Theater Review: Trinity’s His Girl Friday
Friday, September 16, 2011
Kiss the girl? Brazil & Sullivan, Jr. 
As Act 1 of Trinity's His Girl Friday lumbers on, a full hour passed, another half hour still to come, the pounding dialogue thuds like a newspaper printing press. Amid the din, all I can hear, or wish I heard, was what editors used to holler into the phone.
Get me rewrite!
In other words: pull this production out of the platen of its metaphorical late 1930s typewriter and rip it up.
What is tiresome in Act I does not improve in Act II. The result: a disappointing opening to Trinity's 2011-12 season and great dramatic legacy insulted.
The victims: First, The Front Page, an acerbically funny play about the news game written by two former Chicago reporters, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, which premiered in 1928 and became a smash hit on Broadway. Second, His Girl Friday, the 1940 film adaptation of that play, which drew the tension between female reporter Hildy Johnson and her boss Walter Burns into the foreground. Directed with perfect rhythm and pitch by the great Howard Hawks, His Girl Friday both crackled with verbal jousting between peers and hummed with sexual tension. And yes, there was the slightly seedy newsroom and its denizens, plus crooked politicians, plus an escaped murderer hiding in a roll-top desk, surrounding Hildy and Walter's battle of the sexes as a rich, rattling-typewriter landscape. It is a wonderful film, a great story, and slides down with a wonderful bite like whiskey stashed in a reporter's desk drawer.
Not so at the Lederer.
The perps: It begins with John Guare, the accomplished playwright who sought to combine elements of both works and create a new version for the stage. The result is a play that does too much and nothing much, and for way too long. Hawks' film opens with the splendid Rosalind Russell as Hildy striding through her former newsroom to tell her ex-husband Burns (the equally splendid and whipsharp Carey Grant), that she's on her way to Albany to marry again. And off we go. Guare's play revives a long opening exposition in the sole location of a criminal courthouse originally part of The Front Page. By the time this Hildy (Angela Brazil) and this Burns (Fred Sullivan Jr.) meet, it feels like half a play has gone by. This may have worked in The Front Page, but does nothing for this audience.
This kind of overreach is made worse by the play's political underpinnings. In the film, the motivations around a murderer scheduled to hang display big-city politics at their worst. In Guare's Friday, our murderer is now symbolizing the creeping anxiety about Hitler's encroachment into Poland and Czechoslovakia, not to mention the wounds felt by the Great Depression. That's bold-face type, that is, and this is part of what weighs down the dramatics to the point of plodding, not to mention preaching. It also subjects us to an ill-conceived Eastern European accent that sounds like something Hank Azaria would create on The Simpsons.
The crimes: With all this dramatic ballast, is it even possible that Guare's adaptation could have rammed home with the velocity and sparks of the film? Unlikely, but the misguided casting at the center of Columbus' production makes it impossible. Brazil and Sullivan, each strong actors, each practiced at comedy, lack chemistry. Not only as scene partners, but moreso as sexual partners. Both look uncomfortable not only in their period costumes; the big payoff kiss at the play's conclusion feels forced.
The doubling of each secondary cast member is barely profitable, as Columbus doesn't do enough with his blocking to emphasize that the always good Brian McEleney is flying out one door as a snobbish dandy reporter, and back in another as Burns' reptilian enforcer. Stephen Berenson is forced to double as the sheriff, and it's doubtful a Trinity actor has been less convincing. The game Stephen Thorne wields an ear-tweaking quasi Chicago accent (the only one in the bunch) as a reporter, and tries hard to make the mother-coddled, Nazi-sympathizing fiancee of Brazil less repugnant. But to what end? Janice Duclos makes the cameo of a wandering priest a mannered comic turn that shines in an otherwise grey tableau, but her rants as Hildy's mother-in-law to be are so shrill they are barely tolerable.
And this may be the production's greatest crime. Lacking the dialogue and not supplying the proper physical pacing and blocking to make this Girl Friday jump like the typewriter keys that everyone pounds so fast it becomes parody, Columbus substitutes volume. This is the loudest two and a half hours in recent theatre history in Providence.
This should be the kind of play that you lean forward to catch the fast, sharp dialogue. Here, you slump and wonder how and when it will be over. And you go home and rent the Hawks film and hope for better, next time, from Trinity Rep.
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