Requiem for a Theater: Off-Broadway Loses a Pearl

Theater fans do not—or, at least, should not—live on Broadway musicals alone. Don’t get me wrong: the truly great Broadway musicals might call for a more diverse set of performance and stagecraft skills than any other theater genre.

'But the hottest new tickets can burn holes in the pockets. (A year after sweeping the Tonys, premium tickets for Hamilton are still running upwards of $800.) Moreover, fans are more likely to patronize shows that offer an escape from the real world rather than a reflection of it.

Such shows don’t often engage in the psychological complexity that actors love or that make audiences think long after they leave the theater. That type of work has become more and more the province of the smaller Off-Broadway venues that allow for avant-garde work, a revisit of a classic, or both.

"Is the theater really dead?" are among the “things that matter” in Simon and Garfunkel’s Sixties dissection of alienation and ennui, “Dangling Conversations.” The question was melodramatic back then and maybe even now. But there’s no doubt that the Off-Broadway scene that has provided an alternative theatrical experience for the last half-century is facing heightened challenges these days.

Or even outright danger, as suggested by last week’s announcement by the Pearl Theatre Company that it was shutting its doors.

“Pearl” was the right name for this repertory company that brought the best of classic theater Off-Broadway for 33 years. Shakespeare, Shaw, Ibsen, Gogol, Euripedes, Ionesco, and Williams are just a few of the giants produced on this stage. It was all brought to life by a group of largely unknown character actors who learned versatility by necessity. (With one conspicuous exception: I was not aware, until reading Michael Cooper’s New York Times article about the theater’s bankruptcy filing, that a very young David Hyde Pierce appeared in the troupe’s inaugural season.)

In a sense, it might have been a case of history repeating itself. The company’s longtime home, Theater 80 St. Marks in the East Village, had been a much-loved movie revival house until the advent of the VCR cut down one after another of these in the mid-to-late Eighties.

The VCR, it seems clear, was the leading edge of a host of new electronic and digital technologies that have transformed Americans’ viewing habits. You can get your entertainment anywhere these days, and live performances are no longer an imperative.

Nor was that the only long-term cultural trend endangering the Pearl’s commitment to classical repertory theater. The culture wars of the last quarter-century have not only seriously undercut federal support for the humanities, but have fostered the notion of theater, opera, classical music, and other performing arts as elitist. Nor have rising labor costs--hardly even a living wage to meet the cost of living in New York--helped.

The heaviest weight in the balance might have been the New York real estate juggernaut. When that industry was gasping for air, the Pearl and similar theatrical troupes could survive unmolested. 

But when the appetite for Manhattan residential, retail and hotel space first became healthy, then ravenous, the Pearl could hardly compete in the face of steeply rising rents.  In the last decade, it became the Flying Dutchman of theatrical troupes—moving first from its Village perch up to New York City Center Stage II in Midtown, then to what unfortunately turned out to be its last home, on 42^nd Street. 

That should place in some perspective, I think, an admission by a Pearl spokesperson that the organization should have done more to diversify its audience. Perhaps. But when a nonprofit group signs a 20-year lease for a 160-seat space, then faces a minimum lease payment of $282,825 this year and $329,317 in 2020, it’s hard to see how it survives.

I think I may have seen a half dozen productions by the company over the last two decades. Though I enjoyed some more than others, none were bad or even mediocre. At this juncture, I am simply sorry I didn’t see more—not simply to increase my appreciation for theater as an art or even to enjoy a show (what’s wrong with that?), but simply to support the Pearl at a time when it really needed it.

Because, let’s face it, the arts run the risk right now of being victimized as much by the revival of the city’s real estate industry as it once was by its decline—maybe more so. Whatever his stated desire to encourage culture through his own personal largesse, former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg promoted, in his 12 years at City Hall, an atmosphere in which the city’s real estate industry felt no compunction about damaging the arts and humanities. 

In December 2006, for instance, veteran retail broker and consultant Faith Hope Consolo explained to Gabby Warshawer of The Real Deal Magazine how easily theaters could be transformed into retail space. “Theaters make for great retail space because of their large floor plates, and since we have a trend right now of bigger and supposedly better, they’re very attractive,” Ms. Consolo said then. “Theaters also pay very, very little in rent, and owners and landlords realize they can get much more.”

The real estate industry’s boom at that time became a bubble—which, like similar manias, left damage in its wake. (See, for instance, my prior post about the needless demolition of the old Donnell Library branch of the New York Public Library system, a move dictated by a botched hotel development deal, leading to a reopened but far smaller space for the branch.)

I’m sure that economic viability has been an ongoing topic of theater administrators for a while now, and that thinking outside the box—something more than small casts assuming multiple roles (as in the Pearl’s final production, Vanity Fair, which I reviewed here)—has only accelerated following the Pearl’s collapse.

But such efforts ultimately will go nowhere without support from those who care about live theater. That involves attending shows, taking out season subscriptions, talking about shows with friends, writing about them, or spreading the word through social media.

The closing of the Pearl, then, has left me disappointed and bereft over the death of another theater at a time when we can ill afford another such loss. But it has also left me with a sense of gratitude to the Pearl actors and behind-the-scenes personnel who created such great work over time. So:

*Thank you to Shepard Sobel, for establishing the company in the 1980s and leading it for more than two decades.

*Thank you to his offstage partner, Joanna Camp, for her luminous presence in the title role of the first Pearl show I attended, Shaw’s Candida—and for convincing me that this was a place worth coming back to.

*Thank you to Robert Hock, for embodying Shakespeare’s Prospero in The Tempest with all the magical imperious force that the role demanded.

*Thank you to Carolyn McCormick of Law and Order for a delightful guest turn with her stylish performance in S.N. Behrman’s unjustly neglected 1930s comedy of manners, Biography.

*Thank you to Erica Rolfsrud as the beguiling Polish aviatrix and physical-fitness buff Lina Szczepanowska in Shaw’s Misalliance.

*Thank you to Sean McNall, for fine performances in these last two plays, as well as the king who loses his throne but find his poet’s soul in Shakespeare’s Richard II.

*And thank you to Austin Pendleton, triple threat (starring, writing and acting) on stage, screen and TV, guest directing in what turned out to be the Pearl’s last season, bringing to late, glorious life Shelagh Delaney’s long-neglected 1958 drama A Taste of Honey, while expertly guiding the young Rebekah Brockman to what I hope will be a highly successful career.

Theater Review: Thackeray’s ‘Vanity Fair,’ From The Pearl Theatre Co.

Like its crafty female protagonist, Becky Sharp, Vanity Fair—the Pearl Theatre Co. production that closed this past weekend—was nothing if not ambitious. In adapting the 1848 “novel without a hero” by William Makepeace Thackeray, actress/playwright Kate Hamill boiled down a sprawling masterpiece covering 30 years to approximately 20 named characters, embodied by seven actors. It may, in fact, have moved even faster than social-climbing Becky; events and characters were compressed, telegraphed even, into somewhat less than 2½ hours. A nuance or two might have gotten lost along the way, but really, who cares?

“Who are you to judge?” Becky demanded accusingly of the audience. Who, indeed? The odds against survival in early 19^th century England are stacked against Becky, the daughter of a Frenchwoman who, scandalously, appeared on the stage. A governess job might serve the likes of Jane Eyre, but why stop there when you can aim so much higher?

In a sense, Becky can be seen as a Regency England precursor of Scarlett O’Hara, another conniver who uses her intelligence and feminine wiles in a society upended by a tumultuous war (in the case of Becky, the Napoleonic wars that end with the bloodbath at Waterloo). At the same time, one has to be a bit careful about enlisting Thackeray as a proto-feminist, as he gave precious little assistance to Charlotte Bronte when she asked his help as she and sisters Emily and Anne tried to get a hearing for their novels in the patriarchal publishing industry of their time.

But for the Pearl troupe’s feminist angle, that’s their story, and they were sticking to it. I thought that viewers might be more vexed by the breathless, even breakneck pace dictated by director Eric Tucker. Just as Becky careens from one (mis)adventure to another, so do the tables, chairs, and other furniture that serves as the play’s locales. The actors sprinted around, too, changing accents, costumes, wigs, even their sex as most of them assumed multiple roles. It was a challenge to keep it all straight in the play’s running time. 

In the performance I attended late in the show’s run, the understudy Kaileela Hobby filled in for Hamill, who originated the role of Becky. It would have been interesting to see how Hobby physically embodied a Becky she had created on paper, but Ms. Hobby was a more than capable substitute.

The other cast member with a single role was Joey Parsons as Becky’s schoolgirl friend Amelia—a thankless part due to the character’s almost willful naivete.  Parsons did all that she could to keep her from dissolving in a simpering puddle.

Also of note in this production: Debargo Sanyal, who gave Amelia’s husband, the doomed rakish soldier George Osborne, an appropriate Donald Trump-ish pout; Brad Heberlee, who made Amelia’s brother, Jos Sedley, a hilarious mark for Becky; and Zachary Fine, equally good as the licentious Lord Steyne and the Stage Manager, a winking ringmaster for these proceedings.

Last fall, the Pearl Theatre mounted a fine revival of Shelagh Delaney’s 1958 comedy-drama A Taste of Honey (see my review in this prior post), which, though a century removed from Vanity Fair, also spotlights a young woman struggling to rise above circumstance and class. The two plays could not seem more germane to our own time of limited horizons and national upheaval. One awaits eagerly what this longtime Off-Broadway troupe will come up with this fall.

Photo of the Day: Playwrights' Sidewalk, NYC

It might not have the mega-watt appeal of Hollywood’s “Walk of Fame,” but New York has its own commemoration of stage luminaries—or, more specifically, the playwrights whose work has enriched Off-Broadway. 

I stumbled across the Playwrights' Sidewalk earlier this year as I waited to get into Lucille Lortel Theatre on Christopher Street. The photo I took then—the one that accompanies this post—contains only a portion of all the playwrights, living and dead, honored in this space, which was dedicated in 1998.

Approximately 50 playwrights—many of whom have been performed at the Lucille Lortel--have their stars placed here, including Eugene O'Neill, Sean O’Casey, Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams, Wendy Wasserstein Tony Kushner, Terrence McNally, Paula Vogel, John Guare, and A.R. Gurney. It is a permanent monument to those who have created much of the most daring work in the American theater in the postwar era.

Theater Review: N.C. Hunter’s ‘A Day by the Sea,’ From the Mint Theater Co.

Over the last half-dozen years, I’ve come to rely on the Mint Theater Company to present wonderfully staged productions of unfairly forgotten plays. But a second rental increase in three years forced this jewel of the Off-Broadway theater scene out of the West 43^rd Street building it had called home for the last two decades. Fortunately, it found another domicile only a block south, on West 42^nd Street, in the Beckett Theater on Theatre Row.

Five other theater companies share space in the complex with the Mint, but for playgoers, it is a more comfortable, pleasant environment. At the same time, the space still allows playgoers the feeling of eavesdropping on a very small group of people—an essential quality in sustaining the aura surrounding its current production, a revival of N.C. Hunter’s serio-comedy of the 1950s, A Day by the Sea.

This is not the first time that the Mint has turned its attention to Hunter: A couple of years ago, it mounted another success of his on London’s West End, A Picture of Autumn. But now, with this production, it is making a sustained case for taking him seriously and reviving his reputation once and for all.

A Day by the Sea focuses on Julian Anson, a stuffy, workaholic mid-level Foreign Service diplomat,

who finds himself, after two decades of ceaseless striving, in becalmed waters. Taking a break from his posting in Paris to visit his mother at her seaside home, he discovers that an expected promotion won’t be coming to him after all. The rejection leads him to intense self-examination about his shallow private life as well, a process only magnified by the arrival of his childhood friend Frances.

At first glance, Frances would seem exactly what Anson would not want: a widow with two young children who had become the kind of scandalous woman that respectable people run away from. She had worshipped Anson until her late teens, when, realizing his focus on college and his career path had become all-consuming, she ran away to marry a much older man who had since died. More recently, against her better judgment, she wed a younger man who killed himself. His suicide note, forgiving her, was printed in the newspapers, making her notorious.

Anson’s late recognition of her love—and his determination to make amends for his long-ago neglect—leads him to think he can reshape their future by taking up where they left off. But matters are not so simple, as Hunter considers the sad impossibility of returning to the past.

The interplay among the characters here is deeply sensitive and nuanced, and one gets the distinct impression from reading about Hunter that this play is all of a piece with his other work. But so deeply has Hunter been forgotten by the theater world that one is stunned to find that once he was very highly regarded indeed—that is, until Kenneth Tynan dealt a grievous blow to his reputation.

The strong influence of Anton Chekhov in Hunter’s work especially provoked the British drama critic. A Day by the Sea seems almost tailor-made for this criticism, with several elements suggesting the playwright’s particular attention to Uncle Vanya:

*It depicts a middle-aged male’s melancholy upon abruptly realizing that his life’s work doesn’t really amount to much;

*It features a doctor of great intellectual gifts who is increasingly lapsing into alcohol; 

*A plain but kind woman pines helplessly for the doctor;

*An attractive woman causes the males around her to lose their minds;

*An elderly man wakes up periodically to say comic, often inappropriate things;

*The playwright presciently worries about both man’s encroachment on nature and an unseen but sensed upheaval in the future of his nation (for Chekhov, a revolution that will destroy the aristocracy; for Hunter, the Suez crisis that marked the end of Great Britain as an imperial power).

Far more than other contemporary West End practitioners of the “well-made play” like Noel Coward and Terence Rattigan, Hunter suffered grievously at the hands of Tynan, who championed the “angry young man,” often fiercely political theater of John Osborne. It didn’t help that Hunter's stress on character development rather than plot make for a pace that can charitably be described as leisurely. 

The latter fault has not disappeared. But the strength of the play also appears more readily than Tynan gave it credit for: naturalistic dialogue that gives virtually the entire cast of 10 at least one opportunity to sharply define the laconically expressed but very real disappointment of middle-class characters who sense that, like the tide, the promise of their early lives has ebbed. 

Much of this is due to veteran actor-playwright-director Austin Pendleton, who has demonstrated his range convincingly this fall by staging another British play from the Fifties vastly different in tone from this one: Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey, at the Pearl Theater Co.

Pendleton has elicited striking performances from his cast. Julian Elfer subtly marks out Anson’s transformation from buttoned-down bureaucrat (someone with “a lot of porridge in his veins,” according to his own mother) to a more questing figure who tries to recapture his youthful sense of confidence, purpose and idealism. Katie Firth renders Frances with a dignity and realism about her severely constricted choices after a series of life mistakes. 

Polly McKie brings poignancy to the role of the affectionate but lovelorn 35-year-old governess to Frances’ children, seeing in the prospect of marriage to hard-drinking Dr. Farley a last chance for both of them. And, as the doctor, Philip Goodwin unleashes a ferocious rhetorical outburst that at once castigates diplomats for the failures that result in war, explaining much about his personal downward spiral. 

 

A Day by the Sea closes this coming Sunday. Once again, the Mint has done well by a theatrical work that has been inexplicably and shamefully consigned to the margins.