A Theater Review. The Craft of Acting

By BEN BRANTLEY
Published: October 9, 2009
Hard-core disciples of the religion known as the Theater are scarce on the grounds these days. But two evangelists of that embattled creed have set up camp at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater to attest that the faith lives on. Portraying 1920s stage stars in the Manhattan Theater Club’s Broadway revival of George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber’s “Royal Family,” which opened on Thursday night, Jan Maxwell and Rosemary Harris are giving the kinds of performances that turn agnostics into true believers.

Ms. Harris is Fanny Cavendish, the matriarch of an acting dynasty, and Ms. Maxwell is her daughter, Julie, the reigning goddess of Broadway. And when, in the play’s second act, this mother and daughter start to preach the family gospel to an apostate in their midst, something close to a miracle occurs.
A production that up to that point has seemed merely a handsome, stilted revival of a dated comedy (a genre all too common in Manhattan’s institutional theaters) is suffused with the radiance of the pure, inexhaustible love of an ancient craft. All the usual clichés associated with the thrill of stage acting — from the paralyzing precurtain jitters to the revitalizing embrace of an audience — are not so much spoken as exhaled, as if they were the breath of life.
That Ms. Harris, 82, played Ms. Maxwell’s role in a fondly remembered Broadway production in the mid-1970s adds another layer of sentiment. But even those who know nothing of her history may find themselves moved to tears. What is happening is a blurring of illusion and bone-deep conviction that is peculiar to live theater, as two actresses playing actresses spin hokum into moonlight, just as their characters are said to do.
As reported earlier this week, it briefly looked as if another, less felicitous, melding of art and life might have befallen Doug Hughes’s production of this 1927 comedy. Fanny speaks proudly of her husband’s performing in sickness as well as health. And in a preview on Sunday, Tony Roberts, playing the Cavendish family’s business manager, experienced a minor seizure and became noticeably ill in his first scene, causing the matinee’s cancellation. His understudy, Anthony Newfield, filled in for him for several performances, but Mr. Roberts returned to the production on opening night. (His entrance was received with hearty applause.)
Mr. Roberts, a confident veteran of stage and film, gave a likable, restrained performance at the preview I attended. But it is only when Ms. Maxwell and Ms. Harris are center stage (and this is a play in which everyone vies for that spot) that the show moves from sepia-colored past into flesh-toned present. A satire notoriously inspired by the Barrymore clan, “The Royal Family” has always been a favorite of theater folk, for obvious reasons.
Like Noël Coward’s “Hay Fever” and the musical “Kiss Me Kate,” other larky portraits of people who live and die by the theater, “The Royal Family” allows performers to caricature the narcissism, self-dramatizing and infantile craving for attention that were once said to characterize their profession (and of course have nothing to do with actors as we know them today). It also pulses with the door-slamming farcical sound and fury found in the liveliest of Kaufman’s collaborations (like “You Can’t Take It With You” and “Once in a Lifetime”).
Yet in recent years I haven’t seen a fully satisfying production of “The Royal Family.” Too often the characters become the strutting sum of their affectations, as if they themselves came out of the parody-ready melodramas in which they were sometimes reduced to appearing.
As staged by Mr. Hughes (“Doubt,” this season’s revival of David Mamet’s “Oleanna”), this “Royal Family” takes a while to find its natural rhythm and even then doesn’t always hold on to it. Not all the cast members seem equally at home in John Lee Beatty’s lush rendering of the Cavendish family’s two-tiered apartment, a deluxe playpen for grown-up babies. (Catherine Zuber has provided mouthwatering period costumes to match.)
Fun and games at the Cavendish household include boxing lessons, furniture-toppling fencing matches, random piano playing and dodging the madding crowds that assemble outside once Tony Cavendish (Reg Rogers), a childlike Lothario modeled on John Barrymore, comes home from Hollywood, trailed by a process server with breach-of-promise papers. But the favorite activity for this family’s members is emoting for and at one another, which can grow wearisome if it’s not rooted in real emotional substance.
Mr. Rogers brings a zestful touch of Marx Brothers mania to the swashbuckling Tony, and he combines worldliness with innocence in a way that makes you understand why his mother dotes on him. And the estimable John Glover (late of “Waiting for Godot”) exudes a touching, broken dignity that helps lubricate the stiff-jointed role of Herbert, Fanny’s less successful thespian brother.
But Kelli Barrett, suggesting a standard-issue ingénue from the 1970s instead of the ’20s; Ana Gasteyer, who overdoes the shrillness of Herbert’s tootsie of a wife; and David Greenspan, as the loyal family butler, all seem to have arrived from different planets. (So does Larry Pine, as a rich suitor from Julie’s youth, but then that’s what his part asks for.) They’re not bad, but they’re not credible, either. And their self-consciousness is fatal to farce. (In fairness, I don’t think anyone could do much with the lovers’ dialogue between Ms. Barrett and Freddy Arsenault, as her society swain.)

Ms. Maxwell, whose supporting performances were the best things about the Broadway productions of “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” and “The Dinner Party,” gets the star role she has long deserved and fills it to the fingertips. Like Fanny, this Julie turns the hackneyed notion of “theater in the blood” into biological fact. Both women are wonderful paradoxes, people for whom artifice is truly natural, and as mother and daughter they communicate in a perfect private language to which we are allowed privileged access.
Fanny and Julie are poseurs, for sure, but there is real feeling not just behind but within the poses. As satire, “The Royal Family” is not deathless. But the passion at its heart, as Ms. Maxwell and Ms. Harris make so movingly clear, is forever.