Occupant by Edward Albee, at the Signature Theatre
Yesterday was massively cultural, because after they museum I saw Mercedes Ruehl (an actress I've admired and had the hots for ever since her role in Terry Gilliam's great New York film The Fisher King) play the sculptor Louise Nevelson in Edward Albee's Occupant. It's a simple play. The dead artist is interviewed as though by a TV interviewer but with the audience filling the role of, well, audience. Nevelson is invited and cajoled to reminisce about her career and her marriage, her breakdown, her son, about drinking, sex and travel. And we see her lie, tease, exaggerate, fabulate and obfuscate her way through a process that is clearly both pleasing and painful for her. It's a portrait of an individual, a woman the playwright knew, but it's also a play of ideas about what it is to be an artist, about the loneliness, rejection and perseverance beyond which, sometimes, an artist realises and fulfils herself, and comes to occupy a space that's somehow hers.
It's a static play, too. It depends not solely on monologue - there's some sharp dialogue too - but so much of it is reminiscence and opinion that inevitably it lacks the sparkle of real drama. I almost fell asleep in the first half (but that was no doubt linked to the gourmet burger and ale that I'd had at the Landmark Tavern round the corner from the Signature Theatre). But the second half was much better as the ideas come to the fore. I was happy with Mercedes Ruehl's performance, but I felt she was constricted by the part, and that we saw a narrower, more subdued, quieter performance than I'd have liked. I think there's something more expansive in this actress that I'd have liked to see come out.
After the performance there was a talk-back with the director, Pam MacKinnon, and the playwright, and it was clear from the discussion that having liked Nevelson, Albee wanted very much to bring her to life and was determined that the look and gestures of the leading actress, her accent even, should closely mirror those of the woman he knew: he mentioned the availability of films of Nevelson as a resource to the actress to model herself on, for instance. This approach I felt shackled Ruehl rather than freeing her. I note that Anne Bancroft got ill during the previous run of Occupant at this theatre in 2002, and I have to say I might have fallen ill myself at the thought of being straitjacketed like this in my performance. It was great to hear Albee commenting on his own play of course, but I did get the sense of a controlling writer, who sees actors and directors more as instruments than collaborators; and I suspect all productions of this play must be rather alike.
Perhaps only time and distance from its historical subject will allow productions of this play to rise above a focus on the particular and personal, and emphasise the wider exploration of what it means in our time to be dedicated to art and to achieve in it - an exploration that I think is the play's real interest.
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