Hungry for a Comeback, but Pretty Thirsty, Too
By BEN BRANTLEY
Published: April 28, 2008
Correction Appended
A single breath of suspense, as faint as a half-stifled sigh, occasionally stirs the inert revival of Clifford Odets’s “Country Girl,” which opened on Sunday night at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater. This anxiety does not arise from the fraught plot-propelling questions posed in this backstage drama from 1950: Will the washed-up actor stay off the sauce long enough to make his comeback? Will his wife leave him if he does (or if he doesn’t)? Will the play they’re all working so darn hard on make it to Broadway?
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Frances McDormand and Morgan Freeman as a suffering couple in the revival of "The Country Girl" at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater.
Related
Theater: Driving Mr. Freeman Back Onstage (April 20, 2008)
Times Topics: Morgan Freeman
Times Topics: Clifford Odets
Review: 'The Country Girl' (Nov. 11, 1950) [pdf]
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Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
Frances McDormand in "The Country Girl."
Instead what keeps you vaguely but uncomfortably on tenterhooks is wondering whether three of the finest actors around can make you care, for a single second, about any of these questions before the play ends. Sorry to jump to the last page, folks, but the answer is no.
How could this be? “The Country Girl” is headlined by three stars known for the intensity of their presence and the integrity of their acting: Morgan Freeman, Frances McDormand and Peter Gallagher. Its director, Mike Nichols, picks up Tonys the way cashmere picks up lint.
Sure, the play reads like a relic, but so do two other shows from the same period, “Come Back, Little Sheba” and “South Pacific,” which both opened on Broadway this season with cobweb-clearing vitality. And “The Country Girl” is about people who love the theater so much it hurts, which is presumably also true of this production’s illustrious participants. Why else would well-paid screen stars return to the dusty boards?
Yet passion — and I don’t mean just a mechanically raised voice or fist — never makes an appearance here. It’s a law of theatrical physics that electricity is generated onstage only when a connection is made: between actors and audience, yes, but first of all among the actors themselves. And for whatever reason, everyone in “The Country Girl” seems to be operating on his or her own isolating frequency.
As befits a play about theatrical birth pains, “The Country Girl” arrives swathed in reports of a torturous delivery. It was said in The New York Post and echoed in chat rooms that Mr. Freeman, playing the alcoholic actor Frank Elgin, was having trouble remembering his lines and that Mr. Nichols, assisted by the playwright Jon Robin Baitz, was merrily rewriting Odets.
But if Mr. Freeman was still unsure of his lines, it was undetectable in the performance I saw, which exuded a low-key confidence and charm. (This is not, I hasten to point out, what the part requires at all times.) And if you compare this version’s script with Odets’s published text, the deletions and discrepancies don’t change the sense of things, though the word substitutions are often bizarrely capricious. I would happily have put up with flubbed lines if real runaway feelings accompanied them. Each star has a few abrupt moments of simulating anger or sorrow via sharp, attention-grabbing technique. But I rarely felt prepared for these explosions; they seemed like unanchored, virtuosic exercises. And while Mr. Gallagher and Ms. McDormand bring a brisk surface energy to the proceedings, the overriding note of this production is fatigue, right down to the funereal tones of Tim Hatley’s backstage sets and Albert Wolsky’s costumes.
An autumnal sensibility is not inappropriate to “The Country Girl,” which is best known today for the 1954 movie starring Bing Crosby, Grace Kelly and William Holden. Its pivotal character, Frank, is an aging actor whose star sank long before the play begins.
Now considered unhirable because of his reputation as a lush, Frank has one steadfast fan in Bernie Dodd (Mr. Gallagher), a younger director who remembers the old guy when he was good, and risks starring him in a new Broadway-bound drama. The catch is that with Frank comes Mrs. Elgin (Ms. McDormand), known as Georgie, who is either her husband’s salvation or nemesis. Bernie suspects the latter.
“The Country Girl” has its quaint spots, and Odets’s stylized, tough-cookie language can feel ripe for parody, especially in its encomiums to theater with a capital T. But as a study in varieties of co-dependency — alcoholic, sexual and artistic — the play is well shaped, and it offers the opportunity for some teasingly layered portraiture. The real driving force of “The Country Girl” isn’t the success or failure of the play within the play but the gradual revelation of just who is using whom and why.
This aspect of psychological mystery is barely evident in Mr. Nichols’s production. It’s hard to credit the poisoned interconnectedness of people who appear to have stepped out of different genres of theater. Ms. McDormand plays the long-suffering Georgie with the mannered briskness of a wisecracking heroine from a 1930s screwball comedy. I suppose it could be argued that this is Georgie’s defense system, but I rarely glimpsed the life-flattened woman underneath.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: May 1, 2008
A theater review on Monday about “The Country Girl,” at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, misidentified the singer in one of the recordings played between scenes. The singer is Perry Como — not Bing Crosby, who starred in a film version of the play.
Mr. Gallagher would seem to be trying for a more classically Odets-like figure: the hard-boiled urban guy with the manners of a thug and the heart of a poet. He brings an entertaining nervous restlessness to this archetype, and he has some funny running physical gags with cigarettes. But like Ms. McDormand he’s on a private wavelength, shared only by Lucas Caleb Rooney, in an enjoyable turn as the stage-obsessed stage manger.
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Frances McDormand and Peter Gallagher in "The Country Girl."
Related
Theater: Driving Mr. Freeman Back Onstage (April 20, 2008)
Times Topics: Morgan Freeman
Times Topics: Clifford Odets
Review: 'The Country Girl' (Nov. 11, 1950) [pdf]
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Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
Dysfunction and deceit: Peter Gallagher, far left, Frances McDormand and Morgan Freeman are the stars of a revival of Clifford Odets’s 1950 backstage drama, “The Country Girl.”
In theater as in film Mr. Freeman is a quietly commanding presence. When Frank auditions for Bernie, the producer (Chip Zien) and the playwright (Remy Auberjonois) in the opening scene and begins improvising, you get a flash of the wild-card artistry that makes Bernie prize him. Otherwise he seems natural, affable, occasionally irritable, but not like a man wrestling with demons.
It suggests how little confidence this production has in its material that the scenes are separated by a perky and distracting mixed-period soundscape of radio ads and pop hits.
I had watched the film version recently and hooted at the old-style underlining of big moments (like the drunken Frank seeing his face in a mirror) with crashing symphonic chords. But as creaky as the movie seemed, Crosby, Holden and, most surprisingly, Kelly (who won an Oscar for her performance) created a poignant vision of people with the power to wound one another irrevocably. In Mr. Nichols’s production, where the performances might as well be taking place in separate sealed bubbles, there’s no danger of anybody getting hurt.
THE COUNTRY GIRL
By Clifford Odets; directed by Mike Nichols; sets by Tim Hatley; costumes by Albert Wolsky; lighting by Natasha Katz; sound by Acme Sound Partners; hair design by David Brian Brown; revisions by Jon Robin Baitz; production manager, Aurora Productions; production stage manager, Barclay Stiff; general manager, 101 Productions; associate director, B T McNicholl. Presented by Ostar Productions, Bob Boyett, the Shubert Organization, Eric Falkenstein, Roy Furman, Lawrence Horowitz, Jam Theatricals, Stephanie P. McClelland, Bill Rollnick/Nancy Ellison Rollnick and Daryl Roth/Debra Black, in association with Jon Avnet/Ralph Guild, Michael Coppel, Jamie deRoy/Michael Filerman, Philip Geier/Donald Keough, Max OnStage and Mary Lu Roffe. At the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, 242 West 45th Street, Manhattan; (212) 239-6200. Through July 20. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes.
WITH: Morgan Freeman (Frank Elgin), Frances McDormand (Georgie Elgin), Peter Gallagher (Bernie Dodd), Remy Auberjonois (Paul Unger), Anna Camp (Nancy Stoddard), Joe Roland (Ralph), Lucas Caleb Rooney (Larry) and Chip Zien (Phil Cook).
