At the performance I caught of Clifford Odets’ 1949
drama The Big Knife, the audience broke out in applause at the wonders
that set designer John Lee Beatty had performed at the American Airlines
Theatre. The time might have been the late 1940s, as the Hollywood studio
system felt its hegemony seriously threatened for the first time. But most of
the theatergoers undoubtedly wished that the movie-star home they saw was real
and that they could move in there themselves.
Before long, we learned that it was all a gilded
cage. The owner of this splendid Beverly Hills home, Charlie Castle, is a
prisoner in his own well-appointed fortress. All these creature comforts only
make it that much harder to unfasten the chains of a multiyear contract that
his studio is pressing him to sign, through every means, fair and foul, at its
command.
John Garfield, then about to be caught up in his own Tinseltown
tragedy as a blacklist victim, starred in the show’s initial run more than 60 years ago. Surely, the
matinee idol and Odets, his onetime associate in New York’s Group Theatre, the great
troupe that helped revolutionize American acting with a more naturalistic
style, shared bone-deep aspirations to higher art and an all-too-human
susceptibility to matters of the flesh that elevated this collaboration to moments
of real power.
That sense of urgency, however, was never really
communicated in the revival mounted by the Roundabout Theatre that closed this past Sunday.
Charlie’s gilded cage might be one reason why some
audience members (and judging by the reviews, critics) had had a hard time
warming to this production. No getting around it: this is a problem play, in
more ways than one.
Like an earlier play by Clifford Odets, Golden Boy
(revived in an acclaimed production late last year at Lincoln Center), The Big Knife dramatizes the way that
capitalism corrupts, undermines and defeats artistic aspirations. It is much
easier, however, for an audience to feel sympathy for Golden Boy’s Joe Bonaparte—fearful that the Great Depression will
crush his dream of a career as a violinist, grasping at boxing as his
meal-ticket out of poverty—than Castle, earning his way in an uninspired
career, but gainfully employed, for all that.
The melodrama that Odets wrote, from inside the
belly of the beast, mirrors in some ways the B-movie fare that Castle longs to
escape. Seldom has any writer’s disgust with Hollywood been rendered so
palpably. (In Billy Wilder’s Sunset
Boulevard, a star might be forgotten, but not a target for blackmail or
cause of a murder plot—just a perpetrator of a crazed, accidental shooting.)
From 1935 to early 1940, Odets was considered the
“golden boy” of American theater, with seven plays to his credit. In 1949,
after a prosperous but artistically unsatisfying time writing and directing
films, he returned to the Great White Way, hoping that this vehicle—molded
first to the persona of good friend Cary Grant, then, more crucially, to
Garfield—would be his comeback.
It wasn’t--and, if a critical reevaluation will ever
try to salvage Odets, it’s hard to see how this play will reclaim his
once-prestigious perch in American theater.
By and large, the drama is about as well-cast as any
recent Roundabout production. Marin Ireland makes for a deeply sympathetic Marian, Charlie’s estranged wife,
whose continuing love for him is sorely tested by his unfaithfulness, his
departure from his ideals as a struggling young actor, and the presence of a
stalwart if dull writer who would like to marry her. Chip Zien turns Charlie’s agent Nat Danziger into an anguished
father figure to Charlie and Marian, who tries to resolve the impossible: his
client’s wish for artistic freedom and the studio’s mounting anger over their
chief moneymaker’s defiance.
Particularly excellent are two heavies in this
production: Richard Kind, who, as an
at times comically tyrannical studio boss, Marcus Hoff, will remind many of
Columbia Pictures’s infamous chief, Harry Cohn; and Reg Rogers as Smiley Coy, Hoff’s slimy all-purpose fixer, who, with a phone
call, can make almost any problem disappear—including a drunk-driving incident
from a year ago that involved Charlie, for whom a friend took the fall.
The one major actor I could point to in the cast who
was problematic was, unfortunately, the lead, Bobby Cannavale. He made a fine impression on me in a fine 2005
ensemble production of David Rabe’s Hurlyburly,
but he couldn’t carry the burden created by Odets.
The difficulty starts with the playwright’s quirky
dialogue. Sometimes a line puts a sharp twist on what, in other hands, would
sound cliched (Charlie to Marian: “Play billiards, Angel, or put the cue down,”
rather than “Don’t start a conversation and then drop it”). In other instances,
though, the lines come across as faux-poetic (“You go on grieving for the past,
like a weeping bird”). In still other cases, the dialogue is the worst kind of
speechifying, holding the play’s themes aloft in the most boldface banner
(Charlie on studio bosses such as Hoff: “Don’t they murder the highest dreams
and hopes of a whole great people with the movies they make? This whole movie
thing is a murder of the people.”)
Perhaps only Garfield could have invested such lines
with the raw believability that Odets desired. Nowhere near as heralded as he
should be today as the precursor of Brando, Pacino, DeNiro, or, indeed,
generations of New York actors, Garfield--whose centennial went criminally unnoticed a few months ago (including by me)--might not have been always
sympathetic, but with his intelligence, sexual magnetism, and unrelenting
intensity, he was compulsively watchable and fully human. It isn’t a disgrace
that Cannavale doesn’t possess all these qualities, let alone in such
abundance. Few other actors do.
Nevertheless, my disappointment as I left the American Airlines
Theatre was keen. I had vague memories of the 1955 film adaptation of this play
starring Jack Palance, Ida Lupino, Shelley Winters and Rod Steiger. I had hoped
that the Roundabout would weave magic from this fascinating but neglected
drama. But despite fine casting and production values, Doug Hughes’ deeply
respectful direction only focused more attention on the play’s hollow core.
No comments:
Post a Comment