Theater Review: Fall Roundup at NY’s Roundabout

Don’t let anyone tell you differently: Putting together a schedule for a theatrical season can be murderously difficult. Just look at the Roundabout Theatre Co. Without a standing repertory company, it must reinvent itself with virtually every production. Getting the right actors when they’re available is a crapshoot. And, while every company with any kind of ambition wants bragging rights to developing and mounting a successful new play, what do you do when audiences don’t cotton to it? 

Even when you go for what seems the tried and true, things have a way of blowing up in your face.

Which brings me to the Roundabout’s fall season. I had no real desire to see Cabaret again after the landmark 1998 revival starring Natasha Richardson—the prospect of seeing Alan Cumming, in his star-making turn as the MC, held no real interest for me. My fear—that this production would not differ much from that earlier show—proved correct. The one hope I had—Emma Stone as Sally Bowles—proved premature, as the film star was only able to take over a role originally meant for her until well after Michelle Williams had given it a try.

The other offerings have been a mixed bag, too. With a top-notch cast working with a virtually foolproof script, You Can’t Take It With You would, in a more just world, go on indefinitely at the Longacre Theatre. But, with audiences at only 58.91% of capacity, it placed among a group of underachieving box-office “underdogs” for the week just before Thanksgiving. At this point, it is set to close February 22, but don’t be surprised if it’s gone sooner.

There are a couple of excellent reasons why this uproarious screwball farce won the Pulitzer Prize back in 1936, and why it still brings down the house with laughter in its current revival. First, George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart were not just playwrights, but also directors who knew how to juice up a work that might have unaccountably gone flagging, resulting in a comedy as durably constructed as that other marvel of 1930s engineering, the Hoover Dam. Second, the rise of multiple media channels has only whetted Americans’ interest in grand eccentrics like this play’s Sycamore family and those who come into their orbit. Third, nearly 80 years after its premiere, in another age of economic unease at home and storm clouds abroad, the comedy still proves a tonic for the lowest of spirits.

James Earl Jones, in an unexpected comic turn, is first among equals here as Grandpa Martin Vanderhof, a businessman who stopped going to the office years ago—and stopped paying income taxes, too. Perhaps the next best-known cast member, Rose Byrne, had the unenviable task of playing the ingénue, Alice Sycamore—the only normal member of her household. (Since I saw the play, Ms. Byrne was succeeded in the role by Anna Chlumsky.)

Alice dreads the idea of her prospective in-laws, the Kirbys (the father owns the factory where she works), visiting the family she loves. You would, too, if you had a father whose basement experiments involve rockets operating only by chance; a mother who started a novel because a typewriter was delivered to the house by mistake; a sister of nonexistent dancing skill who continues to perform jettes around the house; and two Russian emigres—a dance instructor and a former grand duchess-turned-Manhattan waitress—with astonishingly demonstrative personalities.

Although, in terms of lines, a number of parts in the play would normally be deemed small, they are so outsized in eccentricity that the supporting actors have their moments to shine just as much as Jones. Particularly outstanding are Elizabeth Ashley as the grand duchess, Annaleigh Ashford as Essie the would-be ballerina, Reg Rogers as her hilarious dance teacher Boris, and Kristine Nielsen (as fine here as in Christopher Durang’s contemporary Chekhov reimagining Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike) as “playwright” mom Penny Sycamore.

A curious thing happened in the fall with the two Tom Stoppard plays produced by the Roundabout. In its cast size (15 actors) and its widely varying settings (1930s India and 1980s India and England), Indian Ink would normally fit best into the company’s flagship venue, the 740-seat American Airlines Theatre.

But that space was reserved for what is probably the most popular (and accessible) work of the English playwright’s career, The Real Thing, even though the latter calls for fewer actors, smaller production demands and less ambition. So Indian Ink (which closed in early December) was staged in the 424-seat Laura Pels Theatre, where the Roundabout tends to put on its smaller, more experimental fare.

What you had, then, was the type of canvass used to explore Anglo-Indian relations by novelists E.M. Forster (A Passage to India) and Paul Scott (The Raj Quartet), except that, through the teeming intellectual ambitions of Stoppard, this drama takes in even more than that. It shouldn’t cohere. The fact that it does owes less to Stoppard’s usual theater of ideas, and more to the tactile hold on the imagination that India continues to exert on him, 70 years after he lived there briefly as a child.

Rosemary Harris, whom I’ve been lucky enough to see onstage (in the Roundabout’s 2002 production of Edward Albee’s All Over) and on film (Spider-Man 1, 2 and 3 and Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead) is her typically wondrous self as Eleanor Swan, gingerly trying to enhance her beloved older sister’s critical reputation decades after her death, even as she navigates the tricky access demands of biographers.

But the real discovery here, at least for many U.S. playgoers who might only know her for her appearance in the film Atonement, was Romola Garia as Eleanor’s sister, the (fictional) bohemian poet Flora Crewe. She was absolutely fearless in playing this desperately ill woman who, in 1930s India, burns with desire to experience what may well be the last stop on her life’s journey. She was particularly impressive in her scenes with Firdous Bamji (playing Indian painter Nirad Das), switching from imperious, aloof—and, in her urging to penetrate to the truth of what Das sees, challenging and encouraging.

The Real Thing, which closed a week ago, came into New York with high expectations, because of its two prior New York productions (including the 1984 original directed by Mike Nichols) and its top-flight cast. Critics were not generally kind to the show, perhaps because the results couldn’t match the importance this play has taken on as perhaps the centerpiece of Stoppard’s long, much-honored career.

I was inclined to see this carping as misplaced. The most intriguing bit of casting was Sex and the City star Cynthia Nixon (a Roundabout board member, and star of such previous shows as Distracted and The Women), who had played the teenage daughter of playwright Henry in the original show. This time, she fit the bill as Henry’s first, acerbic wife, Charlotte, an actress appearing in his current play. Maggie Gyllenhaal, employing a not-always-convincing British accent in her Broadway debut, came off less well as Annie, the friend with whom he has an affair, then marries.

The role of Henry, a playwright of flashing wit and intelligence, with a deep, abiding interest in popular music such as The Crystals’ 1963 pop hit “Da Doo Ron Ron,” bears more than a little resemblance to Stoppard. Ewan McGregor captured Henry’s darting verbal dexterity (particularly in the play’s famous long “cricket bat” speech, likening good writing to a bit well hit) well enough. But Henry’s’s jealousy and anguish in the second act, when he suspects Annie of committing adultery again, eluded his grasp.

This Day in Theater History (George S. Kaufman, Master Collaborator, Born)

November 16, 1889—George S. Kaufman, synonymous with urban wit as a member of the Algonquin “Roundtable” and as a playwright and director who preferred to work with others, was born in what many in his circle would have regarded as the sticks—Pittsburgh.

Nowadays, it is not unusual for theater professionals to hone their craft in this area of western Pennsylvania—brother and sister Rob and Kathleen Marshall (director-choreographers of, respectively, Chicago and The Pajama Game), for instance, cut their teeth in the theater program at Carnegie-Mellon, in Pittsburgh. But Kaufman’s path was more circuitous, and less happy.

With his long face, tortoiseshell spectacles and bushy hair brushed upward into a preposterous pompadour (a look appropriated for John Turturro’s Clifford Odets-like playwright in Barton Fink), Kaufman in adulthood appeared—not to put a fine point on it—like a grown version of a nerd. Indeed, his childhood was given over far more to books than to play.

But the cosseted circumstances that limited his physical activities early on derived from an understandable reason on his parents’ part: the loss of an older brother. The library became George’s favorite place, and something involving writing—in the end, journalism—his intended profession.

In his 20s, Kaufman wrote for a number of Washington and New York newspapers, including a stint as drama editor for The New York Times. 

That work was distinguished by a penchant for one-liners that made him a regular at the fabled Algonquin Round Table of Twenties wits, and became a hallmark of his later comedies. (For instance, in one review, he noted caustically, "There was laughter in the back of the theatre, leading to the belief that someone was telling jokes back there.") 

He made his debut as a Broadway playwright with Some One in the House in 1918.

The presence of two co-authors, Larry Evans and W. C. Percival, might indicate that the rookie playwright required the assistance of more seasoned professionals, but in fact this became Kaufman’s preferred mode of working for the rest of his four-decade career. 

“With few exceptions, all of  [Kaufman’s] forty-five librettos and nonmusicals were written with somebody else,” noted Thomas S. Hischak in Boy Loses Girl: Broadway's Librettists (2002). 

His collaborators included neophyte playwrights (Ring Lardner, John Marquand, even “stripper-intellectual” Gypsy Rose Lee) and other, more established figures who, with him, formed, in the interwar period, the closest thing that America has had to Restoration Comedy (Marc Connelly, Edna Ferber, Morrie Ryskind, and, most significantly, Moss Hart).

Hart’s Act One, perhaps the best-loved of all show business memoirs, exhibits extraordinary respect for his senior (by 15 years) partner while also spelling out Kaufman’s individual, unusual, sometimes downright eccentric working methods: sessions that began at noon and continued, without food, for another 4½ hours; lying on his back as he tried out ideas; devoting as much as two hours to a single line of dialogue, or a whole afternoon to an entrance or exit.

In that attempt to create comic machinery as smoothly running as a Swiss watch, along with an aversion to sentimentality so intense that he would run to the bathroom to wash his hands to avoid one of Hart’s effusive expressions of gratitude, Kaufman resembles nobody so much as Seinfeld co-creator Larry David. In fact, a Myra Chanin article in The Huffington Post last month referred to Kaufman as “the Larry David of that day…a major maven of human imperfections.”

Kaufman would share the Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice, for his work with Morrie Ryskind and Ira Gershwin, on the musical satire Of Thee I Sing (1932), and with Hart for You Can’t Take It With You (1936). (I will eventually review the latter, now being revived on Broadway with James Earl Jones.)

The influence of Kaufman, as playwright and director, extended not only from every year from 1921 (when his second play, Dulcy, opened) to 1958 (when a comedy he directed, Peter Ustinov’s Romanoff and Juliet, closed) but even down to the present day. 

Woody Allen, Larry Gelbart and Neil Simon are just a few of the comic writers who have cited Kaufman and Hart as major influences on their own style growing up. 

In addition, two shows he wrote in the 1920s for the Marx Brothers, The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers, were adapted to film, becoming crucial in creating their cinematic persona. 

"My dad gave Groucho his walk and his talk," Kaufman’s daughter, Anne Kaufman Schneider said in a 1988 interview with the Los Angeles Times.