Joe's View

Playbill.com announced some great stage news earlier this week. The epic Sarah Ruhl drama, “Passion Play,” that opened the 2008-2009 Yale Rep season is being produced in New York City in April.

Mark Wing-Davey — who staged the New Haven production — is putting together a new, site-specific version at the Irondale Center inside the Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn.

Previews of the Epic Theatre Ensemble show will be starting April 27 with an official opening set for May 12.

I loved “Passion Play” at Yale Rep but understood why it was not immediately snapped up by a commercial producer in New York — the three-hour piece calls for a large cast and considerable scenic elements.

Yale Rep did the show at the larger University Theatre rather than the Rep stage and it was an awesome production of Ruhl’s trilogy of interconnected plays about the ways in which the Christ story has been dramatized for the last 500 years.

Act One takes us to England in 1575 where the queen has just banned stage tellings of the Passion, and the people in a small northern village are having their livelihoods threated since they are famed for an annual staging of the Bible story.

Act Two moves us to Germany in 1934 and the Oberammergau Passion which draws tourists from all over the world. Ruhl shows us the role the pageant played in reinforcing the anti-Semitism of the Nazi Party.

The third play is set in Spearfish, South Dakota in 1969 and 1984 where locals put on a popular Middle American version of the Christ story.

“Passion Play” is about acting and the theater as well as religion and politics.

Ruhl dramatizes the struggle of artists in three different eras in coming to terms with a stage representation of “the greatest story ever told.”

The playwright also examines the provocative and perhaps unintended sexual undertones in the story of the “virgin” birth and a handsome messiah’s relationship with prostitutes and eager male followers.

“Passion Play” never directly addresses the hugely popular Mel Gibson filmed “Passion” a few years ago, but Ruhl does explore the way show biz has benefitted from the sensational violence and near-nudity involved with various Bible tales and the end of Christ.

The cast was quite extraordinary from top to bottom, with several ensemble members returning to work on the play after doing earlier productions in Chicago and Washington, D.C. Polly Noonan played a “village idiot” in the first two acts who is actually much wiser than most of the folks who mock her. In Act Two, the encounter between the “idiot” and a Nazi in the forest becomes one of the most subtle and horrifying dramatizations of the Holocaust that I’ve ever seen in a film or on stage.

Kathleen Chalfant (above and below) delivered a tour de force performance as the queen, Hitler and President Ronald Reagan.

Ruhl’s Reagan has tinges of parody in it, of course, but she also draws us in close to the actor-turned-president in a fantastic and very brief aside in which Reagan confides to us about his love of public performance: “I always liked the light from the camera. The wall of light gave me privacy, made me feel comfortabke. A light would go on and I would relax. All I saw was the light.”

“People are afraid of actors,” the president continues. “They’re afraid we’re good at lying. I’ll let you in on a little secret. We’re really just EXTRA good at telling the truth.”

I can’t wait to see this play again. I hope Wing-Davey is able to use some of the amazing actors who made the New Haven production so special.

The great film and stage producer David Brown died yesterday at the Manhattan apartment he shared with his wife Helen Gurley Brown.

He was 93 and enjoyed an incredible career that included co-producing some of the biggest hits of all time, including “Jaws” and “The Sting.”

It was Brown and his partner Richard Zanuck who launched Steven Spielberg’s big-screen career with “The Sugarland Express” in 1974. Even though that movie wasn’t a box-office hit, Zanuck and Brown were knocked out by the young Spielberg’s talent and decided to gamble on him by giving the filmmaker “Jaws” which opened the following year.

The producing team stuck by Spielberg when costs went through the roof – mostly due to problems with the mechanical shark – and the studio pushed the duo to bring someone else in. They backed their director, and the rest is Hollywood history.

Brown and his wife more or less created the modern woman’s magazine when she took over the moribund Cosmopolitan in the 1960s and turned it into a huge (and continuing success). David wrote many of the sexy cover teasers that made the magazine irresistible to the young women of the 1970s and 1980s.

I met Brown once when his film “Deep Impact” was about to open in 1998 and found him to be one of the wittiest and most direct movie people I’ve ever met. He laughed when asked about “Myra Breckinridge” (below), the X-rated 1970 disaster that led to him and Zanuck being fired from their production chief jobs at 20th Century Fox.  ”I still like that movie!,” he said, with a wry grin that acknowledged his minority view.

Yesterday, the Esquire Website re-posted a terrific Cal Fussman piece from 2001 in which Brown shared some of his life lessons. Here are a few of the wiser nuggets:

Work yourself to death. It’s the only way to live.

I’ve never loved a dumb woman. The brain, combined with moderate good looks, is an overwhelming aphrodisiac.

Exercise is pushing away from the table.

The screenwriter George Axelrod advised that when you were breaking off a love affair, always do it in a restaurant. He thought that most women would be constrained. I wouldn’t count on that.

It doesn’t comfort me to know that with my passing there will be no pain. I don’t want to leave the party.

Marriage to a woman more successful than you can work, provided you take pride in her achievements and are secure in your own. For years I was known as Helen Gurley Brown’s husband, and, frankly, I loved it.

Good health is beautifully boring.

When you visit the Hayden Planetarium at the Museum of Natural History and you realize the enormity of the universe and the insignificance of Earth and all who live on it, it’s hard to conceive of a god in our own image.

Never sleep with anyone who has more trouble or less money than you have.

The most unlikely women are the most explosive lovers.

Bad news is rarely exaggerated, and first reports of disaster can always be trusted.

A man’s attitude toward money is indicative of his meanness or generosity of spirit.

If you’re going after mass circulation, you must have mass appeal.

I once took Mae West to a restaurant. Nobody bothered her. When we left, there was a standing ovation. That’s respect. That’s love. It’s overdone now.

Never be the first to arrive at a party or the last to go home, and never, ever be both.

If you’re broke, you’ll live forever. If you’re rich, you’ll die tomorrow. To confound the fates, live it up, but little by little.

Success is a man who has the love and trust of a woman, a job he likes, and an abiding sense of humor. Success is a man whose children love him and have made him proud of them. Success is a man who dies at home in his sleep after a good life.

Eat just enough to fill out facial wrinkles.

What do I love about Helen? Her infinite configurations. Like a cat. No expression, movement, or phrase is ever quite the same. She’s loving and funny and infinitely caring and has a work ethic that is admirable. She has a great laugh. What I love about her is everything. Everything.

Marriage is a lottery. I had been married twice when I met Helen. I had no belief that a marriage would work at that point. I was attracted to Helen sexually. I didn’t know she was a wonderful woman. That’s the luck of it. It’s forty-one years now, nearly forty-two. There isn’t a day when I don’t smile when I think of her. We’re still lovers. My great anxiety is that one of us is going to lose the other at some point, and it’s a thought I can’t bear to dwell on.

The biggest tip I’ve ever given? 100 percent. I always keep my hand over the bill so that Helen can’t see it. She says, “How can I submit this bill on my expense account with this tip!”

I get good tables.

After seventy, if you wake up without pains, you’re dead.

R.I.P.

Longtime Weston resident Christopher Plummer has won just about every stage acting award, but an Oscar nomination has eluded the star despite a film career that goes back five decades.

Today, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences made up for its oversights by (finally) citing Plummer for his work as Leo Tolstoy in the biographical drama “The Last Station” (top-billed Helen Mirren was nominated in the best actress division).

Perhaps Plummer’s long-standing preference for stage work over film roles annoyed the folks in Hollywood, but he is long overdue for a nomination.

Back in 1999, I assumed the actor would be nominated for his amazing performance as CBS newsman Mike Wallace in “The Insider,” but he was overlooked. This was probably one of the most daunting acting assignments of the 1990s — in a phone interview after he finished shooting the part Plummer told me he was nervous about playing a very famous real person (who was still quite alive) but that director Michael Mann made the job one of the best movie experiences of his career.

The bad news about today’s good news is that Plummer is a long shot in his category.

Christoph Waltz has won virtually every preliminary best supporting actor award for his scary and hilarious performance as the primary Nazi villain in Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds” and is a heavy favorite to win.

The new play by Yale alumnus Dan Via — “Daddy” — that opened last night in Manhattan under the auspices of Downtowntheatre Company, features a trio of really strong performances in a story that touches on lots of interesting issues.

The play has a huge, deal-breaking flaw in the last ten minutes, but let’s stay positive for a bit. (Also, the deal-breaker involves a twist that I can’t write about here anyhow.)

The central matter at hand in “Daddy” is how a long-term friendship can be shaken when one of the friends finds a new romance.

Colin (Gerald McCullouch) and Stew (played by the writer) are middle-aged best friends — both gay — who are so tight that they are more like brothers than friends. Colin is still slim and attractive so he has no problem snagging a one-night stand whenever he’s in the mood. Stew has middle-aged spread and leaves the impression he hasn’t had a date in a long time (“Anyone who believes opposites attract hasn’t been to a gay bar,” he tells his friend.)

Colin is a popular writer for a Pittsburgh daily newspaper and Stew is a law professor at Pitt who is interviewing for a new job at Stanford as the play opens. We can tell that both men worry about the separation the job would cause, but they pretend that it’s just a great career opportunity.

Real change enters in the form of Tee (Bjorn DuPaty), a Carnegie-Mellon journ student who interns at Colin’s paper. Tee hero-worships the writer because of his tough, gay activist reporting.

Tee and Colin begin a sexual/romantic relationship that Stew thinks is entirely inappropriate — Tee was raised by his fundamentalist Christian grandparents and appears to be seeking a father figure as well as a boyfriend.

The three actors are very good, with McCullough (of the “CSI” series) displaying a mix of charisma, ego and compassion that makes it easy to see why he attracts people of different ages and types for friendship and more. Via takes the role of a rather bitter sad sack character and makes us care about a guy who is obviously not as tough as he talks, DuPaty plays the most callow and ambiguous character — he suggests a slightly sinister undertone that leaves us wondering what we don’t know about him.

“Daddy” unfolds in a series of witty and well-observed scenes that keep us interested in the characters and their problems. But then in the final 10 or 15 minutes — just when we think “Daddy” is going to turn into a David Mamet-style examination of workplace sexual harrassment — Via makes a melodramatic revelation that was frankly impossible for me to accept (detailing my objections would mean giving away the surprise — which appeared to work for some people at the TBG Arts Center last night).

The bomb Via drops is so big that I wish he had built the play around this shocker rather than tossing it at us so close to the finale.

For ticket and performance information, visit www.DaddythePlay.com