Elizabeth and I spent three days last weekend on a "working vacation" in Portland, OR. We visited old friends (some of whom I've written about here before), enjoyed the city's inherent lovely greenness, ate very well in excellent company, finally caught up with Me and Orson Welles (mostly loved it) and Kraken rum (I make a mean Dark & Stormy), and managed to catch William Hurt in the Artists Rep production of Eugene O'Neill's bleak autobiographical 1956 drama of addiction and family dysfunction, A Long Day's Journey Into Night.
Now, being a theater dude I went into Long Day's Journey aware that any company these days has a hard road to hoe in making that particular four-hour Pulitzer Prize-winner fresh and gripping for a modern audience, for whom O'Neill's once-searing and pioneering realism may have been diluted to homeopathic nullity by the intervening decades of "reality" media saturation. While I bear nothing at all against O'Neill's masterfulness — cf. my post about The Iceman Cometh — I predicted that this play in particular is now past its sell-by date and that only an extraordinary and bold production could undo that. This one was neither extraordinary nor bold, plus was riddled with artistic and directorial choices that left me wondering if everyone involved knew they were supposed to be working on the same play.
So, although actors William Hurt and especially Robyn Nevin were several kinds of terrific, I came away needing a palate cleanser and mood lifter. And for me the Marx Brothers have always been a reliable tonic when such needs arise. I reached for their second film, Animal Crackers, in which Groucho riffs on O'Neill's expressionistic play Strange Interlude by stepping forward to address the camera (that is, the audience) and soliloquizing thusly (the 2:20 mark):
Suddenly the world was brighter again.
Among the many things I love about 1930's Animal Crackers (and its 1929 predecessor, The Cocoanuts) is that they are just about our only records of what it was like to see the Marxes performing live on Broadway. The films, shot in Paramount's Astoria studios in Queens, NY, were adaptations of two of their Broadway shows. The Brothers shot The Cocoanuts at the studio during the day, then hot-footed back to Manhattan to perform Animal Crackers on stage in the evenings. It wasn't until their third (and first all-original) film, Monkey Business (1931) that they moved to Hollywood, where they spent the rest of their lives.
The original stage script was pared down for the screen, so as a film Animal Crackers is a rough approximation rather than a full-on reproduction. Still, as an historical document it benefits from unadorned point-and-shoot camerawork, a proscenium staginess, and lack of cinematic flair. A script credited to Bert Kalmar, Harry Ruby, and George S. Kaufman doesn't hurt either, even though showbiz legend has it that Kaufman, backstage during one of the shows he wrote for the notorious ad-libbers, once exclaimed, "Wait! I think I just heard one of my lines!" (I have more to say about the Marxes' Paramount films at DVD Journal.)
So when Groucho quips, "You're very fortunate the Theatre Guild isn't putting this on, and so is the Guild," it's a line that would deliver an extra layer of funny to a Broadway audience, especially since it was the Guild that had recently premiered Strange Interlude for the play's 1928-29 run. The Internet Broadway Database tells me that from Oct. 23, 1928 to February 1929, the Broadway runs of Animal Crackers and Strange Interlude overlapped as they played simultaneously at the Forty-Fourth Street Theatre and the John Golden Theatre respectively.
Oh, what it must have been like to catch both shows on consecutive nights.
In his current series on the Marx Brothers, Mythical Monkey's excellent blog takes a good look at the Brothers at this stage of their stage-to-film career.
While I was putting together Tuesday's post, I wrote that José Quintero had made his name directing Eugene O'Neill's stage dramas, "notably the '56 production of The Iceman Cometh that launched Jason Robards." For hours after I published the post, that mention of the Robards' Iceman kept buzzing in my head. When a song earworms through my brain, the only way to purge it is to actually listen to the damn song. It's not often that I get a video earworm (a videotapeworm?), but I had one now and there was only one way to deal with it.
As an ardent theater-lover with something of a DVD addiction, I went to the span of shelf space dedicated to the Broadway Theatre Archive and reached for the double-wide spine with the little picture of Robards at the bottom. (Doing so, I noticed that I need to dust more often, but that's another day. Deadlines, you know.)
So here I am now, raising a pint to Broadway Theatre Archive, where five decades' worth of great stage performances and some of television's hallowed events are preserved on modern video. And let's raise another to DVDs, which let us watch them without fuss on home screens that — to the original viewers of these productions — would seem ripped from vintage issues of Amazing Wonder Stories magazine. And before we fall face-forward to the scarred hardwood tabletop, raise one more to the Golden Age of televised dramatic works, which in 1960 brought us a powerful adaptation, directed by Sidney Lumet, of Quintero's seminal New York Circle in the Square stage production of The Iceman Cometh, the one that made Robards a star.
Robards' virtuoso performance as the glad-handing, doom-ridden Hickey is the role's gold standard, one Kevin Spacey aspired to reach in a strong 1999 revival of Eugene O'Neill's 1939 masterpiece.
Set in 1912 New York, The Iceman Cometh turns the spotlight on the failed lives, empty hopes, and perpetual pipedreams barely propping up the last-ditch community of stewbums, anarchists, and hookers of Harry Hope's seedy saloon. Most gave up on their lives long ago, and the only guarantee they can look forward to is the arrival of their old friend Hickey, a charismatic traveling salesman and everyone's life-of-the-party drinking companion.
But when Hickey shows up for his semi-annual bender, this time he's a changed man. He has sworn off liquor, yet instead of crusading temperance he is on a higher mission — to convince these booze-soaked burnouts that guilt-cleansing "truth" is the only deliverance from "the lie of the pipedream."
On the other side of the argument is aging anarchist Larry Slade, who counters that it's raw truth that beats down men, whose happiness hangs on their desperate need for illusions and pipedreams.
The presence of the evangelical salesman affects everyone. As Hickey's "generosity" painfully strips the masks from everyone he touches, long-held guilts are aired and secrets unlocked, and not everyone is left alive by the closing credits. (Death is the overshadowing "iceman" here.) Naturally, Hickey's own truth is the most revealing unmasking of all, and his 30-minute confessional final soliloquy is still one of the great declamations of modern theater.
The Iceman Cometh is heady stuff, alright, dissecting wasted lives and failed dreams. Like the dive in William Saroyan's The Time of Your Life, Harry's shabby saloon is the world in a bottle, its inhabitants' dreams summing up the various forms humanity's illusions take — political, racial, domestic, sexual, intellectual, and religious. And as delivered here it's also funny and wise, compassionate and ruthless.
At the start of its 1960 broadcast to a national TV audience, someone added a preamble by legendary New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson, and that's on this DVD. Looking more than a bit uncomfortable, Atkinson tells us that a "mature, sensitive" audience might be prepared for this raw depiction of "the dregs of society" and their "vulgarities." (Was Lumet under pressure from the studio or sponsors to not give all those immature, insensitive TV viewers a case of the fantods?)
In a word, it's riveting. There are more guts and humanity here than in a summer's worth of Hollywood blockbusters. If nothing else, there's great pleasure in just witnessing extraordinary actors at the top of their craft bringing life to one of the great American plays. Robards is astonishing in his career-making performance, and he went on to be hailed as the authoritative interpreter of O'Neill's linchpin characters.
The Iceman Cometh's superior ensemble also showcases other familiar faces as O'Neill's consciously colorful characters — Myron McCormick (as Larry Slade), Tom Pedi, James Broderick (Matthew's dad), and there's no missing boyish 24-year-old Robert Redford in an early major screen appearance as poor, pitiless Don Parritt, who gets the last word (even if it is a thump! on the sidewalk outside his window). According to his IMDb.com filmography, 1960 was Redford's screen debut year, and a big one with nearly a dozen appearances on shows such as Perry Mason and Playhouse 90.
For TV, the production was sensitively directed by Sidney Lumet (12 Angry Men, Fail-Safe, Network, and on and on). I can't tell while watching it, of course, where Quintero's original stage directing ends and where Lumet's TV directing begins, other than the movements (and close-ups, etc.) of Lumet's television cameras. On some of the other Broadway Theatre Archive DVDs, it's clear that experienced studio directors such as Kirk Browning deftly respected a production's theatrical origins while simultaneously making terrific television, and we can assume that Lumet preserved Quintero's directorial instincts while also adding his own. Lumet fully employed his simple but effective camera setup, floating within long continuous takes that cut only for O'Neill's scene breaks. The long takes are extra impressive nowadays: where else can as we observe actors on a screen, big or small, displaying their art and craft to this extent and this vulnerably?
As Variety wrote at the time, this production was "a landmark for the video medium, a reference point for greatness in TV drama." Even at three-and-a-half hours spread across two discs, it reminds us of how good theater faithfully restaged for television can be.
Boy, I sure wish we could see this kind of theater-for-TV presentation more often, not just occasionally on PBS. (That said, when I was able to pick up the 2007 Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim's Company on Blu-ray, that's when I knew the new format had truly settled in and put its feet up to stay a while.)
This Broadway Theatre Archive DVD preserves as closely as possible the original audio and visual components. However, because now it's digitally remastered (from the original 2" videotape) the resolution also preserves the limitations of 1960 TV technology. Expect some video blooming and black-and-white imagery that's contrasty and not nearly as sharp as modern technology allows. Nonetheless, it all looks remarkably good given its years of inattention, and the audio comes through strong in 1.0 mono.
There's also a DVD edition of the 1973 John Frankenheimer movie version starring Lee Marvin as a coarser, less likable Hickey alongside Fredric March, Robert Ryan, and Jeff Bridges taking over for Redford. YouTube provides a bit of the 1999 Kevin Spacey performance as well as Al Pacino giving Hickey's big speech a quiet, nearly mumblecore interpretation. And it goes without saying that The Iceman Cometh, the dreadful 1989 Hong Kong action fantasy with Maggie Cheung and Biao Yuen ("Un remake idiot de 'Highlander', said a French magazine) is, like, so not O'Neill.
Music: Marc Seales, "Highway Blues" Near at hand: a tiny Yoga for Dummies book
