Luis Alfaro’s Bruja at San Francisco’s Magic Theatre continues his recent spate of Latino-themed adaptations of classic Greek plays.  Following Oedipus el Rey, which premiered at the Magic in 2010, Bruja takes on the Medea story, which proves remarkably relevant to contemporary Latino/Latina experience.

With slight shifts in location and tone, the play imports the story to San Francisco, where Jason (Sean San José) and Medea (Sabina Zuniga Varela) have immigrated with their two sons—Acan (Daniel Castaneda) and Acat (Gavilan Gordon-Chavez)—from Michoacán, Mexico, making their way up the west coast through California.

As illegal immigrants looking for a better life, the couple and Medea’s old servant, Vieja (the wonderful Wilma Bonet), settle uneasily in a place owned by Creon (Carlos Aguirre), the contractor with whom Jason finds work and whose favor he curries.  As he falls prey to the older man’s machinations and is blinded by his own dreams of power and wealth, Jason betrays his commitment to Medea, which unleashes her righteous anger and the devastation that always follows in this story of disinheritance, jealousy, and matricide.

In Alfaro’s treatment, the overlay of Chicano immigration and assimilation brings the story resonant new themes.  Medea is a curandera, a healer with mystical powers and insight.  As the play opens, she stands center stage, her arms extended with palm fronds, performing a ritual that exemplifies her connection with the earth and her spiritual power.  Played by Zuniga Varela as an earthy, sexual, desirous young woman, Medea fiercely expresses her passions and her knowledge.

Vieja protects her charge, whom she raised with devotion, intending to throw herself in Medea’s grave should the girl die first.  Vieja’s commitment keeps her hovering nearby and allows Alfaro to use her as his Greek chorus, commenting on the action in direct and sometimes humorous address to the audience.  Bonet’s Vieja is part stand-up, part matriarch and our conduit to Chicano/a culture.  In a play peppered with Spanish and Spanglish, she’s a translator and guide.  Bonet’s solid, knowing presence and her deft physical comedy (she performed for many years with the San Francisco Mime Troupe) grounds the spectators’ reactions as events unfold.

Jason reeks of desperation to assimilate into American culture.  He insists his sons call him “Dad” instead of “Papi,” making fun of what he considers its feminine Spanish inflections compared to the manly mono-syllables of the English.  He’s entranced by Creon’s power and influence, and sees him as a “door” into the world for which he longs.

His hubris is to believe he can play games with impunity, that the ends justify the means of his collusion.  But when he moves into Creon’s home and marries his daughter, Medea’s wrath dismantles his plans and leaves him in bloody ruin.

Alfaro’s adaptation easily and persuasively superimposes Chicano analogies over the Greek story.  Medea has killed her devious twin brother, leaving his body behind in Machoacán and fleeing across the U.S. border with Jason.  She owns her father’s land in Mexico, a deed of contention that Creon insists she pass to him.  When she refuses to become party to Jason’s dealings with the corrupt businessman, Creon makes her a pariah in the community.  If once she was a healer, she quickly becomes known as a witch (bruja in Spanish).

The faithful Aegeus (Armando Rodriguez), who comes to Medea to be healed and for help making his wife fertile, reports on Medea’s diminishing standing and offers her shelter after she’s thrown out of her home.  But no one can stand in the way of Medea’s deadly revenge.

Medea is nothing if not melodramatic and Alfaro’s Bruja treads close to its inevitable histrionics.  But Zuniga Varela’s simple, direct performance—all earnest sincerity before she reaches her necessary murderous rage—and San José’s believable regret as Jason keep the production from overstatement.  While their chemistry isn’t as palpable as it might be, Alfaro’s text and Loretta Greco’s direction focus on Medea’s sensuality and desire, whether or not it’s reciprocated.

Medea’s status as what Creon calls a “ghost”—an undocumented immigrant without state or family rights, since she and Jason aren’t married—makes her powerlessness poignant and resonant, as Creon strips her of her home and her partner.  When he insists that she give Jason his sons, and Jason rationalizes that they’ll inherit Creon’s wealth if he adopts the boys, Medea plays the only card left in her hand.  She ends Jason’s blood line and accepts her own tragic fate.

Zuniga Varela’s restrained performance makes Medea’s plight sympathetic instead of anathema.  She’s a rather reactive heroine, making her choices according to those made against her.  In the style of the Greek original, much of the action is narrated by Vieja or by Aegeus.

Bonet is particularly good as the bearer of bad news, describing how Medea’s curse turned the snake-skin dress she presented to Jason’s new wife into a nest of live reptiles that squeezed her rival to death and caused Creon’s demise.  And although Medea kills her boys offstage, Greco directs her first to chase each of them down, wielding a medieval-looking sword as a tangible embodiment of her fury.

Clear from Alfaro’s intelligent adaptation and Greco’s sensitive direction is how well the story adapts to describe the impossible situation of Chicano immigrants who travel at great personal cost across the border to better their lives, only to land in situations in which the American Dream dangles like unreachable fruit.  Adopting American ways—including the machismo of capitalist cowboys out to make a buck through any available means—becomes a devil’s bargain that requires giving up their ethnicity, culture, and faith, and that ultimately leaves them stranded and as morally bankrupt as the country they long to adopt.

Alfaro’s playwrighting embellishes a career in which he won a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award and for many years toured in autobiographical solo shows.  While I miss the incisive social commentary of his queer Chicano memoir performances and his considerable magnetism as a performer, it’s wonderful to see him reimagining the classics through Chicano and feminist eyes (which puts him in conversation with Cheríe Moraga, among others).  He’s extending his canon in welcome, generative directions.

The Feminist Spectator

Bruja, the Magic Theatre, San Francisco through June 24.

 

What novelty to see a play that’s not only by and about a woman but that takes feminism as its topic and theme.  Gina Gionfriddo’s (Becky Shaw) new play uses the history of the second wave American women’s movement to tease out the consequences of life choices for two women who started in the same place—same graduate program, even sharing the same boyfriend—and ended up very differently.

 

Gionfriddo’s 21^st century view of white middle-class women’s potential choices offers a refreshing rethinking of the tired binaries of professional work versus stay-at-home-motherhood.  Rapture, Blister, Burn also recalls 1980s plays by Wendy Wasserstein (The Heidi Chronicles) and Beth Henley (Crimes of the Heart) that addressed similar issues in ways specific to their own historical moment.

 

Catherine (Judging Amy’s Amy Brenneman), Gwen (Kellie Overbey), and Don (Lee Tergesen) were close friends in graduate school, their relationships comfortably triangulated.  Catherine and Don were a couple until she accepted a year’s fellowship in London and didn’t return when he asked.  While she was gone, Don mutinied and married Gwen.  They had two well-spaced and very different sons, as Catherine’s career exploded with two books about women, pornography, and popular culture that made her a favorite on the television pundits’ circuit.

 

When Catherine’s beloved mother, Alice (Beth Dixon), suffers a heart attack, Catherine arranges to take a sabbatical year in her home town to care for her.  Coincidentally, Don and Gwen live nearby.  Through a drunken phone call Catherine makes to her old friends that establishes the play’s themes and its motivating crisis, Don arranges for Catherine to teach at the local college, where he’s now the dean of students.

 

Fifteen years post-graduate school, the three friends have arrived at the beginning of their collective middle age in various states of disgruntled unhappiness.  Though professionally successful, Catherine hasn’t had satisfying romantic relationships and has never married or had children.  Don and Gwen’s marriage has calcified into a deadening routine.  He’s addicted to porn (though he protests that it’s free and “soft,” rather than graphic or violent) and he lost his ambition years ago, despite his early intellectual and academic promise.  Don smokes pot and Gwen nags him to organize and execute his work with socially troubled students.

 

Don achieved an administrative position in academic student life, though he planned to be a scholar.  Gwen dropped out of the graduate program altogether and has made her life caring for her sons and tending to her sobriety.  Her recovery has short-circuited her brain editor, so Gwen over-shares and speaks too much truth at mostly the wrong moments.  Her self-righteousness is played for laughs, and to Gionfriddo’s credit, a character that could be arch, smug, and conservative winds up being as personally and politically ambivalent and three-dimensional as Don and Catherine.

 

Gionfriddo delivers her polemic about women’s choices through the conceit of a summer course that Don arranges for Catherine to teach.  The only two students to sign up are Gwen, who’s hoping to finally finish her degree, and Avery (Virginia Kull), Gwen and Don’s babysitter, whom Gwen dismisses from their employ when she arrives with a black eye to care for their son.  Gwen’s rigid moral code precludes exposing her three-year-old to violence of any sort, even though Avery’s accident resulted from her involvement in a reality-television prank engineered by her boyfriend.

 

Catherine’s syllabus presents the raw material of Gionfriddo’s argument, as the women discuss insights from Betty Friedan, Nancy Friday, and, for an opposing viewpoint, Phyllis Schlafly, who becomes the counterpoint to more progressive feminist perspectives throughout the play.  Avery proves herself a quick study and a complicated, provocative thinker.  She’s a nascent “third wave” feminist, though she quickly declines describing herself as a feminist at all in a predictable statement Catherine remarks on ruefully.  Gwen uses the course readings to justify her own choice to be a homemaker and to criticize Catherine’s decision to make a life of her career.  Alice supplements the three women’s banter with wry observations and the benefit of hindsight.  She survived a bad marriage in 1950s America and appreciates everything feminism now offers women.

 

Rapture, Blister, Burn might be considered The Heidi Chronicles for 2012.  Nearly 25 years ago, Wasserstein’s titular heroine—a smart, white, middle-class woman just like Catherine—found herself confronted by a confusing array of new choices.  She decided to be a professor with an adopted baby who eschewed marriage to Scoop, the smart narcissist she might have selected as a mate.

 

Wasserstein’s Heidi observes the feminist movement passing before her eyes, never quite joining in and never quite opting out of the social revolution the play charts at a comfortable remove.  Wasserstein’s play ends with Heidi hoping that things will be different for her daughter, postponing the advent of real feminist change to some time in a distant, if hopeful, future.

 

Gionfriddo’s Catherine Croll is Heidi Holland 25 years later.  Catherine, too, is a professor; Catherine, too, is invited to speak about her ideas on television talk shows.  But where Wasserstein wrote a brilliant, caustically funny scene in which Heidi Holland fights for airtime between her two male best friends as they show off for television viewers, Gionfriddo clarifies that Catherine is adept as a public intellectual.  She’s a regular on Bill Mahr, invited on as the hot academic feminist who sits between a senator and a rapper, speaking with easy confidence.

 

Catherine’s two ballyhooed books give her street cred and academic prominence at an unnamed Ivy League institution in Manhattan.  Her trip into the wilds of New England (every playwright’s favorite location for unnamed, fictional liberal arts colleges) proves her a fish-out-of-water.  Her black sheath dress, linen pants, silk shirts, and stiletto heels present her as a don’t-fuck-with-me but fuck-me feminist, sexy and smart.

 

Director Peter DuBois smoothly moves the play between its two locations:  the interior of Alice’s house and the exterior of Don and Gwen’s.  Although Catherine seems more comfortable in her mother’s old-fashioned living room than in her friends’ suburban backyard, it’s clear that she’s at home in neither.

 

But her mother’s recent heart attack prompts Catherine to reexamine her choices.  Revisiting her relationships with Don and Gwen highlight what she could have been, if she’d chosen differently.  In her drunken phone call, dialed from a bar at which she was picking up men for anonymous sex, she suggests that they might trade lives.  Gionfriddo’s plot gradually sets the switch in motion, as Don and Catherine rekindle their old attraction to pursue the fantasy of what might have been, had Catherine returned from London as Don asked.  Gwen takes her probably-gay son off to New York to live in Catherine’s apartment while she helps him pursue theatre training.

 

Needless to say (though I should note this spoiler alert), the switch fails.  After a month of Bacchanalian sex, drinking, and DVD film festivals that last all night, Don’s skin turns bad from junk food and beer and sleeplessness and even he, the perpetual teenager, longs to return to the happy constraints of a more structured adult life with Gwen.  Gwen, whose central emotional relationship has been with her oldest, show tune-singing son, realizes in New York that the boy actually isn’t gay (at least not for now), and that eventually he’ll leave her for his own life.  She tries to reenroll in graduate school, unhappy to be the oldest student in the class until she finally accepts that she’ll never finish her degree.  Gwen returns home and Don begs to come back to his familiar low-stakes life.

 

And our heroine, Catherine?  When she gives in to her old attraction to Don, she thinks she can turn back the clock not just on their relationship but on his failed career.  Offering advice from her own hard-won success, she suggests topics for books he might write, and wants to take him on an academic junket to Italy.  She suspends her own work to play with him all summer, staying up late, eating his pizza, guzzling his beer, performing as though sex and carefree companionship are all that matter.

 

That real life catches up with all three characters is part of Gionfriddo’s nuanced understanding of 21^st century women.  Feminism might provide a certain kind of woman, situated in certain ways, with certain choices and advantages.  But ultimately, we make our own choices, which have less to do with politics or dogma than with who we are and how we’re hard-wired to interact with a culture that keeps switching out the screensaver on gendered options for living.

 

Catherine’s achievements happen not just because feminism has established a cultural landscape that makes her success possible but because of her own drive and work ethic.  Her scholarship addresses the mutual influence of society and art and media on how women’s evolving roles are digested and disputed and detailed in genre movies like slasher films.  As Avery points out toward the play’s end, quoting feminist film critic Carol Clover, horror films once ended with the endangered woman rescued by a heroic man.  Now, they more often feature the “final girl,” who survives despite the terrifying attack on her sexuality and her person.

 

Catherine and Avery are Rapture, Blister, Burn’s final girls.  When Don and Gwen resume their marriage, Catherine asks Avery to join her on the Italy trip, and the young woman eagerly accepts.  Avery has already suggested that perhaps emotional fulfillment comes from women friends, while sex and a certain kind of stalwart presence is all women can expect from their men.  And that’s okay with her and finally, it seems, with Catherine.

 

With Avery, Gionfriddo updates the Denise character from The Heidi Chronicles.  In Wasserstein’s play, Denise represented third wave, younger women’s feminism as a blatant critique of the choices and potentials of second-wavers like Heidi.  By contrast, Avery’s engagement with feminism is more forgiving and practical.  Rather than rejecting Catherine’s analysis of women’s history and the gendered meanings of contemporary entertainment and culture, Avery explores her teacher’s arguments with humor and insight.  Her observations parallel Alice’s, so that the older and younger women’s perspectives bookend Catherine and Gwen’s middle-age, second wave quandaries.

 

In many plays about women academics—which have become their own subgenre—accomplished women are punished for pursuing lives of the mind.  In Margaret Edson’s Wit, the central character—a John Donne scholar—dies of ovarian cancer (nothing like illness as metaphor).  In Sarah Treem’s The How and the Why, the molecular biologist who gave up her daughter for adoption to achieve her career also has cancer.  In Wasserstein’s Third, a subsidiary academic female character has cancer, and the central female professor has to leave her teaching position to re-center a life Wasserstein suggests has become too stringent and dogmatic.

 

Unlike these plays (and so many more), Rapture, Blister, Burn narrates five very likable, healthy characters (all beautifully played) and doesn’t rank their choices while it teases out their inevitable differences.  Gionfriddo manages to tell a story about a swathe of contemporary middle-class white women that doesn’t judge them, deride, or punish their decisions so much as it contextualizes them within feminist history and the idiosyncrasies of personal, as well as political, choice.

 

Brenneman performs Catherine as low-key and elegant.  She’s not parodied for her intellect, but instead, Brenneman plays her as empathetic and watchful, someone who listens well and speaks carefully.  She doesn’t have all the answers to the ambivalences of her own or anyone else’s life.  She’s allowed to be sexual without, finally, surrendering her smartness.  In Catherine, Gionfriddo explodes the stereotype of the dour, dowdy feminist for a newer archetype.

 

Alice, Catherine’s mother, and Gwen, the uptight, righteous housewife, tread closer to types we’ve seen before:  the wise but funny older mother, entering her dotage with irony and insight, and the resentful, sexless middle-aged mother who buries her hopes in her son to avoid the problems in her marriage.   But if these two characters seem a bit less three-dimensional, they nonetheless provide a context in which to view Catherine and Avery’s choices more magnanimously.  That Dixon and Overbey play Alice and Gwen with such intelligent generosity also helps avoid the stereotypes.  Dixon is spry and sweet as Alice, and Overbey tempers Gwen’s resentment and self-righteousness with a dollop of clear and self-knowing graceful humor.

 

The acting enlivens each of the five characters.  Tergesen is terrific as Don, the much maligned boy-man who’s very comfortable in his unambitious life.  The character presents a humorous gender-switch; Don is far from Scoop Rosenbaum in The Heidi Chronicles, who literally scoops Heidi on all their potential life choices.  Scoop edits a magazine, becomes a public intellectual, and runs for office, while Heidi dithers over her lack of feminist community and builds a much quieter career as an art historian.  In Rapture, Blister, Burn, Don discards his potential for a life that proceeds quietly under the social radar while Catherine moves out into the public world of ideas and culture.  Tergesen strikes just the right notes as a charming enough middle-aged man who knows himself and his limitations.

 

Virginia Kull, as Avery, turns in perhaps the best performance in an ensemble production that boasts five of them.  Avery could play as an annoying know-it-all, much like her ‘80s counterpart, Heidi‘s Denise.  Instead, she’s a young woman who thinks as she goes, who brings her analysis to bear on history and the present, who’s open to listening and revising her life plan.  Kull brings a refreshing mix of ambivalence and certainty to the character, as well as a wonderfully ingenuous earnestness.  Interpreted by Kull, Avery is young and hopeful and eager to be tutored and mentored as she works toward making her own life choices.  Kull’s performance grounds the play’s sunny outlook on cross-generational feminism.

 

Catherine and Avery consider their lives within the context of a larger movement.  Rapture, Blister, Burn has its didactic moments, in part because of its pedagogical conceit.  Several scenes show Catherine literally leading the other women through texts, as they teach themselves and think about feminism as an historical movement and a present-day option.  They drink martinis while they work that encourage them to be personal in their responses to what they read.

 

Occasionally, I feared that viewers might think feminist seminars are all and only about the experiential sharing that Catherine encourages from Gwen and Avery in their encounters with the assigned reading.  But as a dramaturgical choice, I appreciated that feminism was an overt part of the discussion, that ideas became the yardstick against which all four women—and by extension, Don—measured their lives and aspirations.

 

At the play’s end, Avery and Catherine celebrate their decision to go to Italy together and Alice applauds their detachment from men. The three women lean over the candles lit in the hurricane lamp that’s warmed the scene to blow them out.  As their faces converge over the flames and the stage lights fade, the moment explicitly recalls the end of Beth Henley’s Crimes of the Heart, in which the three sisters blow out the oldest daughter’s birthday candles on a note of hope for a better future.

 

With this gesture, director DuBois and Gionfriddo bring Rapture, Blister, Burn full circle in its homage to 1980s plays by women that address women’s choices and the potential of feminism as a movement and as a way of life.

 

In Gionfriddo’s hands, feminism is a practice pliable enough for anyone.

 

The Feminist Spectator

 

Rapture, Blister, Burn by Gina Gionfriddo, Playwrights Horizons through June 24 (discussed performance of May 30, 2012).

Shonda Rimes’ new television series arrived at its first season finale last week, after a terrific premiere and seven-week run and the promise of renewal for a second season.  Kerry Washington stars in the first series to feature an African American woman in the leading role since 1974, a fact of network history that seems both outrageous and significant.  The lie that America is “post-race” has long been put to rest, but that Scandal’s demographics make history in 2012 seems hard to believe.

 

Washington plays Olivia Pope, a Washington, D.C., crisis manager whose story is based on the real life of Judy Smith.  Smith established her reputation working for the D.C. district attorney’s office in the 1990s, when then-mayor Marion Barry was caught using cocaine.  Her demonstrated crisis management skills prompted the first Bush White House to hire Smith as a deputy press secretary, and lead to the storied career on which Scandal focuses.  When Smith struck out on her own, her firm’s first client to draw national attention was Monica Lewinsky.  (Smith is on board as one of the show’s producers.)

 

As Kerry Washington said in a recent exclusive interview with The Feminist Spectator, the fact that Scandal is based on a real person delights her, because it prevents people from scoffing about the character’s believability.  Washington’s performance more than honors her source—Olivia Pope is one of the most compelling women characters I’ve ever seen on television.  Subscription TV has given us Nurse Jackie, Weeds, The Big C (on Showtime) and more recently Veep and Girls (both on HBO), all shows that offer leading women characters a broader range of experiences and foibles than most.

 

But Scandal is one of the first network series to feature a woman—let alone a woman of color—in its central role and to allow the character to be emotionally strong, professionally powerful, and personally complicated.  (Those illustrious few include The Good Wife [CBS] and The Killing [AMC] . . . Missing [ABC] didn’t grab me, which is unfortunate, because I really appreciated the series star Ashley Judd’s recent protests about the media’s focus on women’s physical appearances.  All of these series, however, feature white women leads.)

 

Washington is pleased that Scandal pushes the envelope of network television.  While she admits that it would be a different show on cable, she says, “I’m proud that it’s on the network.  That it’s mainstream America.  . . . Cable is known to take more risks, but it’s time to have a show with a black woman as a lead not seen as a big deal.”

 

Emily Nussbaum, in The New Yorker, suggests that Scandal in fact avoids mentioning Olivia’s race to the show’s detriment.  But as she does with Grey’s Anatomy and Private Practice, Rimes seems more concerned with affirming racial and ethnic diversity as a visible part of her series’ stories, without emphasizing race as content.  Representational politics seem to me equally important right now—that is, seeing people of color on television in roles typically populated (without comment) by white people makes its own statement.

 

On Scandal, Olivia Pope administers her firm with iron-clad rules and demands fierce, uncompromised loyalty.  Her rag-tag band of employees—the so-called Gladiators in Suits—all boast certain skills, and most have sordid, secret pasts from which they’ve been rescued by Olivia.  Like the squad of detectives who surround Chief Brenda Johnson (Kyra Sedgwick) on The Closer (TNT), Olivia’s team stands in awe of her know-how but also harbors deeper emotional feelings for a boss who leads them with careful aplomb through the minefields of a very political world.

 

If part of the joke of The Closer is that Brenda’s squad is full of men (of various races and ethnicities), each with his own charmingly comic character flaw, Olivia’s team on Scandal is comprised of men, women, white people, and people of color, each with his or her own charming if dangerous character flaw.  And instead of playing on overly feminine white Southern wiles to get her way, as Brenda does in the very male world of Los Angeles police work, Olivia Pope stands strong, tough, and African American in the very white and very male world of presidential politics that provides Scandal’s milieu.

 

As a Shonda Rimes show, Scandal mixes intense workplace environment storylines with subplots about the personal lives of characters whose professional commitments always drive their ambitions.  Olivia’s team is on call day and night.  Her newest employee, Quinn Perkins (Katie Lowes), plays with fire when she decides to date a journalist who’s sniffing around the firm looking for information about Amanda Tanner, one of its clients.  The other team members are already stalwart:  Harrison Wright (Columbus Short) has some sort of prison record, which makes him happy to be at Olivia’s beck and call; Abby Whelan (Darby Stanchfield) is a progressive who’s appalled when Olivia decides to take the case of a Latin American dictator searching for his apparently kidnapped wife.

 

Stephen Finch (Henry Ian Cusick), who comes closest to being Olivia’s professional equal, proposes to his fiancée in the series’ first episode, but rarely spends time with her.  He arrives at Olivia’s home any time of the night to consult with or comfort her.  And the mysterious, taciturn Huck (Guillermo Diaz) demonstrates his loyalty and his acute empathy for Olivia’s frequent ethical anguish by constantly reassuring her and the others that he’s got Olivia’s back.

 

The crew is idiosyncratic and interesting and the family of actors assembled to perform the team is apparently very close.  Washington says, “People at the network are surprised, they really love each other.”  She attributes this intimacy to Judy Smith, whose compassion for her fellow human beings inflects her work and Olivia Pope’s character.  Washington says that Smith “comes to the work as a nurturer.  She wants to make sure that people are taken care of.  She realizes that justice isn’t always just, that not everyone gets a second chance.  People make mistakes, everyone is human.  She’s a very caring and compassionate person.  Olivia Pope has pulled in these people who work for her who she takes care of.  They also have skills that make them assets.”  She continues, “I often think when we’re thinking about powerful women we disassociate them from their maternal instincts.  Olivia has no children (that we know of) but she’s very much in touch with the maternal.”

 

The actors’ ensemble work has already gelled into a terrific chorus for Washington’s star turn as Olivia.  And what a turn it is.  Washington brings to Olivia Pope a superbly talented actor’s confidence and the empathy of a woman who can read a scene (in real life and in a script) with an almost tactile feel for the nuances of its politics and its themes.  Her intelligence shines through her performance, and the series’ scripts allow Washington’s smarts to propel Pope’s character.

 

You can actually see Washington thinking through Olivia’s frequent quandaries.  One of the character’s best traits is that she thinks fast and effectively.  Other critics have noted that the D.C.-based show’s dialogue echoes the West Wing; the walk-and-talk practices established by that landmark show are recalled in Scandal.  But here, what Washington calls “Scandal-pace” isn’t a function of the D.C. political setting but of its central character’s intensity.  All the characters speak with urgency, and the show’s editing moves it quickly through its central story and subplots each week.

 

Washington says that Scandal-pace comes from Smith herself.  “Judy is always moving very quickly,” she says.  “When you walk beside her, you’re out of breath and she’s talking effortlessly.”  That stamina and endurance shows in Washington’s carriage as she’s performing; Olivia holds herself proudly and propels herself through each scene as though she’s singing the 11:00 number in a musical while chorus boys fall at her feet.

 

Olivia’s personal sense of urgency matches that required by her work.  Washington notes that crisis management moves fast and that it’s changed a lot since Smith began working in the field.  Now, it’s necessary to fix something or to stop a story in five minutes instead of five hours or five days.  Washington says crisis managers are “constantly playing games where you have to think five steps ahead” of the media and law enforcement.  “Time is money,” Washington says.  “Time could be life or death.”  That urgency fuels each moment of Scandal.

 

But the fast-talking is written mostly for Olivia.  Her ability to think aloud in eloquent, pointed paragraphs is demonstrated best when, in each episode, she typically delivers an ultimatum (or two) to a client or a nemesis balking over a deal.  Those scenes beautifully showcase Washington’s ability to be at once emotionally and intellectually acute.  They’re typically filmed in close-up, so that the screen is filled with Washington’s beautiful, expressive face, her lips moving faster than seems humanly possible while her eyes register all the complicated devotion or disdain Olivia feels for her interlocutor.  Often, these moments are about persuading another character of an ethically questionable choice.  The dialogue carries the heavy-lifting of reason while Washington’s countenance reads with all the agony of the necessary compromise or concession.

 

I love those moments in Scandal because they let you see a very talented actor at work in the guise of a character whose skill at fixing political and personal crises invariably saves the day.  This isn’t a woman seducing a client through personal charm.  On the contrary, Olivia Pope lays down the law, tells it like it is, reads the riot act, and otherwise gives people their marching orders, with Washington making every one of those speeches heart-rending and convincing.

 

Washington says she was drawn to the role because “the emotional life of the character was on the page from day one”:

 

That very much drew me to this project.  The woman is often the accessory, so you’re looking for ways to three-dimensionalize the character.  Your job as an actor is to fill that picture.  But when I read the pilot it was all there.  I loved that you could have this woman who was fierce and powerful and together in her professional life.  But her personal life is a bit of a mess.  That dichotomy could exist on the page.  These people [her team] would go over a cliff for her.  [She says she doesn’t cry, but in the] pilot, you see her crying alone in a coat closet.  She has so many ways that she performs her identity.

 

Washington says that she’s always interested in a character’s different performances of her public and private selves.  Olivia is a rich example of the compromises often required of professional women.

 

Perhaps the biggest scandal on Scandal is that Olivia has an on-going romantic affair with the President of the United States, Fitzgerald (“Fitz”) Grant (Tony Goldwyn, exceptionally sexy and soulful as a powerful man with sexual secrets).  The episode called “The Trail” (#106, aired 5/10/12), flashed back to the beginning of Fitz and Olivia’s relationship to reveal that they started their affair when Fitz hired Olivia to assist on his campaign for the presidency.

 

Although his marriage is a sham, the President nonetheless can’t afford to compromise his image as a happy husband.  His mercenary wife, eager to gain and later retain her power as First Lady, brazenly aids and abets the cover-up of Fitz’s infidelities.

 

Washington and Goldwyn’s scenes together are gentle, sad explorations of a desire that just won’t quit, despite the challenges of position and politics.  Although Fitz’s escape from the prison of the White House in “The Trail” stretched credulity (hey, it’s a television show, after all), the President’s mournful appearance at Olivia’s door proved a touching illustration of their mutual need and yearning.

 

Jeff Perry plays Cyrus Beene, the President’s Chief of Staff, who’s determined to alienate Fitz from Olivia.  The ongoing mystery plot in Scandal’s first season sees Olivia hired to help and protect Amanda Tanner, a former White House staffer who claims she’s had a relationship with the President and is carrying his baby.  Olivia’s new client strains the triangulated relationship between Cyrus, Fitz, and Olivia, in which each balances their power, their abilities, and their insights to keep the President in office.  The Amanda Tanner storyline threads through each of the season’s episodes, keeping the tension ramped up as Olivia and the team otherwise solved the crises of each week.

 

Tanner, it seems, was pressed into service by shadowy enemies to blackmail the President into thinking that the baby she carried was his.  When Tanner decides to back out of the plan, we see her call her operatives to renege.  Shortly after, a black-clad, hooded figure breaks into her apartment, knocks her out, and carries her off.  We don’t see her again until her body is dragged from the Potomac.

 

Billy Chambers, the Vice President’s Chief of Staff, is involved in this nefarious plan.  The VP, beautifully played by Kate Burton as a southern conservative Tea Party-er from hell, ran against Fitz in the presidential primary, and reluctantly joined his ticket in the second spot.  Billy’s reptilian delusions of grandeur lead him to fantasize that he can unseat Fitz and install his woman instead, using Amanda Tanner’s affair with the president and her pregnancy as the impeachable offense.  He captures the media’s attention by spreading rumors of the President’s ethics violations and it looks like Fitz might have to step down.

 

In the season finale (“Grant:  For the People,” episode #107, aired 5/17/12), the plot only thickens.  (Spoiler alert!)  Olivia and Fitz share a brief romantic moment imagining that they can have a normal domestic future if the scandal forces him to leave the presidency.  But thanks to the mercenary deal struck by Fitz’s wife, and thanks to Olivia’s brilliant abilities, they spin the story to avert disaster.  The wife exacts her revenge by forcing Fitz back into a sexual relationship to produce the baby she claims to be carrying, and Olivia grieves that her commitment to her job (and I guess her country) means she has to sacrifice the love of her life.

 

The season’s real twist, though, comes in the final moment, when we learn that Cyrus, not Billy, engineered Amanda Tanner’s murder.  Played by Perry as a smug, grasping narcissist, the plot twist dangles the promise that many more complications are in store, which will no doubt continue to muddy the waters of Olivia’s already troubled ethics.

 

I’ll look forward to that.  It’s great fun to watch an African American woman navigate the halls of power with her personal and professional dignity intact.  I revel in Scandal’s implicit feminism and the pleasure of seeing an African American woman order people around on the screen.  Washington says, “I’m proud to play this role as a feminist,” in part because “one of the things that makes [Olivia] powerful is that she’s a human being.  She’s always trying to be the best version of herself, despite her own confusion.”

 

Despite the high visibility—and no doubt, some vulnerability—of being the first African American woman to star in a network TV series since 1974, when a show called Get Christie Love aired starring Teresa Graves, Washington says she doesn’t feel a heavy burden of responsibility about this historical fact.  “I actually feel very supported doing it.  There was a lot of anticipation about the show; people were excited that this character was going to live and breathe and exist off the page.  I felt a lot of support from the community of women of color actresses in Hollywood.”  The pressure, Washington suggests, is on the audience:  “Will the American people show up and watch this smart woman, in a show that’s female-driven, that’s driven by an African American female?  Will people allow her into their hearts?”

 

That Scandal has been renewed for a full second season seems to indicate audiences’ willingness to take that leap.  And that faith, Washington believes, might contribute to real social change.  She says, “Audience members in theatre, film, and television, through consciousness and imagination, are able to put themselves in other people’s shoes.  That expanded consciousness makes us more inclusive and lets us see similarities instead of divisions.  Art can show us who we want to be.  That’s powerful work.”

 

Let’s hope spectators will be willing to put themselves into Olivia Pope’s (gorgeous) shoes.  She’s a tough woman navigating a brutal world, and doing so with intensity, grace, and a ramrod straight spine that makes her irresistible to watch, especially in a medium that allows so few women to be as complex, powerful, and charismatic.  And thank goodness an actor as ethical, aware, and committed to social change as Kerry Washington is bringing Olivia to our hearts.

 

The Feminist Spectator

I’m coming late to the controversy over the resoundingly white male-written and -directed season announced for the Guthrie next year, in part because I’m tired of hearing myself rehearse the same old indignities at these repetitive insults to women’s artistry and integrity.  Reading the many smart excoriations of Guthrie artistic director Joe Dowling’s defensive protestations about why it’s okay to ignore gender and race in season selection, I’m simply reminded, yet again, of the supreme arrogance of white men like him (not all white men) who are accustomed to seeing and remaking the world in their own image.

 

I was deeply moved by Polly Carl’s essay, “A Boy in a Man’s Theatre,” on HowlRound (4/28/12), in which she eloquently admitted, “I am compelled to talk some truth about finding yourself ‘other’ in a white man’s world—about the importance of insisting on being seen.”  Describing her reaction to watching a rehearsal of Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori’s adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Carl realized that although the new musical isn’t her “exact” story, “it was my story.”  The power of recognition—of seeing a life that looks like yours on stage—was overwhelming for Carl.  And if I’ve done my math right, Carl is in her 40s.  She’s been feeling invisible for a long time.

 

I wish someone like Joe Dowling could imagine what it feels like to go to the theatre or the movies, or turn on the television, and never see yourself represented.  If you’re white and male, and especially if you’re straight, it must go without mention that something that at least looks like your life will be part and parcel of the story told of an evening.  I can’t imagine the privilege of just assuming that the world will look like you, and that if it doesn’t, it’s because affirmative action or some other “self-serving” quota system (as Dowling accused protests over the Guthrie season of being) has allowed the riff-raff of gender, race, ethnic, and sexual difference to sneak in.

 

Even the conservative Wall Street Journal published an article called “Lots of Guys, Too Few Dolls,” shortly after this year’s Tony Award nominations were announced, in which the reporter—Pia Catton (a woman)—noted that “one is reminded of a sad truth:  While Tony’s are equally bestowed on male and female stars of the stage, there’s a colossal gender gap in the honors given to the men and women who create the shows.”  Catton went on to report that the percentages of plays written and directed by women on Broadway has barely changed over the decades, quoting experts like Susan Jonas, who co-wrote the 2002 New York State Council on the Arts report on the status of women in theatre, and mentioning the recently established Lilly Awards (named after Lillian Hellman), which turn their backs on the Tonys’ snubs by giving their own honors to women working in theatre.

 

On a much brighter side of this ubiquitous story, this week I received by snail mail the new season announcement from Arena Stage, in D.C., and was reminded that the gender and racial diversity in play and director selection that Dowling considers impossible or beneath him (or both) happens as a matter of course at other U.S. theatres.  In a market bigger than Minneapolis, with subscribers equally as august and long-standing, Arena artistic director Molly Smith regularly programs seasons that include a majority of productions written or directed by women and people of color (and both).

 

For 2012-2013, Arena’s eight-play season includes three plays by women, two of which are by women of color:  Pullman Porter Blues, by Cheryl L. West, and The Mountaintop, by Katori Hall, as well as a revival of Metamorphoses, written and directed by Mary Zimmerman.  West’s play will be directed by Lisa Peterson, who, along with colleagues Zimmerman, Jackie Maxwell, Kyle Donnelly, and Smith herself, comprise a roster of five women directors out of the eight productions.  Of the remaining three shows directed by men, two are directed by African Americans (and Tazewell Thompson also wrote the play he’ll direct).  The one show written and directed by a white man is One Night with Janis Joplin, so its content counts as gender diversity, if part of the issue is whose stories are told and whose bodies are seen on stage.

 

Good for Molly Smith and her artistic staff and her board, who no doubt ratified her progressive vision.  Smith is directing My Fair Lady at Arena next season, the Lerner and Loewe musical she mounted last summer at the Shaw Festival in Canada.  That production was a terrific, high energy, multi-racial cast production that rivaled her 2010 reimagining of Oklahoma! in its rejuvenated vision of the classic American musical.  Smith takes the American canon—part of Arena’s mandate—and refashions it to speak across identity communities, instead of sequestering it in presumptively white enclaves and preserving it for white people.  That narrow vision—Dowling’s vision—doesn’t reflect or do justice to the complex race, gender, sexuality, ethnic, and class composition of contemporary America.  Dowling’s vision is former presidential candidate Bob Dole’s bridge to the past; Smith’s is a glorious, hopeful representation of a reimagined future.

 

Playwrights Horizons in New York also deserves a place of pride in this counter-pantheon of progressive American theatres.  For 2012-2013, long-time artistic director Tim Sanford (a white man) offers six productions, new plays all, of which four are written by women (one of whom is African American), and one is a musical adaptation of Far From Heaven (written by Richard Greenberg and directed by Michael Greif), Todd Hayne’s wrenching 2002 film about the wife of a closeted gay man navigating her nuclear family life in the 1950s.  White women direct three of the six productions:  Anne Kauffman directs Lisa D’Amour’s Detroit; Carolyn Cantor directs her frequent collaborator Amy Herzog’s The Great God Pan; and Leigh Silverman directs Tanya Barfield’s The Call.  Sam Gold, who’s proven his sensitivity as a director of women’s work, directs Annie Baker’s The Flick.

 

Playwrights’ season teaser brochure also includes a clever “key” to the genres and themes introduced by its six plays.  The guide includes symbols that run alongside each play’s title, indicating whether it addresses “comic relief,” “gaiety” (of the LGBT variety), “parenthood,” “race relations,” “impossible love,” “job inequality,” “prophetic vision,” “skeletons in the closet,” “strange neighbors,” “suburban angst,” or “Mormonism.”  Just reading this key made me laugh; what a witty reminder that any production has something idiosyncratic for everyone and that “universality” never means just one thing.

 

Arena and Playwrights regularly stage plays written and directed by women and people of color, not to fill a token slot in each season, but because these productions showcase voices that have something to say across communities.  They make visible populations of citizens alongside all the Joe Dowlings who are too blind to see how these so-called minorities/future majorities are remaking our collective world.  Molly Smith’s Oklahoma! is the state we live in now, thank goodness.

 

Likewise, Emily Mann’s production of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, now playing on Broadway with a cast of people of color, shows us something new about ourselves and the canon of American drama.  Mann knew Williams and discussed Streetcar with him.  She researched the French Quarter of the period and articles by theatre historians about other multiracial productions (especially Philip C. Kolin’s essay “Williams in Ebony:  Black and Multi-Racial Productions of A Streetcar Named Desire,” in African American Review, 25.1 [Spring 1991]: 147-181).  Mann found ample justification for casting the Dubois family and Stanley as black, conflicted by the same class differences that propel Williams’s drama when it’s cast with white actors.

 

But critics like Ben Brantley consider this “gimmick” casting, and scoff at Mann and the producers (who also mounted an African American production of Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) for fooling around with the American canon in ways they, like Dowling, find self-serving.  These reviews sound reminiscent of Stephen Sondheim’s admonishment last summer that Diane Paulus and Suzan-Lori Parks had gone too far in their adaptation and revision of Porgy and Bess.

 

Underneath all these criticisms that purport to champion good American drama is a warning to women and people of color that they shouldn’t get too uppity, that they should steer clear of white men’s work and stay barefoot and happy—and invisible and silent—in the ghettos of their “special interest” theatres.

 

The same blatant discrimination was recently called out at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival, where of the 22 films nominated for the 2012 Palme D’Or prize, none were written or directed by women.  The oversight caused a similar online uproar as the Dowling debacle among the film (and larger) arts community, through which petitions circulated for signatures to protest this blatant exclusion.

 

Have we gone back to the future?  Is it the 1950s again?  In a political moment in which Republicans and Tea Party-ers threaten to reverse every achievement for women’s reproductive rights garnered since Roe v. Wade; when the same politicians inflame xenophobic anti-immigration sentiments about our southern borders (and when similar anti-immigrant racism roils political waters in Cannes’ France); and when LGBT activists have to celebrate when Obama announces that he’s “evolved” into thinking same-sex marriage is okay after all (gee, thanks, Barack), maybe it’s no surprise that the festival director at Cannes, and Brantley at the Times, and Dowling at the Guthrie think they can discriminate against women and people of color with impunity.

 

 

Let’s not let them get away with it.  Write to Molly Smith at Arena, and Tim Sanford at Playwrights and tell them how pleased you are with their 2012-2013 season announcements.  Write to Dowling at the Guthrie and tell him how disappointed you are that he’s such a Neanderthal.  Sign the petitions circulating protesting the exclusion of women from the prize at Cannes.  And write letters to the Times protesting that white men like Brantley and Charles Isherwood foster a discourse about the arts in which decisions like Dowling’s season are okay and productions like Mann’s Streetcar are dismissed.

 

Don’t just go to the theatre—respond to it, write about it, protest it, reimagine it.  It’s too important to keep allowing the barbarians to guard the gate.

 

 

The Feminist Spectator

 

 

Smash ended its first season this week, and has been renewed for a second, minus Theresa Rebeck, its creator and original show runner (and one of the only women playwrights to be produced on Broadway).  Too bad that Rebeck is losing such a high profile, visible perch from which to write for television, but maybe the small screen isn’t her milieu.  While her plays—see the recently closed Seminar for only one example—are filled with sharp dialogue, witty repartee, clever plotting, and acutely drawn characters, Smash has this season seemed a muddle of genres, styles, and concerns, none of which have gelled.

 

I’ve been watching avidly, but come away from most episodes disappointed as the show sinks more and more into a Glee-like thematic integration of songs into the plot, instead of the more theatrically-based use of musical numbers that promised from the outset to distinguish the series.  The Marilyn Monroe musical that the show’s characters have worked to develop all season–called Bombshell–actually seems quite good; I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a real Broadway spin-off in the works.

 

The rehearsal numbers, which often morph into fantasy performance sequences, as the company prepares for its Boston tryout (something productions never do anymore, one way in which the show is full of anachronisms), are wonderfully choreographed (by Joshua Bergasse), and feature talented singers and dancers.  The two principals—Megan Hilty as Ivy and Katharine McPhee as Karen—have continued their uneasy alliance throughout the season, as they both keep their eye on the prize of Bombshell’s lead role.

 

In the season finale, that competition comes to a temporary conclusion, as (spoiler alert, just in case) the moody director Derek asks Karen to perform as Marilyn, rejecting Ivy by telling her she just doesn’t have that “certain something” that keeps Karen-as-Marilyn haunting his mind.  Despondent, Ivy is last seen spilling a bottle of prescription meds into her hand, staring into her dressing room mirror looking determined for all the wrong reasons.

 

The show’s ur-theme unspools how these talented young women have become cogs in the wheel of Broadway’s machinery, as the producer, Eileen—Angelica Huston, in a role that flatters her talents not at all—debates how to make the musical a necessary success.  In an earlier episode, after a backers’ showcase for which Ivy performs as Marilyn and to which would-be investors respond tepidly, Eileen decides that the show needs a star, and imports film actress Rebecca (Uma Thurman) to play the lead.

 

Thurman’s performance over her several-episode arc found the tone Smash needs to really work.  Thurman camped it up as the film star whose foray into live performance both terrified and thrilled her.  As the diva who requires lavish care and feeding, Thurman played the role with a kind of tossed off enthusiasm, not taking it all too seriously and as a result offering a playful, knowing performance.

 

The character’s predictable peccadilloes let Thurman highlight Rebecca’s narcissistic performance of herself.  In other words, Thurman parodied her character and herself, capturing the recognizable stereotype of a famous film actor doing a guest spot as a famous film actor swanning around a Broadway show.

 

Aside from Thurman’s episodes, the series hasn’t been able to find a consistent tone.  Smash is really a soap opera, a melodrama like Grey’s Anatomy and others of its ilk.  But the writers seem to want more than that.  They want to capture the backstage breeziness of the musical theatre gypsies who surround Karen and Ivy (and who are wonderful in the musical numbers), offering a theatrical glimpse into the cattiness and mutual supportiveness of those who are most often anonymous and invisible except as parts of the larger whole.

 

At the same time, Smash wants to play as serious dramatic realism, but the scenes the writers generate for the principal characters sound pretentious, contrived, and overly histrionic.  The contradiction makes for a kind of fascinating train wreck—how do you make a show about the process of creating a show dramatically interesting?

 

As Feminist Spectator 2 (Stacy Wolf) notes, it’s easy to think of numerous backstage musicals and films from the 20th century to the present, all of which demonstrate audiences’ fascination with how theatre works and how productions get put together.  The rehearsal scenes in Smash demonstrate something of that world, except that the characters are forced into the most old-fashioned, stereotypical versions of their parts.  Derek (Jack Davenport) is played as a temperamental artiste and womanizer who “gets” the performance he needs from his female leads by seducing them.  The stage manager is portrayed as harried, the chorus as catty, and the creators as conflicted (with themselves and one another).  This very conventional understanding of creativity—and gender—doesn’t do justice to the complexities of making something work for live theatre.

 

The series hasn’t yet found a way through its conundrums.  Talented performers like Debra Messing and Christian Borle, as Julia and Tom, the songwriting duo creating the Marilyn musical, are mostly wasted in roles that require them to plod through melodramatic plot lines about failing relationships that don’t showcase their real skill.  Both actors succeed in making more of their roles than the scripts deserve, but sometimes, their necessary labor shows.

 

Messing’s Julia is punished for her desire in a too predictable, too stereotypically gendered storyline.  Not for the first time, Julia sleeps with Bombshell’s leading man (Will Chase), jeopardizing her marriage to Frank, a perfectly nice if boring science teacher (played earnestly by Brian D’Arcy James).  Messing and Chase spark with attraction in their flirtation scenes.

 

By contrast, Julia’s domestic life with Frank and her imperious, impossible teenaged son are routine and dull.  Julia is supposed to be an accomplished Broadway lyricist/songwriter, yet she’s hobbled by a family whose demands on her emotional life threaten her ability to do her job.

 

Gay Tom, on the other hand, can at least follow his own desire.  He’s cycled through two different relationships this season, leaving a nice but ordinary lawyer with whom his mother, of all people, set him up, and ends the season having an affair with one of Bombshell’s chorus boys, a faith-full African American who wants to go slowly and build an emotional connection before consummating their relationship in a sexual one.  Although the couple is entirely unbelievable, Borle and his would-be boyfriend have nice chemistry (for a straight man, Borle does an excellent, convincing job playing gay).

 

Then there’s the Karen and Dev (Raza Jaffrey) subplot, in which Karen and her longtime boyfriend suffer complications from privileging her career as a performer over his as a politico/lawyer.  He’s been demoted in his mayor’s office job; his unhappiness leads him to flirt with a co-worker.  After he almost has sex with her, Dev runs to Boston to propose to Karen because he’s startled by his attraction to the other woman.

 

But handsome, soulful, mostly supportive Dev is rebuffed by Karen (who can’t contemplate a marriage proposal while she’s in tech, for heaven’s sake!).  And then, of all things, Dev parks at the Boston hotel bar to drown his sorrows, where he bumps into Ivy, propelling them into an inexplicable one-night stand.

 

These far-fetched stories would be fun if the show admitted to its own trashy campiness.  But Smash’s tone doesn’t signal anything but a weird earnestness about its unlikely narrative turns.  The musical numbers sometimes get the campiness right, though a Bollywood number, in which Karen performed in some sort of India royal court for Dev, with the two of them and the others decked out in Orientalist-wear, was completely gratuitous and patently racist.  But after these extra-textual insertions, the show returns to its soapy stories without the knowing self-reflexivity that would make them, well . . . fun, smart, and snappy.

 

Seeing two different Broadway theatre productions recently that featured two of Smash’s leading performers also helped me realize one of the show’s central problems.  Megan Hilty starred in last week’s City Center Encores! production of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, directed by the super-talented, super-funny John Rando (Urinetown).  The short-run production was a confection, a sweet, playful paean to a 1940s musical that uses musical idioms of the 20s (in which the story is set) and the 50s (to which it looks forward) to move its heroine, the iconic Lorelei, through a silly plot about finding a millionaire mate on a ship bound from New York for France.

 

Lorelei, of course, was originally played on Broadway by a young Carol Channing, and then on film by Marilyn Monroe.  That Hilty was cast as the Monroe character while she’s on television starring in a series about the making of a musical based on Monroe doesn’t seem a coincidence.  During the talk-back after last Saturday’s matinee performance (5/12/12), a vibrant and excited Hilty said that she and Rando talked about how she might make the role her own.

 

Hilty played the role as though she were born to it.  Her Lorelei, though, wasn’t the breathy bombshell who uses her sex appeal like a weapon, as Monroe would have her.  Hilty’s Lorelei was sweet and surprisingly smart.  Although she’s full of malapropisms and her take on politics and the real world is slightly askew, Lorelei becomes the voice of sanity in the play’s rather crazy world.

 

And via Hilty, Lorelei was all heart.  Hilty is a terrific, superbly charismatic stage performer.  “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend” was a knockout number in Hilty’s hands.  She controlled every note, every step, and every beat of her delivery with a confidence, wit, and pleasure that made her galvanizing to watch.

 

The stage is Hilty’s milieu.  Her connection to her fellow performers and to the audience was palpable and thrilling throughout the Gentlemen performance.  She’s a graceful, generous performer; you can see and feel her buoying up the rest of the cast and offering herself with powerful aplomb to the audience, with the Lorelei role as the vehicle for her wonderful talent.

 

Watching Hilty perform live helped me realize what’s wrong with Smash.  Although it’s great fun to see so many Broadway actors on the small screen, television just can’t do justice to their talent.  As Ivy, Hilty’s charisma is compressed by a story that makes the character jealous and small, and by a format that shrinks her exuberance down to fit a much more constrained medium.

 

Although we get glimpses of Hilty’s magnetism in the few numbers Smash shares from Bombshell, they barely hint at the power of her live presence as a performer.  It’s in the exchange between cast-mates and audience that Hilty excels, putting over a number by how she orients her body and her sound to the house, by the outsized smile she wears, which shines on her heart, beating on her sleeve.

 

Television and a melodrama about leading women competing with one another over a role and over their men diminish Hilty’s innate strengths.  Smash forces you to look at this glorious performer as though through the wrong end of a telescope; she’s reduced, shrunk to fit a two-dimensional screen that can only flatten her.

 

The same is true of Christian Borle, who’s performing on Broadway in Peter and the Star-Catcher, a wonderfully invented play with music that began at New York Theatre Workshop last season.  The play (by Rick Elice) narrates the back-story of Peter Pan, featuring an ensemble of 10 men and one young woman (the very talented, delightful Celia Keenan-Bolger, who plays “Molly,” a feisty girl who goes on to become Wendy’s mother).  The actors deliver the tale in a terrifically physical, energetic, transformational acting style.

 

Co-directed by Roger Rees (he of Nicholas Nickleby fame, to which Peter has been compared by some critics) and Alex Timber (who created a similarly active, imaginative mise-èn-scene for Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson), Peter uses the actors’ bodies and simple theatrical tricks to create the story of three boy orphans who are shipped against their will to an evil king.  En route, their lives are saved and transformed by Molly and her father, the custodians of magical “star stuff,” who are delivering their goods in another ship.  When two trunks get switched before these two ships sail, the crew and contents of both vessels become intertwined to spin out the story that leads to Peter Pan.

 

As Black Stache (short for “moustache”), the character who eventually becomes the vile Captain Hook, Christian Borle is, in a word, awesome.  Like Hilty, he’s a consummate live performer, whose work with the ensemble and his interactions with the audience are hilarious, smart, and entirely skillful.  He jumps, he leaps, he sweats, and he works on stage, all to make it look easy and so much fun.  (His extra-large theatrical persona was also evident in his turn as Prior in last year’s Signature Theatre revival of Angels in America.)

 

Sitting at a piano crooning tunes and rolling his eyes at his fellow characters’ machinations in Smash wastes Borle’s abilities.  But how could television incorporate the wonder of seeing him use the space of the stage to express his outsized talent?  TV compresses these wonderful stage actors into a story that reduces their characters and their own performing gifts.

 

Before it became routine and tiresome, Glee captured some of the campy style that Smash needs to make it, you should excuse me, sing.  The series needs less plodding scripting and more celebration of what it feels like to be able to sing with a voice like Megan Hilty’s, and more acknowledgement that performers with as much presence and charisma as Hilty and Borle are what makes Broadway continue to attract audiences, even while film spectacles beckon them away.

 

Hilty and Borle demonstrate that live popular performance like Broadway musicals and comedies rely on something very old fashioned indeed:  the magnetism of consummate performers who know how to hold the audience in the palm of their hand.  How pleasurable it is to be carried away on the high of an actor’s charisma.  And how sad not to be able to capture that on a television show about Broadway.

 

The Feminist Spectator