The Revisionist which opened at the intimate Cherry Lane Theater on February 28, 2013 for a limited run has been extended, with great good cause, a couple of times.
In this case, the great good cause is 76-year-old Vanessa Redgrave at her incandescent best, a plateau, she, or any great actor for the matter, fails to reach on every outing. I am particularly thinking of her two most recent Broadway appearances. In Joan Didion’s, The Year of Magical Thinking (2007), though Redgrave demonstrated a riveting presence with a capital P – after all this is her calling card – she was unable to bring what was essentially a bunch of black words on a white page sufficiently alive. It didn’t help that she spent, as I seem to remember, more time tethered to a chair rather than standing. Though her performance was nominated for a Tony she lost out to Julie White in The Little Dog That Laughed.
In Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night (2003), for which she did win a Tony, her performance, boldly acted and exciting to watch – no stage actress is as wildly experimental, as extravagant in their acting choices, than Redgrave – you should have seen her clawing the walls and incessantly twirling her hair – in my mind’s eye never quite captured the drug addled Mary Tyrone. (And while I’m at it, Brian Dennehy, most always a bull in a china shop by weight and size alone, was no great shakes as Tyrone either, this despite his winning a Tony. Of course, bearing in mind Watson and Imprinting, A Long Day’s Journey into the Night being the very first play that I ever saw – the year was 1956 – the roles of Mary and Tyrone, deeply embedded in my brain, still belong to Florence Eldridge and her husband Fredrick March. It is a memory that I will take to the grave with me.)
The Revisionist takes place in Poland. The plot, at least outwardly, is quite simple. Inwardly, the inner lives of the characters are complicated. What makes the play seem more than it is are the strong performances of its three actors.
David, a self-centered young writer played by Jesse Eisenberg (who is also the playwright) arrives in Poland for a week’s stay with his second cousin Maria (Redgrave) whom he met once when he was 10, a meeting that he has no memory of. He has come to Poland to revise his recently rejected novel, though he spends more time smoking grass than working on his book. Ignoring the generosity of his cousin who is both feeding and housing him – she even gives him her bedroom and takes to the couch – he spends his time, rudely, and often vociferously, worrying about his own creature comforts.
The third character in the play, adding a bit of humor, and a whiff of danger, is Zenon (Daniel Orekes), who in this play speaks Polish only. The son of Maria’s recently diseased friend, Zenon’s role in Maria’s life is to help her with her shopping, as well as shave her legs once a week. It seems, as Maria explains to David (who is shocked at seeing this) that Zenon used to shave his mother’s legs, and when she died, he switched his attention to the still shapely legs of Maria. This could be an act of nostalgia, or maybe something more than meets the eye.
The thrust of the play, a kind of duel, if you will, are the verbal and physical exchanges, many of them heated , between the intractable Maria and the equally intractable David as they try, mostly in vain, to open up their hearts to each other. Yes, some secrets, like Maria losing her family in the Holocaust seep out. Others, left unexplored by the playwright, remain deeply buried. Eisenberg, employing his usual jerky quirky movements and rat-a-tat talk – the same physical qualities we experienced in his Oscar-nominated performance in “The Social Network,” and in Asuncion, the first play that he wrote – does hold his own with Redgrave, that is, once you adjust to this annoyingly tick-like behavior.
Though appropriate for the David’s character, if you want to grant him that, I could not help wondering if Eisenberg’s movements and patter register as affectations; is this all we are ever going to get from this actor? I am thinking of Matthew Broderick’s cutesy-pooh antics in Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs (1983). At age 17, such antics were both new and cute. Thirty years later, Broderick, now in his early 50s, is still playing, with far less effect, the same card.
The joy of the evening, therefore, is watching – studying is a more accurate word – Redgrave as she limberly negotiates John McDermott’s set, a small, highly detailed apartment, perfectly outfitted for an old lady. As I always did when watching Uta Hagen, another great actress that demanded attention be paid, my eyes were glued to Redgrave’s every move, action, facial expression and eye movement, looking for a spot where she falls out of character. This never happens.
Just as each actor gets the perfect amount of attention from Redgrave, in this prop-heavy play, there is no dress, blanket, spoon, bottle of vodka, radio, TV, or telephone, or family photographs, that Redgrave doesn’t make us believe she had been living with for decades. Did I tell you that she also speaks pure Polish, as well as Polish accented English in the play? Now this is great acting.
