"Collected Stories" Powerful, Intense
The set for New Rep's terrific new production of
"Collected Stories" draws in the audience even before the figurative
curtain rises. Any booklover will drool
over the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, the comfy leather library sofa and
chair, the assembled New Yorker
magazines, and the cozy oriental rugs. (We
decided we wanted to live in that apartment!)
Three cheers to Jenna McFarland Lord for set design. Kudos also to Deb Sullivan for lighting
design; in this two-character play, the lighting becomes something of a third
presence, cleverly evoking the seasons, time of day, and New York skyline.
Ultimately, however, it is the acting that astounds. Local great Bobbie Steinbach has created such
a completely real, believable, flawed, contradictory, passionate, and human character in Ruth Steiner that we
left convinced we had met this person before.
Ruth is a writer and professor, a tiny, fierce, quintessential New
Yorker who feels and expresses everything with
such intensity that her hands tremble and she appears about to levitate at the
peak of a discussion. Steinbach's
performance is so powerful that we risk siding too much with her in the
eventual show-down Ruth has with her graduate student mentee, Lisa (played
convincingly by Liz Hayes) -- more on this later.
Lisa is ambitious and
wants to surpass her teacher (witness the prickly conversation about why Ruth
never wrote a novel, for example). The
play, a terrific work by Donald Margulies, which was nominated for a Pulitzer, is
ultimately about ownership of one’s story. It evokes the danger of
sharing too much, making yourself vulnerable, even while it shows us the beauty
of this as well. The work is about
teachers and students, artists and acolytes, and the moment where the student
begins to overtake the teacher. But this
raises a critical question: whose stories belong to whom? Can a an “innocent ‘ unsophisticated artistic newbie appropriate
an entire culture, e.g. New York artistic Jewishness, about which she has only
heard? The artistic process can devour
everything in the environment, appropriating other people's lives and precious
stories. We have a hint of what Lisa can do with her art when she
incorporates her father’s love life in a story and then chooses to share just
that story with him, then seems puzzled by his reaction. (Ruth keeps asking her
why that story and never gets a clear answer.)
Without giving away too much, suffice it to say that Lisa crosses a boundary in ways that
Ruth can’t forgive. It is hard to tell if she is smart enough to know what she
has done, and we're never quite sure why she did it. The script is unclear on this point. More conviction on the part of Hayes -- and
perhaps some righteous anger or indignation in that final argument -- might
have helped her explain herself better. The
final argument felt one-sided. We left the theater not sure if it was our
sympathy with the older character (who is no saint, who takes advantage of the
license of being an elder who can say whatever the hell she wants), the
playwright’s intention, or the effect of the unequal skills of the two
actresses. Haynes is skillful, but she doesn’t summon up the anger to make her
an equal combatant in the final scenes. You see a flash of it when Ruth pushes
her too far; we would have liked to see more.
(Though standing up to Bobbie Steinbach certainly can't be easy, we're
sure.)
On the whole, this is
an excellent production. New Rep has
done itself proud with this one!
~ Johanna Ettin &
Shauna Shames, New Rep Reviewers
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