COLLECTED STORIES
by Donald Margulies
Directed by Lori Kee
Starring Grace Kiley and Christina Toth
East Village Basement
Tickets and Info
Reviewed by David Spencer
Among the most delicate and complicated relationships in the world of the arts is that between mentor and protégé. Especially when at the start the mentor is a curmudgeon and the protégé is adoring. The protégé absorbs like a sponge everything the mentor has to say—even the mentor’s unwisest attitudes and opinions—and inevitably, it is the filtering of those flaws that causes the breach. As the protégé breaks away, s/he almost always does so by returning a dose of the mentor’s own medicine. And, in a manner that is almost always hurtful…but more than that, at first, bewildering…the mentor is not only unappreciative…but without understanding.
Countless acquaintances and colleagues of mine have gone through this rite of passage with their mentors, I’ve been through it myself, and if you’re lucky enough (as I was) to come from a fairly well-adjusted homelife, your mentor inevitably provides—as a friend of mine once put it—the dysfunctional family you never had. (While boning up on character lore for a novel I wrote some years ago, based on the teevee series Alien Nation, I rescreened an episode called “Partners”. The human cop, Sikes [Gary Graham] has just discovered that his mentor is terribly flawed. Trying to make light of it, he says to George, the alien-planet cop who is his partner [Eric Pierpoint], “It’s not like he was my father or anything.” And George’s sober, gentle response is: “Oh, no, Matthew—he was much more than a father to you.” It’s a scene that’s etched in my brain and the exchange still haunts me. I think it always will.)
I have remained just as haunted by Donald Margulies’ 1997 play “Collected Stories” which is still, to my memory, the first and only dramatization of this relationship that is so pointed and specific. It follows in detail the “arc of inevitability” described in the opening paragraphs…but it never settles into seeming schematic, because Mr. Margulies is so deft at keeping the relationship shaded in hues of gray. Right and wrong don’t exist here, just a ritual passing of the torch, with all the jealousies and rebellions—conscious and otherwise—that entails.
And it’s receiving a mainstream-octane revival in a new off-off Broadway theatre space—the East Village Basement—on 9th Street. That the place is almost unapologetically a reconverted apartment whose maximum audience capacity is something like 50 is offset by the fact of the play’s setting being the mentor’s apartment, and that by whatever repurposing of the place by the three listed “coordinators” for props, costume and set (respectively Josie Underwood, Carol Brodsky and Akash Inti Katakam), the near-environmental experience (almost all of it takes place in front of us, but we’re wrapped by the room) is completely convincing. The only credited designer is for light and sound (Giovanni Valleri), and, all things considered, that’s fairly impressive too.
The characters are: short story writer Ruth Steiner (Grace Kiley), crusty, middle aged, single, a literary icon but not really a household name, never having braved a full novel…and Lisa Morrison (Christina Toth) her graduate student, who soon becomes her assistant, and, in short (and unspoken) order, a kind of surrogate daughter. She will eventually brave the novel. And therein will lie the seeds of a very arguable betrayal.
And it is very well argued too. Mr. Margulies puts equal weight on a students’ responsibility to be sensitive…and the mentor’s responsibility to understand how much power her words carry. At the play’s shattering climax (well, perhaps not shattering—but traumatic enough) you are at a loss for who to root for. Sadder still—you’ve come to love them both: because you can see each in the other’s eyes…you understand intimately what brings them together…and what rips them apart. (I hasten to add, sobering as this play is, it is far from humorless. A sense of irony is what draws these two together—and rips them apart—too.)
Under the direction of Lori Kee, the cast of this revival is quite fine: Ms. Kiley, is as virtuosic as the role of charismatic mentor demands, but also—and this is where the play can so easily fail—centered enough not to let that pull focus from her costar; she carefully, invisibly feeds the balance. Opposite her, Ms. Toth assays a convincing gradual growth from fawning naïveté to maturity as the newcomer to the craft. But I I wonder if, without losing any of the natural ebullience and persona she brings to the role, there’s a way to fine-tune the transition just a bit further toward ambiguity once she hits that point of maturity. My reaction may have to do with my knowing the play too well (this is my fourth go-round), but I think it’s possible that she occasionally gives us clearer glimpses of her wheels turning than we should see. But that’s a quibble, especially given a venue which perforce mandates as much “kamikaze” choice-making as precise consideration. But that’s part of what makes this unexpected production so vital too.
I’ll add that, as smoothly delivered two-handers go, this one is as worthy of quick uptown transfer as Job was two seasons ago. But that’s up to the theatre gods. For now, plan to see it in a hurry; the limited engagement ends on May 18th.
All this said, “Collected Stories” is by no means a great play—merely a very good one. But it does something great. It nails a vital dynamic in the creative process. And it assures all of us who have been through it, are going through it, or have yet to go through it that it’s a time-honored path to tread…
…and that we are not alone…