Berkshires arts reviews

July 13, 2007 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

Playwright Crispin Whittell’s “Villa America,” although interesting and at times well acted, is, regretably, a flawed script that fails to deliver the“Making it New” life style that Gerald and Sara Murphy briefly (and successfully) established on the French Riviera before the spot was fashionable. This Williamstown Theatre Festival production is the world premiere.

Whittell himself may have applied too literally the making-it-new slogan that at roughly the same time as that covered in the play was being extolled by Pound while he urged Eliot and Joyce on, and in doing so structured his script in a “new” way - technically with four scenes beginning in 1968 and moving chronologically backward - 1926, 1923, to end in 1915 downstage left where it had begun in 1968 with Sara Murphy crouched by the wind-up phonograph.

The 1915 moment theoretically set the Murphys off on a life style that would become important in a brief but dynamically significant way, as a part of a movement we now call Modernism.

They were both central to the movement, briefly. Gerald even created modernist paintings, several of which can be viewed at the Williams College Museum of Art all summer, along with photos, documentary films and works of more famous artists nurtured in their salad days by the philanthropic Murphys.

In his play, Whittell gives Gerald little scope and his character, played by Karl Kenzler, seems a bit zany, out-classed, out of the loop, doing exercises or raking the beach.

Sara, according to the director’s notes, is the center around whom he has built his play. She is the queen bee around whom the other four men in the script buzz. Fitzgerald (Nate Corddry), Hemingway (Matthew Bomer) and Picasso (David Deblinger) make up the foursome.

At times each man will have a “Sara” scene in which her character and fascination are skillfully developed by Jennifer Mudge. Mostly it is all too disjointed and muddled to work.

Much of the confusion seems to arise from the mistaken idea of having an intermission in this ninety minute play, fracturing the structure even more disastrously in that it bisects scene two (with Hemingway eventually banished).

By scene three, a young Picasso, not yet terribly famous, has a brief seductive appearance, and the off-stage Zelda is already a problem. The scene ends on one brief moment of nudity and pearls that almost qualifies for that obligatory scene which “must-be-staged” no matter how the play is structured, but it is not enough to pull together the miscellaneous threads that tangle this play.

Despite many objections, the play is worth seeing if only after a visit to the Williams College Museum where you can learn more of the background that screams for inclusion in the play and that the playwright seems to have deliberately left out.

Moments of the play are fun with a strikingly handsome Hemingway (good casting) dragging in the fish he shot (and stole?) and advising Fitzgerald regarding sexual prowess and his Zelda problems. He bounds about the play with zest, chants his death wish (or dread) yearns for action, and has to be banished by Sara.

Picasso’s pudgy glistening body on the beach as he makes his play for Sara leads to one of the play’s few high spots.and probably evokes the period best.

Fitzgerald opens the play as a ghost visiting Sara and in general as a character within the play is too one note about problems with the off-stage Zelda. As performed he seems unlikely as the author of “Tender is the Night,” and Sara and Gerald do not seem, in
the play, much like the Divers in his novel, except for the symbolic pearls-on-beach.

As now running, the play seems one more in the process of becoming and is not neatly enough sorted out for the playwright’s intentions to be clear. The characters and material are worth a reworking into a possibly longer, and certainly differently organized
play.

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