The Westport Country Playhouse held
a sneak preview of its upcoming season on Thursday, March 19, at the Playhouse.
The venue’s current tag line is: “Theater Worth Talking About,” and that is
what Mark Lamos, the Playhouse’s artistic director, and several guests did:
they talked about aspects of the upcoming season, starting a conversation that
will hopefully last until Arthur Miller’s “Broken Glass” closes on October 24,
and perhaps even longer.
Mark Lamos
Lamos began the proceedings by
commenting that the upcoming season “is all about family,” for each of the
plays, in one way or another (if one broadens the definition of “family”), is
about the conflicts and controversies, joys and sorrows, that vitalize and
vitiate family life. However, Lamos’s use of the word extended beyond the plays
chosen, for many of the actors and creative team members who will be involved
in the upcoming productions have worked at the Playhouse before, and many of
the playwrights have previously been featured on this venerable stage.
For Lamos, the concept of “family”
extends beyond those involved in the productions to embrace the audience, for
it is for the people sitting in the theater that all of this effort will be put
forth and from whom the rewards and satisfaction will be garnered. From
playwrights to actors to directors to creative team members to audience, it is
a community eager (perhaps, at times, given our growing isolation, even
desperate) to communicate on a human, visceral level.
Penny Metropulos
Opening the 2015 season will be
David Ives’ “The Liar,” an updated version of Pierre Corneille’s 1644 farce.
Directing will be Penny Metropulos, who spoke to the audience via a taped video.
The play is about – as might be expected from the title – an inveterate liar, a
man named Dorante who not only disdains the truth, he laughs at it. Metropulos
described what Ives has called his “tranleftation” of the play as “rich, crazy
and wonderful,” adding that in her opinion it is “one of the funniest, brightest
of contemporary comedies,” one that Ives has chosen to write, in the spirit of
the original, in rhyming verse. Sensing that this detail might be somewhat
off-putting, Metropulos added that the verse is “completely accessible.”
Apparently, although Dorante is a prevaricator of the first order, his skill is
such that, as Metropulos explained, “in the end we are completely mesmerized”
by the high-wire act that Dorante engages in. The fun is seeing if this scamp
can pull it all off. In the end, however, as Metropulos noted, quoting Ives,
the play “seems to be made out of nothing but ends up being about so much.”
A. R. Gurney
Jumping forward to the Playhouse’s
third scheduled production, the world premiere of A. R. Gurney’s “Love and
Money,” Lamos introduced the playwright, with whom both Lamos and the Playhouse
have a longstanding and warm relationship. Before commenting on his new play,
Gurney took a moment to compliment the Playhouse, suggesting that here was an
“unusual situation: a town outside of New
York with a theater of this magnitude.” Gurney segued
from the compliment to pick up on the theme Lamos had introduced, saying that
the “theater was the last artistic place where a community can get together…the
last way a community can be created” embracing both the stage and the audience.
With that, Gurney ceded the stage to Maureen Anderman, who will star in the
Playhouse’s production of Gurney’s play.
Maureen Anderman
Anderman described the upcoming
play as “complex,” a “play about,” well, “love and money.” She will play the role
of Cornelia Cunningham, a woman “of indeterminate age,” as the actress
described her, who has come to the point in her life when she must decide what
she will do with the wealth she has been surrounded by. “She is a woman of many
colors,” Anderman said, a “wealthy WASP” who “describes things beautifully and
completely.” What she is now facing, the actress added, is “the desire to
expiate for the crime of having too much money.”
The play is being produced as a
co-production with New York ’s
Signature Theatre, and it was there on the past Monday that the play had a
reading, with Anderman playing Cunningham and Gurney in attendance. “I thought
it was terrible,” Gurney said, referring not to Anderman’s portrayal but to the
play itself. As Gurney explained, it’s one thing to write the words down on a
page (or up on a screen) but quite another to hear them spoken, to get the feel
of the play as it is brought to life. Though he wasn’t happy with what he had
created, he said the disenchantment had motivated him, for he now knew where
the laughs and “feelings” were, and where they were not. “I knew I had a hell
of a lot to do,” he said, adding, “Plays are not written, they are rewritten,”
and that is what he is doing right now. “Love and Money” will run from July 21
through August 8 before going on to the Signature Theatre.
Moving back to the Playhouse’s
second scheduled production, C. P. Taylor’s “And a Nightingale Sang,” which
will open on June 9 and run through June 27, Lamos introduced David Kennedy,
WCP’s associate artistic director, who also spoke to the audience via a taped
video. Kennedy, who will direct, described the play, which spans the time frame
of World War II, as “warm, funny and poignant.” Set in Newcastle
in northern England ,
it focuses on how a family copes on the home front while the country is at war.
“It’s a series of domestic scenes,”
Kennedy said, “showing how the family deals with rationing, air raids – and a
burgeoning love affair.” With regard to the love affair, Kennedy said that it is
“kind of an ugly duckling story,” for one of the main characters is Helen, the
family’s much put upon daughter who, in her early 30s, believes she is plain
and unlovable. A soldier on leave suggests otherwise and Helen begins to
blossom. As Kennedy commented, this is slice-of-life theater, for it “observes
life as it is actually lived,” offering the audience “the full spectrum of the
human experience.”
John Tillinger
Moving on to the Playhouse’s fourth
production, Alan Ayckbourn’s “Bedroom Farce,” which opens August 25, Lamos
introduced John Tillinger, who will direct. Lamos asked Tillinger to comment on
the play. Tillinger straightened up in his chair and said, “Well, I haven’t read
this play,” a feigned insouciance that captured the play’s farcical nature…and
Tillinger’s whimsical and witty personality. Admitting that he had, in fact,
read the play (adding that he had seen part of a performance but his date for
the evening had thrown up during the first act so he had had to leave),
Tillinger said that the production’s “operative word is farce,” but added that
even though the play is set in three bedrooms, “There’s absolutely no nudity,
I’m afraid.”
Chronicling the antics of four
couples in three bedrooms over the course of one Saturday, the play is
quintessential Ayckbourn, with the pain of human foibles and failures the touch
point for much of the humor – with the audience getting to wallow in schadenfreude. “It gets to the truth
about how people behave when their backs are to the wall,” Tillinger said.
The evening ended with a discussion
of Miller’s “Broken Glass,” one of the playwright’s later plays (1994). Lamos
described the play as both “powerful” and “dense,” constructed as a mystery.
Set in Brooklyn in the time leading up to
World War II, it focuses on Sylvia Gellberg, the wife of, as Lamos described
him, a “self-hating Jew.” Reading in the
newspapers about the horrors of Kristallnacht (hence the play’s title) in Germany , Sylvia
suddenly becomes paralyzed. A doctor is brought in to determine the cause of
the paralysis and his investigation opens up dark closets containing “guilt,
intolerance and personal tragedy.”
Michael Yeargan
Helping to bring the play to the
stage will be Michael Yeargan, a Yale professor and renowned scenic designer who
will design the sets for both Miller’s and Gurney’s plays. Lamos, who will
direct “Broken Glass,” discussed the nature of the relationship between the
director and the set designer with Yeargan, with Lamos suggesting that, in most
cases, after the director has read the play his first discussions about its
staging will be with the set designer, who obviously brings a visual take on
the words in the script, which helps the director in the initial stages of
bringing the play to life.
Given that “Broken Glass” won’t be
boarded until early fall, Yeargan has not yet come up with any specific designs
but, when he is not involved with the previews of “The King and I,” the revival
at the Vivian Beaumont Theater starring Kelli O’Hara, he has been thinking
about the play.
“It’s the play’s title,” he said,
“the broken glass. You can’t get away from that,” suggesting that the set might
somehow incorporate that motif in some manner.
Lamos had another take: “Perhaps it
should have the look of film noir.”
Broken glass and dark, menacing
shadows may not end up as part of the staging of the play, but that is where
the scenic designer and director are right now – but it’s early days. All too
soon, however, the show will be cast, the sets designed, rehearsals off-site
will be over and it will be time for the technical rehearsals, the moment when
cast and crew gather onstage to work out the innumerable “bugs” in the
production. It’s an arduous task, running at the Playhouse for three days from
noon to midnight, but as Lamos explained, “it’s when we find the vision, we find
out how the play wants to breathe.” He
paused and then used a different metaphor: “It’s, well, let’s watch ‘baby’ take
its first steps.”
Yeargan agreed, but suggested that
here at the Playhouse the whole process was less arduous, for coming to work here
was like coming home, a place where “you can take your shoes off,” relax and
just do your job. His comment elicited nods from Gurney and Tillinger.
Yeargan looked out at the audience,
at the theater, and said: “You feel like there are good ghosts here.”
Those ghosts, going all the way
back to Dorothy Gish, will certainly be hovering as the Playhouse ventures into
its 85th season, a season that appears to offer those who will
attend the five productions the opportunity to both laugh and cry and, for a
span of two hours, to be part of a community.
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