Late in the evening, as the rest of the household sleeps, a woman tells her middle-aged son about the one who got away — the man she longed for throughout her marriage, whom she once sneaked off with overnight, leaving her children alone at home.
In “Grand Horizons,” Bess Wohl’s clever truth bomb of a play, it is a scene that makes the Broadway audience roar. Nancy, a retired librarian played by Jane Alexander, has just asked her husband of 50 years for a divorce.
Their son Brian, played by Michael Urie, is shellshocked by the split. His mother’s confession, sprinkled with explicit details that he is desperate not to hear, is a way of explaining to him that her passion was always elsewhere.
“Mom, please,” he says, “I’m begging you.”
But she won’t be stopped, and it’s terrific comedy: her unperturbed insistence, his escalating agony. Wohl is tapping a reflex, inviting us to enjoy the easy scandal of a proper, older woman being sexual, using raunchy words. And Nancy is accustomed to being laughed at by her grown-up boys — condescended to, affectionately minimized.
Then, bam, she has had enough.
“No,” she tells Brian. “You have to hear this. I will be a whole person to you. I will.”
That bold, quick-change moment of asserted dignity is when I swooned for “Grand Horizons,” which for all its plot about a marriage’s unforeseen implosion has another matter urgently on its mind. Like Kate Hamill’s delicious “Dracula,” a feminist romp at Classic Stage Company, Wohl’s play is a powerful argument for the full humanity of women in our culture — a matter that’s not as settled as we might like to think.
Nancy, for one, belongs to a generation of women raised to care-take and accommodate, never to make a fuss about themselves. She reminds me my aunt, who, riding shotgun on a road trip, temporarily lost her sight in one eye. Not wanting to trouble my uncle as he drove, she made not a peep about it. Nancy, I imagine, might have done the same.
When she was a child learning how to canoe, Nancy says, her father taught her to “never to take my paddle out of the water, forward and back, forward and back, so that I wouldn’t even make the smallest splash, the tiniest sound. And now I think I lived my entire life that way — no splash. No impact.”
“Grand Horizons” is the story of her comparatively clamorous awakening, in which she finds an ally in Jess, her heavily pregnant daughter-in-law. Jess looks at Nancy and glimpses a terrifying, imminent future in which she is viewed only as a mother — her own needs and desires permanently subjugated in a way that her husband’s will never be.
The stuff of nightmares, of course, varies for each of us. But Jess would be right at home in the audience for “Dracula,” whose 19th-century women feel a more inchoate version of her fear. The world they inhabit in this loose, rollicking adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel is frightening precisely because it’s not so different from our own.
The title page of the script calls it “A bit of a feminist revenge fantasy, really,” and that’s exactly how this female-centric reinvention feels. It scares us not with monsters, though it certainly has those, but with the sinister prospect of women’s dehumanization at the hands of men empowered by law and intractable custom.
Its threats are both supernatural — Dracula, the bloodsucking Transylvanian traditionalist — and mortal: everyday Englishmen.
“Your man can lock you away for being mad, you know,” cautions Renfield, a Dracula devotee written here as an Englishwoman who has indeed been locked away. “And they say what madness is! They define all the words! They make all the rules — and they don’t let you break them. And they try to break you if you try!”
If, for the 21st century, her warning is not quite factually spot-on, it carries a certain metaphorical heft.
True, Renfield (played by Hamill) is possessed of drolly alarming appetites; when she asks Seward, her doctor, for a “plump, juicy, crunchy little kitten,” she’s not hoping for a playmate. But this patient, a onetime poet, does seem to have cracked under the constraints of a world that demanded her submission to a cruel husband.
A tale of domestic horrors — and perhaps an egalitarian manifesto, too, by a playwright who got married during previews — Hamill’s “Dracula” is about the expectation that women will bend themselves to the rigid frame of ladylike behavior, no matter how it deforms them. They mustn’t be brainy, lest their menfolk feel slighted; they mustn’t be willful; and they surely mustn’t let too much of their real personalities show.
When a grieving Seward buries his fiancée, Lucy, he says: “She will be laid to rest, in peace, as she lived — an angel, beyond any reproach!”
“An angel?” her best friend, Mina, erupts. “Lucy was vulgar — and funny — and clever — and complicated. She was not some porcelain idol for you to worship! You didn’t even know her.”
What’s so offensive to Mina is that this intended compliment, calling Lucy an angel, is in fact a denial of her very humanity. Mina herself, in the meantime, is pregnant and thus assumed by those around her to be in a diminished state — physically delicate and mentally frail. One outlier: the vampire-hunting physician Van Helsing, a woman who takes no guff from anyone and taps Mina as a kindred spirit.
If Mina suffers from any condition, it’s being female in a society designed and run by men, for men. She and Van Helsing do fight back, and they notch a win. Which is what makes this fantasy so much fun — because in the real world, theater being no exception, men still hold outsize power.
So many plays, including whole acres of Shakespeare, are about struggles for dominance. “Grand Horizons” and “Dracula” wage a more elemental battle: to grant women their full personhood — not lesser than, but equal to.
“You cannot tear down all of the old ways alone,” Dracula says menacingly.
Wohl and Hamill are not alone, though. And those old ways are crumbling.
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
