Half Moon

I'm sure you've already heard the "hook" of the Nora Theatre's production of Eugene O'Neill's A Moon for the Misbegotten (sorry, had to pull the photo for the show, because its photographer - Elizabeth Stewart - has been a huge pain in the ass).  And Jesus, Mary and Joseph, the Irish lass at the center of the piece is played by an African-American (the talented Ramona Lisa Alexander). What is the world comin' to, etc!

Well, I don't know the answer to that question, but as long as the Nora is happy to cast A Raisin in the Sun with white folks, I suppose there's no problem with this approach (although somehow I don't think they are).  As Hub Review readers know, I'm a strong advocate of color-blind casting in general; still, some plays are so associated with a certain culture or milieu that one does raise an eyebrow at fiddling with that context. And O'Neill is very specific about his context here - an Irish farmstead in 30's Connecticut - and director Richard McElvain seems to have no interest in tweaking that set-up in the least.

Although of course it's fun that a black lady should be playing one of the Irish, I suppose, many of whom in times gone by were notorious for their racism; and it was definitely a kick watching Terry Byrne, in the pages of the Globe, do back-flips to show how down she was with all this, after years of bowing and scraping to South Boston in the pages of the Herald.  Meanwhile the fact that Ms. Alexander was playing against Will McGarrahan, a stalwart of the gay-oriented SpeakEasy Stage, seemed like so much icing on the multi-cult cake - and left me hoping the supporting cast might be filled out with Asians and Latinos, all sporting accents from Killarney.

But no such luck.  And alas, Ms. Alexander is actually not all that sure of her accent, nor does she have an abundance of chemistry with Billy Meleady, the real-life Irishman who plays her Da (perhaps partly because Meleady doesn't really have as much scabrous fun with the part as he might). For much of the production's first half, it's only intermittently engaging, and seems like hardly a patch on the powerful Merrimack version of a year or two ago.

But Ms. Alexander has a lock on at least one aspect of the role - she's got the earth-mother thing that the play demands going big-time.  Whenever Alexander braces herself, hands on hips, legs planted far apart, those legs seem to stretch right into the ground - she looks rooted; and when she embraces her drunken, fallen suitor, you can indeed believe that poor Jamie Tyrone (and poor Eugene O'Neill) might have found solace in her arms. Meanwhile McGarrahan goes to very dark and desolate places as the ruined, alcoholic, sacrilegious Jamie, and he does so almost off-handedly, so that his performance, though perhaps lacking in believable sexual bravado, slowly becomes intensely poignant. And Alexander matches him, beat for beat. By the time the sun rises on this long, perhaps-redemptive night (an effect brought off beautifully by lighting designer Margo Caddell), Alexander and McGarrahan have taken us to the heart of the matter, as it were. Which is where any production of A Moon for the Misbegotten wants to end, however it gets there.

Lady with All the Answers doesn't really offer any

Stephanie Clayman as Ann Landers. Photo by Elizabeth Stewart.

The Nora Theatre Co.'s The Lady with All the Answers, at the Central Square Theater through June 26, purports to be a biography of "Ann Landers," the pseudonym for Esther Pauline ("Eppie") Lederer, the Chicago sage who via her ubiquitous advice column led a kind of ongoing national salon in the pages of the press for 47 years.

Lederer's long success in the role of "Ann" (she was so popular that identical-twin-sister "Popo" soon carved out a competing chunk of turf as "Dear Abby") wasn't much of a mystery. She may have been no student of the human soul, but Eppie had a keen eye for the emotional (and moral) bottom line - you couldn't pull one over on her; and of course she had an army of experts at her beck and call, who could advise on the technicalities of virtually any topic. She also had a style - a punchy, wiseacre chirp with an ethnic lilt that had somehow been drained of all ethnicity, and was spiced instead with her own curious brand of 40's slang: "Bub, you've got a geranium in your cranium!" was a typical line.

Did anyone ever actually talk like that? I mean besides "Ann"? Well, apparently Eppie did, too; or so playwright Rambo would have us believe. He doesn't really try to crack the veneer of Lederer's linguistic vim and vigor, but does a pretty good job of capturing its cadence, and making it sound roughly like conversation. Although in The Lady with All the Answers, Eppie's the only one talking; the play's conceit is that she's holding court in her plush Chicago apartment (perfectly rendered in Louis Quinze and Chagalls by designer Brynna Bloomfield) as if it were a talk show set, chatting across the fourth wall to the audience about this or that famous letter or opinion. But at the same time, she's trying to crank out her most famous, and most personal column - the one that announced her stunning divorce from Budget Rent-a-Car bigwig Jules Lederer, her husband of 36 years. Yes, public face and private heartbreak. Sexual betrayal - and how to hang the toilet paper! This double device is unwieldy at times - intermission arrives because Eppie declares she needs a bubble bath - but to be honest, it does kind of capture the column's funny yin-yang tension between the tragic and the trivial.

But the playwright treads so lightly in Eppie's private life that we actually learn none of her secrets. The script's raison d'être would seem to be to get behind that famous column - but Rambo steadfastly refuses to do so. We learn hubby Jules was having an affair "with a woman younger than his daughter" (that daughter would be Margo Howard, who kept the advice dynasty going with "Dear Prudence"), which meant the marriage was over. But we do wonder why, exactly - Eppie was constantly advising other couples to go through counseling, patch things up for the sake of the children, try to learn to trust each other again and see the marriage through. So why couldn't she take her own advice?

Likewise her famous (and utterly understandable) feud with "Dear Abby" is acknowledged, but given the comic brush-off (after a reported five-year silence, the two did reconcile, below). We do learn a few things about Eppie that hint at a powerful, and possibly mercurial, personality - such as the fact that she dropped a standing fiancé to marry the handsome Jules (whom she met while shopping for her wedding veil!). Perhaps Eppie was more demanding and pampered (all those bubble baths!) than she, or Rambo - or perhaps Margo Howard, whose protective presence seems to hover over the play - lets on.


"Eppie" and "Popo" - a.k.a. "Ann Landers" and "Dear Abby."

On the plus side, we also get a sense of Lederer's considerable political energy (she was a liberal Democratic operative, and her connections to many of her experts came from her friendship with Hubert Humphrey), which you'd think could open up for us a whole new perspective on "Ann Landers." After all, Eppie was hardly politically mainstream; she was progressive, and Jewish, and pretty much a proto-feminist, all while insisting she was a "square" with a WASP name out of Leave it to Beaver. Playwright Rambo doesn't really limn these contradictions, but does perhaps his best work while detailing Lederer's frustrating campaign against the Vietnam war. Her change of heart over, and eventual championing of, gay and lesbian issues is likewise quite touching. Eppie was certainly on the right side of most of our political struggles, even if her commercial connections and general social M.O. left many progressives and feminists sneering.

Some of the potential edge of this material is lost, however, in the smooth bubble bath of nostalgia at the Central Square Theater, where Daniel Gidron has directed the play as a light crowdpleaser - which is probably precisely how it was intended. And it is entertaining - and even moving in its more-political segments. I just think it could have been a little bit more. As Eppie, actress Stephanie Clayman is certainly likeable and full of pep -she earns the right to wear that famous perm. And she nails a Midwest accent so eccentric something tells me it's drawn from recordings of Lederer herself. But Clayman doesn't really push the envelope when it comes to the deeper feelings that must have tugged at Eppie while writing that fateful column; she pauses and sighs a lot, it's true, but once the column's done, and read aloud to daughter Margo, Clayman hardly seems emotionally exhausted; instead, she actually lets out a great big yawn. Oh, well, so much for Jules, off to bed!! This probably squares with the expectations of the audience - which really wants just one more Ann Landers column, rather than an investigation of the whole phenomenon. But anyone who thinks The Lady with All the Answers has answered any of the open questions about Eppie Lederer has a geranium in his - or her - cranium.

Sophie's choice

Craig Mathers, Anne Gottlieb, and Marianna Bassham try to breathe life into Not Enough Air.

Watching Becky Shaw last night at the Huntington, I was struck by how playwright Gina Gionfriddo kept tossing little poisoned darts in the direction of the feminine victimization fetishes taught at Brown University (and really the entire academy). Would she could have also taken aim at Not Enough Air (through Sunday at the Nora Theatre Company), the disjointed update of Sophie Treadwell's Machinal that the critics did hand-springs for, but which left me (and the audience I saw it with) pretty cold.

Indeed, playwright Masha Obolensky (who's at Northeastern, not Brown, but what's the difference) could crib more than a few notes from Gionfriddo - that is, if she wants to really get at what she's pretending she's interested in: the dangerous psychological material that the notorious Ruth Snyder murder trial dredged up for playwright/reporter Treadwell.

That's right - Not Enough Air is a play about writing a play, which I guess is its excuse for being kind of a conceptual mess. But that's probably what comes of caring more about your theatrical effects (none of them particularly new) than you do about your characters. Treadwell's Machinal, though rarely produced today, made a Broadway hit out of the Snyder murder trial by turning it into an expressionist meditation on the entrapment of women in marriage and, you know, society and stuff. Thus Not Enough Air aims to be a post-expressionist (or post-meta-expressionist) meditation on an entrapped woman writing about the entrapment of women. Or something like that.

The problem, of course, is that Ruth Snyder (at left) wasn't really trapped, and neither was Sophie Treadwell. Indeed, it's telling that Ruth's murder of her husband (with the help of the lover she browbeat into the job) inspired not just Machinal but also James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity. These different takes on the basic facts operate like opposed stars: to Treadwell, Snyder was a victim of a masculine power structure machine-like in its oppression of women ("machinal" is French for "mechanical" or "automatic"). To Cain, she was a brilliant, diabolical seductress. Both are essentially paranoid (or maybe hysterical) extrapolations of an almost amusingly tawdry murder case. The real Ruth Snyder was rather obviously neither a crushed violet nor a Venus flytrap; she was, instead, cruel, ruthless, and rather stupid. (Her hilarious missteps and inadvertent confessions basically sealed her and her lover's fates.)

This doesn't mean, of course, that Treadwell's obsession with her isn't interesting as a dramatic subject; the trouble is that Obolensky doesn't know how to dramatize said subject. Instead for about an hour we get poor Anne Gottlieb (as Treadwell) supposedly getting sucked into the Snyder case, but really just wandering through a gauntlet of popping flash bulbs, loud sound effects, nasty phalanxes of company men, and shadowy, noirish tableaux. We get the sense that we're supposed to be saying to ourselves "OMG! IT'S LIKE A MACHINE!" over and over again, but we soon get really tired of saying that and begin to wonder when the actual play is going to start.

To be fair, something dramatic does get started in the second act, when Obolensky trains her sights on Treadwell's efforts to conjure her own characterization of Snyder in the play-within-the-play. Briefly, something seems to be at stake for the characters, at least in the wary, menacing dance between Gottlieb and the ever-terrific Marianna Bassham as Snyder's fictional double. But the excitement these talented actresses generate when left alone together soon dissipates. Obolensky seems to want to convey that by opening up the Pandora's box of her repressed feelings about the "trapped" murderess, Treadwell destroyed her open, quasi-bohemian relationship with fellow journalist George Stillwell (the wasted Craig Mathers). This is a promising idea, but soon we feel ourselves filling in all the dramatic blanks for Obolensky on this score; the playwright simply can't seem to get inside Treadwell's relationship (or give poor Stillwell much of a characterization). And at any rate, Machinal didn't exactly turn Treadwell into a great artist (the rest of her oeuvre is hackwork); so we wonder if, in the end, losing whatever she had with Stillwell was worth that one success. Not that Obolensky would ever go there; instead, we're soon back to political stick figures, scenic out-takes from Chicago, and meta-theatrical constructs. Every now and then, I hoped the cast might just break into a chorus of "He Had It Comin'," but no such luck. What was most touching about the production, in fact, was charting its rise and fall on poor Anne Gottlieb's face: first she looked lost, then thrilled to be playing against Bassham, then lost again. This fine actress deserves better.

Oh, well. Needless to say, director Melia Bensnussen, who's made a specialty out of pounding a politically-correct template down onto Shakespeare, was pretty much indifferent to whatever emotional connections Obolensky hints at between men and women. Instead, as is her wont, Bensnussen emphasizes just about everything that's dramatically weak (but politically au courant) about Not Enough Air. The supporting cast - a roster of Boston's best actors - dash about with more than enough energy to put over the director's puppet show, but it's kind of a lost cause. David Remedios's sound design deserves praise, and John Malinowski certainly gives the lighting grid a workout. Beyond that, though, there's really not enough drama in Not Enough Air.