FeedA bittersweet tribute to a Buffalo icon: The Grand Manner
Art and artifice collide in A.R. Gurney’s new play, The Grand Manner, now playing at Lincoln Center. As with many of Gurney’s works, the play is inspired by Gurney’s own life. While just a schoolboy, Gurney briefly met the great actress Katharine Cornell, and this encounter fuels The Grand Manner. What begins as a simple re-creation of Gurney’s fifteen-minute brush with Cornell expands into a fantasia about what might been … and the fine line between the grand and the mannered.
Of course, Cornell, like Gurney, grew up in Buffalo. Sharing a hometown creates instant rapport between the play’s Cornell and Pete (Gurney’s dramatic stand-in, charmingly played with abashed aplomb by Bobby Steggert). Buffalo references abound. In the first ten minutes alone, Buffalo’s mentioned 17 times. Later, Cornell recalls playing hockey in Delaware Park and confesses that despite all her elocution lesions, she refuses to shake what she calls her “Buffalo R.” “Without my Buffalo R’s, I’d feel fake and mid-Atlantic, like those Hollywood actresses who try to play rich women,” she says.
Cornell longs for an artistic home, a place where she doesn’t have to hide behind mannered speech or grandiloquent gestures. Playing the Erlanger in Buffalo, surrounded by people who knew her before she was famous, is as close as she gets. In one of the play’s more moving moments, Cornell tells Pete:
It will always be home. And they know that in Buffalo. They know who I am. I can’t get away with a trick when I’m there. I may be playing some strange part, but they see through it. Or not so much through it, but underneath it, or beyond it. They see the foundation. Because they know me. They know my family. And that’s what we want in life, don’t we, Peter, in the end? Don’t we want to be known?
For the play’s Cornell, then, the struggle is between being grand and being honest. She fears her style, once daring, has now calcified. Young Pete can only be dazzled by her glamour, but he gradually realizes that inevitably, Cornell must pass the torch to the next generation. Still, in her best moments Cornell does, like the Juliet she played at age 38, teach the torches to burn bright. Despite her anxiety, she still displays some powerful acting chops, including a snide slide into a flirtatious Blanche Dubois and a thrilling re-creation of Cleopatra’s death scene (a thrill due as much to Kate Burton’s charismatic Cornell as much as Gurney’s sturdy script).
Cornell is the long-forgotten “First Lady of American Stage.” In celebrating her, The Grand Manner becomes a bittersweet valentine to American theater, a tribute to its lost magic as well an acknowledgement of its cruelty. Overall, the play lacks urgency, and it drags in places, despite Mark Lamos’ crisp direction. True, it’s deliberately set up as a fiction, as “what might have been,” but Pete’s prolonged backstage visit strains belief, not to mention dramatic tension. Sturdily constructed and carefully measured, the play is as smoothly “grand” —and lacking in organic, messy, pulsing life—as Cornell fears herself to be. It’s “Genteel” with a capital G, or as Cornell defines genteel in the play, “self-consciously respectable…It means going to the theatre and congratulating yourself while you’re doing it.” For as much as Grand Manner contemplates the unease between art and pretense, it comfortably sweeps this unease under the carpet and wraps things up in a tidy, inspirational bow by the end. Cornell shoves her anxiety aside after some Shakespeare, and Pete becomes a playwright—and all is well with the world, just like that.
Nevertheless, like the compelling figure of Cornell he’s created, Gurney’s play still startles with flashes of inspiration. Cornell’s monologue about longing for home is one such moment, Pete’s discovery of his story-telling skill is another. There are many grandly humorous scenes, as when Pete inadvertently compares Cornell ‘s Cleopatra to his grandmother, when Cornell’s manager and lover, Gertie (the deadpan Brenda Wehle) wryly explains what Pete can discuss with her employer, or when Cornell’s husband and director, Guthrie McClintic (smoothly played by Boyd Gaines) tries to explain his rationale for cutting Shakespeare.
Ultimately, The Grand Manner is more respectable than grand, a well-made play for the self-congratulatory masses. And yet, in its gently entertaining way, it’s endearing, a pleasant fantasy of nostalgia tinged with regret. To dismiss it would be less than genteel.
The Grand Manner by A.R. Gurney
Directed by Mark Lamos, Featuring Kate Burton, Boyd Gaines, Bobby Steggert, Brenda Wehle
Through Aug. 1
Tues.-Sat at 8 pm, Matinees on Wed. and Sat. at 2 pm and Sunday at 3 pm
The Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, Lincoln Center, 150 W. 65th St., New York, NY 10023
Tickets: $80 and $85
Tickets available through Lincoln Center Box Office (www.lct.org) or Telecharge (www.telecharge.com and 212-239-6200)
Length: 95 minutes, no intermission
Heather J. Violanti is a dramaturg and playwright
