Three plays on regional stages this week – two at Williamstown Theatre Festival and one at New Century Theatre – have at their center strong women confronted by life-changing choices. Coming from three different eras of American theater, they nevertheless address analogous situations and present, in quite different ways, women negotiating a world defined and dominated by men. All three also involve an older woman’s relationship to a younger, more independent woman, and most crucially, in all of them the women face decisions that will define their futures.
Both the WTF pieces are world premieres, which might be surprising, since one of them is almost 50 years old. That’s Off the Main Road, a recently discovered work by William Inge, author of Bus Stop, Picnic and other Broadway staples of the 1950s. The other is Legacy, by Daniel Goldfarb. It is set in an upscale flat in present-day Manhattan, and has all the polished attitude, glib cultural references and R-rated language you’d expect in that setting. Main Road takes place in a rustic holiday cabin outside St. Louis, and though it was written in the boundary-testing sixties it retains the structure and diction of works from Inge’s heyday.
Both plays center on women with husbands disgruntled because their shooting-star careers have fizzled, and both turn on emotionally charged either-or choices. But there’s a critical difference. In one, the women make those choices, for good or ill, and in the other the choices are made for them – by men. The shocking thing is that it’s not the older play that shackles its female characters, but the brand-new one.
Legacy involves a 40-something married couple, Neil and Suzanne, he a famous author whose latest novel is a flop, she a researcher documenting Holocaust survivors’ experiences. He’s thinking about his legacy, genetic as well as literary, and rethinking their longstanding decision to be childless. As Suzanne prophetically remarks, “He always gets what he wants.” Having agreed to this U-turn, she then can’t get pregnant, and they turn to a surrogate – one of his students, Heart (sic), who is assisting Suzanne in organizing the archive of Neil’s papers. And that’s where the corkscrew plot takes off (the between-scenes music is Haydn’s Surprise Symphony).
The play’s style is also something of a corkscrew, and Oliver Butler’s direction simply underlines it. Starting as a straightforward domestic drama, it quickly swerves into wisecracking sitcom (complete with a farcically flippant ob-gyn) before spiraling into medical soap-opera territory – at which point the logic of the plot also starts to unravel.
Four good actors do their best with this mishmash, one of them brilliantly. As Suzanne, Jessica Hecht fills every moment – comedic, poignant, pathetic – with truth and texture. Halley Feiffer is Heart, young, smart and cheerfully self-centered (“I’m a genius – just fucking better than everyone else”). But Heart, eventually facing even more wrenching choices than Suzanne, cedes every decision to the men – not only narcissistic Neil (Eric Bogosian) but the ethics-free jokester doctor (Justin Long).
Judging from the rather self-satisfied interview with Goldfarb and Butler in the program, I’m not at all sure the playwright even knows what he’s written: a play that’s centrally about the women, but where the men have all the power.
William Inge knew exactly what he was writing in Off the Main Road, especially in the second act scene with a closeted gay man (Howard W. Overshown), which Inge was himself. That sympathetic nod is mostly a sidelight in a piece that focuses on the man’s lifelong friend, Faye, and her teenage daughter Julia. The play’s rustic cabin is the refuge Faye seeks from her abusive husband Manny, a former baseball star in a post-career slump.
The script is quite sturdy for one that never saw the footlights in its day and was written in its author’s own late-career slump. It covers a lot of thematic territory – not just the homosexual taboo, but wealth and class, awakening spirituality and sexuality, need and loneliness – and its carefully crafted dialogue supports a taut plot and explosions of violent action.
The large, strong cast of 11 is led by Kyra Sedgwick, who gives Faye a brittle fragility masked by a socialite’s well-groomed veneer. Newcomer Mary Wiseman is wonderfully affecting as young Julia, already facing a decisive fork in her life’s path. Manny, the hunky has-been, could be simply the heavy, but Jeremy Davidson brings a painful sadness that adds depth to the dramatic tension. Only Estelle Parsons, who mugs her way through her role as Faye’s highhanded mother, is out of place in this well-modulated ensemble.
The sly predators in the title of Lillian Hellman’s classic drama The Little Foxes, at New Century Theatre through Saturday, are Ben and Oscar, who inherited their father’s fortune, and their sister Regina, who didn’t. The reference is to the biblical verse about the sneak-thieves who “spoil the vines,” in this case, a trio of schemers who absolutely personify greed and entitlement – which makes this play from the 1930s disturbingly timely.
Regina’s life choices may have been circumscribed by her gender, but she’s the smartest fox in the room, and the play watches her seize a sudden chance at power and independence in a high-stakes gamble. Greg Trochlil’s imposing set gives us a finely detailed feel for the family’s milieu, lush and expansive yet cratered with shadowy corners and closed-door secrets, and so does Ed Golden’s smart, well-paced production.
This is another play with a large, able cast – ten – and without diminishing the others’ contributions, I will mention John Kooi and Jake Berger as the rapacious brothers, Stephanie Carlson as Oscar’s frightened bird of a wife, Sam Rush as Regina’s frail but steely dying husband, Aimee Doherty, by turns silky and waspish as Regina, and Emery Henderson, unfailingly authentic as her daughter – another young woman, in this absorbing trio of plays, on the cusp of a life-altering choice.
New Century Theatre photos by Carolyn Brown; WTF photos courtesy Williamstown Theatre Festival.
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