NY Review: THE COUNTRY HOUSE
By Toby Zinman
For the Inquirer
What an extraordinary mash-up of theatrical events in one week: first the Arden Theater's production of David Hirson's La Bete (which I'm also teaching and thus rereading this week); then the updated, celebrity-stuffed Broadway revival of Terence McNally's It's Only a Play; then the Broadway production Donald Margulies' newest play, The Country House. What made this a bizarre concurrence is that all three plays take up the same debate: high art vs. popular art, Broadway vs Hollywood, theatre vs. movies, serious art vs. commercial success.
Interestingly, and surprisingly, Margulies, a Pulitzer-winning playwright without a film or TV credit to his name, seems to be on the theater-is-a-ridiculous- profession side of the debate. We are, apparently, watching his inner struggle as his characters, a multi-generational family of actors, meet in their country house in Williamstown (home of a prestigious summer theatre festival in Massachusetts), "where ambivalent actors come for absolution."
They are: Gran (the lovely Blythe Danner), a once-great actress who's feeling her age, preparing to play Shaw's Mrs. Warren; when her startled granddaughter Susan asks, "Couldn't you make your presence known?" she replies, "I did. I entered the room." It is Gran's daughter and Susan's mother who died of cancer a year before, and it is that anniversary that brings this group of temperamental people together.
The granddaughter (played by Sarah Steele who is probably most familiar as Alan Cumming's snarky daughter in TV'sThe Good Wife) is the most likeable and least pretentious character—significantly, she's not an actor. Steele's performance is a standout amid the older, experienced, more famous cast members.
Walter, Susan's father (David Rasche), is the widower who brings his young fiancee (Kate Jennings Grant) to this gathering; she, it turns out, had a vague relationship years ago with Eliot (Eric Lange) the dead woman's brother; Lange gives a tremendous and moving performance as a failed actor turned failed playwright who is also a failed lover.
When Walter defends the cheesy movies he makes for the "endless supply of fifteen year old boys who think it's cool to blow things up," he indicts Eliot with a harsh truth: "you're on everybody's life-is-too-short list."
The outsider—there has to be an outsider to logically generate exposition-- is a celebrity actor (Daniel Sunjata) who is rich, handsome, pursued by women ("models with disturbingly wide gaps between their legs") but is, despite it all, adrift and unhappy, trapped in a successful TV series as a sci-fi doctor.
Margulies is obviously reimagining Chekhov's The Seagull (the latest knockoff obsession among contemporary playwrights—cf New Paradise Lab's Fringe entry, last month, The Adults), with some Uncle Vanya thrown into the mix (cf. Durang's Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike—a much funnier and much more Chekhovian and much more profound take on the issues here). Unlike Chekhov, Margulies is sentimental and cannot bear the melancholy of his characters who were once beautiful and are no longer, who feel they have wasted their lives in the theatre, where, as the schlock movie director says, "grown people shout in a room missing a fourth wall."
The play is both entertaining and engrossing for its duration, but has nothing new to add to the high/low, Broadway/Hollywood debate. The family quarrels are obvious, the dialogue is predictable. It's exactly the kind of play that, to my mind, gives serious theatre a bad name. Daniel Sullivan, a major New York director, oversees these proceedings.
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Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, 261 W. 47th St. Tickets $67-125. Information: Telecharge.com or 212-239-6200.