August Wilson’s Two Trains Running at Rochester’s Geva Theatre

August Wilson

Whatever else has been on the season’s playbill at Rochester’s Geva Theatre the last four years, the play we’ve looked forward to the most each has been a play by August Wilson.  Geva has been doing one play from his Pittsburgh cycle each year, and we’ve loved them all — Gem of the Ocean (set in 1904),  The Piano Lesson (set in 1936), Fences (set in 1959; see Emsworth’s delighted review), and now this season’s play, Two Trains Running (set in 1969).  Indeed, we still have fond memories of a joyful Jitney (set in 1977) mounted by Geva in April 1999.

Pittsburgh's Hill District, seen from the Monongahela River around 1935

Two Trains Running tells the stories of the folks who hang around Memphis Lee’s ill-patronized diner in Pittsburgh’s Hill District.  Memphis himself (A. C. Smith) is bracing for a fight with city authorities over the value of his building, which is being condemned for urban renewal.  He wants his price — $25,000 — but doesn’t really expect to get it after a lifetime of seeing black men cheated and robbed of their dignity.  Memphis himself, as a young man, was driven out of Jackson, Mississippi by white men who aimed to demean and humiliate him as much as to rob him.  

A. C. Smith plays Memphis Lee

Memphis has no use for the ways his friends cope with poverty and racial oppression.  His young friend Sterling Johnson (Javon Johnson) is excited about a black power rally at which Malcolm X will be speaking, but Memphis tears down the poster Wolf pins on the wall of the diner.  His young waitress Risa (Patrese D. McClain) quotes the Bible and sends her tithes to Prophet Samuel, a charismatic local preacher; Memphis scoffs at the Prophet’s money-grubbing.  Sterling, who has fallen for Risa, fantasizes about Cadillacs but is more interested in petty crime than hard work; Memphis sadly predicts that Sterling will soon be back in the penitentiary.  

Memphis can barely abide the half-crazed Hambone (David Shakes) and his fixation on being paid the ham he was promised nine years earlier for painting a fence; Memphis berates Risa for her kindness to Hambone.  And Memphis cannot bring himself to do what his best friend Holloway (Alfred Wilson) recommends to everyone: go down Wiley Avenue to see the 322-year-old Aunt Ester, a semi-mystical seer who appears, on-stage or off, in several Wilson plays.  Yet skeptical as he is that there can be justice for a black man, Memphis intends, perhaps for the first time in his life, to take a stand for his own dignity and to insist on his price for his building. 

Patrese D. McClain has a sharp stage presence as Risa, waitress and object of Sterling Johnson's desire

And as August Wilson sadly shows, oppressed black folk sometimes oppressed one another in turn.  Early in the play, Memphis gains our sympathy with his story of how his wife left him for no good reason — but as the play goes on and we see Memphis’s harsh treatment of Risa, we understand better what life might have been like for a woman of his. Prophet Samuel preys on his congregation. Everyone plays the numbers, but as Holloway explains, the numbers racket means that money just moves from one black person to another.  The wealthy undertaker West, who owns much of the neighborhood, is eager to make a low-ball offer for Memphis’s building. 

We liked these vivid characters more than we can say.  True, we didn’t grow up black in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, where all these plays are set, and we certainly didn’t suffer racial oppression, but we did grow up among working-class people in western Pennsylvania, and we identify strongly with Pittsburgh, its people, and their ways.  We knew folks who talked like Troy Maxon, in Fences, and Memphis Lee, in Two Trains Running.  Like Sterling Johnson in Two Trains Running, our relatives sought work from J & L Steel.  And we were in our mid-teens in 1969, when the story of this play takes place. 

A. C. Smith in a fall 2009 production by Chicago's Court Theatre of August Wilson's play Ma Rainey's Black Bottom

The cast of Two Trains Running is excellent, though not quite to the standards of last year’s Fences (see Emsworth’s review). The actors and director Ron OJ Parson are based in Chicago, according to the program notes, and are veterans of a number of August Wilson plays. A. C. Smith, a large man, is an imposing yet vulnerable Memphis Lee; the lovely Patrese D. McClain stands out as the clear-eyed waitress Risa. 

Two Trains Running is a rich play with many more subplots and layers than we can mention here (and the characters all have a penchant for storytelling), but nothing gets lost in this well-directed production.  The performance we liked best was Alfred H. Wilson’s as Holloway, who from his side booth offers shrewd, sardonic commentary on everyone else’s troubles. Mr. Wilson has a marvelously expressive voice and stage presence — oddly, though, more than once he seemed to be struggling for his lines.

Arthur Miller’s The Price at Geva Theatre

Arthur Miller

Our first professional play was one of Arthur Miller’s masterpieces, and Emsworth wonders if he’s the only person left in Rochester who remembers it. It was 1973, and a community theater group had arranged to put on Death of a Salesman in the Strasenburgh Planetarium.  

This was theater-in-the-round; the stage was on the central platform out of which projection equipment ordinarily protruded.  Designed for looking at stars up on the ceiling, our seats went back nearly all the way. We’d always assumed that a play would have scenery, but on this tiny, unconventional stage there was only a wooden chair.  There couldn’t have been more than a dozen people in the audience; we have a vague recollection of getting there through a blizzard.  

We found Miller’s play powerfully moving. Was it well-acted? Frankly, we have no idea, although we surely thought so at the time. Still in our teens, we were thoroughly susceptible to the raw emotional power of the tragedy of Willy Loman. And with no prior experience with theater, we didn’t know good acting from bad.  

Arthur Miller’s play The Price opened at Geva Theatre here in Rochester a week or so ago, and we went to see it after accumulating 37 years of life experience and theater-going adventures. The Price was written (and is set) in 1967, nearly two decades after Miller wrote his two best-known plays, Death of a Salesman (1949) and The Crucible (1953), and we were surprised to find that it’s more conventional in some respects than either of those plays.  There are no flashbacks, fantasy scenes, or flirtations with the supernatural, and the entire play takes place in the course of a single morning.  

Richard McWilliams and Carmen Roman as Victor and Esther Franz

The Price is the story of Victor and Walter Franz, two brothers who haven’t seen or spoken to one another in many years. Victor (Richard McWilliams), now 50 years old, is a low-paid policeman from Queens who sacrificed opportunities for higher education to support his father, who was crushed by the stock-market collapse of ’29; Victor has spent much of his unglamorous career doing airport security. He is finally eligible to retire, and his wife Esther (Carmen Roman) is anxious for their “life” to finally begin, but neither of them have any sense what that might mean.  His estranged brother Walter (Tony DeBruno), who made no such sacrifices, has become a well-to-do doctor.  

The play takes place in the attic floor of an old house in Queens where Victor’s and Walter’s father lived until his death some years earlier.  Their father’s furniture and antiques are still there and must finally be removed; Victor has made an appointment with an elderly Yiddish antique dealer, Gregory Solomon (Kenneth Tigar), whose name he found in the yellow pages.  He wants Solomon to appraise and possibly to buy the lot. Technically, the pieces belong to both brothers, but Walter has refused to take Victor’s calls inviting him to come for the appraisal. Victor and Esther hope the pieces will bring enough of a price to launch them comfortably into their new life.  

Kenneth Tigar as the antique dealer Solomon, with Richard McWilliams as Victor Franz

Solomon turns out to be an eccentric, charming, and ultimately frustrating old man; only with the greatest difficulty can Victor, a poor haggler, bring him to place a dollar figure on the pieces. (Victor’s repeated question “But what’s the price?” tests the audience’s patience as well as old Solomon’s; we sense Miller’s nod to the then-trendy theater of the absurd.) Just as Solomon and Victor finally settle on a price, and just as the curtain is about to fall (figuratively speaking; the GeVa stage does not have a curtain) on the first act, Walter unexpectedly walks on.  

The second half of the play belongs mostly to the two brothers, who hash out the grievances and resentments that have separated them for so many years.  Secrets and truths long-repressed spill out at an alarming rate.  Solomon retreats to a back room of the attic, emerging only occasionally to offer solomonic advice to the brothers. 

The Price seemed to us to have less in it than Miller’s more famous plays.  Perhaps the themes simply aren’t as great; The Price is much less complex than, say, Death of a Salesman, which has the same number of characters, and it doesn’t begin to approach the latter play’s emotional intensity.  The playwright intended Victor’s great, apparently unnecessary sacrifice of his prospects as a metaphor for what he viewed as the unnecessary sacrifices America was making in Vietnam.  But the Vietnam war has been over for nearly four decades, and we doubt if many audience members, including Emsworth, would have noticed the metaphor if they hadn’t read the essay in GeVa’s program.  

Still, for an audience member like Emsworth who is far enough along in life to reflect, like Victor, Esther, and Walter, on his choices in life and the value of how he has spent his working life, The Price still has a good deal of resonance. And the acting in this play is very, very good — especially the veteran actor Kenneth Tigar, surely one of Miller’s most memorable characters. Tigar brings an almost unwordly transcendence to his portrayal of the old Yiddish antique dealer.  This show has our solid recommendation.  

Tony DeBruno played Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2009

We were interested to see that Tony DeBruno, who plays Walter,  is a long-time member of the company of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which appears to be the only American classical repertory theater of comparable breadth and quality to the Shaw Festival and the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, in Ontario, Canada, which Emsworth faithfully patronizes.  Someday we’d like to pay it a visit.

August Wilson’s Fences at Rochester’s GeVa Theatre

Tony Todd (right) and Wiley Moore (left) as Troy Maxson and his best friend Bono.

It’s too late now to do anyone any good, because the show closed a week ago, but GeVa Theatre just put on a fabulous production of August Wilson’s Fences here in Rochester.  Unfortunately we couldn’t make it down to GeVa till the run was almost over. We would have loved to have seen it again.

The late playwright

This is surely one of the very best American plays. We say that not merely because the play (a) is set in Pittsburgh, near our boyhood home in western Pennsylvania and (b) involves baseball. No, Fences is a masterpiece because of Wilson’s gorgeous cascade of language and his sympathy for the frailties of mankind.  What happens to the soul of a good man who is blocked from fulfulling his dreams? What if he finds himself resenting the promise and potential of his own son? How can a man who loves and honors his wife nevertheless end up in bed with another woman?

Troy Maxson claimed that Dodgers star Jackie Robinson wouldn't have been good enough to play with him in the Negro Leagues

Fences is the tragedy of Troy Maxson (Tony Todd), a former star of the Negro Leagues whose career ended before baseball was integrated. Now he works on a garbage truck, bitter about missing out on the fame and money enjoyed by younger men like Jackie Robinson — who, he says, wouldn’t have been good enough to make the teams he and Josh Gibson played on.

Clemente's 1959 baseball card

What Troy refuses to see is that times are changing. He tells his best friend Bono (Wiley Moore, who nails the role) that baseball will always keep the black man down. Why else, he asks, would the Pirates be keeping Roberto Clemente on the bench? In fact, by 1957, ten years after Robinson joined the Dodgers,  Willie Mays and Hank Aaron were among the biggest stars in baseball, and Clemente had been the Pirates’ full-time right fielder since 1955.

And Troy himself has won a victory in the struggle for racial equality. When he files a formal employee grievance against the policy that only white men could drive the garbage trucks (black men had to work on the ground), he and his wife Rose (Nora Cole) worry that he’ll simply be fired. Instead, his grievance is upheld and Troy is promoted to the cab of his garbage truck.

Rose is proud of their son, Cory (Jared McNeill), who has become a high-school football star and has been offered a college scholarship.  But Troy is afraid that sports will be a dead end for Cory as it was for him.  Or so he says — is Troy really jealous that his son might achieve the success in sports that eluded him?  He refuses to sign scholarship papers for his son and insists that Cory keep working at the neighborhood grocery instead of pursuing football.

Tony Todd has an unforgettable, modulated, gravelly voice, and he was a superbly physical Troy Maxson.  He had his audience in the palm of his hand from the opening scene in which Troy drinks whiskey with his buddy Bono (Wiley Moore) and brags about his wife and their vigor as lovers. Like Troy Maxson, Todd is a master storyteller; in one of the most unforgettable scenes in this show, Troy reminisces about his abuse at the hands of his own father. Tony Todd is known for his movie roles (Candyman, The Rock), but he is a first-rate actor, and here in Rochester he left nothing of August Wilson’s script on the page.

In fact, the entire cast of this show was up to Todd’s standard, especially Nora Cole as Troy’s long-suffering wife Rose. This production richly deserves to be seen elsewhere — we thought it every bit as fine as the recent production of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone on Broadway, which we also saw and loved (see this post) — but as nearly as we can tell, it closed for good here in Rochester.

Cuddy

It was August Wilson’s general policy that his plays be directed by black directors.  We understand that GeVa Artistic Director Mark Cuddy obtained special permission from Wilson’s widow to direct Fences (which necessarily has an all-black cast) himself.

This exception for Cuddy didn’t get any particular public attention, so far as we know.  But the selection of another white man, Bartlett Sher, to direct the afore-mentioned production of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone on Broadway did stir up a fuss. The choice of Sher aroused the ire of some African-Americans — in fact, we ran across one blogger (here he is) who complained hysterically that this was yet another “openly blatant example” of “insidious and pervasive American racism.”

It didn’t seem very “blatant” to us, and personally, we didn’t think GeVa’s production of Fences was tainted by having a white director. Perhaps Mr. Cuddy can’t claim to fully appreciate African-American culture. But people are still people. Who would argue that Mr. Cuddy shouldn’t direct Chekhov because he didn’t grow up Russian?  Anyway, the themes of Fences are universal, not tied to the experience of being black in America. We don’t see why Mr. Cuddy or Mr. Sher should have been disqualified from directing two of the very finest American plays simply because of their race, and we’re glad Mr. Wilson’s estate agreed.

We also think this show succeeded so well mainly because of its superb performers, not because of Mr. Cuddy, whose direction was unobtrusive. Our guess is that Mr. Cuddy had the good sense not to interfere with veteran actors who plainly understood Wilson’s play and what to do with it.

UPDATE: APRIL 2010.  Emsworth greatly enjoyed GeVa’s production of August Wilson’s Two Trains Running.  See this link.

Sweeney Todd at Rochester’s GeVa Theatre

We never saw Sweeney Todd on Broadway, nor did we get around to seeing the movie version of this musical. So our first taste of the demon barber of Fleet Street was the remarkably sharp new production currently at Rochester’s GeVa Theatre.

Stephen Tewksbury as Sweeney Todd, and Kristie Dale Sanders as the maker of the worst pies in London

Granted, there’s no such thing as a “normal” premise for a musical play. By any standard, though the premise of Sweeney Todd is outrageous. The play’s hero, the barber Sweeney Todd (Stephen Tewksbury), has returned to late-eighteenth-century London obsessed with getting revenge on a corrupt judge who, years before, abducted and ravished Sweeney’s lovely young wife. Judge Turpin (James Van Treuren) had covered up his crimes by having Todd himself transported to Australia on a trumped-up charge.

Todd sets up his barbershop above Mrs. Lovett’s meat pie shop, hoping to lure the judge into his barber’s chair so he can ply a fatal razor on the judge’s throat. In the meantime, though, he strikes up a stomach-turning relationship with the brassy, vulgar Mrs. Lovett herself (Kristie Dale Sanders); Todd slits the throats of random customers and slides their bodies down a trapdoor into her kitchen.  Mrs. Lovett incorporates the meaty parts of their corpses into meat pies and feeds to unsuspecting customers.

Here’s what you should know if you’re thinking of seeing this show:

1. The grisly business isn’t as stomach-turning as you might expect. Granted, throats are slit and customers sit at cafe tables clamoring for pastries made of human flesh. But the blood-shedding is minimal and stylized (especially compared to the oceans of blood that reportedly flowed in the movie version of Sweeney Todd). And of course the audience can’t actually smell or taste Mrs. Lovett’s meat pies.

Maybe we’re jaded and shock-proof after all the graphic violence we’ve seen on film for the last 35 years, but in any case Sweeney Todd doesn’t really press the envelope. We may be titillated, but we’re not revolted.

Stephen Tewksbury

2. It’s not as terrifying as you might expect. Sweeney Todd isn’t a thriller, and it doesn’t have nail-biting, edge-of-your-seat qualities. And the villains in the play (in fact, all the characters are scoundrels)are not played as larger-than-life sociopaths; they don’t terrify us. Director Mark Cuddy didn’t go for shock value.

3. You’ll end up enjoying the music. Of course, the music of Stephen Sondheim is a far cry from the feel-good, sing-along anthems of Oklahoma or the sentimental song in Fiddler on the Roof. Sondheim doesn’t shy aware from dissonance or from startling melodic leaps.  No hit songs came from Sweeney Todd.

But we liked the music — welcome relief from the bland, cliched numbers in popular musicals of recent years (think Wicked and Rent). Sondheim’s lyrics are perfectly fitted to the melodies, and the musical accompaniments are exquisite. We have only one real complaint. Why did Sondheim write duets in which the singers are singing different lyrics at the same time? The audience can’t understand either lyric.

Roland Rusinek played Beadle Bamford

4. It’s an good cast. Stephen Tewksbury, as Sweeney Todd, and Kristie Dale Sanders as Mrs. Lovett have fine singing voices and as a couple they are remarkably well-matched. (Their relationship is worth paying attention to; the middle-aged Mrs. Lovett has lascivious, even matrimonial, designs on Todd, but he has nothing on his mind but revenge.) We liked the singing of Daniel Bogart, who plays Todd’s friend Anthony Hope, and we especially enjoyed Roland Rusinek as the judge’s brutal strongman, Beadle Bamford.

Marissa McGowan: her lyrics were sadly unintelligible

We were disappointed only in Marissa McGowan as Todd’s daughter Johanna, whose diction was so poor that we simply couldn’t make out any of the lyrics of “Greenfinch and Linnet Bird.” We were sorry, incidentally, not to see any local actors in the cast.

We attended the last performance of Sweeney Todd before its official “opening,” and it wasn’t a good night for the sound crew. As the show opened with “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd,” the very first singer’s microphone wasn’t on (we heard him just fine anyway).  The amplified voice of the second singer came as something of a jar.

Having decided to mike the lead actors, the sound designer evidently felt he needed to mike everyone in the chorus as well — another eight or ten voices. This went badly. The vocal mix was much too loud and resulted in distortion, so we didn’t understand a lot of the lyrics sung by the ensemble. Unfortunately, the orchestra (especially the electronic keyboard) was also over-amplified at various points during the show.

But why amplify the voices at all? GeVa Theatre (550 seats) just isn’t that large. None of these talented performers would have had difficulty projecting their solo singing voices throughout the hall, and amplifying the ensemble was not only unnecessary, but deleterious to the sonic effect. We were against it.

Pride and Prejudice at Rochester’s Geva Theatre (a review)

Emsworth has no prejudices to speak of. Yet when I hear that someone has tried to adapt one of my favorite works of literature for stage or screen, I expect a failure or an abomination, and I’m usually right.

Of course there are exceptions. I think of Booth Tarkington’s Alice Adams (1936 movie starring Katharine Hepburn), Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men (1949 movie starring Broderick Crawford), Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables (1980 musical play), and (surprisingly) The Lord of the Rings (2001, 2002, and 2003 movies starring Ian McKellen).

But the list of failures is much longer. Notorious among these are Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1974 movie starring Robert Redford); Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990 movie starring Tom Hanks); and Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1997 Broadway musical; it was our misfortune to attend a performance with the unspeakably awful Sebastian Bach in the title role).

So when I saw that Geva Theatre (Rochester, New York) was planning to adapt Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice for the last show of its 2007-08 season, my expectations were low. I know and love the novel, and I didn’t feel any need to see it enacted — or worse yet, “reinterpreted” and mangled — on stage. Fortunately, the Geva show was a pleasant surprise.

Marge Betley (Geva’s resident dramaturg) and Mark Cuddy (Geva’s Artistic Director and director of this show) adapted the novel themselves, and they stuck fairly closely to Jane Austen’s story. They added no new characters or new scenes, and they used as much of Austen’s language they could. Prudently, they decided not to use a narrator.

These were smart choices, but the result was not compelling theater. For one thing, there were simply too many characters; familiar as I am with Pride and Prejudice, I still had trouble keeping track of some of them.

But all the Geva audience really wanted was to see their favorite Austen characters come to life on the stage. They were not disappointed, especially in Elizabeth Bennet, played by Meghan Wolf, a fetching brunette who gave us all the vivacity, wit, and intelligence that one could want in Austen’s heroine.

For the romantically inclined, Ms. Wolf and David Christopher Wells, who played Mr. Darcy, made a striking couple. And as director, Mr. Cuddy made sure that his audience would believe not only in Elizabeth’s improbable attraction to the ill-mannered Mr. Darcy, but also in her relationships with her sister Jane (Alyssa Rae), her best friend Charlotte Lucas (Vanessa LaFortune), and, most of all, her father. As played by Guy Paul, Mr. Bennet was a gratifyingly complex character.

Most of the actors did seem to appreciate that they were there for the purpose of entertaining us. Randy Rollison played the pompous, self-absorbed Mr. Collins to full comic effect, and Melanie Little was an audience favorite as the bookish, sanctimonious Mary Bennet.

But some cast members seemed merely to be reciting passages from the novel — most egregiously, Vanessa LaFortune as Charlotte Lucas. Moreover, to my mind, Carole Monferdini as Lady Catherine de Bourgh did not even come close to capturing the essence of Austen’s dragon lady, and her odd costume suggested one of the witches from The Wizard of Oz. Unfortunately, we were not able to understand the first lines of the play, shrilly delivered by Mrs. Bennet (Peggy Cosgrove) in an accent that continued to challenge us throughout the play.

Women have no monopoly on Jane Austen, but if this had been a movie, it would have been a chick flick. The women at Geva loved Mr. Darcy’s bungling courtship of Elizabeth Bennet. But some men were less appreciative. In the men’s room at intermission (which followed immediately after Elizabeth’s rejection of Mr. Darcy’s proposal), one man was heard commenting to a friend, “She owes me big time for this.” His friend agreed: “I’m not saying I’m holding the gun to my mouth, but close.”

Incidentally, if one must adapt someone else’s novel, it seems to me that one is better off starting with a piece of literature that is merely second-rate, rather than a masterpiece like Pride and Prejudice. It worked with Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind (1939 movie starring Vivian Leigh and Clark Gable), Edna Ferber’s Showboat (1927 musical), Stephen King’s The Shining (1980 movie also starring Nicholson), and Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men (2007 movie starring Tommy Lee Jones).