The first time we see her, Lynn Redgrave's character is a devastatingly confused, imperious old Englishwoman who used to be a famous actress. Now her career is over, her husband is dead, and her daughter, who lives in California (of all places), carries on with a lesbian. "I suppose she is a person, of sorts," the old actress says about the lesbian. "She never puts me in any of her films."
Tom Chargin
Starry Night: Cynthia Mace, Lynn Redgrave, and Mercedes Herrero.
Details
Produced by the San Jose Repertory Theater
Through Feb. 24
Tickets are $20-44
(408) 367-7255
www.sjrep.org
San Jose Rep, 101 Paseo de San Antonio (between South Second and Third streets), San Jose
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"She does animal documentary films, mother."
Redgrave's play is called The Mandrake Root because a mandrake has a forked root that looks like a naked woman, and the myths and properties clinging to it have to do with sex. Mandrakes were also believed to howl like banshees when you ripped them from the ground. The old Englishwoman, Rose Randall, not only has been ripped away from two important men (a husband and a lover), she's also obsessed with sexual things at the uncomfortable age of 80. Sex confuses her; it won't let her go. She fixates on her daughter's lesbianism and gets lost in dreamlike memories of her own complicated marriage.
The story has a few roots in the Redgrave family saga, but it's not autobiography. The old woman might be Lynn's mother, the actress Rachel Kempson; the dead bisexual husband might be Michael Redgrave, her father. The daughter, Sally, might easily be Lynn Redgrave herself, except that Sally's a childless lesbian who writes children's books. (Lynn Redgrave has three kids.) Lynn's brother and sister, Corin and Vanessa, have nothing to do with this production, and the plot would expose a scandalous family secret if it were true. But "the play is completely invented," Redgrave has said.
Fine, but is it any good? Mandrake is Redgrave's second adventure in playwriting (after Shakespeare for My Father), and in the wake of last year's rocky world premiere in Connecticut it has been radically revised. The result isn't perfect, but it's not bad, either. Redgrave took to writing her own stuff after directors stopped "beating down doors" to give her work -- she'd reached that awkward impasse of an aging doyenne. Though you'd expect Mandrake to be just a Redgrave vehicle, a show for a star and a handful of minor planets, it's better than that. It's an honest-to-God drama, with flaws.
Redgrave does vivid, stirring work as Rose, first as an impossible old woman who carries home the wrong suitcase from LAX and insists on cooking dinner in the morning. She snaps at Sally's girlfriend: "You probably can't even cook, you're too busy being a lesbian." In these scenes Redgrave is not merely funny; Rose's instability has a pathetic force behind it, as sorrowful as King Lear's. Redgrave underscores the pathos by playing Rose at age 22 with a hopeful, girlish ebullience, perfectly tuned, as she marries a dashing but reluctant actor named Robert Randall.
Cynthia Mace does an excellent job as Sally, the exasperated daughter. Sally might be a thin character in someone else's hands, because Redgrave the playwright hasn't given her much of a past (in spite of flashbacks to Sally's childhood, with Jillian Lee Wheeler playing the excessively cute and precocious little girl). But Mace has taken object lessons from Redgrave the performer, displaying some of the older performer's light but sophisticated style.
David Adkins brings depth to the husband, although Robert is more of a handsome figure than a dynamic character. The flashbacks to Rose's past with him are enthralling. At their wedding, Robert pulls a friend named Alistair aside and says he's nervous about sex with his new wife; he might not be able to hold up his end of the marriage. "Entertain her for me, will you?" he asks Alistair, and Alistair (played spottily by Keith Langsdale) obliges.
Mercedes Herrero is also uneven as Sally's girlfriend, Svea, and as a few other underwritten characters.
The Mandrake Root shows signs of having once been a star vehicle, maybe before director Warner Shook and dramaturge Tom Bryant helped Redgrave rewrite. It also rides the mandrake metaphor too hard, and finds too many excuses to work in John Donne's "Song" ("Go, and catch a falling star,/ Get with child a mandrake root"), when one or two references would have been just fine. But the core of the play -- the strained mother-daughter bond, the undercurrents of sex in an old woman's dotage -- feels thrillingly clear. Redgrave just might have a future as a playwright.
