The Wall Street Journal - 03.04.2020

Houston premiere of “1984,” as the

stage version is known, should by

all rights have been a box-office

smash. Alas, the coronavirus

closed the theater before the show

could open, but the company was

able to tape a performance and it

is now available as a pay-per-view

webcast. Crisp, unflashily photo-

graphed and as hard-hitting as a

right to the kidney, it comes

across with bright clarity on the

small screen, and even if you know

the novel by heart, I expect that

you’ll find it—to paraphrase some-

thing one of Orwell’s characters

said—tripleplusgood.

The six actors, all of whom are

LYNN LANE

Jay Sullivan and

Shawn Hamilton

FILMREVIEW| JOE MORGENSTERN

Past Visions

Of an Empty

Present

Vacant cityscapes are now the real-life norm,

though they’ve long been a cinema trope

Clockwise from above: Ivan Jandl in

‘The Search’; Cillian Murphy in ‘

Days Later’; Orson Welles in ‘The

Third Man’; Tom Cruise in ‘Vanilla Sky’

EVERETT

COLLECTION (4)

‘NINETEENEIGHTY-FOUR,”

George Orwell’s parable of the

coming of Stalinist totalitarianism

to England, is the most significant

political novel of the 20th cen-

tury—but one with which many

readers are by now so familiar

that they can no longer come to it

fresh. Adapting it for the stage is

one way to restore the immediacy

of Orwell’s nightmare vision, but

the 2014 West End production of

the Robert Icke-Duncan Macmillan

stage version, which played on

Broadway three years ago, was a

bells-and-whistles multimedia ex-

travaganza that strayed too far

from the original novel for its own

good. Not so Michael Gene Sulli-

van’s no-frills, six-actor 2006 ver-

sion, intended for performance on

a near-bare stage. The script

tracks the book closely, spelling

out the once-unprintable obsceni-

ties at which Orwell could only

hint in the late 1940s, though most

everything else, even the tele-

screens, is left to the imagination.

This strikes me as the right way

to go, and the Alley Theatre’s

members of the Alley’s resident

acting company, play multiple

roles save for Shawn Hamilton,

who is appropriately fearful and

desperate as Winston Smith (you

can all but smell the sweat on his

brow). Everyone else provides ex-

citing support, with Chris Hutchi-

son, who plays O’Brien, Winston’s

grand inquisitor, giving an excep-

tionally memorable performance.

His grotesque parody of kindliness

as he tortures Winston in order to

convert him to the gospel of good-

think is striking.

The décor of this “1984,”

staged with clean, spare economy

by Rob Melrose, the Alley’s artis-

tic director, is as fine as the act-

ing. Michael Locher’s stark unit

set consists of a circular platform

ringed with swivel chairs at

whose center is a sunken pit lined

with searchlights. Raquel Barreto,

the costume designer, has dressed

everyone in shades of black, gray

and taupe, creating an impression

of monochromatic hopelessness.

Cliff Caruthers’s space-age elec-

tronic music and sound design

add immeasurably to the total ef-

fect, especially in the torture

scenes, which are all the more

frightening for their restraint.

Even though the Hubbard The-

atre, the Alley’s mainstage venue, is

a 774-seat house, this “1984” is a

small-scale show whose strength is

rooted in its intimacy. It wouldn’t

surprise me if it works at least as

well when viewed at home as would

have been the case had the show

gone on. It’s a must-see webcast, in-

contestably superior to the 2017

Broadway production. Comfort food

it isn’t, but if you’re up for stronger

fare, make haste to check it out.

1984

AlleyTheatre, Houston (viewable on-

line only, $20). For electronic “tick-

ets,” go to alleytheatre.org. The show

can be viewed through April 12.

Mr.Teachout, the Journal’s drama

critic, is the author of “Satchmo at

the Waldorf.” Write to him at

[email protected]

THEATER REVIEW| TERRY TEACHOUT

‘1984’: A Stunning Dystopia on Our Telescreens

U

ntil a few weeks

ago it was the mov-

ies we looked to for

haunting spectacles

of great cities sud-

denly stilled by

epic events, their streets and

squares devoid of visible life. Now

we needn’t look farther than our

own doorsteps. We’re living inside

a frightening drama with an inde-

terminate running time, beset by

barely imaginable special effects.

What films we choose to watch

when we’re able to pry ourselves

away from the news are likely to

be uppers, reliably entertaining

and life-affirming. Yet another cat-

egory might be worth checking out

every now and then—movies cele-

brated for their scenes of eerie

emptiness or stylized solitude,

their evocation of negative spaces.

By heightening and clarifying our

perceptions, they can do what art

has always done, help us under-

stand what we’re feeling in our all-

too-real lives.

One of the most startling such

scenes—and all the more remark-

able since no CGI was involved—is

the dream sequence near the be-

ginning of “Vanilla Sky” (2001),

with Tom Cruise as an overprivi-

leged egomaniac named David

Aames. Pulling out of an under-

ground garage in his black Ferrari

coupe, David gradually realizes

that there’s no one in sight. It’s

9:05 a.m. by the chronograph on

his wrist, yet the traffic lanes and

sidewalks of Central Park West are

empty. Then he reaches Times

Square, which is empty too, a be-

wildering vista that leaves him

screaming in terror. (Next we hear

his therapist telling him, and us,

“Well, I suppose the empty streets

meant loneliness.”) It’s worth not-

ing that the script was adapted,

mostly shot for shot, from a much

superior Spanish film, “Open Your

Eyes” (1997), in which the hero

leaves his apartment in a Volks-

wagen convertible at 10:04 a.m.—

everything happens later in

Spain—and discovers the total de-

population of Madrid’s Gran Vía.

No shrink is employed to tell us

what the dream means.

Los Angeles is as empty as Tom

Cruise’s New York in the early

stretches of “The Omega Man”

(1971), and it’s not a dream; that is

to say, within the narrative struc-

ture Charlton Heston’s Dr. Robert

Neville, a survivor of a global pan-

demic that wiped out most of our

species, is actually driving through

a city from which all humanity has

vanished, leaving only zombies.

The film hasn’t aged well, unlike

“WALL-E” (2008), the peerless

Pixar masterpiece that opens with

a vision of the entire planet as an

abandoned garbage dump.

An argument could be made

against including another zombie

movie; slouch-shouldered slobber-

ers resemble one another so

closely that they allow us humans

to detach from the full impact of

the horror. That said, Danny

Boyle’s “28 Days Later” (2002) is a

triumph of cross-genre craftiness.

It’s a horror film, yes, in which

most survivors of a cross-species

pandemic are classic zombies. But

it’s also an elegant end-of-civiliza-

tion fantasy with breathtaking

shots of London bathed in soft

pink sunlight, and not a living soul

to be seen on its silent, breeze-

swept streets.

An apocalyptic war has left

Paris shattered and uninhabitable

in “La Jetée,” the immeasurably

influential sci-fi short, set forth in

still photos, that Chris Marker

made in 1962. (Among the many

features it inspired was “12 Mon-

keys.”) Yet films don’t need to de-

pict devastation of that magni-

tude in order to resonate with the

anxiety and isolation we’re expe-

riencing now. Open spaces with

people in them will do the trick,

depending on the tone of the

of emptiness—on streets, in fields,

in an upscale residential area on the

edge of Rome. The few people drift-

ing by seem lost to the world, and

to themselves.

Even movies that say nothing

about spiritual isolation can con-

vey it strongly. Alexander Macken-

drick’s “Sweet Smell of Success”

(1957) is a classic study of ambi-

tion and venality, with Burt Lan-

caster as J.J. Hunsecker, the despi-

cable gossip columnist modeled on

Walter Winchell, and Tony Curtis

as the craven press agent Sidney

Falco. Yet there’s a climactic mo-

ment of exquisite aloneness when

Sidney, set up and cast out by J.J.,

makes his way in the dead of

night to Times Square, where he’s

the only person visible—it’s a

foreshadowing of “Vanilla Sky”—

until a couple of cops come along,

beat him up and haul him off.

And, in a counterpoint that could

serve as a hopeful symbol for

these times, J.J.’s younger sister,

Susie (Susan Harrison), frees her-

self from his suffocating clutches,

leaves his apartment and walks

out onto a Broadway that’s almost

empty but starting to fill up in the

rising light of dawn. Back in the

world at last, she’s ready for a

new life.

scene, cinematography being a

powerful emotional tool.

In Fred Zinnemann’s stirring

though all but forgotten “The

Search,” a 1948 drama about a lost

Czech boy reunited with his mother

in postwar Berlin, a lone woman

walks, in long shot, alongside an au-

tobahn on which no traffic flows. In

Carol Reed’s darkly resplendent

“The Third Man” (1949), set in the

wreckage of postwar Vienna, the

camera tilts and a zither plays as an

ancient balloon-seller crosses the

wet cobblestones of a little plaza at

night; the scene bespeaks, quite un-

accountably, deep solitude. “L’Ec-

lisse” (1962), a meditation on loneli-

ness in contemporary life by

Michelangelo Antonioni, the cin-

ema’s poet laureate of social dis-

tancing, ends with a visual survey

A12|Friday,April 3 , 2020 THEWALLSTREETJOURNAL.

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