The revival of Wendy Wasserstein's 'An American Daughter' is disappointing

 

When I walked into the Irene Diamond theatre for An American Daughter I gasped and said to the usher, “What a set.”  The large sunny living room featured a high ceiling with windows nearly floor to that ceiling and a cushioned, pillow-filled window seat that looks out to a garden of trees, with a windowed door opened invitingly.  Comfy furniture, shelves filled with books, a huge portrait of a young woman over the fireplace indicate the country home of a wealthy family

Wealthy, yes, but Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams’ set represents Georgetown, which surprised me when I read the program.  I spent a great deal of time in Georgetown when I lived in Baltimore and never thought that much green space could be behind those stately facades, but then I only knew them from walks through the neighborhood.  Our seats were in the wide cross theatre aisle, with seats on the other side descending, so we had a clear view.  With nothing in front of us my friend and I felt as if we were right there in the bright living room (lighting design by Alan C. Edwards).  What a treat.

So, set: 10. 

For performances, by veterans such as Robert Sean Leonard (in photo), Montego Glover and Dakin Matthews, it was acting: 10.  But play by Wendy Wasserstein, well, maybe 7. 

It’s not that I didn’t like the play, which opened last night.  It’s that at two and a half hours it’s way too long.  If it were greatly tightened, especially in the first act, and unfolded quicker, it would be a good play.  Sarna Lapine, who most recently directed Call Me Izzy on Broadway, directs.

The play opens with Lyssa Dent Hughes (Jean Lichty, in photo) holding a remote tightly and speaking along with television coverage of herself from her earlier appearance before Congress to accept her nomination by the President to be the new Surgeon General.  (Lichty is founder and executive director of La Femme Theatre, which is producing this revival of Wasserstein’s 1997 play).

Lyssa is waiting for the moment where she makes one tiny mistake and gets furious with herself.  She’s a classic high achiever, most recently president of Georgetown Hospital, and prides herself on being an American daughter as the fifth-generation granddaughter of General Ulysses S. Grant.  It is his wife, Julia Dent Grant, whose likeness, in various shades of blue, is portrayed in the painting over the fireplace.  Her father, Alan Hughes (Matthews) is a conservative Republican Senator from Indiana.

Lyssa later describes her family ancestry as, “My family is American and has been for generations in all its branches, direct and collateral.”

Lichty is diminutive, maybe 4’ 9’, and railing thin. Costume designer Donna Zakowska made a wise choice in creating her style.  Lyssa wears slacks with an oversized top that give her some physical stature to command the attention her professional stature deserves.  The large top is well structured so it doesn’t look sloppy or just thrown on.  It’s Lyssa’s unique style, one that for her I’m sure is intentional.

Unfortunately, she’s the only well-developed character.  Her husband, Walter Abrahmson (Leonard), is a bland but esteemed sociology professor at Georgetown and her close friend since their Miss Porter days, Judith B. Kaufman (Glover), is the stereotypical single professional desperately trying to have a child through fertility treatments.  She’s an oncologist but her main identity is that of a baby obsessed and despairing woman.  As she puts it, she can’t give or save life.  Glover deserves better.  I first fell in love with her in Memphis, which I saw twice and I still enjoy through the CD cast recording. 

Another stereotypical character is Quincy Quince (Carmen Zilles), a former student of Walter who is now enjoying success as the author of a wildly popular book called The Prisoner of Gender.  She walks confidently into Lyssa’s living room one day, having let herself in through the garden where the gate seems to always be unlocked.  (No one in Washington D.C. in 1997 would have any unlocked door, especially in an affluent neighborhood and with a resident who is becoming a high-profile figure in the news.)

Once inside Quincy asks for Walter and when Lyssa tells her he’s not there she makes herself at home anyway.  I’m sure everyone in the audience will conclude as I did that she either had an affair with Walter, was still having one or planned to.  And they would be right.  The older male college professor and young female student relationship is ridiculously overdone.

A character who would have been more enjoyable if he had been a stereotype is Morrow McCarthy (Ryan Spahn), a gay man who is a friend of Lyssa even though he’s recently turned anti-choice.  He’s a former Washington Post columnist turned screenwriter who has sold a script to Disney for seven figures.  Usually the lone gay character has the best laugh lines or is the lovable, sympathetic friend but Morrow comes off as an annoying pest who seems to always be around.  The only humor associated with him comes when Judith addresses him with a Shakespearean “Good Morrow.”

Lyssa is on target to sail through her confirmation hearings until she makes a comment during an interview with popular television journalist Timber Tucker (Chris Ghaffari), which she sits for at the President’s request.  Her description of her mother as “the kind of ordinary Indiana housewife who took pride in her ice box cakes and cheese pimento canapés” sets off a backlash the way Hillary Clinton’s comment about not staying home making cookies did during her husband’s 1992 presidential campaign. 

Any hopes for shifting this narrative are torpedoed by Walter who, at a brunch Lyssa is hosting, drops the bomb in earshot of Timber that Lyssa has never served on jury duty.  She had received a notice once but, busy woman that she is, had left it to the assistant who handles her mail to make sure she sent it in by the appointed date and then put it out of her mind.  She never saw the notice again and figured the maid might have thrown it out.

Sensing a new angle, Timber asks why she didn’t contact the court for a new jury notice.  As this unfolds it sends her once sure-thing confirmation from a little wobbly because of the baking reference into a major crisis, as small things often do for female candidates.

A nerdy image consultant, Billy Robbins (Will Devary), is called in.  By the time Lyssa walks into the living room for her final interview with Timber she looks like a 1950s socialite in an off-white Chanel suit with the skirt below her knees and wearing a matching hair band.  Anyone who remembers the 1992 campaign will instantly think of the derision Hillary Clinton faced when she began wearing hair bands to shift her image, which to the right wing was equal to that of Lady Macbeth.

I won’t tell you the ending, which would have had more power if it had come sooner.  I hope seeing all Lyssa had to endure won’t discourage any potential female candidates in the audience.  Hopefully, though, it will make them steer clear of hair bands. 

The Whoopi Monologues

 

My friend Ruth and I left The Whoopi Monologues at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater happy.  As we walked across the Lincoln Center plaza we laughed as we talked about the funniest moments.  Unfortunately, they were all in the fifth of the five monologues.  If it hadn’t been for Kecia Lewis’ hilarious descriptions of menopause our reactions would have been quite different.  We agreed this was because it was the only one that sounded like Goldberg, who wrote all five, at least as we know her through movies.

This new show is a reimagining of Goldberg’s 1984 self-titled one-woman Off-Broadway production in which she played six characters.  Director Whitney White, who was nominated for a best director Tony for last season’s Liberation, updated the monologues and reimagined the show as an ensemble piece for five actresses, one of whom is Kerry Washington, who is a producer. 

New York Times theatre critic Mel Gussow lavished the original with praise.  “Quickly we realize that Miss Goldberg is not simply a stand-up comedian but a satirist with a cutting edge and an actress with a wry attitude toward life and public performance,” he wrote.

I wish I had seen that production because I like Goldberg and would have appreciated hearing her present her own work live.  Director Mike Nichols was so intrigued by the review he attended a performance and loved it enough to take it to Broadway where it opened in October 1984.  That production prompted an HBO special the following year titled “Whoopi Goldberg: Direct from Broadway.”  (Interestingly, Lurleen, the menopausal character, wasn’t in Goldberg’s original show but was added for a 20^th anniversary production on Broadway.)

The monologues in this show are: Fontaine, in which Kara Young plays a drug-addicted Ph.D.; Blonde Girl, with Kai Heath as a young girl who wishes she had long blonde hair so she wears her tan jacket (costumes by Qween Jean) on her head and Jamaican Lady for which Danielle Pinnock overdoes the accent.  I found all irritating.  The fourth, Washington’s, is Surfer Girl, in which she plays a 13-year-old Valley Girl (greatly overdoing the word like) who gets pregnant from a one-night stand.  She turns to a priest who slams closed the confessional window on her and, when she won’t leave, sends her to the nearby nuns who also send her away.  Turning to her mother for comfort, she is put out on the street.  This was the most moving of the monologues and would have been even more so if the Valley Girt talk had been toned down.  I am always happy to see Washington back onstage.

And then Lewis’ Lurleen, boldly attired in gold, red and black with heavily braided hair flowing from a top notch (hair and wigs by Nikiya Mathis).  She’s delightfully angry and sassy, complaining about how unprepared she was for how hot she’d be during menopause.  Not from outside but from deep within.

“Ooh, and there ain’t no celebratory feeling to it.  It ain’t like erectile dysfunction.  Oh, you know what I mean, when you see those commercials for erectile dysfunction always everybody having a big party.  The women are always smiling at the men because they know there’s a pill that’s gonna keep that man hard for 19 hours.”

But not the women experiencing menopause.

“They look like they about to slit their own throats.” 

And they’re not interested in sex.  But her husband, thanks to that pill, is raring to go.

“I say, ‘Look here, wrap that thing back around your neck and walk away.”

She’s given hormone pills to control the hot flashes but then is told they cause cancer.  “And you say, ‘Wait a minute, you can keep a man hard for 19 hours but you can’t find a way to balance out a hot flash?’”

While this was our favorite, audience members -- who were mostly women in a variety of ages, Black and white -- were engaged throughout, so much so that I wondered if some had been planted or were prescreened as they are for Every Brilliant Thing.  Many had no sense of the fourth wall separating audience from performers.  They engaged with the actors through enthusiastic comments and the actors reached out to high five those in the first rows. 

It’s a high-energy show, 90 minutes with no intermission. 

Dolly Parton's coming to Broadway

 

Dolly: A True Musical, a bio-musical about that phenomenal country singer who needs no last name (it’s Parton) is coming to Broadway’s St. James Theatre in December, with an opening night of Jan. 19, Parton’s 81^st birthday.   The show will chart her rise to fame and feature her greatest hits.  She’s the book’s co-writer with Maria S. Schlatter

“My whole life has been a musical,” she said in a statement.  “A great ole opera really and I can’t wait to present it to you on Broadway.  I hope you enjoy watching as much as I’ve enjoyed livin’ it.”

Tony winner Barlett Sher will direct, with Mandy Moore choreographing.   

Casting has yet to be announced.  Quite a while back Kristin Chenoweth talked about wanting to play Dolly, one of her inspirations growing up in Oklahoma, in a Broadway musical.  Unfortunately, at 57, she may have aged out to play Dolly in her early years.  She’d be a good one, though.  I love her 2011 CD of country music, Some Lessons Learned, for which she wrote two of the 13 songs.  One is called “What Would Dolly Do?” or “WW Double D?”

The musical had its world premiere last summer in, appropriately, Nashville.

This will be Parton’s second time on Broadway.  She wrote the music and lyrics for 9 to 5: The Musical, which premiered in 2009.

LCT to revive 'The Sound of Music'

 

Lincoln Center Theater, which has brought us so many excellent musicals over the years, including the current revival of Ragtime, will present The Sound of Music next spring starring Jasmine Amy Rogers, the powerhouse star of last year's Boop! The Musical.  Lear de Bessonet, in her second year as the theatre’s artist director, will direct.  She directed Ragtime, which won this year’s Tony Award for best new musical revival.

 

James Earl Jones to be honored at the theatre that bears his name.

 

A larger-than-life bronze bust of James Earl Jones will be unveiled June 16 in the lobby of the 48^th Street theatre where he made his Broadway debut in 1957. Previously the Cort Theatre, it was renamed the James Earl Jones Theatre in 2022, becoming the second Broadway theatre renamed for a Black artist, following the August Wilson Theatre in 2005.

Jones died in 2024 at 93. 

Nathan Lane and Laurie Metcalf star in 'Death of a Salesman'

 

I have never seen such a depressing production of Death of a Salesman as director Joe Mantello’s revival at the Winter Garden Theatre.  My introduction to this 1949 Arthur Miller classic came in 1972 when I saw it at Baltimore Center Stage when I was 17.  I knew nothing of the story and left the theatre devastated at Willy’s death.  To me it was a sad play but not depressing.  I felt this way through three degrees in English, one of which is an MFA in playwriting.  Deeply flawed though he is, I cared about Willy and saw his humanity.

When I heard Nathan Lane had been cast in the role I couldn’t fathom him as Willy.  He has such a distinct speaking voice, one that to me is like fingernails on a chalkboard, and he is always Nathan Lane no matter what character he is playing.  I didn’t feel that way initially in Salesman but when he first raised his voice, which he does far too often, the voice I heard was Max Bialystock, his Tony Award-winning role in The Producers.  I don’t know if I would have heard that just from having seen the 2001 musical but I had listened to the cast recoding a couple of weeks before I booked the show so throughout I heard Max.  And except for a fleeting moment at the end, I didn’t feel his humanity.

I also didn’t like Laurie Metcalf’s Linda because she also did too much shouting, directed at her ne’er-do-well adult sons Biff (Christopher Abbott) and Happy (Ben Ahlers).  A strong Linda is a welcome change from the doormat Linda I had always seen until Sharon D. Clarke’s spot-on portrayal in the powerful revival four years ago.  When Wendell Pierce’s exceptional Willy hollered at her or belittled her she’d take it patiently and as soon as he turned away would offer a gesture or facial expression that made clear she wasn’t hurt or overcome by him.  It was the first time I ever felt Linda loved him and in Pierce’s performance I felt he loved her.  It was the only time I’ve seen this play as being about a marriage and not about a father and his sons.  They had excellent chemistry together.  I felt Metcalf’s Linda loved Willy fiercely but I felt no marital chemistry between them.

Adding to the gloom is Chloe Lamford’s scenic design that looks like a set from a gangster movie.  What looks like a long-abandoned, decaying warehouse contains metal furniture that looks as if it belongs in a prison — a table, two benches and two straight chairs.  Jack Knowles’s lighting is bleak and fog wafts around throughout.  Willy’s red 1964 Chevy is center stage, the dominant figure, which makes sense because he arrives in it from his day as a traveling salesman to start the play and leaves in it to die in it, crashing it so his family can collect the $20,000 insurance. 

Just before his exit, in the climatic scene when Biff tries to force Willy to see “I am a nobody,” I felt the strongest connection in the production when Biff got on his knees and cried in Willy’s lap.  When he left, Willy sat dazed, marveling that Biff loved him.

I’ve never had much sympathy for Biff except when I saw Kevin Anderson in the role opposite Philip Seymour Hoffman in 2012. I also saw the 1999 production starring Brian Dennehy.  I didn’t care for their portrayals of Willy either.  And I saw the show at Syracuse Stage in 1983.

I never liked Happy in any of the productions I’ve seen either because he’s such a cad, using women for one-night stands and boasting about it.  In this production, though, he had a certain winning charm.  Ahler’s baby face softens Happy’s crudeness.  I love this actor’s portrayal of Jack Trotter on the Broadway-rich HBO series “The Gilded Age,” a servant who invents an improved alarm clock and becomes rich.

It’s interesting that the productions I liked the most were the two with all-Black casts.  The 1972 show I saw in Baltimore was the first time for such casting in this country.  Miller came to the opening.  It took a half-century for Broadway to follow but that production had the same gut-punch force for me as my first.  Both of those will always be Death of a Salesman for me.

Kelli O'Hara and Rose Byrne booze it up in Noel Coward's 'Fallen Angels'

 

I had been looking forward to Fallen Angels at the Todd Haimes Theatre.  A play by Noel Coward starring Kelli O’Hara and Rose Byrne sounded like a great way to spend an evening.  Unfortunately it wasn’t.  Under Scott Ellis’s direction the women overact, using exaggerated English accents that quickly became annoying.

They play two friends, Julia Sterroll (O’Hara, right in photo) and Jane Banbury (Byrne) , who had an affair with the same man, Maurice Duclos (Mark Consuelos) years ago, before they were married, and are now expecting him to visit.  In the dining-drawing room of Julia’s spectacular London apartment (fabulous Art Deco set by David Rockwell), dressed in Jeff Mahshie’s gorgeous gowns, they booze it up until they are staggering.  O’Hara is a marvel at physical comedy.  She collapses so completely and quickly that it was as if she has no bones.  Crumpled on the floor she looks like a human puddle.  It’s also a hoot watching them try to navigate their lighter to light their cigarettes at the end of long holders.

When he does show up, two days later, making the appearance of a dashing Frenchman, they learn that he has taken the apartment between theirs, which are two floors apart.  The women are thrilled to go see it, leaving behind their dull, startled, husbands, Fred Sterroll (Aasif Mandvi) and Willy Banbury (Christopher Fitzgerald) who soon hear the sounds of laughter and frivolity drifting down.  Lighting designer Kenneth Posner has the chandelier do a nifty little dance as the good time of the reconnect lovers picks up speed.  

Coward wrote the play when he was only 24.  It premiered in London in 1925 and hasn’t been seen on Broadway in 70 years.  To me it was just 90 minutes of silliness but the audience was laughing uproariously throughout.