By Cynthia Citron
NEW YORK, N.Y. — It was a “Three Standing Ovations” week!! Not easy to come by in New York, where audiences reward only the very best. (Not like Los Angeles audiences, who habitually award standing ovations to actors just for showing up.)
There is so much energy and anticipatory excitement generated in the elegant, intimate theaters on Broadway that it’s enough to give you the vapors. And if the plays are good, you might actually swoon!
And so it was for me last week. I saw three extraordinary plays, each unique, beautifully written, wonderfully acted, and set in the lush, evocative settings that Broadway so readily provides.
The first play was Jerusalem, by playwright Jez Butterworth and the Royal Court Theatre, in which Mark Rylance, Broadway’s new darling, stormed the stage and kept all eyes riveted on his every move, despite the fact that he was surrounded by an ensemble consisting of actors who were each remarkable in their own right. Rylance, who has won just about every major theater award that Britain and America have to offer, has a unique problem this year. He will undoubtedly be competing with himself for Best Actor honors for this play as well as for his performance earlier this year as a street clown in David Hirson’s comedy, La Bete.
In Jerusalem Rylance plays Johnny “Rooster” Byron, a rowdy one-time daredevil now living in a dilapidated trailer in the woodsy environs of a suburban park in Wiltshire, England. His immediate living space is cluttered; you know that if he were transported to an inhabited neighborhood he would have a dead truck mounted on bricks in the front yard.
As it is, his personal neighborhood is inhabited by a clique of young freeloaders to whom he offers drugs and drinks. He is their Pied Piper, impelling them to acts of mischief and bravado by fanciful tales of his own derring-do. (He tells them he built Stonehenge, for example.) And, as is to be expected, the people of the larger community want him out of the woods and out of their hair.
Impeccably directed by Ian Rickson, the 16-member cast mills around as Rylance rants and raves and periodically spills a variety of liquids all over himself. He is a force unto himself and would be just as effective if he were alone onstage, which, for all intents and purposes, he is. And the contortions he puts his body through as he rambles provide a demonstrable explanation of why he thanked his chiropractor in the program notes.
The title of the play is taken from an early 19th century poem by William Blake that was set to music in 1916 as a hymn to inspire the English in a time of war. Blake also meant Jerusalem to serve as a metaphor for the heaven on earth that he hoped his countrymen would one day create.
From Jerusalem to another playwright’s prospective heaven on earth: Tony Kushner’s The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures. (Too long for the marquee, right?) This play, a collaboration between The Public Theater, the Signature Theatre Company, and the Guthrie Theater, premiered at the Guthrie in 2009.
In this one, a 72-year-old widower, Gus Marcantonio (Michael Cristofer) is confronted by his family in an intervention designed to dissuade him from committing suicide. Gus is a retired dockworker and Union organizer who is feigning Alzheimer’s to justify his desire to die. “Alzheimer’s pulls me into the blank space,” he says.
“Don’t die because you’re bored,” his son Vinnie (Steven Pasquale) tells him. “I shouldn’t have cut my wrists on your birthday,” Gus says by way of apology. But as the family votes on Gus’ future, he expounds on his own sense of uselessness and the current diminished state of America’s unions. (“We’re losing the Party—the Method of Marx,” he grieves. “And I have to pretend to forget what I can’t bear to have in my head.”)
Also weighing in on the debate are Gus’ older son, Pill, a history teacher, and daughter Empty, a lawyer/activist (Stephen Spinella and Linda Emond), who are both gay, and their significant others, who drag their own individual problems along with them. Pill is considering leaving Paul (K. Todd Freeman), his partner for 26 years, for a young hooker, Eli (Michael Esper), who, in urging Pill to marry him, delivers a beautifully passionate encomium to love. And Empty’s partner, Maeve (Danielle Skraastad), a 40-year-old divinity student, is about 11 months pregnant with the baby for which Vinnie supplied the sperm.
And finally, there is Clio (Brenda Wehle), Gus’ sister, an unfrocked nun who spent time in Peru and came back thoroughly demoralized and bitter.
This brief description only deals with a fraction of the activity, the conversation, and the plot, and to hurry it along Kushner and director Michael Greif conspire to have scenes overlap and everybody talking at once, which is both challenging and fascinating.
The other production values are equally engaging. The fabulous dining room in which the play takes place (within a brownstone in Brooklyn over a weekend in June, 2007) moves front and center and then rolls into the background as other venues replace it briefly.
But the production values that take the cake for this marvelous week in New York are those in Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s hilarious tour de force, The Book of Mormon. This vastly entertaining and exuberant musical disperses a band of young men from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints to proselytize the denizens of a village in Africa. Within minutes the smug young men who opened the show with a rousing narcissistic number, “Mostly Me,” are confronted by equally bouncy “Lion King”-type villagers singing “Hasadiga Iboway.” But this is no “Hakuna Matata.” As the village leader explains, “Hasadiga Iboway means F..k you, God!” and it’s the people’s response to the fact that “everyone has AIDS.”
Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the iconoclastic creators of the often-loathsome cartoon series South Park, have done little to soften their attacks on just about everything, but in The Book of Mormon the satire is so outrageous and genuinely funny that it is almost tasteful. As many reviewers have noted, even the most fervent Mormons who have come to see the show have found themselves laughing at the absurdist interpretation of the history of the Church.
Parker and Stone were joined by Robert Lopez in the preparation of the book, music and lyrics, and their efforts were launched into orbit by the spectacular choreography of Casey Nicholaw and the superbly timed direction that he and Parker provided to the more than two dozen cast members.
In a production in which every actor’s performance was a treat, kudos must still be awarded to the two principals: Josh Gad and Andrew Rannells as Elder Cunningham and Elder Price, respectively. Gad, who is a dead ringer for Josh Mostel as King Herod in the film version of Jesus Christ Superstar, bumbles around making up Mormon history as he goes along. (To which the troop sings a rambunctious, “You’re Making Things Up Again, Arnold.”) And Rannells runs rampant in a wonderfully staged “spooky Mormon hell dream.”
Shouts and whistles from the enthralled audience after every number nearly tore the roof off the elegant Eugene O’Neill Theatre. And at the end, when the audience rose with one giant leap to offer their standing ovation, their feet nearly left the ground.
The other two plays certainly deserve their standing ovations as well, but for The Book of Mormon it was a flying ovation that left the audience members as exhilarated as the cast.
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Citron is Los Angeles bureau chief for San Diego Jewish World. She may be reached at cynthia.citron@sdjewishworld.com