by Rob Kendt
Folklore of stage and screen is ready-made fodder for TV biopics
and docu-plays eager to capitalize on the familiarity of legendary figures
whose private lives are as much a part of the culture as their performances and
productions. Such fare tends to be either ultra-reverent or queen-bitchy, or
some unholy union of the two, like ABC's recent Life With Judy Garland: Me
and My Shadows, in which dead-on performances by Tammy Blanchard and Judy Davis
couldn't conceal the telepic's tawdry pop psychology; we got generous helpings
of Garland's drug-addled excesses and their corresponding special-pleading
justifications.
This may be why I found Austin Pendleton's Orson's Shadow so rich and
refreshing, in a small, smart new production at the brand new Black Dahlia
Theatre (on Pico near Fairfax, not far from Playwrights' Arena's old haunt),
which recently extended through July 1. Pendleton delivers all the dish and
discourse we'd expect of a play inspired by the real-life 1960 Royal Court
production of Ionesco's Rhinoceros, in which Orson Welles directed
Laurence Olivier. But rather than resort to cheap Freudianism, Pendleton does
something much more satisfying and ultimately moving: He imagines the
Welles/Olivier dynamic as a story of betrayal straight out of Shakespeare's
Henry trilogy. Welles, who's trying to get investors behind his Bard-based Chimes
at Midnight project, is the sad old drunk Falstaff, forsaken by the savvy,
ambitious knight, Olivier, who's cutting his losses as he assumes a mantle of
public responsibility; Sir Larry will soon found England's National Theater and
shed his mad, needy wife Vivien Leigh for the fiery young Joan Plowright. The
betrayal of Welles extends implicitly to the entire "court" of
Hollywood and the English-speaking theatre establishment, who've never forgiven
him the precocious masterpiece Citizen Kane. If this
sounds reductive of the man's genius, trust me, it's not. (Film geeks
everywhere, rise in nit-picking protest.) And while Pendleton's play is too
bluntly, almost panderingly expositional to be a great one, its witty, wise,
never jaundiced take on some often-rehearsed themesÑWelles vs. Hollywood,
Olivier vs. the American Method, pabulum vs. agitpropÑevinces the deep but not
reverent love man-of-the-theatre Pendleton has for his fellow artists. Which is
why casting the withering (in both senses) critic Kenneth Tynan as the play's
acerbic host may be Pendleton's masterstroke; Tynan neatly punctures any
creeping pretentiousness in the show's "great men" concept, while at
the same time conveying the deep, complicated attachment of a critic to the art
he evaluates (know that feeling).
It doesn't hurt that Robert Machray etches such an eerily perfect
evocation of the looming, exhausted Touch of Evil-era Welles,
or that the rest of the cast is letter-perfect: Jeff Sugarman renders an
Olivier whose actory self-indulgence masks predatory calculation, Geraldine
Hughes roots Plowright in tough love, Dreya Weber gives Vivien Leigh brittle,
wounded venom, and Andrew Ableson cuts a perfectly sardonic, sneakily desperate
figure as Tynan. Director Matt Shakman, also Black Dahlia's artistic director,
has kicked off his new theatre most fortuitously.
¥ A less successful inauguration was the recent, highly touted
revival of the storied Padua Hills Playwrights Festival as Padua Playwrights
Productions, which kicked off a new, more modest life at the elegant 2100
Square Feet with festival co-founder Murray Mednick's 16 Routines. This
sketch-like show about an aging vaudevillian seemed to me a ponderous,
pretentious, and preachy mess, despite a powerhouse cast (including William
Mesnik, Maria O'Brien, Ryan Cutrona, Grace Zabriskie) and an inventive
director, Wes Walker (also a playwright, and I daresay a more interesting one
than Mednick). Still, I look forward to the next Mednick/Padua play, Joe and
Betty, purportedly an autobiographical look at his parents, if only for another
high-powered cast headed by Jack Kehler and Shawna Casey.
¥ Speaking of Padua, former student John O'Keefe recently world-premiered
Glamour in Santa Rosa, way up north in Sonoma County. Of this play about
writer Robert Graves and his paramour Laura Riding, local stringer Bob Canning
wrote: "Put Fatal Attraction and Pacific Heights together, set
them in the 1930s, and you have the squirm factor that is Glamour." Given
Canning's former association with the Colony Studio Theatre, can an L.A.
production be far off?É The teen rock musical bare, whose hit
run at the Hudson Mainstage last year divided critics and audiences (I was more
or less in the aye column), is reportedly slated for New York's Public Theater
this summer.É After serving for years as publicist for the Will Geer Theatricum
Botanicum, Jennie Webb is now the company's playwright-in-residence, with a
commission for the end of summer 2001. Webb is currently working on a play
called The Complete Story of the War at Minneapolis' Playwrights' Center.