Kate Burton as Katharine Cornell and Bobby Steggert as Pete
(Photo credit: Joan Marcus)
Although the generation brought up on film won’t recognize the name, back in the 1940’s, Katharine Cornell had been dubbed “The First Lady of the American Stage” by critic and columnist Alexander Woollcott. Aside from the 1943 Stage Door Canteen playing herself and trading lines from Romeo and Juliet with a soldier, she appeared in no films.
Why? Best known as a tragedienne for her roles in plays by Shakespeare, Chekhov and Shaw, she is reported to have believed that her grand manner was unsuitable for film. Ironically, her contemporary roles were fought over by Hollywood’s divas and brought great success to the likes of Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Norma Shearer, Irene Dunne, Rosalind Russell and Hedy Lamarr.
In February 1948, the month that Cornell claimed to turn 50, the young A.R. Gurney, then a boarding school student and later to become a playwright famous for his own high style, attended her acclaimed performance in Antony and Cleopatra at New York’s Martin Beck Theatre. As both he and she were from Buffalo, he was granted the special privilege of going back stage to have her sign his program. That brief meeting is the basis for his charming new comedy, The Grand Manner, having its world premiere at Lincoln Center’s intimate Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater.
Under the polished direction of Mark Lamos (a long-time director of Gurney plays), Kate Burton (herself heir to the grand tradition in acting as the daughter of Richard Burton) plays Katharine Cornell. Unexplainably, Burton and Lamos have made a choice to depict Cornell at her most homey, at her most relaxed, as she might have behaved in her own living room. But there is no “grand manner” on the stage of the Mitzi Newhouse. Other than that seeming weakness, Gurney’s Grand Manner is a veritable valentine to, for and of the theater.
The play is set in the greenroom of the Martin Beck in February 1948. Pete (played by Bobby Steggert in his third New York role in the past nine months), Gurney’s actual nickname, awaits Cornell as she is to come from her dressing room before leaving for the evening. His Buffalo grandmother has written a letter of introduction to the actress who was also brought up in Buffalo and considered it her home town.
Gertrude Macy (Brenda Wehle), Cornell’s unshakable business manager warns the young man about what not to say to the overly-sensitive star. Cornell enters still dressed in her Cleopatra costume, asks for all the news of home, signs Pete’s souvenir program, and that is that. Pete then turns to the audience and tells us that is what really happened, but all these years he has imagined a play on what might have happened if he had gotten to stay longer.
What follows is the fantasy of what might have occurred. Using hindsight and some research, Gurney has written a comedy on Cornell at a turning point in her life: reaching 50 and discovering that her style may have become out of date and passé, of more interest to grandmothers, as she ruefully puts it. Pete has stumbled into a crisis in Cornell’s life and as a fellow native of Buffalo, she opens up to him about her instinct that maybe she ought to retire from the stage.
What has triggered these nagging doubts, as she tells Pete, is that the young Marlon Brando, who appeared with her in Candida as Marchbanks (and according to the critics almost stole the show right out from under her,) has turned down the offer to appear with her in Antony and Cleopatra as Octavius. He has instead chosen to play Stanley in the young Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, a play Cornell regretfully notes out loud to Pete that she would never have been offered. The young Elia Kazan, director of Streetcar, has pointed out that her style is “much too grand” for Williams.
Pete also gets to meet Cornell’s husband and director, Guthrie McClintic (Boyd Gaines) who can’t wait to get rid of the young man as he is a reminder of Cornell’s often stated longing to retire from acting in order to find out who she really is, as she could in Buffalo. The couple is also late for a midnight supper at Twenty-One with NBC television executive Pat Weaver (later to be the father of actress Sigourney) to discuss Cornell’s recreating some of her greatest roles on the small screen. If Pete doesn’t leave, they will be later still.
But thoughts of Buffalo and Pete’s youth and desire to make a career in the theater have made Cornell introspective and she wants him to stay. Little by little, Pete finds out about her unusual marriage as McClintic is gay and she and Macy are lovers. Would the young stranger have been told all this in 1948? Is it the late hour, his eagerness to learn about the theater, or her need to review her life at this turning point?
The play will be most enjoyed by long-time theater aficionados with its name dropping and inside theater gossip and jokes. Cornell speaks of people in her cast for whom she predicts great futures – the young Eli Wallach and Maureen Stapleton, and a young spear-carrier who may have a fine career once he learns what to do with that spear, the then unknown Charlton Heston. She tells Pete stories of her colleagues the Lunts and Helen Hayes, and McClintic and Macy also let Pete know what a life in the theater is really like. Written with hindsight, The Grand Manner is right in assuming a turning point in Cornell’s life, for after 1948 Cornell only appeared in contemporary plays for the remainder of her career.
Burton is warm, funny and appealing as the off-stage Cornell. Like Mark Rothko in Red, she gives us insight into the fears and trepidations of a great artist who hears the next generation battering down the door. Steggert, fresh from his critically acclaimed roles in Ragtime and Yank!, still has the wide-eyed look of youth on the brink of maturity and intuits the sensitivity of the budding young playwright finding his natural element.
As one of the two props in Cornell’s life, Boyd Gaines portrays McClintic as a tough and resilient man of the theater with a grounding in reality. He runs the gamut from strength to seductiveness when he discovers that Pete does not have a steady girl friend. Wehle is strong and efficient as the other prop in her life, exuding a wry humor that sees the dangers that lurk behind every corner.
John Arnone’s greenroom set with its variety of props and red-hued furniture supposedly left over from various productions is enormously atmospheric and Ann Hould-Ward’s costumes for both Cornell’s on and offstage wardrobe are appropriately theatrical. Russell H. Champa is responsible for the suitably unobtrusive lighting while John Gromada has composed the classical music indicative of the grand style.
The Grand Manner is A. R. Gurney in a light-weight mode but dealing with serious artistic questions from ageing to finding one’s true self. Written as a valentine to the theater, the play offers Kate Burton, Boyd Gaines, Bobby Steggert and Brenda Wehle a chance to trade witty theater talk in an historical context. Just don’t go expecting to see an example of the grand manner, which is probably gone for good.
(through August 1)
Lincoln Center Theater at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, 150 W. 65th Street, in Manhattan
For tickets, call 212-239-6200 or http://www.telecharge.com