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Vol. LXII, No. 33
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Wednesday, August 13, 2008
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Vol. LXII, No. 33
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Wednesday, August 13, 2008
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As she finished a reading from George Bernard Shaw’s play, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Emily Mann expressed the hope that many of those in the audience in the Keifer Auditorium at Monroe Village on Monday afternoon would be attending the McCarter Theatre production of the play she will directing early next year. Judging from the wide-ranging discussion led by the McCarter’s artistic director with residents of the senior living facility, it seemed likely that they would indeed attend the play, which will run from January 9 through Februrary 15, 2009.
Ms. Mann appeared under the aegis of the Encore (“lifelong access to arts and culture”) program sponsored by the PHS (formerly Presbyterian Homes and Services) Senior Living Foundation. In addition to giving the seniors the opportunity to hear Ms. Mann read and to speak with her, the event included a chance for them to take advantage of discount theater packages and “reliable” transportation to and from McCarter.
“I just feel it’s a privilege to speak here,” Ms. Mann said after the program. “This is a group of extraordinary people who have seen a lot and know a lot about theater. I always learn something from them.”
In fact, Ms. Mann seemed to have had a kind of epiphany as a result of comments from Monroe Village resident and former U.N. activist Norma Levitt, who pointed out that Ms. Mann has “always shown a lot of courage about your plays,” and wondered which ones were the most challenging.
Noting that it was “a wonderful question,” Ms. Mann began by saying that doing two plays by Edward Albee was a “stretching” experience. “It’s hard to be in the same room as the man who is probably our greatest living playwright,” she observed.
Mrs. Packard, the play she wrote and directed about a 19th-century woman whose husband had her committed to a mental asylum was, she said, “one of the hardest things for me to write, and a very, very difficult play to produce. It made a lot of people angry; it made a lot of people happy.” Describing encounters with various husbands and wives after they had seen the show, she felt that the happy people were women, who got the “code” in which Ms. Mann had written the play, and the angry people (“tepid,” at best) were husbands, who were sure that the events on the stage had nothing to do with their own marriages.
Another challenge for Ms. Mann was her 2006 adaptation of Nobel-prize winner Isaac Bashevis Singer’s novella, Meshugah. “I am Jewish,” Ms. Mann noted, pointing out that Singer was her father’s favorite author. “Conservative people in the Jewish community despise Singer,” she added, because he “exposed their frailties, especially their sexual passions.” She admitted getting a lot of flack about that production.
In response to an audience member’s query about whether the Broadway hit, The Drowsy Chaperone, might make it to the McCarter, Ms. Mann suggested that things usually go in the other direction, with successful McCarter productions making their way to Broadway. Another theater enthusiast reminisced about growing up in New York City, when theatergoing was an affordable way of life. She remembered seeing Lee J. Cobb in Arthur Miller’s play, The Death of a Salesman, and the way he “hunched his shoulders before he said a word.”
A Chicago native recalled seeing performances by the renowned husband-and-wife acting team, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, as well as a production of Medea, starring Judith Anderson.
Ms. Mann agreed about the high cost of theater tickets these days, noting that, as a Tony Award voter, she gets to go for free. Otherwise, she recently realized, the two tickets she and a friend used to see a Broadway musical would have cost $280. The McCarter, she noted, offers “pay-what-you-can performances,” as well as specials for school children and seniors.
“This is a very cultured audience,” observed PHS Senior Living Foundation Executive Director Joseph T. Claffey when the program was over. Noting that many of the facility’s residents come from cosmopolitan centers like New York and Chicago, he mused about the possibility of having a “total theater” on the premises.