Word: yellen
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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...
...role of Sinclair Lewis in Strangers has all the individual ingredients for a bring-down-the-house, Tony-award-winning performance, but they never coalesce into a complex, recognizably human character. Yellen hasn't given him any shading; the role is all in the snappy dialogue with nothing in between the lines. Lewis and Thompson (Lois Nettleton) bicker through an interminable "seduction" scene in her Berlin apartment, fly off to Moscow where he gets drunk and insults the Commies, return to Berlin where he gets drunk and insults her, get married and move to Vermont where she misses her journalism...
...TRAGEDY, according to Yellen, is that Sinclair Lewis and Dorothy Thompson, two brilliant writers and decent, caring human beings, were unable to know each other, to love each other. He attempts to explain Lewis' problem in the final scene, where Dern, who has gotten drunk and become violent, sits strapped in a straitjacket and launches into a lengthy monologue as Lewis's father, revealing the old man's perpetual dissatisfaction with his son. The speech should be a tour-de-force--Dern does a beautiful job with it--but it is so empty in concept, so obvious in construction, that...
...Yellen can write amusing dialogue, but the jokes rarely have anything to do with the characters, and most of the "meaningful" lines are slick and stilted: "You drink to be more than yourself, but it only makes you so much less than you are," "I don't know how to love," etc. The play never casts light or the writing of Sinclair Lewis, and the characters are not sufficiently human or interesting enough to survive without the glamorous names. There's nothing inherently "dramatic" in Strangers except that the two leading characters talk a lot and the rapid flow...
...drift of Sherman Yellen's book is that Henry divorced or beheaded wives in quest of a male heir. Actually, there was a son, Edward VI, who died at the age of 16. Scanting the versatile Renaissance man, Yellen paints the portrait of a male chauvinist executioner...