Neil Simon’s “Lost in Yonkers,” at the Richard Rodgers, is a play that’s difficult to be enthusiastic about unless one is a devoted fan of Mr. Simon’s work or else is committed to the notion that every season has to have a Broadway hit. A family melodrama set in New York during the Second World War, “Lost in Yonkers” is about what happens when a cowering, pathetic man has to leave two adolescent sons with his intimidating mother for the better part of a year, and suffice it to say that in the entire play there is not one glimmer of honesty or authenticity.
The character played by Irene Worth, Grandma Kurnitz, is as phony a creation as you could hope to meet in a Broadway theatre. A German-Jewish refugee, unloving and inaccessible (she cannot love because she has loved and lost, cannot forgive because that would mean letting down barriers, etc., etc.), she has warped more children than you can shake a stick at. (She actually carries a stick.) Her daughter Bella, who at thirty-five, still lives at home, is enslaved to her and slightly brain-damaged—the result of having been hit in the head too often as a child. Bella’s sister, Gert, has been so terrorized all her life that fear has permanently affected her breathing, and the second half of her every utterance is delivered while she’s sucking in air; and another brother, Louie, works for a gangster.
All this—adding up to the idea that Grandma is not good for children—is established in a dialogue between the two grandsons (Jamie Marsh and Danny Gerard) before Miss Worth ever comes onstage, and that’s unfortunate, because it makes it unnecessary for Miss Worth to do any acting or for Mr. Simon to do any writing for her. In any case, Miss Worth has been handed what amounts to an unactable part—a character with no discernible point of view. Grandma does not change, nor does she have anything to teach. And it turns out to be Bella whom Mr. Simon is really concerned with, not Grandma at all. (That’s also too bad, because while Miss Worth is one of our subtler actresses, Mercedes Ruehl, who plays Aunt Bella, is not.) After much suffering and several long speeches, Aunt Bella undergoes a miraculous transformation from mental defective to romantic. (It’s that sort of play.)
“Lost in Yonkers,” which has been termed a “memory” play, seems to suffer from a basic confusion about what sorts of things are interesting as truth and what sorts of things are interesting as fiction. An Uncle Louis who worked for a gangster is the sort of relative someone might actually have—remarkable for seeming like a character out of a Broadway play. But put that Uncle Louie in an actual play and he instantly becomes phony. Not that there’s anything wrong with contrivance: we’re willing to put up with a certain amount of artificiality in the interests of being moved, and willing to see the predictable happen, provided a play is intelligently acted. But Mr. Simon is not well served here by his longtime director, Gene Saks, who tends to favor a style in which one or two character attributes are endlessly manifested—Jewishness or tiredness or unrelentingness or addledness or being from Brooklyn. Mr. Marsh and Mr. Gerard remember to gesticulate “Jewishly” and to say “fevah” instead of “fever,” and, between them, try to approximate the performance that Matthew Broderick made famous. Mark Blum, as the boys’ father, concentrates all his energies on seeming weary, stooped, and defeated. Irene Worth projects the appropriate persona—which is all you can do with a character who wants nothing and owes nothing to anyone. Kevin Spacey’s performance as Louie is the only really engaging thing in the play—partly because he’s the only one having fun and partly because he’s such a pro.
The phoniness of JoAnne Akalaitis’s production of “Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2” is of a totally different variety. It’s false artiness—intellectual dishonesty—rather than false feeling. There’s bogus acting going on here, too, but it’s intentional—half camp, half parody. When Ms. Akalaitis directs Shakespeare, bad acting is meant to be avant-garde: she seems to cast actors not for their strengths but for their embarrassing weaknesses—to make the material look silly, lest the audience think it too challenging. It’s an effortless way of tampering with the presiding values of the play: in the roles of Hotspur and the King—characters meant to represent the chivalric ideal—you cast actors whose approaches to Shakespeare have a distinctly effeminate tinge; in the role of Justice Shallow you cast an actor who talks like Elmer Fudd.
It’s too bad that Ms. Akalaitis gave herself this assignment, and too bad that Joe Papp appointed her one of the New York Shakespeare Festival’s new associate directors. Ms. Akalaitis seems ill-disposed toward the material and ill-equipped to deal with it. She appears not to know that certain words—“opposed” and “puissance,” for instance—need to be uttered trisyllabically if they are to be in accord with the metre. In fact, Ms. Akalaitis seems not to know that Shakespeare wrote in iambic pentameter at all. Another thing she seems not to know is that between-scenes blackouts and between-scenes action serve the same purpose (you use one or the other, not both), and the extent of her textual analysis seems to have been to give Hotspur a stammer like the one Olivier used.
A program insert includes a genealogy, a chronology of the relevant events, a map of England, and a vast number of quotations from various historical and literary critical sources. Nothing about the production suggests that Ms. Akalaitis is familiar with any of this material. At any rate, she fails to translate the information into stage terms. George Tsypin’s décor is the usual uningenious combination of scaffolding and transparencies more reliant on research than on visual allusion: there are portraits, etchings, photographs, and (for battle sequences) film footage; there’s brickwork, stonework, iron, straw, Mediterranean-style flooring, and, for some reason, a suggestion of railway trestles. Costumes range from Elizabethan bard to “downtown,” with some out-of-period stuff thrown in for good measure. (Falstaff, Louis Zorich, is dressed traditionally in Part 1 but wears white patent-leather boots in Part 2.) Characters drink out of blue cups, read comic-book versions of the play, hand each other publicity shots of each other, and do other things intended to be clever and avant-garde; during the tavern scenes, which are like something out of a high-school production of Marat/Sade, white-faced extras wearing cellophane sit around scratching and making village-idiot grimaces to show how tough life was in the Middle Ages. (One, wearing a Cleveland Indians baseball cap, appears to be talking on the phone.)
Thomas Gibson, who plays Prince Hal, is not an actor with a great range of expression. He has a smile of delighted amiability, which he sheds on everyone with whom Hal is not actually angry or in the soup, and he has a tendency to race through his lines in situations where the smile would be inappropriate. Mr. Zorich gives a workmanlike performance as Falstaff, but most of the rest of the acting comes under the category of unpitched hamming. Exceptions are Poins (Rene Rivera), Lady Percy (Lisa Gay Hamilton), Hastings (Traber Burns), Mowbray (Mark Deakins), and the young princes (Arnold Molina, Roger Bart, and Reese Madigan). Jared Harris, who plays the stammering Hostpur in Part 1, Plays Pistol, in Part 2, as a nasty, lisping mental defective. (There must be a speech therapist backstage, because he comes back later without the lisp.)
The music that Philip Glass has composed for the production consists of not very effective or appropriate pastiche. There is a thriller theme, highly reminiscent of the soundtrack for “North by Northwest,” comic-caper music for the Gadshill incident, and a sort of music-hall ditty in Part 2, which becomes increasingly irrelevant as the play proceeds. Mostly, the music is used to upstage any famous sequence, such as the Uneasy lies the head” speech and the scene at the end when Hal appears as King Henry and says to Falstaff, “I know thee not, old man, fall to thy prayers!” (Mr. Gibson shouts this line.) It’s a miracle that we get through the “Chimes at midnight” scene without hearing from Mr. Glass.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, December 3, 1990