We've got one word for this (everyone together): P-L-A-S-T-I-C.
Even that might be over-praising The Graduate ... try T-I-N F-O-I-L.
Parked at Cashman Theatre through Sunday, this road version of the London/Broadway adaptation of the seminal '60s film about the ennui of alienated youth—and the novel on which it's based—is as confused over its identity as was Dustin Hoffman's Benjamin Braddock. It wants to toss off breezy one-liners with the weightless irreverence of early Neil Simon, then cause us narrative whiplash by whirling around toward the deeper social underpinnings of its source material.
Disgruntled critics on both sides of the pond weren't wrong. Reinventing the piece as pure comedy, even with the same setup and characters, would've been a perfectly legit choice, but this translation plays with our heads because it doesn't know where its own head is at.
Casting TV suds siren Morgan Fairchild as Mrs. Robinson—a role previously played by Kathleen Turner and Jerry Hall, among others—not only gives this Graduate its marquee punch, but also nearly its entire reason for being. A tart mint julep in this often flat vat of 7-Up, the still yummy diva of the small screen has a confident stage presence, even during the brief, much-tittered-about nude scene (lit in deep shadows, leaving just enough for the eye, the rest to the imagination).
Set to some Simon and Garfunkel and other period pop-rock as exit and entrance music, the original story's intact: Young Ben (Nathan Corddry), a recent, aimless college grad, is wondering what to do with his life, searching for some meaning in 1960s California, when he's seduced by Mrs. Robinson—who gets a first name here, "Judith"—and then throws his family and hers into further turmoil when he falls for her daughter, Elaine (Winslow Corbett).
Fairchild's Mrs. R is miles from the coldly calculating man-eater indelibly etched by Anne Bancroft, who lent the character a dazzling blend of poison and pathos that elevated that performance to iconic.
With her golden-yellow locks cascading over her shoulders, her voice sanded by bourbon and cigarettes, Fairchild's she-devil is more of an overgrown (if disillusioned) party chick, and her va-va-va-voomerism stretches the role to a sexually stereotyped extreme with little room for subtlety. But few actresses have such a woozy, boozy way with one-liners. She's damn entertaining. And for a time that's enough, until the play attempts a depth for which her role, and the play, never lays a foundation. Wild tonal leaps between comedy and drama, even within a single scene, seem born of a writer's bipolar disorder.
Numerous narrative choices confound: Would Mrs. Robinson really come on to Benjamin in his upstairs bedroom with his parents and 30 party guests downstairs, rather than in her empty house, as in the film? And unlike the movie, when they do bed down, intercourse, fellatio and cunnilingus are simulated under the sheets. A pretty cheap nod to salaciousness.
In other principal roles, Corddry plays Ben mostly with an unruffled shrug and jaunty sarcasm, rarely revealing any conflicted emotional grit behind his well-played shtick, and Corbett's Elaine is a high-pitched harpy, rather than the vision of purity she should represent to Ben as her mother's counterpoint. Their romance? Simply stage direction. But as Mrs. R's cuckolded hubby, Dennis Parlato has some fine moments of garrulous bonhomie and quiet rage.
The piece is cleverly staged and the background set, a huge, multi-tiered wall of stacked, shuttered closet doors, nicely captures a sense of suburban prison walls—the lives these characters can't escape.
But herein lay the dangers of trying to be all plays to all audiences:
The Graduate wants to be The Graduate for anyone who remembers The Graduate. And a two-and-a-half-hour giggle—with sporadic dramatic pauses—for anyone who doesn't.
It's neither to either.
Test Market often dances on the edge of theatrical daring, and sometimes the results are robust, as in Adam Baum and the Jew Movie, Psycho Beach Party and Waiting for Godot. But, as with anyone willing to take creative chances, sometimes the rewards reaped fall short of the risk taken. Way short.
So the less said of Test Market's decision to produce Seattle playwright Larry Coffin's Croquet is Okay—a cacophonous, abysmally absurd, metaphorically muddled "history of our modern empire" involving a stolen beefsteak, Harpo Marx, a hippie chick, Indian cheerleaders, dry humping, Moses hawking broken commandments, a Free Tibet campaign and croquet jokes about one guy's balls touching another guy's balls—the better.
Consider it said.
Though cherished as the 1962 film memorably marqueed by Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick and graced by Henry Mancini's Oscar-winning theme, the addiction melodrama The Days of Wine and Roses fermented as J.P. Miller's Playhouse 90 TV play in 1958. It hits the stage again at Community College of Southern Nevada's Horn Theatre (on the Cheyenne campus; 651-5483) for its second and closing weekend.
W&R is the wrenching story of a young couple's relationship devastated by alcoholism, particularly when one of them climbs out of the bottle, but the other doesn't. (Written today, it'd probably be updated to cocaine or some other recreational drug du jour.)
The effort is notable for its inter-company cooperation: a CCSN production helmed by Walter Niejadlik, president of Las Vegas Little Theatre, where CCSN drama Prof. Joe Hammond has been spotted committing theater.
Creative current running both ways? The crackle of theatrical synergy?
A refreshing break from our Days of Whine and Dozes.