Craig Lucas, author of such distinctive plays as Prelude to a Kiss and Blue Window, has an affinity for springing the unexpected on his audiences. And it's that anticipation that keeps you hooked through the first act of Stranger, his new play, which opened Tuesday night at the Vineyard Theater.

Two people are sitting on a plane. Linda (Kyra Sedgwick), a talkative, edgy young woman engages her seat mate, Hush (David Strathairn), a quiet, Bible-toting, middle-aged man, in conversation. Almost before he realizes it, she's told him her life story: rich, uncaring parents; drug abuse; marriage to a dull, placid mail carrier, whom she later abandons.

She also draws some personal information from Hush, a born-again Christian who speaks mostly of the struggle between God and Satan. He tells her he's just been released from prison after serving a 15-year sentence for kidnapping.

Sedgwick gives Linda an almost excessively manic quality, while Strathairn's Hush is a soft-spoken cipher. Neither one engages our emotions, but there is the gripping feeling of waiting for the other shoe to drop.

It comes crashing down in the second act, after Linda persuades Hush to come to her remote cabin to minister to her messed-up psyche.

The ingenious part of Lucas' work is that his revelation makes everything in the first act click into place. What had seemed meandering was actually tightly written. Everything Linda and Hush said was important to the plot. They were, in effect, filling in the story before we realized what the story was.

The playwright is less successful in making what happens matter on a human level. Linda and Hush are two deeply troubled people looking for love in all the wrong ways. And their torments are so deep and exotic, and become so entwined with the passions of fundamentalist religion, that their needs race beyond understanding.

The director, Mark Brokaw, usually does a very sensitive, nuanced job of presenting human relationships, but by the last 15 minutes of Stranger, things seem to get away from him--and Lucas--and the play degenerates into a loud, confusing, almost hysterical yowl.



Eyes for Consuela
Variety
February 16, 1998
By Greg Evans

Playwright Sam Shepard returns to the New York stage with the Manhattan Theater Club's world premiere of Eyes for Consuela, an uneasy blend of American naturalism and south-of-the-border mysticism. Terry Kinney's direction is more fever pitch than fever dream, and this jungle-bound tale of a tormented gringo's struggle for his soul only occasionally blooms into something truly alive.

Based on a short story by Mexico's Nobel laureate Octavio Paz, Shepard's play begins where Paz's story left off: An American (David Strathairn), having abandoned a troubled marriage and failed life, has retreated to a seedy hotel deep in the Mexican jungle (think Night of the Iguana). Against the advice of the one-eyed hotel owner (Jose Perez), Henry, the American, takes a jungle stroll one hot, sleepless night, only to find himself ambushed by a drunken, machete-wielding bandit (Daniel Faraldo). The bandit makes a savage demand: He wants to gouge out Henry's blue eyes and present them as a macabre bouquet to his beloved wife Consuela (Tanya Gingerich).

Clearly, we're in fable territory here, and Shepard builds on Paz's tale by having the American and the bandit argue over a variety of topics, mostly touching on the role of sacrifice in love. Is Henry willing to give up his eyes in exchange for the freedom to reunite with his wife?

The threat of violence lends some nervous tension to the lengthy discourse, with the menacing bandit seeming to have supernatural knowledge of Henry's life and problems. The mysterious Consuela, dressed in a black peasant gown, makes periodic, mostly silent visits, often dancing in a rather dreamy way. Audience won't be surprised to learn that Consuela is dead, and her bandit husband makes his gruesome offerings as some sort of appeasement to her ghost. Naturally, the one-eyed hotel owner figures into the story, too.

As the troubled American, Strathairn simmers, scared and defeated, through the first act, but, apparently under Kinney's direction, races through much of the second half in a sputtering hysteria. The overwrought approach seems all the more transparent as Shepard's play spreads its rather slight premise too thin. At two hours, Eyes seems more than a little padded--a one-act structure might have been enough.

Rest of the cast, particularly Faraldo as the bandit, is fine, though Gingerich's mysterious visits seem as silly as somber. Guitarist Josue Perez adds some flavorful background music. Santo Loquasto's jungle set is lush and threatening, Walt Spangler's sweat-soaked costumes and Jennifer Tipton's eerie lighting just right for this journey into jungle madness.



Three Sisters' revival fails despite Strathairn
The New York Times
February 15, 1997
By Ben Brantley

It's no secret that when people in a Chekhov play talk about how wonderful tomorrow is going to be, what they're really saying is that today is lousy. Still, it's a special treat to see what an actor like David Strathairn can make of this sad spiritual grammar, speaking in the future tense because life in the present is all too glum, all too boring, all too distant from anything noble.

Strathairn is playing Vershinin, the unhappily married lieutenant in Scott Elliott's erratic production of Three Sisters, which opened Thursday night at the Roundabout Theater Company. And when his character arrives in the provincial household of the Prozorov sisters, it is easy to understand why he becomes a magnet for them, and not only because he's fresh from Moscow, the golden city of the women's dreams.

He's more than an airy fantasizer, describing an unimaginable but glorious future centuries away; he is obviously rooted in an almost masochistic awareness of present circumstances, and there's never any question that he's responding immediately to what surrounds him.

Yet Strathairn plays down the more obvious romantic posturing associatedwith the role. His voice is pitched low and evenly; his gestures are few and small. He brings to mind an often-quoted Chekhov dictum, "When someone expends the least amount of motion on a given action, that's grace."

That state of grace is hard to come by, and that Strathairn acquired it in the short period of rehearsal time afforded by Roundabout productions is itself a small miracle. Watching this spotty, nobly ambitious interpretation, one is tempted, in Chekhovian terms, to imagine a utopian system in American theater in which actors would have time to burrow fully under the skins of their characters.

As it is, one is left with only a handful of fully integrated performances in a play that needs a meticulously balanced ensemble to succeed. This production is dotted with moments of luminous insight. But it never achieves the fluid sense of people existing continuously in the unforgiving element of time, which alters them by subtle, erosive degrees.

Too many of the actors in this impressively starry cast are reduced to shorthand characterizations. Often they resort to either a broad series of personality-defining gestures or the striking of one emotional note that is held, with only small variations, throughout the play. And there's a pervasive air of self-consciousness that is only underscored by Lanford Wilson's oddly strained translation.

And while Three Sisters may be about human loneliness, it is also crucially about the ways in which people affect one another's destinies, often unwittingly, by their sheer proximity. Elliott, a director who realized just this kind of effect in his productions of Ecstasy and Curtains for the New Group, hasn't been able to do the same here.

Instead, he has chosen to stress the characters' isolation with staging, seen against Derek McLane's forbiddingly gray sets, that places oceans of distance between them. Monologues are frequently directed at the audience, sometimes creating a sense that the performers are auditioning for an actors' workshop.

As a consequence, the evening definitely seems long at three and a half hours. But it is by no means a total waste of time. Strathairn's exemplary performance alone makes it worth seeing. And there are two other incisively fresh interpretations of familiar characters that etch themselves into the memory: that of Billy Crudup, in the relatively small role of a destructively unhinged young soldier, and of Calista Flockhart, who portrays Natalya (or Natasha), one of the most compellingly selfish characters in theater history.

The sisters are embodied by a glamorous trio of actresses: Amy Irving, Jeanne Tripplehorn and Lili Taylor, all known for their exciting work in films.

As Olga, the spinster schoolteacher and the eldest of the three, Irving comes off best. Her natural girlish luminousness, peeking through the character's strained comportment, and her slightly affected diction work to her advantage here.

The performances of Tripplehorn and Taylor remain largely in one key, and their monotony can become wearing. As Irina, the youngest of the sisters, Taylor needs to have a radiant, dewy bloom at the play's beginning. Yet she seems a blighted bud from the start, and her lines are mostly delivered in a tired, recitative rasp. As the restive, miserably married Masha, who falls in love with Vershinin, Tripplehorn looks ravishing in sweeping black dresses.

At the Criterion Center Stage Right, 1530 Broadway, at 45th Street, New York City through April 6.



Pinter's Pauses: Even the playwright thinks they've led to over-pausing. But actors in two new productions find them exciting
Newsday
November 5, 1989
By Aileen Jacobson

On a recent trip to New York, the British playwright Harold Pinter announced that he's sorry he ever incorporated the famous Pinter pause into his stage directions. This was startling news to the actors and director rehearsing two of his plays, since those italicized pauses are difficult to ignore.

What's an actor to do with them?

"They're very exciting things to play," said David Strathairn, appearing in The Birthday Party and the American premiere of Mountain Language, opening Wednesday at the CSC Repertory. "When you're performing, you know when you're off the beat. You know when you're derailed, because you'll play a pause and you won't feel the same energy in the silence as you would some other time when the rhythm is really right on... It's very much like music."

The cast, which also includes Jean Stapleton and Peter Riegert, was influenced by Pinter's early October speech at the 92nd Street Y, as well as by his visits to their rehearsals. They reported that he regretted ever starting to write "Pause" as a stage direction, because it often leads to portentous overacting.

Pinter's comments, said Stapleton, "freed" the cast from feeling reverential about his pauses. "There's nothing holy about them at all... It's come to be kind of an oppressive tradition," she said. "Some of them are very useful, but they're not in cement."

"He didn't want them weighted that much," said director Carey Perloff, who is also CSC's 30-year-old artistic director. "He kept laughing that everybody made such a big deal about it." He wanted them honored, she said, but not as "these long, heavy, psychological pauses, where people look at each other filled with pregnant meaning."

Indeed, the first act of The Birthday Party, which premiered in 1958, should go quickly, like farce, she said. "It's hilariously funny... You have absolutely no idea anything bad is going to happen."

This is the second time Perloff and most of her cast are doing The Birthday Party. They first presented it a year and a half ago, after a great struggle to get rights from Pinter. The playwright, she said, is reluctant to have his plays produced in New York, because he's been unhappy with some previous work.

Perloff wrote letters pointing to her studies at Oxford and her marriage to an Englishman but got no results until another playwright, Tony Harrison, who's a friend of Pinter's, intervened.

Following the glowing reports of friends who'd seen it, Perloff said, Pinter came to New York to discuss moving the production to another theater for an extended run, which wasn't possible at CSC's 13th Street theater. That didn't work out, but a week later, she said, his agent called to say he wanted her to present the American premiere of his newest play, Mountain Language, which is about 20 minutes long, and to pair it with The Birthday Party.

Though different in setting and tone, Perloff said, "The two plays, now previewing, share a theme: oppression of the individual."

The Birthday Party, which takes place in a seaside town, centers on Stanley (Strathairn), a pianist living in a shabby rooming house run by Meg (Stapleton). Two visitors, Goldberg (Riegert) and McCann (Richard Riehle), come by and start to torment Stanley. It's never clear whether the visitors are gangsters, terrorists or officials from an insane asylum.

In Mountain Language, presented first, Pinter is more overtly political. The setting is a prison in an unnamed country, where prisoners are tortured and local people are not allowed to speak their own language. Pinter, a human rights activist, has visited such nations as Nicaragua and Turkey.

"His themes are the same. It's just that he finds things less funny," said Riegert, probably best remembered for his role as a pickle merchant in Crossing Delancey. During his week in New York, said Riegert, Pinter was "encouraging us to economize and simplify." The pauses, Riegert believes, are "suggestions by him with regards to the tempo of a scene or an act. It has to be found by the particular company that's doing it... A pause can be as misplayed as a line can. I think too much can be made of it."

Although Strathairn also believes pauses can be overdone, he thinks Pinter's are distinctive. "The natural ones always seem to be right where he wrote them. His pause or beat comes naturally in the rhythm of conversation. You find yourself pausing in mid-sentence, thinking about what you just said or are going to say..."

During last year's run, he said, "it was uncanny: The laughs came right where the pauses had been written, which is just more testament to his greatness, to his awareness of the language... Your own impulses carry you through those moments. You don't necessarily play the pause, you let the pause play itself."

Stapleton, last on Broadway in Arsenic and Old Lace but best known as Edith Bunker in All in the Family, has to deal with more than pauses in Mountain Language. Her character speaks hardly at all, partly because prison guards forbid her to. "To be free of words is a rare exercise. It requires a great deal of concentration," she said. "Silences are wonderful, you know, in the theater, and he knows that... If you fill it properly mentally, it will show [on your face.] You don't put on a face. You follow the inner line of the character, what she wants, what she's responding to... You don't drop out, or you ruin the play."

Even though the play is short--"minimalist" in Pinter's own words, she said--there's enough for her develop a "mental and emotional line" for her character: "He's written a very vivid situation. This woman with her son in prison has come to see him, and she's brought him apples and bread. And she's not allowed to give them to him. In the first scene, she's been waiting for eight hours."

Perloff sees a difference between pauses and silences, which are prevalent in Mountain Language. "One of the things that he [Pinter and I both felt as we watched the run-throughs together is that the silences were very important, and that they shouldn't be rushed, and that each silence had to be given almost metrical weight. I mean, really held."

Still, she said, "You don't act the silence. What you try to do is make the tension clear. The silence comes out of someone's desperate desire to say something coupled with their terror of actually saying it, because they'll make themselves vulnerable or reveal too much, and they'll get hurt for it."

For both plays, Perloff said, Pinter kept stressing that actors should not try to play the symbolic meanings of the scenes or characters, but to "play the moment. Play the reality of the moment... He wants it very real, more than I actually expected."

Pauses, she added, can play different roles: "The pauses are often the tiny little moments where a character actually reveals something. Or a pause in Pinter can be a bizarre jump from one thought to another, and the pause is like the bridge between the two. You're talking about one thing, and there's a pause, and suddenly the character is on to something else, and you think, God, how odd.

"Sometimes a pause is like going around a corner. One of the tricks in Pinter is to let go of one thought and start another thought, and not carry it over. And that's how a pause works."