Word: stagings
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...dissolution of 19 Gramercy Park is a sad sight for anyone who knew it in its former days, but it has a certain fitness. The house was a stage set; its natural fate was to be struck. The man who inhabited it, the producer, director and short, waddling star of the comedy of manners that unfolded in its rooms for some 40 years, was Benjamin Sonnenberg...
PEOPLE WILL see the new play Strangers for Bruce Dern, but they'll be surprised at how the stage softens him, neutralizing the eccentricities on which he has built a fascinating film career. Sherman Yellen's drama, about the stormy relationship between Sinclair Lewis and journalist Dorothy Thompson, might have been written as a dull screen biography of a famous American, but Hollywood stopped investing in those bland tear-jerkers decades ago. So it winds up on Broadway, with a film star intent on "flexing his acting muscles" in a role that taps a fraction of his considerable talents...
Much of Strangers concerns itself with Lewis's failure to write anything of merit after winning his Nobel Prize. The writer who loses his ability to write is an agonizing, highly personal subject that has rarely been handled well on stage--probably because it attracts writers who themselves are struggling to write something, and this subject allows them to be miserably self-indulgent and generally unperceptive...
...folksy, to plead and be charmingly self-deprecating, to do lots of nightclub imitations (accents were Lewis's specialty), to get drunk and be irrepressibly untactful, exposing the hypocrisy of others, to despair and age and writhe in agony. Dern does well, especially considering he's been off stage for 19 years, but the quality that makes him special, that sometimes seems too intense for the big screen, is imperceptible on stage. You'd think that his body and features would be sufficiently mobile to make Dern a great stage actor, but Yellen's writing, for all its superficial energy...
...takes considerable artistic and economic courage for an established film actor to return to the stage--even in a "safe," commercial play like Strangers. But Dern has worried enough about being typecast to take that risk. Perhaps his publicly expressed feeling that there are similarities in background, education and personality between himself and Sinclair Lewis led him to overestimate Strangers, to judge it a far more significant play than it is. But Strangers does not serve the "daring" that we associate with even his most typical film performances, and perhaps no play in the commercial theater can. Film stars have...