A fruitful collaboration is springing up between Liev Schreiber, perhaps the finest stage actor of his generation, and director Gregory Mosher.
They scored last season with the critically acclaimed revival of “A View From the Bridge,” which received six Tony nominations, including Best Actor for Schreiber (which he lost to Denzel Washington).
Now I hear they may team up again next season for a revival of Jason Miller’s Pulitzer-winning drama, “That Championship Season.”
There is, alas, no role for Schreiber’s “View” co-star Scarlett Johansson because the play has an all-male cast. But Mosher’s pursuing great Scottish actor Brian Cox to play the pivotal role of Coach.
The pairing of Schreiber and Cox — who was, incidentally, the first Hannibal Lecter (“Manhunter,” 1986) — would certainly be dynamic. The play is full of roaring confrontation scenes, just the kind of stuff bold, ferocious actors like Schreiber and Cox love to tear into.
“That Championship Season” is about the reunion of a Catholic high school basketball team on the 20th anniversary of its victory in the Pennsylvania state finals.
The coach is dying of cancer, and the former players gather at his home for what turns out to be a long and violent evening of reminiscing and heavy-duty drinking.
Schreiber would play George Sitkowski, the blundering, corrupt mayor of a small town who’s caught up in some shady dealings with an old friend and former teammate also on hand for the reunion.
The other members of the team also face various crises. While their beloved coach tries to buck them up, he, too, unleashes a few personal demons.
“That Championship Season” started at the Public Theater before moving to Broadway, where it ran 700 performances in the early 1970s.
Clive Barnes was an early supporter of the play, writing in his 1972 review that it “lacerates the sickness of small-town America full of bigotry, racism, double-dealing and hate.”
The original cast is now legendary — Charles Durning, Paul Sorvino, Richard A. Dysart, Walter McGinn, Michael McGuire and Jason Miller, the playwright, who a year later would be vomited upon by Linda Blair when he played Father Karras in “The Exorcist.”
There’s a riveting chapter on the making of the play in “Free for All,” Kenneth Turan‘s superb oral history of the Public Theater that was published last year.
The actors were at one another’s throats during rehearsals, and some of them almost came to blows.
Joe Papp, the founder of the Public, watched a run-through one afternoon and said, “You’ve got something here, boys, and the only ones that can destroy it is yourselves.”
IT’S never a good sign for a the ater company when somebody in the audience says, “No, no, no” throughout the first act.
It’s even worse if that person happens to be the playwright.
And it’s an outright disaster if that playwright happens to be America’s greatest living dramatist.
That was the case Monday afternoon at a reading of Edward Albee‘s 1967 play “Everything in the Garden” at the Peccadillo Theater Company.
Directed by Dan Wackerman, the reading featured an impressive cast, including John Rubinstein, Kathleen Butler and Michael Hayden.
“Throughout the play, Edward, who was sitting a seat away from me, was moaning and muttering, ‘No, no’ and putting his hands over his face,” my spy reports. “He left at intermission.”
Right on his heels was Elizabeth I. McCann, who’s produced many of Albee’s plays, including the great “Three Tall Women.” Billy Crudup slipped out during the second act.
My spy adds: “The whole play was paced more like a Method exercise than a reading. It was interminable.”
Another source says Albee was upset that Wackerman didn’t get any of the play’s humor.
The reading was part of Peccadillo’s series “Plays-You-Should-Know-and-Probably-Don’t.”
It’s a safe bet they won’t be doing “The Lady From
Dubuque” anytime soon.