Heartland Heartiness

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

The great post-World War II story of the American stage is the rise of resident companies in scores of cities. Instead of offering just touring entertainments on their way to or from Broadway, they present new works and innovative reconsiderations of the classics. The foremost symbol of this regional movement is the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. One of the older companies -- it marks its 25th anniversary this year -- it is also among the biggest, with 1,441 seats, more than in 25 of the 37 playhouses on Broadway.

The Guthrie emphasizes European drama, including adaptations of fiction, in a schedule rarely leavened by a conventional comedy or musical. Unlike its rivals in total audience, the Shakespeare festivals in Ashland, Ore., and Stratford, Ont., it depends chiefly on its heartland community rather than tourists. And it is plainly prized by that constituency: the Guthrie is filling more than 80% of the house for almost 250 performances this season. It derives a hefty 54% of operating costs from the box office, with local corporations subsidizing a further 13% of the $8.5 million annual budget. While a dip in subscription sales last year contributed to a record $684,000 deficit, subscriptions this year are the highest since Sir Tyrone Guthrie's inaugural season in 1963.

The artistic directorship of the Guthrie is thus one of the plums in the American theater. Despite this, of the six men who have held it, only two have been Americans. Alvin Epstein lasted a single season before returning in 1979 to a distinguished career as a roving actor and director. The second is Garland Wright, 42, who was appointed two years ago and recently extended his contract until 1992.

Bearded and brooding in appearance, the Texas-born Wright often looks like a villain in a Jacobean tragedy. He has directed on Broadway (Pvt. Wars), off- Broadway (Vanities), and at regional stages in Washington, Dallas, Denver and . Seattle. In style and choice of plays, he suggests no major break with the Guthrie's traditions. His major effort is to enhance the status and creative contribution of actors. He wants to shift from the present resident company of 43 to a sort of extended family of 150 or so performers who will work there often but not necessarily every year or even for a full season.

The most important show staged by Wright since he became artistic director, and the newest addition to the Guthrie's repertory, is a four-hour, 41-actor production of Hamlet. In it, Wright depicts a crumbling monarchy in which no one is competent to rule, so that Fortinbras' climactic coup d'etat is no tragedy but a blessed relief. Wright invigoratingly moves the action from space to starkly different space within the castle, mostly by use of lighting and a movable back wall that is by turns opaque, reflective or transparent. The first act begins with an elaborate dinner party glimpsed from an antechamber; the second starts with a gaudily dressed, Kabuki-like version of the play within a play; the third, with Ophelia's funeral. In each case, the ceremony heightens the sense of falseness and decay against which the prince rebels.

For actors, the key question about Hamlet is his sanity. Zeljko Ivanek, 31, one of the nation's most gifted young actors, shapes his performance as a great arc. At first, everyone onstage thinks him crazy, but in his acerbic asides he persuades the audience that he is sane. Then he gradually transits into giggling, glittering-eyed madness. But from Ophelia's funeral forward, he regains himself and is ever sounder and stronger. Ivanek employs some daring and memorable gestures. Just before the start of "To be, or not to be," for example, he half-dangles from a balcony railing, makes a whooshing sound, and twiddles his fingers in tentative mimicry of a dive into nothingness.

Hamlet is the fourth production to join a Guthrie season that started in June. The others: Wright's own direction, design and adaptation of Moliere's The Imaginary Invalid, transplanted from a 1983 mounting at Arena Stage in Washington; The Glass Menagerie, staged by Vivian Matalon (Morning's at Seven); and a new work, Frankenstein -- Playing with Fire, which reached the main stage after a Guthrie-sponsored 31-state national tour. All were visually striking and raucously performed in the broadly expressive 19th century style that Wright seems to favor, particularly for the stadium-like Guthrie, where the seats are so steeply stacked that none is more than 52 ft. from the stage. Says Wright: "That is a rather gladiatorial space. A lot of small plays and intimate approaches are eaten alive."

Certainly, there is nothing intimate about this Menagerie, in which the supposedly fragile Wingfield family seems robust enough to set out for the frontier in a Conestoga wagon. Guilt, the haunting theme of the play, has no place here, and there is only peevishness, rather than Oedipal tension and rage, between TV Star Polly Holliday (Alice) as the mother and David Ossian as her poetic son.

Barbara Fields' Frankenstein -- Playing with Fire is probably the least gory and most thoughtful adaptation ever made of Mary Shelley's novel. This Dr. Frankenstein is no put-upon idealist but a chilly megalomaniac who has a kinky preoccupation with death. The would-be Shavian dialectic between maker and monster is suggestive rather than fully realized: too often, with a flourish, it reveals the obvious. Yet it is never dull, and it derives its narrative momentum from ideas rather than theatrics.

The splashiest of the season-opening productions was Invalid, a satire of medical quackery and patients' gullibility that ended its run Aug. 11. The text is too dated to have much to say to this era of CAT scans and laser surgery. But Wright adorned the show with every possible gimmick, from magical entrances and exits to graphic enema jokes. Some of the excess was wretched, some delightful.

Still to come this season are two formidable challenges for the Guthrie and its audience alike. One is Rumanian Director Lucian Pintilie's harrowing vision of Ibsen's The Wild Duck, stressing its social-class conflicts, first seen at Arena Stage in 1986. The other is the U.S. premiere of Pravda, a 1985 London hit about the takeover and corruption of serious news media by a tycoon whom critics likened to Rupert Murdoch. Wright is looking forward to them confidently. "Thanks to the long and rarefied history of the repertory at this theater," he says, "the audience is much better educated than average about the literature of the stage and eager to embrace demanding and sophisticated work."