On the Stage: All My Sons and Speed-the-Plow

Here is the second part of this week's theatre review by Kevin Sessums, continuing on from yesterday's look at A Man for All Seasons. You can also catch up with Kevin online at his own blog at MississippiSissy.com.

Director Simon McBurney — whose work with London’s Complicitie theatre company has been rightly and internationally praised — has taken a completely different tact in his approach to Arthur Miller’s first great Broadway hit, All My Sons. His reverence for the play doesn’t frame it — congeal it really — in a proscenium’s constraints as Hughes has chosen to do with A Man for All Seasons, but instead uses so many directorial arrows in his quiver that we almost lose sight of Miller’s always lovely, sometimes lacerating realism. This production never lets the audience forget that IT HAS BEEN DIRECTED. At times I felt as if I were watching a conductor hoist his baton in front of an orchestra instead of being able to forget there is a director’s invisible hand at work. I was always enraptured but seldom moved. The stagecraft of the production impressed me — as did the acting — but I was never able to forget I was watching a play being performed instead of inhabited.

Ben Brantley of the New York Times kept referring to the Greek tragedy qualities that this production highlights, but I kept being reminded how influenced the young Miller had been by Ibsen. There are obvious parallels in this early Miller work with The Master Builder and The Wild Duck and An Enemy of the People in which the results of a factory owner’s war profiteering disrupt his life in a tragically personal way.

But let’s go ahead and get this aspect of the production out of the way. Katie Holmes, in her Broadway debut as Miller’s toughened yet tenderhearted ingenue, Ann Deever, is first-rate — or will be with even more performances under her belt. So many screen actresses can only summon their talent in emotional segments because of the technical stop-and-start intricacies involved when working on a film and seem stranded when not losing their balance completely as they attempt to walk the uninterrupted dramatic through-line required of great stage acting. Holmes more than keeps her balance. And when she’s emotionally stranded onstage, it is her character Ann Deever’s predicament she is making us so expertly feel. There is such a primal scream of misplaced love and angry loss that comes from her in the second act, it hits the audience in its collective solar plexus. It’s a moment that must please her husband, Tom Cruise, as a fellow actor but perplex him as a husband. Pleased or perplexed, I am certain he must be proud of his wife for she is proving, just as her character proves throughout the play, that she is no shrinking violet and should not be underestimated.

John Lithgow is giving a Tony-worthy performance as the factory owner. Dianne Wiest, a bit miscast as his midwestern housewife, is still able to hone in on the horrible hearbreak and equally horrible knowledge that she must live with day-in and day-out. Patrick Wilson, as the couple’s surviving son, is at his stolid best and, in the climatic scene with Lithgow, more than stolid: he is stunning. The rest of the cast is at the baton-wielding whim of the director. At times McBurney’s production was like watching Our Town as if it had been written by Clifford Odets or Bertolt Brecht. At other times I kept thinking of Dogville, the Lars von Trier film which starred Tom Cruise’s former wife, Nicole Kidman, for McBurney has turned All My Sons into the kind of heightened neo-artistic indictment of the American dream so coldly distilled in Dogville (their tacked-on endings of images of our country's unwashed-masses even mirror each other) instead of Miller’s more heartfelt and, yes, homegrown version of that same indictment. But trust me on this: the production will never bore you.

T T T (out of 4 possible T's)

All My Sons, Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, 236 W. 45th Street, New York. Ticket information here.

***SPEED-THE-PLOW

The three happiest faces in New York were those of Jeremy Piven, Elisabeth Moss and Raul Esparza — the three stars of the Broadway revival of David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow — as they came back for yet a second curtain call during the audience’s standing ovation at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on only the second night of previews, which was when I caught the revival of this production. The three actors had just given a performance of the play that made it seem as if they were already in the second month of their run. They were hitting on all cylinders as they mined the acrid ore of Mamet’s singular cynicism.

Continued, AFTER THE JUMP...

First-Timer David Hyde Pierce Among Tony Award Winners

David Hyde Pierce came out publicly last week, just in time to be able to thank his partner at the Tony Awards. In an unexpected win, the three-time Emmy Award winner took home his first Tony for his role as Lieutenant Frank Cioffi in Curtains, beating out favorite Raul Esparza.

Hyde Pierce noted his significant other at the end of his acceptance speech, joking: "My partner Brian - cause it's 24 years of listening to your damn notes. That's why I'm up here tonight."

A full list of Tony Award winners follows after the jump...

Broadway Actor Raúl Esparza Enjoys the Company of Men

The NYT threw a coming out party yesterday for the star of the new Broadway revival of Company, Raúl Esperza. The paper notes that in this case, life imitates art:

“Company”: The story of Bobby, a charming single man, who is unable to commit to a relationship and who may have questions about his own sexual identity.

Raúl Esparza: No longer truly married but not entirely separated, whose romantic conflicts go far deeper than that of the character he plays and have no easy fix.

Esparza's recent separation from his wife came after finally acknowledging that his attraction to men wasn't something transient. It's a journey he observes in his stage character as well: "I think the real thing that Bobby is going through is that he’s trying to grow up, and that means accepting things you can’t change, and it also means that in spite of all the messiness and failure you make a choice to love someone and live your life in the way that’s right for you. It’s messier than the pretty picture you painted for yourself. I had a romantic idea of what it means to be an adult: all husbands and wives who love each other get to stay together forever, love is enough."

Esparza's certainly not the first married man to face this particular music. But Company, which opens Wednesday will surely be more resonant because of it.