Lawrence Harbison, The Playfixer, brings you up to date with what’s hot and what’s not in New York and this, week, Stratford, Canada.  This week, Larry tells you about ANOTHER PART OF THE FOREST, LITTLE DOC, DIETRICH AND CHEVALIER, WHEN WE GO UPON THE SEA and my visit to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. 

The Peccadillo Theatre Company, dormant for a while, has come roaring back with a superb production of Lillian Hellman’s Another Part of the Forest, at the Theatre at St. Clement’s. I was unfamiliar with this play, as it pretty much fell into obscurity after its modest Broadway run during the 1946-1947 season, so for me this was like seeing a new play. It was a great way to end a theatrical season loaded with terrific plays by women. 

Another Part of the Forest is a prequel to Hellman’s most famous play, The Little Foxes, and deals with the dysfunctional Hubbard family, who make O’Neill’s Tyrones look like the Cleavers. The pater familias, Marcus, rules the roost with an iron hand, which extends to his frustrated wife Lavinia and his two sons, Benjamin and Oscar, who work for him in virtual indentured servitude. Regina, his daughter and the main character in The Little Foxes, is his father’s pet; but she too has her own agenda, and the seeds are sown for her titanic struggle against Benjamin and Oscar in The Little Foxes. Benjamin is continually scheming to find a way to get the old man’s money, and eventually he succeeds. 

Peccadillo’s production, beautifully directed by Dan Wackerman, makes a fine case for this play as a forgotten American classic, and the actors are just wonderful. Sherman Howard is appalling (and I mean that in a good way) as the vile Marcus, and Matthew Floyd Miller is brilliantly devious as Benjamin. 

The play runs about 3 hours but you never have the sense that it is over long. It’s a don’t-miss. 

Dan Klores’ Little Doc, at Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre, is a fascinating though ultimately unfilled drama about drug hustlers in 1970’s Brooklyn. Ric, the only character in the play who might escape this life, may or may not have stolen $50,000 from Manny, sort of a father figure to him. He plans to run off with the wife of his best friend, who doesn’t seem to care, to start a new life. 

The play builds to a tragic ending which, unfortunately, the playwright doesn’t supply; but if you don’t mind spending time with a bunch of despicable lowlifes, Little Doc is worth seeing, particularly for the fine performances, most notably by Adam Driver, who continues to impress me, as Rick. 

Dietrich and Chevalier, at the Theatre at St. Luke’s, is a bio-musical by Jerry Mayer about two great entertainment icons, Marlene Dietrich and Maurice Chevalier, who met in Hollywood in 1932 and carried on a love affair (though each was married to someone else), before parting. Both ran up against the Nazis. Dietrich managed to trump them, while Chevalier allowed himself to be blackmailed into performing in Paris during the German occupation, finding himself on trial for collaboration after the war ended.

 Interspersed with this fascinating story are songs closely identified with each, ably performed by Robert Cuccioli as Chevalier and Jodi Stevens as Dietrich. Neither looks much like his/her character, but they manage to embody their unique style of singing. 

This one is, I think, for theatergoers old enough to remember Maurice Chevalier and Marlene Dietrich. Younger people may wonder what the fuss over them was all about. 

The prolific Lee Blessing has a new one, at 59 E 59^th’s Americas Off Broadway Festival, When We Go Upon the Sea, a “what-if” play which imagines former President George W. Bush hauled before the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague. The play takes place in a suite in a first-class hotel the night before Bush’s trial is to begin. The concierge does everything he can to make the former president comfortable, which extends to bringing in a mysterious woman, who may or not be his wife, to provide him with torrid sex. 

Had this play been about the imagined trial, it might have been interesting. As it is, I just found it silly and distasteful, a rare misfire for this fine playwright. The actors are good, but you could give this a miss. 

Finally, I visited the Stratford Shakespeare Festival for the first time in many years, seeing two plays, As You Like It and The Tempest, both directed by Stratford’s Artistic Director Des McAnuf. As The Tempest was in previews when I saw it, I really can’t comment on it, other than to say the production stars Christopher Plummer as Prospero. Well, heck – let me just say that Plummer is predictably amazing. 

McAnuf has set the first part of As You Like It in a 1920’s fascist state. When we move into the Forest of Arden, we enter a surreal world right out of Magritte, replete with extras standing around wearing animal and flower-bush heads. McAnuf gets a little carried away with this concept, I think, but the acting is of such a high quality that it doesn’t matter. Brent Glover makes a fine Jacques, more quizzical than misanthropic, and Andrea Runge is a delight as Rosalind. 

In my opinion, all lovers of classical theatre should make the pilgrimage to Stratford at least once. It’s a lovely town, and there you’ll find the best Shakespearean productions this side of that other Stratford, across the Big Pond. 

 “It requires a certain largeness of spirit to give generous appreciation to large achievements. A society with a crabbed spirit and a cynical urge to discount and devalue will find that one day, when it needs to draw upon the reservoirs of excellence, the reservoirs have run dry.” 

                             —– George F. Will