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Highly
Recommended
December 18, 2007
BY HEDY WEISS
Theater Critic
|
Corporate couple live in ruins
An executive and his
wife exist in bitterness and fury framed in 'Hotels'
These days, Jon Robin Baitz is best known as the
creator of the hit ABC
series, "Brothers & Sisters." But he began his career as a
playwright. And his work for the stage during the late 1980s and '90s
-- including such dramas as "The Film Society," "Three Hotels" and "The
Substance of Fire" -- was unique for its worldliness, intelligence and
suppressed passion.
Of all Baitz's plays, "Three Hotels" (loosely based on the career of
his father, an executive of the Nestle conglomerate's Carnation Co.,
manufacturer of evaporated milk products) has always held a particular
place in my heart. I saw it first Off Broadway (with Ron Rifkin and
Christine Lahti) and then in several subsequent editions, and it has
never failed to leave a deep impression.
Its current revival by
Chicago's Actors Workshop Theatre -- the storefront operation that
enjoyed great success with "Equus" earlier this season -- could not be
more ideal.
A quietly blistering play, "Three Hotels" is about the insidious price
paid for corporate success, the ugly downside of globalization, the
terrible violence to the self that comes of burying one's identity, and
the unraveling of a long marriage between two complicated people. All
this in a two-character, 90-minute drama that unfolds in a series of
three tightly linked monologues. The
hotel settings (Tangier, Morocco,
the Virgin Islands and Oaxaca, Mexico, each deftly evoked by set
designer Joe Schermoly) only add to the sense of two
sophisticated
adults, who have lived in many "developing nations" and have become
tragically unmoored along the way.
The Actors Workshop
production, insightfully co-directed by Michael
Colucci and Johnny Garcia, features superb, wholly engrossing, crystal
clear performances by Brian Parry and Jan Ellen Graves.
Parry plays Kenneth Hoyle, a Jew born Marcus Hershkovitz who changed
his name to ride the corporate escalator and now is vice president of a
multinational that sold baby formula to African women to disastrous
effect. At once martini dry and
fervent in his self-lacerating
confessions, Parry gives us the chronicle of Hoyle's rise and fall and
return to self with brittle brilliance.
Graves is spot-on as
his wife, Barbara, who fell in love with this man
when they were idealistic Peace Corps volunteers, but who has since
watched his sad transformation and endured her own crackup (triggered
by the senseless murder of their 16-year-old son in Brazil). She
delivers her speech to young company wives ("Be careful," she warns)
with a fine, understated fury.
Throughout, the
eloquence of the writing and the meticulously narrated
acts of desperation, rage and loss are exquisitely conjured both by
Baitz and the actors. Anyone in search of a window on the world will
want to book this "Hotel."
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Highly
Recommended
Short List
Reviewed by Lawrence Bommer, Chicago Reader
|
In bitterly contrasted monologues by
the former marketing wizard of a venal American corporation and his
disgusted wife, playwright Jon Robin Baitz reveals a terrific ear for
the interface between domestic and corporate corruption. The wiz sold
potentially poisonous baby formula to third world mothers, promoting
the swill by having salespersons disguised as nurses discourage
breast-feeding. His wife, who refuses to put a smile on the scandal,
echoes and reinforces his seller's remorse, but Baitz implies that
remorse and noncompliance bring redemption. With the help of directors
Michael Colucci and Johnny Garcia, Brian Parry and Jan Ellen Graves
ground their increasingly urgent confessionals in the details of
American arrogance and ignorance, especially our "manufactured
thuggishness" and huge capacity for blaming the victim.
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Compelling
'Three Hotels' gets powerful revival
By Barbara Vitello | Critic at large
3½ stars out of four
|
It never fails.
Sure as snow in January, each December a show sneaks in under the wire
to snag a spot on my list of the year's
top theater productions. (For the complete list, see the Dec. 28
edition of Time out!).
This year, Actors Workshop Theatre's quiet, compelling production of Jon Robin
Baitz's "Three Hotels" earned a place among the runners-up largely on
the acting prowess of Brian Parry and
Jan Ellen Graves, whose nuanced performances amount to a master class
in subtlety.
Shrewdly directed by
Michael Colucci and Johnny Garcia, "Three Hotels" is a wry,
insightful, tightly constructed drama about corporate malfeasance and
marital conflict, underscored by personal and professional tragedy and
set against the pursuit of power and the erosion of individual ethics.
Like Brian Friel's "Faith Healer," the play unfolds as a series of
monologues spoken by corporate VP Kenneth Hoyle and his wife, Barbara,
and delivered separately from nondescript hotel rooms in Morocco, the
Virgin Islands and Mexico over several years during the late 1980s. The
principals never interact in this talky play where the action consists
of characters' recalling the past. Yet Baitz (writer and producer of
ABC's "Brothers and Sisters") keeps us engaged in this tale about a
company man who sacrifices his conscience to ensure quarterly profits,
which is rooted in 1977's international boycott of the Nestle company
for promoting formula over breast milk in third-world countries.
Parry plays Ken, a former Peace Corps volunteer turned marketing wiz
turned hatchet man for Iris and Rose, a U.S.-based, corporate giant
that manufactures baby formula. Ken rose through the ranks on the
strength of his specious African ad campaign touting the company's
formula as preferable to breast milk and using saleswomen dressed as
nurses to promote the product.
Having abandoned his idealism and compromised his ethics, Ken
approaches his territory (Africa) with a sort of cordial condescension
and "manufactured thuggishness." Referring to third-world markets as
"developing nations, which is slightly laughable given just how little
development occurs," he justifies his behavior as "just business,"
until a scandal forces him to reconsider how his company does business,
resulting in a crisis of conscience and the rueful observation that
"we've brought them the worst we've had to offer … people like us."
Parry, whose
monologues bookend the play, is pitch-perfect as Ken, whose cool
arrogance and glib defense of company policy give way to self-loathing,
self-awareness and finally to remorse as he struggles to recover what's
left of his conscience. Ken might have sold out, but he is not without
a soul. Parry makes us see that. He
invites our scorn, but still manages to elicit our empathy. It's a neat
trick and Parry performs it
flawlessly.
Graves plays Barbara, also a one-time Peace Corps member who played the
dutiful corporate wife until a personal tragedy transformed her.
Speaking to the wives of executives assigned overseas, she urges them
to be careful. "Be careful that the company does not turn your husband
into something unrecognizable," she warns them. Like Ken, she
experiences a crisis of faith. But in her case, it's faith in her
husband that has been shaken, pushing their marriage to the breaking
point.
In Barbara's monologue, Baitz artfully weaves together her speech to
the women with recollections of her teenage son's murder, which
occurred when the family was assigned to Brazil.
Graves is terrific. In a
subdued, effortless performance, she reveals a steeliness beneath
Barbara's grief and resignation, the kind of resolve that
enables her to reclaim herself, even though that comes at a price.
What's more, she connects with every
person in the room. Granted, the space is small, but the
connection is palpable. We feel her
pain. And it's something we won't forget.
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Convincing speeches
in 'Three Hotels' at Actors Workshop
By Kerry Reid |Special to the Tribune
December 21, 2007 |
Jon Robin Baitz is an exemplar of
the Guilty American School of Playwriting. The usual narrative arc for
such plays involves some variant of the Ugly American who receives a
Botox injection of harsh reality abroad -- and ends up determined to
use his or her First World privileges for good, rather than evil.
Baitz is too smart for that kind of self-congratulatory malarkey. His
characters realize that our limitations define us as surely as our
intentions. His 1993 play-in-monologues, "Three Hotels," now in a taut
and tidy revival with Actors Workshop Theatre under the direction of
Michael Colucci and Johnny Garcia, explores the effects of the 1980s
baby-formula controversy on a company executive and his wife, who is
teetering on the brink of emotional collapse.
The hyper-articulate speeches occasionally feel like a playwright using
his characters as ventriloquist dummies for his own essayistic
explorations, but as performed by Brian Parry and Jan Ellen Graves,
Baitz's keenly honed insights into the moral intricacies of exporting
American-style consumerism hit home with clarity and admirable
restraint.
Kenneth Hoyle (formerly Hershkovitz) is the hard-charging son of
Russian immigrants. He and his wife, Barbara, are former members of the
Peace Corps who now live a decidedly less-spartan existence as Ken
travels the globe, promoting the baby formula of "Iris and Rose"
(Baitz's father was once an executive with Carnation) by using
marketing tricks such as saleswomen dressed like nurses. The problem is
that many of the women targeted by the campaign lack access to potable
water to mix with the formula, so their children become ill and die.
"Developing nations," Ken half-sneers early on. "Slightly laughable,
considering how little development takes place." His main job now is to
be the enforcer, getting rid of lower-level executives who can't stand
the heat. "For Ken, firing people has become a sort of prayer," says
Barbara.
As the title implies, the action unfolds in three different hotel rooms
in three different countries. The central panel in this theatrical
triptych is Barbara's monologue, in which she re-creates a speech she
delivered to young wives whose husbands are preparing to embark on
their careers. Barbara uses the occasion to jab at her husband, calling
him "the Albert Speer [Hitler's architect] of baby formula."
One sees clearly the outlines of outrage mixed with sardonic wit that
Baitz brings to his ABC dramedy, "Brothers and Sisters." Graves is a
more anguished version of Sally Field's firebrand matriarch. But
Parry's performance really anchors the piece as Ken moves from
swaggering self-awareness to muddled confusion. The last monologue
finds Ken making a tape for his senile mother. Like Beckett's Krapp,
he's a man mumbling into the void, trying to figure out where things
went wrong, and what on earth he might have been able to do differently.
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Workshop
Crafts Galvanizing Production
December 19, 2007
By CATEY SULLIVAN Contributor
|
Searing and searching, Jon Robin
Baitz' "Three Hotels" is stripped
clean of all but the stark, riveting essentials. The taut piece is
comprised of three monologues delivered by two actors on a set as spare
and bleakly functional as the anonymous hotel room it represents. A
florescent glare comprises the light design; the soundscape is void of
evocative audio effects, instead wholly dominated by the softly killing
words that make up the script.
Without trappings to create a buffer between lackluster thespians on
stage and gaping boredom in the audience, "Three Hotels" rises or falls
according the abilities of the duo that comprises the cast. You have to
keep the clarity of the piece, to paraphrase a bit of monologue, or
else it all turns to dust. And that turn happens all too easily. This
is a treacherous beast of a drama, one that dares to name the worst
kind of horror the world has to offer, the devolution of hearts into
stones. Attack it with less than infinite subtlety and you've got a
grade school Greek tragedy on your hands, paroxysms of wailing and
chest-thumping when whispers and barely discernible gestures are needed.
With an exquisite
understanding of precisely what is needed, co-directors Michael Colucci
and Johnny Garcia have crafted a quietly galvanizing production for
Actors Workshop Theatre. There are no fireworks in the pitch perfect performances by Jan Ellen
Graves and Brian Parry, just the sort of all-engulfing
authenticity that sucks the oxygen right out of the room and leaves you
emotionally gasping in the wake of the curtain call.
A story of banal corporate evil and senseless, all-but-irrevocable
damage, "Three Hotels" takes place primarily in Morocco, unfolding in
an emotional landscape almost as desolate as the Western Sahara that
lurks at that country's southwestern edge. Almost. There's hope
glimmering from the depths of the story, an insistent, stubborn glint
of goodness even in a world where mass murder is legalized in mass
marketing campaigns and meticulous viciousness is rewarded with
bottomless expense accounts.
Parry plays Kenneth Hoyle, a senior executive for a company that is
doing for its brand of baby formula what other big pharmaceutical
corporations did for Thalidomide and the Dalkon Shield. (And if you're
too young to understand those references, be thankful.) Graves is his
wife, Barbara. They're both at an international convention, where he's
been busy firing people and she's called on to give an informational
talk to corporate wives whose husbands have been transferred to branch
offices overseas. Barbara goes way off script in her talk, but not in
the way you might expect. The impact of her willful implosion is one of
complex, toxic irony, swift devastation and -- seemingly paradoxically
-- soaring freedom.
In
Kenneth,
playwright Baitz gives us the dark, prosperous mirror-image of Willy
Loman, a man for whom success proved just as lethal as failure did for
the antihero of "Death of a Salesman." But Parry's shark-like
confidence is slowly, surely crumbling into a confessional plea for
forgiveness and a half-remembered Yiddish folk song about a dead child.
Graves matches him in both power and intensity, as a good corporate
wife unwilling to play that role any longer.
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****
out of ****
Reviewed by Joe Stead
www.steadstylechicago.com
|
Brian
Parry and Jan Ellen Graves star in Jon Robin Baitz's "Three Hotels" at
Actors Workshop Theatre.
Jon Robin Baitz's "Three Hotels" is a tour de
force for two consummate actor orators. In the wrong hands, these
three separate yet related monologues with their lack of dramatic
interaction could be as exciting as watching paint dry. Fortunately, Actors Workshop Theatre (soon
to be Redtwist Theatre) has in Brian Parry and Jan Ellen Graves a pair
as ripe and compelling as any you will find in Chicago's Off Loop
theatre circuit. Although Baitz originally wrote and
directed this piece for American Playhouse on PBS, this is the kind of
dramatic exercise that can only work in the theatre with experienced
acting muscles at the helm.
Baitz explores the ever timely topic of conscience verses Capitalism
and questions whether personal ethics can take a back seat to
professional ambition. Like most of his peers, Kenneth Hoyle
(Parry) has a fairly uncomplicated goal in life: to make a buck.
As the Vice President in charge of Marketing and Corporate Affairs for
the ficticious Iris and Rose Company, Ken has overseen the promotion of
powdered baby formula to developing (read Third World) nations.
By illustrating sales girls dressed as nurses in the advertising
campaign, Hoyle has successfully ensured that the product is given a
stamp of approval by the "health" industry. It's a slick but
"morally indefensible" move as babies begin dying in mass. The
fact that the country doesn't have drinkable water may have been a
factor as well, but who cares when profits justify the results?
As illustrated by the playwright with incisive candor and scorching
cynicism, Ken Hoyle is merely emblamatic of a results driven corporate
culture. "You've got to be thick skinned in this world," he
warns. To be a success, one must perform and those who don't are
"dead wood in a petrified forest." Ken is responsible for sifting
out that dead wood. Letting people go may be "gruesome work" but
he dispatches employees with the same kind of cool, unemotional
detachment he employs to market a questionable product to unwary
consumers.
Ken is a master at selling lies, not the least of which is
himself. He has skillfully replaced his real Jewish name and
identity with a more WASP sounding one, but faced with overwhelming
disapproval everywhere he is getting tired of lying about
himself. Even worse, the one person he feels he should be able to
talk to, his wife Barbara, is growing more and more distant to
him. It's not just their radically different political points of
view (Barbara was a once Peace Corps inducted liberal with high
ideals), but the politics of being "an American abroad" that is causing
Barbara to slowly dismantle.
As she lectures other executive wives on the challenges they will face
in the strange and often barbaric land, Barbara (Graves) tries to
reconcile herself that "they just do things differently here."
But how to look at political and cultural injustice and do nothing, she
wonders how to explain these things to children. Barbara has also
been having an affair, she claims to rekindle the memory of her
murdered teenaged son, the product of her one real passion. How
will this couple hold up under the stress of their personal and
professional crisis? As she sums up, "Be careful of stupidity -
one's own!"
Brian Parry
and Jan Ellen Graves turn in a virtuoso effort, under Michael Colucci
and Johnny Garcia's finely honed and subtle direction. Watching these intelligent,
introspective and quietly shattering performances could be something of
a master class for young actors. And without detracting
from the heart of the acting, Set Designer Joe Schermoly and Lighting
Designer John Kohn III have created a beautifully textured and
atmospheric environment. This
is potent and provocative stuff, and you won't find a better way of
experiencing this powerful and insightful drama up close and personal
than in Actors Workshop's intimate space.
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Recommended
**** out of ******
Reviewed by Kris Vire, Time Out Chicago
|
HEARTBREAK
HOTEL
Told via a triptych of monologues, Jon Robin Baitz’s play (originally
written for television in 1990 and premiering on stage three years
later) deals, in a broad sense, with the moral ambiguities of
America’s—and Americans’—influence abroad. The first and final
monologues are delivered by Ken Hoyle, an executive in charge of
selling powdered infant formula in developing nations (though Ken
prefers to call them “third world”; there’s so little about them that’s
developing, he says). The unethical, or at least amoral, tactics his
company uses—dressing sales girls as nurses or nuns; mounting
billboards implying doctors’ endorsements that the formula is better
than breast milk—recall the African baby-formula scandal of the ’70s
and ’80s that led to interventions by UNICEF and the World Health
Organization and the Nestlé boycott.
The middle scene, delivered by Ken’s wife, Barbara, after she’s
delivered a speech to the executives’ wives’ club in the midst of the
scandal, contextualizes and humanizes Ken’s initial appearance. The
information she provides us about the death of their son on one of
Ken’s international assignments helps to ground Ken’s ugly-American
behavior.
Baitz’s play is ultimately an indictment of the way international
business-—the culture of greed-—has evolved into American colonialism.
“We have brought them our worst,” Ken finally says. The playwright’s
structure only allows the actors to interact with us (never directly
with each other), but Parry and
Graves overcome the potential pitfalls in a manner reminiscent of many
modern couples: They create a credibly human marriage without ever
being in the same room.
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Recommended
Reviewed by Tom Williams, ChicagoCritic.com
|
Riveting
story of international corporate greed unfolds
The soon-to-be
Redtwist Theatre (the Actors Workshop Theatre) presents two of their
finest actors, Jan Ellen Graves and Brian Parry in Jon Robin Baitz’s
1996 Pulitzer Prize finalist--Three Hotels. This two-hander
utilizes three monologues to tell the story of corporate greed at the
expense of mothers and babies in third world nations through the eyes
of Ken and Barbara Hoyle.
We meet Ken (Brian Parry) as he explains, justifies and expounds on his
role for a large multi-national corporation where he rationalizes
compromising his personal morals with his professional responsibility
toward corporate profits. Playwright Baitz’s model was his father who
worked for Carnation Company. Ken explains how the corporate culture
placed morality and social ethics beneath the pursuit of profits. Ken
is an amoral corporate functionary always maneuvering toward a higher
rung on the company’s latter of success. Brian Parry uses all his
acting skills with his outstanding elocution and articulation to paint
a picture of a man who has lost his soul and become a true cynic
without compassion as a corporate monster. Parry presents Ken as a
likeable yet immoral man who believes profits need to be made even at
the expense of third world babies.
His company tricks mothers to use their over-priced baby formula
instead of mother’s milk to nurse their babies. He proudly used women
dressed as nurses and nuns to persuade mothers to use his
product—that—when mixed with contaminated drinking water led to the
death of thousands of babies. Ken and the company denied any wrong
doing—after all—profits are king! Ken’s job is to travel around
third-world locations and fire any company executive who doesn’t
aggressively market the baby formula according to company policies and
tactics. Exuding charm with Baitz’s
caustic wit, Parry warmly presents the cynically amoral Ken
brilliantly. Long monologues test an actor’s ability to communicate.
Parry and Baitz together present a most engaging tale.
When Barbara (Jane Ellen Graves) presents her speech to the corporate
wives seminar, she gets caught up remembering the death of their 16
year old son in Brazil. While warning the wives on the pitfalls of
living abroad, she warns the women to not let their husbands become
“the Albert Speer of baby formula” as her husband Ken has become. Her
strong criticism of the company has dire consequences for Ken. Graves deftly delivers enough pent-up rage
to be quite effective.
In the third act, Ken talks of life after leaving the company. The use
of three hotels as metaphors to the transient nature and impermanence
of one’s actions works nicely. Hotels just aren’t reality to Ken.
This well written and finely acted
play is a disturbing glimpse into the international corporate
world where profits supersede social responsibility. Kudos to Redtwist
Theatre Company (Actors Workshop Theatre) for mounting this timely work.
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Recommended
Reviewed by Steven Hammond
EDGE Chicago Contributor
Tuesday Dec 18, 2007
|
Three Hotels is the story of a successful corporate VP,
Kenneth Hoyle, who risks losing everything in his pursuit of corporate
gain. With today’s current trend of corporate marauders who show no
regard for their fellow men, it is refreshing to see that there may be
some hope, some tiny shred of dignity that can remain in tact for a cog
in the corporate machine. It is a shame that Kenneth Hoyle and his wife
Barbara, had to be thrown under the bus so-to-speak in order to once
again face their own humanity.
The three part, three monologue design of the play (by Jon Robin Baitz)
gives us a complete picture of the characters: Kenneth and Barbara
Hoyle, played exquisitely by Brian
Parry (Kenneth) and Jan Ellen Graves (Barbara). Spoken in a
straightforward, confessional style, the audience receives every bit of
back-story necessary to formulate just and accurate opinions of these
characters. And because of this, the traditional relationship between
the audience and the actors is altered. The audience is put into a position to lend
an ear, as if to an old friend, which creates something of a bond with
the characters, thus pulling the audience in closer to the couple’s
story.
When lost in the mechanical repetitions that sometimes life creates, we
can lose sight of what is most important to us. Baitz’s choice of
content and subject matter of Three Hotels are extremely important
factors behind the play’s success. There is so much more that is going
on than one man struggling with his conscience over a bad business
move. The situation and events of the play ask its characters to
examine where the passion has gone, and what has it been replaced with.
This is a core theme that can hit home with anybody. When lost in the
mechanical repetitions that sometimes life creates, we can lose sight
of what is most important to us. Kenneth and Barbara Hoyle have hit
that wall, and have to face the spectrum of emotion that comes with it.
Jan Ellen Graves and
Brian Parry beautifully put that raw emotion on display for us all to
experience and believe.
Head on over to the
Actors Workshop Theatre to see this play - it will likely be a night to
remember. As an advanced warning, you might want to take public
transportation if they have not gone on strike by the time you decide
to see the play; parking is tight and scarce. You may have to drive
around for some time before you find a spot. Enjoy.
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The Centerstage Review
by Sarah Terez
Rosenblum.
Wednesday Dec 19,
2007
|
As the popular
feminist statement goes, the personal is political—meaning that our
personal lives are affected by politics and vice versa. It's one thing
to intellectually embrace this concept, but it's quite another to take
it and turn it into a production that is interesting to watch. Billed
as the story of a corporate V.P. who loses touch with his morals and
risks his personal life in the service of corporate gain, "Three
Hotels" multi-tasks its way toward this lofty goal.
Luckily playwright Jon Robin Baitz had a firm grasp on his material,
and directors Michael Colucci and Johnny Garcia made confident choices
and deft use of a tight space. The
leads, Brian Parry and Jan Ellen
Graves, are consistent and easy to watch. Were one of these
variables
out of place, the ambitious "Three Hotels" might easily have lost its
footing. But the artists involved nimbly traversed material daring in
its scope and complexity.
Performed without an
intermission, the 85-minute piece consists of three lengthy monologues,
which touch on everything from Jewish identity and the pressure to
assimilate to the slow death of idealism in the face of corporate
greed. ...I was satisfied
by the production as a whole, and particularly impressed with Parry. He
excelled at the difficult task he was given—to breathe life and
theatricality into what in less capable hands might have been nothing
more than a politically-fueled after-dinner anecdote.
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Highly Recommended
Reviewed by Valerie Jean Johnson
Listed among top 5
shows to see now
|
Jon Robin Bait's ninety-minute drama
about corporate greed in the worldwide baby-formula industry is at once
a poignant statement on the often not-so-hidden horrors of global
commerce and an intimate examination of a marriage on the brink of
disaster. Certainly the stuff of high drama; but where another
playwright might use such subject matter to pit characters against on
another on on stage in face-to-face battle, Baitz opts for a quieter
approach: that of isolation and self-reflection. His story unfolds
through a series of three monologhues, delivered by a ballsy and
corrupt executive and his long-suffering wife. While the script falls
into preachy and melodramatic traps at times, Brian Parry and Jan Ellen Graves imbue
these two characters with real humanity, bringing a palpable urgency to
their struggles, especially effective in those spots where the
momentum could otherwise begin to stall up against lengthy
exposition.
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Stunning revival...
powerful...gripping
January 4, 2008, By Betty Mohr
|
|
Gripping 'Three Hotels' deserves checking
out
Art imitates life in a stunning revival of "Three Hotels"
at the
Actors Workshop Theatre in Chicago, a tiny storefront theater company
that is coming into its own after its Jeff Award-winning production of
"Equus."
The riveting drama of "Three Hotels," which is
reminiscent of Arthur
Miller's "All My Sons," centers on the impact of a business's lapse in
morality on a man, his wife and society at large.
At its crucial center, the work re-creates the
Faustian bargain, in
which a man sells his soul for money and power, and which also may
represent playwright Jon Robin Baitz's own personal journey.
The son of an executive of the Carnation Company,
which produces
evaporated milk, Baitz modeled his story after his own parents. His
father worked internationally for the company, which was accused of
selling tainted products to African mothers, creating a furor when the
milk formula caused the deaths of many children.
And Baitz, who began his career as an idealistic
playwright, sold
out when he was seduced from the stage by television's big bucks to
write and produce "Brothers & Sisters."
Set in hotels in Morocco, the Virgin Islands and
Oaxaca, Mexico, well rendered by Joe
Schermoly, the play gives us a strong sense of
time and place. With sharp co-direction by Michael Colucci and Johnny
Garcia, it builds to a crescendo of devastating emotion.
The fierce 11/2-hour drama Baitz wrote in the
1980s focuses on a
husband and wife who deliver three monologues chronicling the loss of
their identity, power and marriage. Their decline comes as a result of
the husband's slavish devotion to his company, coupled with the wife's
explosive breakdown after the senseless death of her son.
As he drowns his problems in martinis, the
corporate executive,
Kenneth Hoyle, reveals that he changed his name from Marcus Hershkovitz
so that his Jewish heritage wouldn't get in the way of his climb to
success.
And his wife recalls how she first fell in love
with her husband
because of the idealism she saw in him, and how her marriage is now
being destroyed by his moral decline.
"Three Hotels" presents
a powerful story, but is made especially
gripping by the sharp and vivid portrayals of Brian Parry as Hoyle and
Jan Ellen Graves as his wife. Parry, whose velvety voice ranks right up
there with that of Richard Burton, delivers a riveting characterization
of a man's loss of self, and Graves comes through with piercing and
affecting sympathy.
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BY MARY SHEN BARNIDGE |
BY MARY SHEN BARNIDGE
The blunders made by American manufacturers attempting to market their
goods to other cultures are sufficiently numerous to make the topical
roots of 1990s wunderkind Jon Robin Baitz’s agitprop drama almost
irrelevant outside of its own literary universe. The error in this
fictional case, however, has fatal consequences: a large stateside
conglomerate’s advertising campaign for a nutritious, nonperishable,
instant baby formula has featured billboard models dressed like doctors
and sales personnel dressed like nurses assuring potential consumers in
their target populations (those of “developing countries,” a.k.a.
“third world”) of their product’s safety, oblivious to the dangers
presented by the scarcity of clean water with which to mix the miracle
powder.
When the World Health Organization calls the irresponsible planners to
account, the flakcatcher assigned to get them off the hook is Kenneth
Hoyle (nee Marcus Hershkovitz), an Organization Man with extensive
overseas experience whose loyalty is unimpeachable. Didn’t he stay the
course even after his teenage son was killed in Rio for the crime of
wearing an expensive watch? But then the equally righteous Mrs. Hoyle
loses her composure while delivering an orientation talk to new
corporate wives, and both spouses are forced to confront the moral
compromises they have made.
Baitz’s decision to have his characters confess in three solitary
monologues recounted within an assortment of hotel rooms presents
actors with an open invitation to mumble introspections while staring
at walls or their own shoes. To be sure, Barbara Hoyle’s soliloquy
takes place on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas, and her husband
first owns up to his misdeeds in Morocco, then again in Mexico. But
without cinematic exterior shots, platoons of servants and flashbacks
of exotic locales, the various transient quarters are as anonymous as
those occupied by Willy Loman.
So it’s up to Brian Parry and Jan
Ellen Graves to generate any concern we may feel for the plight
of the Hoyles. Under the co-direction
of Michael Colucci and Johnny Garcia, however, with invaluable
assistance from dialect coach Carrie Hardin, both performers conjure an
array of unseen but crucial commentors displaying accents ranging from
redneck good-old-boy to chauvinistic Brit to ersatz Henry Kissinger.
The result makes for an immediacy heightened by the intimate storefront
space of the Actors Workshop on Bryn Mawr Avenue (though watch for it
to take on a new moniker soon). In the meantime, if you find yourself
increasingly suspicious of the TV commercials for pharmaceuticals,
you’ll want to revisit this caveat on foolishly parochial assumptions.
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