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Kansas City's Online Journal of the Performing Arts

Lana Turner is coming to Kansas City this fall, after a fashion. When a young Tennessee Williams, fresh from the failure of his first play and the halfway success of his next two works, traveled to Hollywood, in 1944, like so many serious writers before him and after in search of inspiration-or at least, some change in his pocket-he was set to work on a project for Lana Turner, at MGM. His contribution was perhaps ill-advised, like commissioning Beckett to write a screenplay for Sarah Jessica Parker; Williams referred to the movie as The Celluloid Brassiere, and his name is absent from the writing credits of Marriage is a Private Affair. But like so many other writer bees, he was working on something that would pay off off-screen: the drama he was remembering from his own life lent its autobiographical urges to what would become The Glass Menagerie, the first of his achievements on stage.

If the postwar Southern comfort of Williams' dreamy dialogue seems out-of-place in an out-of-control modern world, Kansas City theatergoers will find out soon enough. The Glass Menagerie (January 9-February 8, 2009) is but one of several classics to be staged this season by the Kansas City Repertory Theatre. Under the auspices of the Rep's new Artistic Director, Eric Rosen, the company will peregrinate between the classics and contemporary productions, such as August Wilson's Radio Golf, with a few hybrids of both.

As the recently ended Metropolitan Ensemble Theatre's production proved in the revival of The Homecoming, Harold Pinter's forty-year-old drama of familial fractiousness, the right kind of play ages as smoothly as a vintage wine. Combining timelessness with timeliness is one of art's roll of the dice; the play that can surface and resurface successfully beating the odds against culture's indifference to the past is the play that will always have something inherently worthy to offer.

 Eric Rosen's decision to turn back to three classics that in a certain harsh light could appear to be moth-eaten is a necessary step if serious theater-here or anywhere-intends to preserve its dignity in a world busy shrink-wrapping its truths for another day.
 

The Glass Menagerie, suffused like Williams's best work in the contradictions between the daydreams of the impractical and the nightmares of the inevitable, is an adult drama that has been reshaped over the years into the quintessential high school project, performed year after year, often with the mother character of Amanda no older than Amanda's fragile daughter, Laura. Numbing it down inevitably robs the play of its surprises and it will be up to Rosen and his cast to find a way to do more to hold the audience's attention than requesting that it turn off all cell phones. So much has happened since Williams wrote his play-he was still new as a playwright, still, in a sense, living out his plays-it is easy to view it as a museum piece. Yet, reading the script, feeling along with the narrator Tom's own mixed-up desires to satisfy his yearnings while being responsible to his detached mother and too-attached sister, Williams's mastery rises up: "Go to the moon, you selfish dreamer," Amanda tells Tom at one point. Like Hemingway's sing-song prose which was never intended to be realistic but rather a reach for a realism closer to life than to formal literature, Tennessee Williams wrote in a style that certainly could be bold (consider Stanley Kowalski's howls or Big Daddy's Zeus-like pronouncements), but it is more forceful, oddly, in his will-o'-the-wisp characters-the Blanche de Boises of the world.

Theatre is daydreaming; the question (or the answer) is, how big does one dream? In the new Charlie Kaufman movie, Synecdoche, New York, Philip Seymour Hoffman plays to perfection an over-earnest director of a local company for whom revisiting the classics (Death of a Salesman is invoked as the standard hack classic) becomes meaningless; in his case, he develops an increasingly larger and more elaborate series of sets and set-pieces which mimic his own life. Another of the Kansas City Repertory Theatre's staged classics this season, Georges Feydeau's 1907 farce, A Flea in Her Ear (May 15-June 7, 2009), will test audiences in a different way: how well does humor hold up through time? Feydeau is French like Pepe le Pew in the Warner Bros. cartoons, seeing the humor in romance, especially its missed moments. A Flea in Her Ear is his most famous play-for most people it is his only play-and, again, it will be interesting to see how a modern audience, raised (or lowered) on recent all-out-for-laughs comedies will sit for a simple bedroom farce about a suspicious wife. The essential story is not far removed (just turn on any TV channel or open the newspaper); but this is theater, so the language is of-the-time, and the Belle Epoque is, I imagine, getting harder and harder to translate into our green, global, Oprah age: do we have time to dream, anymore? The new adaptation, by the usually witty David Ives, promises to connect Feydeau's finger-wagging dialogue with a sensibility that we are comfortable with-but not entirely.

If Tennessee Williams's plays are ingrained in our national character, Sherwood Anderson's novel, Winesburg, Ohio, verges on our national neurosis. Published in 1919, set in a Midwestern town whose characters Anderson culled from his own hometown, the young hero of the work, George, recalls Tom of The Glass Menagerie, hoping to get away from his claustrophobic home-life yet drawn back each time by the inviting dreamers living around him. Eric Rosen's musical adaptation Winesburg, Ohio (March 13-April 5, 2009), ought to shake up our standard view of the work. Adding music and lyrics both forces the audience out of its hazy remembrance of the book from required high school reading to revisit what really happens, and makes the experience self-consciously theatrical. The best Hollywood and Broadway musicals throughout the Golden Age of the Thirties and Forties were able to withstand the characters bursting into song. How true to Anderson that Rosen and his collaborators are able to take the story will determine whether we can go back in time not merely to remember but, Proust-like, to be able to look ahead simultaneously.

Just how well the classics will sit with contemporary audiences, like a traditional holiday dinner, depends as much on the audience as on the playwright and the actors. Years ago, when Robert Altman was a guest on the old Dick Cavett Show, he explained his philosophy thusly: "The audience has to meet the filmmaker halfway." Altman's maxim goes for anything artistic: how many movies, novels, poems, plays, operas, dances, paintings, and whatnot have gone the way of Mozart's unmarked grave because they were not met halfway? The once avant-garde theater of Beckett and Pinter has given way to high school and regional productions: that is something to cheer. It reinforces the idea that the only new idea is an old idea in a new context. The Coterie Theatre's version of Our Town (coming next January) is one more oldie ever threatening to become a moldy, but so is the forthcoming Broadway revival of Pal Joey. It is the challenge of theater everywhere to prove the play's the thing, and the only thing.

For tickets and information to Kansas City Repertory Theatre, call 816-235-2700 or go to http://www.kcrep.org.

By Steve Shapiro

Theatre Contributor (Past writer)
Steve Shapiro has been writing about the arts for over twenty-five years. He wrote and broadcast a weekly radio book review on KCUR-FM for ten years, and has contributed to NPR's Morning Edition book segment.

As a contributor to local publications such as KCMetropolis.org, KC Tribune.com, The Kansas City Star, Review, The Pitch, and Helicon 9, he has published essays and criticism on art, books, cinema, theater and the cultural Zeitgeist.

A chapter on the museum architects Frank Lloyd Wright and Steven Holl was published in the anthology, The Sixth Surface: Steven Holl Lights the Nelson-Atkins Museum (2007). On the side, he juggles Dachshunds and is available to moderate book groups.