Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at the Shaw Festival

Tennessee Williams

(May 11, 2011)  Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is on the short list of plays that we’ll happily see anytime, anywhere. Such glorious poetry — and what else is it but poetry, for who really talks like the characters in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof?  It’s magical how Tennessee Williams brought his characters alive by giving them lines no one would utter in ordinary speech and making them have conversations no ordinary people would have.  The characters in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof are as painfully real as can be.

In the Shaw Festival’s 2011 production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which we saw in a mesmerizing preview performance last weekend, the poetry flows like honey from the lips of Moya O’Connell (a treat for the eyes as Maggie the Cat), Gray Powell (Brick), and Jim Mezon (Big Daddy).  Their characters could hardly be more vivid.

Anyone who has seen the bowdlerized movie version (Paul Newman, Elizabeth Taylor) will find this a much darker (and more explicit) show.  The long first act shows us only Brick and his sexually frustrated wife (the scenes of the play all take place in their bedroom in Big Daddy’s Mississippi delta mansion house), but through Maggie’s chatter we meet the rest of the Pollitt family as well.  Maggie and Brick also introduce us to a major character who never appears in the play, Brick’s late friend Skipper, and to the play’s great mystery: what Brick and Skipper really felt for one another, why Skipper took his own life, and why Brick no longer has any interest in anything but drinking bourbon until he feels the “click”.

The play’s first act leaves us persuaded that there is nothing left between Maggie and Brick. But the second act teases us with the notion that there is still some palpable affection between Brick and his father, Big Daddy (Jim Mezon).  (The mere appearance of Mezon, once again a superb stage presence, noticeably ratchets up the play’s energy level.)  Father and son find common ground with their mutual detestation of “mendacity,” but Big Daddy’s ego leaves him unable to penetrate Brick’s alcoholic retreat.

Again and again, love is offered and spurned.  Maggie adores and desires a husband who tells her that he can’t stand her.  Big Daddy loves a son who’s weary of listening to his father “gas” about himself.  We are shocked at Maggie’s abasement when Brick rejects her; even more appalling are the scenes of deliberate cruelty in which Big Daddy insults his “fat” wife (who loves him) and humiliates her in front of the family and friends gathered for his birthday party.

Brick, Big Daddy, and Big Mama

As Big Daddy’s feckless, foolish wife, Corrine Koslo manages, against strong odds, to to arouse our sympathy for a thoroughly unlikeable character.  As Brick, Gray Powell gives the best performance we’ve seen from him at the Shaw Festival; it must be a challenge to play a character whose range of emotional response is constrained by his chronically high alcohol level.  We particularly appreciated Patrick McManus in the difficult role of Brick’s older brother Gooper, scheming with his fecund wife Mae (Nicole Underhay, also pitch-perfect) to get what he sees as justice from a father who has always preferred his younger brother.

We know we’re in danger of deep waters here, but we couldn’t help thinking how the playwright’s sexuality kept bursting forth at various points throughout the play — and we don’t mean simply the storyline about the attraction between Brick and Skipper.  Was Tennessee Williams repulsed by women’s bodies?  In the first act, Brick tells Maggie he is “disgusted” only seconds after she refers to her breasts and her figure.  Did the playwright feel threatened by sexually aggressive women?  Brick stubbornly resists Maggie’s sexual advances, and Big Daddy has stopped having sex with Big Mama (who likewise “disgusts” him).  And the playwright is clearly revolted by the sexual appetite and fecundity of Gooper’s wife Mae.

The Shaw Festival’s production might disappoint those who expect the lines to be rendered in the accents of the deep South.  But we probably wouldn’t understand a word if they did.  In this production, fortunately, the actors are all intelligible; they slip in and out of their accents just enough to remind us where the play is set.  And they nailed the main thing: the poetry.

We preview the Shaw Festival’s 2011 season

A year ago we were wondering whether the Shaw Festival management might be chafing a little at having to build its seasons around the plays of Bernard Shaw. The 2009 season was all about Noël Coward, and the Festival’s marketing for 2010 certainly didn’t lead with the two Shaw plays that were on the bill. In fact, the first Shaw play of 2010 didn’t even open until the end of June.

Shaw

But if the Shaw Festival is thinking about putting Shaw on the backburner, it’s not happening in 2011, because for its 50th season there will be an unprecedented four Shaw plays at Niagara-on-the-Lake. Personally, we’re not tired of Shaw yet. Here’s what we think of the 2011 Shaw Festival season, beginning with the shows we’re looking forward most.

1. The Admirable Crichton (James M. Barrie). Several months ago, when we offered a few suggestions for future Shaw Festival seasons (see this post), a play by J. M. Barrie was high on the list. It wasn’t The Admirable Crichton, but we’ll settle for this inventive comedy, which we’ve read but never seen (the Shaw Festival put it on back 1976, when Emsworth was still a student, unaware of theater festivals in Ontario).

James M. Barrie

Like several Shaw plays (including Candida, also on the 2011 playbill), The Admirable Crichton involves the clumsy efforts of “advanced” English folk to live up to their socialist ideals. In this play, the Earl of Loam makes it a monthly practice to hold a dinner in which his household’s servants are treated like equals. The idealistic earl explains to Crichton, the butler: “Can’t you see, Crichton, that our divisions into classes are artificial, that if we were to return to Nature, which is the aspiration of my life, all would be equal?” Crichton, a clear-sighted conservative, does not agree: “The divisions into classes, my lord, are not artificial. They are the natural outcomes of a civilised society.”

Fantasies become reality in many of Barrie’s plays.  In The Admirable Crichton, the Earl’s household, servants and all, take a long voyage together and find themselves shipwrecked on a deserted Pacific island, where the Earl’s egalitarian theories are put to the test. In Bernard Shaw’s My Fair Lady (also on the 2011 playbill), a poor flower girl is taken out of her station life and transformed into a jewel of society; in Barrie’s play a butler is changed into a master, and a lord finds a station in life fitting his own natural ability.  Stephen Sutcliffe will play the butler, Crichton, and David Schurman will be the Earl of Loam.

2. My Fair Lady (Bernard Shaw, Alan Jay Lerner, Frederick Loewe). We can’t imagine why they’ve never put on My Fair Lady at Niagara-on-the-Lake till now. Sure, it’s just an “adaptation” of Shaw’s play Pygmalion, but it uses a high percentage of Shaw’s original lines and sticks to the story. There was no good reason for the Shaw Festival to snub My Fair Lady for 49 years.

P. G. Wodehouse must have been suffering from indigestion, or gout, or kidney stones when he saw this show in the 1950s and told a friend it was “the dullest lousiest show” he’d ever seen.  This is our favorite musical play, if Showboat isn’t. We love its songs and have sung and played them all our life: “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly,” “I Could Have Danced All Night,” “Get Me to the Church On Time.” Deborah Hay, who so successfully played another girl from the slums a couple of years ago in Born Yesterday, will play Eliza Doolittle.  We particularly look forward to Benedict Campbell as Henry Higgins.  Little round man Neil Barclay, who is in fact an excellent song-and-dance man, will be Alfred Doolittle.

3. Candida (Bernard Shaw). This never-tedious comedy is among our favorite Shaw plays. Candida is the wife of James Morelle, a vicar and popular socialist speaker who serves a run-down parish in London. In the fundamentalist circles of Emsworth’s younger years, one sometimes heard of preachers who were “so heavenly minded” that they were “of no earthly good.” Morelle is the liberal analogue, so zealous for his causes that he doesn’t pay enough attention to the living, breathing people in his own circle, especially his wife. We give the radical socialist Shaw credit for being able to satirize someone like Morelle, a soldier on the front lines of the socialist campaign.

The plot of Candida revolves around the infatuation of young Eugene Marchbanks for Candida, who is 15 years his senior. In other productions of Candida that we’ve seen, Candida is portrayed as genuinely wavering between the young poet and her husband. This has never seemed right to us; we don’t think Candida ever seriously considers leaving James for the boy, and we don’t think the dramatic interest of the play requires it.

Gina Wilkinson was originally scheduled to direct Candida; sadly, she passed away in December 2010. Claire Jullien will play Candida.

4. Drama at Inish (Lennox Robinson). Several years ago we got a charge out of the Shaw Festival’s production of Seán O’Casey’s 1926 play The Plough and the Stars, even though we had trouble understanding the heavy Irish accents. Irish drama was something new for us, and we liked it.

We’ve been expecting more O’Casey but instead, in 2011, we’ll be getting a 1933 drama called Drama at Inish from one of O’Casey’s Irish contemporaries, Lennox Robinson. We dug around and found a copy of this comedy on-line and were greatly entertained by our reading of it. Jackie Maxwell herself, who we think is the best director at the Shaw Festival, will be directing. Two of our favorite Shaw Festival actresses, Mary Haney and Corrine Koslo, will have leading roles.

This is a play about actors and their audiences. Perhaps you remember a story — it might have been Mark Twain, maybe Bret Harte — in which some cowboys seeing their first play didn’t understand that the drama on stage wasn’t real, so they pulled out their pistols to shoot the stage villain. Drama at Inish similarly pokes fun at small-town theater-goers who confuse the real world and the gloomy on-stage worlds of Ibsen and Chekhov. (When this play initially came to Broadway, it was called “Is Life Worth Living.”)  

5. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Tennessee Williams). This 1955 play is high on our list of all-time favorite plays. It will be only the second Tennessee Williams play to appear at the Shaw Festival (we enjoyed Summer and Smoke in 2007) and hope A Streetcar Named Desire won’t be far behind. We note, in passing, that, 10 years ago, before they relaxed “the Mandate,” the Shaw Festival probably wouldn’t have offered a play written after Shaw’s death in 1950.

This is the story of Brick and Maggie, a young couple whose childlessness is a sore point with Brick’s father, Big Daddy, a wealthy, domineering Southern planter who is dying of cancer. Maggie’s childless condition is due mainly to Brick’s puzzling lack of interest in his wife; does Brick simply despise her, or is he (like Tennessee Williams himself) simply not attracted to women?

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is full of delicious, unforgettable scenes and characters.  Moya O’Connell will play Maggie the Cat; Jim Mezon will play Big Daddy.  It seems that this will be Mr. Mezon’s only major role at the Shaw Festival in 2011; we’re a little disappointed that in the Festival’s 50th year, he’s not playing a lead role in a Bernard Shaw play. 

6. The President (Ferenc Molnár). This one-act comedy, starring Lorne Kennedy, was such a success as the one-hour lunchtime show at the Shaw Festival in 2008 that they’re bringing it back. We meant to see it then, but it never worked out, so we’re glad for this second chance.  This play too involves a “make-over”; a cabdriver with communist leanings must become someone suitable as the husband for the daughter of a soybean tycoon. Presumably most of the same cast will be back, although Chilina Kennedy, who played the daughter in 2008, is now a leading lady at the Stratford Festival. At $32, it’s a bargain.

The plot of The President, originally written in Hungarian in 1929, is thoroughly Wodehousian, and in fact there’s a connection: P. G. Wodehouse adapted one of Ferenc Molnár’s plays into the 1926-27 Broadway smash The Play’s the Thing, which we intend to re-read before heading off to see The President.

7. Topdog/Underdog (Suzan-Lori Parks). This 2001 play by Suzan-Lori Parks won the Pulitzer. It’s about two brothers (black men, but they actually are brothers) and their struggles to get by. They’re the only two characters in the play, which will play for only a short run (from July 19 through August 27) in the Shaw Festival’s new Studio Theater, which they reserve for “contemporary” plays. The Shaw’s track record in this space (John Osborne’s The Entertainer in 2009, Caryl Churchill’s Serious Money in 2010) is very good.

8. Heartbreak House (George Bernard Shaw). It’s one of Shaw’s greatest plays, according to all the experts, and who are we to argue? It includes some of our favorite Shaw characters, like old Captain Shotover, who treats his country house as if it were a sailing ship and pretends to be more senile than he really is. We consider the Captain a role model for our own declining years and are delighted to see that Michael Ball will take the role.  In fact, this show will have the Shaw Festival’s “A” case, with Robin Evan Willis, Deborah Hay, Patrick Galligan, and Patrick McManus as key cast members.

The first half of Heartbreak House, written during the first World War, is witty and entertaining; the second half turns deadly serious, and it’s all intensely metaphorical. In fact, we would go so far as to suggest that Shaw’s reputation for being “talky” owes more to Heartbreak House than to any other of his plays. Toward the end, the characters simply sit around the terrace engaged in intellectual duels that make you, in the audience, feel stupid because you didn’t understand someone’s winning thrust.

9. Maria Severa (Jay Turvey and Paul Sportelli) Ever longer grows the list of recent Broadway musicals (like Spring Awaking, Billy Elliott, and In the Heights) that we have not seen and, frankly, don’t feel the urge to see. So will we make it a priority to see this brand-new musical by two talented members of the Shaw Festival company (Jay Turvey and Jay Sportelli)?

The play is about Maria Severa, a historical character who, in her short life (1820-1846), became a legendary Portugese singer of fado songs.  Julie Martell, who is both easy on the eyes and an excellent singer, will play the title role.

10. When the Rain Stops Falling (Andrew Bovell). We don’t know about this one. Here’s what Ben Brantley said in a review of a London production of this Australian play in the New York Times last summer:

The play begins with people hidden by umbrellas walking in circles under sheets of water, until a man in the center of the stage is compelled to scream a scream of human angst. Then a fish falls into his arms.

11. On the Rocks (George Bernard Shaw). Besides three of Shaw’s best-known plays, the 2010 season will include one of his least-known — or, at least, an adaptation of it. We were altogether unfamiliar with this late (1933) Shaw play till we saw it was going to be offered in 2011, so we read it.  We can now explain (a) why, in 50 years, this is only the second time the Shaw Festival has put on On the Rocks and (b) why it needed to be “adapted”.

Interviewed at the age of 92, P. G. Wodehouse stated, “I don’t want to be like Bernard Shaw. He turned out some awfully bad stuff in his nineties. He said he knew the stuff was bad but he couldn’t stop writing.”  Shaw may not have been in his nineties when he wrote On the Rocks, but it’s the sort of thing Wodehouse was talking about.  As Shaw wrote it, On the Rocks is a tedious play about a conservative English prime minister and his cabinet who, in a time of national crisis that has brought the nation close to anarchy, suddenly “realize” that various collectivist measures are what is needed to save the country. It’s the equivalent of a radical socialist’s wet dream. The characters, on the page anyway, are wooden and featureless. No doubt the adaptation, by Michael Healey, will be more interesting than if we were given Shaw’s play straight, but we’re not attracted.

Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard at the Shaw Festival

Benedict Campbell as Lopakhin and Laurie Paton as Lyubov Andreyevna Ranyevskaya

You want variety if you’re thinking of seeing two Shaw Festival shows in one day.  For instance, you don’t necessarily want to see two yawner dramas like The Seagull and Heartbreak House within the course of nine hours.  We tried pairing a frivolous forties musical (see this post) with Anton Chekhov’s tragicomedy The Cherry Orchard and ended up with a nicely balanced day.  

On such doubleheader days we marvel at the repertory actors who are doing double duty.  The afternoon’s singing and dancing star of One Touch of Venus, Robin Evan Willis, for example, reappeared in the evening’s The Cherry Orchard as Anya — and we are in a position to report that Ms. Willis still had time between shows to have drinks at the Epicurean with what looked like out-of-town friends.  It was probably well that, in her first scene in The Cherry Orchard, Anya is supposed to be exhausted from a long journey.  Mark Uhre, Neil Barclay, Gabrielle Jones, and Julie Martell all delivered high-energy performances in the musical before walking across the street to use their heavy acting chops in the Chekhov play in the intimate confines of the Court House Theatre, where the actors are only inches apart from the patrons. 

Neil Barclay as Pishchik and Laurie Paton as Ranyevskaya

The Cherry Orchard is dear to our heart, and judging from the snippets of animated conversations we overheard at intermission, many of our many fellow patrons also had decided feelings about the play. It can’t be easy for a director like Jason Byrne to bring something fresh into a play so well-loved by so many, but we think he succeeded.  The Shaw Festival show is intelligently planned and exceptionally well-acted, and we found it genuinely moving.

The Cherry Orchard gives us several painful scenes in the life of a family of Russian aristocrats around the turn of the last century. The central figure is Lyubov Andreyevna Ranyevskaya (Laurie Paton), a widow whose large estate has a formerly magnificent cherry orchard that she considers “the one remarkable thing in the whole province.” As her brother Gayev (Jim Mezon) chimes in, it’s mentioned in “the Encyclopedia.”

But as much as she professes to love her home, Ranyevskaya has spent the last six years off in Paris wasting her fortune on a worthless lover while working out her grief from the accidental drowning of her small son.  She and and her daughter Anya (Robin Evan Willis) arrive back home just weeks before the estate is to be sold at foreclosure.  Even though the situation presents a business opportunity for himself, Ranyevskaya’s wealthy neighbor Lopakhin (Benedict Campbell) magnanimously urges her to save herself from financial ruin by taking an axe to the cherry orchard and converting the land into riverside summer cottages for upwardly mobile city-dwellers. 

As the family dithers, Yepikhodov plays his guitar for Dunyasha in the estate gardens. This illustration by Lajos Szalay is in one of our editions of The Cherry Orchard.

Ranyevskaya and Gayev can no more deal with this crisis than the czars could deal with the conditions that would lead to the communist revolution only a few years later. Still less can they hear advice from Lopakhin, whose father was, after all, only a serf. Together with their equally impecunious neighbor and constant houseguest Pishchik (Neil Barclay), they all dither until the day of the auction, expecting, like Micawber, that something will “turn up.” 

What riveted us in this Cherry Orchard was the relationship between Ranavskaya and Lopakhin.  Even though Ranyevskaya still thinks of her wealthy friend as a peasant boy, she is, paradoxically, anxious for her stepdaughter Varya (Severn Thompson) to be married to this very man. 

Early in the play, Lopakhin remembers when, as a child, his drunken father bloodied his nose and Ranyevskaya washed him up, saying, “Don’t cry, little peasant; it’ll mend by your wedding day.” A footnote in one of my editions indicates that this is just a proverbial Russian phrase, but Chekhov’s use of it was no accident. Decades after the bloody-nose episode, Ranyevskaya is hoping to see Lopakhin married in earnest. Is she thinking only of how such an alliance could save them all from poverty?  Or does she also mean to patronize the grown-up peasant boy?  Would she and Gayev still be anxious to bestow Varya on Lopakhin if Varya’s father had been a nobleman, not merely a lawyer? 

And what of Lopakhin and his heart-breaking inability to propose to Varya? Before seeing this show, we chalked it up to the inability of any Russian in this play to act sensibly or decisively. But now it seems clear to us that Lopakhin cannot propose to Varya because he is, instead, in love with the unattainable Ranyevskaya. He agrees to speak to Varya only because, like a peasant, he can deny Ranyevskaya nothing to her face.  But there will be no wedding day; his peasant’s nose, figuratively speaking, will be bloodied and unmended for the rest of his life. 

Robin Evan Willis, Laurie Paton, Severn Thompson, Jim Mezon

The cast of The Cherry Orchard is the Shaw Festival’s “A” team. Jim Mezon overpowered a weaker cast last year in A Moon for the Misbegotten, but here, working with actors of the same rank, he is an ideal Gayev, a drone of a brother given to meaningless eloquence. As the much-abused Varya, Severn Thompson gives a nuanced, genuinely moving performance, the best we can remember seeing from her. Laurie Paton is finest of all as the tragic Ranyevskaya; every word, gesture, and glance from her tells. 

The family leaves the cherry orchard estate. Lajos Szalay's illustration: "Good-bye to the old life!"

We don’t know what to make of the fact that each of three shows we’ve seen so far this year at the Shaw Festival involves elements of magic. In Harvey, of course, the pooka himself is magical and the story is spiced with supernatural events. In One Touch of Venus, a statute transforms into a goddess who, in one scene, disappears like magic from a barber’s chair. And in The Cherry Orchard, Anya’s governess, Charlotta (Gabrielle Jones), who was raised among gypsies, performs magic tricks for the amusement of the family.

Emsworth’s take on the Shaw Festival’s production of the Kurt Weill musical One Touch of Venus is at this post. His review of the classic American comedy Harvey, also in repertory at the Shaw Festival, is at this post.

Emsworth’s pre-season thoughts on all the shows in the Shaw Festival’s 2010 season are at this post.

The Devil’s Disciple at the Shaw Festival

We hesitated before committing to The Devil’s Disciple this year because, frankly, we failed to see much in the play when we first saw it thirteen years ago. But friends were saying good things about the show, Evan Buliung was starring, and the play was, after all, supposed to be one of Shaw’s most popular. Maybe, we thought, we just didn’t get it thirteen years ago. Or maybe the 1996 production was under par.

Dick Dudgeon (Evan Buliung) has a troublesome moment as a prisoner of General Burgoyne's soldiers

So we went after all, and this one was well worth the price of admission. We still can’t rank The Devil’s Disciple with our very favorite Shaw plays, especially The Philanderer and Arms and the Man.  But this time around it struck us as one of Shaw’s wittiest.  And this particular show has some larger-than-life performances.  The play swept us along along so nicely that we weren’t bothered by the improbable twists of its plot.  We enjoyed it a lot.

The Devil’s Disciple is set in 1777, in the third year of the Revolutionary War, and centers around Dick Dudgeon (Evan Buliung), a young reprobate who is the black sheep of the Dudgeon family because of his impiety and his line of work (smuggling). (There are eight Dudgeons in the play, two of whom die shortly before the first act, and keeping them all straight is a bit of a challenge at first.) As the play begins, Dick’s puritanical mother (Donna Belleville, who gives a strong performance) gets the news of her husband’s death from the Presbyterian minister, Anthony Anderson (Peter Krantz).

Peter Krantz and Fiona Byrne as the Reverend and Mrs. Anderson

To his mother’s irritation, Dick shows up with the other relatives for the reading of his father’s will. He scandalizes his mother, shocks Lawyer Hawkins (Lorne Kennedy), and repels the minister’s devout, pretty wife (Fiona Byrne) by bragging about his allegiance to the devil. To Mrs. Dudgeon’s even greater consternation, her husband’s deathbed will and testament leaves everything to Dick.

But the British are coming! General Burgoyne’s army, invading from Canada, is just a few miles away and bent on making examples of rebel sympathizers. The Dudgeons all flee, except for Dick, who announces that he is going to join up with the rebels. When the redcoats march into town, their first order of business is to arrest Reverend Anderson for his seditious sermons. But when the soldiers arrive at his house, they mistake his visitor Dick for the Reverend. In the tradition of Sydney Carton, the gallant Dick does not undeceive them, nor does Mrs. Anderson.

Evan Buliung as Dick Dudgeon; the British still think he is Reverend Anderson at his "trial." The minister's wife, on the left, tries unsuccessfully not to interrupt

The soldiers arrest Dick and take him away to be hung. At the British headquarters, Dick meets General John Burgoyne (Jim Mezon) and his aide Major Swindon (Peter Millard). “Gentlemanly John” Burgoyne is unenthusiastic about the proposed execution and, indeed, about the British mission in America altogether:

BURGOYNE (throwing himself onto Swindon’s chair). It is making too much of the fellow to execute him. However, you have committed us to hanging him: and the sooner he is hanged the better.

SWINDON. We have arranged it for 12 o’clock. Nothing remains to be done except to try him.

The historical British General, John Burgoyne

When he wrote The Devil’s Disciple in 1896, Bernard Shaw hoped to meet the popular demand for melodrama, and indeed the play has a lot of that. Or so we suppose — we’re not sure we’ve ever actually seen a melodrama. Our notion is a moralistic story with a wicked, blasphemous villain, a virtuous young woman who must be preserved from a fate worse than death, dramatic scenes of unconsummated romance, a family lawyer’s reading of a will, and life-and-death suspense.

The Devil’s Disciple has all these cliched elements — but Shaw has made a comedy out of them. As Christians, we ought to feel cold shivers when we hear Dick Dudgeon’s blasphemies, but we don’t. We ought to fear for the purity of the minister’s wife when sparks begin to fly between her and the gallant Dick, but we don’t. We ought to shudder when they lead Dick to the gallows, but we don’t. The play’s light tone reassures us that things will come out all right in the end.

Dick Dudgeon has a noose around his neck

Not surprisingly for a play written by a Irishman about a war between England and its colonies, The Devil’s Disciple is devoid of anything like patriotic sentiment. Shaw reserves his satire mostly for the British and their pretensions of “duty” and “honor.” And he makes it clear that he thought American independence was inevitable, the British management of the war ludicrously incompetent, and the mutual slaughter senseless:

RICHARD. Let us cow them by showing that we can stand by one another to the death. That is the only force that can send Burgoyne back across the Atlantic and make America a nation.

JUDITH [the minister's wife] (impatiently) Oh, what does all that matter?

RICHARD (laughing). True: what does it matter? what does anything matter? You see, men have these strange notions, Mrs. Anderson; and women see the folly of them.

Hardly anything anyone says in this play can be taken at face value; Shaw means for us to judge the characters strictly by what they do. Mrs. Dudgeon claims vociferously to be a Christian, but Shaw (as he so often does to Christian believers in his plays) makes her a hypocrite; she bullies and abuses an orphan niece, feigns remorse at the news of her husband’s death, and tries to turn her own son from her door. Dick claims to be the devil’s disciple — but it is he who protects the orphan, saves the honor of a susceptible woman, and offers his life for his friend.

Evan Buliung and Jim Mezon as Dick Dudgeon and General Burgoyne

Evan Buliung is as rousing and dashing a Dick Dudgeon as anyone will ever see. But Jim Mezon as the heavy-jowled General Burgoyne — world-weary, clear-sighted, and practical — is wonderful; his scenes with Peter Millard (as Major Swindon) are superb. If Mezon is not the world’s finest actor of Shaw, he can’t have many rivals.

How could Shaw have expected his play to pass for a melodrama when he peopled it with such complex, multifaceted characters? In fact, we don’t think he did; in his script Shaw dropped a clue that he knew full well that his play wasn’t a melodrama at all:

BURGOYNE (suddenly becoming suavely sarcastic). May I ask are you writing a melodrama, Major Swindon?

SWINDON (flushing). No, sir.

Peter Millard as Major Swindon

Although Buliung is a mature and accomplished actor in his own right, we thought we detected the influence of the veteran Mezon in his performance. We’ve seen and heard Mezon many times on the Shaw Festival stages, and at several points Buliung seemed to be channeling Mezon’s distinctive inflections and delivery. He could do far worse.

Thoughts on other 2009 Shaw Festival productions:

Noël Coward’s Brief Encounters (see this post)
Noël Coward’s Ways of the Heart (see this post)
Noël Coward’s Play, Orchestra, Play (see this post)
Noël Coward’s Star Chamber (see this post)
Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George (see this post)
Garson Kanin’s classic American comedy Born Yesterday (see this post)
Left-wing ideology in Born Yesterday (see this post)
Eugene O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten (see this post)
“Nothing personal” from The Devil’s Disciple through The Godfather to Ted Kennedy (see this post)

A Moon for the Misbegotten at the Shaw Festival (a review)

Thanks to the battalions of gardeners employed by the local municipality, Queen Street was colorful as well as bustling on our first visit of the year to the Shaw Festival.

But the Shaw’s production of A Moon for the Misbegotten at the Courthouse Theater was a disappointment — all the more so because the Shaw’s production of Ah! Wilderness in 2004 was so good. How could two Eugene O’Neill plays with the same director (Joseph Ziegler) turn out so differently?

Ah! Wilderness was, of course, a comedy, while A Moon for the Misbegotten is mainly a melodrama. The real difference, though, was the cast. The ensemble that gave us Ah! Wilderness was of uniformly high quality; that can’t be said of the smaller cast of A Moon for the Misbegotten.

Here’s the plot: Hard-working, hard-drinking Irishman Phil Hogan (played by Jim Mezon) and his daughter Josie Hogan (Jenny Young) are long-time tenants on a rocky farm in Connecticut. Their alcoholic landlord, James Tyrone (David Jansen), has promised never to sell the property to anyone but them. However, a wealthy, polo-playing neighbor, T. Stedman Harder (Patrick McManus) covets the Hogan farm, not because he wants to farm it, but because Hogan’s pigs keep getting loose and fouling Harder’s ice pond. The Hogans worry that Harder will make Tyrone an offer for the farm that’s too good to refuse.

Meanwhile, there is something between Josie and Tyrone that may, or may not, be leading to marriage. Phil Hogan is preoccupied with whether the attraction between Tyrone and his daughter will ever come to anything. Josie’s reputation for sleeping around complicates matters, as does Tyrone’s constant drinking. Hogan devises a scheme to trap Tyrone into matrimony with his daughter.

Jim Mezon did not look nearly as respectable as this in A Moon for the Misbegotten

From the moment he takes the stage as Phil Hogan, filthy, sweaty, and disgusting from a long day in the fields, Jim Mezon towers over everything and everyone with his bear-like presence and endless torrent of words. Early in the play, the rich neighbor comes by the farm to complain about the pigs; Hogan bullies him, toys with him, triumphs over him, and drives him away with a barrage of mockery. This magnificent scene cried out for spontaneous applause, which surprisingly never came. (Emsworth is never brave enough to be the first to clap.)

And after that, the show (we saw one of the last preview performances) was never the same. Hogan retreated from sight into his farmhouse, and in the next scene, between James Tyrone and Josie, the show’s energy level dropped like a stone.

The problem was that one larger-than-life character is not enough for A Moon for the Misbegotten; the play needs three. Surely Josie should be every bit as forceful a character as her father. This is a character, after all, who not only has always been in control of her own sexuality, but who is more than a match for Phil Hogan, verbally and physically.  Jenny Young is simply not Josie, and at times her readings of her lines seemed — it pains us to say — amateurish.

Nor does she look the part. O’Neill conceived Josie as a large, slatternly woman just past the bloom of youth. Despite her loosely fitting costumes, Jenny Young was clearly pretty and petite. The amply-proportioned Nora McClellan (the long-time Shaw Festival actress who deserted to Stratford last year) had both the look and the stage presence and would have been superb in this role in her younger years.

David Jansen was disappointing last year as Horace in Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes (see Emsworth’s review); he was disappointing again this year as James Tyrone. Tyrone may be a drunk, but surely O’Neill didn’t intend him to be as colorless and ineffectual as this. Why would the strong-willed Josie even consider an alliance with such a man?

The Courthouse Theatre

From this production — especially from Jim Mezon — we saw just enough of O’Neill’s vision to have a sense of the power of the play. We can only imagine the impact A Moon for the Misbegotten could have had, with a different cast, in the intimate confines of the Courthouse Theater.

Emsworth reviews of other Shaw Festival productions in 2009:

Noël Coward’s Ways of the Heart (see this post)
Noël Coward’s Play, Orchestra, Play (see this post)
Noël Coward’s Star Chamber (see this post)
Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George (see this post)
Noël Coward’s Brief Encounters (see this post)