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Call it a pilgrimage, but I would have driven a lot further than 250 miles for this opportunity. A long-lost Tennessee Williams play, perhaps his last major work? And not just any Williams, but one of his obsessions: a free adaptation of his favorite play, Anton Chekhov's masterpiece "The Seagull", which happens to be among my favorites as well? Master designer Ming Cho Lee to do the sets, and an international star, Lynn Redgrave, to play the Russian theater diva Arkadina?
Let's face it: nothing, from torrential rains and automotive gremlins, was going to keep me from the U.S. premiere production of "The Notebook of Trigorin" at Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park.
The Playhouse deserves credit for searching out the play and showering its attention and resources on it, from stunning designs to excellent dramaturgical notes. The production is certainly lavish. The designs are elegant and simple, with Ming Cho Lee's black-and-white background of trees continually transforming themselves into romantic pastel mists and shadows through Brian Nason's subtle light design. Candice Donnelly's costumes are gorgeously appointed and the furnishings sumptuous, providing the impression of a country estate fit for one of those leisurely idylls in a Merchant-Ivory film.
But it's a false impression, because the games here are of broken hearts and betrayal -- a daisy chain of unrequited love, interspersed with acts of selfishness, ultimately leading to tragedy.
Williams made "The Notebook of Trigorin" a trip deeper into the shadow of the human soul than Chekhov's. "Some people are so thoroughly doomed, it's a contagion," says a character in the first act. What we get in this late-career "notebook" is a contagion of ill-fated people -- mostly frustrated artists and the people who thanklessly cater to them -- whose tragedies left me strangely unmoved.
Ever since the trip, I've been ruminating over the mysteries of my discontent. Given that the two great compassionate voices of 20th century theatre, Chekhov and Williams, meet in this work -- why did this production hold me (and much of the audience) at such a frosty distance, and leave me with a shiver of ice in my veins? Was it intended? And if so, by whom?
One major source of the chilly temperature has to be director Stephen Hollis, who takes skilled actors and from them sculpts performances that are often mannered or implacaby grotesque. Redgrave's Arkadina is a case in point: makeup troweled on until her face is a mask of mascaraed blinks, her voice like a trumpeting elephant, she hurls herself across the stage like one of those mythic monster mothers -- Mommy Dearest crossed with Grendel's Dam. I dare not believe an actress of her stature would willingly choose such a characterization, an Expressionist gargoyle smack in the middle of standard regional theatre poetic realism.
Another cold malignant force is Doctor Dorn, in Chekhov a source of empathy, here sadistic and venal -- Philip Pleasant plays him as a lascivious toad. When these two spirits collide in the evening's tragic end, with a gesture of cruelty instead of compassion, it's like throwing a bucket of ice water over the suffering -- and the audience.
The lion's share of the production's empathy and attention is split between the two male writers: Arkadina's neglected son Constantine, aspiring but callow, and Trigorin, successful but self-doubting. Williams paints Trigorin as a closeted homosexual, whose night "swimming" with beefy male servants helps take the pressure off his relationship with Arkadina, which is somewhere between society walker and blackmailed kept man.
The production forces our identification into the obvious by making up Jeff Woodman's Trigorin to look a Williams impersonator; in a mustache and white suit, he seems to have walked out of the portrait on the program cover. Besides being ham-handedly reductionist -- like Chekhov, Williams was a master at investing himself in more than one character -- it puts Woodman at a terrible disadvantage: he doesn't have the sensitivity or the subtlety that we associate with Williams, and he's too young by half. His scenes with Nina (Stina Nielsen) are particulary devoid of any chemistry save a faint curiosity. Considering that the bulk of the interesting speeches are Trigorin's, I spent several scenes wondering what the production would have been like if the star power budget line had been invested in his role instead of Arkadina's.
Timothy Altmeyer as Constantine is handsome and energetic, but his constant actorly leaping nearly drove me to distraction, like an MFA intern with too much stage combat training. Nielsen plays Nina as poutily pretty in her early scenes, but naive to the point of near-stupidity. Both Altmeyer and especially Nielsen are eventually affecting as they mature into their fourth act breakdowns.
I've saved the best for last, the production's crown jewel: Natacha Roi as the unhappy Masha. Darkly intense, disciplined and self-aware, Roi made me see every thought in her head. Her scenes -- funny, desperate, subtle, and luminously intelligent -- were the high points of the play. I kept wondering, as I drove those long four hours home, what the production could have been like if the main characters had had her ambiguous grace. She's a star on the rise: look for her.
Originally published on Aisle Say. October, 1996.
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