Scratchings

Dave and I took advantage of a discount offer on tickets and went back to see Anatol at the Aurora again. We both liked the play even better the second time. The performances were even stronger, sharper, and funnier than before. Also, we got to see the play from the opposite side of the stage (the Aurora has a thrust stage, with the audience on three sides), so we could see everything from a different angle — great fun, so thank you, ye gods of seat assignment. The Aurora has been one of my favorite companies since their days playing in a large room at the Berkeley City Club, and this production was no exception.

I gather from the comments I’ve seen on Goldstar and elsewhere that this hasn’t been a popular production. I’ve seen comments and a couple of reviews that complain that the central character isn’t likable and that makes the play itself impossible to enjoy — an attitude I totally do not understand. It seems to me that liking a character and being interested in what happens to the character are two different and to some extent even independent things.

Some of what I’ve read also suggests that some people are assuming that Anatol is supposed to be sympathetic and was regarded as sympathetic by nineteenth-century audiences, which is just wrong. If you cringe frequently at what Anatol says and does, then you’re getting the play, and you’re getting it in more or less the same way that its contemporary audiences got it; you’re just not getting that you get it.

One reviewer seemed to think that Anatol was a success originally because of its frankness about sex, but that our changing attitudes toward woman have dated the play and made it impossible now to approve of Anatol’s womanizing. That’s not quite right; there were plenty of plays in the nineteenth century that were every bit as frank about sex — really, many that were far more so. So many, in fact, that the theater had a reputation as not being quite a nice place for really respectable people.

However, in a typical nineteenth-century play, after the audience had had its fill of racy fun, the last scene would show conventional virtue triumphing. What was shocking about Anatol wasn’t the frankness about sex but the lack of explicit moral judgment. Anatol is presented for our examination and amusement, not as a simple theatrical type, neither as a single-minded villain nor as a shallow buffoon, but as a complicated psychological portrait with a few good points along with all his many bad points. If the final scene were replaced by one in which Anatol either shoots himself in despair or is forever reformed by the true love of a good, pure woman, the play would have looked a lot like a hundred others. But Schnitzler neither reforms nor kills off Anatol at the end of the play, just leaves him to continue on his self-deluded way, and some in the audience in those days found the absence of a firm moral judgment to be unsettling. Looks like some still do.

Anatol at the Aurora was terrific. Mike Ryan is both adorable and exasperating as Anatol — he made me believe that women would keep falling in love with Anatol and also made me believe that women would keep breaking up with him. Tim Kniffin as Max is funny and quite a bit more acid than I’ve imagined Max to be when I’ve read the play.

Delia MacDougall is really brilliant and often hilarious as six of Anatol’s lovers — a different one in each scene. Her performance is partly a tour de force and partly a quick-change stunt, and I’m not sure that in my ideal production I wouldn’t rather see two or three women splitting the roles, but she pulls off the six roles with great style and assurance.

She’s especially touching as an former lover of Anatol’s in a chance encounter on Christmas Eve, and especially hilarious as a ballerina eagerly wolfing down the expensive after-performance supper of oysters and champagne and Sacher torte that Anatol is buying her, determined to enjoy it even though the two of them are quarreling all through the meal, for she knows that the relationship is ending and that it will probably be her last fancy supper for a long time, and she can’t bear not to savor it.

Barbara Oliver’s staging is lovely, inventive and lively, but at the same time simple and direct. (I was misremembering before, though, when I said she directed that wonderful Vanya — welcome to late middle age, Scott. She was in it but did not direct it.)

Seeing the play in performance for my first time, I found that some parts of it seemed fairly facile to me again, just as the whole play had when I first read it in college. While I like the play much better now than I did in college, I can see why I felt the way I did. Some of it is predictable stuff. The first scene in particular seems that way to me, taking a fair amount of time to reach a conclusion that is telegraphed early on, and I think it gets the play off to a weak start.

But along with the sometimes-too-pat plotting is a lot of wonderful insight into a character who is maddingly, hilariously oblivious to his own nature and how he sabotages himself in his relationships with women.

The play is in seven unconnected vignettes; in this production one is dropped and the order of the others is slightly changed — probably in large part to make Ms. MacDougall’s changes of costume and character more manageable. Nothing wrong with any of that, but as long as they were switching things around, I do kind of wish that they’d dropped the first vignette instead. The vignette they don’t use involves Anatol’s affair with a married woman, and to me it has a bracing bleakness to it — on the page, anyway — that the other scenes don’t have, even the bittersweet Christmas Eve scene, and it makes an affecting contrast with the comedy of most of the scenes.

Over the last few days I’ve reread Schnitzler’s play Anatol, to get ready for the Aurora Theater production which we’re planning to see.

I don’t think I’ve looked at the play since my twenties. If I remember correctly, I was actually looking for a copy of Reigen (meaning Round Dance, but best known in English as La Ronde after the movie version), which I’d seen a production of, and while I was browsing through some used-book store or other, I came across the Modern Library edition of some of Schnitzler’s plays, including Anatol. Some time later I came across a wonderful little book of the published letters between an experienced actress and a young man just starting out, in which she writes about the art of acting in comedy, and she uses the last scene of Anatol as the basis for many of her examples, so I was glad to have a copy of the play handy.

Still, I don’t remember thinking much of the play when I was younger. My recollection is that I thought it was arch and facile, going after paradoxes and contradictions for easy laughs at the expense of believable characterization.

Oh my. Well, what can I say, I was in my twenties and didn’t understand much about human nature yet. On rereading it, I find that the paradoxes and contradictions in the play seem very true to me of how people actually are. Just not true of the way we think we are when we’re in our twenties. The way Schnitzler pokes fun at Anatol’s self-imposed delusions — with affection and understanding, perhaps, but unsparingly all the same — reminds me a lot now of Chekhov and Ibsen. (I know, I know, Ibsen??? But in my middle age I have come to think of both of them as two of the greatest comic playwrights ever.) The director of Anatol, Barbara Oliver, directed the sharpest and at the same time the funniest Uncle Vanya I think I’ve ever seen a few years ago, so I’m expecting that she’ll do right by Schnitzler, too, and I’m greatly looking forward to the play. (Later: Whoops. Ms. Oliver was in that production but did not direct it. I’m getting forgetful in my advancing age, I fear. That doesn’t change the fact that Barbara Oliver is a longtime favorite director of mine and Dave’s.)

I was struck by how similar Anatol is in structure and theme to the musical Company. Anatol has no story; it’s just a series of seven vignettes, each showing Anatol’s relationship with a different woman. Taken all together, they’re a shrewd and funny and rather sad portrait of a man who is completely deluded about love, who wallows in his illusions about it and refuses to give them up even when it should be obvious that they are not serving him well. As a result, even though he thinks of himself as an expert on love and the human heart, he’s completely barricaded himself off from any genuine love in his life.

One considerable difference is that in Company Bobby eventually comes to see through the lies he tells himself and makes a psychological breakthrough — and it’s by far the least convincing part of the story. Anatol gets to the end of his play having not learned a thing; the only real difference between the first scene of the play and the last is that at the end Anatol has gotten himself into a much bigger mess than he ever has before. Yet I find the ending of Anatol very satisfying, at least in the reading of it, and after seeing the show several times I still find the ending of Company a real letdown.

But I’ve never seen Anatol staged before, so I’ll have to see how I think it works once I’ve seen it in performance.

Curiously, Anatol has much more in common with Company than it does with The Gay Life, AKA The High Life, the 1950s musical that was ostensibly based on it. I’ve never seen the show and I don’t have a copy of its book, so everything I know about the story is from a couple of synopses I’ve read. But it looks like they basically threw out the play, threw out most of the characters, threw out everything the play is about, and replaced it all with a rather trite, sentimental story about a playboy who is in the end reformed by an innocent young woman who loves him. Blech. Why bother with the pretense of adapting a play if you’re going to throw out everything but your central character? And not even really keeping him, just keeping his name and changing the essence of his personality. I’ve got the original cast album, too, but I haven’t listened to it much. There’s one song I like a lot, “Something You Never Had Before,” but the rest of the score has always seemed rather lame and false to me.

Dave and I BARTed out to Concord Saturday night to see Pride and Prejudice, Part II, at the Butterfield 8 Theater Company. We didn’t wait to see Part I first because our schedules make it uncertain if we could then get to Part II still later in the run, but we figured we’d be able to figure it out. Not like I haven’t read the novel a half dozen times or so.

The adaptation is by Donald L. Hardy, who is an old friend of ours. Don’s goal with this adaptation has been to use Austen’s own words as much as possible, revising and rewriting as little as possible in the process of adapting for the stage. The play is in two parts.

I fooled around some years ago with the idea of adapting P&P for the stage, in my case as a musical — that has already tried once, as First Impressions, but it’s a terrible score that trivializes the characters and situations and doesn’t catch any of the flavor of the novel, and I had wondered whether it would be possible to do a better job of it. I even went as far as working out a rough outline of how such a work might be structured. It didn’t take long to figure out that I’d be faced with an impossible choice: either cut so many incidents and characters that those who love the novel would immediately bristle at the omissions, or race through the story so quickly that there’d be no time to develop characters, no time to linger over the most important situations and let them develop their proper emotional weight. (I suspect that that’s part of what’s wrong with First Impressions, though I’d still like to get hold of the book sometime and take a look.)

The issue of stage time is more critical for a musical than for a spoken play (and even more critical for an opera — as a rough rule of thumb, when you’re writing the words for a musical, you have to tell your story in half as many words as you would for a spoken play; when you’re writing the words for a fully sung opera, you have to tell your story in half as many words as you would for a musical), but even for a spoken play it’s still very important. A novel will generally have too much story to squeeze comfortably into a two-and-a-half-hour spoken play (let alone a musical or opera); a novella will more often have about the right amount.

It isn’t the way I would have done it myself, but given that it was Don’s desire to use Austen’s own words as much as possible, his decision to write the play in two parts was a good one. I can only judge from Part II so far, but it worked for me. The pace of the story is more leisurely than is usual for a play, but after ten minutes or so I got accustomed to it and enjoyed it. The performance really does capture the feel of the novel, and it reminded me in a very good way of a “literary cabaret” I used to go to regularly when I lived in Los Angeles, in which the performances consisted of nothing more than actors sitting and reading, but reading really, really well. This production is staged, but in a small and informal setting (the audience sits along three sides of the playing area, at tables set for tea — indeed, you can buy a pot of tea and sip it during the show if you like), and the overall effect is charming and engaging, like sitting in a living room and being told a story by a group of really good storytellers.

As I said, it isn’t the way I would have done it myself, and there were places I felt there wouldn’t have been anything wrong at all if Don had rewritten Austen’s words to make things less literary and more theatrical. But it’s a charmer and a lot of fun, and the acting is good — several of the actors I thought were very good indeed. We’re definitely looking forward to Part I this week.

On Saturday, Dave and I saw the opening night of The Verona Project at California Shakespeare Theater. I liked it a lot more than I was expecting to, neither rock musicals nor Two Gentlemen of Verona generally being high on my list of ways I’m eager to spend an evening. But I thought the show was endearing, the music was both enjoyable and interesting, and the performers were terrific.

Amanda Dehnert has made a lot of ingenious and fanciful changes to Two Gentlemen and shaped it into an engaging story about a bunch of likeable but flawed people looking for love and discovering that they need to learn and fix some things about their own characters before love has any chance to get through to them. Intriguing elements of fantasy and magic realism are scattered through the story, though the alternate society in which the characters live and travel isn’t really developed much and its peculiarities rarely influence the way the story develops. A highlight is a lovely, rambling song that Julia sings at the start of the second act, “Julia Says”, telling how she came to grow a fantastical garden inside her house, where few could see it, and then only through the windows.

One rather cool twist is that Ms. Dehnert has flip-flopped the sexes of one of the couples in Shakespeare, turning male Thurio and female Sylvia into female Thuria and male Silvio, without changing their roles in the story. Proteus becomes bisexual, then, and what’s more, nobody in the story finds it particularly startling or shocking that his desire wavers back and forth between a woman (Julia) and a man (Sylvio). Sexual orientation is fluid in this world, and it adds a few new layers to the complications. Ms. Dehnert and actor Dan Clegg make Proteus’s impulsive and shifting passions believable and even somehow naive and guileless rather than hurtful and creepy (which is how they tend to come across in the Shakespeare).

In spite of all the fun, and all good changes made that ought to give the show some emotional weight, I came away feeling that the show felt lightweight, completely charming and enjoyable but only intermittently emotionally engaging. This in spite of the fact that I found the story interesting and the characters, despite their various flaws, understandable and likeable.

I think there are two main reasons. One is that Ms. Dehnert makes a lot of use of the device of having a character turn to the audience and describe what’s happening to himself or herself in the story. This is a charming device at first, and at times even saves some stage time, as when a character turns to the audience and simply explains some unusual trait of the strange society in which the story takes place. But when it takes the form of, say, the actor playing Julia turning to the audience and saying “Julia felt such and such about what Proteus just said”, instead of finding a way for Julia to convey to us what she’s feeling while staying in character, I think it tends to keep the audience at arm’s length emotionally.

In spite of the best efforts of my theater history and playwriting professors in college, who tried so hard to pass along to me their boundless admiration of Brecht’s theories of epic theater and the “alienation effect”, I’ve just never thought that constantly calling the audience’s attention to the artificiality of theatrical conventions was a good idea. Here and there, sure. Breaking the spell now and then can be playful, it can be ironic, it can be dramatic, it can even be chilling, as when Sweeney Todd suddenly addresses the audience directly in his “Epiphany”.

But when this is done very frequently, I think it ends up sacrificing one of the biggest advantages theater has over other forms of art, its power to convey emotion with a directness and immediacy that no other form has. And, despite Brecht’s fondness for keeping the audience at an emotional distance from the play, I don’t think it gains you enough for what you’ve given up. This business of actors talking directly to the audience about their characters in the third person is used a lot in The Verona Project, and I think it gets in the way of giving the play the feeling of emotional weight and depth that the play really ought to have and deserves to have, given all the good stuff in it.

(If I’m remembering correctly, there was an adaptation of Emma at the Aurora Theater a few years ago made extensive use of the same device, and I had a similar cool reaction. And Emma is one of my all-time favorite novels.)

The same sense of emotional distance is true of the songs, which seem to me to be terrific songs, musically interesting and inventive and intriguing. Yet, with only a couple of exceptions, they are generally not sung by a character who is actually singing them in character, within the story. Most of the time, the song is written from a point of view outside the story and is used to comment on that character or explain something about him or her. There’s nothing wrong with that as far as any particular song goes, and they’re all enjoyable songs, but when so many of them are like that, it gets in the way of the audience making a strong emotional connection with the story and characters. Or at least it does for me.

Which seemed like a shame to me, because, as I said, I enjoyed the show a lot. It was totally endearing and it held my interest every step of the way; it just never touched me as deeply as I wanted it to, and as I felt it had the potential to. I hope Ms. Dehnert isn’t finished with it quite yet.

The cast is terrific and charming and energetic, and I was completely in love with all of them — psychological flaws and all — by the end of the evening, especially Dan Clegg as Proteus, Nate Trinrud as his childhood friend Valentine, and Arwen Anderson as Proteus’s girlfriend Julia.

I’ve fallen behind in blogging again and am just now catching up with a few things. Dave and I went to see Titus Andronicus at the California Shakespeare Festival a few weeks ago. I’d seen Titus twice before and wasn’t feeling any desire to see it again, but the play had a kickass cast, headed by James Carpenter as Titus and Stacy Ross as Tamara, and that was enough to get me wanting to see it.

The play was given an effective and creepy production. The director, thankfully, did not go all dour with the play, as some do with revenge plays of the period, and the horror alternated with scenes played for dark comedy — the dinner scene near the end of the play was a standout, with Tamara at first suspicious of the food and with trepidation taking the tiniest nibble at it, then finding it delicious and wolfing it down with gusto.

All in all it was an enjoyable roller coaster ride of a production, but it didn’t change for me the fact that the play is still Titus Andronicus and pretty shallow stuff, even for a revenge play. ‘Tis pity it’s by Shakespeare and thus gets dusted off more often than it needs to be, given its very limited merits, while there are so many other plays of the genre, most of them no worse and some of them quite a bit better, that I’ll probably never get to see staged even once.

Dave and I saw Anna Deveare Smith’s new one-woman show Let Me Down Easy at Berkeley Rep last night, and it’s terrific, both the writing and the performance. The show is a series of vignettes in which Ms. Smith portrays a number of people talking mostly about their experiences with hospitals, illness, and death; the words are taken from actual interviews Ms. Smith made with them. Several of them are well known — Lance Armstrong and the late Ann Richards, for example, both talking about how their lives had been changed and shaped by battles with cancer — and others are not — a doctor at a hospital in New Orleans talking about the days after Katrina, for example, trying to give her patients the best possible care while waiting for help that never came. Both the words in the vignettes and Ms. Smith’s portrayals are wonderfully vivid and lively, taking delight in the variety of strengths, weaknesses, and idiosyncrasies her characters display.