In today’s Wall Street Journal, I review regional webcasts of Doubt and The Niceties. Here’s an excerpt.
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Some plays are so obviously well-suited to socially distanced webcasting that I can’t imagine why every regional theater company in America hasn’t taken them up. John Patrick Shanley’s “Doubt: A Parable” is a case in point. It has only four characters, none of whom is required to touch or closely approach any of the others, and it calls for no set pieces other than a door, a desk, a phone, two chairs and a couple of park benches. Nothing more is needed but appropriate costumes, atmospheric lighting and sound design and a director and cast unafraid of the thorny ambiguities of Mr. Shanley’s 2004 study of a regular-guy priest suspected of molesting a child in his care and a hard-nosed nun who takes it for granted that he is guilty, notwithstanding the absence of hard evidence.
Even so, Jobsite Theater’s revival of “Doubt,” directed by Summer Bohnenkamp, is the first version I’ve seen online since the beginning of the pandemic. It is also a memorably fine piece of work….
Eleanor Burgess’ “The Niceties” had a month-long Manhattan Theatre Club in 2018 and was subsequently taken up by regional companies all over the U.S., of which Madison’s Forward Theater is the latest. I can see why: “The Niceties” is a variation on David Mamet’s “Oleanna” in which the militant student (Samantha Newcomb) is a young black woman and the benighted, condescending baby-boom professor whom she seeks to bring down (Sarah Day) is a garrulous middle-aged left-winger who has never questioned her own wokeness. Like Mr. Mamet, Ms. Burgess has stacked the deck high, and the results feel less like an actual human transaction than a scripted, somewhat stilted debate with good-gal-bad-gal dramatic flourishes thrown in.
Jointly directed by DiMonte Henning and Jen Uphoff Gray, this production was filmed not in an empty theater but in what looks like an actual professor’s office. Ms. Day, whom I know from her work as a core-company member of Wisconsin’s American Players Theatre, America’s finest classical theater festival, gives a pitch-perfect performance—she always does—but Ms. Newcomb, who became one of APT’s apprentice actors in 2019, also leaves nothing to be desired….
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To read my complete review of Doubt, go here.
To read my complete review of The Niceties, go here.
In today’s Wall Street Journal I pay tribute to Hal Holbrook. Here’s an excerpt.
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Hal Holbrook, who died on Jan. 23 at age 95—his death was announced this week—spent most of his long career working in television, first as a soap-opera lead, then in series, miniseries and made-for-TV movies that are almost entirely forgotten today (who now remembers “The Bold Ones: The Senator”?) save by wizened couch potatoes. He was rarely seen on Broadway, and on the big screen he generally appeared in choice but small character roles…
Yet Mr. Holbrook is remembered to this day for his two greatest stage roles, both of which he also had the uncommon good luck to perform in very fine TV versions that remain in circulation. (They can be viewed on YouTube.)
Not surprisingly, they were character roles, but of a kind that most actors would kill to play, and one of them was in a show of his own meticulous and imaginative devising. In 1948, Mr. Holbrook began performing a monologue in which he portrayed Mark Twain, eventually doing it in New York nightclubs, on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and on Broadway, where it had three separate runs, in 1966, 1977 and 2005. In addition, “Mark Twain Tonight!”(as the full-evening version was called) was telecast in prime time on CBS in 1967, and that oft-repeated TV version made him a star.
Ten years later, Mr. Holbrook played the Stage Manager in a made-for-TV version of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” directed in the studio by George Schaefer. Though he never appeared in the role in New York, he played it more than once in regional-theater productions, most recently at Hartford Stage in a 2007 revival directed by Gregory Boyd that I called “the finest ‘Our Town’ I have ever seen or hope to see.”
What was it about Mr. Holbrook that made it possible for him to give unforgettable performances of two such different roles?…
