Jonny Lee Miller and Benedict Cumberbatch switch roles in National Theatre production of FRANKENSTEIN (photo by Catherine Ashmore)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Sunday, December 4, $25, 11:00 am (version B)
Monday, December 5, $25, 7:00 (version A)
212-924-7771 www.ifccenter.com ntlive.nationaltheatre.org.uk
In early 2011, Oscar-winning director Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire, 127 Hours) staged Nick Dear’s adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein at the National Theatre, starring Jonny Lee Miller and Benedict Cumberbatch alternating in the roles of Victor Frankenstein and the Creature. If you couldn’t make it to London to see the show, you can now catch it as part of the National Theatre Live series, which screens theatrical productions in movie theaters across the country. Both versions of Frankenstein will be shown at IFC Center, with Miller (Elemental, The Flying Scotsman) playing the Creature on December 4 at 11:00 am and Cumberbatch (Sherlock, The Imitation Game) as Frankenstein’s monster on December 5 at 7:00. The Daily Mail called Frankenstein “a memorable production and will doubtless be spoken of for years to come,” while the Guardian declared it “a humane, intelligent retelling of the original story in which much of the focus is on the plight of the obsessive scientist’s sad creation, who becomes his alter ego and his nemesis: it’s rather like seeing The Tempest rewritten from Caliban’s point of view.” The two-hour show, which earned both Miller and Cumberbatch the Olivier Award as Best Actor, also features Naomie Harris, Karl Johnson, Ella Smith, George Harris, and Andreea Paduraru, with music by Underworld, set design by Mark Tildesley (28 Days Later, 24-Hour Party People), and costumes by Suttirat Larlarb (Slumdog Millionaire, Sunshine).
Clarice (Adina Verson) and Silvio’s (Eugene Ma) true love is threatened in THE SERVANT OF TWO MASTERS (photo by Henry Grossman)
Theatre for a New Audience, Polonsky Shakespeare Center
262 Ashland Pl. between Lafayette Ave. & Fulton St.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 4, $85
866-811-4111 www.tfana.org
“For nitwits are we all,” the cast declares early on in Theatre for a New Audience’s wacky version of Carlo Goldoni’s eighteenth-century commedia dell’arte classic, The Servant of Two Masters, only the second time the show has ever been presented in English in New York City. The strange and crazy antics, involving lots of nitwits and numbskulls, take place over one very long day in Venezia, as the masked Truffaldino Batocchio from Bergamo (Steven Epp) serves up chaos while secretly serving two masters. The very hungry Truffaldino’s predicament derives from a typically byzantine plot: the supposed death of Federigo Rasponi from Torino is followed by the appearance of Federigo’s sister, Beatrice (Liz Wisan) — disguised as her brother in order to marry his betrothed, Clarice (Adina Verson), the daughter of his business partner, Pantalone (Allen Gilmore), and collect a promised dowry. Truffaldino immediately signs on to serve Federigo/Beatrice. Meanwhile, Clarice wants to marry her true love, Silvio (Eugene Ma), the pampered and overly twee progeny of Dr. Lombardi (Andy Grotelueschen). Later, when the valiant Florindo Aretusi (Orlando Pabotoy) shows up, Truffaldino accepts a position with him as well after Florindo’s aging porter (Liam Craig) proves inadequate. But even though Florindo and Beatrice are madly in love, neither knows the other is in town, and Truffaldino, who has become smitten with Smeraldina (Emily Young), Clarice’s maidservant, struggles to keep it that way so they won’t discover that he’s serving both of them. Over the course of two and a half hours (with intermission), there is masked mayhem, mistaken identity, slapstick comedy, devious deception, satirical songs (with onstage music by Christopher Curtis and Aaron Halva), and improvisation galore, some that works, and some that doesn’t.
The cast of THE SERVANT OF TWO MASTERS has a blast in commedia dell’arte classic (photo by Gerry Goodstein)
In 2011, playwright Richard Bean and director Nicholas Hytner transformed The Servant of Two Masters into the hit Broadway comedy One Man, Two Guvnors, which earned James Corden a Tony for Best Actor. At TFANA’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center, director Christopher Bayes (This Ridiculous Dreaming, The 39 Steps) and star Epp (Tartuffe, Figaro), veterans of Theatre de la Jeune Lune, have gone back to Goldoni’s more improvisational original, further adapting Constance Congdon’s version of Christina Sibul’s translation, eschewing a more structured narrative for large amounts of ad libbing. Thus, the play is different every night; right now it is rife with references to the presidential election that can range from wickedly funny to random and repetitive, along with nods to current commercial jingles that get chuckles but feel out of place. Valérie Thérèse Bart’s period costumes are a hoot, colorful and dankly elegant, while Katherine Akiko Day’s set is centered by a curtain through which the characters enter and exit, with a trompe l’oeil sky in the background in front of which are miniature houses. The cast, many of whom have worked together before either at Yale Rep or Juilliard, displays an infectious camaraderie and a willingness to try just about anything; Epp is a terrific physical comedian, harkening back to the days of vaudeville, while Pabotoy, Gilmore, and Fiasco Theater’s Grotelueschen and Young are stand-out commedia dell’arte practitioners. The play is probably about a half hour too long, and the anti-Trump jokes were often too easy and obvious, detracting from the overall atmosphere of chaotic fun. In the beginning, Truffaldino asks several times, “When’s the play going to start?” Near the conclusion, he declares, “This play’s never gonna end!” Of course, it does end, and you’ll leave the theater in a gleeful mood, if not completely satiated.
Martin (Michael Crane) doesn’t quite understand Emil’s (Joe Tippett) relationship with Irene (Holley Fain) in THIS DAY FORWARD (photo by Carol Rosegg)
Vineyard Theatre
108 East 15th St. at Irving Pl.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 18, $79-$100
212-353-0303 www.vineyardtheatre.org
Philadelphia-born New York City-based playwright Nicky Silver again explores the craziness of a dysfunctional family, and especially its matriarch, in his latest work, This Day Forward, continuing at the Vineyard through December 18. The first act takes place in 1958 in a room at the St. Regis, where the erudite Martin (Michael Crane) is excited about consummating his marriage to the seemingly beautiful, proper, and ditzy Irene (Holley Fain). However, Irene has a secret that she is frightened to reveal to Martin. “Irene, listen to me. I’m your husband and I love you. You can tell me anything. I’m your safe place. Your harbor,” the kind and caring Martin says. “Whatever it is you want to tell me, whatever you’ve done, or haven’t done, whatever it is, you can tell me. You can trust me. Always. You can tell me. Tell me.” She finally tells him, and it’s not a secret that makes him very happy, as it involves a gas station worker named Emil (Joe Tippett). Soon the maid, Melka (June Gable), and the bellboy, Donald (Andrew Burnap), get implicated in the madness and mayhem as Irene, Martin, and Emil try to figure out what happens next. The second act jumps ahead to 2004 to an oh-so-contemporary tasteful apartment in New York City, where Noah (Crane) is living with the younger Leo (Burnap). A film director considering working in television, Noah is awaiting the arrival of his sister, Sheila (Francesca Faridany), a loud, fast-talking woman who lets him know that their mother (Gable) has been growing more and more confused and disappearing. When at last everyone is together, some hard truths emerge as the results of decades of dysfunction strike deep.
Siblings Sheila (Francesca Faridany) and (Michael Crane) fight over what to do with their aging mother in new Nicky Silver play at the Vineyard (photo by Carol Rosegg)
Silver (Pterodactyls, The Food Chain), whose terrific The Lyons started at the Vineyard before transferring to Broadway in 2012, is unlikely to make the same trip with This Day Forward, which, like The Lyons, is directed by Mark Brokaw (How I Learned to Drive, Heisenberg). There are funny and poignant moments, particularly in the much better second act, but the play as a whole feels unfinished, as if it is still being workshopped. Allen Moyer’s sets are lovely — the posters on Noah’s walls of robot movies give quick insight into his character — and Kaye Voyce’s costumes, especially Irene’s wedding dress and Emil’s grease monkey outfit, are right on target, but the story languishes in too many places. The cast is strong up and down the line, although Melka as written is too cartoonish (but well played by Gable, who is outstanding as the mother in 2004). It’s still an enjoyable play, one that cleverly deals with the choices we all make and how that impacts future generations, but a few nips and tucks could help tighten what could have been a much more insightful and entertaining drama.
Lynn Nottage’s SWEAT examines the dying American dream in factory towns such as Reading, Pennsylvania (photo by Joan Marcus)
Martinson Hall, the Public Theater
425 Lafayette St. at Astor P.
Extended through December 18, $95
212-539-8500 www.publictheater.org
If Hillary Clinton or anyone from the Democratic National Committee had seen Lynn Nottage’s blistering Sweat prior to election day, they might have focused more sharply on the electorate that has made Donald Trump our next president. Originally presented last year by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival as part of its “American Revolutions: the United States History Cycle” and then at Arena Stage in Washington, DC, earlier this year, Sweat is a provocative drama that intelligently and sharply deals with such issues as race, drugs, poverty, NAFTA, education, and, primarily, jobs. The story takes place in Reading, Pennsylvania, moving back and forth between 2000, as George W. Bush seeks the Republican presidential nomination, and 2008, when former best friends Chris (Khris Davis) and Jason (Will Pullen) try to get their lives back on track after eight years in prison. Most of the play is set in a local bar run by Stan (James Colby), who spent twenty-eight years working at the steel-tubing mill before an injury on the job left him with a noticeable limp. The bar regulars include three forty-something women who currently work at the factory: Chris’s mother, Cynthia (Michelle Wilson), an African American woman whose husband, Brucie (John Earl Jelks), is a drug addict who disappears for long stretches of time; Jason’s mother, Tracey (Johanna Day), a white woman and widow; and Jessie (Miriam Shor), a divorced white woman who drowns her sorrow in booze. Meanwhile, Latino bus boy Oscar (Carlo Albán) cleans up after them. In 2008, Chris and Jason’s parole officer, Evan (Lance Coadie Williams), is trying to help them, but they both may be too far gone, overwhelmed by their anger.
Jason (Will Pullen), Stan (James Colby), and Chris (Khris Davis) think about a better future in SWEAT (photo by Joan Marcus)
As rumors spread about big changes at the mill, from news that the owner’s grandson is taking over and that a high-level position is open to everyone to possible layoffs and a move to Mexico, things heat up at the bar. “I’ve been on the floor for twenty-four years,” says Cynthia, who is considering applying for the opening. Tracey responds, “Well, I got you beat by two. Started in ’seventy-four, walked in straight outta high school. First and only job. Management is for them. Not us.” The floor is the only job the women have ever had, perhaps the only decent job available to them in this working-class town, filled with immigrant families of German descent. Stan, who has heard it all before, puts it into perspective: “Give me a break. That place hasn’t changed since I walked in there in ’sixty-nine. Not a lightbulb, not one single nut or bolt. As a matter of fact it hasn’t changed much since my grandfather began working there in ’twenty. Good luck, sweetheart,” he tells Cynthia. “I don’t know him, but I can tell you that Olstead’s grandson is the same brand of asshole as all of ’em, stuffing his pockets rather than improving the floor.” But Stan also recognizes that not everything is actually the same, particularly in regard to management’s treatment of the employees. “You don’t see the young guys out there. They find it offensive to be on the floor with their Wharton MBAs,” he argues. “And the problem is they don’t wanna get their feet dirty, their diplomas soiled with sweat . . . or understand the real cost, the human cost of making their shitty product.”
Tracey (Johanna Day) and Oscar (Carlo Albán) get into a misunderstanding in SWEAT (photo by Joan Marcus)
Brooklyn-based Pulitzer Prize winner Nottage (Ruined, Meet Vera Stark) spent a lot of time in Reading, the steel and textile town that was ranked as the most impoverished city in America in 2011 and has remained in the top ten ever since, with extremely high unemployment and low education leading to a poverty rate of more than forty percent. She met with many of the struggling people there, encountering feelings of desperation, sadness, and betrayal, and turned their stories into Sweat, which continues at the Public Theater’s Martinson Hall through December 18. (Nottage has also developed the Reading Project, which seeks to use art and activism to improve the community.) “These are the conversations we should be having, and I feel like as artists we should be socially engaged, and that at times we can be strategic in the ways we engage audiences,” she told American Theatre in July 2015. Not a single word or movement is out of place in the incendiary production, which features impeccable performances by the outstanding ensemble cast, expertly directed by longtime Nottage collaborator Kate Whoriskey (How I Learned to Drive, Ruined), who maintains a fierce powder-keg pace that ultimately explodes in shocking violence on John Lee Beatty’s rotating set. As the characters’ American dream turns into a nightmare, the bar television follows Bush’s ascendancy during the 2000 primaries, but there’s only the briefest discussion of politics in the show; Sweat is not a condemnation of any one party or politician but of everything that has led to there being so many Readings throughout the United States, as evidenced by the results of the 2016 presidential election.
The state of the economy turns friends into enemies in SWEAT (photo by Joan Marcus)
“Between my new lady and Uncle Sam, money got a way of running outcha pocket. Nobody tells you that no matter how hard you work there will never be enough money to rest. It’s fact. A fact that should be taught to every child!” Chris, who wants to get out of the factory and become a teacher, tells Jason. “I kinda wanna do something a little different than my Moms and Pops. Yo, I got aspirations. There it is. And I won’t apologize,” he says, but it’s not that easy to break away in these small towns. “Dude, you ever given any thought to what you might do if this don’t work out?” Chris asks Jason, who responds, “Nah, not really. Knock on wood. I plan on retiring from the plant when I’m like fifty with a killa pension and money to burn, buy a condo in Myrtle Beach, open a Dunkin’ Donuts and live my life. Right, Stan?” As Stan can vouch, that’s not the way things generally turn out. Nottage has beautifully and honestly captured these characters’ lost dreams and desires, along with their frustrations and tenuous friendships, in a searing play about the literal and figurative shackles that bind too many Americans in this supposed land of plenty. (Be sure to pick up the four large broadsheets in the Public Theater lobby collectively called “Boom & Bust: The Rise & Fall of American Cities,” which details evolving economic situations in Butte, Montana, Silicon Valley, California, Eagle Ford Shale, Texas, and Detroit, Michigan; you can read more about it and other digital dramaturgy here.)
The game of tennis becomes a metaphor for life in DON’T YOU F**KING SAY A WORD (photo by Hunter Canning)
59E59 Theaters
59 East 59th St. between Park & Madison Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 4, $35
212-279-4200 www.59e59.org
Some tennis matches are nonstop exciting events, thrill-a-minute delights with the final outcome constantly in doubt; think Roger Federer vs. Andy Roddick in the 2009 Wimbledon final, Jimmy Connors against John McEnroe in the 1980 U.S. Open semifinals, or Venus and Serena Williams going at it in the 2008 U.S. Open quarterfinals. Then there are the dull, decidedly one-sided affairs that you can’t wait to end, noncompetitive matches that practically put you to sleep. Andy Bragen’s Don’t You F**king Say a Word, with a title worthy of a McEnroe tantrum, falls somewhere in between. Taking place on Amy Rubin’s makeshift, condensed blue tennis court, the eighty-minute play is about the interaction between two couples, centered around the sport that dates back to the Middle Ages. One afternoon, former college classmates Kate (Jennifer Lim) and Leslie (Jeanine Serralles) bump into each other at the public Brian Watkins Tennis Center on the Lower East Side, where their significant others often play; Leslie’s boyfriend, Brian (Bhavesh Patel), is all about style, while Kate’s partner, Russ (Michael Braun), has a gruffer but no less competitive nature. Both men want to win, every time out. Meanwhile, the women address the audience directly, offering a “postmortem” on a major fight that Brian and Russ got into on the tennis court that serves as the impetus for the story. “Maybe along the way we’ll make some kind of discoveries. About boyfriends. Or husbands,” Leslie says. “Or men in general,” Kate adds as they seek to uncover “the deep wells that drive men forward — to the office, to the track, to the fields of war, to the fields of sport.” As the women talk about Russ and Brian as if they’re not there, the two men keep playing tennis around them, voguing into position as they prepare to serve, hit a cross-court shot, or head to the net for a put-away.
Two couples attempt to solve some personal issues on and off the court in tennis-based play (photo by Hunter Canning)
Bragen (This Is My Office, The Hairy Dutchman) and director Lee Sunday Evans (Caught, Wellesley Girl) try to make the play answer some major questions about contemporary American society, but the play works best when it is at its simplest, just depicting two competitive guys who might or might not actually be friends. “We Americans read so much into winning,” Leslie says. “It’s character. It’s will. It’s that little extra something. Or is it luck or chance? Fate?” Kate responds. Leslie: “Everyone likes to win. Men in particular.” Kate: “And when they don’t . . .” Leslie: “. . . it can become a much bigger deal than it should.” Just at that moment, Russ shouts out “Goddamnit!” as he loses a point to Brian as if it’s the end of the world. Some of the staging involving the tennis game is inventive (yet repetitive), but the play never achieves that nail-biting, back-and-forth verbal volleying it aspires to. Occasionally there’s a rousing smash or a stirring forehand, but not nearly enough to lift it out of being much more than a pleasant diversion with some neat insight that doesn’t effectively challenge the audience when it should. Perhaps it needed more Andre Agassi and Connors and less Novak Djokovic and Kim Clijsters to lead it into the later rounds, as slow and steady is not always the best way to win over an audience, onstage or on court.
Golden Theatre
252 West 45th St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 8, $49 – $132 theencounterbroadway.com
Innovative British theater director and actor Simon McBurney spent nearly twenty years trying to figure out how best to adapt the story of photojournalist Loren McIntyre’s adventures in the Amazon for the stage; what he ultimately came up with is absolutely genius. In the solo show The Encounter, playing at the Golden Theatre through January 8, McBurney uses the art of storytelling itself to dramatize McIntyre’s treacherous 1969 solo trip into Amazon’s Javari Valley, where he made contact with the indigenous Mayoruna tribe. Without any physical evidence, including photographs or notebooks, McIntyre shared his tale with Romanian-American writer Petru Popescu, whose book about the journey, Amazon Beaming, came out in 1991. And McBurney, whose 1999 production of Mnemonic by his Complicite company is considered a landmark in contemporary experimental theater, also uses the barest of evidence in The Encounter, which explores time, consciousness, memory, acculturation, and humanity’s connection with nature in spectacular ways. As the audience takes their seats, McBurney is wandering around the stage, which is littered with water bottles, a box of VHS tape, a desk with several microphones and a laptop, and a central figure — an Easter Island–like binaural head that turns out to be a speaker. McBurney addresses the crowd directly, toying with the notion of whether the show has actually started yet. “My children will always be able to look back over all of these photographs and videos and see their entire lives. But of course it’s not their life, it’s a story,” McBurney says about his smartphone. “So I’m worried about them mistaking it for reality, like we all mistake stories for reality. So I feel really responsible, because as I’m capturing moments on this [phone], I’m essentially deciding what story I’m going to tell them about their past . . . and about the world. But it’s not a reality. It’s a story. Stories are how we understand life. . . . You might say that stories are what have allowed the human race to thrive.”
McBurney, who has appeared in such films as The Golden Compass, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and Mission Impossible — Rogue Nation and has adapted such other literary works as Haruki Murakami’s The Elephant Vanishes, Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles, and John Berger’s To the Wedding, tells his story through headphones that each audience member must wear, with different sound effects and dialogue coming out of the right and left earpieces. There are also sounds that reverberate through the theater, outside of the headphones, that immerse the audience into this created world, from doors slamming shut to random muttering voices. He calls it a “technological trick,” but it’s actually a shrewd artistic device that is no mere gimmick. McBurney plays multiple roles by using microphones that change the pitch, tone, and even accent of his voice while combining live text with prerecorded snippets; among the real-life characters he portrays are McIntyre, McIntyre’s pilot, and Popescu heard alongside dialogue from such psychiatrists, scientists, and other experts as Iain McGilchrist, Steven Rose, Marcus du Sautoy, George Marshall, and Rebecca Spooner, who lend authenticity to the proceedings. Meanwhile, McIntyre claims to communicate with members of the Mayoruna, including Beam, Barnacle, Tuti, and Red Cheeks, via some kind of telepathy that echoes McBurney’s use of the headphones for the audience. Meanwhile, he is sharing the story with his seven-year-old daughter, Noma. “Dadda, who are you talking to?” she asks early on. “I’m not talking to anybody, sweetie,” he replies. “Yes, you are!” she demands. “No, I’m not. Well, I am in a way,” he answers. “But there’s nobody there!” she claims. “That’s true, there’s nobody there,” he agrees. Of course, McBurney is talking about the show itself; the only person there is him, yet, as time goes on, we feel as if we are deep in the Amazon rainforest, meeting all of these characters, trudging through the muck, and seeing the monkeys that threaten McIntyre.
For both McIntyre and McBurney, the concept of time is a critical element, photographer and performer each trying to capture and share a moment in time. “What lay behind this frenzy, Loren thought, was fear. Fear of the future. Fear of losing the past,” McBurney relates. “So unlike these people, he thought. They never think of the future, they don’t hoard or store up belongings. Time for them was an invisible companion, something comfortable and unseen like the air. For us, the civilizados, time was a possession. An increasingly more efficient machine.” Time for the Mayoruna is changeable, while the West’s obsession with time is limiting and controlling. As McBurney writes in a new foreword to Popescu’s book, “Our adamantine vision of time as an arrow, moving in a pitiless irreversible horizontal motion towards oblivion, is called into doubt. Could it be that this version of time is a fiction, a story that only exists in our common imagination? Our idea of distance, crucially the distance between one person and another, is also challenged. The notion of a ‘separate self,’ so precious to our contemporary notion of identity, is undermined to the point that it becomes, for McIntyre, utterly illusory. One self, one so-called individual consciousness, he discovers, is not necessarily separated from another by language, time, or distance. We are possibly interconnected in ways to which we are, mostly, blind in the modern world — a world in which, paradoxically, we are more connected by technology that at any time in history.”
Simon McBurney makes remarkable use of unusual props in THE ENCOUNTER (photo by Joan Marcus)
The play, which runs approximately one hundred minutes without intermission, is also very much about contact, from McIntyre meeting the Mayoruna to how each audience member experiences it individually, a solitary yet communal experience. “There were so many things here in their elemental state, why not thought, too?” McBurney asks in the show. “Why not the simplest form of human contact — mind to mind. No, for goodness sake. But then something had been ratified, because he had been given this most beautiful gift.” We have also been given a most beautiful gift, The Encounter, which is essentially transmitted mind to mind in a mesmerizing tour de force by McBurney; also deserving of major kudos are set designer Michael Levine, sound designers Gareth Fry and Pete Malkin, lighting designer Paul Anderson, and projection designer Will Duke, who all participate in this amazing feat. At the end of the show, I fully believed that I had traveled through the Amazon with McBurney and McIntyre, had seen the Mayoruna, had felt the heat and fought off the mosquitoes, had experienced the fear and loneliness McIntyre had experienced, even though it was essentially all just McBurney getting inside my head and manipulating, and freeing, my mind. “To accept that our ability to hear, to listen to each other, is perhaps essential for our collective survival,” McBurney also writes in his foreword to Amazon Beaming. “These thoughts are urgent because, in order to survive, we need to acknowledge that there is another way of seeing the world and our place in it.” That could not be more true, today more than ever.
Molly Ringwald and Hannah Dunne play mother and daughter in U.S. premiere of TERMS OF ENDEARMENT (photo by Carol Rosegg)
59E59 Theaters
59 East 59th St. between Park & Madison Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 11, $70
212-279-4200 www.59e59.org
My beloved fourth-grade teacher, Miss Schimmenti, taught us to never use the word “nice,” emphasizing that it was a meaningless adjective and urging us to always look for a better, more specific modifier when trying to describe something. Meanwhile, I have virtually banned myself from using the word “perfect,” since it has become ubiquitous and vastly misused, as very few things are absolutely perfect. Thus, I am struggling to find the right words to describe the U.S. premiere of Dan Gordon’s Terms of Endearment, which I found to be, well, perfectly nice. First produced in 2007, the show is based on both the 1975 novel by Pulitzer Prize winner Larry McMurtry and the screenplay by James L. Brooks, who also directed the Oscar-winning 1983 film, which won five Academy Awards and was nominated for another six. The movie features memorable performances by Shirley MacLaine as Aurora Greenway, a widowed mother who is unhappy with certain choices made by her daughter, Emma, played by Debra Winger. Emma is preparing to marry Flap Houston, played by Jeff Daniels; meanwhile, Jack Nicholson nearly steals the film as Garrett Breedlove, a boozing, womanizing astronaut who lives next door to Aurora, who is outraged by his unsavory behavior. The original 2007 theatrer production was a vehicle for Dallas stalwart Linda Gray, who starred as Aurora on a UK tour that was supposed to come to the States but never did. But Terms of Endearment is at last making its U.S. debut, running at 59E59 through December 11, with Gray now serving as one of the presenters. Molly Ringwald (Cabaret, Enchanted April) has taken over the role of Aurora, and she does a perfectly nice job, as does Hannah Dunne (Mozart in the Jungle) as Emma, Denver Milord as Flap, Jessica DiGiovanni (Of Good Stock) as Patsy and others, and Jeb Brown (Beautiful: The Carole King Musical) as the wild and crazy Garrett.
Aurora Greenway (Molly Ringwald) keeps in touch with her daughter via phone in TERMS OF ENDEARMENT (photo by Carol Rosegg)
Aurora has been putting down Emma her whole life, and she’s getting even worse as her daughter’s wedding approaches. “Emma, you are not special enough to overcome a bad marriage,” she says. Six months later, she says, “I never fool myself, Emma. I’m always brutally honest with myself. I never try to whitewash the fact that you married badly.” Actually, there’s just about nothing that Emma can do to please her mother, who complains about her daughter’s weight, her clothing, her bank account, her hair, her husband, her living conditions, etc. But that doesn’t stop the good daughter from loving her mother and talking to her over the phone every day. Playwright and screenwriter Gordon (Irena’s Vow, Murder in the First) doesn’t really add anything new to the story, merely condensing the book and the film, hitting the tale’s high points but losing any edge and flow. It all turns choppy as Emma and Flap have a few kids, Flap might be cheating on her, and Emma becomes seriously ill. The scene in which Aurora and Garrett meet with Dr. Maise (John C. Vennema) feels like it’s from a different play. Michael McDonald’s middle America costumes look perfectly nice on Ringwald (MacLaine’s wardrobe in the film was to die for), but David L. Arsenault’s set, constructed around invisible boundaries that separate Aurora’s living room, Emma’s bed (through the years), Emma and Flap’s couch and kitchen, and Garrett’s front door, gets confusing, forcing the audience too often to have to figure out how the geometry works as characters go from one place to another. Troupes such as the Godlight Theatre Company (Deliverance, In the Heat of the Night) and Ivo van Hove’s Toneelgroep Amsterdam (Scenes from a Marriage, Cries and Whispers) adapt novels and/or the movies they’ve been turned into by using creative staging techniques that are unique and inventive, but Gordon and director Michael Parva merely rehash this familiar story without any real panache. You could say that it’s all perfectly nice. Or, as Emma tells her mother early on, “Well, what is the point?!” (Oh, and sorry, Miss Schimmenti.)
