CLIFFORD ODETS ALWAYS dismissed The Country Girl as a
superficial sell-out, written only to make money. And it did, of
course, becoming second only to his Golden Boy in stage success
and turning into the movie that won Grace Kelly an Oscar.
If one needs to be reassured, every so often, that Country Girl is
a better play than Odets claimed, the revival that opened last night
at the Roundabout is certainly useful enough. No one is going to
start calling this an important play, but Kenneth Frankel's production
is an intelligent and thoughtful character study with a cast that
approaches the melodrama as if it were something new.
In fact, the fine actors - mostly too young for the roles -probably
don't get much chance to play this kind of plummy '50s style, with
its straightforward storytelling and florid dialogue. There is little to
say beyond the obvious in the tale of a down-and-out alcoholic
actor (David Rasche), once a big star, whose wife (Karen Allen)
permits his comeback by martyring herself to his illusions.
Despite the patches of artsy language, however, Odets
shapes his characters from tart, unsentimental observations that
defy the predictable. There is no redemption without ambivalence,
no clarity without give-backs. Frankel, who staged such
memorable productions of Quartermaine's Terms and The
Common Pursuit, even makes the wife's romantic complication
with her husband's hotshot young director (Paul McCrane) seem
less tacked-on than usual.
Hardly any of his actors seem likely types for these characters,
but their commitment amid improbable casting is endearing. If fun
isn't too strange a word to apply to a potboiler with serious
implications, we can imagine they are having some -- and it helps.
Rasche, known in the theater as a complex golden boy and on
TV as the one-joke but amusing Sledge Hammer, ages himself
into a towering hunk of gratifying contradictions. His Frank Elgin
goes beyond the words to show us the embarrassing side of the
actor ego, the combination of vanity and insecurity, coquetry and
self-loathing, talent and pathos.
Allen is similarly uncompromising, toughening up her usual
sweetness and thickening her delicacy into a slow, bulky bundle
of responses. Georgie, Frank's wife, is no simple victim -- what
the '90s term a co-dependent or enabler. Odets lets her
deprecate herself as a simple country girl, lets her endure being
called "Papa's little helper," but she knows she is smart and she is
mercilessly aware of when and why she lets herself be used.
McCrane, usually seen in weak or weasly roles, wears leadership
well as the young director with his jumble of cynicism and idealism.
Geraldine Leer is too old to pull off the baby-ingenue role, yet
somehow she almost does. George Morfogen has just the right
hang-dog attitude as the worried producer and Hugh Landwehr's
sets look suitably rough and back-stage show-bizzy.
But what about those set changes? Stagehands, in period
stagehand costumes, are constantly rolling in beds, rolling out
beds, setting up walls, taking down walls, carrying chairs here and
there. This is either a brilliant exercise in self-referential post
modernism or the most primitive, least imaginative set changing
seen at a professional theater in years.
Copyright © 1991 Newsday, Inc.