Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Arts & Entertainment

Music Review
Sharps and Flats
The first serious Grateful Dead retrospective is riddled with confounding decisions, stupid mistakes and beautiful music -- just like the band.
By Seth Mnookin
[11/29/99]

Movie Review
"End of Days"
Arnold's back, with a Jesus Christ pose.
By Andrew O'Hehir
[11/24/99]

Movie Review
"Tumbleweeds"
Mom just wants to have fun, daughter sulks. Haven't we seen this movie before?
By Stephanie Zacharek
[11/24/99]

Movie Review
"Toy Story 2"
Buzz and Woody get warm and fuzzy in Pixar's terrific sequel.
By Janelle Brown
[11/24/99]

Music Review
Sharps and Flats
Fiona Apple transforms from a flinty "Shadowboxer" to a raging bull.
By Alex Pappademas
[11/24/99]

Complete archives for Arts & Entertainment

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

He needs to, because that's the way the play -- a 1954 hit now best known for the movie version starring Burt Lancaster and Katharine Hepburn -- is constructed. It's set in a tiny, mid-Depression Midwestern town whipped by a long drought; the drought is an emblem for the female protagonist, Lizzie Curry (Jayne Atkinson), who's heading for spinsterhood. Starbuck appears out of the windless night, claiming implausibly that he can conjure up a storm for a hundred bucks, and puts an end to both dry spells.

The Rainmaker By N. Richard Nash Directed by Scott Ellis for the Roundabout Theatre Company New York

Nash's play is hokey and homiletic, and there's no music in the lines. Starbuck corners Lizzie, pointing out the nervousness that, along with her pragmatic dismissal of his boastfulness, conceals her sexual terror, and you long for the poetic intensity that Nash's contemporary, Tennessee Williams, could imbue a similar encounter with in a play like "The Eccentricities of a Nightingale."

Instead you have to settle for the usual brand of Broadway-drama speechmaking as the characters tell glaringly obvious home truths about each other. They've been drawn mostly to fulfill functions. Lizzie has a wise, loving father (Jerry Hardin, in a sweet-natured performance) and two brothers who stand at opposite ends of the spectrum: the elder, Noah (John Bedford Lloyd), the practical one, who runs the farm and says things like "Drought's a drought, and a dream's a dream," and the younger, Jim (the immensely likable David Aaron Baker), who's driven by his hormones.

Sense-talking Noah continually tries to control Jim -- to take him down a peg, to harness his youthful wildness -- but Starbuck champions the boy, just as he fights for Lizzie when Noah tells her to face up to the fact that she's doomed to be an old maid. Lloyd gives a believable performance in a bummer of a role -- a man whose confidence in his own eternal rightness sours everyone's milk. And Ellis gets as much cartoon humor as he can out of the early scenes between the brothers, playing Lloyd's rangy cowhand looks against Baker's toad-hopping energy so they're like a squabbling Mutt and Jeff.

Ellis and the actors deserve a lot of credit: Nothing exposes the limitations of Nash's imagination more than the joshing male exchanges in this play, especially the one where Lizzie's father and brothers try to entice the laconic deputy sheriff, File (Randle Mell), into courting her. Mell is suitably sturdy and he has an amiable low-key humor, but emotionally repressed File, who can't admit his wife ran off on him, is almost as crummy a part as Noah. (The biggest mistake the play gets by with is matching him up with Lizzie, whom we love.)

Next page | Harrelson's hound-dog approach to acting