Cherry Lane Theater Artistic Director to Leave and Sell Building

December 21, 2010, 4:36 pm

By FELICIA R. LEE

Angelina Fiordellisi, the artistic director of the nonprofit Cherry Lane Theater, a Greenwich Village institution since 1924, will step down next year, she said on Tuesday. She said that she plans to sell the building, at 38 Commerce Street, and that constant financial struggles in recent years and the changing nature of the business had led to her decision.

In September, Ms. Fiordellisi announced that the Cherry Lane would not produce plays on its main stage for a year or longer to buy time to cope with a deficit that now stands at $250,000. Ms. Fiordellisi attributed the shortfall to a steep drop in income from government and foundation support, ticket sales and rental fees.

“It’s frightening to me, what’s happened to Off Broadway theater,” said Ms. Fiordellisi, who plans to step down between March and June. “I feel that we can longer do theater for the sake of the art form. We have to adhere to the formula of having a film star in our productions to sell tickets because it’s so financially prohibitive. I don’t want to do theater like that.”

Still, Ms. Fiordellisi said, her tenure at the theater has been “just glorious” because of the chance to “revive the spirit” of the theater and to produce work by playwrights of the caliber of Edward Albee. She has identified strong candidates to succeed her, she said, pending approval by the theater’s board.

Despite its fabled past — the theater was started by a group of artists who were colleagues of Edna St. Vincent Millay and has showcased work by Samuel Beckett and Sam Shepard — it had not staged a play in two years when Ms. Fiordellisi bought it for $1.7 million in 1996 and renovated it for $3 million. She hopes to sell it for $12 million, Ms. Fiordellisi said, adding that she had some interested buyers. The price includes the 179-seat main stage and a 60-seat studio.

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Theater Talkback: When Familiar Words Are Heard Anew

“Wahuhrah, wahuhrah…” exasperated pause, “words.” That, more or less, is how Rory Kinnear pronounces the immortal redundancy “words, words, words” in Nicholas Hytner’s new production of “Hamlet” for the National Theater in London. Those words (words, words) have of course been uttered more times than any calculator could compute.

But my ears pricked up when I heard Mr. Kinnear’s Hamlet mangle them, for strategic purposes, in speaking to David Calder’s Polonius. They sounded new. And, more important, when you thought about it, they sounded just how someone would sound were he trying to convince somebody else that he was out of his mind. Especially a listener like Polonius, who is a little slow on the uptake and could easily be toyed with by an impatient prince of quicksilver intellect.

I had the chance to catch Mr. Kinnear’s inspiring diction lesson last week in a movie theater in New York, where his “Hamlet” was broadcast from London as part of the National Theater Live series of performances. I went to the show with some reluctance. It was a cold and forbidding night; I had seen another London-born production of “Hamlet” (starring Jude Law) twice in the previous year; and I do believe that a filmed version of a stage performance is a pale substitute for the real thing.

But I was very happy to have seen this “Hamlet,” even in two dimensions. There were distinct advantages to watching this production on film, despite the absence of long shots that captured the full sweep of Mr. Hytner’s mise-en-scene (designed by Vicki Mortimer). All those close-ups of eavesdropping agents of the evil King Claudius (Patrick Malahide) tended to kill the subtlety in Mr. Hytner’s notion of Denmark as a 21st-century fascist nation where state surveillance was inescapable.

What a treat, though, to be able to hear so precisely the inflections that Mr. Kinnear and company brought to their readings of well-known lines throughout, and to see the thoughts behind the lines reflected so clearly in the speakers’ magnified faces. Mr. Hytner’s overall conceit of Hamlet’s Denmark as a latter-day Stasi state was justified and well thought-through (though I’m a little weary of seeing productions with Shakespearean kings preening for television news cameras). But it was the specificity and originality that the actors brought to the familiar words they spoke that made this filmed production worthwhile.

In the title role, Mr. Kinnear has the royal share of those words, and he kept surprising me with his spontaneous-seeming shadings of them. Even “to be or not to be” (delivered in the muddled, meditative manner of a man truly trying to sort out his thoughts) and “alas, poor Yorick” sound newly minted. And everything that the fabulous Clare Higgins says as Gertrude in the second half of her third-act bedroom scene with Hamlet has an unexpected spin. That’s because, in this version, you suspect that Gertrude has (contrary to the usual interpretation) seen the same ghost that Hamlet sees, though she may deny it.

And remember that oft-quoted saw of Polonius’s “To thine own self be true?” It’s cited out of context all the time as a pearl of genuine wisdom, but in the playing it’s traditionally rendered just one of the many aphorisms spouted by an old gas bag. Here, after Mr. Calder says it, he falls into silence, with an expression on his face that is close to shame. It as if Polonius has fully heard what he is saying and realizes how untrue he has been to his own self, in acting as the usurping Claudius’s right hand (and spy). And with that one sentence, or the pause thereafter, a fatuous fool suddenly registers as a figure of pained self-awareness.

And that’s part of the reason why we (or at least I) keep going back to see plays we think we know all too well: the possibility that those same old “words, words, words” will assume new meaning. I have experienced such moments with other Hamlets, too (including Simon Russell Beale and Mark Rylance). And I have been startled by revelatory readings from Rebecca Hall as Rosalind in “As You Like It” (saying, among other things, “I am falser than vows made in wine”) and Patrick Stewart doing “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” in “Macbeth.”

I might also mention Cate Blanchett reinventing the single word “Eureka” as Blanche in “A Streetcar Named Desire” or Kathleen Turner pronouncing “abandoned” as Martha in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” But I’m going to stop rummaging through my memory and ask you to look into yours. Have there have been instances where you feel as if you’ve heard for the first time a familiar line or phrase or even single word, thanks to a performer’s unexpected interpretation?

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Theater Talkback: Giving Thanks in a Thankless Season

A distinct gloom has descended upon conversations among those of us whose business it is to attend the theater as often as some people turn on the television set. By which I mostly mean critics, although I do number among my friends a few obsessive civilians who see almost as much as I do. As the fall season dwindles to a close, the general opinion is that this has been an unusually grim and often grueling couple of months for New York theater, with the more hollow-eyed and enervated among us even suggesting that it’s the worst season in memory.

Of course, I can remember years in which similar doom-laden cries were heard early in the season, as the turkeys were piled up high on Broadway long before it was time to make pumpkin pie. The pain of the toothache you have today smarts a lot more than the recollection of a more severe malady you endured long ago. But it does seem that since the season got under way in September, dispiriting, mediocre or misbegotten shows have far outnumbered those evenings that leave you dizzy with pleasure at having witnessed some kind of theatrical magic.

In the spirit of the day, I am going to buoy my spirits by concentrating here on the high spots. Thanksgiving often seems to be more about food preparation and consumption, and the careful tending of simmering family tensions, than actually giving any thanks. So to put myself in a proper frame of mind, pre-turkey, I have decided to celebrate all the good tidings of the season so far, with the occasional backhanded swipe at the trials I’ve endured. (Hey, I am grateful that they are in the past, at least.)

Oddly enough, I am thankful for the unusual preponderance of reruns on Broadway stages this fall. Much of the best new theater this season was some of the best new theater of last season. Donald Margulies’s “Time Stands Still,” with Laura Linney and Brian d’Arcy James giving performances as fine as any on Broadway right now, is a rare and welcome return engagement. With the enduring Broadway veterans Bernadette Peters and Elaine Stritch now in the lead roles, Trevor Nunn’s revival of “A Little Night Music” has taken on a bright, bewitching new sheen. “Brief Encounter,” the inventive charmer I caught in both London and San Francisco before it made its way to Brooklyn last season, is thriving on Broadway. And the arrival of the Public Theater’s summer production of “The Merchant of Venice,” with Al Pacino and Lily Rabe squaring off in a climactic scene of spellbinding power, offers reason to cheer, or at least to profitably brood over this troublesome Shakespeare play.

I am grateful that it has been at least 24 hours since I’ve had to read anything at all about the travails of “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark,” possibly the most-written-about and least-eagerly-awaited new musical in Broadway history. Here’s hoping the blackout of news on this front will endure through the holiday weekend. If Julie Taymor breaks a nail, I don’t want to hear about it.

While it has not been a rich season for musical theater, thanks should be given for the delicious pairing of Kelli O’Hara and Will Chase in the Encores! production of “Bells Are Ringing.” Although much of this perky musical comedy seems to consist of laborious subplot amplified by filler, Ms. O’Hara and Mr. Chase lit up the stage with their warm charisma, and sang with style, finesse and heart. Someone write them a show, please.

“Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” ranks among the more piteous misfires of the fall season. But salvation from its numbing hyperactivity arrives in the second act, when Patti LuPone stops the busy traffic of the show with a powerful, keening lament for loves and looks lost, “Invisible,” that made me grateful to have seen the show, despite its disappointments.

This season Broadway got into the business of undermining its own allure by mounting inappropriately overscaled productions of Off Broadway hits like“Driving Miss Daisy” and “A Life in the Theater.” But the strongest new writing appeared on some of the smaller stages in town: Amy Herzog’s pointed family drama “After the Revolution,” at the upstairs space at Playwrights’ Horizons; “Tigers Be Still,” by Kim Rosenstock, part of the Roundabout’s Underground series; and Will Eno’s “Middletown” at the Vineyard Theater.

Mark Rylance: No explanation needed.

Last but by no means least, the enterprising troupe the Civilians reminded us that great theater in New York City is not confined to the narrow strip of self-absorption known as Manhattan. “In the Footprint: The Battle Over Atlantic Yards,” the company’s entertaining, insight-rich show about the controversial redevelopment plan in Brooklyn, restored my faith in the ability of theater artists to engage meaningfully with the world, here and now.

So here’s hoping that with the new year on the horizon the theater season will offer more such rewarding theater to celebrate. Now I just have to clear one last, potentially dispiriting hurdle: “Donny and Marie: A Broadway Christmas.” OK, that was decidedly not in the Thanksgiving spirit. But then again, given the bruising I’ve taken in the past couple of months, it is not out of the question that this festive holiday offering will end up on my top 10 list for the year.

If you are among those efficiently organized folks who have the holiday meal in hand and can spare a few minutes to offer your opinions on the season so far, please chime in. Do you share the view that it’s been an endurance-test fall at the theater? Dispute it? Care to nominate another year as the all-time nadir?

I should note that I have not been able to see absolutely everything that’s opened this fall – my double date with “Angels in America” is still in the future – and would be happy to hear about under-sung productions I might still be able to catch.

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