Theater Review: A.R. Gurney’s ‘Love Letters,’ at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre

A cynic would explain the many productions of Love Letters as the result of its low production costs: only an actor and actress, wearing comfortable everyday clothes, sitting at a table with scripts in front of them— no large casts, musicians, costumes, special effects or even prompters. But that explanation, though not without merit, fails to account for the cleverness and heart that playwright A.R. Gurney invests in this comedy-drama about the complicated half-century relationship of two prep-school friends.

The production going on now at Broadway’s Brooks Atkinson Theatre is directed by one man, Gregory Mosher, but in a real sense, audiences will be seeing a different play each time a cast member changes. The Wednesday matinee I caught was one of the last three performances by Mia Farrow, who was succeeded this week by Carol Burnett. (Between now and February 1, actors will last between 30 and 40 performances, with the current male lead, Brian Dennehy, being succeeded by Alan Alda, Stacy Keach and Martin Sheen, and Ms. Burnett followed by Candice Bergen, Diana Rigg and Anjelica Huston.)

I’m sure Ms. Burnett, one of the great comic actors of our time, will mine every nanosecond of humor from the role of artist Melissa Gardner, a rebellious daughter of the East Coast elite. But Broadway appearances by Ms. Farrow are rare (aside from a one-night benefit reading of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? 10 years ago, her last time on stage on the Great White Way was back in 1980, in Bernard Slade’s Romantic Comedy). Given her intense humanitarian efforts, it could be quite a long while before we see her back, so I jumped at the chance to see her.

I was not disappointed. It wasn’t a reading that Ms. Farrow gave so much as a total inhabitation of her character. She might be turning 70 next year, but the years seemed to melt away as she summoned the girlish cadences of Melissa wondering about her birthday gift from fellow grade-schooler Andrew Makepeace Ladd III (“I don't believe what you wrote. I think my mother told your mother to get that book.”) She pouts, grimaces, giggles, shivers, curls up in pain—in fitting contrast to Mr. Dennehy, playing Andy as rock-solid and enduring.

Melissa disdains letters so much that she hates reading them, let alone writing them. In contrast, Andy—more strait-laced, if stuffy, than his friend—finds in letter-writing a corrective to the frequent silly rules and personal wounds inflicted by their upbringing. His rationale is so eloquently expressed that is difficult not to regard Andy (if only on this point) as a stand-in for his creator:

“They gave us an out in the Land of Oz. They made us write. They didn't make us write particularly well. And they didn't always give us important things to write about. But they did make us sit down, and organize our thoughts, and convey those thoughts on paper as clearly as we could to another person. Thank God for that. That saved us. Or at least it saved me. So I have to keep writing letters. If I can't write them to you, I have to write them to someone else. I don't think I could ever stop writing completely.”

Yet, as much as this two-hander deals in words, it also finds a world of meaning in silence and the WASP code of decorum and reticence. Several times, when either Andy or Melissa crosses a boundary, the response from the other is silence. Tight-lipped responses also inevitably reverberate throughout the play. Andy writes that he is returning to the United States without the Japanese woman he wed while stationed abroad with the Navy, and that will be the only thing he will ever express on the subject. More devastatingly, just as her emotional conflicts begin in earnest, Melissa discloses that her stepfather, Hooper McPhail, ''was a jerk and a pill, and he used to bother me in bed, if you must know.''

If this were a conventional romantic comedy, Andy and Melissa, despite differences in temperament and class (she comes from Old Money, he must climb his way into The Establishment), would carry all before them. But their deep-seated feelings for each other only come out indirectly, and the time, more often than not, is out of joint for them.

The running time of the play is only an hour and a half, without intermission, but it feels like everything essential about the lives of two characters over 50 years has been said. Their correspondence, as interpreted by two magnificent actors, constitutes a collective book of laughter and regretting.

(By the way, there is a very fine profile of Dennehy by Joseph Amodio in the Fall 2014 issue of Promenade Magazine, featuring wonderful photos by my college classmate Ari Mintz that capture the actor in all his warmth and charm.)

Flashback, October 1979: Bo a Big-Office ‘10’

It might have been Oktoberfest in bars around the U.S., but, with her improbable cornrow hairdo and jog toward the camera in a revealing one-piece swimsuit, 22-year-old Bo Derek turned the nation’s box offices into a jigglefest in her first major film role, in the Warner Brothers release 10, premiering 35 years ago this week.

The film popularized the notion of a woman so hot that, on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 the highest, she rates the latter number. (Ironically, in the movie Derek’s character is considered so sexy that even this numbering system is deemed inadequate to summarize her charms, so she is accorded an 11.)

The tidal wave of publicity associated with that designation did more than make Ms. Derek the sex symbol of that moment. It also:

* catapulted the film to #1 at the U.S. box office its opening weekend, and among the top grossing movies of the year;

*it turned the favorite lovemaking accompaniment for Ms. Derek’s character, Jenny—Maurice Ravel’s Bolero—into one of the most requested bits of music on classical music stations, a distinction it contains to hold (see this prior post of mine on the piece's 1928 premiere);

*it transformed the short, hilarious Dudley Moore—who, the year before, had stolen Foul Play out from under Chevy Chase and Goldie Hawn—from a quirky supporting actor into an unorthodox leading man;

*it built name recognition, in a small but well-acted role, for character actor Brian Dennehy; and

*it allowed writer-director Blake Edwards, in the last dozen years of his film career, to project his own raging private anxieties onto a series of male protagonists who were in conflict with themselves.

Derek might be regarded as America’s answer to France’s Brigitte Bardot. Consider the following similarities:

*Both blondes were stamped indelibly as sex symbols for the rest of their lives at age 22 (in the case of Bardot, by the 1956 movie And God Created Woman).

'*Both were largely the creation of cinematic Svengalis better known for relations with three stunning women who became their wives or lovers than for their own, limited talent. The title of the memoir of director Roger Vadim spoke (unintended) volumes about his influence on world cinema: Bardot Deneuve Fonda. For similar reasons, John Derek, an actor whose last good film had been two decades before 10, might have styled the reminiscence he never got to write Andress Evans (Bo) Derek.

*Both women, after a relatively short filmography, retired and became animal-rights advocates.

*Both women dismayed the more liberal members of their nation’s cinema communities by backing right-wing causes. Within the last decade, Derek supported the candidacy of Republican George W. Bush. Bardot’s known foreign-policy views were a good deal more extreme, leading her to be fined 12,000 euros in 2007 for inciting racial hatred for complaining that Muslims were “destroying our country by imposing their ways."

(For the seismic effect that the French sex kitten--she should have trademarked the phrase!--had more than 20 years before 10 on young American males, I urge you to read novelist and occasional blogger Peter’s Quinn’s hilarious post, “Vive Brigitte Bardot!”)

All of this lay in the future, however. In the late Seventies, after scouting coffee shops, talent agencies, little theaters, model agencies, even a fashion show for the personification of feminine beauty for his next film, Edwards met Ms. Derek, at the urging of her husband. Edwards remembered: "Her first words, when she came in to read for us, were: 'I'm sorry about wasting your time.’...Meanwhile, [co-producer] 'Tony Adams' and I were crossing our fingers and praying: 'Let her be able to act—please let her be able to act!'"

Sorry, I must have missed something in that last sentence. The implication seems to be that Ms. Derek won out over a number of other candidates (reportedly including Christie Brinkley and Kim Basinger) because of her talent to emote. Now, from what I’ve heard, she seems to be a nice enough woman, and maybe even relatively intelligent. (I’ve always thought that Joan Rivers’ crack—“She’s so dumb that when she saw a sign saying, ‘Wet floor,' she did”—was cruel.) But, for all that she has shown onscreen (and that’s plenty), acting ability is not one of her assets.

Considering the irony that permeated so many of his films (notably, his Hollywood satire S*O*B), Edwards could have been putting on his interviewer. On the other hand, maybe he was simply displaying old-fashioned gallantry to a woman who, whatever her shortcomings, deserved a thousand times less opprobrium than the sexist pigs who ran the studios and who had been making Edwards’ life miserable.

In this case, Edwards turned out to be considerably shrewder about what would work at the box office and with critics than studio heads. On the one hand, he knew how to lure into theaters guys who would salivate endlessly at Ms. Derek (including a friend of mine—AND HE KNOWS WHO HE IS!!!!!).

On the other hand, just below the surface of a bedroom farce that the French could have enjoyed thoroughly, was a far more subdued, rueful comedy, shot through with melancholy, about a man in full-blown personal and professional midlife crisis. In his professional accomplishments—notably, several Oscars for his songs—Moore’s George Webber sounds superficially like the man who had contributed magnificently to so many Edwards films, Henry Mancini. 

But, in his increasing sense that time might be slipping away from him—a fog of depression so thick that even a psychiatrist is of little use—George is a seriocomic version of Edwards himself. (The final three films in the Pink Panther series had given Edwards what Hollywood worships above all else—the golden touch—but had also given him major agita in the form of star Peter Sellers, who wore the director out with constant arguments and all-around derangement.) Edwards is the only writer-director I’ve ever heard who listed his psychiatrist as a co-screenwriter on a film (That’s Life!, in 1986).

Few if any reviewers remarked on this autobiographical element at the time, the way they would that year with Bob Fosse (All That Jazz), Woody Allen (Manhattan), and David Steinberg (who, in the bomb Something Short of Paradise, not only parsed his own story, as a Jewish comedian obsessed with old films, but Allen’s similar persona, in Manhattan and Annie Hall). The fact that critics overlooked it had much to do with the felicitous casting of Moore, who came on board during shooting when George Segal left (reportedly because the latter thought the role of Julie Andrews, Edwards’ wife and frequent leading lady, was being built up at his expense). Now, Edwards was able to use an inspired farceur, as well as a piano player of considerable talent who, in an extended solo, made the fundamentally autumnal mood of this material unmistakably apparent to audiences.

As notoriously documented in Gay Talese’s Thy Neighbor’s Wife, the 1970s had transformed America into a Disneyworld writ large for sexual experimentation. But, like the theme park, it catered overwhelmingly to the young. 

The loneliness of those left on the fringes because of age is depicted repeatedly in 10—in George, who becomes a peeping tom, low-grade stalker, and adulterer in his foolhardy pursuit of Derek’s character, a bride named Jenny; George’s gay songwriting collaborator, bitterly aware that he won’t be able to hold onto his younger lover for much longer; and George’s level-headed, age-appropriate lover Samantha (played by Andrews), who fumes as she waits for her boyfriend to give up his oafish quest for a woman who can make him feel young again. The movie was, as Nathan Rabin noted as part of the series “Forgotbusters” for the Website “The Dissolve," “simultaneously a perfect sociological document of the era that created it, and strangely timeless in its obsessions.”

Edwards would go on to write and/or direct a series of highly personal films, over the next dozen years, about male characters deeply conflicted and insecure: The Man Who Loved Women (an adaptation of the Francois Truffaut film), That’s Life!, Skin Deep and Switch (a conflict worsened in the last of these by the fact that womanizing Jimmy Smits, murdered by ex-girlfriends, is reincarnated as a woman).

The barrel-chested, fortysomething Dennehy couldn’t be less like the voluptuous Derek. But I couldn’t write this post without mentioning the veteran character actor, who used his few minutes of screen time to make a notable impression as a sympathetic bartender. It was the first in a series of roles that incrementally raised his profile in the entertainment industry, to the point where he is now one of the giants of the American stage.

In 1989, Moore and Derek reunited to present the Oscar for Best Costume Design—an occasion, the award show’s writers not-so-subtly reminded the audience, that was 10 years after their hit. He seemed to recall playing opposite someone who looked like her, Moore said with a straight face: “How odd that the mind plays tricks. Would that the body could as well!”

In the end, Edwards’ film conveyed the wisdom that when it came to relations with women, male emotional health consisted in accepting the fact that it was better that the body not play the tricks once (seemingly) within reach, and that a dream girl might not necessarily provide the goal of life: love.

Theater Review: Dennehy and Gugino in Eugene O’Neill’s “Desire Under the Elms”

From the moment that adolescent farmboy Eben Cabot and his newly arrived, not-much-older stepmother, Abby, locked eyes on each other, you could forget about all their subsequent protestations of hatred.

The heat from the stage at the St. James Theatre was palpable, as if an electric current had passed between these two people, with an almost animal attraction overtaking their need to manipulate and dominate. 

Transfixed in their places onstage, they were goners, and whether they admitted it to themselves or not, an ancient triangular love affair was about to be reenacted in their 19th-century New England farmhouse.

For the last generation or so, directors have been trying to pull the moss off the early, more experimental works of Eugene O’Neill, America’s first great playwright, with mixed results. 

More often than not, the Robert Falls-directed production I saw of the 1924 tragedy Desire Under the Elms—at the show’s final performance two weeks ago—succeeded, largely because of moments like the one I just described.

My major disappointment had nothing to do with the play, but rather the audience at the St. James Theatre—or, rather, the one that never came to this challenging but worthwhile production. All around me in the mezzanine section were row upon row of empty seats—not unlike the performance of Rent I witnessed late in its long run.

Yes, the show’s inexplicable shutout from the major Tony Award nominations a few weeks ago undoubtedly shortened its initial projected run by nearly two months. 

Moreover, it’s easy to attribute this sorry spectacle to the recession, but considering the severity of the downturn, other Broadway shows hadn’t done this badly. In fact, as reported by The New York Times, total Broadway box office receipts edged up slightly for the 2008-09 season.

You have to wonder, then, if a show such as this—featuring major, talented actors like Brian Dennehy and Carla Gugino, riding the crest from good buzz out of town (at Chicago’s Goodman Theater)—can’t make it, what hope does other dramatic fare have?

It has been more than 30 years since I’d read Desire Under the Elms, and, like many, if not most, in the audience, I’d never seen it performed onstage. If memory serves me correctly, the number of speaking parts was a good deal longer in the original text than the five roles here. If that’s the case, Falls admirably scaled the play down to the tight, intimate dimensions that really matter for this drama.

Clocking in at 100 minutes counting intermission, this was not the baggy, patience-testing creative product that made O’Neill the Theodore Dreiser of American drama. That’s not to stay that Falls didn’t commit some missteps along the way.

Perhaps in an attempt to make this story a bit more contemporary, Bob Dylan’s “Not Dark Yet” plays in the background in one scene, and in her bright-red dress and nylon stockings, Abby would have been regarded as a visitor from another planet in the 1850s New England setting of this play rather than the incendiary presence clearly intended by O’Neill.

But these are minor quibbles about an otherwise worthy production. A sterling cast can help obscure a galaxy of sins against the commandments of drama. In the three actors who anchored this production, the ghost of O’Neill would have been delighted—as much as his mordant Celtic soul was capable of that emotion—by what transpired at the St. James.

Start with Dennehy, who, since Jason Robards’ passing, might now be the premiere American interpreter of O’Neill. In the last decade, he’s tackled Hughie, A Touch of the Poet, The Iceman Cometh, and, perhaps the most acclaimed of all these productions, Long Day’s Journey Into Night (an all-star vehicle also featuring Vanessa Redgrave, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Robert Sean Leonard).

Now, he is probably at the best time to carry off the physically demanding role of Ephraim Cabot, a patriarch powerful enough to subdue a son five decades his junior in a wrestling match but vulnerable enough to worry (rightly so!) about pleasing the comely young bride he’s brought home. As Ephraim, Dennehy recoiled in bewilderment over Abby’s rejection of his advances. The suddenly downcast eyes told everything we needed to know about the loss of virility—and of the concomitant ability to dominate—he dreads.

Nearly a decade ago, Mary-Louise Parker pulled out of a commitment to Desire on Broadway so that she could do Proof. That decision didn’t turn out badly at all, but it’s interesting to speculate how well she might have pulled it off had she elected to go with her first impulse.

Not that Gugino needs to dread the comparison. The actress brought more than sensuality to her role: she summoned the hunger and wistfulness of a character who knew only want as a child. Those two qualities help redeem Abby from O’Neill’s somewhat misogynist delineation of the character.

Gugino makes you withhold judgment on whether she’s really abandoned her desire for this house—the same that Eben craved enough that he bought off two older stepbrothers for their claims to it.

As Eben, Pablo Schreiber might have had the trickiest role of all. When you watch his confused, lust-driven young man follow Abby downstairs to the house’s parlor, where his mother, worn down by Ephraim’s selfish demands, died, the Freudian psychology in the setting couldn’t be more plain. The way Eben tries to make out the intentions of this ghost will remind you of nobody so much as Psycho’s Norman Bates. (Indeed, Anthony Perkins starred as the overly sensitive, mother-obsessive young man in both films.)

Schreiber found the key to Eben in the youth’s relationship with his father—a man he blames for the death of his mother, and one he wants to undercut and supplant. After Eben finally gets over his doubts about Abby’s intentions and sleeps with her, Schreiber had him crow like a rooster, not even bothering to conceal his triumph over his confused and cuckolded father.

In framing the play, Falls seized on a line by one of the Cabot stepbrothers: “stone walls to fence us in.” It takes a hard, ruthless man to think he can make a living from this unyielding soil—someone like Ephraim Cabot. Scenic designer Walt Spangler did wonders in fashioning mass rock formations on either side of the stage, powerfully suggesting that the Cabots’ fates are, literally, set in stone.

The two stepbrothers begin the play by pulling these rocks, grunting all the way, only to stop in order to remove the entrails of a pig—an acknowledgement that a bloody sacrifice of another kind would take place by the end of the performance.

For all his artistic faults, O’Neill never turned down a challenge, preferring to fail big than to succeed small. Even as directors puzzle how to make his plays more audience-friendly, his example—using all the resources of the theater to make audiences feel and tremble over the fall of man—remains unexpectedly relevant for 21st-century Broadway.

Quote of the Day (Carla Gugino, on a Formative Acting Experience)

“‘Troop Beverly Hills’ was very meaningful because it allowed me to support myself for the first time, which gave me increased confidence as an actor.”—Carla Gugino, quoted in Patrick Healy, “Giving in to ‘Desire’: It Works for Her,” The New York Times, April 12, 2009

I’d wager that the above quote might be the first time in recorded history that “Troop Beverly Hills” and “meaningful” appeared in the same sentence. Certainly poor Shelley Long might think twice about that, as it confirmed that, post-Cheers, her choice of material might not be the best.

You can click on the link above just to see for yourself that the quote is true. But while you’re doing that, you’ll ask find a very interesting interview with Ms. Gugino.

I don’t recall offhand having seen the actress in film or on TV, but I do remember well her fine turn a few years ago at the Roundabout Theatre’s production of Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer, in the role that Elizabeth Taylor played onscreen. Ms. Gugino is not only an actress of considerable talent and intelligence—something that anyone who watches her can see for themselves—but also, according to colleagues in the theater, a professional of dedication and passion for her craft.

Passion in another context is what her appearance in Eugene O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms is all about. Gugino and the play (also starring Brian Dennehy) earned rave notices before being transferred to New York. It promises to be a highly sought ticket in what has been, all-around, a pretty dreary last six months on the New York theater scene.