THEATER REVIEW: SEMINAR

Write away

By Ed Rampell

One of the great things about L.A.’s theater scene is that the TV and film industries provide a vast talent pool of thespians, some of whom are eager to ply their trade by trodding the boards, from Equity waiver 99-seaters to the Ahmanson. And Angelino audiences are in luck, as Seminar’s lead role is played by Jeff Goldblum, a bona fide Hollywood star who has appeared in blockbusters from Jurassic Park to Independence Day.

A once promising novelist now under a cloud of suspicion, Leonard seems to have abandoned his art for booze and bedding co-eds, as he turns to book editing, magazine articles and academia to keep the wolf (re: bill collectors) at the door. He also teaches a pricey rarified weekly writing seminar for young aspiring literati in the Upper Westside apartment of wannabe wordsmith Kate (Aya Cash), who comes from a well-to-do family. At Kate’s posh Manhattan pad Leonard proceeds to alternately praise or rip his tutorial subjects apart, lauding or lambasting their literary efforts, as he, perhaps, unleashes and works through his own inner demons. (When he does so Goldblum is the creepiest he’s been since David Cronenberg’s 1986 sci-fi horror remake The Fly.)

Douglas (Lucas Near-Verbrugghe) is a pretentious scribe who happens to have a last name with a certain cache in the dynastic-oriented literary realm. He pompously holds forth on topics, describing their “interiority and exteriority” and so on. Izzy (Jennifer Ikeda) schemes to attain celebrity status by sleeping her way toward the pantheon of scribblers in the public eye. The stony broke Martin (Greg Keller) is critical of both the maestro and his classmates alike. But for some strange reason he never quite gets around to submitting his own unpublished manuscripts for review, and possible scorn and derision.

As the quartet strive for success in the world of publishing, the rapidly paced clever dialogue references creative communities and colleges such as Yaddo and Bennington, supposed hothouses for launching hopeful literary lions towards getting published, fame and fortune. As Leonard’s class unfolds there are enough shifting romantic liaisons to make Woody Allen’s polyamorous skull spin. Who does and does not get “lucky” (and with whom) is a wry commentary on “success,” which can be sexual in the celebrity sense and/or artistic.

Award winning playwright Theresa Rebeck’s must-see (and hear) Seminar is often funny, sometimes sexy and always insightful, shedding light not only on the trap and claptrap of celebrityhood but more importantly on the literary creative process and on what it truly means to be a writer. Along the way there are meditations upon ethics and great lines tossed about, such as thoughtful Kate’s spot on observation: “Fraud is a way of life in a capitalist culture, especially in the arts.”

Sam Gold, who helmed the Broadway production of Seminar, expertly, tautly directs the current ensemble cast with finesse. They all strike the right notes of pathos or humor, especially Goldblum, who, in addition to his Tinseltown big budget hits, has a rather extensive theater background and has acted in films by Robert Altman, Paul Mazursky, etc. At age 60 Goldblum is hitting his stride and all his marks, whether delivering zingers, stingers or soliloquies.

The breezy dizzy Izzy is no ditzy blonde -- she’s an Asian-American. Ikeda appeared on the Great White Way in Top Girls, which is ironic as her girl goes topless in Seminar while she uses her feminine charms to climb the literary ladder towards media acclaim. Some may consider Izzy to be a blithe free spirit; others may find her to be a sensationalized sensual-ized stereotype of the “Eastern” sex kitten who freely pleasures white males.

Rebeck’s rumination on the literary life contains plot and character twists that reveal what it genuinely means to be an artist, especially in this overly commercialized world where a terrifyingly small number of Americans read contemporary fiction, and where the publishing world is undergoing major shifts due to the nature of technology and a collapsing economy. Of course, the underlying core of the problem is the small amount of readers of books in our glitz-driven electronic and digital media saturated society, which seems poised on the verge of becoming a parody of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, where there’s no need to outlaw reading books, since so few people do, anyway. (The lawmakers are probably illiterate and couldn’t write the legislation anyway.   

Seminar ends contemplatively and with the play’s only scene change. In another realistic set designed by David Zinn, Martin confronts his tutor at Leonard’s apartment, its shelves brimming with books, where the truth is revealed by the student and his teacher, who confesses to having “no skin.” The perfect note -- literally -- is struck, as church music mysteriously sounds, suggesting the spiritual nature and calling of the writing process.

What, pray tell, exactly is a writer, those creatures inking out a living by creating a precious cosmos composed of words, as Seminar puts it? For my money (or lack of, since I am one) a writer is someone who has something to say and says it well, in written form. And, dare I say it, may even hope to write the wrongs of the world in doing so.


Seminar runs through Sunday, Nov. 18 at the Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90012. For more info: www.centertheatregroup.org/; 213-628-2772.

 

    

FILM REVIEW: WUTHERING HEIGHTS

Cathy (Kaya Scodelario) in Wuthering Heights.

On the lower half

By Ed Rampell

A while back audiences experienced a series of screen adaptations of Jane Austen’s 19^th century novels. Now, we seem to have a cinematic cycle of revivals of the Brontë Sisters’ Gothic romances. Charlotte’s oft-filmed Jane Eyre (the first movie version was shot by 1910) returned to the big screen last year. Now it’s the turn of Emily Brontë’s likewise much made (originally in 1920) and much-remade Wuthering Heights (published in 1847) to be reincarnated on the silver screen. So what’s different and new about English director Andrea Arnold’s rendition, which she co-wrote with Olivia Hetreed (Girl With a Pearl Earring)?

At first blush, one might think that adding an interracial dimension to this tale of thwarted love is a brand new 21^stcentury brainstorm. I hate to dampen the Eureka! moment, but William Wyler’s 1939 version -- the most famous adaptation, this Best Picture Oscar nominee was co-written by no less than Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur and John Huston -- co-starred Englishmen Laurence Olivier and David Niven, who played opposite Merle Oberon. While her character, Catherine Earnshaw, is certainly of pure British pedigree, Ms. Oberon herself was reportedly born in Bombay and of Welsh-Indian ancestry. So the inter-ethnic element was already arguably implicit in Wyler’s Wuthering Heights, although to be fair it is far more explicitly explored in Arnold’s film.

Solomon Glave, who plays young Heathcliff, and James Howson, who portrays Heathcliff as a young man, both appear to be black, UK-born actors who make their acting debuts in this tragedy about unrequited love. The lead male character is a foundling, brought to Wuthering Heights by the erstwhile Bible-thumping Mr. Earnshaw (Paul Hilton), owner of the eponymous remote farm located in northern England near windswept, mystic moors. Although Heathcliff’s color is much remarked upon (especially by Cathy’s older brother, the harebrained Hindley, roguishly played by Lee Shaw), his precise ethnic origins are never fully explained. Although if I heard correctly, at one point he’s referred to as a “Lascar,” which -- if that’s the case -- would make Heathcliff from India or another country east of the Cape of Good Hope at South Africa. However, I do think this Heathcliff is meant to be of indeterminate African ancestry.

Be that as it may (or may not), his dark skin complicates matters greatly and amplifies why he is “unworthy” of being loved by Cathy. Heathcliff grows up in close quarters with Cathy, portrayed as a young female of indeterminate age(s) by newcomer Shannon Beer, then as an adult by Kaya Scodelario, both of them apparently Caucasian British actresses. Living a hard scrabble existence at the farm, she and Heathcliff romp on the moors -- away from civilization’s restraints -- together, sleep in the same room and develop deep bonds for one another, unhindered and unimpeded by the taboo of incest (unlike Hindley, which may explain part of his brutish antipathy towards Heathcliff, who unlike him, is free of that social constraint).

As Heathcliff and Cathy mature he is deemed to be her social inferior (not least of all because he’s like, you know, black) and they are torn asunder, becoming arguably the most star-crossed lovers in English literature. The wild child becomes a “lady” and marries properly, at least according to 19^thcentury stuffy status conscious British standards. Heathcliff doesn’t exactly sit still for it as he is shunned because he started out life as a mere servant, a stable boy, who in this retelling is black.

Before Sigmund Freud evolved his scientific theory of the id versus superego, the Brontë Sisters did so on the artistic level in their Gothic classics. Heathen Heathcliff represents the unbridled id, the unrestrained instinctual self. Cathy’s id is at war with her superego, the constraints and inhibition imposed upon her by society. As aboriginal heathenism clashes with Christian original sin, their saga encapsulates what Freud would later call “civilization and its discontents” in a scientific book of that title written only a mere 82 years after Em wrote her epistle.

At the heart of both Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights is the thwarting of sexuality. It remains open to speculation as to whether the very youthful Heathcliff and Cathy indulge in actual sex play, or if they never ever act on their sexual impulses, including even kissing, until adulthood (and when it is too late). Take your pick; it’s subject to intepretation. In any case, 165 years after Emily’s classic was published, one would hope that the notion of sexual repression would by now be an extinct “Brontë-saurus.” Alas, the brouhaha surrounding birth control, “legitimate rape,” and so on -- that actually began during this election cycle with Obama’s refusal to allow “underaged” females over the counter access to so-called “Plan B” morning after pills -- proves that those puritanical dinosaurs still trod the Earth.

The supernatural angle of Emily’s novel and the 1939 classic film is played down in Arnold’s film. Emily’s literary device of a character named “Lockwood” demanding that Nelly (Simone Jackson) relate the saga of Heathcliff and Cathy is not used in this adaptation, which is largely told from Heathcliff’s point of view. Cinematographer Robbie Ryan’s moors, shot on location in the Yorkshire Dales, are appropriately moody. (BTW, of the eight Oscars Wyler’s 1939 version was nominated for, the sole Academy Award it won was for the cinematography by the immortal Gregg Toland, who in the next couple of years went on to lens John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath and Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane.) Ryan’s close-ups of flora and fauna are also very elemental, rooting 19^th century humans firmly in the Earth, as much a part of nature as the insects, beasts and plant life of their very rustic surroundings. However, there’s one too many a close-up a la early D.W. Griffith of a caged canary, an all too obvious metaphor of poor Cathy, who palpably yearns to fuck the daylights out of poor Hetahcliff but is restrained Mr. Linton (Oliver Milburn) and the other trappings of the civilized self. Hail Britannia!

Beer is flat and not particularly appealing as the child/early teen Cathy. Scodelario is more attractive but sometimes stagey as grownup, sexually frustrated Cathy, the epitome of the conflicted, divided self. However, both Glave and Howson as the younger and more mature Heathcliff, always strike the right note, from snarling to defiance to howling at the moon. Sex, after all, cannot be denied, when all is said and done (and undone). Even -- perhaps especially -- in regards to forbidden love.