Theatre in Review: The Country House (Manhattan Theatre Club/Samuel J. Friedman Theatre)

	Daniel Sunjata. Photo: Joan Marcus

When The Country House finally gets down to brass tacks and bared emotions, it becomes a drama with the vigor to match its intelligence. Elliot, a 50ish actor of no distinction with an alarmingly thin resume, has decided to turn playwright, and he gets together a group of friends and family for a reading. (We are in the domicile of the title, in the Berkshires, near the Williamstown Theatre Festival.) We don't hear a word of Elliot's play -- we come in just as the reading is over -- but the body language of all involved indicates that it is a real stinker. Everyone scurries away, remaining noncommittal, but Elliott, ignoring all the signals, insists on getting an opinion. Finally, his weary brother-in-law, Walter, a successful film director, decides that genial evasions will no longer do. He asks, "What is about you, Elliot, this gift you have for self-mortification? You practically insist that people hurt you." He then proceeds to shred the script, terming it unprofessional, an embarrassment to all.

The perpetually aggrieved Elliot then launches an attack on two more fronts: First, he is furious that Walter never gives him a job. The fed-up Walter replies, "No one wants to work with you, Elliot. You've done a very good job of making yourself radioactive. You're on everyone's life-is-too-short list." Second, he accuses Walter of giving up the theatre to become a Hollywood hack. Walter's answer is even more succinct: "What you have done? Huh? Besides squander your life on vitriol. You've stewed in it. Remove the anger and what's left? Nothing. A big, fat void where a life should be." Fisticuffs ensue, with Elliot embarrassing himself in front of friends and family.

Later, with what few shreds of dignity he has left, Elliot turns to his mother, Anna, the last of the theatrical grande dames and not one to waste sympathy on a son she thinks a fool. Elliot, begging for something, anything like love, says he should have died, not his beloved sister (who passed away a year earlier). Anna clearly regards this display as merely untidy, and, his unhappiness and resentment laid bare, Elliot goes away empty-handed. It is a testament to the skill of playwright Donald Margulies that we understand the accuracy of Elliot's perception -- he has been severely short-changed by his mother -- and yet his clinging to the past is a pointless exercise by one who has learned to enjoy playing the victim.

Both confrontations bristle with ugly truths and both end in total dissatisfaction for those involved; they constitute some of the best writing Margulies has done in some time. But the first two thirds of The Country House, for all its smart talk, wanders badly, leaving one wondering exactly what the playwright has in mind.

One thing seems certain: This is Margulies' modern Chekhov play. Like a kind of dramaturgical Joseph Priestly, he has grafted a strain of The Cherry Orchard onto Uncle Vanya, creating a strange hybrid that engages and bemuses in equal measure. Elliot is the piece's Vanya, a middle-aged loser who has wasted his life while everyone around him has profited from the world. Like Vanya, Elliot is mourning his late sister, and he mightily resents his brother-in-law, who has taken up with a beautiful younger woman. To make things especially galling, she is Nell, an actress for whom Elliot has been pining since their long-ago appearance in a bad play. The Astrov is Michael Astor, star of television and gossip columns, who tries to fill the emptiness inside with charity work and the odd theatre job -- or maybe making a pass at another man's fiancée. The Sonia is Susie, Walter's daughter, and the only member of this glittery crowd who isn't obsessed with show business. (She's a religious studies major at Yale, with a minor in psychology.) Susie is devoted to Elliot and furious at Walter for taking up with Nell so soon after her mother's death. Sweeping in from The Cherry Orchard is Anna -- vain, impetuous, blind to the pain of others -- practicing her charm on everyone; even as she worries about age and fading powers, she thinks that Michael -- who once played Marchbanks to her Candida -- might be just the thing for a little summer romance.

When the characters are dissecting the first-world problems of those in show-business families, The Country House provides plenty of adult entertainment. Pointing out Walter's new Porsche, Susie notes, "Doesn't it just cry out 'male menopause'?" Trying to get rid of Susie, Anna says, "Shouldn't you be out having unprotected sex with people your own age?" Walter comments on those who shed their high-priced Hollywood slavery for a little summer theatre, seeking "the Williamstown cure: better than a high colonic." Anna, appalled at Elliot's new career aspirations, says, "A playwright? Acting isn't demoralizing enough?" When Nell gushes that Anna is a Broadway star, Anna replies, "There are stars on Broadway, but they aren't Broadway stars," a comment that got plenty of knowing laughter at the performance I attended.

But for the longest time it's hard to tell exactly where any of this is going. All of the women make a pass at Michael, and Nell proves pretty popular with the men, too, but until Elliot finally erupts, there is too little action, along with a deficit of feeling underneath the wisecracks and missed connections. For a play rooted in mourning and loss, the sorrows of the people in The Country House feel oddly weightless. One spends a great deal of time wondering who is supposed to matter and why. Also, at times the plotting is a little illogical: Susie tells Nell, who looks to be in her 40s, that she is foolish for marrying Walter, who is 66, envisioning for her a tedious future of caring for an old man. Yet Susie's mother must have been considerably younger than Walter as well. And Margulies never really gives Susie a plausible reason for being so attached to Elliot, who proves so thoroughly irritating to everyone else.

Still, under Daniel Sullivan's direction, a first-class cast goes a long way toward keeping us interested in these people and their not-quite problems. Blythe Danner's Anna is every inch an exasperating charmer: "I entered the room," she says with some asperity. "I am not one whose entrances go unnoticed." Truer words were never spoken, and one regrets her absence whenever she is offstage. Eric Lange's skillful work excavates the agony under Elliot's prickly exterior. David Rasche is exceptionally appealing as Walter, his affability giving way to powerful fury when he squares off against Elliot. Kate Jennings Grant brings a nicely rueful quality to Nell, whose career hasn't worked out and finds herself on the Hollywood wife track. Sarah Steele has perfected the art of playing skeptical young ladies -- see her appearances on The Good Wife as Alan Cumming's wised-up daughter -- and she does basically the same thing here. Daniel Sunjata brings his looks and presence to the role of Michael, and a good thing, too, because the character is otherwise pretty much a blank. It's a difficult challenge to create a character who is essentially an empty vessel and Sunjata justifiably struggles with what he has been given.

As always at Manhattan Theatre Club, the production design is a beauty, down to the last detail. John Lee Beatty's set is the summer house living room of our collective dreams, and it is lit with typical meticulous detail and attention to time of day and climatic conditions by Peter Kaczorowski. Rita Ryack's costumes are thoroughly right for each character -- especially Anna's elaborate costume-like outfits. Obadiah Eaves' solid design provides the requisite ambient effects plus reinforcement for Peter Golub's original music.

Clearly, Margulies, in his wide-angle view of the characters and his even-handed treatment of various plot threads, was going for a kind of group portrait. Nothing wrong with that, but the result here is a series of conflicts that don't get going until it is almost too late. The result is a play that is as diffuse and unfocused as a lazy summer afternoon.--David Barbour