Review: Revivals Reviewed Work(s): A Delicate Balance by Edward Albee and Gerald Gutierrez; Buried Child by Sam Shepard and Gary Sinise Review by: Steve Vineberg Source: The Threepenny Review, No. 68 (Winter, 1997), pp. 30-31 Published by: Threepenny Review Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4384599 Accessed: 20-06-2017 18:29 UTC

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This content downloaded from 158.135.172.215 on Tue, 20 Jun 2017 18:29:23 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms THEATER supremely designed areas are meant to she declares that she's retiring as home- stave off has been trapped inside with maker and throws the responsibility for the characters. -deciding what to do about Harry and The immense environment Beatty has Edna on his shoulders, she defines the created for Balance immediately- arouses precise terms on which his decision Revivals your curiosity about the family that has must be made. George Grizzard plays to support it.- They are Tobias (George Tobias with a hint of baby talk in his Grizzard); his wife Agnes (Rosemary line readings. This man loves the cozy Steve Vineberg Harris); her alcoholic sister Claire comfort of being infantilized by the (Elaine Stritch); and Agnes and Tobias's woman who bore his daughter (and a daughter Julia (Mary Beth Hurt), seek- son, Teddy, whose boyhood death is ing refuge after the collapse of her the family's unhealed wound, and the A Delicate Balance, way both skew the conventions of fourth marriage. This quartet is joined play's rough dramatic equivalent to the by Edward Albee, American drama's most beloved genre, at the end of Act One by Agnes and imaginary son in Who's Afraid of directed by Gerald Gutierrez, the family play. Attending revivals in Tobias's best friends, Harry (John Virginia Woolf?). In Grizzard's perfor- New York, 1996. New York these days is a refresher Carter) and Edna (Rosemary Murphy), mance, Tobias emerges from a course in the glories of the American who, approaching old age and general Strindbergian vision of men who can Buried Child, repertory; A Delicate Balance and existential despair, have suddenly never successfully rise up against the by Sam Shepard, Buried Child, with their backward become terrified enough to knock on tyranny of women; the difference is directed by Gary Sinise, glances at earlier family dramas, layer their friends' door, seeking shelter and that Toby is pleased as punch to buckle New York, 1996. the revival experience. solace. The pillars of the play, howev- under to it. He's the American daddy as er-certainly of this production-are schoolboy. Agnes, Tobias, and Claire. Harris plays He's babied equally by Agnes and F OR SEVERAL seasons now, the CC 0 O0YOU KNOW these people?" the Agnes as a queen WASP, holding every- Claire. Casting Elaine Stritch as the revivals on Broadway have been far man next to me asked just as the one around her at bay with her meticu- complacent, besotted Claire-Stritch, more interesting than most of the new lights dimmed for the third act of A lously constructed witticisms. She sits with her thorny, burgundy-soaked alto plays. But it's way past time to moan Delicate Balance. The answer, of elegantly on her living room couch, her and her self-mocking vaudevillian's about the disintegration of the New course, is no; no one in the history of face composed, sipping brandy and raucousness-was a stroke of genius. York commercial theater. Anyway, the planet has ever truly been like the smiling the Cheshire Cat's superior Playing in two entirely different but when you see Cherry Jones in The monsters who stalk the epigrammatic smile-at the husband she manipulates equally constructed styles she and Heiress one season and in The Night of world of Edward Albee's plays. Maybe masterfully, puts down oh so gently, Harris suggest two kinds of the Iguana the next, you don't think that's why we never ask the terrible and at the sister who's on the receiving well-brought-up Protestant women- about how bankrupt our theater is; you questions that would explode them, like end of her worst velvet-gloved insults. the control freak and the rebel-and think about how lucky we are that a "Why don't Nick and Honey just Harris's Agnes rides on the heights of they're absolutely convincing as sisters. performer like Jones, who would have leave?" (in Who's Afraid of Virginia her own verbal deftness, enjoying her- (You begin to see them as flip sides of been as legendary as Ina Claire or Woolf?) or "Why don't Agnes and self immensely as she turns every com- the same expensive coin.) The true Pauline Lord if she'd been born into an Tobias kick out all these parasites?" (in ment by anyone else, even the presence "delicate balance" in this production is era where the New York stage still A Delicate Balance). Albee's dialogue is of anyone else, into proof of her own the one these actresses preserve in their occupied the center of the American so stylized that we're afraid to ask; the unfailing correctness and eternal mar- scenes together, where the sisters trade arts, gets to step into roles of this cal- texts, preposterously overwritten in a tyrdom. Often her bon mots are like quips and test just how far they can go iber, even if they're old roles. We can self-adoring theatrical prose, keep us at those convoluted false syllogisms that with each other. (The fact that they've all agree that Jones deserves to have a formal distance, like cowed guests at a convert A into B; she knows exactly been testing each other all their lives is great vehicles written for her, the way tea party. Gerald Gutierrez's inspiration what she's doing, but it delights her- both alarming and funny.) Neither will they were written for Claire and Lord, in this- new Delicate Balance is to make it's a game she knows she'll win every ever let go of the mechanism that links but since that time is long dead, we can a virtue of the stylization by treating the time. Its point is to confirm that she their lives; neither will ever cease to rejoice that the repertory can still yield play as a comedy of manners. The rules the roost. When she speaks of her play the role they detest in each other, first-rate works to frame her, and in echoes you hear in this show are of a sacred homemaker's role-of maintain- because they both know that they truly splendid revivals. The night I saw peculiar variant on the family play- ing the "shape" of the family-she's a define themselves against each other. The Heiress, a densely written Philip Barry's high comedies, where the nightmare version of Virginia Woolf's It's hard to imagine that Stritch has three-hour costume drama out of bonding elements in the family are lega- Mrs. Ramsay (a role Harris has also ever given a better performance. She Henry James's Washington Square, the cy, stature, and a need for maintaining played), the matriarch turned to granite. even manages to find a plausible area packed audience sat stone still during control amounting nearly to a mania. Agnes is deeply infuriating, but, in of vulnerability underneath the brittle the action, and at intermission all any- Barry loved and pitied his aristocrats, Harris's portrayal, she's also hilarious. exterior: her reading of Claire's mono- one around me wanted to talk about though; Albee either pillories them on She's like Geraldine Page's repressed logue about her efforts at sobriety is was the characters. It was a far cry their own wit or uses them, in a rigged matron in Woody Allen's Interiors, more touching than you'd guess from from the usual intermission chatter at sort of way, to expose the emptiness at only played for laughs, and triumphant. reading it (or seeing anyone else Broadway hits, where desperate- the heart of the American dream, pent- Imagine if Tracy Lord hadn't under- attempt it). sounding playgoers who've paid these house floor. That's why Gutierrez's con- gone her conversion in The Neither John Carter nor Rosemary obscene ticket prices on the strength of cept, terrific as it is, can't sustain itself Philadelphia Story, or if Johnny Murphy Case makes in much of an impression, inflated reviews rush together to assure through the whole play-inevitably, he Holiday had married the chilly sister but who would want to play these each other that they're having a mar- smashes into the hollow wood of instead of the free-spirited one; then parts? They're a dramatic conceit: see velous timre. Albee's dramaturgy. (It happens some- add a couple of decades, and you've got them as dim echoes of Tobias and The best revivals are the ones that, where around Act Three.) But he offers Rosemary Harris's Agnes. But though Agnes and you've got the whole story. like Robert Falls' The Night of the theatergoers a lot of pleasure before- she's playing a Philip Barry-inspired And Mary Beth Hurt, who is often Iguana at the Roundabout last winter, and even after-he rams into that back character, Harris makes the role glitter wonderful, can't budge the impossible convince you that you've been forget- wall. in ways that Barry's muse, Katharine role of Julia, the whiny, tantrummy ting-or unldervaluing-a masterpiece Gutierrez. who also staged The Hepburn, couldn't in the deadly 1973 daughter who takes Harry and Edna's for years. Gerald Gutierrez's deservedly Heiress, is a master of technique, and film of Albee's play (where she starred appearance as a personal affront. The popular and lauded mounting of he understands the apparatus of a~ opposite Paul Scofield). This is one of more time these characters spend on Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance big-boned Broadway play on a physical Harris's great performances, like the the stage, the more glaring the play's doesn't have that effect; in this case a level. Both of these productions are ones she gave on stage and film in weaknesses become. But Gutierrez and had play remains, in the final analysis, about what they look like-that is, Uncle Van ya, on stage and TV in his three stars, as well as his other col- a bad play. What Gutierrez demon- they're about the symbolic meaning of Heartbreak House, and on British TV laborators ( including the costume strates is that a brilliant director and the trappings of a moneyed existence. in To the Lighthouse. designer, Jane Greenwood, another vet- superlative acto)rs can enliven the right You might say they're about the archi- The fact that Albee doesn't try to eran of The Heiress), do more with kind of bad play-can confirm the tectonics of the well-heeled American make Agnes sympathetic works to Albee's diarrhetic closet-drama writing immense satisfactionls a star vehicle family. can Both plays transpire in huge Harris's and the production's advan- and his stiff-necked iconic characters provide.-Gary Sinise's Buried Child rectangular sets by John Lee Beatty, tage. She's actually entertainingly con- than I would have thought possible. restores the vitality of a modern classic magnificent sets that provide spaces- trolling: we can enjoy her manipula- that, perhaps because the playwright outer corridors and a staircase in The tions because we know the play isn't Sam Shepard's recent work has tended Heiress, suggestive beginnings of adja- going to turn around and tell us to WV HE N YOU READ Sam Shepard's to be redundant, mired in self-con- cent rooms in A Delicate Balance-like weep for her. (Perhaps Albee really did WBuried Childl, the plays he's par- sciousness, has faded since Shepard insulation that finally guarantees no intend us to feel something for her, but odying line up before you like tin sol- won the Pulitzer Prize for it in 1978. more protection than the locked palace if so, he failed so miserably it's as if he diers ready to be pinged. The nutty What made seeing these shows back to doors- of Poe's "Masque of the Red never tried.) Agnes tells Tobias exactly Gothic family in their central Illinois back this summer so much fun was the Death." The unhappiness these what she wants him to do; even when farmhouse, Halie and Dodge and their

30 THE THRE

This content downloaded from 158.135.172.215 on Tue, 20 Jun 2017 18:29:23 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms progeny, suggest the uncorseted like an ancient, splayed paintbrush. bizarre crypto-rape by (presumably them like a nQ-man's land, and its Vanderhofs from Kaufman and Hart's His voice is worn down to a cornhusk, impotent) Uncle Bradley; at this point stage-left staircase up to the unseen sec- You Can't Take It with You gone to but he performs miracles with it, wind- we see how the noir creepos and radia- ond floor, creates the layered, haunted seed and madness. The return of the ing a whole reedy scale through it, and tion monsters of the Fifties link up with space Shepard and Sinise demand. (You grandson, Vince, with his L.A. girl miracles with the John Carradine-Percy the human monsters of Seventies hor- glimpse the Seventies through the friend Shelly in tow, stirs up the family Kilbride moldering-reprobate type he's ror movies. Sinise's production has a Thirties and the Fifties.) secret of what's buried out in the (sud- playing. His line readings are endlessly funhouse mirror quality, with all of Sinise's inspired production gives tes- denly mysteriously fertile) corn field, varied and surprising and uproarious. these images from Broadway and timony that when the director and and suddenly you've got a wildcat ver- Lois Smith, who can be tight and Hollywood reflected back at us distort- actors know what they're doing, the sion of all those Freudian family plays affected in movies (where she's gener- ed. That's how he reads Shepard's poet- skeletal outlines on the page in that took American theatergoers out of ally used for her eccentricities, as she ic lines about the familiar faces Tilden Shepard don't remain outlines on the the war and into the Eisenhower Fifties. was in the drippy role of the hippie and Vince, estranged father and son, stage-as they do in Mamet, for Shepard's also referencing, of course, sculptor aunt in this summer's see within their own and each other's instance. Shepard isn't a disciple of the "buried child" of Who's Afraid of Twister), plays Halie as a punch-drunk faces: what they're seeing aren't just the Pinter, like Mamet is; he looks toward Virginia Woolf? Brooding, uncommu- tough dame, a Joan Blondell type. The connections between them, blurred by Samuel Beckett, master of the poetic nicative Tilden, Vince's dad, retreating brilliant costume designer, Allison time and distance and the unspecified stage image, the scratchy black humor from some unidentified "trouble out Reeds, fits her into a black Thirties fog over the country (Vietnam, presum- of entropy, the vaudeville-sketch west," is a take on Lennie in Steinbeck's dress studded with little silver buttons ably) that has half-erased the national horror-show. The difference between Of Mice and Men, a link that's made that march across her breasts and memory, but their connections to earli- Shepard and Beckett-a huge one-is obvious when, alone with Shelly at the down her frame like a game of Follow er images of the American family in Shepard's Americanness, which he glo- end of Act Two he asks her to let him the Dots, and a black hat is -fixed to drama, where, Shepard implies, the real ries in. He's no minimalist. He brings a fondle her rabbit-fur coat. Tilden, who one side of her long platinum wig. obsessions in our culture are explored. trunkful of American stage and screen was a high-school fullback, also con- Then she saunters offstage, not to The superb double-bracketed set by lore into Buried Child, and a great nects up with the failed all-American return for two days (and two acts), and Robert Brill, with its two walls (one vis- mounting like this one hoists it open heroes of dramas like Death of a when she does, she's changed dramati- ible through the screen in the other) like and lets the hungry trouper ghosts Salesman, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and cally: her hair is orange, her dress is echoes of each other, its porch between come streaming out. OI Picnic: Halie's disappointment in her bright yellow, and you sense she's shift- promising sons-one's dead, one's lost ed into the Fifties, where she's adopted a leg, and Tilden is a psychological crip- the role of Blondell's later counterparts, ple-replays the personal and (by exten- the scarlet women played by Gloria sion) national disenchantment that the Grahame and Dorothy Malone in film fall of the athletic champion occasions noirs and Douglas Sirk melodramas. In in Miller, Williams, and Inge. (In Sinise's reading, the play seems to take Shepard, these heroes have turned place in a time warp: when we walk sociopathic.) into Dodge and Halie's house, we don't On the page, all of this is mere schol- know if we're in the Thirties or the arship. I confess I didn't care much for Fifties (and the family is like some Benevolence Buried Child until a memorable pro- cross-breeding of figures out of Walker duction by a colleague at College of the Evans and Charles Addams). The mix Holy Cross clarified for me the way it's feels appropriate, since the American supposed to work. If it's true that you family play is generically an amalgam When my father dies and comes back as a dog, never truly get a play until you see it of images from that roughly half-centu- I already know what his favorite sound will be: performed, that must be doubly true ry span-in the Thirties, it's blended the soft, almost inaudible gasp for Shepard, who writes in a sort of with the Depression play; in the late as the rubber lips of the refrigerator door projected collaboration with the actors Forties and Fifties, it takes on Freud unstick, followed by that arctic who will play his roles. In Gary Sinise's and the scars of the Second World version, the actors-especially James War. Sinise throws in Hollywood pulp exhalation of cool air; Gammon as Dodge, Lois Smith as to spice up the stew, sending up the then the cracking of the ice cube tray above the sink Halie, Kellie Overbey as Shelly, and mad-scientist films of the Thirties when and the quiet ching the cubes make Leo Burmester as Bradley, the psycho- wooden-legged Bradley comes lumber- when dropped into a glass. pathic son with the wooden leg-have ing in at the end of the first act (Leo a Krazy Glue grip on their characters. Burmester makes a spectacular slap- Unable to pronounce the name of his favorite drink But the psychological material of the stick entrance, tripping and cursing) or to express his preference for single malt, play-the part you focus on from the and the sci-fi pictures of the Fifties he will utter one sharp bark outset at a play by Miller or Williams when Vince and Shelly arrive in Act and point the wet black arrow of his nose or Inge-omes at you at weird angles Two and find that, like small-town imperatively up through the boffo vaudeville-sketch Americans taken over by aliens, the at the bottle on the shelf, presentation of these personalities. In whole family has apparently forgotten Sinise's hilarious production, Gammon who Vince is. Tilden (played with then seat himself before me, and Smith play Dodge and Halie like unsettling effectiveness by Sinise 's trembling, expectant, water pouring some off-the-wall burlesque rendition Steppenwolf pal Terry Kinney), a spec- down the long pink dangle of his tongue of Ma and Pa Kettle on the farm, sur- tral presence with hooded eyes, thin as the memory of pleasure from his former life veying the increasingly lunatic proceed- hair, unkempt beard, and an eerily shakes him like a tail. ings in their dilapidated living room-a hushed voice, keeps wandering out into litter-strewn den gathered haphazardly the fields behind the house, into an epic What I'll remember as I tower over him, but unmistakably around an eternally rain, and coming back with his boots holding a dripping, whiskey-flavored cube fliCk ering TV-Withz a mixture of and faded plaid pants muddy and his above his open mouth, amusement and irritation. The actors arms stacked high with vegetables; this relishing the-power rushing through my veins approach their roles as if they were out- supernatural bumper crop also recalls the way it rushed through his, lines for extravagant comedy routines; Fifties sci-fi. (IShepard's ultimate image, you've spent most of the evening with which makes the title explicit, is the what I'll remember as I stand there them before you realize how much conclusion of this motif.) is the hundred clever tricks emotional backwater they've stored up Vince (Jim True) carries a horn case I taught myself to please him, behind those routinles. and, in his leather jacket and shades and for how long I mistakenly believed The first (and one of the funniest) and coiffed hair, has a rock-star per- that it was love he held concealed in his closed hand. bits is the squabble Dodge and Halie sona; Shelly, in her bell-bottom jeans, is have in the opening mninutes of the an anorectic-looking West Coast vege- play, screaming at each other-because tarian wearing a fur coat (that's purest he's stationed, as always, in front of L.A.). These two bring the Seventies in -Tony Hoagland the television, and she's upstairs getting with them. But they're stranded in this ready for an outing with the priest, time-stalled netherworld, where the Father Davis (Jim Mohr), she's almost ghosts of our collective theatrical past certainly sleeping with. James hover. When Vince goes out for liquor, Gammon, whose Dodge is onstage Shelly finds herself effectively alone (either awake or; asleep) fo)r the entire with his zoned-out dad (Dodge is off in play, wears a gray mustache that looks TV-land), and then the victim of a

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