WANT A TENNESSEE WILLIAMS HEROINE? Here, take four. From left, Jean Lichty, Annette O’Toole and Kristen Nielsen in “A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur.” (Not shown: Polly McKie, whose character lives upstairs in her bathrobe and cries a lot.)
GOD KNOWS IT’S NOT the Year of the Woman again, but the schedulers of the first month of New York’s fall theater season apparently were not informed.
As of early October, four new productions (on Broadway and off) have already given us new heroines — all living in different historical periods, with wildly different senses of self
A French actress who believes she can do anything (even play Hamlet)
*An Albany politico (politica?) who stays busy at her sewing machine while she’s helping run state government
An introverted New England poet (poetess?) whose mind is so beautiful that a chamber quartet plays there year-round
A romantically betrayed Depression-era St. Louis schoolteacher waiting for a phone call
The one thing they have in common: We’re meant to admire them.
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BERNHARDT/HAMLET
WHAT A PIECE OF WORK IS MAN Janet McTeer as the actress Sarah Bernhardt, with Jason Butler Harner as the playwright Edmond Rostand, in “Bernhardt/Hamlet.” Bernhardt may be playing Hamlet, but she gets to wear lots of women’s clothes too.
BERNHARDT/HAMLET American Airlines Theater, 227 West 42nd Street. 2 hours 20 minutes. Limited run: Closes Nov. 11.
That’s Janet McTeer playing Sarah Bernhardt, who — well, to call her the Meryl Streep of her day would almost be to diminish her. Bernhardt (1844-1923), born in Paris to a courtesan and raised with financial help from her unknown (at least to history) father, became the most acclaimed stage actress of her day. By the late 1890s, when “Bernhardt/Hamlet” takes place, she was in her 50s and running out of challenges. So she announced her intention to play Shakespeare’s depressed, conflicted, devious Danish prince in “Hamlet.”
A FAVOR TO ASK McTeer in her character’s dressing room with a surprise visitor: her lover’s wife (Brittany Bradford).
McTeer, 57, first awed New York theater audiences two decades ago when she starred in “A Doll’s House” (1996) on Broadway. We sent her home with best-actress Tony and Drama Desk awards. In this, her latest role, she’s in splendid form. I was carried away by her energy and confidence in both acts — and touched by Bernhardt’s reactions when her lover’s wife (Brittany Bradford) pays a gentle but pointed backstage visit.
AN ACTOR’S LIFE Dylan Baker, as a fellow cast member, with McTeer-as-Bernhardt-as-Hamlet in rehearsals.
I enjoyed Bernhardt’s misguided idea of having Rostand (Jason Butler Harner) rewrite Shakespeare, taking out all the poetry. Loved the supportive cast interaction as the actor who’s playing the Ghost of Hamlet’s Father is trying to find his way dramatically. And I particularly enjoyed the characters’ discussions about whether Hamlet, a college student on a visit home, should be played as 19 or 30. (How much grad school did people need in those days?)
Jesse Green’s New York Times review did find the production clever, timely and uplifting, as all the ads will tell you, but my favorite description in Green’s article is “a deep-inside love letter to the theater.” A place where any change is possible!
MORAL: Sarah Bernhardt could do anything. Probably feeling that way about yourself is the best first step toward your next success.
THE TRUE
PAJAMA GAME Polly Noonan (Edie Falco) is devoted to Mayor Erastus Corning II (Michael McKean), but she is not — despite vicious rumors — his mistress. Best silent cameo of the season so far: His wife.during this late-night scene.
THE TRUE Pershing Square Signature Center, 480 West 42nd Street. 1 hour 45 minutes (no intermission). Limited run: Extended through Oct. 28.
IF YOU’RE INTO CONTEMPORARY politics, the first thing you want to know about Sharr White’s political one-act “The True” is that the main character is Kirsten Gillibrand’s grandmother. Kirsten Gillibrand, the Democratic U.S. senator from New York. Strong, smart, politically savvy women apparently are a family thing.
The second thing you need to know is Edie Falco. She plays our heroine, Polly Noonan, a nice 1970s married lady in Albany who has been the driving force behind the political career of Erastus Corning II (Michael McKean), who was mayor of Albany from 1942 to 1983. This play, by Sharr White (“The Other Place”), takes place in 1977, when things went began to go wrong.
Ms. Falco (an Emmy winner for both “The Sopranos” and “Nurse Jackie”) does not disappoint. Her performance is snappy and slightly over-the-top, but like Polly Noonan she gives it her all within the constraints of American women’s sex roles, shifting as they were in the 1970s but still fairly rigid. The overwhelming symbol is Noonan’s home sewing machine, where she always seems to be working while talking Democratic strategy with the guys.
TALK TO ME, YOUNG MAN Peter Scolari, far left, plays the heroine’s supportive husband. Austin Cauldwell, center, is a newcomer whose devotion to politics falls far short of Polly Noonan’s (Ms. Falco’s) standards.
Just one distinguishing characteristic: She curses like a drunken sailor, which contrasts vibrantly with her ladylike midcentury fashions (costume design by Clint Ramos). The main conflict is that Corning is facing a big primary challenge, yet he fires Noonan — apologetically — because of all the gossip that she’s his mistress. She isn’t. She loves her husband (Peter Scolari, far left in photo), who is a saint and a fine home bartender.
This is a New Group production, directed by Scott Elliott, with a first-rate crew (right-on-target sets by Derek McLane) and a stellar supporting cast. The run, which has been, is already sold out, but there’s always that hang-around-the-box-office strategy.
MORAL: Keep trying. Keep fighting. Really care about what you do.
BECAUSE I COULD NOT STOP
BELLE OF AMHERST Angelica Page, far right, as Emily Dickinson, with the chamber orchestra who seem to live inside her head in “Because I Could Not Stop.”
BECAUSE I COULD NOT STOP: AN ENCOUNTER WITH EMILY DICKINSON Pershing Square Signature Center, 480 West 42nd Street. Limited run: Closes Oct. 21.
“BECAUSE I COULD NOT stop for death, he kindly stopped for me.” Even high school poetry students know those words by Emily Dickinson. And even they know that Dickinson was a quiet late-19th-century Massachusetts spinster who lived in her parents’ home in tiny Amherst and was too antisocial or oversensitive to keep up the “visiting neighbors” part of her era’s social life. She died in her 50s, leaving behind a trove of glorious, sharp-edged first-person poetry that made her a posthumous star.
Angelica Page (who, metaphorically, will always live in her parents’ house, because her parents are Geraldine Page, who died in 1987, and Rip Torn) becomes Dickinson for this intriguing production, which defies categorization. Normally, you’d call it a solo show, but Page is rarely alone onstage.
In this imagined Amherst parlor, a chamber quartet play Amy Beach’s exquisite neo-classical music. And sometimes a pianist (Max Barros), plays an instrument that Liberace might have outbid you for at Sotheby’s. The suggestion seems to be that inside this physically drab woman’s head was such glorious music that it defined, spurred and embraced her. At times, a soprano (Kristina Bachrach) enters and breaks into plaintive song. Looking at the setup, we have to believe that Dickinson also had a projection designer in her head. The only thing I choose to take literally is the swan buffet, although it looks terribly Art Deco.
I can’t say that James Melo’s script taught me a lot about Dickinson. I don’t even know what to call this production genre, but it’s a transporting concept filled with promise, directed respectfully by Donald T. Sanders.
Maybe the Poetry Foundation sums up Dickinson best, as the woman who “crafted a new persona for the first person” and as one of poetry’s “sharp-sighted observers who see the inescapable limitations of their societies as well as their imagined and imaginable escapes.”
MORAL: Get out!
A LOVELY SUNDAY FOR CREVE COEUR
HA HA, I”M NOT HYSTERICAL JUST BECAUSE THAT CALL’S NOT FOR ME Kristine Nielsen, left, and Jean Lichty as Depression-era roommates in Tennessee Williams’s “A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur.”
A LOVELY SUNDAY FOR CREVE COEUR Theater at St. Clement’s, 423 West 46th Street. 1 hour 45 minutes (no intermission). Limited run: Closes Oct. 21.
FOR DOROTHEA (JEAN Lichty, in photo), life couldn’t be mcuh better. She wakes up — a young, pretty, healthy schoolteacher — in the affordable St. Louis apartment she shares with a much older, much larger woman nicknamed Bodey (the perfect Kristine Nielsen). It’s a beautiful Sunday, and Dottie (that’s what everybody calls her) is glowing as she does her morning exercise routine and waits for a phone call from her secret boyfriend, T. Ralph Ellis, the school principal.
As Dotty confesses to Bodey a little later that day, she recently succumbed to passion in the back seat of Ralph’s car, and it was such a pure, spiritual experience that she has no doubt that he returns her love and they’ll marry soon. Bodey would rather see Dottie with her bachelor brother, who smokes smelly cigars but is otherwise a fine human being.. So Bodey spends much of the play’s action preparing food for a picnic in a nearby lakeside park, Creve Coeur (she pronounces the first word to rhyme with “grieve,” because that’s what Americans like to do to nice French words).
Bodey and Dottie have two visitors today. Poor Miss Gluck (Polly McKie, in photo), who lives upstairs in this apartment complex, is mourning the recent death of her mother. She seems to wander the staircase or hallways in near catatonia and sometimes settles in Bodey’s cluttered living room, expressing her sadness in mournful German and looking as if she’s trying to will her own death. But Bodey tries to help! (Williams was always fascinated by European immigrants living in the United States.)
The second guest is Helena (the splendid Annette O’Toole, in photo), a single-schoolteacher friend of Dottie’s and the only character who bothered to dress for the outside world today. Helena has persuaded Dottie to share an apartment with her, a much nicer one in a much nicer neighborhood, and has come to collect money. Even though Dottie hasn’t told Bodey her plans yet — and although, as she dreamily tells Helena, she won’t be needing the apartment for long because of the obvious coming developments in her romance. Helena can barely bear standing in Bodey’s living room; it offends her innate sense of good taste.
“A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur” isn’t revived that often. Its premiere Off Broadway production received less than dazzling reviews when it opened in 1959, and it closed a month later. But you can’t be a true Williams scholar without knowing it. Did we mention that there’s bad news for Dottie in the Sunday paper?
Moral: Get a grip! It may not be too late not to turn into Blanche du Bois. (H/T my St. Clement’s seatmate, CP.)
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Want to learn a lot of great theater terms? Check out the Press Nights Glossary.
Soon: Check out our Absurdism Off Broadway fall 2018 feature.