Word: langella
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...Quentin, Frank Langella at first seems too sensuous to be playing the kind of man who sins only so he can suffer. By the second act, however, when Quentin is mud wrestling with Maggie's demons and making them his own, Langella has captured the character's soul; he is stooped, obsessive, spent. As Maggie, Dianne Wiest is an inspired piece of miscasting...
Luminous earlier this year in Serenading Louie and Other Places, Wiest is still no sexpot, no Marilyn; truth to tell, Langella is prettier than she is. More over, she affects a wispy giggle that mimics Monroe and every little girl lost from Susan Alexander Kane to Judy Garland. Yet Wiest has managed to bleach the intelligence out of her face, leaving only a cunning child with the look of a battered seraph. This is no flesh-and-blood performance; it is pure, chilling marrow. Emotional striptease is what such acting is all about. But perhaps not play writing...
...ride through life on a silk cushion, inventing their own rules and then ignoring them, cutting the boorish infidels down with gay, rapier wit. Thus it is with the merrily amoral ménage in Design for Living, a triangle with some complex emotional geometry. Otto (Frank Langella) and Leo (Raul Julia) are friends; Gilda (Jill Clayburgh) and Otto become lovers; Gilda dumps Otto for Leo; Gilda leaves them both for a stuffy art dealer; Otto and Leo liberate Gilda from genteel sobriety. In Coward's world the cabal of camaraderie must ever win out over the exclusivity...
...galumphs, on thundering rhino feet, at the pitch and tempo of farce. Frenzy worked fine for Director George C. Scott in his production of Coward's Present Laughter two years ago. Not so here, where the bonhomie is so forced that it comes across as bullying. Though Langella and Julia occasionally mine the text for subterranean veins of grace and melancholy, Clayburgh storms about with the booming baritone and great-lady gestures of a strung-out dowager. One yearns for the buoyant charm that Vanessa Redgrave brought to the role in a 1973 London revival. But charm, alas, cannot...
...Mason, who has proved admirably sensitive on any number of past occasions. The complexity of the intertwining roles called for more rehearsal time than the actors apparently got. Bob Gunton is a shade too stilted as James, hoping perhaps that physical constriction could simulate advanced middle age. Frank Langella moves with grand assurance across Broadway's Longacre stage, ranging from impish mischief to laceration of soul. As Eleanor and her alter ego, Damon and Kerr lend their roles compelling honesty, and Roxanne Hart is a five-alarm sexual conflagration...