Ave, Albee! Ave Antush!

I know, I know--the late Edward Albee would hate my focusing on his 1962 play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in writing about him, but I'm afraid I can't help it. You see, when I read the play in my Modern American Drama class at Fordham--

--Half a mo. I'm afraid another grace note has to creep in here. You see, the professor for that class, John V. Antush, died at the end of August, and deserves a look in. He was a gentleman who was also a gentle man, and yet he pushed you in class. (I took both Modern American Drama and Modern European Drama with Dr. Antush, so I know what I'm talking about.) For example, in MAD, when we covered Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, he made the almost entirely white class read lengthy extracts of the play. He assigned me to read the sequence in Act III when the African-American Walter Lee Younger is tempted to take the money offered him not to move to a white neighborhood, and practices doing it, "in profoundly anguished imitation of the slow-witted movie stereotype." It was bloody harrowing for me, and I think, the other members of the class. Which, I strongly suspect, was the bloody point. But Dr. Antush also expanded our horizons in more pleasant ways. He arranged for the MAD class to see Talley & Son in its first NYC production, and to participate in a Q-and-A wit the class. I've never known anyone more in love with the theater's ability to bring empathy and to open new vistas.

--but I digress. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? blew my mind in college, sufficiently so that when I got the chance to do my first show as a director, that's what I picked. The rights fell through, and something else had to be done (a director's workshop, a miscellany of plays with several students directing excerpts from their favorite plays--you know, I'm really much better when helping others to try to realize their ambitions than when playing a lone hand.) But the play held my mind--and my heart (not sentimentally, more in the "did they really do that?" vein. Years later, I saw the Steppenwolf production excerpted up top with good theater buddy Karen Clark, and saw what seems to me almost the platonic idea of Albee's richest (to me) play. Frothy and funny to start, with the laugh lines suddenly becoming cruel, and the jokes no longer funny, and then--Martha and George are wounding each other (and Nick and Honey, as collateral damage) with, to steal a phrase from T.H. White, "words, their cruel bright weapons," which had so lately been funny, now laying waste.

My other Albee highlight was appearing in a student film of The Zoo Story as Peter. It was the last acting I've done, or am likely to do. It was--interesting. Finding Peter, his anxiety and conformity, and being challenged to the character's breaking point--yeah, Albee (and a very gifted student director, and a helluva Jerry) got a good performance out of this uncured (to date) ham.

"It's Only With the Heart that One Can See Clearly. What's Essential is Invisible to the Eye."-- The Fox: Gene Wilder (1933-2016)

Today's news that Gene Wilder has died hits home:

Gene Wilder, who established himself as one of America’s foremost comic actors with his delightfully neurotic performances in three films directed by Mel Brooks; his eccentric star turn in the family classic “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory”; and his winning chemistry with Richard Pryor in the box-office smash “Stir Crazy,” died on Sunday night at his home in Stamford, Conn. He was 83.

Eric Weissmann, who was Mr. Wilder’s lawyer for many years, confirmed the death. A nephew, Jordan Walker-Pearlman, said that the cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease.

Mr. Wilder’s rule for comedy was simple: Don’t try to make it funny; try to make it real. “I’m an actor, not a clown,” he said more than once.

With his haunted blue eyes and an empathy born of his own history of psychic distress, he aspired to touch audiences much as Charlie Chaplin had. The Chaplin film “City Lights,” he said, had “made the biggest impression on me as an actor; it was funny, then sad, then both at the same time.”

And that was the brilliance of the man. He inhabited his characters as fully as if they had been written by Shakespeare. His vulnerability to their sorrows, their fears, and their hopes (there's a reason why some Nietzsche thought hope was the last and greatest evil in Pandora's Box), brought a dimension of complexity to his roles, that adds the meat to his films, however uproarious they are.

When I was about 10 or 11, our parents took my sister and me to see Young Frankenstein. It's one of those golden movies of my childhood that is evergreen and forever altered who I am, like Lester's "Musketeers Diptych" (yes, I know about the third one, but it's not at the same level).

That's not because of Mel Brooks's rapid-fire gags (which are great, don't get me wrong--if there's a funnier movie, I have not seen it). It's Gene.

Wilder plays Frederick Frankenstein (that's pronounced Frah-nkenstein) as a genius surgeon who is haunted by the obloquy of his grandfather's infamous madness (nobody believes in the Monster, of course). When he creates his own Monster, though, he slowly goes from comic terror of "the Creature" to compassion, finally risking his life to save it.

And the sincerity of the performance works; stripped to its essence, remove the most obvious schtick, and you have a worthy successor to James Whale's Bride of Frankenstein (1935).

There's a line I half remember from the liner notes to High Anxiety: Mel Brooks' Greatest Hits, I think written by composer John Morris, in which he says that the parody and the purity of his score were meant to work in counterpart, the lush violin anchoring the "spooky house" cues:



That's a great analogy to how Wilder plays the part. How he played all his parts. Willy Wonka can be bloody scary, all rage and venom (albeit funny at the same time), only because he's so real underneath:



In The Last Hurrah, the dying Frank Skeffington asks his absurdly loyal, clueless aide "Ditto" the question: How do you thank a man for a million laughs? That's my question tonight, but only in part; laughter is the least of what I owe Gene Wilder.

Requiescat in pace.

The Hour You Can’t Afford to Miss: An Acting Masterclass

I recently discovered The Hour, the 1950's-set backstage drama focusing around a pioneering female producer creating and then developing a "60 minutes" stele news program. (Anyone who thinks the notion of the BBC giving a show to a woman in the late 50's is inherently unrealistic should bear in mind that a mere 7 years after the setting of Series 1, Verity Lambert was the creating producer of the new series Doctor Who).

The Hour is well-written, with an appealing group of flawed characters played by--and this is the real draw--stunningly good actors. I mean, seriously, the cast is standout. Romola Garai is excellent as Bel Rowley, the fledgling producer, ably supported by Ben Wishaw as irritant-brilliant-young-journalist/love interest Freddie Lyon. The love triangle (quadrilateral, really) is completed by Dominic West as presenter Hector Madden, originally promoted through family connections, but who struggles to prove himself, and Oona Chaplin as his wife Marnie. Rounding out the core cast is the incomparable Anna Chancellor as veteran newswoman Lix Storm, who makes the quadrilateral into a pentagon with a naturally louche air.

Series 1 is good (if a tad incestuous), but the show catches fire in season 2.

I want to talk about one plot thread--really, one scene--in series 2, because it is, to me, a masterclass in fine acting, but I can't do so without revealing key plot twists. So be aware….



The scene in question involves Anna Chancellor's Lix Storm and a new character added for series 2, Randall Brown, portrayed by the inimitable Peter Capaldi. Brown, a sober alcoholic with what appears to be OCD, has accepted the position of Head of News at the BBC. He's firm but fair, diagnoses Hector's problem drinking with the knowledge of experience, and challenges but ultimately supports the team. And he spars with Lix, with whom he clearly has deep history--she "steals" and returns his books to which he reacts by simply thanking her, mocks his "fiddling" to his face, but defends him to a shocked Bel.

We later find that Randall took the post to reestablish contact with Lix, and trace the daughter who resulted from their affair in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. This plot thread doesn't spring out at us all at once. It's foreshadowed in series 1 where Lix describes her own past:

Lix: Ah, Bel. Is Freddie in? He just asked me to do something for him.
Bel: What?
Lix: Oh, nothing; it can wait.

***
Bel: But what did he ask you to do for him?
Lix: Oh, he wanted some information on Peter Darrell. It’s nothing, darling. His heart is still with you.
Bel: We’re just friends.
Lix: Of course. I had a friend once. Treated him like a dog. Adorable man; absolutely useless at seduction. Then he married someone else and I realized it wasn’t him that was absolutely useless. It was me.

(Of course, Randall, we find out, is unmarried.)

Randall weaves himself into the show before the daughter motif is raised, and by the time it comes, we are invested in him. So when, after a false positive, Randall hands a folder to Lix revealing their daughter's death in a 1940 air raid, Chancellor and Capaldi show just how good they are:



Now break down the scene into its component parts, one with dialogue, and two without.

The dialogue (Identification of speakers, and characterization of tone by me):

Randall: Would you forgive me if I asked you to go?

Lix: [clearly gutted, voice roughened and a bit ragged] I-I can't move.

Randall: [pause, softly] Please.

Randall: [fiddling, with papers on desk, still softly, but clearly anxious; almost begging her] Please, I need you to.

Lix: [looks up, firmly] No.

Lix: [resuming her normal posture, more firmly--almost angrily] No, Randall, I won't go. [Pause]
I won't. [Almost dismissively] You just just do what you need to do.

Now, as I read this part of the sequence, Lix is both pulling herself together, but feeling that Randall is pushing her away, and trivializing their loss into just another crisis to be tidied away. She's feeling him try to reassemble his walls after he tore down hers, which she is trying hastily to reassemble.

The first portion without dialogue is even more impressive. It's a tableaux--Randall's breakdown as Lix watches. It's easy to focus only on Capaldi's bravura performance of a man living Yeats's line "the center cannot hold." The moment when he's no longer tidying, or adjusting, but flinging, destroying, happens so gradually that it's easy to miss. And then when he drops to the chair (so fast the camera loses him) with a single sob--Capaldi completely incarnates Randall's despair.

[The score, by the way, is very good here--unobtrusive, but subtly getting louder and a tad more dissonant as Randall spirals out of control.]

But you lose fully half the value of the scene if you only focus on Capaldi. Because Chancellor is every bit as good, and as pivotal, here. Lix watches, at first judgmentally, coolly appraising her onetime lover's weakness, which she doesn't understand. As Randall's control begins to shred, and the anger and despair take over, her face grows heavier, empathy dawns in her eyes. She sees this isn't mere anxiety-soothing eccentricity, but something far more. As Randall begins to create mess and then to throw things, her newly reassembled walls break down, and a tear for him trails down her face. She grows alarmed (for Randall--she's not afraid of him, but for him). The full measure of the tragedy for Randall as well as for herself is heavy in the room. When he collapses, she squeezes the tears from her eyes.

The third movement is much, much shorter, but still brilliantly performed. Lix hurries to Randall, and throws her arms around him--

--only for him to flail away, startled, frightened, terrified, by the intimacy. He has one layer of skin too few, and cannot bear to be touched. Lix pulls back, but doesn't completely break contact, hurt but now understanding. Gently, she pushes his head back down to the blotter, and puts her arms around him, much more tentatively, but, when he doesn't flail away from her, more firmly, resting her cheek against his head. This time, he accepts her embrace, and returns it, placing his hand over hers.

It's an extraordinary sequence, brilliantly performed. The characters' respective psyches are illuminated as by a bolt of lightning, and, heart-rending though it is, the last moment is somehow--hopeful.