DEAR MASTER
Writers’ Theatre-Chicago at Books on Vernon
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They were very good for each other–at a safe distance. So it’s not surprising that in Michael Halberstam’s excellent 90-minute staging for Writers’ Theatre-Chicago, Sand and Flaubert keep to separate sections of the elegantly appointed stage and address each other through the audience (producing the same sort of tension born of separation that worked in Dear Liar, about the correspondence of George Bernard Shaw and Mrs. Patrick Campbell, and to a lesser degree in A.R. Gurney’s Love Letters).
Opening their hearts, they expose their contradictions and complexity. A sybaritic recluse, Flaubert was famous as the elitist writer-monk of Croisset, priding himself on a manic devotion to art and to the mot juste. Prizing solitude, despising nature and socialism, preferring promiscuity to romance, and seeing stupidity everywhere, the neurasthenic Flaubert imagined himself a martyr to his one love: “Writing is a torture like a terrible itch–but scratching it is ecstasy!”
On August 10, 1967, Kenneth Halliwell–Orton’s patrician lover of 15 years–took a hammer and beat the brains out of the 34-year-old playwright, then offed himself, swallowing 22 Nembutals (an event surrealistically depicted in John Lahr’s Prick Up Your Ears and Peter Fieldson’s Black and Blue). And much of Nothing to Hide is as ghoulish as this occurrence–intended, I suppose, as a black homage to Orton and his work.
Baroque flourishes and iconoclastic excesses aside, Wood’s script is a tour de force for Shore, thanks to Wood’s enterprising staging. Despite the play’s obsession with Orton’s crushed skull, Shore plays the literal overkill with dexterity, even dignity and poignance. His commedialike Orton is even more impressive than his Halliwell (and as scripted is often accurate: he shows Orton’s pride in his pumped-up body and his compulsion to “do the Freddie,” a particularly stupid 60s dance). Abandoning Orton’s shifting facades, Shore shows the hurt behind his mockery, the desire–especially tempting to gay writers–to reshape through their art a world that’s all too interested in reshaping them. Shore brings surprising grace to Wood’s assaults–no small feat when you spend half the show wearing a bald skullcap and the other with enough gore stuck to your hair to make a zombie wince.
