Retreat from New York

Oh, the melodrama of it all: <i>The Retreat From Moscow</i>'s Eileen Atkins tries to convince Ben Chaplin that there's no movie camera anywhere in the theater.

Oh, the melodrama of it all: The Retreat From Moscow's Eileen Atkins tries to convince Ben Chaplin that there's no movie camera anywhere in the theater.

Forget Moscow, current New York theater is less than enchanting -- but there's hope on the horizon.

by Toby Zinman

Now Open:

Beckett/Albee. In 1959 in Berlin, Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape was paired with The Zoo Story, by then unknown American playwright Edward Albee. The playwrights are paired again in this new program of old plays, a chance to see important dramatic literature performed by important actors, Marian Seldes and Brian Murray. Although Albee's debt to Beckett is clear, this is a lopsided evening in that the first three plays by Beckett are grim, while Albee's longer one-act is not, and not particularly Beckettian either. All four plays, though, could be considered meditations on one of my favorite Albee lines from Counting the Ways: "And think about hence! There are two things: cease and corruption. And that's all there is to say about hence!"

In Not I, a spotlit mouth spews, gushes, pours out language telling the story of her life while refusing the first-person pronoun (and thus the title); the male companion piece is A Piece of Monologue, a tortured reminiscence, followed by Footfalls, in which director Lawrence Sacharow makes some odd decisions: The mother is a visible character rather than just a voice, and Marian Seldes is more herself than May (full of her signature sweeping arm gestures and sly smiles and thus lacking both dignity and inner compulsion). Albee's Counting the Ways, a vicious vaudeville vamp on marriage, allows Seldes and Murray to reunite in the prequel to the couple they played in Albee's later The Play About the Baby. Through Jan. 4, Century Center for the Performing Arts, 111 E. 15th St., 800-432-7250.

Iron. This is an engrossing drama by new Scottish playwright Rona Munro, whose Bold Girls is running simultaneously downtown; both plays are about prisoners. In this, a 25-year-old woman visits her mother in prison for the first time in the 15 years she has been locked up for the murder of her husband. The young woman has no memory of her childhood, and the play is the process of her recovering her memories and herself. The first act establishes characters, several subplots and much tension: We wait to hear the secret of the mother's silence unfold. The second act disappoints: There is no secret and all that was clear in Act One is merely elaborated upon; the subplots turn out to be fake, and the theme of female rage is textbook. The acting, against the stylishly grim set, is uniformly fine -- Lisa Emery as the mother is especially moving and vivid. Through Dec. 28, Manhattan Theatre Club at City Center, 131 W. 55th St., 877-581-1212.

The Retreat From Moscow. It is annoying to watch annoying characters we're supposed to be deeply moved by -- all you really want to do is holler out from the audience: "Stop whining!" It is even more annoying when two fine actors are trapped into tedious, melodramatic performances: Eileen Atkins seems to have chosen flamboyance as her method of conveying misery ("Talk to me. Answer me. Look at me"), while John Lithgow minces around gingerly, using a painfully fake posh accent. This account of an English divorce by William Nicholson belabors its unearned metaphor that the divorce is like Napoleon's catastrophic retreat from Moscow, and although I saw the analogy (wife frostbitten, cast aside and left to die by survivor husband) I didn't buy it for a minute. The husband is a history teacher, the wife is compiling an anthology of poetry (much of which she spouts with annoying regularity -- a poem for every unhappy occasion) when she's not going to church and trying to convince everybody else to. Film actor Ben Chaplin, who plays their adult son, seems to spend most of the time looking for the camera. Daniel Sullivan directs, more or less. The wife tells her son late in the play, "The thing about unhappiness is that it gets so boring." Is there a sane adult alive who doesn't know this? Is there a sane playwright alive who would include this self-indicting line? Open run, Booth Theater, 222 W. 45th St., 800-432-7250.

Strictly Academic. A.R. Gurney (Sylvia, Love Letters) is a boulevard playwright -- charming, lightweight, accomplished. These two one-acts, despite their new umbrella title and despite being touted as a "New York premiere," are old news -- I've seen "The Problem" in a much funnier production locally. They are essentially little-theater scripts: the first about a couple who spice up their sex life with masquerades, and the second, "The Guest Lecturer," about a town's community theater that has returned to the most primal and violent sources of ritual drama. These adept New York actors (Remy Auberjonois, Susan Greenhill, Keith Reddin and Amy Southerland) play small-town theater folks, and there is a whiff of condescension and considerably less amusement than there would be if we were actually subscribers at a little theater in a small town. Through Nov. 30, Primary Stages, 354 W. 45th St., 212-333-4052.

In Previews/Coming Soon:

As you can see from the above, the New York season began with the same thud we heard in Philly: one disappointing production after another. But, undaunted, I look forward to these November New York openings: Richard Greenberg's The Violet Hour (Biltmore Theatre, 800-432-7250), Paula Vogel's The Long Christmas Ride Home (Vineyard Theatre, 212-353-0303) and three all-star classics: Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with Ashley Judd and Jason Patric (Music Box Theatre, 800-432-7250); Shakespeare's Henry IV with Richard Easton, Ethan Hawke, Kevin Kline and Audra MacDonald (Lincoln Center, 212-239-6200); and Harold Pinter's The Caretaker with Patrick Stewart (Roundabout Theatre Company, 212-719-1300).