Written by A.R. Gurney; directed by Gregory Mosher

Performances through February 15, 2015

 

Our most astute chronicler of the upper-crust, A.R. Gurney provides another one-percent primer with Love Letters, returning to Broadway for the first time since 1989 (it premiered the year before in New Haven). Comprising letters written by Andrew Makepeace Ladd III and Melissa Gardner over the course of their lives together and—mostly—apart, the play's epistolary structure makes it easy to perform (it's easily Gurney's most popular play): the performers sit at adjoining desks and read directly from their scripts.

 

The device is so ingeniously simple it's surprising it isn't been done more often. Andrew and Melissa discuss what's happening in their increasingly distant lives, while admitting to (or, occasionally, hiding) their feelings for each other as their decades apart pass by. Andrew is a WASP through and through who is a U.S. Senator by play's end—and, maybe one day, president—who writes letters that are mostly formal and even bland, while Melissa, far more emotionally volatile, wears her heart on her sleeve in each letter (about which she complains regularly, much preferring the telephone), signaling her intensely creative personality.

 

There are flaws, starting with that missing telephone: even with all their letter-writing, are we to believe these people never once pick up a phone to talk about important, or even everyday, matters? (We are also obviously in the pre-cell phone, pre-social media era.) Another problem is pitting highstrung Melissa against even-keel Andrew. She barrels through relationships, breakups, drinking bouts, stints in rehab, etc., while Andrew is the lone person to whom she writes about such momentous events. Even when they finally have their long-overdue affair—he's a Senator with a wife and children, she a divorced mother and frustrated artist—it seems that it's only so she can fly off the handle when he ends it because he's worried about his political career.

 

Gurney's acute ear for dialogue allows his actors to perform sundry miracles, particularly Mia Farrow, who looks two decades younger than her real age (69) as she makes manifest Melissa's broad emotions without wallowing in caricature. She even begins with a young girl's voice for the early letters, gradually—and imperceptibly—turning into a woman's.

 

Brian Dennehy has a forceful stage presence, so sitting and reading isn't his strong suit. But he's a hard-working, intelligent actor who nails Andrew's hesitant attitude. Understatedly directed by Gregory Mosher,Love Letters is an acting exercise in the best sense. (Dennehy and Farrow are in the play until Oct. 10, followed by Dennehy and Carol Burnett Oct. 11-Nov. 8 and Alan Alda and Candice Bergen Nov. 9-Dec. 5.)

 

Brooks Atkinson Theatre, 256 West 47th Street, New York, NY

lovelettersbroadway.com

Written by Ingmar Bergman; English version by Emily Mann; directed by Ivo van Hove

 

Scenes from a Marriage, one of Swedish master Ingmar Bergman's greatest films, has received a tantalizing stripping-down on its way to the stage. That was in Munich back in 1981, when Bergman himself directed his own adaptation of his masterly cinematic exploration of the 20-year relationship of Johan and Marianne, in and out of their marriage. 

 

The German-language production was, by all accounts, a rousing success, and if one can track down a copy of the book Ingmar Bergman: A Project for the Theatre, one can read Bergman's own play, which distills the laser-like focus of the six-part, five-hour television mini-series (edited to 169 minutes by Bergman himself for theatrical release) into an even narrower, pointed psychological anlaysis.

 

Instead of Bergman's own stage version in New York, however, we are getting Scenes from a Marriage as concocted by Ivo van Hove, the Flemish director famous (or infamous) for his deconstructions of classic texts: here, his treatment is a superficially clever travesty of a masterpiece.

 

Emily Mann gets credit for the English version, but it's van Hove who stamps this staging with his own brand of willfully perverse tampering. For the first act, which comprises the first three scenes we see of Johan and Marianne's marriage, the audience is split into three groups to successively watch the scenes, all performed simultaneously in three different spaces by three different couples. (The audience groups move to new sets of seats to watch each scene.) 

 

As each couple enacts its scene, the small space allows the (often yelling) voices from the other two scenes to bleed through, while strategically placed windows at the back of each stage allow audience members to catch what's going on in the other two spaces. 

 

That it doesn't add up too much illumination is beside the point, which apparently is that van Hove is attempting to make this couple's story more universal by casting Johan and Marianne in triplicate, despite the fact that none of his cast looks similar or is even age-appropriate. And van Hove's cast isn't a patch on Bergman's magisterial performers, Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson, who created exacting, individualized characters who were also Everyman and Everywoman through sheer force of their volcanic talent and, of course, their writer-director's genius.

 

After a 30-minute intermission in which the crew dismantles the smaller stages to leave one large, mostly empty performing space, Act II comprises the final three scenes of Bergman's magnum opus. To one-up both Bergman and his own tripling conceit, van Hove has all the Johans and Mariannes act out scenes four and five simultaneously, their words often echoing what what one or another has just said, the dialogue overlapping to the point that one cannot hear clearly what is being said. (There's also a cheap-laugh moment when all three couples, after each retreating to the corners of the space behind the audience, make love and seemingly climax together.)

 

The effect is one of sheer irrationality; and later, during the big fight between the divorcing partners, three sets of couples roll around on the floor in marital and martial war, the whole thing becomes an acting class in which an unimaginative teacher asks students to perform a laboriously physical exercise in front of the others. 

 

What Bergman accomplished with incomparable acting and Sven Nykvist's impeccable cinematography (alternating between unrelenting closeups and exquisitely framed two-shots) cannot be replicated or even approximated, however many actors and actresses are onstage. Van Hove's so-called innovations seem to flame out after the fight, because he stages the last scene with only Johan and Marianne #3 (played by Arliss Howard and Tina Benko, the production's most accomplished perfomers, although Carmen Zilles is appealingly tart as Katarina, the spiteful wife of their friend Peter). 

 

Even here van Hove can't help himself: when Marianne falls asleep, Johan puts on a record and proceeds to do an interpretive dance to Michel Legrand's syrupy "Windmills of Your Mind," another example of this "innovative" director using pop songs for unsubtle ironic commentary, including Paul Simon's "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover" and "Bridge Over Troubled Water."

 

Since the dialogue comes directly from Bergman's own script (with added instances of unneeded foul language), moments of humanity and psychological complexity do bleed through. But van Hove's often arbitrary experimentation smothers the rest.

 

Performances through October 26, 2014

New York Theatre Workshop, New York, NY

nytw.org

Blu-rays of the Week

When a grandfather takes his grandson hunting in the nearby woods, the 10-year-old accidentally shoots a neighbor who's part of a clan with whom this family has feuded, setting in motion an unlikely but inevitable chain of tragic events.

 

Although it has a shopworn plot with predictable twists, this low-budget thriller by writer-director Derrick Sims (who also edited and photographed) is a potent piece of tense realism, with authentic performances by Michael Ray Davis as the old man and Thor Wahlestedt as the young boy. The movie's graininess looks fine on Blu-ray; extras include a commentary, featurette and deleted scenes.

 

Doctor Who—Deep Breath 

In his first go-round as the venerable Doctor Who, the great British actor Peter Capaldi materializes, along with his faithful assistant (the very fetching Jenna Coleman), in Victorian London, as a rampaging dinosaur terrorizes the city.

 

Although Capaldi seems a bit out of his element in this debut episode, his character's behavior is explained away cleverly, and future episodes do find him gaining his footing: and here's hoping that he will also gain the mass audience he finally deserves. The Blu-ray looks superb; extras include featurettes and a prequel scene only shown in theaters.

 

 

 

 

Ghost in the Shell—25th Anniversary 

Anime master Mamoru Oshii made this arresting sci-fi study that brilliantly blends traditional and computerized animation techniques in 1995: so why is this being called the 25th anniversary edition? (Actually, the original manga, or comic book, was published in 1989.)

 

Quibbling aside, this is a remarkable film, both visually and thematically, that's remindful of Blade Runner and Fantastic Planet, but without aping either of those films' equally unique stylishness. The hi-def transfer is first-rate, but there are, strangely, no extras.

 

Neighbors 

Rose Byrne, the talented and delightful Australian actress has had the misfortune to star in two of my recent comic betes noire: the execrable Bridesmaids and this laughless look at a young couple whose homey suburban existence is uprooted when an entire frat house moves in next door.

 

This is a horribly misguided comedy from the get-to, especially when the game Byrne must interact with the awfully one-note Seth Rogen, whose movie stardom simply escapes me. Director Nicholas Stoller and writers Brendan O'Brien and Andrew Jay Cohen throw anything into the mix, and the result is sophomoric and infantile. The Blu-ray image looks good; extras include an alternate opening, deleted scenes, gag reel and featurettes.

 

 

 

Tobe Hooper's 1974 low-budget shocker—made when the world was to going to hell in a handbasket (Vietnam, Nixon, Watergate, for starters)—is anything but artful, but it has much less gore than you thought it had, and its tidy 83 minutes strip away anything extraneous, which keeps the shocks coming right until the end.

 

The 40th anniversary edition includes an excellent new film transfer (which has minor audio and video glitches that novices won't notice but real fans will) and four commentaries, along with an extra disc containing full-length documentaries about the film, deleted scenes and casting calls.

 

We Are the Best! 

This gently satiric portrait of pre-teen girls in early '80s Stockholm rebelling against parents, teachers and fellow students by putting together an awful punk band mines familiar territory for Swedish director Lukas Moodysson: the troubles of the family unit, best shown in his earlier, and superior, Together and Show Me Love.

 

His gimmick of the girls playing the absolutely worst songs ever makes this perversely charming and heartfelt, and he gets wonderfully natural portrayals from the three girls. Maybe Moodysson will take the laurels he's received for this minor but charming film and probe more deeply in his next film. The hi-def transfer looks great.

 

DVDs of the Week

A Rochester family is marked by malaise after an unexplained tragedy that happened just before the current wintry year of 2002, epitomized by the matriarch keeping herself busy watching VHS tapes of her absent daughter, in this earnest but plodding drama, directed with little distinction by Pieter Gaspersz from a soggy script by Sabrina Gennarino (who plays another daughter).

 

Despite a strong performance by the always welcome Kathleen Quinlan as the mother, the movie allows its "secret" to loom so large that the when it's finally revealed, it's a dramatic and psychological letdown.

 

Bill Morrison—Collected Works 1996 to 2013 

This four-DVD, one-Blu-ray set brings together 16 features and shorts by a singular filmmaker who cannily marries found and archival film footage with contemporary musical scores to create dream-like, often surreal cinematic experiences: these include his provocative 2011 masterpiece about coal mining, The Miners’ Hymns; and last year's The Great Flood, which blends vintage film jazz guitarist Bill Frisell's music to provide stark beauty amid the 1927 floods inundating the Mississippi delta.

 

Also included are Morrison's formally rigorous 2002 featureDecasia (the only one appearing on a Blu-ray disc), 2010's Spark of Being, a demented updating of Frankenstein, and short films like The Film of Her, with music by Polish modernist Henryk Gorecki. 

 

 

The Lusty Men 

In Nicholas Ray's offbeat 1952 western, a former rodeo rider (Robert Mitchum) befriends a desperate husband (Arthur Kennedy) and convinces him to start bucking broncos; meanwhile, the man's wife (a sultry Susan Hayward) finds herself both disgusted by and secretly attracted to the broken-down rodeo man.

 

Amidst the exciting archival rodeo footage is a smartly observed character study, with Ray's incisive direction and top-notch portrayals by all three stars giving this a gravitas it probably doesn't deserve. Although restored and looking better than it ever has, this definitely should have been released on Blu-ray.

 

Motown 25—Yesterday Today Forever 

This 1983 TV special became legendary the moment Michael Jackson, during "Billie Jean," moonwalked for the first time, sending the music world into a frenzy; but, as this set shows, there were also memorable performances like Marvin Gaye's impassioned "What's Going On," Stevie Wonder's exuberant medley of hits from "Signed Sealed Delivered" to "Sir Duke" and Diana Ross and the Supremes' grand finale, which begins with "Ain't No Mountain High Enough."

 

The two-hour show (hosted by a mostly subdued Richard Pryor) is housed on the first disc with a behind-the-scenes featurette; disc two hosts rehearsal footage of Gaye, who's also remembered by music-biz people; and disc three comprises additional interviews and featurettes.