Joe's View

The Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia isn’t known for doing volatile new material — it has the world’s largest subscription audience (56,000) and tends to present solid, middle-of-the-road musicals and plays. So, you could feel the tension in the audience at Sunday afternoon’s performance of the world premiere production of “The Eclectic Society,” an ambitious drama-comedy about the huge convulsions in American society during the 1960s.

The play is set on a Connecticut college campus in 1963, just a few weeks before JFK was assassinated and “the 1960s” — as we now know them — really began.

In his debut play, Eric Conger — who went to Wesleyan University — shows us how the conservatism we tend to associate with the 1950s lingered into the first few years of the following decade. You can see that fact reflected in the George Lucas film, “American Graffiti,” which takes place in 1962, but feels like a ’50s story.

Yes, by 1963, the Civil Rights movement was changing the South — and mobilizing white liberal activists in the North — but many college campuses were still rather isolated.

“The Eclectic Society” takes place within a fraternity/literary society which is about to sponsor a young black student from Cleveland as a gesture to racial diversity — a sign that the organization is trying to change with the times. The frat already has one black member, Floyd Wiggins (Carl Clemons-Hopkins, above right), but he is a star athlete — in two sports — and is keeping a very low profile in terms of race.

Darrell Freeman (J. Alex Brinson, below) is a black street poet who is a few years ahead of his time in terms of his interests and his language.

By the late 1960s, Darrell would have been seen as a militant black activist/writer in the LeRoi Jones vein and would have been a star in the eyes of white campus activists at many Eastern universities.

Darrell finds a powerful enemy in the Eclectic Society in the form of Sean O’Dey (Paul Felder) who resents the fact that he has to help pay for Darrell’s lodgings and who may be an out-and-out racist.

Conger sets up a potent situation that explodes in Act Two — with a sensational scene in which Darrell lashes out at the fraternity brothers — but unfortunately the playwright defuses the climax with a twist that throws a wet blanket over the whole story.

Still, in this age of Obama — when we seem to have gone back to lots of veiled racism in public forums — it is electrifying to see the primal white/black conflict explored in a promising new play. The cast is outstanding, with special praise deserved by Paul Felder (above, center) who makes Sean so insidiously attractive and powerful (without tipping over into blatant anger).

It was clear “The Eclectic Society” went too far for the Walnut’s rather conservative subscription audience — the use of the F-word and a brief flash of nudity did not play well with the predominantly senior citizen crowd — but Conger deserves the chance to continue working on the piece at another venue.

(“The Eclectic Society” is running through March 7.  For more information, visit www.WalnutStreetTheatre.org)

Those who weren’t around when the Alfred Hitchcock picture, “Psycho,” opened in 1960 have no idea of the revolutionary impact it had on the movie business.

Hitchcock put sex and violence front and center in a Hollywood film for the first time. From that moment on, moviemakers were given license to keep upping the ante. By the end of the 1960s, blood flowed freely in films as diverse as “Bonnie & Clyde” and “The Wild Bunch” and sexual situations that would have been unimaginable ten years earlier were integral to the plot of the X-rated 1969 best picture Oscar winner “Midnight Cowboy.”

The British critic and historian David Thomson takes us back 50 years in his excellent new book, “The Moment of ‘Psycho’: How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America to Love Murder” (Basic Books).

Of course, the motel shower stabbing death of Janet Leigh — only 40 minutes into the film — was the key moment that shocked and terrified 1960 moviegoers who had no idea that the director of “Rear Window” and “North by Northwest” would turn the camera toward terrible violence, rather than away from it.

The scene of the crime made the sudden murder completely unexpected and strangely titillating to audiences 50 years ago — the combination of the strongly implied nudity of Janet Leigh and the savage violence she faced was startling in the extreme.

But, Thomson points out how “Psycho” broke Hollywood rules right from the start when his camera crept into a Phoenix hotel room where Leigh had obviously just had a lunch-break sexual tryst with her lover (John Gavin).

We quickly learn that the man is piled under debt (including alimony payments to his ex) and cannot offer his “girlfriend” much hope of a future together: other than similar daytime sexual encounters in cheap by-the-hour hotels.

“Look at a hundred other films from the ’50s and you will not find the same cramped air. As a rule, (in other films) the rooms are larger and brighter than they would be in reality, waiting to be filled by the hopes and energies of the era. Most films of the ’50s are secret ads for the American way of life. ‘Psycho’ is a warning about its lies and limits,” Thomson writes.

The author tells us how Hitchcock faced opposition from Paramount when he decided to make an inexpensive little black-and-white shocker — the executives thought the material was so sleazy that they pressed the director to shoot the film at another studio and granted him an unprecedented deal in which Hitchcock would have 60 percent ownsership of the movie (a deal which would make him one of the wealthiest Hollywood directors).

It was only because Hitchcock was such a popular filmmaker — and personally well liked by the people who ran the Production Code censorship board — that he was able to include unprecendented material in a Hollywood film, including a shot of a toilet flushing (the first toilet ever seen in a studio movie!), the opening post-coital hotel scene and the two graphic murders.

Hitchcock knew he was venturing into totally new territory by killing the biggest star in “Psycho” about 40 minutes in. As Thomson writes, the murder opened an abyss that left moviegoers feeling disoriented and helpless — if an intensely likable star like Janet Leigh could be disposed of so ruthlessly, who knew what horrors awaited them in the rest of the movie?

Leigh’s performance comes in for considerable — and well-deserved — praise from Thomson who notes how much of her poignant, dissatisfied character she has to portray without the crutch of any dialogue.

In subsequent viewings, “Psycho” does indeed lose a lot of its power in the scenes after the shower murder, as Thomson notes, but Leigh’s performance and her sad dinner with the shy motel manager Anthony Perkins are as strong as ever.

After taking us through the film, Thomson traces the movie’s influence over the subsequent five decades which have seen Hollywood films include violence so explicit that many horror films have become a form of torture porn.

“There is no need to blame Alfred Hitchcock alone for this development,” Thomson writes of the ghastly special effects-driven horror films of recent vintage. “(They are) rooted in the culture as a whole. But ‘Psycho’ more than any one film had said, ‘Forget the consequences of a case study if the end product is thrilling enough.’…What (has been) lost (over the years) is Hitchcock’s unique jaundiced vision — the thing stressed in the first forty minutes of ‘Psycho’: his sense of the unkind society.”

Many Elmore Leonard novels have been brought to the screen – with mixed results – but my favorite adaptation is one very few people have ever heard of, let alone seen.

The 1986 John Frankenheimer drama, “52 Pick-Up,” suffered the misfortune of being produced and distributed by the Cannon Group, a long-forgotten company that specialized in Chuck Norris action pictures and pop-culture-fad movies about things like break dancing.

The Frankenheimer version of the Elmore Leonard novel is a tough and rather nasty look at the intersection of high life and low life in Los Angeles two decades ago. It’s a crime drama that packs an unusually strong emotional punch.

The late Roy Scheider gives one of the best performances of his career as an industrialist, married to a rising politician (Ann-Margret), who has been having an affair with a pretty young actress (Kelly Preston), new to L.A., who is falling into the porn/prostitution underworld.

A porn director/pimp (played with ferocious force by John Glover) decides to blackmail the businessman with a hidden camera video showing Scheider having sex with the actress.

When the man says “no” and finally confesses to his wife about the affair, the blackmailer ups the ante by killing the mistress and pinning the murder on the businessman.

Scheider manages to make us care about a morally dubious man without ever trying to sugar coat what the adulterer has done to his wife.

When Scheider tells his wife about the affair, the result is one of the best acted scenes to be found in any 1980s Hollywood movie. Scheider’s nervous guilt turns to pain as he watches his wife react to the bombshell revelation (Ann-Margret is simply sensational in this scene).

It was clear watching “52 Pick-Up” that Scheider didn’t care if we “liked” the man he played, but he takes us so far into the character’s dilemma that the empathy factor is strong (when the industrialist is shown a tape of his mistress’ murder, we can see that the man is both horrified by what happened to a girl he cared for and terrified that he has walked right into a trap that will probably destroy him).

“52 Pick-Up” was one of the very few good movies produced by Cannon and  it opened and closed almost simultaneously.

For many years, Frankenheimer was vocal in his pain over the mishandling of the film and the fact that his co-workers Scheider and Glover and Ann-Margret had some of their best screen work go unseen.

“52 Pick-Up” is a lost gem worth searching out.

 How’s this for an attention-grabbing opening?:

“Belle Svetlana surveyed her nude image in a full-length mirror, readying herself for a thirty-thousand-dollar-an-hour sexual encounter with the fifteen-year-old son of an Arab oil tycoon.”

Yes, Jackie Collins has a new novel out — “Poor Little Bitch Girl” (St. Martin’s) — and it is her usual, all-but-irresistible, up-to-the-minute survey of the lifestyles of the rich and famous in New York, Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

No one should feel sorry for a woman who has sold 400 million books in 40 countries — all 27 novels remain in print — but Collins has never been taken with the seriousness she deserves.

Collins started writing long before publishers began ruthlessly categorizing books, so she has existed outside of any of the contemporary genres like chick lit or the many thriller and mystery subdivisions.

“Poor Little Bitch Girl” throws an amazing variety of characters and plot threads into a juicy 472-page read that shows us how prostitution rings and hot clubs operate on both coasts (and in Vegas); how movie stars deal with legal jams; the extreme measures that politicians will take to clean up personal messes; and the way that celebrities can do just about whatever they want most of the time.

The high price call girl of the book’s opening chapter is Annabelle Maestro, who has adopted her New York sex worker name of “Belle Svetlana” in order to shield her real identity as the daughter of two of the biggest stars in Hollywood. Annabelle and her drug addict boyfriend Frankie have set up one of Manhattan’s most lucrative — and most discrete — escort services.

The clients are all high-end — who else can pay $30,000 an hour? — and the “girls” are the creme de la creme: actresses and models who love the amazing dough they can make in an hour or two. Best of all, Annabelle and Frankie run a cash only business: the customers leave no financial trails and the escorts pay no taxes. Isn’t deregulated capitalism great?

The trouble starts when Annabelle’s movie star mother is murdered in her Beverly Hills mansion and it appears that the perp could be the victim’s Bruce Willis/Mel Gibson-style action movie superstar husband.

As if that plot was not enough to keep us going, Collins shifts the scene to D.C. where an old high school pal of Annabelle’s — political aide Carolyn Henderson — finds out she is pregnant by her married U.S. Senator lover and hopes this will mean he leaves his wife and marries her. Guess what? The politician has other ideas and suddenly Carolyn is in terrible jeopardy.

Collins keeps all of her subplots smoothly on track and ends nearly every chapter with a new development or a shock that demands the reader keep going — I polished the book off in two very entertaining sittings. One of Collins’s least written-about virtues is her wild sense of humor: who else can write sex scenes that are steamy and laugh-out-loud funny? 

Non-Collins readers — who are some of her harshest critics — won’t believe this, but the veteran best-seller creator has few peers when it comes to telling a good story (with the bonus of fascinating background material on the madder precincts of show business).

What a treat it is to see veteran character actor Dominic Chianese given the opportunity to carry the vibrant new independent film, “The Last New Yorker.”

The collaboration between writer Adam Forgash and director Harvey Wang is steeped in affection for New York City and the struggles of aging people to survive there. The film opens today in an exclusive run at the Quad Cinemas on West 13th St. in Manhattan.

The mix of drama, comedy and some rather fanciful plot twists might remind you of the 1981 Louis Malle-John Guare picture “Atlantic City” in which Burt Lancaster played an elderly numbers runner with little or no place in the Jersey Shore town after casino gambling was legalized.

The Chianese character in “The Last New Yorker,” Lenny Sugarman, is long retired from the rag trade when we meet him, but he is still full of hopes and dreams.

Lenny’s best friend, Ruben (Dick Latessa) keeps telling him that the New York in which they grew up and spent their prime is vanishing because the middle class has been priced out of the city. Ruben thinks they should move to Alabama or North Carolina where, he says, life is cheaper and easier.

“The Last New Yorker” was filmed in 2006, so it is a tad out of date in terms of finances — old-time businesses aren’t being pushed out by cruel realtors demanding more money, they’re shutting down due to the continuing ravages of the financial collapse of 2008-2009. And when Lenny engineers a bizarre stock market scheme that might hurt his old friends, we can’t help but think of recession era crooks like Bernie Madoff.

Fortunately, the movie is more of a character study and mood piece than a tough-minded docudrama about the financial realities of contemporary Manhattan.

We get to follow Lenny and Ruben on long, chatty walks through the changing city and the two actors’ teamwork is wonderful.

New York stage great Kathleen Chalfant has been given the juicy supporting role of a woman Lenny becomes convinced is the love of his life — even though they’ve never met.

Lenny manages to score a date with the elegant, retired department store buyer. The character of the kind but sane Mimi keeps the film balanced when the more fanciful elements threaten to turn “The Last New Yorker” into pure whimsy.

Wang and Forgash have made a little gem — one of those movies in which the journey is so interesting that you don’t care so much about the final destination.

The fantastic Gordon Edelstein staging of “The Glass Menagerie” at Long Wharf Theatre last season is being revisited in Manhattan starting March 5 at the Laura Pels Theatre where it is set to run through May 30.

The director and his cast took a break from rehearsal today for a photo op (above)  sponsored by Roundabout Theatre which is producing the transfer.

As I wrote in this space when the show opened in New Haven last spring: “People in the theatre — and people who write about the theatre — have a tendency toward hysteria and hyperbole, but Judith Ivey’s performance is quite amazing.

I’ve seen so many bad productions of the Tennessee Williams play — most especially the godawful Broadway revival with Jessica Lange a few seasons ago — that the thought of another night out at this “memory” piece about mothers and children and family responsibility gave me the willies.

But, Ivey is one of my favorite actresses and she has a way of grounding almost any play with humor and gritty realism, so I had a hunch she might blow the cobwebs off this warhorse.

My hunch was well-founded. Under the direction of LWT artistic director Gordon Edelstein, Ivey makes “The Glass Menagerie” feel newly minted.

Who knew there were so many laughs in the character of the faded Southern belle Amanda Wingfield?

And that those laughs could be produced without sacrificing the Williams poetry and the poignance of Keira Kelley’s presentation of poor “crippled” Laura’s fixation on her glass animals?

Who would have thought that a contemporary actress could find a universal essence of motherhood in such a specifically Southern play, written more than a half century ago?

Ivey made me believe she had spent decades joking and arguing with her grown son Tom — the Williams stand-in played so well by Patch Darragh in this production — and that with a fierce combination of love and steamroller guilt she always gets her way (something the woman has expected ever since she was a beautiful, teasing girl juggling dozens of “gentleman callers” back home in Mississippi).”

If you missed this show in New Haven don’t make the same mistake regarding the New York transfer.

Just a few years ago, the gripping theater piece “Decade at a Glance” by Joan Evans would probably have felt harrowing but distant.

After all, Evans uses the Great Depression era photos of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans (below) as the starting point for a theatrical examination of the impact of the financial apocalypse on Midwest farmers in the 1930s.

The loss of money and work and hope would be moving in any period, but at this particular moment — when we might still be on the edge of a global financial abyss — “Decade at a Glance” has the scary feel of history repeating itself.

Evans combines dance and drama and vintage tunes for a piece that only runs about an hour, but which will leave you with more to think about than the average play that is twice as long.

“Decade at a Glance” is a co-production of the Stella Adler Studio of Acting and the Harold Clurman Center for New Works in Movement and Dance Theatre. The show is being presented at the Adler studio through March 7 in a very intimate space that heightens the drama and the emotional impact of the material.

The piece begins in a city (presumably New York) where the ensemble sings a mordant version of “We’re in the Money,” dressed in ragged overcoats.

Evans and the cast quickly fill us in on the Franklin Roosevelt programs that put lots of urban people back to work (including artists like Lange and Evans who were hired by the federal government to travel the country photographing victims of the Depression).

The relief programs were focused mostly on the urban areas of the two coasts, however. The problems in the middle of the country actually got worse in the 1930s as poverty increased and climate changes devastated the area (i.e., the notorious dust storms that destroyed crops and killed farm animals).

For many of these Middle Americans, the only two choices were to starve where they were or to scrape a few bucks together and head out to California (the journey in Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath”).

“Decade at a Glance” features a wonderful ensemble of young actors, most of whom are recent graduates of acting schools around the city.

The company works together so tightly that it would unfair to single one or two of them out. The actors are: Lizzi Albert, Laura Carbonell, Erika Cazeneuve, Annie Chang, Aidan Koehler, Gaja Massaro, Rafa Miguel, Tommy Nelms, Sean Powell, Lulu Rossbacher, Melanie Siegel, Margaux Susi, Elise Toscano, Cythnia Vasquez and Sarah Wharton.

At $18 a ticket — students are only $5 — this is one of the great New York theater bargains of the moment. For more information, go to www.stellaadler.com.

“The Vicious Kind” is another one of the dozens — hundreds? — of recent American independent films that barely qualifies as a “movie,” in the sense of something that gets seen in a significant number of theaters.

The picture was shot in Norfolk, Connecticut, and was screened at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, but it sat on a shelf somewhere until last weekend, when it had its one-screen theatrical premiere in New York City just days before debuting on DVD via Image Entertainment.

Like so many other indie films that never really go anywhere, “The Vicious Kind” has the feel of one of those well-acted, semi-interesting off-Broadway plays that debut in some small space downtown and are never produced again.

You might describe the genre as David Mamet lite or sub-Neil LaBute. Lots of heavy male conflict — and rough tangling with women — but not much believability or depth. They are usually stories about angry men who want a woman in their life but who are so profane and hostile that they tend to scare most romantic prospects away.

“The Vicious Kind” opens in a diner where Caleb Sinclaire (Adam Scott, above) gives his callow younger brother Peter (Alex Frost) advice about women. Caleb’s bottom line is that “they are all whores.”

This scabrous scene could have been lifted right out of David Mamet’s early play “Sexual Perversity in Chicago” in which a jealous misogynist did everything in his power to discourage his buddy from getting serious about a woman. That play began with an obscene rant in a singles bar that was much like Caleb’s diner monologue.

In “The Vicious Kind” opening, we get to see the sensitive man under the barnacles when the younger brother goes to the bathroom — Caleb starts to cry and then quickly wipes his tears away before Peter returns.

Soon, Caleb is giving Peter and his new college girlfriend Emma (Brittany Snow) a ride home to the Sinclaire house for Thanksgiving.

Caleb is alienated from dad (J.K. Simmons) because of something terrible involving his late mother.

The set-up is shaky. Would the shy Peter bring his new girlfriend home for a four day weekend so soon? And would he want her to ride home with his trash-talking brother? Later in the film, when both brothers are vying for Emma’s attention, they get into sexual situations in their father’s home that are patently unbelievable.

What keeps writer-director Lee Toland Krieger’s movie going is his fine work with the cast and his non-condescending view of small-town, middle-class life. Scott and company are so good — and the setting feels so real — that the picture works on a scene-by-scene basis.

But, it never really adds up to much.