With its grand edifice on the block and bill collectors knocking at the door, the Cleveland Play House faces adversity. Adversity, however, seems to be just the fertilizer to make artistic director Michael Bloom blossom, for he is doing his most masterly Elia Kazan pressure-cooker direction in a massive stage adaptation of Heaven’s My Destination, a little-known 1935 Thornton Wilder novel.
The work is an Edward Hopper-flavored, picaresque account of the
travels of a Don Quixote textbook salesman. George Brush is a religious
zealot — warning women of the dangers of smoking and advising
bank robbers on how to turn over a new leaf — who is chastened by
a series of misfortunes. The tone is redolent of the darker side of
small-town America that Wilder injected into his screenplay for
Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt.
The CPH production is an oasis for an institution that usually
adheres to a mundane path of the safe and the bland, for there is a
grab here for a kind of greatness and bizarre magnificence. Sadly, this
greatness is tied to a charismatic failure, which doesn’t spring from
the production’s details, but from an unwise fidelity to the novel
itself. Judging by his compulsion to include almost every incident
contained in the novel, it’s apparent that adapter Lee Blessing is
besotted with the material. Yet he fails to give us the emotional
directness and simplicity that are the cornerstones of Wilder’s own
plays and would elucidate the major scenes of the book.
It’s been many seasons since CPH delivered such a sweeping and
well-executed presentation. The versatile eight-member cast dexterously
bounces through a menagerie of ’30s Americana characters in a manner
that suggests the entire Warner Bros. commissary had been raided. As
the play’s fulcrum, Michael Halling calls up that commanding neurotic
intensity that made Anthony Perkins our favorite psycho. The remainder
of the company vibrantly embodies a diverse congregation that includes
smoky-voiced whores, kind-hearted landladies and vicious small-town
bigots. Russell Parkman’s set design resembles a thrift shop after an
earthquake, but it miraculously transforms itself with cinematic flair
into everything from a train parlor car to a tacky brothel.
Even with a flawed script, there’s an expansiveness to the evening
rarely seen outside of the latest musical extravaganza.
This article appears in May 6-12, 2009.