Morgan Freeman Is Back on Broadway in ‘The Country Girl’

It’s been a while since this fellow has graced a Broadway stage. Everyone likes the guy — he’s personable and sage, with an ever-present twinkle in his eye. Still, as opening night draws nearer, the cast and crew have grown visibly nervous about whether he still has it in him to carry the play.If you’ve seen or heard much about the current Broadway revival of the 1950 Clifford Odets sudser “The Country Wife,” renamed “The Country Girl,” you may well assume that this description pertains to Morgan Freeman, whose comfort level with the text has been the source of much preopening chatter among theatrical circles and in the gossip columns. Such sniping, along with veiled and not-so-veiled allusions to director Mike Nichols’s notably light hand during rehearsals, is typically crippling to any production, no matter how much interest it may spawn among theatrical rubberneckers.But a curious thing happens during this well-mannered mounting — which, as it happens, is about a faded theatrical lion named Frank Elgin struggling to stay off the script and on the wagon during out-of-town rehearsals for a Broadway-bound play. The schadenfreude-pumped audience, ears cocked for the slightest flub from its leading man, imbues “The Country Girl” — a decidedly lesser Odets effort under ordinary circumstances — with a meta-theatrical hum that it would never otherwise have, stifling unkind chortles at the vaguest mention of memorization and cues.The play within the play that causes Frank so much professional and emotional grief, a musty melodrama about grumpy patriarchs and “labor agitators,” essentially becomes a play within a play within a play, with each iteration taking on a new and not unwelcome tingle. The occasional hesitations and reversals at a recent press performance by Mr. Freeman (and by his co-star, the fellow Oscar winner Frances McDormand) came to feel less like nerve-racking scrambles and more like the gambits of a magician who piques the interest of his audience by inserting intentional flubs in anticipation of a final cathartic “ta-daaaa!”Is this an overly generous assessment? Perhaps. But “The Country Girl” is, in addition to a three-pronged drama about the codependencies of marriage as well as of artistic collaboration, a love letter to the art of stage acting. “Nothing is quite so mysterious and silent as a dark theatre — a night without a star,” intones Frank’s long-suffering wife, Georgie (Ms. McDormand). The stars on display may flicker now and then, but they cast a strangely compelling — and equally mysterious — light on the counterintuitive and wistful energies that create art.The modifications by Mr. Nichols and the playwright Jon Robin Baitz, who is credited with “material revisions,” aren’t nearly as extensive as reports had indicated. The play is still given over to the handling (and mishandling) of the delicate Frank, both by Georgie and by his director, the hard-driving Bernie Dodd, “a hot, gifted guy who got somewhere in a hurry.” (Not so different from Mr. Nichols, who directed his first Broadway play at age 31 — and who has cut that description from this production.)Hell-bent on restoring Frank to his earlier heights, Bernie (Peter Gallagher) engages in what amounts to method acting in reverse: Rather than draw from his own emotional experiences to inform his performance as a conniving judge, Frank picks apart the script in search of self-knowledge about what effect Georgie has on him and whether he’s motivated to question this dynamic, letting the play draw him into some risky territory, both for himself and for those around him. Bernie makes no apologies about these manipulations. “My problem is to keep him going — overflowing,” he brags to Georgie. “The longer I keep him fluid and open, the more gold we mine.” The idea is that he’ll break through Frank’s carefully accumulated defenses and unearth the real, raw force underneath, but Bernie has little appreciation for the potentially ruinous consequences of this excavation. (When an “overflowing” Frank actually strikes his female co-star onstage, nobody, least of all Bernie, seems terribly concerned.) We never see the fruits of this approach — Frank’s “onstage” scenes are only heard from the dressing room, one of Tim Hatley’s history-soaked backstage sets — but the imposing Mr. Freeman makes this fraught exploration both plausible and even touching.The dime-store argot that punctuated so much of Odets’s earlier work had been toned down by 1950, but his pungent cadences still pose a threat to modern-day actors. Only Mr. Gallagher, a cigarette invariably shoved into his bludgeon of a jaw, consistently makes lines like “We killed the cat with sentiment” sound remotely natural. He’s so effective, in fact, that he runs the risk of inadvertently harming the production; the stylistic contrast between him and his co-stars is so stark that he sounds at times like a language instructor demonstrating an entirely new dialect to an eager but uncertain classroom.The casting of a black performer in a role created for a white actor is addressed in only the most oblique ways: Frank’s fleeting reference to the actor Canada Lee, Bernie’s confused stare upon seeing Georgie for the first time. This second example touches upon the production’s larger resonances on this score, nearly all of which pulse through Ms. McDormand’s sharp-edged performance. The controversy inherent in an interracial marriage circa 1950 shows through in Georgie’s edgy defensiveness, her insistence on doubling down on what has clearly been an unfulfilling match for long stretches. These frustrations — along with the more typical marital strains — fuel a memorable Act 2 confrontation between her and Bernie, an emotional custody battle over a grown but broken man.Frank’s absence in this scene, probably the finest in this production, makes him even more enormously present: Everyone is more nervous when they can’t account for him. Ideally, this energy wouldn’t permeate “The Country Girl” in quite so public a way. But it does, and while the drawbacks are unavoidable, Mr. Nichols has put them to amazingly good use.Until July 20 (252 W. 45th St., between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, 212-239-6200).

Morgan Freeman Is Back on Broadway in ‘The Country Girl’

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