STAGE REVIEW : ‘Arden’--a Colorful Subject, a Bland Play

One can see the attraction.

A play about one of Orange County’s famous and colorful residents had to be alluring to Orange County’s top theater. With its sparse but witty zingers, Richard Hellesen’s “Once in Arden” probably read beautifully on the page. And typically, South Coast Repertory has spared no technical blandishment to bring it to the stage.

But theater can be perverse. Despite eloquent sets by Deborah Raymond and Dorian Vernacchio, elegant costumes by Dwight Richard Odle, splendid Chopin renditions (by Paderewski?) bridging the scene changes, and effort by director Martin Benson to huff and puff some life into the piece, “Once in Arden” just lies there, stillborn.

It is from the outset a linear biography. That is to say, it embroiders on certain facts in the career and existence of Polish actress Helena Modjeska, who settled in the then-German community of Anaheim in 1876, making her English-speaking debut a year later in San Francisco.

Additional facts are these: In 1883, Modjeska bought a ranch in Santiago Canyon near Santa Ana (later renamed Modjeska Canyon in her honor). With her husband, Count Karol (Charlie) Bozenta Chlapowski, a some-time politician and critic, she continued to tour successfully--and to make and spend several fortunes, eventually falling on hard times. Modjeska had helped to encourage and launch the concert career of Polish pianist Ignacy Paderewski, who presumably repaid the gesture by arranging a testimonial (read benefit) for her at the Met in 1905--four years before her death at 69.

Hellesen builds his play around that testimonial, using it as the basis for a great deal of talk about art versus commerce, integrity versus compromise. It is triggered (at least here) by a lucrative offer from one J. T. Liddell. He wants Modjeska, a class act, to appear on the vaudeville circuit somewhere between the trained monkeys and the circus dogs. (“Shakespeare by the piece--like chicken?” she sniffs, disdainfully.)

Doing vaudeville is something her sparring partner at the testimonial--the celebrated James O’Neill, father of Eugene--has no trouble with. But Modjeska--the classical actress, the dedicated artist, the noble soul--is somewhat hypocritically torn asunder. It strikes her as too blatant, too much of a come-down, though the money would be nice. And we gather that she had fewer compunctions endorsing certain products for money, which, as the wily and pragmatic Liddell points out, was not any less commercial an undertaking. Liddell’s pressure is far more convincing than her resistance to it.

Does she or doesn’t she in the end? For all the talk we never quite find out. So “Once in Arden’s” only big decision is never adequately explored. The play lacks tensile strength. Everything in it is too soft and predictable. Hellesen writes around his subject rather than to it, endlessly circling his prey but never coming in for the kill. Here and there he strikes pay dirt with a one-liner (“I used to think the worst thing was missing an entrance,” says Modjeska, keenly aware of her mortality. “Now I think it is missing an exit”). But one-liners do not a play make.

Nan Martin, a consummate actress, is rather lost as Modjeska, never finding a balance between the woman’s true or assumed nobility--or, for that matter, between talking straight American (as when she recites Lady Macbeth’s speeches) or conversing in some strange accent that doesn’t even sound Polish. One or the other, please, but not both.

Hellesen has wanted to paint Modjeska as a person of principle torn by need, but in the end he succeeds only in showing us a human being who says one thing while doing (or potentially doing) another. It would have been healthier for the play if he had scuttled the reverential stance for an approach as ruthlessly honest as Liddell’s. Perhaps then we would have had the much more complex motivations of arrogance and vanity rationalizing need, which might have made for a livelier play. This probably explains why Liddell is the truest character in this piece, though the fact that he happens to be performed by Ron Boussom is a potent other factor; Boussom remains one of South Coast’s most versatile and valuable actors in virtually any role.

For the rest, Charles Hallahan delivers a blustery, chivalrous and aptly stentorian O’Neill and Kay E. Kuter an absent-minded professor type as husband Charlie. But Patrick Husted, as the vaguely defined Paderewski, only looks cross and preoccupied. Henry Leyva is fine as a stage assistant. But the play is a yawn.

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