TV Review: Mint Theater’s ‘London Wall,’ on PBS’ ‘Theater Close-Up’

One of my major regrets is that, even though I blog daily, I just do not have the time, energy or patience to write on every subject that grabs my interest. My pangs of conscience are keenest when I don’t get to review all the shows I have attended, since one of the inspirations for my little Internet enterprise was the “theater diary” faithfully maintained by Canadian man of letters Robertson Davies.

Of all the productions just beyond my blogger’s grasp, the one that bothered me the most was London Wall, a 1931 workplace dramedy by John Van Druten, best known for I Am a Camera (an adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories that, in turn, inspired the musical Cabaret), Bell, Book and Candle and I Remember Mama. Mounted in late winter and early spring, it admirably fulfilled the ambition of the Off-Broadway troupe The Mint Theater Co. to revive interest, through painstaking craft and care, in vintage plays that have been inexplicably neglected since their original productions.

When I heard that the play would be, in effect, shown again, as part of a new PBS series, Theater Close-Up, I was doubly motivated to write about the event. You see, the latter, a collaboration between Channel 13 and numerous non-profit Off- and Off-Off Broadway theaters, reminds me of nothing so much as a similarly ambitious venture from my youth: Theater in America, which went out into the regional theater scene then starting to explode outside New York.  

If I had to point to an inspiration for my longtime interest in theater, especially classic comedies and dramas, it was the latter show. During my high school years, in the mid-to-late Seventies, its productions piqued my interest in the likes of Shakespeare, Moliere, Chekhov, O’Neill, Rostand, and George S. Kaufman, with some of the best actors of the day (Tammy Grimes, Peter Donat, Frank Langella, Blythe Danner, and Susan Sarandon). After college, with leisure time (and some limited money) available for the first time, I was able to attend live performances at last. 

Theater in America was eventually subsumed under the rubric of the still-running Great Performances—a shame, I thought, as theater deserves to stand apart from opera, classical music and dance. I’m not sure who is the creative godfather for greenlighting Theater Close-Up now—a Young Turk with no memory of the past, or an aging baby boomer like me. But the decision shows TV execs that, like the Mint Theater itself, it’s never too late to revive something from the past.

The TV broadcast reminded me of why I had so enjoyed the performance of London Wall in the first place. The introduction of women into the workplace is a long-settled fact, but the predatory male exploiting his power remains as much a presence in today’s U.S. offices as in the pre-war London solicitor’s office of Van Druten’s setting, so the play hasn’t dated. Moreover, his expert comic timing—along with serious overtones posed by the precarious state of aging single women—did not get lost in the translation from an intimate small-theater venue like the Mint’s to television.

I wrote just now that I was glad of the intense focus on drama that this series affords away from the Great Performances umbrella. But, in one sense, this show does merit inclusion under the old banner, for this broadcast was another opportunity to appreciate fine performances by Julia Coffey as Miss Janus, the super-efficient senior typist and personal secretary at the firm with an unexpected vulnerability; Jonathan Hogan as Mr. Walker, the senior partner in the solicitor’s office; Stephen Plunkett as the office lecher, more enthralled by his own charm than the pretty young things that always catch his eye; and Elise Kibler as Pat Milligan, the naïve young typist who becomes the latter’s prey.

Theater in America was hosted by Hal Holbrook; Theater Close-Up is introduced by a later generation’s theater luminary, Sigourney Weaver. From the episode I saw tonight—which included a post-performance interview with the Mint Theater’s artistic director, Jonathan Banks—Theater Close-Up will shine a spotlight on small companies away from the ballyhoo of Broadway.

The series will continue on successive Thursdays on Channel 13 at 10 PM, with repeat broadcasts on Sunday evenings following Masterpiece. WLIW21 will air the series on Monday evenings beginning Oct. 6 at 10:30 PM. If the rest of the series is as good as this inaugural opening, a new generation of theater fans will be as inspired as I was by public broadcasting’s offerings nearly four decades ago.

Theater Review: ‘Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike,’ at Lincoln Center

“Are we going to have an evening of Chekhov references?” a character asks in the latest comedy-drama by Christopher Durang, which closed yesterday at Lincoln Center after a run of several weeks. For anyone not suspecting something of that sort after reading the title, it’s already too late.

Well, no matter. References to the great Russian playwright and short-story writer abound, all right, in Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, but also plenty of allusions to American pop culture, as well as many of Durang’s own playful jabs. I was amused from the opening to the close of the play when I saw it in mid-November.

Perhaps this is not a spoof (though Durang’s written his share of those during his 40-year career, including A History of the American Film and For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls) so much as a homage. You don’t have to know much about Chekhov, nor the other many allusions (to the Brothers Grimm, The Wizard of Oz and Greek tragedy, among others) that dot this play, but it sure helps.

In collaboration with set designer David Korins, director Nicholas Martin (former artistic director of one of my favorite occasions for theater, the Williamstown Theater Festival) masterfully used the close setting of the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater to meticulously suggest the “lovely country estate in Bucks County” specified by the playwright. The effect of the bucolic setting, however, is to leave “Vanya” (played by David Hyde Pierce) and stepsister Sonia (Kristine Nielsen) bored, embittered by how life has passed them by, and increasingly enervated by and snappish toward each other.

This being a reimagining of Anton Chekhov in contemporary terms, though, each character associated with the Russian suffers from a contemporary malady as well as the one afflicting his or her prototype. The long-suffering Sonia of Uncle Vanya is just as lovelorn here, but now she confesses that she may be bipolar, declaring, “I’m a wild turkey” (as opposed to a seagull). Like his predecessor, Durang’s Vanya is the longtime caretaker of the ancestral home, but now he has an additional reason for quiet desperation: he’s a loveless gay man. Masha—in reality, less like the bitter middle member of The Three Sisters than like Arkadina, the self-centered, aging actress in The Seagull—is here a five-times married Hollywood star. The play’s agent of change here is not a thoughtless academic too old for his pretty young wife but an even more thoughtless boy toy of Masha’s, Spike, who, unable to get past the audition for Entourage 2, is now content to bare his chiseled physique before the delighted females on hand (and the equally enthralled Vanya).

In short, as Vanya notes, “If Prozac were around, there would be no Chekhov characters.”

The show did, at times, resemble a two-hour juggling act, heavily dependent on clever stage business that disguises the lack of a substantial plot. Masha, for instance, induces the other members of the household to attend a costume party, where, to her fury, her far-from-age-appropriate Snow White is upstaged by Sonia (dressed as Maggie Smith, on her way to collect an Oscar for California Suite). Later, Spike’s idiotic comment on why Vanya would use anything as outdated as a postage stamp launches the sad-sack brother into a several-minute-long anti-digital rant that Pierce converted into the comic highlight of the show.

The fine cast had varying degrees of fortune with Durang’s material. For all her enduring skill and glamor, Sigourney Weaver couldn’t get much beyond the film diva caricature created by the playwright, her friend and Yale School of Drama classmate. Virtually all of her gestures as the supremely narcissistic Masha are over the top. As the shallow, wildly exhibitionist Spike, Billy Magnussen elicited belly laughs more consistently, but he also couldn’t overcome the limits of the play.

Nielsen, in contrast, wrings every bit of nuance from her depressed middle-aged spinster. Pierce may fare the best, given that more than a decade as Niles Crane furnished him with plenty of practice in endowing a massive fussbudget with more than a few drops of human sympathy.

Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike is, as might be guessed, more than a bit derivative. With each of its literary and pop-culture allusions, it seems to wink at its audience, “You are so smart, so sophisticated to recognize that. You should be on Jeopardy.” 

Moreover, for all its appeal to a progressive New York audience in, for example, its attitudes toward gay rights and environmentalism (its warning about hurricane-force winds was written not during Hurricane Sandy, three weeks before the matinee I attended, but three years previously), Durang’s dramedy was oddly insensitive to stereotypes of groups that fall outside its circle (the prophetic cleaning maid—Cassandra, of course—played by Shalita Grant, is not only African-American but sassy and adept at voodoo, and another character alludes to a physically abusive, drunk Irish father).

Still, all in all, this work is an affectionate tip of the hat to the Russian master of muted melancholy and mirth, and it left me eager to see what the near future holds in store for the Newhouse Theater and the highly prolific Durang (e.g., Beyond Therapy, Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You).

Quote of the Day (Sigourney Weaver, on Her Spur to Success)

“Having arrived at Yale [School of Drama] feeling I could do anything, I was told I had no talent and should leave. I went to the school psychiatrist, but I had to pay after five sessions and didn’t feel like I could ask my parents to pay more money to send me to a school that didn’t want me. So I just sort of had a quiet nervous breakdown. But if the school had been more encouraging, I don’t know if I would have stayed in acting. When they told me I couldn’t be an actor, then I had to be a successful actor.”—Sigourney Weaver, quoted in Amy Wallace, “A Stand-Up Woman: 10 Questions for Sigourney Weaver,” Reader’s Digest, October 2010

This Day in Literary History (Fitzgerald’s “This Side of Paradise” Published)

March 26, 1920—This Side of Paradise, the first novel of 23-year-old F. Scott Fitzgerald, was published by Scribners, garnering strong sales and acclaim for the author as the voice of a generation.

As a more world-weary Fitzgerald explained in his 1937 essay “Early Success” (posthumously collected in The Crack-Up), his publisher had chuckled at the rookie author's expectation that the book’s sales would not exceed 20,000. Five thousand, he was quickly set straight, would be great for a first-time novelist. 

“I think it was a week after publication that it passed the twenty thousand mark,” Fitzgerald observed drily.

Let’s stipulate this up front: This Side of Paradise is not The Great Gatsby. But every author has to start somewhere (Shakespeare, after all, had Titus Andronicus), and the novel did give Fitzgerald a perspective that he never really lost, despite the epic battle with alcohol he was about to wage: that of a disciplined, professional author.

Even on its own merits, This Side of Paradise doesn’t lack for distinction. It would take hard experience and an obsession with aesthetics that began to take hold (though still fitfully) with the creation of The Beautiful and Damned, but even at this point Fitzgerald was demonstrating that he was incapable of writing a bad sentence.

In this novel and his two subsequent short-story collections, Flappers and Philosophers and Tales of the Jazz Age, he was already showing, according to the late novelist-critic Thomas Flanagan, an “uncanny ability to evoke atmosphere, moods, energies, through his deployment of sounds, colors, lights, shadows.”

From a cultural perspective, the novel might have been significant in another way: I can’t think of an earlier American work of fiction that became famous precisely for its picture of the younger generation. 

Before this, the public had not cared particularly how youth thought or behaved. After the Great Crash, it would take another two decades—until, I’d say, J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye—before serious attention began to be paid to young people again.

Why the attention in the Twenties? The youth who came of age after World War I were different. The automobile gave them unprecedented freedom from their elders, including in sexual matters. 

Furthering their radical estrangement from traditional mores, the war disabused them of all notions of military glory, and Prohibition was creating a nation of lawbreakers.

Fitzgerald’s alienation took an additional form: the collapse of his Roman Catholic faith. The 1919 death of spiritual mentor and surrogate father Fr. Sigourney Fay, an Episcopal convert who had, for a time, heavily influenced the novelist, severed his last connection with the faith of his ancestors.

(Incidentally, Fr. Fay—who inspired the novel’s worldly Monsignor Darcy—also led a young, tall actress to choose a first name that would mark her as distinctive. We know Susan Weaver these days better as Sigourney Weaver.)

Any notion of becoming the voice of “The Jazz Age” was way beyond Fitzgerald (who, it should be noted, like future frenemy Ernest Hemingway, actually preferred classical music) as he wrote furiously in the summer of 1919 in his hometown of St. Paul, Minn. 

He was just a young guy who wanted to write—and to win the hand of a young Southern beauty he had fallen in love with but was in danger of losing because he didn’t have enough money.

A half-dozen years ago, I toured St. Paul, soaking in the atmosphere in which Fitzgerald grew up. In his childhood, the financial travails of Fitzgerald’s parents, Edward and Mollie Fitzgerald, took them to several residences. 

These homes remain privately owned, and the city does not have a Fitzgerald museum. (One residence, however—the apartment building at 599 Summit Avenue where Fitzgerald wrote This Side of Paradise—made the National Register of Historic Places.)

Even without a museum, however, a half-day’s walk will take you through Fitzgerald’s childhood and early adult haunts around beautiful Summit Avenue and its network of side streets just below the Cathedral of St. Paul, in a neighborhood known as Ramsey Hill.

The gracious homes on this sweeping boulevard and its environs--one of the best-preserved Victorian neighborhoods in America--still attract St. Paul’s most famous citizens, including Garrison Keillor, who broadcasts his radio show A Prairie Home Companion out of a restored theater renamed in the novelist’s honor.

It is estimated that there were more than 100 structures in St. Paul associated with Fitzgerald, mostly in a 12-square-block area. Remarkably, approximately 80 still exist.

While Scott attended Princeton, Edward and Mollie relocated to 593 Summit Avenue, part of a brick rowhouse built in the Richardsonian Romanesque style. Four years later, in 1918, they moved again, to the 599 unit on Summit.

Here Scott repaired in July 1919, at the end of a series of failures or anti-climaxes: dropping out of Princeton because of poor grades; an Army stint in WWI in which he never saw combat or even went overseas; a New York advertising job that he loathed; rejection by Scribners of his first attempt at a novel, The Romantic Egotist; the breakup of his engagement to southern belle Zelda Sayre, because she feared he couldn’t support her; and a week-long bender over this romantic failure. 

“I was in love with a whirlwind,” he later wrote, “so when the girl threw me over, I went home and finished my novel.”

Scribners editor Maxwell Perkins, though rejecting The Romantic Egotist, had given Fitzgerald hope that it could be salvaged. In his parents’ “house below the average on a street above the average,” Fitzgerald, looking to stake his claim as a writer, worked tirelessly for the next three months.

When particularly consumed by his work, he’d use a speaking tube outside his room and order meals to be brought up. Onlookers gazing up at Fitzgerald’s guest room on the third floor would have seen the shadows of paper pinned to his curtains and walls – evidence of heavy revisions to his work.

And then…Success.

After he received Maxwell Perkins’ letter accepting This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald ran up and down the street, stopping cars to tell everyone. “That week the postman rang and rang,” Fitzgerald wrote, “and I paid off my terrible small debts, bought a suit, and woke up every morning into a world of ineffable topflightiness and promise.”

Success brought him Zelda. Within two weeks after publication of This Side of Paradise, the two were married in the rectory of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York.

Ahead of them lay a celebrity so luminous that a Hollywood producer suggested that they should play their fictional counterparts from This Side of Paradise, Amory Blaine and Rosalind Connage, in a film version that never came to be. Also ahead, of course, was a nomadic existence, marked by a double tragedy that neither headstrong, lovestruck youth could anticipate.

Movie Quote of the Day (Bill Murray to Sigourney Weaver in “Ghostbusters”)

Dr. Peter Venkman (played by Bill Murray, wagging a finger admonishingly): “I make it a rule never to get involved with possessed people.”

[Dana, played by Sigourney Weaver, embraces him even more passionately than before, the way that only someone possessed by a demon dog can do.]

Peter (his resistance weakening by the millisecond): “Actually, it's more of a guideline than a rule...”—Ghostbusters (1984), written by Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis and an uncredited Rick Moranis, directed by Ivan Reitman

The giddily hilarious Ghostbusters, premiering on this date in 1984, was one of a trio of comedies opening that year which now have the feel of classics. All three starred actors formally associated with Saturday Night Live: cast regulars Murray and Eddie Murphy (in Beverly Hills Cop) and frequent and popular guest host Steve Martin (in All of Me).

I’m not that much of a fan of Murray’s earlier Caddyshack—a film in which the initial plot, concerning Michael O’Keefe and Scott Columby, is dropped like a too-heavy bag of golf clubs so that Murray, Chevy Chase, and Rodney Dangerfield could do their own thing. You could almost see Harold Ramis, here making his directorial debut, making it up as he goes along, just managing to salvage a group of disparate skits.

In contrast, with Ghostbusters, the focus is on this group of paranormal investigators, and even more on their wiseguy chief, Murray—who comes across less like a scientist, as the wary Dana notices immediately, than “like a game-show host.”

Though Murray provides the film’s comic fizz, it’s the willowy Weaver who serves as its plot fulcrum, the object of desire for Murray, Moranis’ nerdy accountant Louis, and, in the sequence here, “The Gatekeeper.”

Murray, hoping for some action with this woman he’s been making the moves on from the beginning, is mystified by her strange appearance and questions: “Is this still a date?” The ante is upped with the follow-up question that the demon transmits through Dana: “Do you want this body?” (Is this a trick question?” Peter wonders.)

Then, the sequence quoted above, followed by Murray’s definitive summary of this close call for Dana and himself: “I think we can get her a guest shot on Wild Kingdom.”

A couple of weeks ago, the announcement was made that Weaver, the last holdout among the original cast members, had committed to Ghostbusters 3. Though her presence will go a long way toward redeeming this sequel for me, I still wish none of the principals had gone near it.

Murray made Ghostbusters 2 for an obscene amount of money and the chance to get his more serious projects green-lighted. If you were in his position, considering the interesting work he’s done in the past decade in more serious films (The Royal Tenenbaums, Broken Flowers, and his Oscar-nominated turn in Lost in Translation), I’m sure you’d feel it was worth it.

I, however, disagree, for this reason: You not only can’t improve on perfection, but you shouldn’t even try. Intoxicants aren’t as fun the second time around.