Some
plays simply don’t need illustration to be understood
or illuminated, especially if they’re post-modern twentieth century
standards.
I don’t mean to say new interpretations or a certain degree of
exploration for
new eras are verboten, but
once you pull
from the repertoire of drama created in a media-savvy world—a world
where
movies, radio, television, nightly news and etc. are starting to be or
have
fully become part of the environmental matrix—you also pull from the oevre of authors who are fully capable of
expressing their
intentions in detail—and do. Beckett and Ionesco let you know you’re
entering worlds of surreality; Thornton Wilder makes it clear that he
means to
examine tropes and archetypes using naturalistic characters in a
ritualistic
setting; In Streetcar and
Menagerie,
Tennessee Williams pretty much defines
the state of lyric realism,
through
selectively poetic dialogue and set description; and Arthur Miller
makes it
perfectly clear when he wants to do more than just tell a
straightforward
story.
And
All My Sons, his
melodrama about the ethical responsibility that comes with achieving
the
American dream, is as straightforward as they come. It doesn’t need
stark
symbolism—melodrama makes all such emphases implicit. Nor does it need
ritualistic staging (i.e. all the actors visible on the sides, awaiting
their
cue to enter the playing area frame); all that does is pull focus from
what is
supposed to be Greek tragedy rewrit as everyday life.
Yet
director Simon McBurney has
put such hey
check out the direction mitts all over the revival at the Gerald
Schoenfeld Theatre. The good
news, such as
it may be, is that this layering on of an extraneous and inorganic
theatrical
language is neither intended nor utilized in the “consciousness
expanding”
(i.e. genuinely distortive) manner of avant garde
hucksters, like
that bewildering New York Theatre Workshop favorite Ivo Van Hove, who
never met
a 60s-style abstractionist pretension he didn’t like. No, the form,
substance,
outline and narrative balance of Miller’s play are preserved, and
McBurney
clearly cares about them. But what’s lost, first, is intimacy. Any time
you add
overt stylization to a piece that doesn’t request it, you add distance
between
the play and the audience, because you’re adding an additional filter
between
the play and their perception of it.
Now,
I’ve not read any interviews with Mr. McBurney on his approach, but I’m
willing
to bet his intention, or one of them, was to strip the play to its
essentials,
to have it look like the classic Greek tragedy its structure emulates,
only in
the garb of Americana. What he has done instead, though, is strip away
one of its essentials. You see,
it’s one thing when
Thornton Wilder creates Grovers Corners out of a bare stage and utility
props
in Our Town. He’s
celebrating the
simple things in life, the things we take for granted, good people
going
through an honest day as best they can, repeating the cycles of life
handed
down and passing forward. Ah, but Mr. Miller’s tragic hero, Joe Keller (John
Lithgow) is not so simple. He presents himself to the world
as an
honest businessman, but in fact what he did—what he has legally gotten
away with doing—is sell airplane parts he knew were faulty to the Army,
inadvertently causing the deaths of some 20 young pilots. And allowed
his
ex-partner to take the fall for it as well. This is a man with secrets.
With
things to cover up.
You
don’t want the actor playing him to lead his company of fellow players
in an
unscripted walk to center stage where they face the audience while, as
a kind
of prologue, he politely asks the audience to turn off their cell
phones &
etc. and then, from an acting version of the script, reads the title of
the
play, the name of the author and the description of time and place.
Because
this shows you the actor as an unaffected and honest human being. Which
only
emphasizes the artifice when he re-enters in character as a man full of
hale,
hearty and well-practiced bluster. Because, even for those of us who
know the
play, the bluster should be able to fool us too. For a time. Else how
are we to
believe his ability to fool himself? Denying guilt involves
rationalization,
and the longer you get away with it, the more your lifestyle adjusts to
it, the
more stable and normalized it becomes. Like any good defendant, Joe
has to
be able to sell reasonable doubt.
You
also kind of want to see Joe’s house, not a symbolic door and a
symbolic
window. Because the house is his own symbol;
the evidence of his success and public vindication. And you don’t want
the
young tree a wind has knocked over to keep pulling focus from that
house. That
tree should be the first small rip in the fabric of the beautiful
things that
surround it, a portent; not the one significant three-dimensional
property
onstage. Put another way: If the guilty verdict is pre-determined, why
bother
having the trial?
This
trade off of realism for symbolism also affects the playing styles,
which are
all over the map. Mr. Lithgow’s Joe is almost a musical theatre figure,
his
bluster a little too Santa-like because he’s protesting too much before
the
threat of exposure emerges. Diane Wiest
as his wife—trying to keep the secret and deny it at
the
same time—is like a haunted spectre of doom, as if she’s wandered in
from
Long Day’s Journey into Night. Patrick
Wilson, as the grown son who genuinely believes in his dad’s
honor,
hits just the right notes and at just the right pitch for this brand of
Arthur
Miller play—and ironically looks to have been beamed in by Scotty from
another production. And poor Katie Holmes proves
another variation on the insufficiently stage-trained film star,
although, to
be fair, she shows potential. Her line readings are undeniably
intelligent, if
not inspired, but they do, alas, sound like readings, and there’s too
much
force in her delivery, as if she’s self-conscious about the need to
project.
But here, too, the director’s eye and ear for balance and
appropriateness seems
to have been misfiring; not having any inside knowledge of the
production’s
rehearsal process, I can’t make assertions, but it certainly seems as
if Ms. Holmes’s performance could have guided to some more humanistic
modulation
and nuance. But then, what with the supporting players, the various
neighbors,
etc. representing likewise a bizarre mix of (mostly exaggerated)
styles, nuance
doesn’t really seem to have been on the table.
All
this said, there may indeed be a way to credibly present All My
Sons in a bare-bones style. But
I think the first thing
you’d have to do is trust the play to take care of symbols and meaning;
for
moral content, it’s Miller’s least ambiguous play. Which—I believe,
anyway—is why you have to present it at its most unpretentiously human…