If you don't look too closely, Clifford Odet's The Country
Girl (1950) is quite a sound boulevard drama. A talented,
ambitious direcor, Bernie Dodd, the victim of an ugly divorce,
is staging a Broadway-bound play when his male star bolts to
Hollywood. Over the protest of the hardboiled producer, Bernie
casts the understudy, Frank Elgin. Once an affluent major
actor, Elgin married Georgie, a sweet young thing from
Connecticut, then started producing his own vehicles, losing in
rapid succession his little daughter and his shirt. Frank hit
the bottle and the skids.
Bernie, though, believes that Frank could again be the splendid
actor he once was. The only thing that stands in his way,
besides seven years of unemployment (he must have broken his
pocket mirror), is Georgie, an apparent alcoholic and hysteric,
who clings to Frank, tyrannizes him, and holds him down.
Actually, the truth is the opposite. Frank is a near-hopelessly
lost soul, sodden and mendacious, and the one thing that has
kept him going is Georgie, who, fed up, may herself be going
now.
The seemingly cheerful but furtive,
hard-to-wean-from-the-hip-flask Frank; the heroically loving,
ready-to-help-yet-again but tired, oh, so tired Georgie; the
fiercely upward-striving, gifted yet deluded Bernie: These
three form shifting alliances or indulge in impassioned
stratagems to help Frank regain his confidence and retain his
lines -- or perhaps to undermine him for sick, private reasons.
Fascinating stuff, yet shrewed scrutiny will find holes
everywhere. A star with a run-of-the-play contract cannot run
off with impunity. A fellow with Elgin's reputation for benders
would not be hired even as an understudy -- especially
not as that. And Bernie, whose father was a self-destructive
drunk, would not so readily fall for Frank's fabrications.
Yet, if these three principals are properly cast, the play has
enough verbal energy, emotional momentum, and theatrical savvy
to carry you along, whatever may happen once you start thinking
back on it. But it does need a trio interacting flawlessly, and
a production that hurtles along a little faster than the speed
of thought. Something, however, tends to go wrong. In the 1950
premiere, Paul Kelly cound not suggest former (or present)
greatness, and Uta Hagen was so tough and in control, she
wouldn't have fooled Baby Snooks, much less Bernie Dodd. The
latter, however was played credibly by Steven Hill.
In the 1972 Broadway revival, Jason Robards was totally,
touchingly believable as Frank, a feckless, crumpled genius and
loveliest of liars. As Bernie, George Grizzard was the very
image of charismatic drivenness, a smiling steamroller who
could run you over before you could muster a squawk. But, as
Georgie, Maureen Stapleton was a triumph of miscasting, equally
incredible as a once pretty young thing and as a now gaunt,
tautly determined, still attractive woman.
The current Roundabout attempt to make it all cohere comes very
close to working, but, once again, hope of fullfillment must be
deferred. Georgie, for the first time, is in the right hands.
Karen Allen conveys magisterially both the delectable country
girl (or mouse) that was and the sobered-up but still
undefeated woman, capable of one more supreme, loving effort.
Though a bit young and undented for the part, Miss Allen does
haunting wonders with it. The dowdily disenchanted bearing, the
defeminized gait, the gaze dilated with tacitly reproachful
resignation -- these, and much else, add up to a performance of
matchless nobility, the very bread and wine of acting.
She gets gallant support from the Frank of David Rasche. A
specialist in somewhat decadent golden boys, he, too, is rather
young for his role. But he carries it off. Perhaps not quite
the once-great star, but everything else: the shifting moods,
the shiftiness of character, the vanity and vulnerability and
vaingloriousness of a childlike actor and infantile man. But
the production crumbles in its Bernie.
Paul McCrane is an accomplished portrayer of confused or
scheming, pathetic or psychotic young fellows; he is not,
however, a dashing young charmer, an overbearing but persuasive
mover and maker. He is neither the man to manipulate a flinty
producer (aptly rendered by George Morfogen) nor the Svengali
to bolster an insecure performer (whether the labile Frank or
the flighty ingenue of the play-within-the-play). Least of all
is he the lover who could rekindle the dormant womanliness in
Georgie and, if only momentarily, sweep her off her feet. When
the beetle-browed, slitty-eyed, prematurely bald McCrane
announces, "I saw him give a performance that made my hair
stand on end," he courts laughter and disaster. He avoids the
former by giving us a dour, maniacal Dodd; but he cannot avert
the latter in his later, softer and more romantic passages.
Although Kenneth Frankel has directed adroitly and gets nice
supporting work from the rock-solid Stephen Mendill and
pleasantly offhand Jim Abele, the long time it takes to shift
Hugh Landwehr's otherwise appropriate decor proves damaging.
Whether caused by shortage of space or of money, the
interruptions during which stagehands putter about prompt the
Roundabout's primitive audience to indulge in obstreperous
chatter that spills over into the actual playing time and helps
dissipate the impact. Even what we get, when the
theater-within-the-theater is left dark, not the right standing
kind of work light but something spindly and nontheatrical
lowered from above, hurts Odets's accurately theatrical
atmosphere. Still, for David Rasche's and, especially, Karen
Allen's sake, genuine theater lovers should not be deterred.
Copyright © 1994 New York Magazine, Inc.