I’ve Always Relied On The Kindness Of YouTube

            Alright, I admit it. I do miss theater. There is something about the experience you can have in a theater that is like nothing else. I still remember reeling out of theaters still shaking from what I just saw. Seeing the gritty, disturbing Alan Bowne play about 42^nd Street male hustlers Forty Deuce at the Perry Street Theater was just electrifying. Bowne’s play about AIDs- Beirut (with thrilling performances by Michael David Morrison and Marisa Tomei) had the same galvanizing effect on me. The experience of watching such astonishing actors as Ruth Maleczech and Frederick Neuwmann (as a female butcher and her abusive husband) in Franz Xaver Kroetz’ Through The Leaves left me speechless. Or the exquisite Joan MacIntosh in the heartbreaking Request Concert, beautifully directed by JoAnne Akalaitis. Those long nights watching the dizzying genius of Jeff Weiss in his ongoing whacked-out sagas. The joy of sitting in a theater and discovering such incredibly talented actors like Giancarlo Esposito, Ed Harris, Laurie Metcalf, John Malkovich and the incomparable Lois Smith. And, I know I am prejudiced, but, simply everything by Elizabeth LeCompte’s The Wooster Group. What LeCompte, and her merry band of theatrical terrorists, does is hallucinatory and transgressive and sublime. 

            But since there seems no foreseeable time yet when I can trek to some hole-in-the-wall off-Broadway theater I spend many hours on YouTube searching for rare theatrical experiences and while this is an ongoing project I’ll let you in on a few gems I have found so far:

            The Three Sisters (Anton Chekhov). (Geraldine Page, Sandy Dennis and Kim Stanley). A legendary Actor’s Theater production of the Chekhov play about three unhappy sisters in 19^th-century Russia. Geraldine Page plays Olga, Kim Stanley– Masha and Sandy Dennis the youngest- Irina, who dreams of going to Moscow. With Shelley Winters and Kevin McCarthy it’s almost actor overload with those great women in the lead roles. There are so few filmed moments with the great Kim Stanley as it is. Called, quite rightly, the female Brando, watching her perform is to be touched by genius and madness.

            Dutchman (LeRoi Jones) (Al Freeman Jr., Shirley Knight). I was a huge fan of LeRoi Jones (Amiri Bararka)- his poetry, plays and writing illustrated his inextinguishable fury. Al Freeman Jr. plays a black man riding the NY subway. Into the car comes Shirley Knight, a sexy blonde who sits beside him and first flirts seductively, then turns and verbally assaults him with deadly aggression. This 1967 production of the play is unsubtle as a bag of hammers, but the performances are just incredible, and Amiri Baraka’s anger still gets to me.

            The Collection (Harold Pinter) (Malcolm McDowell, Alan Bates, Helen Mirren). McDowell plays Bill, a dress designer living in a fancy house with an older man (Laurence Olivier). In a London flat lives another dress designer- Stella (Helen Mirren) and husband/business partner James (Alan Bates). A mysterious phone call suggesting that Bill & Stella had a one-night stand upends everything. Leave it to Pinter to create just the right mood of perverse menace. But what a cast!

            Cat On A Hot Tin Roof (Tennessee Williams) (Natalie Wood, Laurence Olivier). This 1976 television version stars Natalie Wood as Maggie the Cat. She and Brick (Robert Wagner), her former sports-star husband, are at the mansion of Big Daddy (Laurence Olivier) to celebrate his birthday. But Brick has his leg in a cast, won’t come downstairs and is drinking constantly. He also will not satisfy his frustrated wife. I’ve always loved Natalie Wood– and she does have the right sexiness and spunk here. But if you troll through YouTube you might find the amazing 1984 TV version with Jessica Lange as Maggie, with a brilliant, brooding Tommy Lee Jones as Brick, Rip Torn as Big Daddy and the legendary Kim Stanley as Big Momma. Jessica burns up the screen as Maggie- she’s sensual and dangerous and brash and heroic. I’ve never seen anyone play Maggie with that kind of sexy ferocity. 

            A Raisin In the Sun (Lorraine Hansberry) (Danny Glover, Esther Rolle). A 1989 American Playhouse TV version of this celebrated play about a black family who use their late father’s insurance money to move from the slums of Chicago to a new house in an all-white neighborhood. Danny Glover is just amazing as the idealistic head-of-the-household Walter and no one could play Mama like Esther Rolle, with such authority and compassion. Nicely directed by Bill Duke.

            What The Butler Saw (Joe Orton) (Dinsdale Landen, Prunella Scales). I was such a huge fan of sardonic British playwright Joe Orton. This two-act, wild, black comedy is even more bittersweet because it was finished a month before his tragic death. But Orton’s plays are tricky to mount. They have to be played straight and it has to build as the breakneck pace of the farce spins wildly out-of-control. This play is set in a British psychiatric unit with a horny doctor; a sexy secretary; a blackmailed wife; a police officer stripped and eventually dressed as a woman; and the missing penis from Winston Churchill’s statue. This 1978 BBC TV version is a fun version of this hilariously demented play. 

            The Glass Menagerie (Tennessee Williams) (Shirley Booth). This 1966 CBS broadcast was thought to lost for many years. Williams‘ memory play about Tom (Hal Holbrook) remembering growing up in St. Louis with a smothering mother (Booth) and a sensitive, frail sister (Barbara Loden) who collects glass figurines. Shirley Booth has the right strident quality but there’s something missing. It’s a decent interpretation and I’m happy to finally be able to see it. But Barbara Loden!  Her performance as Laura is just incandescent- it just doesn’t get any better.

            True West (Sam Shepard) (John Malkovich, Gary Sinise). Sam Shepard was a great playwright, and this is one of his finest plays. Luckily, in this 1984 American Playhouse mounting, you get to see the two leads from the original Steppenwolf Theater Company production. Gary Sinise plays Austin, writing a screenplay and house-sitting his mom’s place. His scruffy, drunk brother Lee (John Malkovich) shows up and when a Hollywood producer arrives, hijacks the script. Both lead actors are beyond phenomenal.

            Hedda Gabler (Henrik Ibsen) (Ingrid Bergman, Michael Redgrave, Ralph Richardson). The Norwegian playwright’s acclaimed play about a complicated woman- Hedda (Ingrid Bergman), the daughter of a general, who marries an academic George (Michael Redgrave), but not for love. Her former lover- Ejlert (Trevor Howard) is a rival of George’s and she manipulates the alcoholic Ejlert to tragic results. Who knew this production existed? And with this cast?

            Suddenly Last Summer (Tennessee Williams) (Maggie Smith, Natasha Richardson, Rob Lowe, Richard E. Grant). It’s hard to remember this bizarre Williams play was once a one-act. Maggie Smith plays the wealthy Mrs. Venable who wants to pay for a wing to a doctor’s (Rob Lowe) hospital under the condition that he give her daughter-in-law (Natasha Richardson) a lobotomy to stop her from spreading salacious stories about the mysterious death of her late son, Sebastian. It’s all a hothouse tale of perversion, insanity and cannibalism, and boy is it fun!

            All My Sons (Arthur Miller) (Sally Field, Bill Pullman). I’ve always argued that this is Miller’s best play. It’s set in 1947 and about successful businessman and manufacturer Joe Keller (Bill Pullman) and wife Kate (Sally Field). Joe has been exonerated from being accused of selling defective airplane parts during World War II, but his wife knows he is guilty. Joe and his son Chris are avoiding revealing to Kate that her son Larry was killed in the war. Larry’s fiancé comes to town and stirs up everything, especially Joe’s culpability in his own son’s death. This National Theater production is damn good, and Field and Pullman are stellar.

            Come Back Little Sheba (William Inge) (Laurence Olivier, Joanne Woodward, Carrie Fisher). Yeah, I know. It’s hard to forget Shirley Booth in the lead role. But Joanne Woodward gives her a run for her money as poor, blowsy housewife Lola, forever moaning over her lost dog Sheba and nervous about her alcoholic husband Doc’s (Laurence Olivier) return from another stint in rehab. Set in a small university town in the Midwest in the 1940s, it’s a heartbreaker of a tale, and this production isn’t half bad.

            Death Of A Salesman (Arthur Miller) (Dustin Hoffman, Kate Reid, John Malkovich). “Attention must be paid,” to this tragic Pulitzer-prize-winning play about Willy Loman, a 63-year-old self-deluded salesman, and his fractured relation with his sons. Dustin Hoffman received acclaim for his performance as Loman, but I thought he was mannered and phony. Kate Reid and John Malkovich, however, are just brilliant. This excellent 1985 production was sensitively directed by Volker Schlondorff.

            Rhinoceros (Eugene Ionesco) (Zero Mostel, Gene Wilder). Your chance to see Mostel and Wilder teamed again like in The Producers. This theater of the absurd comedy about a French town where the citizens are changing into rhinoceroses. Gene Wilder tries to fight against the herd mentality but exclaims, “People who try to hang on to their individuality always come to a bad end.” This was a 1974 production of The American Film Theater and frantically directed by Hair’s Tom O’Horgan.

            Long Day’s Journey Into Night (Eugene O’Neill) (Jack Lemmon, Bethel Leslie). Eugene O’Neill’s devastating, autobiographical play is set at the Tyrone family’s Connecticut home. This excellent 1987 TV production stars Jack Lemmon as James Tyrone, a penny-pinching actor who settled for a more pedestrian career acting in popular plays. His sons are Jamie (Kevin Spacey), a womanizing alcoholic and Edmond (Peter Gallagher), the more sensitive one, suffering from Tuberculosis. A lovely Jodie Lynne McClintock plays the servant Cathleen. The men sadly sit around the table drinking all night as their mother Mary (Bethel Leslie), a morphine addict, stumbles about upstairs. I know Kevin Spacey’s been publically “erased,” but damn, he was fucking great in this.