Julia Stiles and Bill Pullman in Oleanna / Photo by Craig Schwartz
What a dreary lot the Cavendish family turns out to be in the dull revival of 1927’s The Royal Family. Director Doug Hughes and his design team have polished George S. Kauffman and Edna Ferber’s satire of the Barrymore acting clan to a high sheen, but all the Pledge in the world can’t disguise the fact that the play is imitation junk.
Not content to allow Ana Gasteyer to give a shockingly unfunny performance as a shrewish, grasping no-talent relation to theater legends Fannie (Rosemary Harris) and Julie (Jan Maxwell), Hughes has also encouraged Caroline Stephanie Clay in her portrayal of loyal maid Della as a sassy black housekeeper, David Greenspan as a sibilant butler, and Reg Rogers’s truly atrocious performance as a John Barrymore manqué. Thanks to Rogers’s deluded comic choices—which are mostly limited to sounding like Snagglepuss—it’s clear that his Tony will never make it past the advent of the talkies.
And though Maxwell is in full command of the stage as the star who maybe just wants to be a wife (albeit the wife of the South American emerald king), one wishes that the role of a glamorous 1920s actress had been played by someone, well, more glamorous. No self-respecting star of the '20s theater would ever be caught with her stocking seams twisted around to the side of her leg, as Maxwell’s accidentally were for the first two acts of the performance I saw.
Just a few blocks away, Hughes is also represented with the first Broadway production of David Mamet’s incendiary Oleanna. We know that Oleanna is incendiary because there are post-performance talkbacks to allow a forum for audience members to vent their feelings about such a “divisive” play. But Mamet’s two-hander, ostensibly about sexual politics, doesn’t bear up well under that interpretation. The male college professor (Bill Pullman) comes across as a much-maligned victim in Hughes’s uneven staging, further hampered by the presence of film star Julia Stiles as a garage sale Medea, wreaking vengeance for the slights against her.
Much better to read Oleanna as a cautionary tale of the literal-minded people like Stiles’s Carol, the people who would gasp aloud at a teacher who tosses book-learning aside in favor of teaching about Life. In that interpretation, Carol is like a book burner who has deluded herself into thinking that she’s acting for the greater good, a reading of the play that bypasses Mamet’s messy misogynistic complications. Otherwise, Carol is a ballbusting, castrating shrew who ruins her professor’s life because she can’t understand radical thinking—a trait that Stiles, intentionally or not, nails.
It’s important to note that while John’s life is subtly explored over the play’s duration, we leave the theater not knowing one thing about Carol other than the fact that she’s quick to yelp “Rape!” Theatergoers may be quick to yelp “Facile!” as they leave. Presuming they don’t stay for those talkbacks, of course.
The Royal Family. Through Nov. 29, at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, 261 W. 46th St. (betw. Broadway & 8th Ave.), 212-239-6200. $47–$97.
Oleanna. Open run, at the Golden Theatre, 252 W. 45th St. (betw. Broadway & 8th Ave.), 212-239-6200; $75.50–$116.50.
