#1
Posted: 12/29/07 at 11:56am
From Isherwood in tomorrow's Sunday Times Arts & Leisure:
"Much has been written about the wondrous abundance of straight plays on Broadway this fall, and three cheers for that comeback. But plays don’t perform themselves, and the most inspiring story of the season may be the return to the center spotlight of that undersung asset, the actor.
Undersung? Well, I’m not talking about stars, those increasingly ubiquitous beings whose every visit to a Starbucks leaves eddies of paparazzi photos in its wake. I’m talking about hard-working, little-heralded stage performers who ply their trade without personal publicists and who may not possess the youth or glamour increasingly prized in the theater as in the movies.
Actors like Jim Norton, who has been bringing detailed truth and understated pathos to the plays of the Irish writer Conor McPherson for years and is appearing in Mr. McPherson’s “Seafarer” at the Booth. Actors like Amy Morton, a stalwart veteran of the Steppenwolf Theater Company whose fiercely felt turn as an abandoned wife and abused daughter is integral to the power of Tracy Letts’s “August: Osage County” at the Imperial. Actors like David Pittu, whose name is known to few but who is a key ingredient in the improbable appeal of the “new” Mark Twain play “Is He Dead?” at the Lyceum.
Individually these performers and the many others appearing alongside them are doing first-rate work. But great ensemble acting always adds up to more than the sum of its parts. It transports and transforms, and it illuminates the vital importance of collaboration in the complicated art of making theater.
The material these great acting teams are performing is varied in tone and quality. Harold Pinter’s “Homecoming,” at the Cort, is from the canon of well-thumbed 20th-century masterworks. Mr. Letts’s “August” is a pop classic in the making. “The Seafarer” is a flawed work from a writer of immense talent. The Twain play, meanwhile, is an out-and-out stinker, and not just because the plot turns on a hunk of Limburger cheese. But all these plays benefit from acting that illuminates their strengths and in some cases masks or even obliterates any immediate awareness of the writing’s limitations."
Click here for the whole article
"Much has been written about the wondrous abundance of straight plays on Broadway this fall, and three cheers for that comeback. But plays don’t perform themselves, and the most inspiring story of the season may be the return to the center spotlight of that undersung asset, the actor.
Undersung? Well, I’m not talking about stars, those increasingly ubiquitous beings whose every visit to a Starbucks leaves eddies of paparazzi photos in its wake. I’m talking about hard-working, little-heralded stage performers who ply their trade without personal publicists and who may not possess the youth or glamour increasingly prized in the theater as in the movies.
Actors like Jim Norton, who has been bringing detailed truth and understated pathos to the plays of the Irish writer Conor McPherson for years and is appearing in Mr. McPherson’s “Seafarer” at the Booth. Actors like Amy Morton, a stalwart veteran of the Steppenwolf Theater Company whose fiercely felt turn as an abandoned wife and abused daughter is integral to the power of Tracy Letts’s “August: Osage County” at the Imperial. Actors like David Pittu, whose name is known to few but who is a key ingredient in the improbable appeal of the “new” Mark Twain play “Is He Dead?” at the Lyceum.
Individually these performers and the many others appearing alongside them are doing first-rate work. But great ensemble acting always adds up to more than the sum of its parts. It transports and transforms, and it illuminates the vital importance of collaboration in the complicated art of making theater.
The material these great acting teams are performing is varied in tone and quality. Harold Pinter’s “Homecoming,” at the Cort, is from the canon of well-thumbed 20th-century masterworks. Mr. Letts’s “August” is a pop classic in the making. “The Seafarer” is a flawed work from a writer of immense talent. The Twain play, meanwhile, is an out-and-out stinker, and not just because the plot turns on a hunk of Limburger cheese. But all these plays benefit from acting that illuminates their strengths and in some cases masks or even obliterates any immediate awareness of the writing’s limitations."
Click here for the whole article
"What a story........ everything but the bloodhounds snappin' at her rear end." -- Birdie
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