Tynan's Anger

Some actors would worry about building their career on the portrayal of a psychopath. Mental instability is one of the quickest paths to being typecast, and while it’s built some careers (Christopher Walken), it’s destroyed others (Anthony Perkins).

Bill Connington is the creator and star of the bone-chilling, critically lauded adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ 1995 novella Zombie.  (The show opened at Theater Row on Saturday after a stint at the 2008 NYC Fringe Festival.)  Connington admitted that “people tend to look at you and see something you do well.” What separates Connington’s Quentin P. from any run-of–the-mill serial killer you can see every week on Law & Order is what he described as the “bland, methodical personality of someone you wouldn’t look at twice,” yet who is capable of committing horribly gruesome acts — homemade lobotomies, child molestations, murders — with absolutely no remorse.

Connington, who grew up in Cincinnati but received his training at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, was drawn to the British system because he found it “very practical and pragmatic” in terms of voice and body work. Connington made sure to point out that “I am not a method actor” and noted, “It’s part of my personality to have an approach that is a little more objective.” When playing a character as violently disturbed and sociopathic as Quentin P., keeping a relative distance from his performance may be in Connington’s best interest. “I feel so bad when I hear about Heath Ledger and how he basically played two psychotics in a row. I mean it will always affect you somehow, but the British have this thing about leaving it in the theater…I’ve read that Boris Karloff, with all the terrible characters he played, was apparently the gentlest, nicest guy.”

Zombie was as much of an intellectual challenge for Connington as it was a theatrical one. His previous one-man show, Dating Rituals of the American Male, was a quirky work of indie theater that explored ten different characters from ten different decades in reverse chronological order. Connington then set out to adapt a work of literature by a great living American author.  He had originally desired to produce a series of short stories as monologues. After first choosing eight of Oates’ hundreds of short stories to adapt, he read Zombie at Oates’ own suggestion.

Oates had originally intended Zombie for the theater, but its eventual length turned it first into a New Yorker short story and then a novella. The book received mixed reviews upon publication and has been out of print for several years (Ecco is republishing it in September), but Connington described Zombie as “the only thing I’ve read as an adult that actually made me frightened.” Connington told me he could only get through the first three-quarters of the book after reading it the first time. 

The ability to create that sense of terror for adults in the theater is similarly rare, but Connington’s adaptation produced some of the strongest reactions of any show in the 2008 NYC Fringe Festival. Audiences were legitimately terrified; at the matinee production I saw, a mostly elderly audience had dropped jaws in a mix of shock and revulsion. Connington describes one moment towards the end of the play where he consistently receives from the audience a “particular sound” of “an intake of air followed by a sardonic half-laugh,” which I remember hearing as well. He described the key to getting this response as similar to radio theater, “where the horror takes place in your mind.”

On the phone, Connington was charming, humble, and completely different from the character he inhabited on stage. But as much as his methodical approach to acting distanced him from forming a personal connection to Quentin, it also created a strange level of synergy with the character. “The scary thing,” Connington told me incredulously, “was that I had an immediate understanding of Quentin.” Midway into the rehearsal process, director Thomas Caruso pointed out to Connington that the actor had not asked Caruso for one single character note. “Maybe I should be worried about that?” Connington joked. In fact, the play's staging, a table and a couple of chairs with a notably eerie blow-up doll as a stand-in for Quentin’s multiple failed zombies, were all conceived by Connington immediately.  He had never even considered taking the play out of the monologue format, as Oates herself had feared he might do in the adaptation process.

As for a possible explanation for the actor-character synergy, Connington mentioned with notable neutrality that “we’ve all met a lot of narcissists in our lives, and Quentin is a narcissist to the nth, nth, nth degree…this is a guy who doesn’t realize that other people have thoughts that are separate from him.  A lot of the time, he doesn’t mean to be mean, he’s just totally oblivious.” There’s a fine line between detachment and utter lack of empathy, and while Connington was disturbed by how natural it was to tap into that side of Quentin, he made sure to note that many audience members were even more disturbed to learn that they too could follow Quentin’s logic very easily. 

In fact, the greatest accomplishment of Oates’ novella, which Connington’s production also succeeds in getting across, is that even with the horrible acts Quentin is capable of committing and shamelessly admitting to in his diaries, his way of thinking is not something completely alien to human reason, but perhaps just a side of humanity that is rarely expressed in such a grisly way. One of the major themes in Oates’ prolific career has been exploring the darkest recesses of human experience to find its traces in humanity’s roots.

"When I first told people I was adapting a work [about] a serial killer," Connington said, "the common reaction was ‘how could anyone do something so horrible?’…I’ll be very interested to see what psychiatrists who come to see the show have to say."

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Zombie runs through March 29 at Theater Row, 410 West 42nd Street, between 9th and 10th Aves. Tickets can be purchased at TicketCentral.com. This interview was originally published on Blogcritics

Labels: bill connington, evil, interviews, joyce carol oates, method acting, nyc fringe festival, play adaptations, stanislavsky, theatre row, zombie

(This review was originally published on Blogcritics)

What is Doubt about? Fundamentally, it’s not about anything particularly Catholic, or any mundane detail of the mortal world for that matter. That would be the “parable” side of the play’s original title Doubt: A Parable. Both the play and the movie are about a much more universal dilemma that plagues any system of beliefs: that certainty, or “faith,” is an emotion—a particularly strong one at that—that fundamentally concerns itself with factual matters. Rather than be a roadblock to certainty, doubt is actually what provides faith’s engine. A stronger, absolute conviction better allows you to avoid the pain of uncertainty, which, on a mortal level, is the pain of being alive.

That struggle is tested in a variety of ways by every character in Doubt (except for the gloriously ignorant children) as the possibility of a priest molestation case is raised. There’s no evidence for or against it, but the faith behind either point of view is absolute, irrefutable, and entirely a product of the circumstances. The fact that John Patrick Shanley could reduce that crisis of faith to characters—without making those characters archetypes—is what makes Doubt one of this generation’s greatest dramas. With everyone in both the theater and cinematic world worried about adapting the play to film, we should thank our lucky stars that, no matter what problems in adaptation take place, that core struggle is not lost in translation.

One of the inevitabilities of adapting the play to film is that the specific setting of Doubt will inevitably grow more dominant. That same problem turned the adaptation of Wit, another intellectually astute Pulitzer Prize winning play, into a film that would better be named Cancer. Here, John Patrick Shanley, who directs his own screenplay adaptation, turns Doubt into something of a post-Vatican II period piece. Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep) is a hard-ass stereotypical Catholic school principal nun, and Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is the hotshot, progressive young priest who smokes, takes three lumps of sugar with his tea, and most egregiously, writes with a ballpoint pen. To a modern day audience, the general politics will immediately endear the audience to Father Flynn.

More sinister, however, is the glaring political issue that won’t sway audiences against Flynn. Doubt’s feminist streak is almost impossible to ignore. It rings much stronger in the movie than the racial tension that was emphasized more strongly in the play. Despite a stunning one-off performance by Viola Davis as the mother of the boy in question, in the film of Doubt, Shanley lets the boy’s face in contrast to his peers do most of the talking. That frees up Shanley to focus on the much more fascinating gender dynamics of the Catholic church, which remained virtually unchanged even after Vatican II. The Church is still a patriarchy, and the nuns still have to answer to the old boys club of the pontificate. This emphasis turns Aloysius' campaign in Doubt into something of a feminist underdog story, where the beaten and outmatched nuns have to outwit the much stronger men. Like the first Rocky, the end result is a Pyrrhic victory at best.

Your sympathies in Doubt will inevitably be swayed by whichever character in the play you sympathize with the most. If you’re someone who has the ability to manipulate a situation, whether consciously or not, you will most likely think Father Flynn was blindly attacked. If, like me, you have no patience for manipulation and can’t stand even the hint of it, Aloysius is your girl. In fact, Aloysius represents everything some people wish they could say in a similar situation. If we did, however, we’d end up just as powerless as Aloysius ends up. To me, the debate over whether the molestation occurred—which has taken off in hyping the film—has the same streak as debating the woman’s role in acquaintance rape—it’s as if the circumstance, uncertainty and consequences of an accusation cause people to downplay the act’s heinousness.

The feminist side of the play is handled masterfully by Amy Adams and especially Meryl Streep, who by all accounts is on her way to yet another Oscar nomination at the very least. Adams deserves a supporting nod too, serving as an almost play-by-play conscience throughout the movie as the young, idealistic Sister James. At the beginning of the movie, she wakes up in a scene that may as well be an outtake from the Disney world side of Enchanted. By the end, she's much colder, worn out by the sleepless nights wrestling with struggles in her faith. Sister James’s development mirrors the transition from childhood to adulthood. Her transition from innocence (naïvete) to something harder (more practical) is something every reasonably intelligent person goes through in their lifetime. More so even than Enchanted, Adams looks like a fanciful heroine thrown into the harsh realities of the most definitely non-fanciful real world. Ultimately, however, Sister James is unable to fully accept those realities—she’s willing to give up peaceful sleep for her undying need to feel love.

Love does not enter into the equation for Streep’s Sister Aloysius, who buried her sense of compassion when she buried her husband during World War II. Streep’s Aloysius is one who “knows people,” which essentially means people’s weaknesses, temptations, and occasionally, evil. She can see right through Father Flynn’s ugly manipulations, and maintains her certainty without flinching throughout the film. I never thought I’d be able to see the role with anyone other than Cherry Jones at the helm, but Streep is as much a natural for this role as she is for any role she’s taken in years. Streep’s constant speech manipulations often overshadow her unparalleled ability to adapt to the body mannerisms and attitude of whatever role she takes. But Sister Aloysius is a role that plays to all her strengths: she commands authority, but is powerless against the patriarchy. She is absolutely steadfast in her righteousness, but still vulnerable to her past and her image among the school community. It’s her best performance of the decade, and I wouldn’t be afraid of saying it may be her best ever.

The one place where Streep falters, however is the moment where the play was most moving. After engrossing herself in a shut off, bitter state of mind, Streep can’t seem to handle Aloysius’s final breakdown, where she declares, “I has so many doubts! I have such, such doubts!” Forget August: Osage County’s “I’m running things now!”, Doubt’s last line is the greatest, most cathartic one-liner in American theater this decade. Here, Streep can't fully lets herself go without seeming artificial and forced. This cannot be blamed on Shanley’s direction; Streep’s too much of a professional not to be able to handle this herself. The larger issue, it seems, is that a line that boomed throughout an entire Broadway theater can’t resonate the same way to an audience divided from the action with a screen. Rather than blame some of the film's the flatness on Shanley, the cast, or the act of adapting the play, maybe we should blame these problems on the nature of film itself. Thankfully, those flaws are not enough to hold back this masterpiece of a story.

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Written and directed by John Patrick Shanley; based on his play; director of photography, Roger Deakins; edited by Dylan Tichenor; music by Howard Shore; production designer, David Gropman; produced by Scott Rudin and Mark Roybal; released by Miramax Films. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. Photos by Andrew D. Schwartz.

WITH: Meryl Streep (Sister Aloysius Beauvier), Philip Seymour Hoffman (Father Brendan Flynn), Amy Adams (Sister James), Viola Davis (Mrs. Miller), Joseph Foster II (Donald Miller), Alice Drummond (Sister Veronica), Audrie Neenan (Sister Raymond), Susan Blommaert (Mrs. Carson), Carrie Preston (Christine Hurley) and John Costelloe (Warren Hurley).

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Labels: Amy Adams, Cherry Jones, doubt, john patrick shanley, meryl streep, oscars, philip seymour hoffman, play adaptations, pulitzer prize, viola davis

(This review was originally published on Blogcritics.)

I've seen a lot of off-off-Broadway and workshop productions in the past year that have played with meta-theatricality, political symbolism and reworking classics. Some have utterly failed, some have been more successful, and some I've positively reviewed. After seeing Rising Phoenix Company's Too Much Memory at the New York Theatre Workshop, however, I've found exactly what I've been looking for but have failed to find all this time: a truly honest, tough but fair, and remarkably intelligent play that didn't implicitly apologize for its very existence.

Perhaps the smartest thing Too Much Memory does is start the play by setting humorous but very important ground rules. With no attempt to create a fourth wall (actors even greet their friends in the audience while waiting for the play to start), the "Chorus" (Martin Moran) describes the play as "an adaptation of an adaption of a retranslation" of Antigone, while wisecracking with his fellow actors. But within this explanation of the theatrical ground rules is one of the best explanations of the nature of adaptation I've ever heard:

A director can take a Greek play and have people come on riding motorcycles, come in on motorized scenery. We don't have that kind of room. There's a hundred ways in which you can bring something into the present. We have that freedom, but like I said, in today's world, things being what they are, I think we also have an obligation. To speak up.

How I wish every other company in New York City believed this! Incidentally, that statement works equally well for coping with tragedy. Tragedy, Moran points out later, never ends well—one of things that makes tragedy so upsetting is how inevitable and arbitrary the process is in creating a tragedy. That lack of justice applies equally well for politics, which is what ties this adaptation of an adaptation of a retranslation of Antigone together.

In previous generations, it was the responsibility of the young to speak up, and responsibility of the old to react when the young had a point. Now, with a generation taught that the system of justice is hopelessly arbitrary, that instinct to speak up has been silenced by the same people who initially were doing just that. Playwrights Keith Redden and Meg Gibson have recognized that while justice and laws may not follow any logical standards, the instinct to speak up, to fight against injustice no matter how pointless, can never fully be overcome. They're lucky to have a 2000-year old play that almost too perfectly fits those beliefs.

Unlike almost any other tragic hero or heroine, Antigone recognizes the fate that will follow her actions from start to finish. By pursuing what she believes is right, she has no doubts about the repercussions of her actions, unlike Hamlet, Willy Loman, or even her father Oedipus. Antigone knew that she was to die by sticking to her principles. In Sophocles, she died without almost ever flinching.

Sticking with your beliefs until death is an infatuating concept, but it's more martyrdom than tragedy. In most other versions of Antigone, it's Creon who takes the brunt of the tragedy when his son Haemon and wife Eurydice commit suicide. In this version, Antigone is the most affected by the tragedy, but with a path to tragedy in reverse. At first resigned to death, she ultimately breaks down in remorse as she realizes the full implications of giving up her life for an idea. Ideas can go on without her. It's Antigone's real emotions—her love for Haemon, her hopes for the future—that can never be reclaimed with her death. Conversely, instead of feeling any remorse, Creon ends up resigned to the fate of his principles, even after his own tragedies befall him.

This confounding vision of tragedy and political philosophy could be too much to take at once if it wasn't handled as deftly by Reddin and Gibson, who resist all instincts to turn the play into a lecture. That's why the introduction was so useful—it allowed for the audience to look pastthe ideas of the show by laying out those ideas out immediately. As a result of the honesty of this adaptation, none of the show's political imagery to the present seems forced, nor do its occasional fits of fancy seemed misplaced (though in one misstep in Gibson's direction, she makes a superfluous allusions to waterboarding). The device recalls Our Town, but rather than be a detached omniscient Stage Manager, Moran claims no responsibility or predetermined knowledge for what comes from the rest of the play. Instead, he tries to make sense of what's happening on stage as it happens. For this production, as in life, that's the best anyone can do.

All that would make Too Much Memory a clever, exciting play on an intellectual level. The play's moving, visceral edge comes almost entirely from Laura Heisler's absolutely life-affirming performance as Antigone. I first saw Heisler steal the show in an otherwise unimaginative Williamstown production of Top Girls in 2005. After making a career out of playing mentally unstable and vulnerable young girls, Heisler is stunning and tear-jerking throughout Too Much Memory, flawlessly managing an Antigone whose emotional range varies between adolescent incorrigibility, young love, and tragic devastation at almost a moment's notice. In the Village Voice back in May, Heisler seemed surprised at how often she gets cast as a teenager. In a performance like Antigone, in which she singe-handedly ratchets up the play to a level of transcendence, there should be no doubt that Heisler has the ability to capture the indignant, righteous, and confused nature of youth to a level that, other than perhaps Zoe Kazan, is simply unrivaled among today's American stage actresses.

The play makes uses of texts from Richard Nixon, Pablo Neruda, Peter Brook, Susan Sontag, and Hannah Arendt, but those quotes are so seamlessly integrated into the text that only the most obsessed individuals will recognize where they pop up. Again, there are infinite ways to adapt of Sophocles, just like there are infinite ways Nixon (and the range of Nixon adaptations is already staggering). But this is an adaptation that has something important to say, which is rarer than you think it is.

In this case, the political symbolism takes a back seat to what this play says about the nature adaptation. It's true that ideas last longer than individual life or adaptation. But to the play's creators, the fleetingness of an individual life or adaptation may actually make it more valuable. That ideas persist doesn't mean they ever get settled, but the human need to resolve them is an essential part of our existence. That Reddin and Gibson see this view in all its complexity makes Too Much Memory one the most vital theatrical adaptations of the present day, and one of the most intelligent adaptations I've ever seen. No matter whether you're resigned or perpetually frustrated by politics, philosophy, or any other aspect of human life, there's a side to Too Much Memory that will make you think differently. And that's the best thing any adaptation can ever do.

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Too Much Memory by Keith Reddin and Meg Gibson, adapted from an adaptation of a retranslation of Antigone by Sophocles; directed by Gibson; set design by Ola Maslik; costume design by Clint Ramos; lighting design by Joel Moritz; sound design by Brandon Epperson; video design by Joseph Tekkipe. Photos by Paula Court.

Starring Martin Moran (Chorus), Laura Heisler (Antigone), Aria Alpert (Ismene), Seth Numrich (Haemon), Peter Jay Fernandez (Creon), Ray Anthony Thomas (Jones), Jamel Rodriguez (Barnes/Messenger), MacLeod Andrews (Stuart), and Wendy vanden Heuvel (Eurydice).

Too Much Memory runs through December 22 at New York Theatre Workshop's Fourth Street Theatre, 83 East 4th Street. Tickets can be purchased at www.smarttix.com.

Labels: 2008-2009, Antigone, blogcritics, keith redden, laura heisler, me gibson, new york theatre workshop, play adaptations, rising phoenix repertory, Sophocles, theater review, too much memory

I guess it takes a Pulitzer Prize or a Best Play Tony to get a play made into a movie these days. First, there's the news that August: Osage County will be made into a movie. No doubt several top notch actors will be dying to get a part. Then we get this brilliant poster design for the Doubt movie. The film has Oscars written all over it, and I'll be damned if it doesn't inspire some serious interest in straight plays on Broadway. Will a trickle down effect occur?

All in all, it's looking like an exciting time for the legit side of the Great White Way.

Labels: august: osage county, doubt, movies, play adaptations