“God of Carnage.” Yasmina Reza, playwright. Matthew Warchus director. Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, Broadway.

Yasmina Reza is a French playwright whose works transcend barriers of language and culture to reveal the core of human relationships. She has a gift for lifting the rock of good-mannered stoicism to reveal the baser human emotions squirming just below the surface of our smiles. Her first play, “Conversations After a Burial,” set the theme for most of her other plays, which focus more on conversations than on events or actions.

In her award-winning “Art,” a 15-year friendship among three men unravels when one of them buys an expensive piece of art that is nothing more than a huge white canvas. The purchaser expects his friends to praise his new acquisition, as all good friends should. We all know better than to tell a friend, “That new haircut looks ridiculous.” But here, the conventions are violated.  One friend calls the painting nothing but “white shit,” and the conversation devolves from there. Ensuing conversations center on art, but the play is really about friendship and honesty.Continue reading

“Blithe Spirit.” Noel Coward, playwright. Michael Blakemore, director. Shubert Theater, Broadway.

Here’s one of my immutable rules of theater enjoyment: If there’s a play by George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, or Noel Coward in production, don’t miss it. Wilde and Shaw virtually invented the drawing room “comedy of manners” that exposed hypocrisy and boorishness among the Victorian elite, and Coward perfected it for the Edwardian age. Their plays are witty, quotable, acidic, light hearted, and dead on.  This season the Shubert Theater is presenting Noel Coward’s “Blithe Spirit,” and no matter how many times of seen it, it’s always great fun.

One of the reasons so many high school drama clubs choose these veteran playwrights so often is that they are virtually indestructible. The dialogue is so witty that it carries itself, even if the performances are amateurish and wooden. But in the hands of virtuoso performers like the dapper Rupert Everett and the divine Angela Lansbury, the result is sheer perfection.

Charles  (Everett), a mystery writer, is the model for Pierce Brosnan’s “Remington Steele” character–handsome, debonair, utterly at home in a tuxedo, and totally useless in the home. As the play begins, Charles and his wife, Ruth (Jayne Atkinson), an imperious, no-nonsense socialite who rules the house and terrorizes the servants, have invited some friends to join them for a séance. They don’t believe in this stuff of course, but Charles wants to use the experience for a character he is developing in his latest novel.

Enter the star of this show, Angela Lansbury, as the medium Madame Arcati, who very much believes. Dressed incongruously in gypsy velvets and country tweeds, there is nothing “medium” about this larger-than-life Arcati. She sniffs the air for ectoplasm, listens for spirit voices, douses the lights, and prances vigorously around the stage like a hunter after her prey, in a dance that seems to be channeling the art deco poses of early modern dancers Vaslav Nijinsky and Isadora Duncan. This woman is 83 years old, mind you, dancing about the stage like a 4-year-old, bouncing over furniture and humming tunelessly to summon the spirits of the dearly departed.

And seeming to have the time of her life. Even when she forgets her lines (which happened two or three times at the performance I attended) she makes it part of the character, sputtering like a dotty old woman who can’t think of the proper word until the other character gives it to her, just as you would if you were talking to your own dotty Aunt Ida. Brilliant. Simply brilliant.

During the séance, Madame Arcati unwittingly conjures up Charles’s first wife, Elvira (Christine Ebersole), who then sticks around to haunt and torment her widowed husband and his new wife. Ebersole is considered the new Grand Lady of the Stage, modern Broadway’s answer to Helen Hayes or Gertrude Lawrence. She has won two Tony’s and numerous nominations. But for the life of me I can’t understand why.

Ebersole began her acting career in soap operas (“Ryan’s Hope,” “One Life to Live”) and she should have stayed there. She plays every role with a Judy Holiday whine and rushes each line as though she is worried the director will cut to commercial before she is finished. Good actors don’t just act, they react to events and interact with other actors. Not Miss Ebersole, however. I have seen her enter a scene, shout in agony, “You’re hair!” and THEN turn to look at her onstage daughter’s freshly shorn locks (as M’Lynn  in “Steel Magnolias.”) As Elvira, the ghost of Charles’s first wife, Ebersole is lovely to look at but painful to hear.

But as I said up front, you really can’t ruin a play by Coward. The snappy dialogue, the opulent sets, the stage direction, and the story itself carry it along. And then there is the angelic Angela. The title character of “Blithe Spirit” is meant to be Elvira, who normally steals the show with her ghostly tantrums and ectoplasmic pranks. But no one could steal this production from the sprightly  clutches of Angela Lansbury. After more than 70 years onstage and in films, she is truly a blithe spirit–happy, carefree, and, like a spirit, able to transcend her mortal octogenarian body and float across the stage, timeless and endearing.

My second immutable rule of theater enjoyment is this: if Angela Lansbury is in the cast, cross the continent, if necessary, to see it.