Blythe Danner in The Country House, Geffen Theatre (June, 2014)
Blythe Danner is the name on the marquee to entice audiences to see The Country House, a world premiere, written by Pulitzer Prize Winner, Donald Margulies, directed by Daniel Sullivan, at the Gil Cates Theatre at the Geffen Playhouse now through July 13. The Tony and Emmy winner stars in what is billed as this piercing, comedic look at a family of performers coming to terms with the roles they play in each other’s lives.
The play marks Margulies’ sixth Geffen Production, including Dinner With Friends, Coney Island Christmas, Time Stands Still, and Sight Unseen. It will run through July 13. The popular playwright plus the summer country house setting that theatre goers have come to associate with fare from Chekhov to On Golden Pond, has promise to live up to all expectations.
It is, in fact, billed as, “inspired by Chekhov’s pastoral comedies,” but the play felt more like the Geffen magazine blurb: “ A Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winning team tackle fame, art & love when secrets are spilled in a new comedy!” While the usher reminded us several times as we walked into the theatre that there were three acts, five scenes and one intermission, the evening flew by.
This is due in great part to Dan Sullivan’s direction, and the talent on stage. And it is a delightful country house on stage, created by Scenic Designer, John Lee Beatty. From the minute they took to the stage, the seamless ensemble proved as captivating as Ms. Danner (she who first brought and still brings tears to my eyes simply with her voiceover, reading a letter to her son on his birthday in the film, The Great Santini and seems to be able to play any range of roles from my favorites of her work in “Will and Grace” to “The Love Letter”).
Drawing an immediate and lasting response from the audience were Scott Foley as Michael Aster (Scandal, The Unit, Felicity), Eric Lange as Elliot Cooper (The Bridge, Weeds), David Rasche as Walter Keegan – what a voice! — (Speed-The-Plow Broadway, Lunch Hour), and Sarah Steele as Susie Keegan (off-Broadway: Slowgirl, The Netflix Plays). Emily Swallow as Nell McNally (The Mentalist, Manhattan Theatre Club’s Romantic Poetry), also did a capable job in the near-impossible role of being a perfect “incandescent, flawless beauty.”
While it is fun to see how familiar television favorites fare on stage, this viewer was especially happy that the performance introduced these talented actors for the first time, a joy to watch throughout the entire performance. 
Sarah Steele as the Yale student who rejects her family’s tradition in entertainment on stage and in film, and who seems to have the most common sense in the family despite her years, and the only one to be able to show her vulnerability, is the mainstay that helps bring the family together in a relatively happy ending.
Yet the play, “a work in progress,” according to Mr. Margulies, does feel unfinished and, at the same time, it feels predictable. While Chekhov’s themes centered on the end of the aristocracy and the middle class struggling to find new values, here the focus is on a family’s loss of a key member who passed away from cancer at a young age. But the theme never develops. She is a beloved 41 year-old actress and family member – . She is the daughter of Anna Paterson’s (Danner) but we never learn their relationship; the wife of artistic producer, turned blockbuster shlock millionaire Walter Keegan (Rasche) and we do not know their relationship between an international celebrity and commercial director; the mother of Susie Keegan (Steele), which is the most developed as simply that of loving mother and daughter; the over-achiever sister of Elliot Cooper (Lange), and “act to follow” as a wife for Nell McNally (Swallow).
Lange, playing the miserable downcast, Elliott Cooper (Eric Lange), is so much fun that it is unnatural for him to become the brunt of everyone’s wrath for being so in the last act. We know about the first play he has just completed in an attempt to try something new after being a failed actor his entire life, because he gives out copies for a family read, but not onstage. It is supposedly spiteful and mediocre, but from his lines on stage, has to be anything other than that.
And the case is not made either for the torment of celebrity movie star Michael Astor (Foley), trying to justify his success with summer stock and building schools in Africa.
It might be fun if the staid December-May relationship between grande dame, Danner, and movie star Foley took a surprise turn. Probably not a name to mention at the Geffen, still Steven Berkoff and the ending of his Greek, the story of Oedipus Rex, comes to mind.
Still, Margulies’ character triangles that dance through the six scenes do so beautifully, but the one moment at the end of act two, before the one intermission, that was a terrific surprise, was never followed up!
The Country House is a co-production with Manhattan Theatre Club. Danner will star in both the Geffen and Manhattan Theatre Club runs of the play. Be kind to New York audiences and take the rest of this superb cast there, too. The play was was commissioned by MTC through the U.S. Trust New American Play Commissioning Program.
For performance schedule and ticket prices, please see http://geffenplayhouse.com
BIOGRAPHIES
DONALD MARGULIES (Playwright)
The Country House is Mr. Margulies’ sixth production at the Geffen Playhouse, preceded by Coney Island Christmas, Time Stands Still, Shipwrecked! An Entertainment, Dinner with Friends and Collected Stories. His many other plays include Brooklyn Boy, Sight Unseen, The Loman Family Picnic, God of Vengeance, The Model Apartment, What’s Wrong with this Picture?, and Found a Peanut. He has won a Lucille Lortel Award, an American Theatre Critics Award, two Los Angeles Drama Critics Awards, two OBIE Awards, two Dramatists Guild Hull-Warriner Awards, one Tony Award nomination, six Drama Desk Award nominations, two Pulitzer Prize nominations and one Pulitzer Prize. His works have been performed on and off Broadway; at major theatres across the United States including South Coast Repertory, Manhattan Theatre Club, Primary Stages, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Long Wharf Theatre, Williamstown Theatre Festival and Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival; and in Paris, London, Rome, Madrid, Tel Aviv, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Sydney, Berlin, Vienna, Istanbul, Mumbai and many other cities around the world. Mr. Margulies has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, The New York Foundation for the Arts, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He was honored by the American Academy of Arts and Letters with an Award in Literature, by the National Foundation for Jewish Culture with its Cultural Achievement Award, and was the recipient of the Sidney Kingsley Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Theatre by a playwright. Mr. Margulies is an alumnus of New Dramatists and serves on the council of The Dramatists Guild of America. He is an adjunct professor of English and Theatre Studies at Yale University.
DANIEL SULLIVAN (Director) most recently directed The Snow Geese, Orphans, and Glengarry Glen Ross on Broadway. For The Public Theater, Sullivan directed A Comedy of Errors, As You Like It, All’s Well That Ends Well, The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Stuff Happens, and The Merry Wives of Windsor. Among his Broadway credits are The Columnist, Good People, Time Stands Still, Accent on Youth, The Homecoming, Prelude to a Kiss, Rabbit Hole, After the Night and the Music, Julius Caesar, Brooklyn Boy, Sight Unseen, I’m Not Rappaport, Morning’s at Seven, Proof, the 2000 production of A Moon for the Misbegotten, Ah, Wilderness!, The Sisters Rosensweig, Conversations with my Father, and The Heidi Chronicles. Among his Off-Broadway credits are The Night Watcher, Intimate Apparel, Far East, Spinning into Butter, Dinner with Friends, and The Substance of Fire. From 1981 to 1997, he served as artistic director of Seattle Repertory Theatre. Sullivan is the Swanlund Professor of Theatre at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
EMILY SWALLOW (Nell McNally) Emily just finished a season as Agent Kim Fischer on CBS’ The Mentalist. She previously played Dr. Michelle Robidaux on David E. Kelley and Sanjay Gupta’s show Monday Mornings; other television appearances include Southland, Flight of the Conchords, The Good Wife, Medium and NCIS, to name a few. On stage, Emily recently created the role of ‘Flo’ alongside Mark Rylance in Nice Fish, a world premiere penned by Rylance and poet Louis Jenkins. Emily has appeared on Broadway in High Fidelity, off-Broadway in John Patrick Shanley and Henry Krieger’s Romantic Poetry (Manhattan Theater Club), Measure for Pleasure (Public Theater), The Black Eyed (New York Theatre Workshop) and more. Regional credits include Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Taming of the Shrew, King Lear, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Lobby Hero. Emily stars in an upcoming yet-to-be-titled feature directed by Shana Betz (Free Ride). MFA from NYU Graduate Acting Program
SARAH STEELE (Susie Keegan ) Off-Broadway: Slowgirl, Russian Transport, All-American, Speech and Debate, The Netflix Plays, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Regional: Not Waving (Williamstown Theater Festival). Film: The Untitled Gerardo Naranjo Project (upcoming) Trouble Dolls, (upcoming), Brother’s Keeper (upcoming), The Mend, Song One, The To-Do List, Please Give, Margaret, Spanglish, Last Kind Words, Man (short). Television: Girls, The Good Wife, Nurse Jackie, Blue Bloods, Harry’s Law, Gossip Girl, Law and Order.
ABOUT THE GEFFEN PLAYHOUSE
The Geffen Playhouse has been a hub of the Los Angeles theater scene since opening its doors in 1995. Noted for its intimacy and celebrated for its world-renowned mix of classic and contemporary plays, provocative new works and second productions, the Geffen Playhouse continues to present a body of work that has garnered national recognition. Named in honor of entertainment mogul and philanthropist David Geffen, who made the initial donation to the theater, the company was founded by Gilbert Cates, and is currently helmed by Artistic Director Randall Arney
Proudly associated with UCLA, the Geffen Playhouse welcomes an audience of more than 130,000 each year, and maintains an extensive education and outreach program, designed to engage young people and the community at large in the arts. For more information, please visit www.geffenplayhouse.com.
The Gil Cates Theater at the Geffen Playhouse
10866 Le Conte Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90024
310.208.5454