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.

Theater Review: Shelagh Delaney’s ‘A Taste of Honey,’ Presented by the Pearl Theatre Co.

Only three years after James Dean’s Rebel Without a Cause depicted the free-floating anxieties and unrest of the American teenager, Shelagh Delaney offered a female answer on the other side of the Atlantic in A Taste of Honey. But, while Dean’s youth feels insular (unwelcome at his new high school, unable to respect a father he regards as emasculated by his mother), the protagonist of Delaney’s play, Jo, steps way out of her comfort zone.

“There's no one like me…and don't you forget it!” Jo tells a new friend. By the end of the play, audiences have no reason to doubt that this curious, intelligent, spirited girl is all of that, and more.

But there is a real question whether Jo will be able to carve out a better life for herself than her 40-year-old mother Helen, who bounces from flat to flat and from lover to lover. The adolescent, following an affair with a black sailor who left town without Jo telling him she’s pregnant, is now facing a future with a biracial child in a racist society, with nobody to depend on and nothing but her wits to live on.

Before sociologists began to speak about “the culture of poverty,” Delaney was, back in 1958, depicting the constricted environment and sometimes self-defeating behavior underlying it—and, remarkably enough, she did this with searing insight in this, her first play, written when she was only 18.

In this production from the Pearl Theatre, scenic designer Harry Feiner gives pictorial life to this dreary environment through a backdrop of crowded houses beneath a gray miasma—strongly suggesting Delaney’s sooty hometown of Salford, an industrial community in northern England, near Manchester. As if that weren’t enough, there is the dialogue (“That river, it’s the colour of lead. Look at the washing, it’s dirty, and look at those filthy children.”)

Wanting to break from everything Helen represents, Jo reaches out to those well outside the accepted norms of the time: to the black sailor, Jimmy (given beguiling life by Ade Otukoya) and, when she elects to go on her own, to Geoffrey, whose gay lifestyle has made him an outcast and nomad and needing companionship and friendship as much as Jo. But relationships are temporary and provisional, and Delaney, while leaving her heroine a margin of hope, also is at pains to demonstrate the odds facing her.

A Taste of Honey was directed with considerable aplomb by Austin Pendleton, who, as I discussed in a post earlier this week, simultaneously guided another British Fifties import to an estimable Off-Broadway run: N.C. Hunter’s A Day by the Sea, from the Mint Theater Co.

While both plays mix drama and comedy, their worldviews, stagecraft and resulting challenges to companies reviving them differ dramatically. Hunter’s characters are primarily the upper-middle-class, speaking naturalistic dialogue, in tones of intensely repressed regret; Delaney’s are working-class, ready with a bitter accusation (“The time to have taken care of me was years ago, when I couldn’t take care of myself," Jo tells her mother) or sharply cynical humor (Jo, again to her mother: “You don't look forty. You look a sort of well-preserved sixty.”)

Hunter’s Chekhovian dramedy bears all the hallmarks of the “well-made play” prevalent to that time; Delaney, on the other hand, with her characters’ alienation and defiance of social norms, belongs to what was sometimes termed the “kitchen sink realistic” movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s. As it happened, both writers never achieved the same level of success that they had in the Fifties (though Delaney, who died only five years ago, still turned out the occasional screenplay and radio play well into her sixties--including a 1961 adaptation of A Taste of Honey directed by Tony Richardson and starring Rita Tushingham as Jo).

Delaney’s script has been well-served by a talented quintet of actors. In addition to Otukoya, these include John Evans Reese as Geoffrey; Pearl Theatre vets Rachel Botchan and Bradford Cover as, respectively, Helen and her alcoholic, womanizing lover Peter; and especially Rebekah Brockman as Jo.

Off to the side of the stage (and, at points, even stepping into the action), a trio of musicians play jazz tunes, most notably—what else?—Herb Alpert’s “A Taste of Honey.” It is the same bit of stagecraft employed by the original director of the show, Joan Littlewood, in Great Britain, employing musical shorthand to evoke those who, like Jo, Jimmy and Geoffrey, are beyond category—and certainly beyond the norms of their time.

Delaney's work--even this most famous of them all--does not show up very much in the U.S. these days. Those who haven't seen this production of what is generally deemed her best would be well-advised to catch it before it closes on Sunday.