 The Very Little Theatre continues its 81st season on January 15 with a three-week run of The Country Girl, a riveting backstage drama by Clifford Odets.
Praised as “a fiercely affectionate anecdote about backstage doings,” the play is about washed-up actor Frank Elgin, who has a chance to make a comeback when a successful young Broadway director, Bernie Dodd, offers him the leading role in his new play. Frank, however, is very insecure, has turned to alcohol, and shuns even the smallest of responsibilities, leaving everything up to his wife Georgie, who finds it harder and harder to cope with her husband’s lack of spirit. Bernie tries to help Frank regain his self-confidence, believing that it is Georgie who’s the cause of his insecurity. When Georgie seeks a raise and long-term contract for her husband, Bernie concludes she is also a meddler, and orders her to stay away. The play was made into a successful film in the 1950s starring William Holden and Bing Crosby; Grace Kelly won the Oscar for Best Actress as the wife.
Of the play, one critic wrote: “… as a study in varieties of co-dependency — alcoholic, sexual, and artistic — the play is well shaped, and it offers the opportunity for some teasingly layered portraiture. The real driving force of The Country Girl isn’t the success or failure of the play within the play, but the gradual revelation of just who is using whom and why.”
Director Chris McVay notes that Odets’ play has been described as a love letter to the theatre. After a disappointing stint in Hollywood, screenwriting and script-doctoring, Odets wrote the play at the tail end of his career. “You can feel his loneliness and yearning for the stage, even in his voluminous stage directions,” according to McVay. “When he has a character describe a darkened theatre as ‘... mysterious ... a night without a star…’ Odets expresses some of the love of western theatrical tradition and myth that has been passed down since the Greeks ... and which sometimes seems lacking today.” |
