Theater Review: "Les Liaisons Dangereuses," by Christopher Hampton

Love, the supreme passion, is only a contest of icy calculation—sort of sexual fox-hunting—for the Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil, the debauched French aristocrats at the heart of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Or so they tell each other. For the great irony of their high-stakes gamesmanship is that they are as consumed by hot passions as the people of whom they make sport.

I first read Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ 1782 epistolary novel for a Columbia University course in my long-ago-and-far-away undergrad days, taught by the very fine Professor Lennard Davis. Though I found this tale of revenge and betrayal reasonably diverting (especially sandwiched between Samuel Richardson's insipid Pamela and Fanny Burney's boring Evelina), it never occurred to me, intellectually unformed pup that I was (yes, yes, I hear the inevitable cry: “What’s with the past tense, Mike?”), that it could ever be transformed into a drama that both overflowed with subtext and functioned as sturdy stage carpentry, complete with intriguing opening, sharply ironic reversals and a stunning denouement.

Christopher Hampton's successful 1987 stage adaptation, with Alan Rickman-Lindsey Duncan (early in these distinguished actors' careers), proved me wrong. This past spring, at its American Airlines Theatre on 42nd Street, the Roundabout Theatre mounted the first Broadway revival of the play since that acclaimed production. I was lucky enough to catch the show in early May on a Saturday afternoon matinee.

Though it closed earlier this month, I think it's worthwhile to revisit it—to discover what made it work and to analyze the vast disconnect between some critics' sharp opinions and the equally manifest lack of understanding of what they see.

I'm a Roundabout Theatre subscriber, but even if that weren't the case there was no chance that I would miss this production, especially since it featured one of my favorite actresses of stage, screen, TV, or any venue in any conceivable universe: Laura Linney. In only one of her many roles have I felt that she was even slightly miscast, as the prim and plain Puritan wife Elizabeth Proctor in the 2002 revival of Arthur Miller's The Crucible that co-starred Liam Neeson.

Linney's work here came in for criticism by several reviewers, who carped that her prior work in virtuous roles little prepared her for Merteuil the icy schemer. As far as I’m concerned, this complaint just demonstrates how modern media criticism has become a license for peddling nonsense.

Laced with epigrams, double entendres and subtext, this drama of manners requires dexterous actors. Time and again, Linney demonstrated she was up for the challenge.

As the ancien regime widow and plotter Merteuil, tightly corseted at center stage, she sent out words winged with innuendo, arch malice, and resentment. Merteuil’s most famous line (“I always knew I was born to dominate your sex and avenge my own”) is uttered with typical haughtiness to Valmont.

But Linney really unearthed all kinds of layers in her character in a less-noticed speech, when she involuntarily blurts out to her former lover, "I wanted you before we'd even met. My self-esteem demanded it. Then, when you began to pursue me…I wanted you so badly. It's the only one of my notions that has ever got the better of me."

Ben Daniels, who won an Olivier Award in Great Britain in this role, returned Linney’s volleys at every turn. He also proved a great improvement on John Malkovich in the 1988 movie version. I had always thought that Malkovich simply did not possess the good looks that made the character a ladykiller. Now, I realize, the trouble is more fundamental: that his Valmont practically slithers, snake-like, across the screen.

The Valmont of the stage—as Daniels and, I suspect, Rickman played him – is a man of action—in his element when he is most dashing around, plotting, lightning-fast. It takes this kind of character to initiate the series of events in Act II that make every scene shorter and more likely to lead to disaster for Valmont and his entire jaded society.

Though Jessica Collins did not capture the depth of torment of the object of Valmont’s careful seduction, the virtuous wife Tourvel, the rest of the supporting cast performed very well indeed.
Mamie Gummer, Meryl Streep's daughter, played Cecile, an innocent teenager (also seduced by Valmont) as much more of an idiot than Uma Thurman did in the film—and, judging from Hampton's script, in a manner that was far closer to the playwright's conception of the role. Welsh actress Sian Phillips—best known on this side of the Atlantic for playing an icy villainess in a different era entirely, Livia in the Masterpiece Theatre miniseries about ancient Rome, I, Claudius—invests Madame de Rosamonde, the closest thing to an undestroyed conscience and heart in the play, with maturity and understanding. Kristine Nielsen makes Cecile’s mother Madame de Volanges such a phony that the audience is immediately rooting for Valmont to make a fool of her—though the character is such an idiot that it takes her nearly the entire play to realize what he has done.

The curtain-closing scene, with its famous silhouette of the guillotine—a foreshadowing of the bloody fate awaiting this deeply corrupt society—now also includes an equally appropriate element of stage scenery, a metaphor for everything coming before it: a spider's web.

One of my favorite pastimes as a theatergoer is attending theater-enrichment activities. The Roundabout has offered a particularly stimulating example of this in its Theatre-Plus programs. And one of the best examples of the latter featured a question-and-answer period between longtime Roundabout dramaturge Ted Sod and Caroline Weber, a professor of 18th century French literature and culture at Barnard College.

Professor Weber related how, as a career soldier sidelined from the action he craved, Laclos amused himself one year by writing a novel—his only venture into the genre—about a campaign of love rather than war, but one featuring equal amounts of strategy and tactics. She pointed out an even more surprising aspect of his background: his campaign, in the form of essays, for better educational opportunities for girls. In his novel, the fate of Cecile is a stark object lesson in the dangers of the only available opportunity of the time—a convent education that left its graduates not only intellectually vacant but hopelessly gullible.

Professor Weber was one of the best lecturers in this post-discussion series that the Roundabout has ever had in the decade in which I’ve attended performances. I’m sure nearly everyone in the audience that Saturday afternoon shared my hope that the theater’s management will bring her back for an encore performance soon.

Quote of the Day (Templeton)

“The idea that an individual can find God is terribly self-centered. It is like a wave thinking it can find the sea.”—Sir John Templeton
(The investor and philanthropist died last week at age 95. The foundation named after this Presbyterian layman has presented the Templeton Prize for Progress or Discoveries About Spiritual Realities, kind of the religious equivalent of the Nobel Prize. The award—open to living individuals of any major world faith whose achievements have stirred others to deepen their relationship with God—has been awarded to 35 Catholics since its inception, including Mother Teresa—given her six years before she was recognized with the Nobel Peace Prize—Canadian Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor, and the 2008 winner, Monsignor Michal Heller, a Polish priest-cosmologist.)

This Day in Women's History (The Seneca Falls Convention)

July 19, 1848—In a decade of rising American sentiment for reform and world clamor for revolution, The Woman's Rights Convention met in the upstate New York community of Seneca Falls. The convention's Declaration of Sentiments, adopted a day later, was patterned on the Declaration of Independence, but took that document a step further: not only claiming that "all men and women are created equal," but that this inherent equality entitled women to the right to vote.

"The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries on the part of man towards women, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her,” the declaration passed by the convention noted. “To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world."

George III might have been the target of the colonists, but in Seneca Falls it was the entire male sex that was charged with subverting rights. The long list of grievances—matching in number (18) those against the clueless British monarch—included:

* denying her the right to the franchise;
* making her, if married, "civilly dead" in the eyes of the law; depriving her of property;
* framing divorce laws to benefit men;
* monopolizing employment;
* closing her off to "avenues of wealth and distinction" such as theology, medicine or law;
* perpetuating a double standard in morality that doomed many women but were never enforced against men.

Calling for the franchise was so radical that even one of the convention’s organizers, Lucretia Coffin Mott, reproved the prime mover of the resolution, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, for making the delegates “look ridiculous.” But Stanton was not to be dissuaded, arguing that the right to vote was central to all the other freedoms. Her insight proved correct, as demonstrated years later by civil-rights workers in the South in the 1960s who braved threats to their lives to win the right to vote for their race.

Mott was not the only person to give way before Stanton’s polemical power. In his memoir, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, the great African-American orator recalled the impact of her arguments on his own way of thinking concerning women’s rights:

"I could not meet her arguments except with the shallow plea of 'custom,' 'natural division of duties,' 'indelicacy of woman's taking part in politics," the common talk of 'woman's sphere,' and the like, all of which that able woman, who was then no less logical than now, brushed away by those arguments which she has so often and effectively used since, and which no man has yet successfully refuted."

Just how far Douglass was moved by her arguments was seen on the second and last day of the convention, when Stanton’s resolution in favor of the franchise appeared ready to go down to defeat. Douglass’ speech calling for its approval moved many in the audience to vote in the affirmative.

Not only logic carried the day for Stanton, however. The year 1848 was one of those heady years—1968 and 1989 were others—in which it seemed that the forces of change would carry everything before it and the world really could be made anew. Revolutions in Italy, Ireland, France, and Prussia were causing established governments to tremble all across the continent. In America, rising agitation involved such causes as temperance, prison reform, treatment of the mentally ill, and abolitionism.

The magnetism and very presence of female speakers on abolitionist platforms divided the anti-slavery movement over tactics even as it gave further impetus to the women’s movement. The powerful eyewitness testimony of Sojourner Truth and the southern-born sisters Angelina and Sarah Grimke posed a dilemma for the anti-slavery movement: should they enlist the very public help of these females (who were often more compelling than men on the stump) or should these women accept where custom had always consigned them (i.e., the home)?

The issue came to a head at the 1840 meeting of the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London. After a floor flight, the so-called “Gradualists” (led by New York merchant Lewis Tappan) succeeded in banishing female members of the American delegation to a spot behind a curtain in the meeting hall’s balcony.

This physical position—not only not heard but not even seen—rankled Mott, a female delegate, and Stanton, the newlywed bride of a male delegate to the convention. Events and geography conspiracy to keep the two friends from joining forces again for eight years. What drew them together was an ideological fight on yet another cause—the Quakers’ position on slavery.

Mott, while visiting sister Martha Coffin Wright, supported a local Quaker group calling for abolitionism. It was a good opportunity to meet Stanton, living nearby in Seneca Falls. The three of them, along with Quakers Mary Ann McClintock and Jane Hunt (Stanton was the only non-Quaker in the group), began over tea on July 13 to discuss women’s issues. They decided to call for a grand convention. Immediately.

It was amazing how much they did with almost no time and not a lot of publicity. Only a couple of local papers and Douglass’s abolitionist publication, North Star, were able to get advance word out about a meeting to be held the following week. Stanton and her fellow organizers also worried that, because of hot summer weather and the height of the farming season, attendance would be poor. Nevertheless, some three hundred people managed to pack the Wesleyan Methodist Chapel for the event. (Ironically, because even Stanton grew unnerved at presiding over such a politically risky gathering, men were not only admitted, but, in the person of Lucretia’s husband James, even allowed to head up the gathering.)

The convention received a large amount of press coverage, much of it mixed. While some editors, such as the New York Tribune's Horace Greeley, were sympathetic, others—notably the New York Herald's James Gordon Bennett-- adopted a tack that has been used repeatedly—and all too successfully—over the years: dismiss the organizers as hysterics and misfits. To that end, Bennett reprinted the entire text of the Declaration of Sentiments, believing that he was exposing the group for what they really were. Stanton, however, welcomed this as a means of spreading their ideas.

In the coming decades, America would become convulsed over the slavery issue, relegating women’s rights to the back of the national agenda. Two decades later, Stanton and her friend Susan B. Anthony would find themselves in opposition to Douglass when the latter called for adopting the Fifteenth Amendment, which forbade denial of the suffrage on account of race, color, or prior condition of servitude—but said nothing about gender. By the time women were granted the right to vote in 1920, only one signer of the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments—Charlotte Woodward—was even alive.

This summer, Seneca Falls will undoubtedly be experiencing more tourists than ever because of the anniversary of the convention. However, local history buffs don’t have to go that far to see a place associated with feminist history. Tenafly, N.J., has a National Historic Landmark, a two-story, white Victorian frame house that was the residence of Stanton from about 1868 to 1887.

Quote of the Day (Stewart)

“News used to hold itself to a higher plane and slowly it has dissolved into, well, me.”—Jon Stewart, Ultimate TV, February 2, 1999

This Day in Business History (“Avon” Founder Born)

July 18, 1858—You probably haven’t heard of David Hall McConnell, but you’ve surely heard of his company: Avon Products Inc., one of the great brand names in American enterprise and an employer of choice for thousands of women over the years.

The story of Avon is quintessentially American in that it was (and is) polyglot: The brainchild of the son of a Famine-era Irish emigrant (County Cavan), with a product line probably heavily influenced by French perfume manufacturers then peddling their wares in the States, and with a name taken from the English hometown of William Shakespeare, which reminded McConnell of the American town where his company was based.

As a salesman in charge of the southern territory for the Union Publishing Co. of Chicago, the twentysomething McConnell chafed in a business that was “not congenial” to him. Although they didn’t have a name for the concept then, he made the same dismaying discovery that the book publishing industry keeps having to learn over and over: unless you’re a bestselling “brand” author who give readers more or less the same experience from book to book, such as Danielle Steel, Mary Higgins Clark and Tom Clancy, publishing is a total crapshoots that resists efforts to market books as if they were bars of soap.

It surely irked McConnell that female customers were more likely to buy the products he used as inducements—perfumes—than the major objects of his quests, books. Then he had a brainstorm: while books were really one-offs, perfumes were consumed, so they had to be bought continually. So McConnell sensibly decided to leave the first industry for the second, and in 1886 founded the California Perfume Co. (The name was suggested by a then-business partner, who associated the state with a wild profusion of flowers.)

Know the old line, “Behind every successful man stands a woman”? Well, in McConnell’s case, he started out with two important women and ended up with a veritable army of them. In fact, I think it’s inconceivable that he would have succeeded without them.

The first woman was McConnell’s wife Lucy, who helped him operate a combination of office, laboratory and shipping room in downtown New York, at 126 Chambers Street. This would have tested the patience of anyone, for they operated from a room only 20 x 25 ft. (McConnell’s instincts as a farmboy had been to do things on the cheap so as not to fall in debit.) Her participation was critical, since the business did not have its first $500 day until 1897, more than a decade after California Perfume’s establishment.

The second woman was Mrs. Persus Foster Eames (P.F.E.) Albee of Winchester, N.Y., a 50-year-old woman who had been one of McConnell’s best employees at Union Publishing. It was Mrs. Albee who came up with the company’s business model of “depot agents” selling products door to door in their own neighborhood.

It’s hard to understand what a radical break that concept was from then-current practice. Direct selling in those days depended on commercial travelers arriving by rail in small towns throughout rural America. Coming from nowhere with little but a wave and a smile, these males created a great deal of understandable suspicion.

Now, a woman, working in her own neighborhood with people who knew her—that was someone who could be trusted. At the same time, women—whose only financial options at the time were housework, sewing, teaching, nursing, or working in sweatshops—found an entirely new avenue where they could make money and develop business acumen. Twenty years after its founding, 10,000 representatives and district managers were selling 117 different articles in 600 styles.

By 1897, attracted by country living, McConnell built a wooden lab in Suffern, N.Y., three floors high and 3000 sq. ft.—quite a bit roomier than his initial New York address. By 1971, the Suffern facility was 10 times its original size.

In 1928, after his inspirational vacation to Stratford-on-Avon, McConnell offered his first products under the Avon name – a toothbrush, a talcum, and a vanity set. Amazingly, the company doubled during the next decade—yes, the heart of the Great Depression. By the time of McConnell’s death in 1937, thanks to a nationwide print campaign and the sponsorship of a radio show called Friends (now, not that one, silly!), the company had doubled in sales. So prominent had the Avon name become that two years later, California Perfume became Avon Products Co.

Today, Avon is by far the world’s largest direct seller with 5.4 million Avon Representatives in
over 100 countries. For the full year 2007, according to the company’s latest annual report, it posted revenues of $9.9 billion. It’s a long way from its start as a dream of escape by a harried, annoyed book salesman who learned that it paid to listen to women.

Quote of the Day (Goldwyn)

“If you can fake sincerity, you’ve got it made.”—Movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn

(A motto as true for politics as for entertainment. I mean, you recall what James Carville calls politics, right – “Show business for ugly people”? If anyone would know, he would!)

Sinuous, Sensational Cyd Charisse, R.I.P.

"Son, in this life, you don't walk by a red dress," the late baseball great (he should have been a Hall of Famer) Buck O'Neill once advised a protégée.

Millions of film fans took that to heart when they gaped at an impossibly leggy vision in red appearing with Fred Astaire in the 1953 MGM musical The Band Wagon. 

Oddly enough, the year before they also stared in slack-jawed astonishment at a figure in a green dress, in the Gene Kelly film Singin' in the Rain.

In both cases, the occupant of said dress was Cyd Charisse, whose death from a heart attack at age 86 last month severed one more living tie to the cinematic form that best united the possibilities of sound and movement: the movie musical.

Some years ago, a friend recalled how her husband’s tongue kept inadvertently hanging out during a dance number spotlighting "The Girl in the Yellow Dress" (played by actress Deborah Yates—and by the way, could somebody please tell me whatever happened to her?) in Contact.

Over the years, even more film aficionados experienced the same sensations, on a more extended basis, in the MGM musicals featuring Charisse.

The actress-dancer’s death came out of the blue for me, since only the weekend before I’d seen her in It’s Always Fair Weather. 

This last collaboration between onetime friends Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen not only lived up to its billing—On the Town, 10 years after V-E Day—but, in its sour view of friendship and Eisenhower Era materialism, feels at times like a precursor of Stephen Sondheim’s wised-up musicals starting in the Seventies. It falls just short of greatness.

One reason why is that there's no love dance between Kelly and Charisse to compare with the delirious Central Park number, set to the strains of Arthur Schwartz' "Dancing in the Dark," in The Band Wagon (which Charisse regarded as her favorite scene in all her films).

(Admittedly, this absence is not as unconscionable as Kelly's decision to ax the big dance number featuring co-star Michael Kidd, which appears to have been made to avoid the picture being stolen from its star-co-director.)

But Charisse did very nicely with "Baby, You Knock Me Out." In the politically incorrect parlance of the time, her "classy dame" shone all the more brightly among an all-male chorus that looked like all-too-realistic stand-ins for Stillman Gym's real-life plug-uglies.

The same film slipped in a fact that surprised me when I heard it, but which was confirmed by the obits: the brunette star stood only 5 ft. 6 inches!

Ten years ago, a high school friend of mine who was appearing in films bemoaned a particularly galling missed opportunity in his most recent, major Hollywood production: “They cut my big scene, Mike!”

Woulda, coulda, shoulda…I could write great lyrics—a whole musical, even!—on that one theme. The case of Charisse, however, reveals the truth behind the cliché.

Charisse’s heyday was not only half the length of male co-stars Kelly and Astaire (who, in his autobiography Steps in Time, gave her the appropriate nickname “beautiful dynamite”) but also of other major female musical stars of the time, Judy Garland and Betty Hutton (women whose uncertain temperaments gave them the reputations of “dynamite” of a different sort).

Her first appearance on the big screen was as “Lily Norwood,” opposite Don Ameche in Something to Sing About, in 1943. (The “Charisse” part of her later professional name came from her dance instructor Nico Charisse, whom she married in her teens. The “Cyd” part which gave that particularly euphonious name came after she signed her MGM contract.) 

It took the studio nine years to figure out what to do with the former Tula Ellice Finklea of Amarillo, Texas, while it offered plum parts to the likes of Katharine Grayson and Esther Williams.

“Broadway Melody Ballet,” in Singin’ in the Rain, changed all that. Years later, she joked that her second (and far longer-lasting) husband, Tony Martin, always knew who her co-star was: “If I was black and blue, it was Gene. And if it was Fred, I didn’t have a scratch.”

But Kelly did for her what he did for Reynolds in the same movie—made her a star. She would go on to appear not only in The Band Wagon and It’s Always Fair Weather, but also Brigadoon and Silk Stockings, which she took on the thankless role originally done (as a non-singing part) by Greta Garbo in Ninotchka.

Sadly, at just the moment when storytelling, technological advances, and first-rate choreographers and stars brought the American movie musical to its artistic zenith in the Arthur Freed musicals of the late ‘40s and ‘50s, it all came tumbling down, courtesy of trust-busters, the threat of TV, and studio bean-counters who persuaded the moguls to save money by jettisoning the off-camera talent that gave musicals their wings. 

That spelled the end of her period of greatness for Charisse, who, aside from a few non-musical film roles, spent the rest of her professional career in television, clubs and theater, often with Tony Martin (who survives her).

Time, wrote the poet W.H. Auden in “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” is “indifferent in a week/To a beautiful physique.” But the magic of celluloid musicals preserves the young and the graceful forever in memory. 

Nearly 20 years ago, at a lecture given at Fairleigh Dickinson University, the novelist Mary Gordon made an uncharacteristic wisecrack: "I wish my legs were as long as Cyd Charisse's."

Anyone who ever saw that classy, talented performer—a woman who, in a mere half-dozen years, taught a half century of men never to walk past a red dress—knew what Ms. Gordon was saying.