I wasn’t able to post last Friday’s Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser due to circumstances beyond my control, so here it is, a little late but none the worse for wear. I reviewed two new Broadway revivals, Inherit the Wind and A Moon for the Misbegotten:
Most people know what they think they know about the Scopes “monkey trial” from having seen “Inherit the Wind,” the 1955 play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee that ran on Broadway for two years, was made into a movie in 1960 and has since been performed by every professional, semi-professional and unprofessional theater company in the English-speaking world. But “Inherit the Wind,” which has just been revived on Broadway in a big-budget production starring Christopher Plummer and Brian Dennehy, isn’t what it appears to be. Far from being a fact-based docudrama about what happened when the state of Tennessee outlawed the teaching of evolution in its public schools, it’s a fictionalized account of the trial that plays fast and loose with the facts in the case of Tennessee v. Scopes. You don’t have to be a Holy Roller to be exasperated by its cartoonish absurdity–or disgusted by its repulsive smugness….
Bryan is turned into an oafish opportunist, Scopes into a secular saint, the citizens of Dayton into a slack-jawed gaggle of mouth-breathing morons, and Darrow into a homespun cracker-barrel agnostic with a heart of gold and a weakness for noble curtain speeches: “You don’t suppose this kind of thing is ever finished, do you? Tomorrow, sure as hell, somebody else’ll have to stand up. And you’ve helped give him the guts to do it!” To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, one must have a heart of stone to listen to such tripe without snickering. I don’t, and I didn’t.
It’s impossible to stage “Inherit the Wind” in anything like a dramatically serious way, and Doug Hughes, the director, hasn’t even tried. Nothing that happens in this production bears any obvious relationship to recognizable human behavior. Each performance is a caricature, starting with that of Mr. Plummer, who plays Henry Drummond, the character based on Darrow (everyone in “Inherit the Wind” is given a transparent pseudonym). He oozes the kind of charm that makes you want to go straight home and scrub yourself with a pumice stone. As for Denis O’Hare, cast as a smart-alecky reporter bearing the suspiciously familiar-sounding moniker of E.K. Hornbeck, I’ll say only that in the course of researching my biography of H.L. Mencken, it somehow escaped my notice that he bore any resemblance whatsoever to Pee-wee Herman….
How bad can a good play be? Pretty awful, actually. Eugene O’Neill’s “A Moon for the Misbegotten” opens with an hour and a half of exposition so superfluous that you itch to trim it with a meat ax, all delivered in the kind of stage-Irish accents that should have gone out with John Ford. But just when you’re thinking your watch has stopped, the play gets started, and soon you forget about everything but the tragedy of Jim Tyrone and Josie Hogan (Kevin Spacey and Eve Best), two sinfully proud, irreparably damaged people who can’t bring themselves to let down their guard and love one another. No, it’s not as good as “Long Day’s Journey into Night,” “Ah, Wilderness!” or “The Iceman Cometh,” but “A Moon for the Misbegotten” definitely works, even in so ill-conceived a staging as the Old Vic production that just arrived from London for a two-month run on Broadway….
Howard Davies, the director, must have ordered his cast to play the first act for excruciatingly obvious laughs, while Bob Crowley’s set, which is dominated by a surrealistic-looking farmhouse apparently located somewhere in the Dust Bowl, looks as though it had been intended for a German production of “The Grapes of Wrath” rather than a show set in rural Connecticut circa 1923. Ignore all that and concentrate on Ms. Best. She’s miscast–Josie is supposed to be big and ugly–but so magnetic that it doesn’t matter….
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