Apologia

[edjames]

Back on Broadway is Stockard Channing, one of my favorite actress. I last saw her in Other Desert Cities and of course, her recurring TV roles in The Good Wife. She returns in this London import by author Alexi Campbell. I have a ticket next month and eagerly look forward to seeing this based on the good review it received it today's NYTimes. Now at The Roundabout's Laura Pels theater.

 

Review: Stockard Channing Is a Mother to Remember in ‘Apologia’

 

Stockard Channing wields weapons of deflection like a master samurai in Alexi Kaye Campbell’s “Apologia,” which opened on Tuesday night at the Laura Pels Theater in Manhattan. The pre-emptive put-down, the obscuring fog of abstraction, the barbed aside, the motorized monologue — such are the tools expertly deployed by Ms. Channing’s character, a celebrated art historian who has trained herself to live on the defensive.

 

Her name is Kristin Miller, and she is described by the more temperate of her two sons as “a bloody nightmare.” Since it is Kristin who is the host of the birthday celebration (hers) at the play’s center, and since it is Ms. Channing who is portraying her, you can expect it to become an Olympic event for the hurling of slings and arrows of high wit and low cunning.

 

But anyone who has followed Ms. Channing’s four sparkling decades on the New York stage — from her Tony-winning turn in Peter Nichols’s “A Day in the Death of Joe Egg” (1985) to her portrait of a Hollywood wife with a secret in Jon Robin Baitz’s “Other Desert Cities” (2011) — knows that there’s always more to her interpretations than her fabled way with an epigram. A sharp tongue invariably guards a fragile heart in the Channing portrait gallery, which is what makes her work so affecting.

 

That means that Kristin and Ms. Channing are a perfect match. And her performance in “Apologia,” a Roundabout Theater Company production directed a bit stiffly by Daniel Aukin, goes some distance in disguising the labored exposition of a work that never quite achieves a natural flow or moves you as much as it should.

 

Not that “Apologia,” which I saw with Ms. Channing last year in London, doesn’t have a lot to say that is worth listening to. As in his best-known previous work, “The Pride” (2008), a diptych of two generations of gay men, Mr. Campbell is exploring the toll exacted on those who travel roads not usually taken in convention-clogged lands.

 

In “Apologia,” that’s “the traditionally male-dominated bastion of art history,” as Kristin’s dear friend Hugh (John Tillinger) puts it in a birthday toast. He also praises her, with tongue only partly in cheek, as “Pioneer of Arts and Letters, Champion of the Voiceless and Redemptive Savior of the Western world.”

 

The American-born Kristin came of age in the late 1960s amid the youth-fueled political protests of Western Europe, and she adheres rigidly to the ideals of that era. The younger guests at her birthday party are judged by those standards and found seriously wanting.

 

They include her two British sons, Peter, a banker, and Simon, a writer (both played convincingly by an agile Hugh Dancy) and the women in their lives: Trudi (Talene Monahon), Peter’s chirpy American fiancée; and Claire (Megalyn Echikunwoke), the actress who lives with Peter. That Trudi is a devout Christian and Claire the star of a soap opera become subjects of Kristin’s withering dismissals.

But as insults and recriminations turn a festive occasion into the birthday dinner from hell, it becomes clear that Kristin’s attacks on the values of those around her are in part smoke screens for her own most vulnerable spot. That would be her failings as her mother. She has recently published an autobiography, which shares the title of Mr. Campbell’s play, and her sons find it all too revealing that it does not include a single mention of them.

 

Kristin was separated from her sons by their father when the boys were 9 and 7, and Peter and the mentally unstable Simon have never forgiven her. Or as Simon, who shows up after the party has crashed and burned (and after Mr. Dancy’s other character has conveniently gone to bed), puts it: “I woke up one morning and realized that pretty much everything we are and everything we do is a response against you.”

 

How does a mother respond to such an annihilating accusation? In Kristin’s case, by shutting down, by changing the subject, by going as numb as she possibly can. This scene, which begins the second act and is the play’s most stirring, both cruelly and compassionately lays bare the mechanics of one woman’s defense system.

 

Mr. Campbell is posing exciting and enduringly relevant questions here, about the price for women of achieving and sustaining professional success in a male-dominated world that sees motherhood as sacred. If Kristin has become a monster, she has perhaps had little choice. Celebrity makes at least semi-monsters of most of its possessors, but men still seem to wear that status far more comfortably than women.

 

The layers of Ms. Channing’s interpretation, with its core of lacerating anguish, are more intriguing than the plot that builds to an anticlimactic reveal. Kristin explains to the unsophisticated Trudi (it would be with an “i”) that the word apologia means “a formal, written defense of one’s opinions or conduct,” adding it is “not to be confused with apology.”

 

All the characters wind up presenting their own apologias, often with descriptions of pasts that explain their present. When someone says, “Did I ever tell you about my father?,” you wince in anticipation of the monologue you just know is going to follow.

 

Dane Laffrey’s set (expressively lighted by Bradley King), a mixture of country comfort and academic obsession, creates a natural environment for the examination of these specimens of humanity. And Anita Yavich’s costumes are always subtly, sociologically appropriate.

 

Yet the dialogue only rarely feels organic. And though Ms. Monahon and Ms. Echikunwoke are very good, they don’t disguise the schematic roles of their characters. Mr. Tillinger, best known as a director, is delightful as that hoary staple of contemporary comedy, the outspoken gay best friend.

 

But it is Ms. Channing’s complex, contradictory Kristin who keeps us thinking long after the play is over. And the wordless, gut-deep howl with which she concludes “Apologia” is more wrenching and revelatory than any of the carefully arranged words that precede it.

[foxy]

Saw the play this afternoon. I am a Stockard Channing fan ever since I discovered her in the 1976 disaster spoof movie called The Big Bus. If you haven’t seen it I recommend you seek it out. It’s like Airplane but on the ground. Since then Channing has had a more serious acting career on Broadway, films and tv. She’s a remarkable actress.

Having said that I really didn’t care all that much for this play. While there were plenty of laughs to accompany the dialogue none of the characters or their motivations seemed authentic to me. I’ll just leave it at that.

[Doe Be Doe]

Saw it last week. Enjoyed it.

[edjames]

Saw it last night and liked it very much.

Funny, smart, well-written, and well-acted. A superb cast.