Time stops in its tracks
IT DOESN'T happen often, but when art moves us most, there is a sense of time standing still. Walking around Michelangelo's "David" in Florence we're neither in Renaissance Italy nor in our own 21st-century consciousness, but in some less definable time and space, maybe outside of time and space altogether.
I had that same experience last week seeing Harold Pinter's "No Man's Land" at the American Repertory Theatre, only in part because it's an excellent production of this lesser-known play by the great Nobel Prize winner. For me it had as much to do with my own history and that of the director and star, David Wheeler and Paul Benedict.
When I was going to Boston University in the mid-'60s, Wheeler was artistic director of Theatre Company of Boston and Benedict was one of the main actors, which is saying something since the company also included, at one time or another, Al Pacino, Ralph Waite, Spalding Gray, Stockard Channing, and Dustin Hoffman.
But it's Benedict I remember best. The wry smile and precise diction that simultaneously implied mischievous humor and hair-raising menace were perfect for the modernist authors Wheeler championed, such as Edward Albee, Bertolt Brecht, and Pinter. There was a note of absurdism to all these writers that captured a mid-'60s world that was about to be turned on its head. It was exciting theater for exciting times.
The times, they ain't as exciting anymore, but seeing Wheeler and Benedict excel in the same way that they did 40 years ago, seemed to stop time in its tracks. Sure, Benedict's hair and mustache are white as snow and Wheeler isn't as steady on his feet as he used to be, but it didn't seem to matter. Here were two men who have been remarkably true to their craft and to their aesthetic -- with a detour to "The Jeffersons" and Hollywood in Benedict's case -- for the better part of half a century. To see Benedict jaw with his fellow actors exactly as he did in the '60s made it seem as if art, and ART, had its own temporal rules that didn't bow to the workaday rules of "the real world."
The sense of time standing still and moving forward simultaneously -- in a play that's partly about aging -- was heightened by the presence of Lewis Wheeler, David's son, in the cast of four. The younger Wheeler has become one of Boston's best young actors in a scene that bears little resemblance to the theater of Theatre Company of Boston's time.
It's tempting to watch "No Man's Land" and grow nostalgic for the Theatre Company of Boston and its aesthetic, but back then there was no ART, no Huntington Theatre Company, and none of the strong midsize and smaller companies that have blossomed in the last eight years or so. Some artistic directors, like the ART's Robert Woodruff, pursued their own strong -- in his case, postmodernist -- aesthetic, though he paid the price when it turned out that the chowderheads and cheapskates at Harvard who fired him didn't have the stomach for such rich theater.
Probably the closest artistic director to Wheeler's aesthetic is Jeff Zinn, whose Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater has pursued its own strong sense of in-your-face productions. He has also championed Pinter, along with the next generation of similar playwrights including David Mamet, Sam Shepard, and Martin McDonagh. The plays Zinn produces often challenge the irrational rationalities -- including two remarkably similar wars -- of our time in the same way that Wheeler's did.
There are other artistic directors who often recall Wheeler and the Theatre Company of Boston. There's Rick Lombardo at the New Repertory Theatre, who directed a pair of Pinter plays at Wellfleet two years ago and is bringing them to the New Rep this year. Spiro Veloudos directed a stellar production of Albee's "The Goat" at Lyric Stage Company, which remains one of Boston's best.
Young people don't go to the theater as often as they used to, which is a shame. As great as a television series such as "The Sopranos" is or a movie like "The Lives of Others," there was something life-changing about Wheeler and Benedict 40 years ago and life-affirming about watching them work together today. Maybe decades in the future someone who's in college now will see Zinn and Laura Latreille working together, or Lombardo and John Kuntz, or Veloudos and Paula Plum and have that same experience of time standing still.
Nobody lives forever, but when you see something like "No Man's Land," a work of art can seem like the next best thing to immortality.
Ed Siegel is a former theater critic for the Globe. 