Sean Hayes in Good Night, Oscar and Jessica Chastain in A Doll’s House: Transformation on Broadway
Sean Hayes in May of 2016, Creative Commons License
Jessica Chastain in 2017, Creative Commons License
A couple of years ago (in World Theatre After 1700), I devoted the final chapter to a consideration of Broadway musicals because of their unique contribution to world theatre. I expanded Aristotle’s basic five elements of tragedy to seven and slightly reordered the hierarchy. One of the criteria, I added was “transformation.” In World Theatre Before 1700 in my treatment of the subject of Thespis, again I discussed “transformation.” Thespis, our first actor, transformed himself into a character and audiences watching that change were overwhelmed. It is part of what theatre seeing an actor transform into a character.
This past week, we watched Sean Hayes become Oscar Levant in Doug Wright’s play Good Night, Oscar now playing at the Belasco Theatre on West 44th Street east of Broadway and just a few doors down, I saw Jessica Chastain at the Hudson Theatre become Amy Herzog’s Nora from Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Transforming on stage, better known to us today as acting, is an exhausting business and can have dire consequences. Actor Charles Laughton (1899-1962) “transformed” to King Lear in 1959, and it has been said that he never fully recovered. Of course, we hope Mr. Hayes and Ms. Chastain will be with us for years to come. Each of these shows has a limited engagement and each is worthy of attention, but for different reasons.
Sean Hayes as Oscar Levant is a brilliant portrayal. Not only does he recreate the essence of Levant, whose razor wit made him a welcome guest on NBC’s Tonight Show Starring Jack Paar (1957-62), but Hayes is also able to embrace the spirit of Levant’s genius as a concert artist. Levant struggled for years with drug addiction after recovering from a heart attack. No doubt his situation was brought about by the strain of his multifaceted career on stage, screen, and in concert halls. And, at the same time, he was also a best-selling author! Levant was constantly in the public eye and, at least in this respect, had created a “following”—in this respect not unlike Sean Hayes—whose celebrity status is equally devoted. Hayes is renowned for the character “Jack” in the long-running TV sitcom Will and Grace (NBC), which broke away from the stereotypical depictions of gay representation and made LGBTQ acceptable in prime-time. But this is where the comparison ends. Levant, outside of his film work, was always playing Levant while Hayes was playing the character of Jack. Therefore, it is shocking, particularly to audiences at the Belasco Theatre, to witness the transformation of Hayes into Levant. Not only does Hayes inhabit the body, the face, the manner of Levant, and at times even the sweat of Levant; he possesses the concert artistry of the legendary Levant, who was a phenomenal concert pianist.
Doug Wright’s play provides the vehicle for Hayes’ talent. Cleverly constructed with flawless exposition, it establishes the tortured genius of Levant including Levant’s ready wit as well as his struggle with drug addiction. Wright then gives us a fictitious episode of the Tonight Show where everything that could go wrong does go wrong, a plot line which seems now to be constantly exploited in commercial and community theatres. The coup de theatre arrives when the theatre audience becomes the Tonight Show television audience with just a simple curtain speech by the Jack Paar character (Ben Rappaport): no projections, no gimmicks. Not to give away too much of the plot, but the late-night show turns the spotlight on Hayes to convince us that he is the incarnation of Levant as a musician. And he does not disappoint. The performance that Hayes gives as Levant at the piano is simply breathtaking. In fact, it’s eerie. Not only does he play like Levant, he becomes Levant. It is a total theatrical transformation, and it ought to earn him the Tony.
Jessica Chastain won the Academy Award as Best Actress for The Eyes of Tammy Faye (2021) a biopic about the extraordinary “rise and fall” of the evangelist, singer, and television personality. And the film Tammy Faye also won an Oscar for makeup and hairstyling largely on the strength of Chastain’s transformation in the leading role. If audiences are expecting anything like that kind of “transformation” in Chastain’s Nora, they are in for a severe shock. At the Hudson Theatre’s A Doll’s House, Chastain is unencumbered by make-up and everything about the staging and the performance veers away from the artifice of realism. The emphasis in this performance on the internal development of the character who begins the play as if she were a display item in a revolving jewelry case. Playwright Herzog’s script dispenses with environment and Jamie Lloyd’s direction plays down anything that might distract us by being “realistic.” Ibsen, the father of modern drama, gets a scant five-line bio in the program which would probably not displease him as this reduction of his play has more to do with Jessica Chastain than it has to do with anything he wrote. However, in a reduced theatrical universe every slight movement and voice undulation has a seismic effect. Ninety percent of the evening lulls into accepting Nora’s nightmarish existence as a rotating “doll” for her adoring admirers. Husband Torvald (as played by Arian Moayed) seems animated and at times even likable while Dr. Rank (as played by Michael Patrick Thornton) is clearly the most engaging actor on the stage. Of course, these choices are deliberate, but they come at a price and that price is that they place an unreal burden on Chastain when in the last few minutes of the play she has to transform herself into a dimensional, mature, and responsible presence. In Ibsen’s play, Nora has to take charge of her life. Such a metamorphosis would be most welcome, but sadly in this production, it is not entirely believable. Draining the flesh and blood out of Ibsen’s play to create an abstract mental landscape seems like a good idea, until … My choice for the most bizarre moment is Chastain’s version of Nora’s tortured tarantella when she lies on her back and literally throws a fit which resembles that of a baby’s tantrum complete with legs kicking into thin air. It made me think that it was time to change her diaper. Yes, it is a startling to see, but to paraphrase Shakespeare, it made the judicious “grieve.” In the counter blow climax of the play the strident lines by Nora rebelling against the double standard seem out of place. When Claire Bloom uttered Nora’s lines in 1971, “millions of women have,” about women having to sacrifice their honor for men, women in the audience lept to their feet and cheered. Not so here. The audience at the Hudson responds to her feminist battle cry with a muffled chuckle. Are the rights of women passe? Or has Chastain’s Nora made these lines seem comic? Yet, within its very limited scope, Chastain’s “transformation” at the end of the play is still remarkable. Unfortunately, the “King Kong-cept” of this production places the whole burden on her shoulders, and there isn’t enough stage time left to bring it off. Ibsen used a slamming door to shock his audience with the finality of Nora’s change. At the time, Nora literally rattled the institution of marriage with its reverberations. Chastain performs on a bare stage. I won’t give away the ending, but I longed for the sound of the door slam.
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