Hard Choices, Same as They Ever Were - Boneau/Bryan

'Glengarry Glen Ross,' With Al Pacino, Aiming for Broadway - NYTimes.com
JUNE 12, 2012, 12:02 PM
‘Glengarry Glen Ross,’ With Al Pacino, Aiming for Broadway
By PATRICK HEALY
A new Broadway revival of David Mamet’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play,
Associated PressAl Pacino
“Glengarry Glen Ross,” is in the works for the 2012-13 season with Al Pacino in line to play the
desperate salesman Shelly “The Machine” Levene, according to two Broadway producers with knowledge
of the plans.
Playing Shelly Levene would be a reversal of roles for Mr. Pacino, who – in the 1992 film adaptation of
“Glengarry” – played the hotshot in the Chicago real estate office where Mr. Mamet’s searing comedy
unfolds. Mr. Pacino was nominated for a best supporting actor Oscar for that performance, as Ricky
Roma. It would also be the latest project for Mr. Pacino and the revival’s director, Daniel Sullivan, who
worked together on the 2010 Broadway outing of “The Merchant of Venice.”
A lead producer of the “Glengarry” revival, Jeffrey Richards, declined to comment on Tuesday. He was a
producer on “Merchant of Venice” and has also mounted several Mamet plays on Broadway, most
recently “A Life in the Theater” in 2010 and “Race” a year earlier. The information about the “Glengarry”
revival came from two producers who spoke on condition of anonymity because the revival is not official,
in part because negotiations with several actors are still under way.
“Glengarry” originally opened on Broadway in 1984 and was a critical hit that ran for 11 months; it was
nominated for four Tony Awards, including best play, and won for Joe Mantegna’s featured performance
as Roma. Robert Prosky played Levene in that production, and was also nominated for a featured Tony.
The play was revived relatively recently on Broadway, in 2005, with Alan Alda as Levene and Liev
Schreiber as Roma; both men were nominated for featured Tonys, and Mr. Schreiber won. That 2005
production also won for best play revival; Mr. Richards was one of its lead producers as well.
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/12/glengarry-glen-ross-with-al-pacino-aiming-for-broadway/?pagemode=print[6/13/2012 9:38:31 AM]
'Best Man' Looks to TV in Electing New Cast Members - NYTimes.com
JUNE 12, 2012, 4:08 PM
‘Best Man’ Looks to TV in Electing New Cast Members
By PATRICK HEALY
With four main actors scheduled to depart the show in July, the Broadway
Chris Pizzello/Associated
revival of “Gore Vidal’s The Best Man” is turning to some notable television PressCybill Shepherd
stars as replacements, in hopes they will help sell tickets to the tourists who dominate New York theater
audiences in summertime.
Two of the new cast members will also be making their Broadway debuts: The Emmy-nominated actress
Cybill Shepherd (“Cybill,” “Moonlighting”) will succeed Candice Bergen as a frustrated political wife
whose husband is vying for a presidential nomination, while Kristin Davis (Charlotte on “Sex and the
City”) will replace Kerry Butler as the southern belle married to a senator also seeking the nomination.
John Stamos (“ER,” “Full House”) will play opposite Ms. Davis as the senator, taking over the role from
Eric McCormack. And Tony-winning theater veteran Elizabeth Ashley, last seen on Broadway in
“Dividing the Estate,” will follow Angela Lansbury in the role of a meddling political committeewoman.
The first three actors will begin performances on July 10, and Ms. Ashley will start on July 24. Other
members of the original cast – including two of its stars, James Earl Jones and John Larroquette – will
remain with the production through its final performance scheduled for Sept. 9.
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/12/best-man-looks-to-tv-in-electing-new-cast-members/?pagemode=print[6/13/2012 9:40:33 AM]
Hard Choices, Same as They Ever Were - The New York Times
June 12, 2012
THEATER REVIEW
Hard Choices, Same as They Ever Were
By CHARLES ISHERWOOD
A good, old-fashioned consciousness-raising session flares into life in the first act of “Rapture, Blister, Burn,”
the intensely smart, immensely funny new play by Gina Gionfriddo that opened Tuesday night at Playwrights
Horizons. Over late afternoon martinis, four women representing three generations dive into a freewheeling
conversation about how women’s lives have and have not changed since the 1970s.
The image of women rapping away about gender roles may hark back to that seemingly distant era, but the rap
itself is rich in new perspectives. Consider this unlikely phenomenon: The ideas of Phyllis Schlafly, the antifeminist scold of the “me” decade, are given about as much airtime as those of Betty Freidan, one of the
movement’s heroines.
And guess what? Defending Ms. Schlafly from dismissive scorn is the fiery feminist academic.
“Look, Schlafly is very clear that when a man and woman come together, the man must lead, and the woman
must follow,” she says. “Now, yes, that’s an offensive notion when you put it out there as a rule. But my
middle-aged observation is that in a relationship between two people, you can’t both go first.”
This unlikely iconoclast, Catherine Croll (Amy Brenneman, of television’s “Private Practice” and “Judging
Amy”), has never been one to go second. The author of two books and a television pundit when the occasion
requires, she has forged a high-profile career that has managed to transcend academia. So why does she feel
stranded and unfulfilled as she slides toward her middle 40s? The answer, she freely admits, is that she is
beginning to regret not having married and had children.
The marriage versus career debate faced by women has been a subject of popular debate since feminism first
became a cultural force. Ms. Gionfriddo, the author of the scintillating Pulitzer Prize finalist “Becky Shaw,”
acknowledged in an article for The New York Times that “Rapture, Blister, Burn” can be viewed as an
unwitting homage to “The Heidi Chronicles,” Wendy Wasserstein’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, which explored
the complexities of an accomplished woman’s life with humor and trenchancy back in 1988.
Almost a quarter-century and many a pop-lit best seller later, you might wonder what fresh insights are to be
found by tilling such well-covered ground. But as Ms. Gionfriddo’s play illustrates, each generation of women
has to struggle with evolving attitudes toward marriage, not to mention the seemingly unchanging verities of
the male psyche.
Catherine has returned to her hometown to take care of her mother, Alice (the wonderful Beth Dixon, as
bracingly dry as the martinis she mixes). Alice has recently had a heart attack, but Catherine’s arrival has as
much to do with feeling adrift and unsatisfied — in search of a stable home — as it does with her mother’s
illness.
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Hard Choices, Same as They Ever Were - The New York Times
Catherine soon finds herself keeping company with a man she once loved, who is also the only man she has
ever loved. A detour onto the road not taken suddenly seems a tantalizing possibility.
Don Harper (the excellent Lee Tergesen), a fellow graduate student, was Catherine’s boyfriend when she went
off to London to pursue a promising academic opportunity. By the time she came back, he had taken up with
her best friend, Gwen (Kellie Overbey). Now they have two children and seem at first blush to represent the
ideal that Catherine never had another serious chance to consider.
But it doesn’t take too much digging to uncover the more complicated truth. Catherine, a media studies
professor, has taken a position at the college where Don is a dean. When she decides to start a summer
session, Gwen becomes one of her students — one of only two, as it turns out, the other being (somewhat
contrivedly) the Harpers’ baby sitter, the 21-year-old pre-med dropout Avery (Virginia Kull).
At their first class, Gwen opens up about the problems in her marriage, which range from a grinding lack of
funds to Don’s addictions to pot and pornography. She has often pondered whether she made the right choice
in giving up her own academic ambitions. Catherine represents, to her, another kind of tantalizing ideal.
Avery, full of the brash self-confidence of youth, has entirely different ideas about the way men and women
interact. (She and her boyfriend are “hooking up exclusively,” she corrects Gwen, not “exclusively hooking
up.”) To Avery neither Catherine’s nor Gwen’s life seems a valuable model. As she puts it, “You either have a
career and wind up lonely and sad, or you have a family and wind up lonely and sad?”
Ms. Gionfriddo’s play does not really present Gwen and Catherine’s lives as two sides of the same tarnished,
useless coin. What’s exciting about her writing here is the multiplicity of the ideas it engages. Heady with
sharp-witted dialogue about the particularities of women’s experience (there’s a joke about pornography and
Google maps — believe it or not — that’s worth the ticket price alone), “Rapture” more largely illuminates how
hard it can be to forge both a satisfying career and a fulfilling personal life in an era that seems to demand
superhuman achievement from everyone.
Under the finely honed direction of Peter DuBois, the cast brings Ms. Gionfriddo’s characters to fully felt life.
Ms. Brenneman exudes a brisk intelligence — and a telegenic beauty — that makes her Catherine wholly
credible as a sort of Naomi Wolf-Camille Paglia mash-up. But her sensitively drawn performance also reveals
the emotional yearning at the character’s core.
Ms. Overbey has the soft features of a gamboling beauty from a Fragonard painting, but her Gwen evinces a
firm will that leads her to make a provocative suggestion to Catherine about how both of them could reorder
their lives to the greater satisfaction of all. And Ms. Kull is wonderful as the outspoken Avery, who doesn’t shy
from speaking her mind about just how and why her elders have screwed up their lives.
But eventually even Avery’s armor of self-assurance about how to get what she wants out of life — and out of
those ornery things called men — has been dented by disappointment. Still, she salvages a modicum of
optimism about her future from, of all things, an academic consideration of the meanings of slasher movies.
“O.K., maybe the world has changed,” she says. “That guy who comes in and saves the girl in the end? He
might not be coming. But the girl is still going to be O.K.”
The surviving-the-psycho metaphor may not be a particularly heartwarming one, but as the somewhat arcane
http://theater.nytimes.com/2012/06/13/theater/reviews/rapture-blister-burn-at-playwrights-horizons.html?pagewanted=print[6/13/2012 9:35:52 AM]
Hard Choices, Same as They Ever Were - The New York Times
title of Ms. Gionfriddo’s play suggests (it’s a song lyric from the rock band Hole), a well-lived life today still
means negotiating a fair amount of pain and frustration in search of that elusive goal, happiness.
Rapture, Blister, Burn
By Gina Gionfriddo; directed by Peter DuBois; sets by Alexander Dodge; costumes by Mimi O’Donnell; lighting
by Jeff Croiter; sound by M. L. Dogg; production manager, Christopher Boll; production stage manager, Lisa
Ann Chernoff. Presented by Playwrights Horizons, Tim Sanford, artistic director; Leslie Marcus, managing
director; Carol Fishman, general manager. At Playwrights Horizons, 416 West 42nd Street, Clinton, (212) 2794200, ticketcentral.com. Through June 24. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes.
WITH: Amy Brenneman (Catherine), Beth Dixon (Alice), Virginia Kull (Avery), Kellie Overbey (Gwen) and Lee
Tergesen (Don).
http://theater.nytimes.com/2012/06/13/theater/reviews/rapture-blister-burn-at-playwrights-horizons.html?pagewanted=print[6/13/2012 9:35:52 AM]