With substantial casts, British plays are larger than life
NEW YORK -- Look at the new batch of Anglo-Irish plays on Broadway and off, and you'll notice one thing that most contemporary American plays don't have.
People. Lots and lots of people.
Eight actors in ''The Lieutenant of Inishmore." Fourteen in ''Festen," 16 in ''Stuff Happens," and 17 in ''The History Boys."
Compare this with the two, three, or four actors you find in most new American plays. It isn't necessarily that British playwrights are more expansive. They're just richer. Or, at least, the subsidized nature of British theater and the centrality that it still has in that country's cultural scene allow the Brits to think bigger than their counterparts in this country.
Less, of course, can be more. Edward Albee's plays don't suffer from having so few people in them. And Irish playwright Brian Friel's fine ''Faith Healer," about to open on Broadway, has only three characters.
But in those cases, spareness is an artistic choice. Unless you're Tony Kushner or you have naked baseball players in the shower, keeping the number of characters down in America is an economic necessity. Otherwise, even if you get to Broadway with a serious play, cash-strapped regional theaters are going to look elsewhere.
What American theater sacrifices in the process is a sense of the epic, a feeling that the playwright is following in the footsteps of Shakespeare and Shaw in terms of making a large statement based on the clash of forces or points of view.
That was particularly noticeable in a recent trip here to see these plays as well as American Richard Greenberg's three-character ''Three Days of Rain," which was bloated up to fit on a Broadway stage, as well as to justify having Julia Roberts in the cast. Meanwhile ''Festen," ''History Boys," and ''Stuff Happens" had the luxury to take stock of America and Europe at this point in history with scope and thrilling theatricality.
If that's all it was, ''The History Boys" would still be an enjoyable romp with the wise-cracking octet, the three odd teachers, and the bureaucratic headmaster. The interplay, acting, and dialogue make it better than any of those sitcoms dotting the public television landscape.
But Bennett is after bigger things. The two primary teachers, the eccentric Hector and charismatic Irwin, are quite different poles in the educational -- and social -- spectrum. Hector represents learning for the betterment of the soul, Irwin for the betterment of one's career. Irwin tells the history majors that what matters most isn't what's true -- because any interpretation of history can be true -- but what will catch the eye of people reading their exams. It might be better, therefore, to write about Stalin's virtues rather than his flaws.
Bennett is too good a writer, though, to make Irwin an unlikable bad guy. Both represent types that students gravitate to in high school and college. Loyalties shift, different parts of the brain are stimulated, and watching the eight boys decide between the two heightens the drama.
Hector, far from a saint, gets into trouble for trying to stimulate other areas of the students' bodies. Irwin, far from a devil, is a fascinating teacher in his own right.
But his style of teaching is dismissed by Hector -- and presumably by Bennett -- as journalism. Irwin, who will later host a TV show called ''
What makes ''The History Boys" such a memorable work is the way in which Bennett juxtaposes Hector and Irwin, and what they represent, against the eight students trying to come to terms with their history lessons as well as their hormones. Hector's lessons about classic movies and bawdy music are as much a part of their learning -- and director Nicholas Hytner's fast-moving stagecraft -- as is the battle of Dunkirk.
Whether British companies are allowed to bring in the original cast has mostly to do with tit-for-tat union regulations. Since the play is based on a Danish film of the same name (''The Celebration" in English) it's hard to argue that a British cast is mandatory.
Critics who first saw it in London were much less impressed with the Yanks, but not being among them, I was knocked out. As with ''History Boys," the sheer energy of this staging is something to see. The story revolves around a party for family patriarch Helge, at which several layers of dysfunction burst out of the closet.
The party turns crazed as the family and associates of Helge (Larry Bryggman) barely seem to know what they're celebrating. Director Rufus Norris and designer Ian MacNeil fill the stark stage with, first, a manic sexuality as Helge's two sons (Sisto and Michael Hayden) have dalliances while their sister (Margulies) searches for something, all in the same bedroom. They're actually in three separate rooms, but the staging, with the three almost tripping over each other, has a mysterious power to it.
In fact, the whole production has a mysterious power. The family secrets are nothing new to a modern audience, nor is the anticapitalist theme in which the person in power abuses those under him. But as each of these characters interacts and reveals something new about one another -- sometimes humorously, sometimes terrifyingly -- it's like watching one large, extended family stand in for the fall of the Roman (or American) Empire, particularly in one drunken scene in which almost the entire cast gets into an absurdist conga line onstage.
The variety of acting styles adds to the sense that we're in the middle of an eerie play of forces that isn't quite naturalistic (though MacGraw drags down the production). Absurdist actor supreme David Patrick Kelly, in a relatively small part, is particularly adept at making it clear that this large-scale celebration has one foot in Pirandellian hijinks.
Unlike the other two productions, this one starts from scratch. Hytner directed the British version, also for the National, but Daniel Sullivan has reconfigured it for the Public Theater, featuring Jay O. Sanders as the president.
Here, the mix of styles does not serve the play. Some, like Gloria Reuben as Condoleezza Rice, do spot-on imitations. Sanders and others do the voices and mannerisms but don't look anything like the people they're playing. Then there are those, like Jeffrey De Munn as Donald Rumsfeld and Peter Francis James as Colin Powell, who don't look or sound anything like their counterparts.
Still, ''Stuff Happens" is an effective political play. The large cast maintains a steady cacophony of voices that serves to drown out dissent and banish reason from the proceedings. Hare combines the actual public words of the principals with his imaginings of what went on behind closed doors to convey a disaster in the making.
If it plays as much like comedy as tragedy, perhaps it's because everyone, including Hare, is too close to the stuff happening (the title comes from Rumsfeld's reaction to looting in Baghdad at the beginning of the war). It's difficult to find an arc in an ongoing story or to make sense of Bush's seeming buffoonery.
What Hare does do, though, is find a way to tell a credible political story about how America got into this mess, buttressed with a smart theatricality. It's hard not to feel sorry for Powell, for example, as you realize the sheer numbers he is up against. Bush and the neocon collective -- Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and Paul Wolfowitz -- clearly see a way of establishing a beachhead in Iraq while Rice, Powell, and Tony Blair have their own agendas.
It's a bit like watching one of the ''Elizabeth" films in which dozens of characters jockey for influence and power, only to find themselves at the end of a rope -- if only metaphorically in ''Stuff Happens." Powell and Blair think they can tame the savage beast only to be co-opted by a Bush who isn't as dumb as he acts. Rice is the wild card, here, unwilling to align herself with anyone except the president. Is it careerism or Machiavellianism?
Hare doesn't have the answers, but he has all the right questions. To go back to the dichotomy in ''History Boys," is ''Stuff Happens" art or journalism? It's actually both, which is a virtue and a flaw.
But as these armies of the night do battle, ''Stuff Happens" rises above documentary drama. As with ''The History Boys" and ''Festen," quantity and quality are intertwined. The result is riveting.
Ed Siegel can be reached at siegel@globe.com. 
