Ever since native Eugenean and former Register-Guard reporter Janelle Hartman moved to Washington, D.C. nearly 20 years ago, people have been asking what she likes best about the region. Her response is always the same: “Being three hours and 15 minutes by train from New York City,” a trip she’s made countless times throughout her career in labor communications.
Of all the things she loves about the city, Broadway tops the list. Friends who’ve been reading her travel narratives for years have finally persuaded her to share her “travelogues” with a wider audience.
In her initial onstage travelogue, Hartman writes about her latest visit, and an exceptional new play.
By Janelle Hartman
Friday night of Columbus Day weekend, I had the good fortune to hang out out in an Irish farmhouse with three generations of a raucous family.
At least it felt that way, as I sat in the mezzanine of the Bernard Jacobs Theatre on West 45th Street in New York City’s Times Square during a preview performance of a new Broadway show, The Ferryman. I felt like a fly on the wall of the Carney home in Northern Ireland, the family brought to life by the finest ensemble cast — certainly on this scale — that I’ve ever seen. Not a scenery-chewer among them.
The Ferryman, which won wild acclaim in London last year, is a cavalcade of joy on the surface — a big, loud, loving, laughing, teasing, bickering family.
You meet most of them one at a time as they descend a slatted staircase for breakfast in the wood-beamed great room, a farm kitchen with cast-iron stove, long table and open shelves stacked with dishes, walls papered with children’s art, snapshots, old concert posters and other miscellany, bookcases spilling with odds and ends, much-played board games piled atop more clutter. A room where order and chaos intersect when you’ve got 14 people from infant to octogenarian living under one roof.
“It feels as if the show’s every molecule vibrates with bounteous life,” is how The New York Times’ Ben Brantley summed it up in his London review.
As the Carneys prepare for their harvest feast in late August 1981, Irish Republican Army prisoners are starving themselves to death on Margaret Thatcher’s watch. Some family members are fiercely loyal to the IRA; others suspect/know, or learn that day, that the IRA tortured and killed the Carney brother who vanished 10 years earlier.
The joy is real, palpable, but so is much else: the decades-deep wounds, the grief, the agony of undeclared passions and unrequited love, the tribal hatred and rage, the thirst for vengeance. It’s all laid bare over the course of three hours that lead to inevitable tragedy in the wee hours after the feast.
Some of the show’s lighter moments come in the form of rabbits pulled from an Englishman’s pocket, an unflappable goose (whose character is about to become dinner) and a real live baby. Honestly, I can’t remember another show I’ve seen that’s cast an actual baby. It was surprising enough seeing a toddler on stage at the end of 2016’s Waitress.
Baby boy Carney looked to be about 8 months old. He made three or four appearances on stage in front of 1,100 people, no crying, no fussing. I’d been telling people that he (or she) “played” his part as perfectly as everyone else. But skimming the script on my Kindle, I discovered that he doesn’t take direction well. He’s meant to be crying as the second act opens. Instead, under dim lights, there he is alone on the stage, lying on a pillow on the flagstone floor, happy as a clam, scooped up a moment later and danced about by his teenage sister, one of his six siblings. (Audience, amazed, as eyes adjust: Is that the baby?!) Four babies rotate performances, I learned from the Times this week in a story saluting a Broadway season rich with plays instead of jukebox and movie musicals. (King Kong, now in previews, is one of the exceptions, and, yes, it’s on my list. Pretty Woman, which I saw last month, was largely a disappointment.)
I wish I could tell you that The Ferryman can be replicated in a touring or local production. But it seems an impossibility, given all the moving parts that are working in such synchronicity right now at the Jacobs. I don’t think I’ve ever been less aware of people acting, a credit to the brilliant cast – same as in London — and to sensational direction by Sam Mendes.
In fact, so far many of the regulars who rule the Broadway message boards with biting commentary have been awestruck. (To be clear, I am a nobody in that snarky crowd, a tiny ant of a theatergoer whose collection of 250-plus Playbills would be “cute” next to theirs.) A handful of outliers — and even Hamilton has outliers – complain of boredom or fault The Ferryman in other ways. Even among the awed, some are unhappy about or perplexed by the way the particular tragedies play out in the end. I’ve got at least one foot in that camp myself, but it didn’t take away from an otherwise extraordinary evening of theater.
Despite The Ferryman being as long as my train ride — three hours and 15 minutes, including intermission and a break to stand and stretch between the 2nd and 3rd acts — it virtually flew by. Some of the theater diehards said as much online after the first performances. Happily for my somewhat ADD-self, they were right. Very few shows exceed three hours, as that’s when overtime kicks in. Most are a maximum of 2 hours 45 minutes. As much as I’m enjoying a show, even a relatively short one, I typically long to escape my cramped seat. Friday night, I was too enthralled to notice. Admittedly, it helped to be on the aisle, but there’s still less legroom than flying coach.
The next day, using my Roundabout Theatre subscription, I saw the Saturday matinee of off-Broadway’s Apologia, starring a forceful Stockard Channing as a ’60s activist who’d long ago given up on the United States and moved to England. Thought-provoking and some great lines, and often funny, but not quite the visceral experience of The Ferryman.
As for the rest of my whirlwind two-day visit, I spent hours wandering in lovely weather over ground I hadn’t covered for a while. I encountered more characters than usual along the way — the costumed variety, at least. It was as if the population of bedraggled, tourist-duping Superheroes that impede pedestrian traffic in Times Square had exploded across New York’s west side: Supermen, Batmen, Spidermen, Wonder Women, a hard-shelled Ninja Turtle in my hotel elevator, and the rest of the comic book, Star Wars and Star Trek universes embodied with various degrees of commitment by every age and shape. This wasn’t my first collision with Comic-Con weekend in NYC, but I intend to do a better job avoiding it in the future.
I trekked through SoHo and Greenwich Village, popped by the mouth-watering Union Square farmers market, found colorful new NYC-themed dishes a few blocks north at the forever-crowded Fishs Eddy, and strolled up Lexington Avenue through one of the season’s few remaining street fairs, where I pounced on the hunter green tote I didn’t buy last month, as well as $5 exercise gear that might survive more than one workout. I cooed over the sweet babies at the kitty shelter booth and left a $20 donation. Ten minutes later, I won $20 on a free scratch-off at the NY Lottery stand.
That good karma lasted about five minutes, until I started to head back to the West Side for my matinee. I suddenly realized the sweater I’d balled up in my purse was gone, which wouldn’t have surprised anyone who saw me digging through my mess of a bag at a half-dozen booths. I retraced my steps for eight or 10 blocks and found it at the last place possible. I guess that was good karma, too, interrupted by the cursing in my head. I was less concerned about losing the sweater than I was about freezing to death during Apologia — and, as it turned out, I well might have.
I plan to get back to NYC at least a couple of times this fall, with more new shows high on my agenda. Topping the list: Brian Cranston — who was magnificent as LBJ in All The Way four years ago — in the Broadway premier of Network, and Jeff Daniels as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird.
A rich theater season, indeed.
