A starry ‘Country Girl’ gets an inert Broadway revival
Filed Under Country Curtain | Posted on April 27, 2008
The theater is mysterious,” murmurs the title character at one point during “The Country Girl” — one of the more pretentious (but true) pronouncements in Clifford Odets’ 1950 backstage potboiler about an alcohol-soaked actor attempting a comeback.
That mystery is further reenforced by the latest Broadway revival of Odets’ play, an inert production that has stymied not only such fine actors as Morgan Freeman, Frances McDormand and Peter Gallagher, but savvy director Mike Nichols as well. What happened?
To work, “The Country Girl,” which opened Sunday at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, needs a trio of superb performances to overcome the sudsy quality of Odets’ script. Here, all three performers seem to be in different plays, or at least, possessed of different styles of acting.
Freeman, as an aging actor trying to recapture his past glory, gives a surprisingly low-key performance. He demonstrates little of the charisma that once made this man, Frank Elgin, a star. It’s a cautious, quiet portrait of a guy who has lost it all and now needs to be jump-started to get those theatrical juices flowing again.
As Elgin’s long-suffering wife, McDormand (the “Country Girl” of the play’s title) affects a monotone approach, vocally and emotionally uninvolved for much of the time in Odets’ tale of all the tensions — both public and private — that flourish while putting on a show.
Tags: demons, emotion, putting on a showRelated posts
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