*possible mild spoilers*
I saw today's matinee and it came off as pretty disastrous. To begin, it seemed as if Ian Rickson directed the production with no concept in mind--the whole thing came off as half screwball comedy, half soap opera. Of the principals, only Michael Cerveris as Tesman projected a clear, well-delineated character; the rest of the leading players (save Helen Carey as Aunt Juliane, whom I hardly count as a major character) are out to sea. Mary-Louise Parker is doing her trademark thing and it just doesn't work here. She comes off as an insolent teenager who isn't getting her way, not a high-minded woman stifled by society and zeitgeist. Paul Sparks, oddly using a southern accent, couldn't have projected "passionate intellectual" any less. His seduction of Hedda at the end of Act One was about as fiery as a glacier. And Peter Stormare, whose accent sounded like a mixture of Katharine Hepburn and Groundskeeper Willie, appeared as if he was reciting his part by rote. No attempt at a character, as if he was simply trying to make it to the end of the performance. (How did an actor whose English sounds so poor get cast in a leading role on Broadway? I know he has worked in the US for many years, but his diction just isn't good enough for live theatre.) I won't even mention Ana Reeder's Thea--it seemed like she had been pulled off the street ten minutes before curtain and thrown into the production.
The only thing worth saying about Christopher Shinn's translation/adaptation is that it's unremarkable in nearly every way. In full disclosure, I've never been a fan of his work, but he does have a reputation for being a somewhat daring young writer. His text sounded as if it had been written in the fifties, under a censorship code. Absolutely nothing exciting about it.
"You travel alone because other people are only there to remind you how much that hook hurts that we all bit down on. Wait for that one day we can bite free and get back out there in space where we belong, sail back over water, over skies, into space, the hook finally out of our mouths and we wander back out there in space spawning to other planets never to return hurrah to earth and we'll look back and can't even see these lives here anymore. Only the taste of blood to remind us we ever existed. The earth is small. We're gone. We're dead. We're safe."
-John Guare, Landscape of the Body
Updated On: 1/10/09 at 11:46 PM
