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A 'Candida' That Sticks to the Basics
by Linda Winer
Newsday
1993
Candida. By George Bernard Shaw, directed by Gloria Muzio, with Mary Steenburgen, Robert Sean Leonard, Robert Foxworth, Ann Dowd, Simon Brooking, William Duff-Griffin. Set by David Jenkins, costumes by Jeff Goldstein, lights by Peter Kaczorowski. Roundabout Theater Company, Broadway at 45th Street. Seen at Tuesday's press preview.
Well, it certainly seemed enticing at a distance, this "Candida" at the reborn Roundabout, where "Anna Christie," with Natasha Richardson and Liam Neeson, had just about obliterated all memories of the bad old years of dowdy, dutiful Roundabout revivals. This one would have Mary Steenburgen, who hardly has made an unintelligent gesture ever in a movie, in her Broadway debut as George Bernard Shaw's eerily prescient 1895 power-heroine, directed by Gloria Muzio, one of the challenging mainstream talents around. We even felt assured by the first glimpse of David Jenkins' parsonage set, a handsome study with just enough shabby layers of faded rugs, lived-in books and bourgeois conventionality.
So it is disappointing, and more than a little perplexing, to have to report that the old Roundabout - the one that felt like school - is back. Except for Robert Sean Leonard's ardent, sweetly foolish portrayal of the young poet who challenges Candida's husband for her love, this "Candida" is as earnestly intentioned and squarely mediocre as the Roundabout of yore.
The crushing news, surely, is that Steenburgen, for all her brains and fuzzy old-world beauty, is over her head. This is not a shameful performance, just an awkward one by a stage novice who doesn't know what to do with her hands, which she hangs around her enviable Victorian dresses (designed by Jess Goldstein) as if each hand weighed 25 pounds.
She gets through Shaw's bracing talk without disaster, but her manipulation of Candida's piously devoted husband (Robert Foxworth) and her 19-year-old lovesick poet never gets past bland coquetry - an artifice that is almost unseemly on a woman with Steenburgen's inescapable aura of common sense. She and Candida are so much more than this.
Shaw subtitled this one of his "pleasant plays," partly because the failure of his "unpleasant plays" had him courting the public. But we don't believe him for a minute. Candida - considered one of literature's liberated women - is startlingly blunt about the strengths and weaknesses of the men in her life, but there is nothing "pleasant" about her options. She can choose to mother her "moralizing windbag" of a Christian Socialist-minister husband or run off with a snively romantic poet 15 years her junior.
Shaw also described "Candida" as a mystery, partly because the poet has a not-so-cryptic secret as he leaves the couple's parlor a stronger man. But the bigger mystery remains Candida herself. Is she a heroine who transcends from romantic to maternal love or a victim settling into a stifling Victorian marriage?
Is this a triumph of the superior female domestic spirit or the cruel success of a self-righteous woman who manipulates her marriage into a reverse "Doll's House?" Shaw disapproved of her later in print, but the dear heart does seem to idealize her in his wonderfully articulate play. Mostly, she makes me sad.
Obviously, Muzio's production isn't worrying about that. In what appears to be the director's first major attempt at a classic, she stays close to the basics. Foxworth tries to be likable as Candida's self-satisfied baby of a husband, but he hasn't figured out how to play a boring man interestingly. We glaze over as he talks. The good Ann Dowd makes the most of the pinched, but not closed, parish secretary - even with that awful Miss Grundy wig; William Duff-Griffin, as Candida's scoundrel of a father, seems a cross between a wind-up toy at a London souvenir shop and the joyful vulgarian that Muzio created in her breakthrough production, "Other People's Money."
But Leonard, perhaps best known from the film "Dead Poet's Society," has the comic timing of a romantic clown, toppling off the furniture and bouncing with youthful abandon between gawky poetic cowardice and mature sensitivity. We go to see Steenburgen; we leave remembering Leonard.
Shaw will have to wait, again.
