THE SHOW MUST go on” finds new meaning as Opening Night’s
leading lady stumbles, falling-down drunk, into the auditorium.
Stagehands scurry to remove her messy street clothes, pump her full of
caffeine and slap away at her face with greasepaint-covered powder
puffs, attempting to revive her in time for the show within a show’s
opening night.While they prepare her for her close-up, the lucky
aisle-seat dweller is already being treated to another type of close-up
as the actor’s panty-clad rear wriggles just inches from your nose.
Everyone loves a substance-addled, oncebeloved actress fallen from
grace.We all sheepishly remember finding titillating schadenfreude in
embarrassing wardrobe malfunctions, unruly public displays and impulse
head shaves.While she’s far from analogous to today’s pop-culture
twits, Myrtle Gordon, the aging heroine of John Cassavetes’ 1977 film Opening Night, struggles
to tell the difference between stage and sidewalk, and is forced to
take a hard look at what it means to be an actor when the accidental
death of a fan throws her into psychological crisis.The story follows
Myrtle’s operatic collapses and histrionic tantrums as she rehearses a
play for Broadway debut.
Actor-director van Hove also sees Opening Night as
an opportunity to talk about his job. The play about a play
crystallizes Cassavetes’ definitive theme:The dissonance between
private and public personae. But for van Hove, Opening Night is
not just about self-reflection, it is also “a love story, an
existential text and a family tragedy. It is about this theater family,
dependent upon a star who gives them necessity, a family that totally
falls apart when Myrtle is not able to play her character.”
Elsie
de Brauw, as fame-weary, chainsmoking Myrtle, guzzles her way through
the bottles and men that litter her stage.There is her manipulative
(and married) director Manny (Fedja van Huet), the show’s elderly
producer David (Johann van Assche), and her former flame and co-star
Maurice (Jacob Derwig), who rebuffs her advances, cruelly saying
“You’re not a woman to me anymore, you’re a professional.”
Opening Night is
part cinema, part live theater and part documentary, and while using
video in theater is nothing new, van Hove has found a formal raison
d’etre. Live footage avoids the fakeness that plagues most
meta-theater, using camera as “microscope” to coax sincere,
anti-theatrical performances.
“We never use [video] in a
purely aesthetical way,” he says. “We only use it when it is
necessary.” Camera people follow the actors onstage and simulcast to a
large screen that hangs above the proscenium, as well as to several
strategically placed television monitors.
One hundred audience members sit stage right, inserted into the production as the audience of Opening Night (when
the actors are “acting” onstage, they play to this stage audience and
the house sees them frontally only via screen).This allows van Hove to
harness the cinematic close-up for theater, crucial for broadcasting
the subtle winces, manic shudders and world-weary brow furrows that
make a Cassavetes character.
Opening Night’s biggest
challenge lies in recreating the disparate spaces of Cassavetes’ film.
Characters sprawl in hotel rooms, green rooms, dressing rooms and,
finally, the stage.
Van Hove’s designer, Jan Versweyveld, creates an intriguing visual mise en abyme with
many partitioned stage spaces, screen spaces, auditorium spaces and
backstage spaces. Forget the fourth wall—van Hove’s production is the
spatial equivalent of a Russian nesting doll.The relatively bare set
takes shape through movable tables abundantly stocked with spirits,
resembling the floating workstations of a mad scientist, and
well-chosen props punctuate as visual metonyms for the spaces they
define. Additionally, a host of theatrical guts—trailing sound and
camera wires, costume racks, spike tape directions and a cavalcade of
techies—emphasize the backstage central to the Cassavetes narrative’s
original vision.
Van Hove fancies himself a Cassavetes purist,
saying, “I was not inspired by things outside of the Cassavetes
world.”Yet, several elements of Opening Night differ from the
screenplay. His ballet-like physical passages— sexual, violent and at
times both—are a welcome divergence from Cassavetes’ own style.
The
score’s fade in and out of Neil Young songs creates a lush, nostalgic
atmosphere that recalls a movie soundtrack, appropriate for a work that
hopes to blend the languages of screen and stage.Van Hove’s innovative
direction crafts a virtual reality that does its best to efface what
Myrtle warns against: “We must never forget, this is only a play.”
> Opening Night
Dec. 2-6, BAM Harvey Theater, 651 Fulton St. (at Rockwell Pl.), Brooklyn, 718-636-4100; 7:30, $20-$55.
