Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Resurrection, by Leo Tolstoy -- didactic and mechanical, but still Tolstoy

I recently read Tolstoy's Resurrection, and I was struck by the didactic tone throughout the book -- Tolstoy is out to educate us. The lively details and insights into character and soul that you come to expect from War and Peace and Anna Karenina are still there, but they are separated by long passages of mechanical narrative. I never felt satisfied with Prince Nekhlyudov. Yet his story, in brief, is compelling -- the prince sits on a jury that mistakenly convicts a prostitute of murder; he recognizes her as the young woman he once had a brief affair with, causing an unwanted pregnancy and thus setting the woman on the downward course of life that led her to her current misfortune; and the prince searches for a way to make it up to her, learning in the process what misery and chaos that prisoners suffer on their way through the Russian justice system. There are many moving and wonderful scenes -- from Nekhlyudov's youth, the Easter liturgy when he was young, with the young girl there, the scenes where wretched prisoners besiege him and plead for his help, the dusty agonizing scenes on the road to Siberia. Despite the book's faults, it's still Tolstoy, and you can't stop reading and admiring.

Monday, December 9, 2013

People with little to hide: The Cocktail Hour, by A.R. Gurney

The Cocktail Hour, a play by A.R. Gurney, at the Huntington Theater, Saturday, December 7.

We like A.R. Gurney's plays, having seen Love Letters, The Snow Ball, and now The Cocktail Hour. This last play on Saturday night left me a little let down. The friendly but unsatisfied review by Don Aucoin in the Boston Globe seemed accurate to me.

The young playwright John, played by James Waterston, has brought his play manuscript home for the family to read and approve. The play is about his family, with the father taking a lead role. His patrician and cranky father does not approve -- he doesn't like the idea of the truth being displayed up there on the stage. (Who would?) The family members are generally well drawn, though the sister Nina seems a little odd (she's contented living a family life of many small contentments, yet the actress Pamela J. Gray plays her as being easily riled about her unfulfilled life -- the contradiction bothered me). John struck me as a toned down Woody Allen. Great performances by Richard Poe as the prosperous easy-going father Bradley, and Maureen Anderman, as the apparently ditzy mother Ann. They were both perfect as wealthy, monied Buffalonians who live along Delaware Avenue, near the art gallery.

There are lots of small laughs along the way. I recognized myself and my family in the words and characters. That John goes back home to Buffalo to receive approval for his play, well, that certainly hits home with me. It becomes obvious that John's play is actually the play we are watching, and this has a dated feel to it. We know this is experimental, and there's no compelling reason for it.

It occurred to me that these people, these characters, in fact don't really have any momentous secrets to hide. John wants to create some drama...but there really isn't any, at least not in this play. These are ordinary, decent people, not saints. Their ordinariness is both endearing and troubling. That there is in fact no great conflict, or actual confrontations of the type that John talks about regarding his mother, is what left me feeling that the play is somehow unfinished and unsatisfying.