Entertainment

A SLICE OF ‘COUNTRY’ LIFE

MANY years ago, writing in a different newspaper about a different production, Icalled Clifford Odets’ “The Country Girl” a “good-bad play.”

It’s bad because while craftsmanlike and efficient, it’s also shamelessly manipulative, melodramatic, obvious and sweet. And it’s good for just about the same reasons.

The balance between that enjoyably good and that disastrously bad depends almost entirely on the staging and the performances. The production that opened last night at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre is wonderfully on the side of the angels.

It is crisply and, so far as humanly possible, unsentimentally directed by Mike Nichols, who knows how to let his actors breathe, react and interact, and has a handsomely picked trio of stars in Morgan Freeman, Frances McDormand and Peter Gallagher.

Odets’ 1950 play – even with revisions by Jon Robin Baitz – has a whiff of the Fifties about it, together with suggestions of the film script (starring Bing Crosby, Grace Kelly and William Holden) it was destined to become four years later.

Yet Odets, here towards the end of a rocky career, was impressively – at times, perhaps, disastrously – professional. He knew what they wanted, even if, judging from his memoirs and letters, he wasn’t quite sure who “they” were.

Here the whole play is set up in a perfect arc. Ten minutes into it you can guess not only how it is going to end, but even how it is going to get to that ending.

Of course you can say the same about “Death of a Salesman.” But no one would, would they?

The proposition of “The Country Girl” is simple – a hotshot youngish director, Bernie Dodd (Gallagher), wants to take a chance on a once much-

esteemed actor, Frank Elgin (Freeman), long laid low by the death of a beloved daughter, by bad investments and, although now apparently clean, by booze and the lingering reputation booze brings.

Can Frank make a comeback, can he even learn his lines, can he stay off the demon bottle? And behind all this lies Georgie (McDormand), Frank’s actually supportive wife, very ambiguously viewed by Bernie.

Of all the versions, stage and screen, the one that hit me the hardest was the 1952 London premiere – the text was adapted and even the title was changed to “Winter Journey” – with Michael Redgrave, Sam Wanamaker, who also directed, and Googie Withers. It was all tear-down-the-scenery-and-light-a-bonfire marvelous.

Nichols and his team are less incendiary in intent, but the subtlety makes the melodrama more appealing and, possibly, more convincing. And the performances are superb.

Among the admirable supporting actors, I was especially taken with Remy Auberjonois as Paul Unger, the amiably unflappable playwright, but really there are only three roles that count.

Freeman, who in previews apparently was having difficulties, here seems in full command of the text. He gets every ounce of burnt-out passion from Frank, with the shadowing self-doubts and fears of a shakily recovering alcoholic needing all the help he can get for redemption, while persuasively substituting a childish truculence for the mad anger once offered by Redgrave.

Gallagher’s Bernie is also more realistically toned down than most, carefully calculating that odd conflict of feelings he has for Georgie, and here the great McDormand, at her finest, delivers a portrayal of shattering quietness and nuanced subtlety.

These three are all heart-rendingly credible – it’s among the finest acting of the season – and transcend the simplistic writing to leap into the reality at which Odets surely, and sometimes not so surely, aimed.

THE COUNTRY GIRL

Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, 242 W. 45th St.; (212) 239-6200.