Family Americanus
By Alexis Greene
Flesh and Blood
By Peter Gaitens
New York Theatre Workshop
79 E. 4th St.
Box Office: (212) 460-5475
Family is often thought to lie at the core
of American life, so it is not surprising that the family, with
its psychological, sexual and economic highs and lows, has dominated
American novels and plays.
In exploratory tribute to this phenomenon,
New York Theatre Workshop has embarked on a series called somewhat
coyly “Cradle and All: The Changing American Family.”
NYTW’s third and most recent entry is Peter Gaitens’s
stage adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s mammoth 1995 work
Flesh and Blood, which follows a Greek immigrant and
his descendants from 1935 to 2035. But despite astute direction
and exquisite acting, from a cast of 11 playing 24 characters,
this gargantuan play demonstrates the perils of bringing a novel
to the theater.
Certainly NYTW’s wide stage is an
apt platform for this adventure, and designer Christine Jones
uses it to advantage. Here are all the hallmarks of the traditional
American home, with a difference. Trees rise at the rear of the
stage, silhouetted against the back wall like ghosts from a rural
past. A giant wooden pier juts into the middle of the stage and
forms a staircase. Off to the sides, doors punctuate the stage
walls. Shortly after the play begins, Scott Zielinski’s
subdued lighting picks up actors climbing among the trees, from
where, like a chorus, they momentarily speak bits and pieces of
ghostly dialogue.
Cunningham's novel hints at a tragedy of
Aeschylean proportions. Constantine Stassos, the patriarch, barrels
his way up through the strata of American society with a kind
of rough hubris, making a fortune building cheap tract houses
only to lose the family for which he labored. But the calamities
that befall Con and his family have less to do with over-reaching
than with each member’s inability to respond to his or her
own needs or communicate with others. Mary, Con’s Italian-American
girlfriend, marries him at 17 to escape from her impoverished
home, not because she loves or desires him. From then on she squelches
her emotions in the pursuit of a kind of Anglo-Saxon perfection,
embodied in her mind by expensive clothes and an orderly house.
Their three children live in isolated,
confused worlds, out of which they rarely emerge to share longings
or offer each other help. Susan embarks on a seductive relationship
with her father, which, as she tries to reassure herself, is “only
kisses. And hugs.” She makes a marriage as loveless as her
mother’s. Scrawny, intellectual Billy is gay and for much
of his life engages in a battle of wills with the father he both
loves and despises. Zoe, a free spirit, is more attuned to her
inner self than her older sister and brother, but she has the
misfortune of coming to adulthood in the age of AIDS.
In the novel, the shower of incidents mingles
with Cunningham’s evocations of his characters’ private
dreams and passions. In Gaitens’s adaptation, incidents
abound but there is little space for showing the characters’
inner workings. Occasionally the play stops, while a character
addresses the audience in the first person (Gaitens takes most
of the language directly from the book). But by Act 2, when the
newness of figuring out relationships has worn off, our presumed
task is to follow the tracks of the main characters, their children,
grandchildren, lovers and friends. Our absorption in the stories
diminishes then, for the play feels like a catalogue of battles--a
hundred years family war --rather than an exploration of people.
The character of Con (John Sierros) suffers
most. In Cunningham’s novel he is often bull-headed and
brutish, but you understand his furies. You understand why this
man, who arrived in America with no skills, barely speaking English,
blows up when Billy (Peter Gaitens) insists on wearing jeans to
his Harvard graduation and then, even worse, walks out on the
whole affair. The play, by contrast, draws Con as a stereotype:
a macho immigrant who has acquired the attitudes of homophobic
America.
Compare Flesh and Blood to Long
Day’s Journey into Night, another American family drama
playing New York this year. O’Neill, too, excavates the
tormenting past and present of an immigrant family, the Irish-American
Tyrones. But O’Neill condenses his saga. He is more concerned
with psychological revelations, no matter how contradictory, than
plot. He understands how one day and night can contain lifetimes.
Musings and memory, rather than events, are O’Neill’s
devices of choice. We learn more about the troubled Tyrones by
listening to them writhe verbally than we do watching unhappy
Stassos generations grow up, find and lose partners, and die.
The proof is in the plays’ emotional
impacts. At the end of Long Day’s Journey we experience
indescribable loss and pity, which extends beyond the Tyrones
to the unfathomable emptiness that, O’Neill believed, human
beings share. At the end of Flesh and Blood we feel only
an amorphous sympathy that so many lives have not come to fruition,
and perhaps a vague hope for the future.
This is not to suggest that Gaitens would
have a better play if he adopted O’Neill’s techniques,
only that Flesh and Blood, in its attempt to encompass
the novel’s scope, fails to transfer the guts of Cunningham’s
writing. There is material here for at least three plays, as Aeschylus
would have known.
If the form eventually wearies, the content
does fulfill NYTW’s mandate. Over the course of a hundred
years, the Stassos family changes and changes again. What begins
as a supposedly ideal American unit, two heterosexual parents
with three children, becomes a group that only post-modern urban
America would recognize. Near the play’s end, Billy-–or
Will, as he renames himself-–his partner, Harry (Peter Frechette),
Zoe’s teenage son Jamal (Airrion Doss), and Mary (Cherry
Jones) stand at the tip of Manhattan, torn between whether to
visit Ellis Island or buy sneakers for Jamal in the East Village.
Here, Cunningham and his emissary Gaitens seem to say, is a new
type of American family: gay, racially mixed, parented by people
who offer choice rather than control. They opt for a new pair
of Nikes, leaving Ellis Island and the history of its immigrants
behind them.
The director Douglas Hughes asks his actors
to fill the play’s interstices with true, affecting behavior,
and they oblige. Cherry Jones is a wonder. She looks stunning
in Paul Tazewell’s parade of suits and dresses, which mark
both the changing decades and Mary’s emotional state. In
Jones’ pure, unmannered performance, Mary becomes as tailored
as her clothes. She grows tighter and more fiercely closed down
with each passing year, although just occasionally, when Mary
can no longer bear the pressure, Jones breaks out of the character’s
cool demeanor and shows us a spasm of anger or unhappiness.
But all the performances are strong. Martha
Plimpton’s Zoe is a feral creature, as wild as her mass
of untamed hair. Jessica Hecht acts Susan with a devastating mixture
of hesitation and ferocity, and Jeff Weiss makes Zoe’s friend
Cassandra, a drag queen with infinite knowledge, both funny and
tender. They and the rest of the cast infuse the play with life,
in defiance of the writing.
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