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April 30, 2004
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THEATER REVIEW
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Sydney Swire
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Their living room is a throne room for “The Royal Family,” three generations of the Cavendish family of actors who have ruled the New York stage for decades. Due to poor health, Fanny, the family matriarch, has not trod the boards for two years, and is churning with repressed energy and plans to begin a new tour.
Her daughter Julie is the reigning queen of Broadway, grooming her own ingenue daughter Gwen to follow in her footsteps. For these women, “Marriage isn’t a career, it’s an incident,” until Gwen falls in love with a businessman and begins to understand the cost to her career if she marries him. At the same time, the former love of Julie’s life, who is now a multimillionaire living in South America, reappears and reignites their courtship.
When floods of tears, shrieks of despair and scenes of renunciation, (largely performed on the sweeping staircase, ensuring grand entrances and more dramatic exits) have reached their peak, a fourth Cavendish makes his surprise appearance. It is Fanny’s son and Julie’s brother, the famous silent film star Anthony, seeking refuge from his latest affair, newspaper scandal, and Hollywood lawsuit.
George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber’s classic satire of the Barrymore acting dynasty was written in 1927, and Tom Moore’s lovingly skillful direction burnishes the perfect construction of a comic classic. A strong cast, headed by Marian Seldes as the elegant Fanny, Kate Mulgrew as Julie and Daniel Gerroll as an Anthony, ever-conscious of his famous profile, exude Kaufman and Ferber’s devotion and affection to a time when stars of the theater and the nascent film industry truly seemed exalted beings.
At the Ahmanson Theatre to Sun., May 16.
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Can reason and rationalization ever completely control human nature? Without a personal morality undergirding them, how strong can one’s ethics be?
At the turn of the 20th century, the young, married doctor Carl Jung begins an affair with his patient Sabina Spielrein. By his action, he not only violates the first rule of professional ethics, but by lying about his behavior to the father of modern psychiatry, his mentor Sigmund Freud, he lays a foundation for their final division and end of their professional and personal relationship.
Playwright Christopher Hampton’s triumph in writing “The Talking Cure,” as early psychoanalysis was known, is in balancing the purely intellectual arguments and discussions of behavior and sexuality, with a vivid love story and character studies. Of necessity it is a talky play, and the clinical discussions will be of varying interest to audiences.
However, “The Talking Cure” is first and foremost a play, not a treatise, and Hampton’s humor and technical skill keep the content entertaining. Harris Yullin is generically jovial as Freud, and Sam Robards is dapper, brilliant in mind and weak in character as Jung, but, in a remarkable professional debut, Abby Brammell’s Sabina dominates this production.
Director Gordon Davidson takes the performance from strident mental case to ardent lover to professional doctor herself without missing a nuance: this is an actress and a career to watch.
At the Mark Taper Forum to Sun., May 23.
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Associate Publisher: Irwin Gilman
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