Among the most delicate and complicated relationships in the world of the arts is that between mentor
and protégé. Especially when at the start the mentor is a curmudgeon and the
protégé is adoring. The protégé absorbs like a sponge everything the mentor
has to say—even the mentor’s unwisest attitudes and opinions—and
inevitably, it is the filtering of those flaws that causes the breach. As
the protégé breaks away, s/he almost always does so by returning a dose of the
mentor’s own medicine. And, in a manner that is almost always hurtful…but
more than that, at first, bewildering…the
mentor is not only unappreciative…but without understanding.
Countless
acquaintances and colleagues of mine have gone through this rite of passage
with their mentors, I’ve been through it myself, and if you’re lucky
enough (as I was) to come from a fairly well-adjusted homelife, your mentor inevitably
provides—as a friend of mine once put it—the dysfunctional
family you never had. (While boning up on character lore for a novel I wrote
some years ago, based on the teevee series Alien Nation, I rescreened an episode called “Partners”. The human
cop, Sikes [Gary Graham] has just discovered that his mentor is terribly
flawed. Trying to make light of it, he says to George, the alien cop who is his
partner [Eric Pierpoint], “It’s not like he was my father or anything.”
And George’s sober, gentle response is: “Oh, no, Matthew—he was much more
than a father to you.” It’s a scene
that’s etched in my brain and the exchange still haunts me. I think it always
will.)
I
have remained just as haunted by Donald Margulies’ 1997 play “Collected Stories” which is still, to my memory, the first and only
dramatization of this relationship that is so pointed and specific. It follows
in detail the “arc of inevitability” described in the opening paragraphs…but
it never settles into seeming schematic, because Mr. Margulies is so deft
at keeping the relationship shaded in hues of gray. Right and wrong don’t exist
here, just a ritual passing of the torch, with all the jealousies and
rebellions—conscious and otherwise—that entails.
The
characters are: short story writer Ruth Steiner (Linda Lavin), crusty, middle aged, single, a literary icon
but not really a household name, never having braved a full novel…and Lisa Morrison (Sarah
Paulson) her graduate student, who
soon becomes her assistant, and, in short (and unspoken) order, a kind of
surrogate daughter. She will eventually brave the novel. And
therein will lie the seeds of a very arguable betrayal.
And
it is very well argued too. Mr. Margulies puts equal weight on a students’
responsibility to be sensitive…and the mentor’s responsibility to
understand how much power her words carry. At the play’s shattering climax
(well, perhaps not shattering—but
traumatic enough) you are at a loss for who to root for. Sadder
still—you’ve come to love them both: because you can see each in the
other’s eyes…you understand intimately what brings them together…and what rips
them apart. (I hasten to add, sobering as this play is, it is far from
humorless. A sense of irony is what draws these two together—and rips
them apart—too.)
Under
the direction of Lynne Meadow, the cast
of this revival is quite fine: Ms. Paulson exhibits a wide range of emotions
and a very convincing gradual growth from fawning naïveté to assured maturity
as the newcomer to the craft. And as the teacher, Ms. Lavin manages to exploit
her significant arsenal of nuance and variation without the tics
of grandeur and scene stealing that can come to her so easily. (Exactly the
kind of thing that tainted the performance of Uta Hagen in a 1998—that’s
not a typo, it was indeed little more than a year after the
original—revival.) Ms. Lavin is giving an appropriately virtuosic performance,
to be sure, but one that’s in careful check, and finely balanced with that of
her co-star.
All
this said, “Collected Stories” is by no means a great play—merely a very
good one. But it does something great.
It nails a vital dynamic in the creative process. And it assures all of us
who have been through it, are going through it, or have yet to go through it
that it’s a time-honored path to tread…
…and
that we are not alone…
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