I have had the rare pleasure to experience a contemporary American play in two very different venues and productions in a ten-month period: Kenneth Lonergan’s The Waverly Gallery. I had seen the Broadway production back in September that garnered Elaine May a well-deserved Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play. More recently, I had the opportunity to catch Shakespeare & Company’s production in its smaller Elayne P. Bernstein with a three-quarter thrust stage. The point here is not to compare the two productions because ultimately that is an empty intellectual exercise and, well, plain silly. I mention the former in regard to the latter because it demonstrates the endurability and power of Lonergan’s work that it resonates with its elegiac fury regardless of the trappings of its given production.
With its narrator Daniel (an always nuanced David Gow) recounting a familial past, The Waverly Gallery would seem to belong to the tradition sparked by Tennessee Williams with The Glass Menagerie. And while that is certainly part of its DNA, Lonergan’s play also finds itself as part of an even more storied theatrical tradition – that of Greek tragedy. The plague here does not come in the form of a disease brought down on the City of Thebes but rather as Alzheimer’s as it cruelly afflicts Daniel’s grandmother Gladys (Annette Miller mining the full vivaciousness of this grande dame). In the large Broadway house, the tragedy is Gladys’s with Daniel serving as chorus. In the smaller house in Lenox, the tragedy is that of the entire family.
That sort of tragedy can be difficult for actors to play as they are not necessarily playing an action but reacting to an unseen force that overwhelms them. The family of Gladys, Daniel, Ellen (Gladys’s daughter/Daniel’s mother), and Howard (Ellen’s second husband) is an extremely accomplished one professionally and intellectually; indeed, you could easily find them in one of Woody Allen’s frequent romps through Manhattan’s Upper West Side. And yet, they are unequal to the task at hand. Who could be? They are by no means negligent. They address each new further turn into the darkness with competence and capability using humor as a defense mechanism to shield them from what they know must be. We can certainly empathize with them as they try to hold off fate for just one more day and then just one day more. When the owner of the building where Gladys keeps her little art gallery wants to renovate the space for a café, they are simply incapable of telling her at first. On Broadway, we as the audience were kept distant from their turmoil (aided by a production design that emphasized a rather cool palette) until the devastating coda. In the significantly smaller space, we are on the ride with them, which paradoxically places greater emphasis on the comedic moments andthe building dread.
This production is directed by the legendary Tina Packer, who founded the company. She has assembled an exemplary ensemble that feels like a family, jagged edges and all. She has given the actors the room to find every nook and cranny in their roles and to build fully-realized three-dimensional individuals. She finds the poetry in the often-overlapping dialogue. I did, however, think her guiding thesis for the play to be on the tentative side. She occasionally steps into her toe into the metatheatrical when, at one moment, she has Daniel step over the constructed “proscenium” to address the audience directly. Those moments, alas, are few and far between as she gives into a realism, which – given the limitations of the space and the demands of the play in terms of set changes – did not serve the production as fully as it might have. Whether Greek tragic or American dramatic tradition, often all we need is the rich language of a play and a powerful cast to realize the world of that language. She had both here coming into that rehearsal room.
The cast is uniformly excellent. The one not weakness exactly but weirdness of the Broadway production was the casting of Michael Cera as Don Bowman, the last artist Gladys showcases in her gallery. He is a more a product of the world of Lonergan’s film Manchester by the Sea, a man from the working-class environs of Boston who struggled to become a painter. Previously, I did not understand why either Don or Cera were involved in the proceedings. Here, thanks to David Bertoldi fully integrating himself into the production and fully realizing the pain haunting the character on the margins, I understand Don’s place as a reminder that this tragedy is not the tragedy of those who are visible in most of our storytelling but the tragedy of the human condition regardless of circumstance. Michael F. Toomey is a force of nature whenever on stage, but he allows the audience to see that his bluster and tactless joking are just means of buffering himself from the fateful journey his mother-in-law is taking (and the very different Hell of his own elderly parents). Elizabeth Aspenlieder bares open the brittleness, fragility, and desperation of Ellen. Her evolving grief charts with the vicious course of the disease. Aspenlieder wisely avoids making Ellen a saint or martyr, conveying that her ultimate act of giving will also devastate her.
David Gow as Daniel builds a complex character who has sought to insulate himself from complicated emotions and yet must by play’s end confront the hardest ones of them own. When Gladys has her final break with reality, Gow effortlessly puts Daniel on a rollercoaster ride where the final destination is despair. His humor will not prevent it. Deflection will not prevent it. Cheery reasonableness not will prevent it. His helplessness enrages him, and that rage scares him to the bottom of his core. By his final monologue, you can see him slowly build the architecture to face the harsh realities of the world, and one can well imagine Gow bringing equal power to Tom’s “blow out your candles” monologue in The Glass Menagerie. At the beating tragic heart of the production is Annette Miller’s Gladys. She makes clear the achievements of Gladys’s earlier life, and so the tragedy of what she is losing has that much greater weight. I wish that in that second act she founds a beat or two where Gladys has some momentary lucidity – the false hope of such moments would only have compounded the tragedy – but this is a quibble. By the end, when she is lost in her own mind – confused, frightened, without anchor, without understanding – one would have be dead three days not to be overwhelmed emotionally by Miller’s performance. At that moment, she is not Gladys character on stage but a woman in all of our lives whom we are losing.
Without question, Shakespeare & Company’s The Waverly Galleryis a production that should be seen. But I want to emphasize that you should see it even if – or especially if – you have seen the recent Broadway revival. It is a different vision and a successful one. And so your experience will be different but equally meaningful.