“The Big Knife”

When you have a theater subscription, you sometimes find yourself going to a play that has not gotten good reviews. That was the case last night, when we went to see Clifford Odets’ “The Big Knife” at the Roundabout. I go into these kind of things with an open mind, mainly due to the “Ben Brantley Doesn’t Like Anything”™ factor. I’ve enjoyed a number of shows that he has panned in the Times.

But as I was sitting there and watching the play, I had to admit that it just wasn’t working. It was nicely produced, as all Roundabout productions are, and Bobby Cannavale and the cast were working hard. The play is Odets’ expression of anger and disgust about Hollywood and the Studio system. He had been lured away from Broadway, where he had been so successful, and clearly hated everything about his Hollywood experience. It’s not his greatest work, but theaters should not just revive classics. It is valuable to revive plays like this, if they retain any life or relevance. The play is a little dated, but the basic themes could still resonate. So what happened?

One of the problems is the play itself. Odets was so angry about Hollywood that the anger and disgust sometimes overwhelms the story. The characters, especially Cannavale’s character Charlie Castle, are given speeches about what a corrupt cesspool it all is. They are sometimes of eloquent but the don’t exactly sound like dialog, which bogs things down a bit. The plot is rather convoluted and the exposition takes forever, partly because it is extended by the excoriation of Hollywood.

While it is not the greatest play ever written, I think the whole thing might have worked but for a serious casting/directing error. The ultimate bad guy in this story is the studio head, Marcus Hoff, played by Richard Kind, a character actor that you instantly recognize. (See photo.) In many plays and movies, the tension is dependent on the performance of the villain, rather than that of the hero. In “The Big Knife”, Hoff has virtual life and death power over people. He has to be more than just a rich studio head. He has to be scary. Underneath his facade of being a movie executive, he has to be menacing–like a Michael Corleone. If Hoff is played that way, the play makes more sense. Charlie Castle’s decision to continue with the studio, after loudly protesting that he hates it, makes sense if he (and the audience) realizes that Hoff can and will ruthlessly destroy him if he does so. It would explain why the various lackeys around him seem to fear him. Richard Kind doesn’t really look like a tough guy and you associate him with situation comedies, so he is arguably miscast. But that would have worked if underneath the affable movie executive exterior, you saw a vicious, steel-hard tyrant who would do anything to get his own way. That just wasn’t there, so the play didn’t work. I think Hoff’s part was meaty enough that this angle could have been portrayed. And you would think that an actor as experienced as Kind could have been menacing (although maybe that is beyond his range). So I take this as an inexplicable directorial approach by Doug Hughes, who is certainly a famous Broadway director. The focus of the play seemed to be more about Charlie’s relationship with his wife, rather than his relationship with the studio.

Although the production didn’t really work, there were some good performances and some interesting language. It was interesting to watch, if ultimately unsatisfying.