Dreams pursued and dreams deferred are familiar territory for John Guare. In his first breakthrough play, The House of Blue Leaves, he juggled a narrative with the quirky free association that was the hallmark of much of his one-act period of the sixties. Writing a play that was knockabout farce at the same time that it was heartbreaking tragedy and absurdist playpen was nothing short of achieving the impossible. Following Blue Leaves several years later, Guare wrote Landscape of the Body, the play currently on the main stage at the Williamstown Theatre Festival until July 20.
It is 1977. Betty and her son, Bert, leave Bangor, Maine for New York City where they dream of a better life. But dreams soon turn to nightmares as the illusion is replaced by the bitter reality of street life as it is really lived. Revealed in a series of scenes as cinematic as they are theatrical, the play blends naturalism with expressionism so, just as in Guare's earlier play, we are constantly shifting between what is and what might have been.
But while the playwright found himself so perfectly in Blue Leaves, he meanders and loses his way with Landscape. The integration of songs -- he bills himself not as 'written by' but as 'book, music and lyrics by', the true credit of a stage musical -- plays as nothing more than a gimmick and is rarely effective. The live band is a pleasant diversion but they would have to be essential to avoid upstaging the proceedings and I admit that with each tune they started, I quickly forgot what had preceded the interlude.
And whether or not the direction by Michael Greif is too front-and-centre is hard to say. I haven't seen the play before, though I've read it, and the declamatory style he has stressed doesn't help me to consider the writer's ideas any more than if the action had been less obvious and the text perhaps more focussed.
It's also possible that the rehearsal period hadn't allowed for the concept to gel, for this staging is clearly an example of the director imposing himself on the play. Maybe it should work the other way around.
The large company hadn't found a cohesive approach to the chosen playing style or a connection to one another by the end of the first week's run, and maybe this will improve as the play continues to work itself in. But there certainly was a great deal of screaming of lines, in spite of too much amplification already helping out several actors' small voices. And speaking of voices, the diction for most of the acting ensemble was unusually poor -- slurred and sloppy.
John Guare is among the finest of American playwrights but his great work is limited to two or three works. I'd say that Landscape of the Body is not among those, but it speaks to a festival of Williamstown's conviction that there is room for works not always of the first rank.