STAGE REVIEW : ‘Nothing Sacred’ Takes Off From Turgenev’s ‘Fathers and Sons’

Will Stella Adler please report to the Mark Taper Forum? It’s an emergency.

As Lawrence Christon reminded us in Tuesday’s Times, Adler has a way of standing up and demanding that her acting students quit behaving like winsome children and start confronting their characters’ baser drives. Life, Adler has been known to say, is not tea at the White House.

This is something that the cast of the Mark Taper Forum’s new show, “Nothing Sacred,” needs to be reminded of. Under Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s direction, they work so hard to beguile the audience that the play comes off as piffle.

George Walker’s script takes off from Turgenev’s “Fathers and Sons,” which is not piffle. Neither is it “Crime and Punishment.” It isn’t Turgenev’s way to bore relentlessly to the bottom of his characters’ souls. He observes them, describes them and lets them go.

A certain lightness is in order, then, as the tale unfolds. And Walker can tell it as freely as he wishes--inventing or suppressing characters, underscoring the freeing-of-the-serfs theme, punching up the dialogue to get laughs, and even reversing the results of the absurd duel-at-sunrise between young Bazarov (Tom Hulce) and his best friend’s dandified uncle (Franklyn Seales).

As Walker acknowledges in a program note, some of this tinkering is a little arrogant--the one-liners, especially. Turgenev’s Bazarov would have scorned stooping to this sort of thing in order to catch the rabble.

And he would have sneered at his deathbed scene here, with its mix of humor, pathos and hope for an enlightened peasantry. Exactly the reason that no one takes the modern theater seriously, my dear fellow. I died of a germ, remember?

But those are Walker’s choices, and they work, in a primary-color sort of way. I can’t deny that the acting worked, too, as far as most of the Mark Taper Forum audience was concerned at Wednesday night’s press opening. Everybody loved everybody.

I loved Seales, as the affected uncle. Here was the most theatricalized character of them all, with his powdered face and his silly moustache. But he was in the grip of emotion. We knew what he wanted, whom he loved, how disappointed he was with his life, whom--after himself--he most loathed. And he spoke elegantly.

Seales’ uncle was the most vivid person in the play, and shouldn’t have been. Bazarov is the story’s lightning rod and its rallying point, the fellow everyone likes right away or absolutely can’t stand.

The older people see him as a devilish young man with no respect for anything, a man who wants to destroy every humane tradition in Russia in order to bring about God knows what under the absurd banner of “nihilism.”

His best friend and disciple (Corey Parker) sees him as a cynical saint, a man who will help him change the world for the better. The women (Anna Gibson, Mary Kohnert) see him as a primal force, a tornado.

We see him, alas, in Hulce’s portrayal, as a nice young man who would be welcome for dinner at the most conservative house in the district. A fellow just cynical enough to keep the conversation lively, without presenting a threat to anybody. Oh, he may say those things; but he doesn’t mean them. Bring him into the firm, and he’ll settle down.

In terms of intellectual or moral passion, there’s not much to choose between Hulce and his disciple, Parker. Both seem well-meaning, well-bred and wet behind the ears. Yuppies, in fact. They were around in Turgenev’s day too, but they aren’t the kind of young man he was drawing here.

The rest of the cast divides between vulnerability (Raye Birk as Parker’s father) and eccentricity (Ford Rainey as an old retainer being regroomed for democracy). Some of it is amusing, and a little of it is touching, but there’s a definite lack of bite, as if no one wanted to push the agreeable tone of the show into a dangerous area.

Granted, tone is tricky here, as it is in Chekhov. But this cast needs to put away its knowledge of how basically lovable all these dear, odd, lost-in-the-country people are, and to get down to cases. The set, by Eugene Lee, is plain dirt. A good place to start.

At 135 N. Grand Ave., Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays at 7:30 p.m.; Saturday-Sunday matinees, 2:30. Ends Oct. 23. Tickets: $20-$26; (213) 410-1062, (714) 634-1300.

‘NOTHING SACRED’

George Walker’s play, inspired by Turgenev’s “Fathers and Sons.” Director Michael Lindsay-Hogg. Set Eugene Lee. Costumes Robert Blackman. Lighting Natasha Katz. Original music Nathan Birnbaum. Production stage manager Jonathan Barlow Lee. Stage Manager Dana L. Axelrod. With Ned Bellamy, Raye Birk, Gregory Cooke, Margaret Gibson, David Giella, Tom Hulce, Mary Kohnert, Walter Olkewicz, Corey Parker, Ford Rainey, Douglas Roberts, Franklyn Seales, Karl Wiedergott and John Warner Williams.