Frank Galati stands in the middle of what he aptly describes as “a sort of derelict loft.” Gray and bleak, it looks like a deserted artist’s studio. Strewn about the sprawling space are paintings and pieces of sculpture–some impressionism, some cubism, and a striking minimalist work, a square canvas painted nothing but yellow. Depressing and claustrophobic despite its expanse, the room is a far cry from the set for Galati’s last directing effort at the Goodman Theatre, She Always Said, Pablo. That work, a collage of texts by Gertrude Stein and images by Picasso, had for its set an airy, placid design that Galati calls “an exterior landscape . . . a limitless horizon of sky.” This set, Galati says, looking around him as he stands on the Goodman stage, “is a purely psychological interior. It’s very much within, very enclosed–very in the skull. Which,” he smiles wryly, “doesn’t sound like an appropriate context for a comedy. But it really is,” he insists. “It’s a scary comedy.”
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The work Galati refers to is the Chicago premiere of Peter Nichols’s Passion Play, which Galati is directing as Goodman’s second main-stage offering in its 1987-88 season. First presented in England in 1981 by the Royal Shakespeare Company, the work has had mixed success on this continent. Its 1983 Broadway production was praised for the lead performance by Frank Langella but little else.
In Passion Play, the topic is again marital crisis–the middle-aged hero, James, betrays his wife Eleanor by having an affair with a young woman, Kate. The device this time is clever but hardly original: James and Eleanor are each portrayed by two actors, one representing the public persona (James and Eleanor), the other playing the inner person (Jim and Nell). But the convention of the doppelganger is worked by Nichols through a remarkable variety of permutations in the context of a second device, what Galati calls “narrative tap dancing with the use of time.” At one point, for instance, the audience watches two simultaneous scenes: one showing James and his alter ego Jim writing a love letter to Kate, the other depicting Eleanor’s discovery of the letter. The verbal interplay between the actors in this and other sequences is described by Galati as “like a string quartet”; in another scene, Nichols specifically calls the dialogue “a fugue of voices.” Galati, known for his fascination with the music of language (he has directed numerous works by Gertrude Stein and also several operas), compares the play to an oratorio with a full complement of arias, duets, trios, even a sextet.
