★★★ Ghosts
Having underwhelmed the critical establishment with her Broadway debut in The Parisian Woman two years ago, film star Uma Thurman acquits herself quite capably at Williamstown Theatre Festival in a much more difficult assignment, the tormented Helene Alving in Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts. The classic’s potential to expose the dead past’s corrosive impact on the living present is too often muffed in Carey Perloff’s production, largely through questionable casting. But armed with Paul Walsh’s ear-pleasing translation, enough bold choices are successfully pulled off to move this Ghosts along with interest and dispatch.
I was worried about Perloff’s having directed, or allowed, Thurman to brush off virtually every line in her early scenes with smirking chuckles. Sure, Mrs. Alving aims to hide her concern for prodigal dissolute son Oswald (Tom Pecinka), not to mention relieve the pressures from overbearing Pastor Manders (Bernard White) to ignore the late, detestable Captain Alving’s misdeeds. But each laugh cracks open the pressure cooker lid, as it were, rendering it harder to set off the requisite steam later. Happily, Thurman is still able to crank up the bile in act two, lashing out at those who have betrayed her (and at her own bourgeois timidity) with passionate aplomb. Her verbal eloquence is matched by evocative physical choices, especially in some pietà-like poses with her doomed boy.
Thurman is well-paired with Thom Sesma as Engstrand, the unscrupulous working-class toady who reveals still more skeletons in the already-bursting Alving closet. Sesma insinuates and retreats in his best Uriah Heep manner, his every entrance bringing needed qualities—comedy relief and sinister import—to the occasion.
But where Thurman and Sesma successfully play two or three things at once, the rest can barely manage one. Catherine Combs’s pert maid Regina demonstrates little of the spark she’s said to possess. Pecinka’s Oswald is just a louche whiner in measured cadences and unvarying tenor melody. And the personal magnetism necessary for the plot to function is absent in White’s distracted, dithering Manders, who’s barely struck by each new shocking revelation. (“You are on the brink of sin” is delivered in tones suitable to “You are double-parked.”) When these roles in Ghosts lack strong present-tense objectives, what’s left is the exposition with which this production is weighted down.
Yet things keep getting lifted up by Perloff’s most audacious choice, having composer/musician David Coulter mysteriously lit by James F. Ingalls behind Dane Laffrey’s massive glass wall, where he accompanies fraught moments with plangent notes performed on the likes of saws and wine glasses. As it happens, Jack Nitzsche employed the same unconventional instrumentation in his unforgettable score for the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Coulter achieves the same weirdly distancing, yet enveloping effect. Those who made this Ghosts know how the play is supposed to work, even if they couldn’t quite get it together.
★★★★ Before the Meeting
Running concurrently on a smaller Williamstown stage is another five-hander, the world premiere of Before the Meeting by Adam Bock (The Receptionist; The Shaker Chair), who is no less interested than Henrik Ibsen in examining human beings in their greatest vulnerability. Bock’s are alcoholics and drug addicts, long past the moment of accepting those labels and now engaged in the really tough part, the struggle to change something each day, without using.
The slogan “one day at a time” might have inspired Bock’s structure, which takes us into a church basement in Anytown, U.S.A. during the setups for a week’s worth of AA confabs. That means we’re mostly watching a core group of volunteers make coffee, arrange the chairs, and ask the organist practicing upstairs to please give it a rest. Dutiful absorption in quotidian details, it appears, offers a means by which one’s personal stresses and fissures can be kept in check.
Because this is a play, of course, those fault lines keep getting exposed and reacted to, albeit in fragments. Hypochondriac Ron (a superbly modulated Arnie Burton) fusses to mask worry for a nephew who may be going down his uncle’s path. Young Tim (Kyle Beltran, funny and deeply felt) is the group newcomer, always seeming to be standing at cliff’s edge. Pregnant Nicole (Midori Francis, bringing intelligence and strength to what could be misread as a stock chickadee role) suggests all isn’t rosy with her live-in boyfriend, as she tries to mediate between Ron and and bossy Gail (the brilliant Deirdre O’Connell) in their ongoing battle over, of all things, whether the chairs should be arranged in rows or a circle. The source of Gail’s intransigence? “That’s the way we’ve always done it,” she crisply announces: another instance of dependable routine as lifeline.
There’s one big exception to the way Before the Meeting does it: that is, one departure from its short, snappy scenes. Midway, director Trip Cullman seats Gail in a folding chair down center with the house lights up. We become her meeting as she tells her story in full and in-depth, from youth to rock bottom and beyond, in a tour de force of timing, increasing intensity, and emotional connection lasting well over 15 minutes. By the end, any barrier between character and actor has been decisively demolished. (Later, an unexpected visit from a daughter—briefly but ferociously embodied by Cassie Beck—will challenge the notes of hope with which Gail laces her tale.)
Given the brevity (80 mins.) and multiple loose ends of Before the Meeting, audiences may not find it a fully satisfying evening. But its Williamstown premiere offers them a powerfully performed and enlightening one, and in Gail as portrayed by O’Connell, a first person narrative of love and loss they’re unlikely to forget. I know I won’t.
Ghosts opened August 8, 2019, on the Main Stage (Williamstown, MA) and runs through August 18. Tickets and information: wtfestival.org
Before the Meeting opened August 11, 2019, on the Nikos Stage (Williamstown, MA) and runs through August 18. Tickets and information: wtfestival.org
