TT: A Lion roars in Chicago

In the first of a series of reports from Chicagoland, I review Writers’ Theatre’s production of James Goldman’s The Lion in Winter in this morning’s Wall Street Journal, coupled with an off-Broadway opening, Edward Albee’s Occupant. Here’s an excerpt.
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Now that New York City is playing host to Chicago’s “August: Osage County” and “Adding Machine,” I decided to fly west and spend the next couple of weeks reporting in person on some of the plays currently being performed in and around Second City, which ranks second to none–Broadway most definitely included–when it comes to the quality of its theatrical offerings. My first stop was out in the suburbs, where Writers’ Theatre is putting on a ferociously funny production of “The Lion in Winter” that is one of the finest shows I’ve seen in recent seasons, not just in Chicagoland but in all of America.
Nowadays James Goldman, who died in 1998, is mainly remembered for having written the book for Stephen Sondheim’s “Follies.” In his lifetime, though, “The Lion in Winter” was his best-known piece of work–but not for the original Broadway production, which ran for just 92 performances in 1966. It was the success of the 1968 film version, which won Goldman a best-screenplay Oscar, that made “The Lion in Winter” a regional-theater staple. The film, which starred Peter O’Toole and Katharine Hepburn, was a faithful adaptation of Goldman’s stage script, which takes the story of England’s Henry II (played in Glencoe by Michael Canavan) and Eleanor of Aquitaine, his estranged wife (played by Shannon Cochran, Mr. Canavan’s real-life spouse), and uses it as the framework for a dysfunctional-family domestic drama which is, despite its 12th-century setting, as contemporary in tone as a news flash….
Katharine Hepburn is a hard act to follow, but Ms. Cochran is up to the challenge: Her Eleanor is a sexy, scaldingly hot-blooded woman of a certain age whose passion and anger are never far from the surface. If she had given this performance on Broadway, she would have been a shoo-in for a Tony nomination….
Part of what makes “The Lion in Winter” so theatrically effective is that James Goldman bent its historical characters to his own imaginative purposes. Far too many one- and two-person biographical plays, by contrast, stick closely and uncreatively to the record, meaning that they can do little more than offer their viewers a watered-down history lesson. Edward Albee’s “Occupant,” a portrait of the famously flamboyant sculptor Louise Nevelson, falls somewhat awkwardly–if interestingly–between these two stools.
Mr. Albee, who knew Nevelson, was fascinated by her penchant for making up successive versions of her life story, many of which bore only a coincidental resemblance to the truth. In “Occupant” he pairs Nevelson (Mercedes Ruehl) with a slightly dense interviewer (Larry Bryggman), by turns chummy and pushy, whose purpose is to cut through her dazzling anecdotage and get the facts, while she seeks in turn to seduce the audience with her hard-nosed charm. Unfortunately, Mr. Albee has put his portrait of the artist in a too-cute frame, informing us at the outset that it is being conducted posthumously: “I’ve never interviewed someone who is dead before.” “Yeah? Well, I haven’t been interviewed since I’m dead.” And because “Occupant” tries to cover most of Nevelson’s very long life–she died in 1988 at the age of 89–it never gets very far below the level of flashy superficiality…
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Read the whole thing here.