This is a big article about The Misanthrope, the play that Uma is in

February 15, 1999

THEATER REVIEW

'The Misanthrope': Moliere's Savages Lose Out to Today's

By BEN BRANTLEY

NEW YORK -- "There's nothing remotely naive about you," hisses Alceste, the brooding, middle-aged playwright, to Jennifer, the intelligent, luminous young movie star. Since Jennifer is being portrayed by the intelligent, luminous young movie star Uma Thurman, it would seem difficult to quarrel with this assessment. As a screen presence Ms. Thurman hasn't really registered as naive since her virginal, teen-aged character in "Dangerous Liaisons" was debauched by John Malkovich a decade ago.

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times Uma Thurman and Roger Rees

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Yet in the Classic Stage Company's production of Martin Crimp's contemporary adaptation of Moliere's "Misanthrope," Ms. Thurman gives off an uneasy innocence that would doubtless cause much lip-curling among the wry, worldly and exotic women she has essayed beguilingly in films like "Henry and June," "Pulp Fiction" and "Batman and Robin."

Here, cast against the finely seasoned English actor Roger Rees in the title role and forced to speak in intricate, rhymed couplets, she brings to mind a beautiful, sheltered girl at her first grown-up dance, putting on airs and hoping against hope she'll get away with it.

Actually, there's a game, likable quality to Ms. Thurman's performance, but it goes against the grain of Crimp's take on "The Misanthrope," which isn't likable at all. In transporting Moliere's study of 17th-century hypocrites and the brooding Alceste's one-man war against them into the London theater world of today, the work is intent on outsavaging its dark satiric source.

The point appears to be that compared with their latter-day counterparts, the courtiers and dilettantes of the age of Louis XIV were pikers in the practice of surface worship and self-interest. But after you get past the initial jolt of the script's novelty -- the barbed allusions to current cultural figures ranging from David Hare to Tina Brown, the use of jargon both academic and obscene -- an unrelieved sourness sets in. You experience that sinking feeling that arrives when you're seated at a dinner party at a table of people you know you're not going to like and who aren't quite monstrous enough to be skewered in amusingly horrified anecdotes afterward.

"The Misanthrope" is the first production to be staged at Classic Stage Company by its new artistic director, Barry Edelstein, who was responsible for the warm, compassionate revival of "All My Sons" two seasons ago. Clearly, much thought and labor have gone into this "Misanthrope." Narelle Sisson's set, representing the sort of trendy London hotel room in which a mirror is the most important piece of furniture, and Martin Pakledinaz's devoutly hip costumes have acid flair.

Edelstein alos has assembled a seriously talented cast. In addition to Rees (in a role, it should be noted, he was born for) and Ms. Thurman, there are Michael Emerson (the Oscar Wilde of "Gross Indecency") and Adina Porter (of Suzan-Lori Parks' "Venus"), playing, respectively, John, the conciliatory best friend of the humanity-hating Alceste, and Ellen, a "radical post-feminist journalist." That phrase, incidentally, sums up the tone of characterization in this "Misanthrope," in which everyone, excepting Alceste and to a lesser degree Jennifer, can be reduced to a familiar epithet.

Crimp, who did the wonderful translation for the production of Ionesco's "Chairs" seen on Broadway last season, has said he was trying to recreate the satiric impact of the original "Misanthrope," quoting Moliere's dictum that, in comedy, "if you don't make recognizable portraits of the contemporary world, then nothing's been achieved."

Fresh satire, however, comes hard in a world in which the morning's headlines are the evening's one-liners. Crimp fills his text with all sorts of pretentious argot, from psychobabble to semiotics. (Says one character of a developing relationship with another, "To do it justice, we'd really need to start/a dialogue with Derrida or Roland Barthes.")

But what's remotely new about making fun of these assumed postures? This "Misanthrope" is all brand-name details without any sense of underlying insight.

It's as if the play had been styled to the teeth rather than fully reconceived, a superficial treatment of a superficial world. Crimp has obviously enjoyed himself creating the kind of couplets in which "linguistic formality" is rhymed with "virtual reality," and sometimes that pleasure translates to the stage.

Yet in Moliere's plays the precise poetry matched the highly structured world of court life, whereas there is no such intrinsic connection here, and most of the actors seem only fitfully comfortable with the text. Ms. Porter injects a buzz of arch self-importance to Ellen's polysyllabic pronouncements that can be very funny, while Emerson, his delivery curling at the edges, is the soul of genial, ironic detachment.

But it's Mary Lou Rosato, as an aging, vengeful acting coach, and Nick Wyman, as a corrupt and fatuous drama critic (is there any other kind?), who among the supporting cast come closest to creating full portraits. Paired one on one with Rees, they actually manage to generate some dramatic sparksThurman is known for lowering her forehead, looking up at men from under her brow and talking to them in a husky come-hither voice.

Then there is a movie director who, Jennifer says, "imagines he's the height of moral bravery/for writing scripts that deal with genocide and slavery./Believes he's wise, but what he's done is crossed/the feel-good factor with the Holocaust." The lines are an allusion to Steven Spielberg, said Edelstein. "She's sending up famous people in order to show off how witty and clever she is," he explained.

Further insults include references to an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical as "a natural disaster" and an Alan Ayckbourn work as "one more mediocre British play/hailed as an artistic triumph in the U.S.A."

But most interesting for audiences in London, where the play opened at the Young Vic, has been Covington, who is a mixture of two powerful British theater critics, Michael Coveney and Michael Billington. The critics took revenge in their mixed reviews of the London production. "A middle-aged, menopausal white male specimen named Michael Covington," Coveney wrote in The Observer. "Not an amalgam, surely, of myself and Michael Billington? Pretentious, badly dressed -- nous?"

Still, Coveney called the production lively. And Billington, reviewing it for The Guardian, said it was "agile, topical and cheeky." But, he wrote, the "vain and posturing theater critic called Covington -- can't be one of us, surely?"

Ms. Thurman said before a rehearsal, "I don't agree with that name-using."

But Crimp, in a telephone interview from London, defended the allusions. Speaking of his references to the critics, he said, "I would say it's a compliment to both of them." The play, he said, is meant to be "an attack on the theatrical establishment, highbrow theater."

Edelstein said the references were in keeping with the Classic Stage Company's mandate "to produce the classics from a contemporary point of view, rather than just reviving" them. With an updated play "an audience in New York has the same sensation the audience had in 1666 in the court of Louis XIV," he said. "The audience is sitting there: 'Omigod! I can't believe he just said that.' "

In deciding who should play Jennifer, Edelstein said he thought "it would be a charge to have a movie star playing off this great English classical actor," Rees. He chose Ms. Thurman, he said, because "I knew her to be an actress of style."

Ms. Thurman, whose films include "Pulp Fiction," "Gattaca" and "Henry and June," said that when Edelstein first approached her, she almost turned him down. "I thought he just wanted me for hype," she said. But, "he was so passionate about the piece."

"I'm going through an interesting time in my life," said Ms. Thurman, who is 28 and had a baby daughter nearly seven months ago. "I'm willing to begin again." Ms. Thurman, who comes from an intellectual family, said she needed the challenge. Her father is the Columbia University professor Robert Thurman, an expert on Buddhism. "I felt compelled to do something in which I would be forced with pain or pleasure to grow."

Then there is Maya, Ms. Thurman's daughter. Movies seem out of the question right now. "Does a child want to hang out in a trailer?" Ms. Thurman asked. Her husband, who has published one novel and is working on another, has taken over caring for the baby. And during her long break, Ms. Thurman can bike home to their loft to feed Maya. "It's a miracle to memorize an entire text and be a mother," Ms. Thurman said, because of "the presence of progesterone in your brain."

Some Parallels to Filmmaking

n late January Ms. Thurman and the company rehearsed in a borrowed space at the Atlantic Theater Company on West 16th Street in Manhattan. In some ways, rehearsing a play can be like making a movie in fragmentary takes.

"You see, I'm sure the moral values we apply/undergo subtle changes as the years roll by," Ms. Thurman, as Jennifer, said in an arch voice.

"Wonderful, Uma," Edelstein later said of her reading. "The more it drips the funnier it is."

During a rehearsal of a costume-party scene, Ms. Thurman recited Jennifer's lines: "Play us some music. And nothing too arty./I'm sick of this. I want to party."

Ms. Thurman began to dance, gliding swanlike about the room to the music of the Pet Shop Boys, singing "Always on My Mind." "If that's the life you want to lead," Rees, as Alceste, said to her, "so be it. Just don't come to me when you need/ help, because I shan't be there./You may not believe in despair/but I do."

At one point, Ms. Thurman interrupted a dance rehearsal to say she didn't think she should move around too much in the baroque dress. She had tried on the costume and the bodice was very tight. "It'll look silly," she said. "You'll have to get someone else."

Edelstein rushed to placate his star. "No, never anyone else," he told her.

Now, one by one, Ms. Thurman lured the members of the company into her dance, stopping in front of each one, looking up under her lowered brow and extending a long arm as Edelstein watched.

"Everybody's adoring her," he said of Ms. Thurman's Jennifer. "Bathing in the light of her triumph. She wins."

a snip it from an unknown source on a possible new movie for Uma!!! "Uma Thurman and Tim Roth are in talks to star opposite Gerard Depardieu in the Roland Joffe-directed VATEL written by Tom Stoppard about a 48 hour look into the preparation of a feast for Louis XIV by chef Vatel. "

a short snip it of a "star report" thing in which actors were scoredn or something

The 1998 STARPOWER Report

The actors are ranked based on their ability to:

*Assure financing for a film.
*Ensure a major studio distribution.
*Ensure a film's wide theatrical release.
*Open a film (to significant weekend box office) on the strength of their name alone.

Ranking Structure:

Maximum 88-100
Strong 63-87
Moderate 38-62
Minimum 13-37
None 0-12

Uma Thurman 66

That's all the news I have for now, stay tuned and check out the appearences section for the latest on Uma!!