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| The Glory of Living Synopsis |
play reviewed by theater.com
In the opening scene of Rebecca Gilman's extraordinarily affecting new play about serial murder and sexual abuse, a 15-year-old girl (Anna Paquin) sits hunched on a couch in a trailer trying to ignore the sounds of her mother entertaining a john behind a jerry-rigged sheet. Sitting with her on the couch is the client's companion, a young drifter (Jeffrey Donovan) who proceeds to try to make conversation with the girl. It's ambiguous talk that might be kindness-an attempt to dispel the awkwardness of an impossible situation-or it might not, and the girl seems to know this. So we relax a little. We let down our guard, and even when the drifter begins pointing things out to the girl about her "body language," we allow ourselves to think that she can take care of herself-that some combination of the adolescent hostility and sexual savvy she demonstrates will come into play before too long and act as a deterrent to predatory behavior. Later, we will come to understand that the scene was a seduction of the audience as much as of one character by another. We'll look back and remember how we were made to experience all the intricate, complex feelings of an adolescent girl encountering predatory behavior for the first time-the uncertainty and discomfort, the embarrassment and fear, and, most of all, the idiotic conviction that everything will be all right.
The Glory of Living, which the Manhattan Class Company is presenting in a no-frills production exquisitely directed by the actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, is about how someone who is not a psychopath could end up committing acts of unimaginable cruelty and brutality. It sets out to make incomprehensible acts comprehensible without suggesting we should either condone or excuse them. As such it's very much a play for this particular moment. It also represents a departure for Gilman. In the past, Gilman's protagonists have tended to be highly articulate and educated individuals confronting specific problems, like the assistant dean confronting campus hate-crimes in Spinning Into Butter, or the high-powered journalist in Boy Gets Girl, whose life is destroyed by a stalker. These were characters who loved words and ideas, and who expressed themselves beautifully and at great length-sometimes too beautifully and at too-great length, so that the plays were all telling, no showing.
The world Gilman creates in The Glory of Living is as far as it could be from the bastions of literature and learning that her other plays have focused on. We are in dirt-poor, rural Alabama, where no one uses words particularly well and few people have any experience of abstract ideas. You do what you need to do without thinking about it, whether that means turning tricks with your youngest on the other side of the partition or procuring under-age girls for your husband to violate and abuse. A case-study in the pathology of powerlessness, The Glory of Living gives us a chance to see how Gilman does away from the device of the insightful, self-analyzing character, and she does just fine. Better than fine.
The play is a sort of psychological mystery from which everything we take away is learned without characters explaining themselves or telling us what they think or how they feel. As we watch Lisa, a passive and apparently amoral young woman, take part in a sequence of unimaginable crimes to appease her psychopathic husband, nothing is clear. No explanation is offered. We don't always know what's happening, and we rarely understand anything Lisa does. But because Paquin, the extraordinary Oscar-winning actress from Jane Campion's film, The Piano, plays her, the very lack of an explanation becomes hugely expressive, and we want to know what it's expressive of. What kind of rage is this we're looking at? What would explain Lisa's willingness to visit on others, even smaller and more defenseless than she, the kind of suffering she inflicts? What motivates Lisa's complicity? Why doesn't she run away or try to help the girls? And what strange motivational construct leads her to begin tipping off the police to where the bodies are?
In a sense, Gilman is playing chicken with a dramatic idea, trying to see how heinous a picture of human consciencelessness she can paint and still, without ever asking us to sympathize with her protagonist, manage to move us in the play's closing moments. It makes for a difficult but ultimately rewarding two hours. The Glory of Living is tough to watch at times, and always bewildering, but uplifting in the way of great tragedy that has been flawlessly produced and performed, where the very real human achievement entailed in bringing a grim story to life offsets the devastating nature of its content. Here, consummate acting in the form of understated ensemble work plays a big part. Hoffman has directed with astonishing truth and integrity, skirting pity and melodrama, keeping us ever a little off-balance, so that we're never able to disengage completely and categorize or define what's happening. "Okay that's what this is. It's a play about spousal abuse or sexual abuse or child abuse or victimized women. The Glory of Living is about all those things, yes, but finally it's about something much more ineffable, a kind of disenfranchisement exponentially projected and endlessly mirrored in one person's defeated vision of other people's lives.
play reviewed by variety.com
Anna Paquin is reunited with a piano, oddly enough, in "The Glory of Living," Rebecca Gilman's bleak slice-of-lowlife play about amoral young killers in the American South. The Oscar-winning star of "The Piano," now 19, is making her stage debut Off Broadway as an abused, neglected teenager who winds up on death row. The sad symbol of the childhood she never had is a toy piano she clings to as a memento from a distant but scarcely happier time.
"Glory of Living" actually predates the two Gilman plays that already have been produced in New York, "Spinning Into Butter" and "Boy Gets Girl." Originally produced in Chicago in 1997 and seen at London's Royal Court Theater in early 1999, "Glory" is less overtly a think piece than the other two, but it is also the product of a skilled, intelligent writer with a fondness for diagnostics (and an occasionally heavy hand: The thuddingly ironic title is dubious).
This time the case study is culled from a lower social milieu, the white trash of the Deep South. The play's grisly opening scene finds 15-year-old Lisa (Paquin) making desultory conversation with the older Clint (Jeffrey Donovan), a clumsy sweet-talker, while her mother has noisy sex with a customer on the other side of a sheet strung up in the middle of their dingy one-room apartment.
In the course of the second scene, we learn that Lisa and Clint are married. He's been in and out of jail. She's had twins and spent some time in foster homes. They're now holed up in a dumpy hotel room (Michelle Malavet's sets are grimily on the mark, and lit in apt, ugly antiseptic shades by James Vermeulen).
Clint, played by Donovan with frighteningly amiable menace, alternates physical abuse and ugly threats with words of affection. Midway through the scene, Lisa storms angrily into the bathroom and Clint drags from behind a bed the limp body of a barely clothed young girl. Lisa, it seems, has become a kind of procurer for Clint; eventually it's revealed that she also dispatches the victims afterward with his gun.
We see a couple of their hapless victims: vague, empty-eyed girls whose histories, it is hinted, mirror Lisa's. Moved by inchoate feelings of remorse, Lisa calls the police afterward and describes the locations of their bodies. In act two, Lisa's lawyer tries to probe her blank mind for some understanding of the circumstances that turned her into the willing tool of a monstrous man, but she's hardly capable of the perspective required.
Because it deals with characters whose capacities for complex thought and feeling have been left undeveloped by neglect, Gilman's play cannot really illuminate their interior lives through dialogue. The playwright presents the ugly facts in authentic-feeling detail, but serious emotional engagement is hard when a play's characters can only reveal how hollow they are. We can cluck sadly at the circumstances that brought about this waste of humanity (or snort at the inescapable bit of white-trash black comedy), but since there's actually no humanity on display, there's nothing to move us beyond simple disgust
Philip Seymour Hoffman's direction emphasizes, even exacerbates, the play's chilly, clinical tone. Paquin is convincing as a young girl who has had all the potential drained out of her by 15, and the furtive way she moves her eyes, seeming always to be trained on a corner of the room, is effective. But her affectless delivery of the dialogue, while presumably intentional, is nevertheless monotonous and serves to alienate us further from the character. An actress with more stage experience might be able to communicate nuances in the character's stunted psyche more movingly.
Many of the other actors tap into the same zombielike key: the talented actresses who play the victims, for example, and even Andrew McGinn, playing a man who was shot by Lisa and whose girlfriend was killed by her. When he exhorts her lawyer, "Give her the chair," he says it with an almost complete absence of emotion.
Only late in the second act, when Lisa's lawyer, Carl (the skilled, affecting David Aaron Baker), begins coaxing some glimmers of awareness out of her, does the play begin to resemble something other than a documentary. But the drama that is the play's ostensible subject -- the destruction of a child's humanity -- is essentially over before it begins. We see only the aftermath, which is a repellent spectacle, certainly, but not particularly dramatic and definitely not what you'd call entertaining.
play reviewed by backstage.com
Nineteen-year-old actress Anna Paquin, best known for her Oscar-winning performance in "The Piano" (it was 1993 and she was 10 years old at the time), admits that playing a white trash serial-killer in the ironically titled "The Glory of Living" is, shall we say, challenging.
"I have to get myself into the head of someone who commits murder in order to get somebody's love. Obviously, there's nothing in Lisa's circumstances that are similar to mine, but I think I can understand the sentiments behind what she does. No, I don't think she is dumb, " Paquin underscores. "Actually, Lisa is smart, but not educated. I believe anyone can find himself in a situation where he lets someone else control his life, where someone else's approval is so important, he'll destroy himself."
But then Lisa is not destroying herself, but everyone else she and her trailer-park husband (Jeffrey Donovan) pick up for sexual trysts on their rides through the backwoods of Alabama. The play, a new work by Rebecca Gilman, bowed Off-Broadway at the Manhattan Class Company on Nov. 14.
Bringing to mind the movies "Badlands," "Bonnie and Clyde," and "Pulp Fiction," this piece tells the story of a violent but charming low-life drifter and his beleaguered wife (Paquin), who helps him pick up girls for rolls in the hay--sometimes she participates, sometimes not--and then proceeds to kill the hapless creatures. Lisa has some vague sense that what she is doing is wrong and ultimately calls the cops. She and her husband are captured, convicted, and sentenced. As the trigger woman--she does the killing, not hubby--Lisa faces the electric chair.
The central conundrum posed by the play--and one or two of the characters in it--is this: If Lisa knows that what she is doing is wrong, why doesn't she at least try to escape?
"She has no self-awareness of a life other than her own,' stresses the Winnipeg-born, New Zealand-raised Paquin, who is chatting with us over the phone. "She has no idea that she has a choice. Her love for her husband is her whole life. Without him, she feels she is nothing. If I didn't have my family, if I weren't doing what I'm doing, maybe I might be where Lisa is."
A debatable statement; the two women couldn't be further apart. Paquin's journey is a success story, the stuff of fairy tales. She never took an acting class, and her first gig--through an open casting call--was her star turn in "The Piano," which led to roles in a host of movies, including "Finding Forrester," "Almost Famous," "X-Men," "Amistad," "Fly Away Home," and "Jane Byre." But acting, a profession she has scored in with virtually no struggle, is only part of the picture. Paquin is also a sophomore at Columbia University, where she is thinking about majoring in either literature or comparative lit, with an emphasis on French literature.
"I will be studying literature because it interests me," says Paquin. "But I plan to continue as an actress."
Paquin has taken the semester off to appear in "The Glory of Living," marking her theatrical debut. Two new films she recently made will be released shortly: the thriller, "Darkness," with Lena Olin, and "Buffalo Soldiers," co-starring Joaquin Phoenix and Ed Harris, to be released by Miramax.
A Half-Day Off from School That Never Ended
Paquin does not come from a theatrical family; indeed, both her parents are high school teachers and neither groomed the young Paquin for an acting career. And, as Paquin tells it, she never had her sights set on show biz, either. She wasn't even "much of a TV or movie watcher."
So how did it all come about? As noted, Paquin responded to an open call in a local newspaper. "Some kids in class told me about it and I thought, 'How cool. I'll get half a day off from school.' It never occurred to me that I'd get the part or be an actress. Since that time, I've done, on average, a movie a year."
Looking back, Paquin says she has no regrets; she does not feel she lost out on a more normal--perhaps even happier--childhood and adolescence. In fact, except for the time that she was on a movie set, where she studied with private tutors, Paquin suggests that her life was quite ordinary. "When I wasn't on a set, I was in school, hanging out with the other kids." She stresses, "I've had incredible opportunities that have enriched my life."
In light of her success, it's not surprising that she doesn't view her lack of formal acting training as a loss, not that she has any philosophical objections to MFAs or theatre conservatories or even private acting classes. "It's just that I've had no time. I've worked with terrific actors and I've learned from on-the-job experience." She adds, "I wouldn't even know how to go about looking for an acting school or teacher."
Paquin insists that she'd love to do some more theatre; there are no parts or plays she is dying to sink her teeth into, but she knows "that when the next play comes along that feels like the right thing, I'll do it."
One thing is certain: for Paquin, "The Glory of Living" is the right thing. Or so she proclaims, adding that she hopes audiences find the material as intriguing as she does. If theatregoers view Lisa, her predicament, and her responses to it as ambiguous--that's okay, too.
"I would like audiences to walk out of the theatre thinking about what they've just seen, going over it, saying to themselves, 'My God, it's over,' and then wondering how did that all happen. Each person's response, of course, is going to depend on his own experiences. Some people are going to be frightened, and others will be disturbed."
Not every audience, as a collective unit, reacts to the play in the same way, Paquin continues. "It varies from night to night. There are audiences who will laugh at the funny sections and gasp at the dark sections. Other audiences will laugh at everything. Still others are not sure if they should laugh at all. I know that those of us who are in it are not as shocked by the material as we were in the beginning. We are discovering more comedy."
In fact, Paquin believes that at the end Lisa has found a certain freedom--if not happiness--even as she confronts her death sentence. "This may not be obvious to the audience, but it's what I feel about Lisa."
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