TV REVIEW: MAD MEN

Roger Sterling (John Slattery), Don Draper (Jon Hamm) and Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser) in Mad Men.

In the face of advertisement

By Ed Rampell

When AMC’s Mad Men marathon began Wednesday, May 13 at 3 p.m. I watched for 12 consecutive hours, and intermittently viewed the ensuing 92 episodes, culminating with the last hurrah at Big Sur entitled Person to Person. Watching the series unspool was like reading chapters of a great novel by Leo Tolstoy or Honore Balzac. Leading up to the grand finale by chronologically airing each installment of the groundbreaking program that premiered July 19, 2007, was a stroke of genius. I never binge-watched a production like this before and wonder if any other TV program stretching over eight years has been unfolded, consecutively, nonstop, by a broadcast or cable channel.

What made Mad Men arguably the greatest dramatic series in American TV history is that there was a method to its madness. Using compelling characters and storylines, vivid period set designs and costuming, plus evocative music, creator/writer/director Matthew Weiner explored the changing dynamics of capitalism during one of America’s most turbulent decades. Opening in 1960 against the backdrop of the Kennedy-Nixon presidential race, Sterling Cooper is an independent advertising firm located at Manhattan. Robert Morse portrays co-founder Bert Cooper, an acolyte of Ayn Rand, the apostle of laissez faire economics and the “virtues of selfishness.”

The admen like senior partner Roger Sterling (John Slattery), a likable rogue, are quintessential capitalists who grease the wheels of mass consumption. Unlike industrialists, they don’t create anything tangible; instead, these Madison Avenue hucksters use artistry, psychology and personal persuasion to sell others’ products and their own services to clients to do so. Early on, Sterling Cooper’s much-vaunted creative director, series protagonist Don Draper (John Hamm), proclaims that advertising is about “happiness.” Through various mass mediums admen market manufacturer’s items by positioning them as means to an end, that is, ensuring satisfaction through purchases. For instance, in contrast to beautiful women, Jaguars are sold as beauty men can literally own. In this way advertisers fetishize commodities, often literally linking them to the promise of sexual fulfillment. Their exchange value dwarfs any usefulness the products promise; indeed, much of what’s sold, such as Lucky Strike cigarettes, is not only useless, but harmful. (In the denouement Don’s first wife, Betty, played by January Jones, is dying of lung cancer while Don embarks on a cross-continental odyssey seeking a woman with the portentous name “Di.”)

However, during the show’s seven-season, eight-year arc, despite their desperate maneuvers, Sterling is acquired first by a British firm, then by real life advertising conglomerate McCann Erickson. The freewheeling admen attempt at times to break free and reassert their independence, but are unable to compete with and halt the growth of insatiable corporate behemoths. Over the years a McCann Erickson executive aggressively courts Sterling wunderkind Draper with an Ahabian obsession. He even refers to Draper as his “white whale,” whom he finally harpoons.

Sterling’s trajectory mirrors the mergers and acquisitions of modern big business, as the big fish swallow the little fish. The world of entrepreneurial individual initiative is displaced by corporatization and consolidation, free enterprise replaced by monopolization.

Mad Men expresses self-awareness of this political economy. At one point, creative copywriter Paul Kinsey (Michael Gladis) tells patrician Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser), an ambitious account exec: “People forget that Karl Marx was the greatest economist who ever lived, and whatever you think of his solution, the problem he posed was about the catastrophic up-and-down of the marketplace.” The bearded, pipe-smoking Kinsey, who was a Freedom Rider in the South, had a black lover and ends up a Krishna devotee, is not the only character referencing Marx. Emile Calvet (Ronald Guttman),  French-Canadian father of Draper’s second wife, Megan (Jessica Paré), is a Marxist intellectual.

The series’ plots and characters wind their way through the sturm und drang of the sizzling sixties and early seventies, with the Vietnam War and race relations serving as leitmotifs. Set in New York, Mayor John Lindsay and Gov. Nelson “Rocky” Rockefeller are referred to -- especially as Betty Draper’s second husband, Henry Francis (Christopher Stanley), works for these liberal Republican pols.

Initially, Sterling is lily white, but over time it’s integrated -- that is, to the extent that there are some black secretaries. After Martin Luther King’s assassination riots erupt; at the office whites try clumsily, but sincerely, to comfort African-American colleagues. For example, Peggy Olson (Elizabeth Moss) warmly hugs a black coworker. In the most moving scene, Pete the blueblood blows his top at media buyer Harry Crane, whose main concern is that televised coverage of Dr. King’s murder is preempting commercials.

But within its overall critique of capitalism Mad Men’s most persistent single recurring theme is that of sexual politics. In those days before workplace discrimination and harassment laws, women were treated abominably in the office. The two main female characters embodying this include Peggy Olson, who is sort of Jimmy Olsen, cub reporter, to Don’s Clark Kent. She starts off as a secretary but due to her talent and determination, rises to become Sterling Cooper’s first female copywriter. They have a rocky relationship, but while Don can be cutting to Peggy he recognizes her ability and pushes her to excel, even if he rarely verbalizes his appreciation of and respect for her. Although the married Don is a serial womanizer, in Mad Men’s first episode, he rebuffs Peggy when she places her hand on his, stressing that theirs is a working relationship, not a romance. Over the course of the series they help each other, developing an artist-to-artist rapport, becoming confidants, if not soul mates.

On the other hand, in early episodes as the insecure Pete Campbell is about to get married, he pursues Peggy, impregnating her. Coming from a strict Catholic background in provincial Brooklyn, at first Peggy doesn’t tell Pete and gives her child up for adoption. Just as Peggy struggles on the job, her private life is unhappy. In a lovely moment during the series’ Person to Person sign off, bearded, longhaired art director Stan Rizzo (who’d worked for LBJ’s 1964 campaign) and Peggy admit their love to one another. An important point to note is that this occurs right after Don has made a person-to-person (hence the episode’s title -- although 1950s TV icon Edward R. Murrow’s interview program bore the same name) phone call to Peggy from California, where he confesses his sins and flaws to her. Somehow, in doing so, this enables Peggy to be released, liberated and she opens up to Stan’s profession of love.

Joan Holloway Harris (Christina Hendricks) is Sterling's formidable office manager who must also wend her way through the trench warfare of sixties sexism. Like Peggy, even very late in season 7, she’s still belittled because she’s a woman (and also has a child out of wedlock). The scheming Joan also has an at times contentious relationship with Peggy and becomes a partner in the firm as payment for sleeping with a Jaguar exec to secure the sports car account. Her partnership enriches Joan, who is wooed in the final season by retired millionaire Richard Burghoff (Bruce Greenwood who, along with January Jones, co-stars in their first post-Mad Men roles in the anti-drone warfare movie, Good Kill). But Joan emerges as the show’s top feminist when she declines to marry Richard in order to form and run her own business. Within the confines of capitalist, patriarchal society, Joan is her own boss and in control. On the other hand, Betty, the housewife who gave up her modeling career for Don (twice), dies early.

What made Weiner’s program so outstanding is that he dramatized his commentary on capitalism with gripping plots peopled by eminently watchable flesh and blood characters. Draper, of course, takes pride of place. As his assumed name indicates, “Don” is hiding behind the drapes, having taken the name of another soldier killed while they are in Korea. (As the Wizard of Oz said: “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.”)  

Like Jay Gatsby, Dick Whitman seeks to remake himself and takes on a new identity. Watching the early episodes during the AMC marathon it became clearer what Don/Dick was running away from: His miserable childhood growing up at a farm during the Depression with a prostitute mother who died and an alcoholic father. This shattered Don/Dick sought to escape his dreary background by moving to Manhattan and “making it.” The handsome ad man’s compulsive womanizing, despite his marriages, may be subconscious efforts to find his mother and perhaps the elusive waitress, Di -- whom Don/Dick keeps asking if they’ve met before -- resembled his mother, his doomed Princess Di.

In any case, after Don/Dick and his partners completely lose their independence, swallowed up as a wholly owned subsidiary of the McCann Erickson mega-corporation, he simply walks out of a business meeting and goes Kerouac. On the road, he embarks on a cross-country odyssey, winding up at Big Sur, in an Esalen Institute-inspired countercultural haven. There he participates in group therapy and encounter group sessions. When another participant breaks down and cries, Don embraces and comforts him as he opens to empathy. Then, on a cliff at Big Sur, the azure ocean in the background, amidst hippie-looking men and women, the newly compassionate Don/Dick appears to be meditating and chanting “Om.” As a Buddhist bell sounds, cut to the famous 1971 Coca Cola commercial and jingle with multi-culti youths singing: “I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony” atop a green Italian hilltop.

Is Don/Dick, like Larry Darrell (depicted by Tyrone Power in 1946 and Bull Murray in 1984 screen versions) in Somerset Maugham’s classic 1944 novel, The Razor’s Edge, forsaking materialism and on a quest to attain inner peace and enlightenment? Has he turned his back on advertising, which crassly exploits the counterculture by fetishizing Coca Cola as “The Real Thing”? After all, this isn’t his first brush with alternative lifestyles. In the very first Mad Men Don/Dick’s initial extramarital fling was with an artsy woman who exposed him to Beatnik subculture in Greenwich Village.

Or does Don/Dick’s exposure to spiritual values lead to his becoming an avatar of admen who brings this notion of transcendental oneness back to McCann Erickson (which, in reality, did actually create the Coke ad, although under different circumstances) for the dream merchants to mercilessly manipulate, misuse and cash in on? Is this Dick Whitman’s evocation of Walt Whitman’s “universal soul”? Is Don/Dick perpetrating the ultimate fetishism of commodities by conjuring up a syrupy concoction of chemicals as the cure for humanity’s ailments so people are “All standing hand in hand/And hear them echo through the hills/For peace throughout the land”?

This wouldn’t be the first time mass advertising cynically exploited progressive ideals on the program. In Season 2’s 2008 episode, The Gold Violin, young copywriter Smitty Smith (Patrick Cavanaugh) reads 1962’s Port Huron Statement, the New Left’s founding document. Smitty isn’t endorsing the Students for a Democratic Society’s utopianism, but figuring out how to sell to the younger generation, as SDS’ ideals are misappropriated for a coffee advertising campaign using calypso music.

Revealing time and time again that under capitalism, nothing-- love, sex, participatory democracy, world peace, etc, -- is sacred and can’t be commodified, the enlightening Mad Men had a fine madness.

  

 

 

 

 

 

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FILM REVIEW: BUZZARD

Marty (Joshua Burge) in Buzzard.

Desperate but not serious

By Don Simpson

 

Marty Jackitansky (Joshua Burge) — he’s a “White Russian,” not Polish — is an angry young man. He mostly seems bitter about having to toil away his weekdays as a temp at a bank, though one might surmise that Marty would rather not have to work at all. Marty seems just barely cognizant enough about the economic system to find ways to scrounge together enough money each month to perpetuate his own existence. As a temp, Marty earns a pathetic hourly wage with no benefits, so he partakes in petty scams to make some extra dough — more like chump change.

 

Sticking it to the man, Marty orders office supplies online at work then returns them to the store for cash; he also closes his bank account in order to open a new one and collect the $50 incentive that comes along with it.

 

One day, a fateful stack of returned checks on his desk proves to be far too tempting for Marty, especially when he learns that checks can be signed over to another party. Not surprisingly, Marty does not think the check fraud plan completely through; he ends up on the lam in his friend’s (writer-director Joel Potrykus) basement. Armed with a taste for rebellion and a self-made Freddy Krueger glove, Marty finally escapes the bland conformity of the banking industry; but the perpetual weight of economic pressure finally gets too much for Marty, so he begins to lash out like a financially disgruntled nightmare.

 

Like Ape, Potrykus’ previous feature, Buzzard rails against conformity and capitalism. The economy is the ever-present villain of both films — no matter how much Marty or Ape‘s Trevor try to rebel against the system, they cannot defeat capitalism. Frustrated with the constant struggle, they turn to violence and presumably self-destruction.

 

The gritty cinematic worlds created by Potrykus are difficult for slackers to survive within, presumably because of their inherent laziness, ambivalence and naive expectations of the modern world. Neither of them are all that likable — they are quintessential fuck-ups — but it is difficult not to feel a tad bit sorry for Marty and Trevor as they burn, scavenge and claw for a right to exist; you might even go as far as saying that they are presented as martyrs for the non-conformists of the world.

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FILM REVIEW: THE GREAT GATSBY

A scene from The Great Gatsby.

Egg on the system

By Don Simpson

Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is manufactured in three dimensions of pure, unfiltered opulence. Taking its narrative cues from Fitzgerald’s novel, Luhrmann’s hyper-real universe is constructed by the storytelling devices of embellishment and exaggeration. Told entirely in flashback, Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) is a patient in a sanitarium as he begins to regurgitate his intoxicated recollections of the Summer of 1922. While telling his own story, Nick pieces together the personal history of his mysterious and eccentric neighbor, Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio). In conveying Gatsby’s story, Nick delves into the unreliable narrative of a man who created his entire life out of nothing. No one truly knows Gatsby because his history is all just an infinitely elaborate ruse. Luhrmann luxuriates in Gatsby’s knack for re-imagining and re-constructing the past — as Gatsby weaves unreal tales about himself, filtered for our consumption through the flowery verbosity of Nick’s prose, the film soaks in the artifice of the unbridled extravagance.

Showcasing the unreliability of Nick’s memories and Gatsby’s tall tales, Luhrmann interjects easily identifiable untruths into the film, such as mixing pop culture reference points of our present with the cultural counterparts of the 1920s. In doing so, Luhrmann establishes clear associations between the pop culture of the 1920s and the present. Hot jazz is mashed-up with hip hop and electronic music; the sexually provocative dancing of the 1920s is blended with modern dance; even the drunken debauchery of 1920s petting parties is modernized and amped up to near-Spring Breakers proportions.

Of course, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsbyfunctions as a critique of its characters’ overindulgence and gross decadence. It is a cautionary tale of becoming so engrossed in fantastical parties that reality all but fades away. Luhrmann, however, seems more interested in condemning the 1920s as the birth of the self-made man. Gatsby is very much a product of the capitalist free enterprise system which professes the concept that anyone can become rich. The stock market made it easy to get rich quick; so did bootlegging and other illegal enterprises. Traditionally wealthy families of East Egg such as Tom Buchanan’s (Joel Edgerton), who “earned” their money, looked down upon the new rich of West Egg like Gatsby, who lied and cheated their way into wealth.

The infinite levels of hyperactive falseness do not bode well for the dialogue and plot, which are mere afterthoughts for a man of style-over-substance such as Luhrmann. While most of Nick’s voiceover narrative does retain the literary fortitude of Fitzgerald’s poetic finesse, the dialogue seems overly-simplified and watered-down. The plot may hit most of the primary scenes of Fitzgerald’s novel, but Luhrmann seems much more comfortable conveying the themes of the story with visual allusions rather than words. This might have been a more interesting film if Luhrmann kept his actors silent, since they are often left spouting relatively pointless dialogue while having to rely upon pantomime to convey their character’s real emotions. On that note, DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan (who plays Daisy by way of flawlessly channeling Clara Bow) prove that they would have made fantastic silent film actors.

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THEATER REVIEW: HEARTBREAK HOUSE

Hector (Mark Lewis) and Hesione (Melora Marshall) in Heartbreak House.

Shaw are screwball

By Ed Rampell

I was especially eager and curious to see the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum’s excellent adaptation of Heartbreak House because I know little about George Bernard Shaw beyond his plays, Major Barbara and Pygmalion. To be sure, Heartbreak House is veddy British, and the Theatricum troupe regales the audience with convincing English accents, although its thespians are mostly or all Yanks. But there’s much more to this work than being a mere drawing-room comedy of manners.

Shaw wrote Heartbreak House under the influence of playwright Anton Chekhov, subtitling it A Fantasia in the Russian Manner of English Themes. However, Heartbreak House seems in turn to have had a major impact on American screenwriting and playwriting: It is arguably the prototypical screwball comedy, a genre which hit its prime on the silver screen during the Great Depression. Shaw’s play has the attributes of this breed of humor, notable for its madcap perspective and cross-class romancing, such as in Frank Capra’s 1934 It Happened One Night and George Cukor’s 1940 The Philadelphia Story. Indeed, Heartbreak House’s Bohemian household seems to be forerunners of the wacky, freethinking Sycamore family in Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman’s 1937 play You Can’t Take It With You, which Capra adapted for the screen a year later.

Heartbreak House debuted just as the twenties started to roar, and must have seemed very libertine in its day. With its shifting romantic liaisons, dalliances and alliances, the play seems as sexually footloose as characters in Woody Allen films, particularly his 1982 A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy.  The play is largely seen as an allegory of Europe on the eve of destruction, as World War I, that charnel house of trench warfare and poison gas (the WMDs of its day),looms. This conflagration is hinted at near the end, wherein director Ellen Geer makes good use of the Topanga Canyon grounds where the Theatricum’s amphitheater is set. In any case, what especially interests me about Shaw is that he takes complex theories about economics and class and renders them in dramatic form in a popular mass entertainment medium.

For example, in 1913’s Pygmalion, smug middle class Prof. Henry Higgins, that cunning linguist, indulges in class struggle (as well as the war between the sexes) with the plebian flower girl Eliza Doolittle, whom he endeavors to convert from a guttersnipe into a well mannered repository of respectability. (Along with Moss Hart, Lerner and Lowe famously transformed Pygmalion into the beloved musical My Fair Lady; incidentally, Rex Harrison starred in screen versions of My Fair Lady in 1964 and of Heartbreak House in 1985.) In 1905’s Major Barbara Shaw, a man of the left, dramatizes an economic theory about the role the armaments industry plays in industrial capitalism that is similar to that of the German Spartacist Rosa Luxemburg.

Shaw similarly skewers capitalism in Heartbreak House, and Alan Blumenfeld has good fun deconstructing Boss Mangan. At the heart of the play is whether or not the far younger and more attractive Ellie Dunn (Willow Geer) should wed this presumed man of means. Shaw poses the predicament: Is one to marry for money or love? He also reveals the dilemma of women during that era, disadvantaged by society’s chauvinist conventions and constrictions, and how marriages of conveniences were among the few options open to the so-called “fairer sex.”

Heartbreak House also references race relations. Captain Shotover, the world rover, mentions that he married a “Negress” in the Caribbean, which would make his coquettish daughters with their Greek myth inspired names, depicted by the Caucasian actresses Ariadne Utterword (Susan Angelo) and Hesione Hushabye (Melora Marshall), biracial. However, unlike in the Theatricum’s version of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, also playing this summer in repertory, the themes of miscegenation and race are barely if at all explored in its Heartbreak House.

To my untutored ear Willow affects a flawless English accent, as does most of the cast, as they toss Shavian barbs about like so many verbal Molotov cocktails. Willow’s Ellie convincingly careens from girlish innocence to Lady MacBeth-like scheming. As the family patriarch, Captain Shotover, Hunt is alternately daft and worldly wise, and dispenses some indispensable pearls of wisdom to befuddled Ellie. Mark Lewis is suitably dashing as the rakish raconteur Hector Hushabye, while Ed Giron as the bungling burglar, Aaron Hendry as Randall Utterword and David Stifel as Mazzini Dunn, all have suitably comic turns. On opening night some of the best dialogue was delivered by a dog who repeatedly barked during the first scene -- before adlibbing lines in a droll improv that led to the canine thespian’s expulsion from the stage.

Ellen skillfully helms the ensemble cast of around 15, but one standout who demands to be remarked upon is the mellifluous Marshall, who marshals her considerable energy and talent like a preternaturally gifted shape shifter. In the Theatricum’s Measure for Measure Marshall plays a mustachioed male character, but in Heartbreak House she portrays one of Captain Shotover’s daughters, the eccentric seductress Hesione Hushabye. As she slings zingers with savoir faire, clad in her gown and wig of long black tresses, Marshall is simply unrecognizable from the Lucio she depicts in Measure for Measure. A non-actor can only marvel at how thespians can transmute themselves from one role to another completely different, even diametrically opposed part.

There is much to commend this play to the viewer, but Marshall’s performance alone is worth the ticket price. This type of sophisticated theater driven by the oral pyrotechnics of Shaw’s dialogue may not be everyone’s cup of tea and crumpets, but to them I say “pshaw!” I loved this sparkling, sexy, witty gem.

Heartbreak House runs through September 30 at the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum, 1419 N. Topanga Canyon Blvd., Topanga. For more information: 310/455-3723; www.Theatricum.com.

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FILM REVIEW: MY PIECE OF THE PIE

France (Karin Viard) in My Piece of the Pie.

Sliced

By Don Simpson

Writer-director Cédric Klapisch's My Piece of the Pie  (Ma part du gateau) begins in Dunkirk with a birthday cake yet amidst the celebration, France (Karin Viard) attempts suicide. The quite purposefully named France is a single mother of three who is suffering from depression after the unexpected closure of the factory she had worked at for two decades.

Meanwhile in London, we learn that an evil power broker named Steve (Gilles Lellouche) recently closed a deal that prompted the shuttering of France’s employer. As a bonus, Steve accepts a job transfer that delivers him to Paris.

Meanwhile in Dunkirk, France — who is still recovering from her suicide attempt — cannot find another job; that is until she abandons her fellow factory workers and enters a housekeeper training program in Paris. The training program is designed for immigrants, so France must pretend that she is a foreigner so the other students do not get suspicious of national favoritism. (This could easily be interpreted as an anti-immigrant stance on behalf of Klapisch, as he “proves” to us that French Nationals actually want and deserve the lower class jobs that immigrants are stealing.)

Fate then rears its ugly hand and France is hired as Steve’s housekeeper. France — our working class heroine — is blinded by her income, especially as her salary multiplies upon becoming the nanny for Steve’s son (Lunis Sakji). France quickly learns that the millionaire lifestyle, however subservient her role may be, is not all that bad. Steve’s life, on the other hand, is devoted to the endless pursuit of profit at the expense of less privileged people, as My Piece of the Pie unspools into a cock-eyed message about how seemingly harmless business decisions have broader consequences than anyone could ever imagine. (Themes of financial accountability in this dog-eat-dog capitalist world come up again and again and again.)

And though she constantly ridicules Steve for not spending enough quality time with his son, France has all but abandoned her daughters in Dunkirk at the home of her sister (Audrey Lamy) in favor of spending more time with Steve’s son and thus making a lot more money. Nonetheless, we are supposed to believe that France is a decent, hard working woman who just so happens to have hit a lucky-yet-reckless streak. When France eventually sacrifices herself for her comrades at the factory back in Dunkirk, it is too little too late.

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FILM REVIEW: LOVE CRIME

Isabelle (Ludivine Sagnier) and Christine  (Kristen Scott Thomas) in Love Crime.

Business as usual

By Miranda Inganni

French film director Alain Corneau (Tous les matins du monde; Le deuxième soufflé) and co-screenwriter Natalie Carter created Love Crime to be a labyrinthine murder mystery. Unfortunately, as much as the plot's twists and turns are fun, just keep your hand on the left wall and you'll figure out this maze.

Slick, manipulative and crispy Christine (acutely played by the fluently French Kristen Scott Thomas) loves to capitalize on her meek, but mighty bright assistant, the submissive and streamlined Isabelle (Ludivine Sagnier). Both women take pride in their successes, but as Isabelle comes to realize that Christine is using and abusing her for professional gain and personal amusement, she starts to question her loyalty to her powerful boss (though not the corporation in which they both vie for favorable futures).

Instead of Isabelle fighting the corporate system, she decides -- after being pushed to the brink of self-destruction -- to work it from the inside and plots to take down her towering boss.

Humiliation and exploitation lead to murder and the obvious suspect goes to great lengths to establish her guilt, only in order to disprove it.

Don't be fooled. Despite two strong female lead characters, this is not a feminist film and there are no victors (victorias?). While revenge might be a dish best served warm (preferably with a glass of blood-red Bordeaux), there is nothing neither wise nor noble about it. The "winner" still comes out a loser.

In addition to the acting, one of the highlights is the music, or rather the lack thereof. Centered on Pharoah Sanders' improvisational jazz piece, "Kazuko," the score is practically non-existent, which helps to add tension and tenderness at the climax of the film, while not forcing emotion throughout it.

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THEATER REVIEW: THE POOR OF NEW YORK

A scene from The Poor of New York. Photo Credit:  Henry Holden

Not in but under America

By Ed Rampell

Serious theatergoers have a week left to go to NoHo to see one of the most unique stage offerings currently on the L.A. boards, the Group Repertory Theatre’s revival of Dion Boucicault’s 1857 The Poor of New York. Our economy recently underwent a series of disasters still vexing us but, due to the cyclical nature of capitalism this is nothing new; periodic crises will always be among us as long as there capitalists ride in the saddle. But the Irish playwright’s work starts during the Panic of 1837, which Group Rep’s Co-Artistic Director Larry Eisenberg described in an interview as America’s “first economic collapse, because of greed on Wall Street… Corruption is central to this… Thus this play seemed very relevant.”

Indeed, with its depictions of unemployment, eviction, foreclosure, begging, crime, suicide and other acts of desperation caused by destitution, The Poor of New York has a ripped from the headlines quality, although it’s more than 150 years old.  Stylistically, however, Boucicault’s melodrama is extremely melodramatic.

Eisenberg creatively borrowed from silent filmconventions, and there is actually a screen onstage at the Lonny Chapman Theatre with subtitles and some imagery projected onto it. The production’s props, sets and costumes bestow a period ambiance, as does recorded, old-fashioned music. Footlights mounted downstage enhance the sense of a theater-going experience at a mid-19^th century Broadway thee-a-tuh.     

All of these devices cleverly heighten what playwright Bertolt Brecht called “alienation” techniques that serve to remind spectators via an approach that distances them from the action that they are not watching reality but rather a staged presentation of an approximation of real life. The goal of Brecht and Eisenberg and the Group Repertory, at least here, is to prod auds to think about what they’re watching, instead of merely being emotionally engaged with the story and characters, so they can learn something from the Lehrstücke, or teaching play.

Eisenberg deftly directs the ensemble cast. As the cigar chomping, aptly named Badger, Van Boudreaux strikes the right melodramatic notes. Portraying the devious banker Gideon Bloodgood, Chris Winfield is in the mustache twirling,villainous tradition of bad guys in the Snidely Whiplash mode who used to declare: “Out! Out into the storm! And never darken my doorstep again!” Kate O’Toole is winsome as the love interest Lucy Fairweather while Trisha Hershberger is trashy as the spoiled bourgeois bitch, Alida Bloodgood, who thinks everyone and everything is for sale. It’s good fun watching the evildoers get their comeuppance, with creaky onstage pre-CGI special effects adding to the fun.

However, as this highly recommended play rightfully reminds us, poverty, then and now, is serious business. Greed was not good when perpetrated by Wall Street’s Gordon Gekkos of 1837, or today.

The Poor of New York runs through Sunday at the Group Repertory Theatre at the Lonny Chapman Theatre, 10900 Burbank Blvd., North Hollywood, CA 91601. For more info: 818)700-4878; www.theGrouprep.com 

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