Salon.com > Steve Vineberg

Maggie Smith

Tue, 06 Jun 2000 19:11:00 +0000

The etchings of style in a Maggie Smith performance are unmistakable. First observe the face, with its sharp, art-deco angles, which she tends to stretch into a long rectangle to chart psychic damage, the lines creased as if with a palette knife, the lips pressed taut, elongating the skin between her lips and her nose and lending it a moneyed air. She can alter the shape of her luminous nut-brown eyes to italicize a word or a phrase. Her string-bean figure is Modigliani-like in some settings, meager and scarecrowlike in others. In comic roles, her wire-drawn body becomes a mannequin for wondrous costumes, especially hats. Her arms paint the air in broad waves of expressive color, and as she swivels her frame around, usually in counterpoint to her line readings, she does so many witty things with her rubbery wrists that they're almost always the first thing you focus on when she walks onstage or appears on-screen. (Pauline Kael once dubbed her "Our Lady of the Wrists.")

Nick Nolte

Tue, 14 Dec 1999 17:00:00 +0000

Nick Nolte is like Clark Gable with an anguished soul. Writing about him in 1982, when he'd been playing movie leads for about half a decade, the critic Pauline Kael called him "an ideal screen actor -- believable, and with a much larger range than McQueen or Wayne." Like Steve McQueen and John Wayne in their best roles, it's his physical actions that often articulate what's going on under the surface; like Gable and Mitchum, he's magically relaxed on screen and projects an outsize, sprawling likability. But his real lineage is agonized men's men like William Holden and Dana Andrews and Robert Ryan, and later Paul Newman -- actors whose sensitivity complicates their macho credentials.

“The Rainmaker”

Mon, 29 Nov 1999 17:00:00 +0000

Woody Harrelson is ideally cast as Starbuck, the con man in love with his own
con, in the new Broadway revival of N. Richard Nash's "The Rainmaker." He brings
his trademark wised-up bumpkin presence to the role, his mad satyr's grin, his
unmistakable touch of self-parody. Scott Ellis' production for the Roundabout
Theatre Company (which premiered in a limited run at the Williamstown Theatre
Festival last year) is beautifully crafted and deeply pleasurable, but it's
Harrelson who brings it to life.

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.

“Silent Stars” by Jeanine Basinger

Mon, 01 Nov 1999 17:00:00 +0000

The heyday of silent movies began in 1915, when D.W. Griffith released "The Birth of a Nation"; not quite a decade and a half later they were shoved into an early grave by the invention of talkies. Watching them now, you enter a coded, embroidered world that feels as remote as the Middle Ages. It's easy for a novice to get discombobulated -- as a college freshman, I wandered into a screening of Griffith's great "Intolerance" and was so thrown by the rhythms that I fled, dazed, at intermission.

At the outset of her nearly 500-page volume, "Silent Stars," Jeanine Basinger, a much-published scholar who teaches film at Wesleyan University, attempts to define the world of the silent screen, where

stars look rounder. Their faces aren't shadowed or hawkish, with razor-sharp cheekbones, but romantic and soft, with apparently no bones at all The women are often barely five feet tall, and the men are short, compact, and well proportioned It's an Ur-world, full of strong emotion, and you seem to be constantly sharing lives in secret ways, looking on at secret moments, watching scenes of deeply felt and hyper-expressive revelation.
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“Edward Albee: A Singular Journey”

Tue, 24 Aug 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Edward Albee's first produced play, the canny, eruptive two-character drama "The Zoo Story," reinvented Off Broadway as the locus of experimental theater at almost the moment the '50s flickered into the '60s. Three years later, Albee became the first American playwright nurtured on the work of Samuel Beckett and the other absurdists to open a show on Broadway -- and "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," though it shocked and upset some of New York's more conventional critics, provoked much comparison, just or unjust, to Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams.

But slowly at first, then with increasing speed, Albee lost his foothold. The plays that followed "Virginia Woolf" baffled and alienated audiences and many critics (though two of them won Pulitzer Prizes), and a mere decade after the fireworks over "Virginia Woolf" he was already thought of as a has-been. By the time he wrote what would be his comeback drama, "Three Tall Women," in 1991, he had disappeared so effectively from the cultural consciousness that it took him three years to get the play produced in Manhattan.