Oskar Eustis has decided to send a valentine to his founding Public Theater predecessor Joe Papp. Unfortunately, the arrow shot toward the valentine’s heart has fallen very wide of its mark.
Playwright-director Richard Nelson, who completed his Apple family tetralogy and Gabriel family trilogy a year ago this coming week, may have seemed the ideal choice to present the early history of the Public Theater family. Perhaps not surprisingly, he turns out not to be.
As the many tetralogy and trilogy lovers know, Nelson frequently sets those works in kitchens or dining rooms. He likes to send actors—who are skilled to preeminence in the art of naturalistic performing—about preparing, consuming and clearing up after meals. Over the food, sometimes even cooked at the time, they ramble on about diverse subjects that cumulatively amount to transcendent depictions of East coast life as lived in the early 21st century.
Now it looks as if Nelson has convinced himself he’s honed a style he’s obliged to repeat. So repeat it he does in Illyria, now at the Public. As Jennifer Tipton’s lights go up and Scott Lehrer’s mikes hang over the spare Susan HIlferty-Jason Ardizzone-West, out come the actors in two of the three scenes to get tables ready for consuming.
As they come and go with this and that edible and potable, they talk, as a theater family, about the events of April through August 1958, when the Public was only four years old. That’s when erstwhile CBS stage manager Papp was in danger of ending his few producing (and sometimes directing) days as a result of city disputes regarding Central Park use. Why, there was even the threat of a competing Shakespeare Festival suggested for the impending Lincoln Center development.
Participants in these talks—most often muted but occasionally and abruptly volatile—include Papp (John Magaro), early Public director Stuart Vaughan (John Sanders), staunch publicist Merle Debuskey (Fran Kranz), musician-composer David Amram (Blake DeLong), actor Colleen Dewhurst (Rosie Benton), Papp’s actor wife Peggy (Kristen Connelly), Vaughan’s wife-Papp aide Gladys (Emma Duncan), stage manager John Robertson (Max Voertendyke), Robertson’s actor girlfriend Mary Bennett (Naian González-Norvind) and stage manager Bernie Gersten (Will Brill).
(That few of the actors strongly resemble the real people they portray is probably beside the point, although Magaro, as Papp, hardly conjuring much of Papp’s fabled dynamism is a problem.)
While the group members discuss the jeopardized free-theater future and drop names (like Harold Clurman, Ellis Rabb and the scoundrel George C. Scott), they worry. But other than Vaughan’s insisting that the venture should be regarded as a temporary step towards working in more established Manhattan theater, they don’t get so riled that anyone knocks over a glass or drops a salad bowl.
What makes Illyria (the reference is, of course, to the Twelfth Night paradise) even stranger is that at one point, a confrontation is mentioned that Papp has had with New York power broker Robert Moses. That famous and still controversial figure had a dim view of Papp’s left political leanings and didn’t care for a free Shakespeare post-show donation policy.
Well, once the Moses name arises, anyone listening who has an urge for genuine conflict instantly realizes there’s a play there. Who wouldn’t want to see the inflamed Papp-Moses face-off dramatized? Yes, that’s where the action is and not where the turbulent meeting is only noted amidst chatter about George Scott misbehaving, Joe visiting Peggy’s Utah relatives and a few pals’ Marty-like “what do you want to do tonight?” Ah, but Nelson is wedded to his plates-water pitchers-knives-forks routines.
Moreover, where outside of Manhattan—indeed, where above Manhattan’s 14th Street—is there likely to be rabid interest in a very important theater story so blandly offered. MGM’s old Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney flicks about let’s-put-on-a-show-right-here-in-the-barn had far more life to them than this one has.
And by the way, when the third and final scene fades, Nelson withholds any sign of a Papp and friends conclusive solution. Will free Shakespeare in Central Park continue? Today, everyone knows it will. Nonetheless, it would be nice to learn here about its materializing.
Public Theater partisans are aware of in-house cabaret Joe’s Pub. Now they’re offered Joe’s flub. The sooner the little gift fades into the Public Theater woodwork, the more relieved we’ll all be.