 2014","modified":"Updated on March 22, 2024"},"absolute_dates_time":{"created":"Posted on December 1, 2014 12:00 am","modified":"Updated on March 22, 2024 8:54 am"},"featured_img_caption":"","tax_additional":{"post_tag":{"linked":["Theater<\/a>"],"unlinked":["Theater<\/span>"],"slug":"post_tag","name":"Tags"},"department_id":{"linked":["Theater<\/a>"],"unlinked":["Theater<\/span>"],"slug":"department_id","name":"Departments"},"issue":{"linked":["December 2014<\/a>"],"unlinked":["December 2014<\/span>"],"slug":"issue","name":"Issues"},"section":{"linked":[],"unlinked":[],"slug":"section","name":"Sections"}},"series_order":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"mfb_rest_fields":["jetpack_sharing_enabled","author","featured_img","coauthors","author_meta","relative_dates","absolute_dates","absolute_dates_time","featured_img_caption","tax_additional","series_order","jetpack-related-posts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/83615"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/article"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1671"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/83615\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":128694,"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/83615\/revisions\/128694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=83615"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=83615"},{"taxonomy":"department_id","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/department_id?post=83615"},{"taxonomy":"issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issue?post=83615"},{"taxonomy":"section","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/section?post=83615"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}