When we go to, say, the Metropolitan Opera House or Carnegie Hall, it’s usually to hear the classic scores provided by classically dead white males of the past three centuries.
What is the equivalent of these backward glances in the theater?
In New York, there isn’t one.
The city does not possess such high-powered machines for a theater that’s sharply focused on the past. We should have them – as London has its Royal National Theater and Royal Shakespeare Company, Paris has its Comedie Francaise and so on – but we don’t.
We do have attempts, gallant, underfunded, undernoticed and often underperforming efforts.
The kind of theater I am talking about is one in which you can see “Charlie’s Aunt” on one night and then, on the next, “King Lear” given by much the same cast.
Well, we do have one and a half.
The one is the 30-year-old Jean Cocteau Repertory, and the half is The Pearl Theater – the half being that while the Pearl has, like the Cocteau, a permanent, year-round home and a permanent ensemble, it has yet to make its already announced move into revolving rep.
Two current productions, Tom Stoppard’s “Night and Day” at the Cocteau and Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” at the Pearl, are not exactly typical because the Stoppard is perhaps the most persuasive production I’ve ever seen at the Cocteau, which can show a helter-skelter variation of works, and the Chekhov reveals the Pearl at markedly less than its best.
“Night and Day,” with its journalists covering a civil war in a remote African country recently freed from colonial rule, has acknowledged overtones of Evelyn Waugh’s wonderfully satirical novel “Scoop.” But, as usual, Stoppard is not being just funny.
The subject is freedom – political, sexual and, most overtly, journalistic. What price must be paid for a free press? And is it worth it?
Ernest Johns, making his Cocteau debut, has staged the play with great fluency, and the acting – especially from Angela Madden, as the fantasizing heroine; Harris Berlinsky as her cuckolded, evasive, mine-owner husband; and Jolie L. Garrett as an Idi Amin-like African dictator – is better than the intermittent English accents.
It is surprisingly easy to make Chekhov boring – just how easy, Joseph Hardy’s routine staging of “The Cherry Orchard” makes all too clear. Most of the men’s roles – with the exception of Arnie Burton’s perky Trofimov, that perpetual student, and in part Dan Dailey’s bluff but unsubtle account of Lopakhin, the peasant entrepreneur – are poorly acted.
And the women are not much better.
Yet, yet, yet . . . it is a chance to see one of the theater’s great modern classics. And like most plays, “The Cherry Orchard” is better seen than read.
So obviously, I would be lying if I suggested that these two companies are in any way comparable to the National Theater or the Comedie Francaise.
But what the hell. They both, as John Osborne’s Archie Rice used to say, have a go!