Reviews 2000
Reviews 2000
✭✭✭✩✩
by Donald Margulies, directed by William Carden
Stratford Festival, Tom Patterson Theatre, Stratford
July 28-September 2, 2000
“Go to See Uta Hagen, Not the Play”
In announcing its 2000 season the publicity department of the Stratford Festival loudly proclaimed that legendary actress Uta Hagen would be “joining the Stratford Festival company”. This is rather an overstatement. Neither Hagen nor her co-star Lorca Simons appear in any other Stratford production other than Donald Margulies’ 1996 play “Collected Stories”. The director, designer, sound designer and even the stage manager are all from the original off-Broadway production. Only the lighting designer, Michael Whitfield, is associated with the Stratford and was used since he knows the lighting boards for the Tom Patterson Theatre. The production in Stratford is thus merely a month-long stop-over of a play that has been touring the US Northeast since its run ended on Broadway. Unlike the Australian actress Pamela Rabe, who does appear in a play other than her one-woman show “A Room of One’s Own” at the Shaw Festival, Uta Hagen can in no way be said to have “joined” the Stratford company.
What strikes one first on entering the Tom Patterson Theatre is that the set is definitely not a Stratford set. It is highly naturalistic, overdecorated and in its design of a combined living room/dining room/study immediately calls to mind the sets of any number of TV sitcoms. Windows, bookcases, tables and desks are placed on the periphery of the thrust stage with no concern for the sight-lines of anyone sitting in the front row on any of the three sides. If you plan to see the show, make sure your seat is in at least the second row. The set is well-lit by Michael Whitfield, with an especially nice sequence of extinguished lamps at the end, but presumably he is reproducing the lighting plans used for other stops on the tour.
In seeing Uta Hagen in “Collected Stories”, you will be seeing a great actress in a play that is far from great. The six scenes of the play chart the relationship of two women--Ruth Steiner (Hagen), a famed short story writer and teacher, and Lisa Morrison (Simons), an enthusiastic graduate student who becomes Steiner’s assistant and friend and whose own success as a writer Steiner helps to foster. The crisis comes in the sixth scene when Steiner discovers that Morrison has used information about Steiner’s private life as the subject for her first novel. In the self-aggrandizing programme note, Margulies says that the plot was inspired by the David Leavitt-Stephen Spender controversy.
The “universal truth” Margulies sees in his play is pretty much absent from its first five scenes which remain within the realm of a well-written sitcom full of one-liners and topical references that have already become dated. Incredibly, Margulies seriously uses the Woody Allen-Soon-Yi Previn affair to establish the play’s theme. Then in the sixth and last scene when the women argue over when a person’s life becomes merely “material” for fiction, Margulies rapidly flips through the recent academic vocabulary of political correctness, dropping such concepts as appropriating voices, giving voice to the disenfranchised, transgressing borders, postfeminism and the like. (Margulies teaches at Yale.) Rather than making the play seem universal, this concept dropping without development seems more like a last-minute attempt to convince the audience that what till now has been a sitcom is actually supposed to be taken seriously. It also effectively narrows the meaning of the play to a kind of essay topic: “By publishing a novel based on Steiner’s life, Morrison has stolen Steiner’s property. Discuss”. In so doing, Margulies, this year’s winner of the Pulitzer Prize, follows the clichéd formula of Broadway and now off-Broadway plays--”Make ‘em laugh, make ‘em cry, give ‘em some meaning and send ‘em out in two and a half hours”.
Despite the formulaic nature of the play and Margulies’ decision to hold off on giving us our dose of “meaning” until the last 20 minutes, the performances of both Hagen and Simons are excellent. Hagen, now in her 80s, is famous for creating the role of Martha in Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and for two respected books on acting. Her command of technique and timing are still in evidence, although she seems unwilling to project her voice until the big confrontation in the last scene. This means that people will find her hard to hear.
There is no such problem with her co-star, Lorca Simons, except that since Hagen is so soft, Simons seems too loud. Hagen helps to make Steiner--yet another example of the new stereotype of the feisty, cantankerous senior--into a more rounded character. She successfully ages Steiner over the six years covered by the action without relying on any of the clichéd mannerisms most actors would use. She makes Steiner’s long revelation in scene three concerning her affair with the poet Delmore Schwartz the dramatic high point of the play. Lorca Simons is well matched with Hagen. She effectively portrays the awkward, culturally ignorant graduate student who in her adulation of Steiner can’t seem to put a foot right to please her and makes her character subtly mature until she can later confront her former mentor on an equal footing.
Given the nature of the play, director William Carden draws fine performances from the two actresses though his sense of pace and timing may strike some as too slick. He makes little use of the front quarter of the Tom Paterson stage, so that I would recommended sitting in the side seats rather than in the centre section unless you don’t mind being rather far from the action.
If your goal in seeing “Collected Stories” is to see an intellectually stimulating recent American play, you will be disappointed. If, however, your main goal is to see Uta Hagen on stage while she is still fit enough for a full-length role, then do so by all means. Seeing her have such command now even with an unprojected voice will make you wish you could have seen her in her famous roles of the 1960s and ‘70s.
©Christopher Hoile
Photo: Uta Hagen as Ruth Steiner. ©2000 Stratford Festival.
2000-08-22
Collected Stories