Anyone who thinks he might get a kick out of seeing John Malkovich drink a cup of coffee while balancing another cup of coffee on his head should probably hurry over to the American Place Theater, where Mr. Malkovich is appearing in “States of Shock,” a new Sam Shepard play. “States of Shock,” which has something to do with Vietnam and something to do with clam chowder, is here for a limited run, and that’s just as well. It’s strictly for those who remain convinced that Shepard is a genius and those who continue to delight in seeing Mr. Malkovich do what he does best—namely, be unpleasant in an outlandish way.
Here, playing a character called simply Colonel, Mr. Malkovich makes an entrance pushing Michael Wincott, playing a war veteran called simply Stubbs, in a wheelchair. The setting is a coffee shop, where Mr. Malkovich and Mr. Wincott have come to observe the anniversary of the death of Mr. Malkovich’s son, killed, we’re told, by the same “friendly fire” that left Mr. Wincott maimed and apparently brain damaged. (He keeps saying the same things over and over.) Also at the coffee shop are a middle-aged couple (Isa Thomas and Steve Nelson), who are having trouble getting service, and a waitress (Erica Gimpel), who introduces herself as Glory Bee and is phobic about carrying things. Mr. Malkovich offers her some sound advice about waitressing and orders a couple of sundaes. Much forced comedy is generated over the issue of whose order will arrive first, and much forced ambiguity over the question of whether Mr. Malkovich’s dead son and Mr. Wincott are one and the same. The middle-aged couple take umbrage because the sundaes arrive before their clam chowder, and Mr. Malkovich takes umbrage at something else and begins to beat Mr. Wincott, whereupon the middle-aged man, in whose lap the waitress has dumped one of the bowls of clam chowder, stops cleaning himself and begins to masturbate. There are also some gas masks, a number of portentous lighting cues, and a couple of percussionists making a huge though intermittent racket behind a scrim. The eating of the sundaes becomes a very sloppy business indeed, but whether the ice-cream episode comes before or after the masturbation episode, and how it all ends, I can’t say. I must have switched off at some point.
“States of Shock,” which lasts about eighty minutes and is performed without intermission, has a set by Bill Stabile, costumes by Gabriel Berry, and lighting designed by Pat Dignan and Anne Militello. It was directed by Bill Hart. It’s an index of the bankruptcy of both his and Shepard’s theatrical vocabulary that nothing either of them does can help seeming predictable. The point has been reached where the presence of a character in a wheelchair in a Shepard play predicates the moment when someone will tip that character out of the wheelchair, and when the very mention of an ice-cream sundae or a bowl of soup predicates the creation of a mess.
A similar wistful hankering after anarchy and avant-gardism informs the version of “The Way of the World” that opened at the Public Theatre last week, directed by David Greenspan. Mr. Greenspan, whose previous directing experience has been confined largely to his own works (like the much reviled “Dead Mother or Shirley Not All in Vain,” which was seen earlier this year at the Public), is one of the four new underqualified associate directors of the New York Shakespeare Festival. The current revival is billed as a “modern dress” production; accordingly, what is important about it is not what characters the actors play but what they wear.
That Andre Braugher is playing Mirabell (and who Mirabell is and what he shares with other Restoration heroes) matters less than that as Mr. Braugher sports delicately polka-dotted suspenders. Mr. Greenspan has no interest in the uses of artifice in Congreve, and no ideas about how to find a contemporary equivalent of the Restoration fop (he has Joe Urla play Witwoud as a stereotypical effeminate, and Burke Moses play Petulant as a psychotic biker of ambivalent sexuality). He wants us to notice that Rene Rivera, as the villain Fainall, wears a long braid down his back; that Mr. Rivera and Mr. Braugher and Mr. Urla all wear color-coordinated silk designer ties; and that Mr. Moses has greased hair and wears leather trousers.
The idea of mounting a “modern dress” production of Congreve in a city where Congreve has not been professionally performed in years is absurd enough. But what can have been the thinking behind putting on Restoration comedy with all that downtown leather and lace (the shades, the cigarettes, the stretch pants, the miniskirts) while retaining the very stage devices (the bowing and flourishing, the snuff-taking and fan play) that make one wonder whether the genre can be produced at all on the contemporary American stage? A production set in period but performed without the hackwork one associates with wigs and waistcoats would be a triumph, but, of course, a company of skilled actors and actresses could perform Congreve with or without period costumes—in fishnets or in gorilla suits, stark naked or (as in some Shakespearean productions of the sixties and seventies) in rehearsal clothes—and it wouldn’t matter a damn so long as the play came through.
The poor actors in Mr. Greenspan’s production, unequal to the material to begin with, have been given no guidance or direction. Mr. Braugher, who is one of the few members of the cast with the vocal ability to play classical drama (and who clearly has the wit to play Mirabell), is thrown back on dumb show: he makes little mime gestures to underscore specific words (in case we don’t know what they mean), and keeps striking nineteenth-century poses—putting a hand to the side of the mouth for a secret, raising a finger in the air for a pronouncement, shaping a tummy when referring to a fat lady. Mr. Rivera works very hard to make each utterance seem freshly thought up, but delivers the lines with a steady inattention to what they mean, and sometimes mistakes what Fainall is saying for its opposite. The only actors who find a modern idiom for their roles are James Lally and Angie Phillips, who do a nice job as the clever servants Waitwell and Foible. For the rest, the acting ranges from the unthought-out to the incompetent: Joseph Costa is hamstrung by having to play Sir Wilfull Witwoud as a Texas hayseed; Jayne Atkinson, as Millamant, reduces Congreve’s heroine to a simpering flirt; Caris Corfman is often unintelligible as Mrs. Marwood; and Mr. Urla is too busy to be actually funny. In the incompetent category fall Ruth Maleczech’s Lady Wishfort, Mary Shultz’s Mrs. Fainall, and Terra Vandergaw, who makes such a hash of the small role of a servant that we’re left wondering why a character called Mincing keeps calling the lady of the house Mim.
One can speculate on the sadism behind the unflattering costumes that Mr. Greenspan had Elsa Ward design for the women in the company, or on the hostility toward the play which is suggested by his casting camp actresses like Miss Maleczech and Miss Shultz in classical roles. But the real question is why the New York Shakespeare Festival has been allowed to persist in this vein, becoming a living monument to ignorance and waste.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, June 3, 1991