Vanity is the weakness of most actors precisely to the extent that it's their strength. Actors need enough vanity to believe they can convey another's reality on the stage, but not so much as to cheat the audience of that reality if it happens to be unattractive. Ronald Harwood's The Dresser is a play about, among other things, this particular form of self-satisfaction and its discontents; so it's particularly lovely that the two leading performances in the Steppenwolf Theater Company production are so utterly vanity-free.
The Dresser takes place on the last day of the life of Sir, a Shakespearean actor-manager keeping his company together during the Blitzkrieg by sheer force of will. But the will in question isn't entirely his own: as he deteriorates into a quivering mass of exhaustion and senility, Sir relies increasingly on Norman, his faithful dresser. During a performance of King Lear, Norman manages to keep the tottering Sir onstage while battling the stage manager for the right to determine whether the play should go on. He also does his best to work around the actor's wife Her Ladyship, who though she plays Cordelia has the spite and fury of Goneril and Regan combined. Finally, Norman runs interference between Sir and the rest of the company, however truculent, inept or lascivious.
The play is clever but its seams show. Having Sir transform himself into Lear is just a shade over-determined, and beginning the piece by having the dying actor come in from tearing off his clothes in a storm is really gilding the lily. But it's a feast for the right pair of actors, and John Mahoney and Tracy Letts are those actors. Mahoney, fresh off his rageful and commanding performance in I Never Sang for My Father, allows himself to be seen onstage diminished not only emotionally but physically, in a singlet that emphasizes sunken chest and shrunken arms ("hose a world too wide. . ."). It must be terrifying for an actor to reach the right age to play Sir, but Mahoney doesn't flinch. He portrays the end of life as the scene of a final terrible battle with a God who may not even be there, using the usual signs of aging-slipping memory, declining energy, fear of being alone-as hallmarks of how unfair the contest is. Mahoney manages to be both pitiful and pitiable, though being pitiful usually evokes contempt instead. His Sir is not an admirable man but we admire him nonetheless for holding himself and his troupe together just one more time.
Letts's work is, if anything, more remarkable, as he's been cast so far against type. Generally a solid, forceful, quintessentially masculine actor, he nevertheless plays "pansy-boy" Norman without hesitation or condescension. He seems as attuned to Mahoney as Norman is to Sir, and the bond between the characters-with all its frays and disappointments-would make the evening worthwhile if nothing else did. Here the much-touted benefits of working with a stable ensemble are on full display, as the two actors do a tricky and painful dance with the ease and grace that comes from knowing your partner. As Letts moves between preening and servility, between manipulation and honest emotion, he never loses touch with the character's humanity, so Norman remains a perfect surrogate for the audience as we venture gingerly into the world of the play.
For all practical purposes, these two are the play. But they receive good support from Peggy Roeder as Madge the stage manager, whose long-suppressed love for Sir is finally aired in a scene of admirable, and character-true, restraint. The adorable Mike Nussbaum, as an actor stepping in for a man much larger in every way, provides comic relief worthy of Sir Andrew Aguecheek or the Gravedigger while still managing to wear his Fool's cap and bells with wisdom and dignity. The one weak link is Mary Beth Fisher as Her Ladyship. Skilled at portraying contemporary independent American women, she seems completely at sea as a discontented British mistress from the 1940s. She looks as uncomfortable and miscast in her role as Her Ladyship does playing Cordelia.
Director Amy Morton is certainly entitled to credit for the generally excellent acting, and for the expeditious staging of a play often threatening to bog down in its own allusive dialogue. But her usual power as a director doesn't come through, stymied by the play's staginess and self-consciousness-its vanity, you might say. Actors Mahoney and Letts escape the deadly sin's snare, but playwright Harwood got caught.