Jessie Barr as movie star Kay Gonda and Dan Pfau as
press agent Mick Watts in a scene from Ayn Rand’s Ideal
(Photo credit: Avery McCarthy)
Best known for her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, philosopher Ayn Rand also wrote four plays early in her writing career. Two of these reached Broadway in the 1930’s while the two unproduced scripts were not published until 1984 in The Early Ayn Rand: A Selection from her Unpublished Fiction. Her second play, the 1934 Ideal, is now being given its first New York staging as part of the “Americas Off Broadway” Festival at 59E59 Theaters.
The problem with the production by the Brooklyn non-profit arts organization FGP NYC, INC is that not only are the actors too young for their roles, but the general level of the acting is too amateurish to really evaluate the quality of the play. Although the play has all the flaws of plays by novelists, Ideal remains an engrossing story.
Written first as a novelette, Ideal betrays its origins with its long scenes and multiple settings. The dialogue is often too dense, didactic or moralizing to be real conversation. However, the plot is absorbing and the varied cast of characters, though stereotypes, add diversity. Set in Los Angeles, where Rand was at the time of its composition trying to make a living as a script writer, Ideal begins with Kay Gonda (played by Jessie Barr), Hollywood’s most famous actress, going missing after being suspected of murdering her lover, business tycoon Granton Sayers.
While her studio searches frantically to find her before the police do, Gonda is visiting six of her most devoted fans for whom she represents their ideal. Will one of them be willing to a risk and put her up for the night? Although Ideal is not representative of Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism in the way that her later novels demonstrate her theories, Gonda finds that her fans choose self-interest over altruism, one of the tenets of Rand’s beliefs.
The play is extremely schematic as the fan letters to Gonda are read aloud before each of six scenes, and then Gonda makes her appearance at each residence. The fans are also intended to be representative of different strata of society during the Great Depression: a low-level assistant manager, a socialist and rebel, an artist, an evangelist, a European aristocrat down on his luck, and an out-of-work alcoholic.
Jenny Beth Snyder has directed in a vigorous, animated manner and her staging in the small space at 59E59 Theaters’ black box Theater C (with the audience sitting on two sides of the playing area) is remarkably fluid. The actors, though often misguided, are always brisk and high spirited. Unfortunately, the casting is often eccentric with actors unable to bring enough experience to their roles, making some of the scenes look like late-night college dorm parties rather than gatherings of world-weary sophisticates. For example, as the head of Farrow Film Studios, Andrew Young behaves like a novice bureaucrat, rather than a veteran tycoon of industry. While Barr is efficient and business-like as the movie star, she lacks the sense of glamour and style that is needed to make Kay Gonda, Hollywood’s most famous actress, believable.
Snyder has also not read the script very carefully: Gonda we are told was pulled out of a gutter in Vienna but has no foreign accent nor does Count Dietrich von Esterhazy who boasts of his Austrian heritage. The cast of twelve play 33 characters, with all but Barr as Gonda playing between two and four roles each. This, however, makes it difficult to differentiate between the characters and the different social milieu with these inexperienced actors returning in subsequent scenes not looking or sounding much different than in other parts they have previously played. Though always impassioned, the actors are mostly callow and one-dimensional, making Rand’s representative types more clichéd than absolutely necessary.
Being given the task of creating eight 1930’s settings for the small stage, Rachel Schneider has cleverly solved the problem by using white cubes which are reconfigured before an art deco backdrop. Amy Sutton has been successful in designing costumes that suggest a black and white film by using a limited palette. However, as most of the black, white, pale blue and pink costumes are too similar in style, it makes it difficult to keep the various characters separate when the same actors reappear in totally contrasting roles.
When a lost play is rediscovered after many decades, it is incumbent on the producers to give the work its best shot. Ayn Rand’s fascinating though dated mystery melodrama Ideal, being given its local premiere after 76 years, deserves a better production. The script, however, remains far superior to the production. Ayn Rand disciples will want to catch this rare chance to see one of her seldomly staged plays.
Ideal (through July 3)
59E59 Theaters, 59 E 59th Street, in Manhattan
For tickets, call 212-279-4200 or http://www.ticketcentral.com