Drama Queen

I’ve been following playwright Teresa Rebeck for a very long time, and I’ve always been impressed with her ability to create sparkling, cutting dialogue that actually gets to the heart of important issues with a truly provocative level of insight. The plays she wraps around this dialogue are of varying quality, but lately they’ve been quite good. Seminar continues that trend, taking us on a wild ride through the emotional lives of five writers.

Four aspiring young writers are accepted for a private seminar with Leonard (Alan Rickman), a respected novelist. He teaches them with ruthless, often unkind honesty, which also includes, under pressure, honesty about his own unethical behavior. Sex comes into play, but isn’t the thematic center of the play (at one point Leonard pushes the subject aside with something along the lines of “enough of the soap opera”). Gradually Martin (Hamish Linklater) emerges as the central character and his professional love/hate relationship with Leonard the spine of the play.

Rebeck is remarkable for the way she combines a realistic style with sharp-eyed satire (all her plays are satirical on some level). This is her most engaging comedy in quite some time; she is not immune to the occasional plot hole, but it’s all in the service of telling the often funny truth about the difficult, bruising life of a writer.

Rickman delivers his usual excellence as Leonard, portraying a man whose charisma and love for his craft more often than not overcome his genuinely heinous character flaws. Linklater is at the zenith of his geeky hotness here (particularly in one all-to-brief shirtless moment) and gives a detailed, appropriately twitchy performance that more than stands up to Rickman’s. Director Sam Gold, making his Broadway debut, connects with Rebeck’s hard edges and gives the play’s zing full reign.

If writers are important to you like they are to me – I’ve been working with them since I was 18 – then Seminar might be just the cup of sweet-tart poison for you.

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I’m a big fan of Noël Coward – here’s a gay playwright who married queer wit to a penetrating understanding of human emotions. Director Richard Eyre’s breezy new production of his Private Lives largely does right by my boy Noël, although his cast sometimes plays the darker side a touch too heavily, which throws Coward’s glittering balance off a bit.

Glamorous Brits Amanda (Kim Cattrall) and Elyot (Paul Gross) have been divorced from each other for five years. Now, on honeymoons with new spouses in the South of France, they meet again on neighboring hotel balconies, rekindling their powerful love and lust for each other…and then, slowly, the things that drove them apart originally begin to creep back in.

For the most part, Catrall and Gross do a solid job of keeping the pace quick, the quips delivered with sharp timing. One trick to playing Coward, though, is not letting his incisive insight into human psychology shade too dark. He is making gimlet-eyed fun of human folly, and much of its charge comes from the tension between glittering surfaces and murky depths. Put those depths too much on display, and the energy goes slack. That happens particularly in Act III of this production. By the very end though, Catrall and Gross are back on track, and finish off the evening on an appropriately light-hearted note.

Rob Howell’s set is the production’s biggest misstep – I get the idea behind the art deco apartment in the second half, but it is so poorly executed that it undercuts the elegance that is such a crucial part of Coward’s world. This is a minor hindrance, however, and most of the time this featherweight production glides by swiftly and effervescently, just like it should.

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I’m so thrilled that 2011 can be marked as the year that two very promising American playwrights crossed over into visibly being really great writers. David Lindsay-Abaire did it on Broadway in the spring with Good People, and Jon Robin Baitz did it Off-Broadway with Other Desert Cities. I rarely miss anything on Broadway, so I knew about Lindsay-Abaire’s triumph first-hand. I heard Baitz’s triumph trumpeted frequently by people whose taste I trusted, so I was very much looking forward to the inevitable Broadway transfer of Other Desert Cities. I was not disappointed.

In Other Desert Cities, writer Brooke Wyeth (Rachel Griffiths) reunites with her parents (Stockard Channing and Stacy Keach), former members of Ronnie and Nancy Reagan’s inner circle, her brother (Thomas Sadoski) and her aunt (Judith Light), in Palm Springs, to celebrate Christmas 2004. Six years after writing a hit novel, Brooke announces that she is about to publish a memoir focusing on an explosive chapter in the family’s history, throwing the holiday reunion into turmoil, as the Wyeth family struggles to come to terms with their past.

This is first-rate, intelligent family drama, as powerful in its own way as Tracy Letts’s breakthrough August: Osage County – and more tightly written. Political hot-button issues of all sorts are raised, their personal dimensions smartly explored – the comparisons and contrasts between the personal and the political are thoroughly worked over – and no easy answers are offered (though Baitz resolves the family stories in ways that feel earned, honest, and satisfying).

Rachel Griffiths is terrific as Brooke, and Stockard Channing is frighteningly accurate as she charts the shifting perspectives of Brooke’s mother Polly, a Texas Republican who also happens to be a Jewish ex-screenwriter, full of all kinds of surprises. The most compellingly writen character of all, though, is Polly’s fuck-up liberal sister Silda, which Judith Light plays to perfection. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the first serious contender for 2012′s Best Play Tony.

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While visiting mainland China some years back, playwright David Henry Hwang was invited to see a new arts center in a large provincial city. He was very impressed with the state-of-the-art facility; he was also thoroughly taken aback by the embarassing mistranslations between English and Chinese that populated the signs at this otherwise immaculately turned out center.

In Chinglish, Hwang explores the deeper problems that these mistranslations point towards, while also exploiting the hilarious misunderstandings they engender for maximum comic effect. American businessman Daniel Cavanaugh (Gary Wilmes) – owner of a sign-making business – knowing nothing about either the culture of China or its language, seeks a relationship with government officials, hoping to expand his market. Along the way, he becomes involved in an intrigue with the guarded, mysterious Xi Yan (Jennifer Lim).

Lim and Wilmes play out the complicated relationship between Daniel and Xi with great attention to detail, not letting a stitch drop when it comes to the social and moral implications of what goes on between them. Leigh Silverman’s taut direction helps a lot, too, filling out the third dimension in Hwang’s occasionally over-schematic script.

Chinglish is also an impressively designed show: Anita Yavich’s costumes make droll points about the fetishization of Chinese culture by Westerners and vice versa. David Korins’ double-turntable set is a marvel, especially when moving in sync with sound designer Darron L. West’s pungent musical selections.

The surtitle projections by Jeff Sugg and Shawn Duan – an essential part of a show where a large percentage of dialogue is in Chinese – are mercifully clear, but the need to focus on them for long periods of time can be a bit headache inducing. Chinglish is intelligent and insightful, but wears its smarts lightly. All in all, a brisk, engaging comedy with some serious issues on its mind.

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How do you adapt one of the cornerstones of kinky culture, without creating pornography? Playwright David Ives has come up with a very creative solution for this smart, sexy show, by showing us an extended, out-of-control audition in which a director and an actress act out the major scenes in Venus in Fur, a watershed 1870 novel by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch – a book so sexually ahead of its time that the word “masochism” was derived from the author’s name.

Vanda (star-in-the-making Nina Arianda) is a young actress determined to land the lead in a new play based on Venus in Fur. Or at least that’s what she claims to be, though hints are dropped pretty quickly that she may be up to more. The adorable Hugh Dancy, wearing a very tight gray t-shirt, plays Thomas, the play’s adapter/director. While Ives’s main thematic prey is the psycho-sexual depths explored in the novel, he also takes ample delight in pointing out the sadomasochistic truth about show business, and auditions in particular.

The play is especially delicious as a tour de force for two actors. As wonderful as Arianda was in Born Yesterday, she is positively dazzling here. And Dancy is a terrific foil – it’s very hot indeed to see this hunk’s skin get flushed in some of the show’s more intense moments.

The show’s handful of failings include being too long (even at an hour and 45 minutes, there still is much that could be cut) and the occasional lapse into lazy pretension. That said, Ives has done a marvelous job of making sure that the play isn’t just red meat for actors, but a roller coaster of a good time for the audience. Venus in Fur is a hot plate of kinky fun.

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