The Williamstown Festival boasts an exceptionally full season and extends
beyond the confines of late spring-early fall. With the outstanding new
facility in operation, including parking garage (too small and in need of staff
to re-direct harried audience members to alternative options), the campus of
The largest of
the three venues, where the Hellman play was produced, is a real gem. Sight lines are
so comfortable, so totally designed to bring audience and performer into the
same world. I only wish that I had enjoyed the performance as much.
Hellman’s
play, first produced on Broadway in 1951, doesn’t share the dramatic power of The
Children’s Hour or The Little
Foxes. Rather, Hellman sought to
create a world more Chekhovian, which is to say more defined by character than
by plot or overriding theme. The result is a play that takes its own good time
(and ours) to find its way. Whether or not it was the particular performance I
saw (matinee following opening night), I can’t say. But the pace was so
determinedly slow and the text itself so self-consciously ruminative, that the
second intermission felt like one too many.
The large
company of twelve actors had not yet established its own rhythms and there was
no momentum to or from moments of insight or revelation. Hellman’s pattern of
lives intersecting without being force-fed felt self-conscious and engineered.
Of the company
itself, John Benjamin Hickey was always fascinating. Never predictable in his
responses, he brought the world of the play to life with each of his scenes. Elizabeth Franz brought strength and tenacity, cut with acid
humour, to an underwritten role. Maryann
Plunkett wisely resisted
condescension in her portrayal of a scattered wife (and managed to define the
only credible three-dimensional character). Allison Janney, playing
an ageing woman whose emotional life has been sacrificed or appropriated (you
decide which) by southern provincialism, was gracious, if surprisingly muted.
The