Getting new life

Dead End comes to Williamstown

by Steve Vineberg

DEAD END By Sidney Kingsley. Directed by Nicholas Martin. Set designed by James Noone. Lighting by Kenneth Posner. Costumes by Michael Krass. Music by Mark Bennett. With Robert Sean Leonard, Campbell Scott, Hope Davis, Julie Dretzin, Scott Wolf, Christopher Fitzgerald, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Sam Wright, Gregory Esposito, Jack J.W. Ferver, Marian Seldes, Amy Van Nostrand, and Lee Wilkof. At the Williamstown Theatre Festival, through July 20.

Sidney Kingsley's 1935 melodrama Dead End is a beautifully engineered thesis play -- big-boned, multi-plotted, its message sharpened to a fine point -- that belongs inescapably to the American theatrical past. It was a hit on Broadway, and William Wyler turned it into a classic film two years later. But it requires such an enormous cast and makes such major technical demands, that revivals, under the current economic constraints of professional theater, are just about out of the question. So there's a built-in excitement in the Williamstown Theatre Festival's choice to stage it, and on the scale it needs and deserves. Dead End is a tirade on social equality, set in 1931 in a waterside alley where a slum abuts the backside of an expensive apartment building and the disadvantaged local kids take their recreation in the East River. Clearly it wouldn't make sense without its perspective and levels, without the ill-mixed crowd of tenement dwellers and aristocrats (who are forced by street construction to use the rear door of their building as an entrance for a day or two).

The main excitement is right there on the stage. Williamstown's Dead End is a triumph of craft and energy -- for the long-forgotten Kingsley, for the set designer, James Noone, and for the director, Nicholas Martin, who marshals 42 actors through the corridors of Kingsley's play and Noone's set with dexterity and invention. From the outset, this was a play whose meaning was embodied in its visual design, and it's no exaggeration to say that the original set by Norman Bel Geddes is one of the most famous in modern theatrical history. Noone does full justice to both Kingsley and Bel Geddes (whose work is preserved in stills, and in Richard Day's expanded soundstage version for Wyler's film). What the audience sees at first is mostly scrim, deceptively front-lit with a skyline projection. When Kenneth Posner's marvelous, poetic lighting reveals the depths of the environment behind the scrim, the ironic juxtaposition of rich and poor becomes suddenly, vividly three-dimensional. Bel Geddes and Kingsley (who directed the first production) complemented the set with a city soundtrack. Williamstown has commissioned an original score by Mark Bennett that is both evocative and cinematic.

Martin has assembled a vibrant cast. As the slum-born architect known as Gimpty, who hops around on a symbolic bum leg, Robert Sean Leonard uses his high, trembly voice far more expressively than he has in his movies. Leonard is often startlingly good here. The pitfalls of his performance are inherent in the writing: in a play with so much action thrusting it forward, the protagonist remains tentative and immobile for too long. Campbell Scott brings an unusual combination of elegance and grit to the role of "Baby-Face" Martin, the gangster bred in these streets who comes home, his familiar face hidden by plastic surgery, to see his mother (now a bitter old woman) and his childhood sweetheart (now a syphilitic whore). Marian Seldes gives an extraordinarily skillful performance as Mrs. Martin; her exchange with Scott is the show's most memorable scene. Amy Van Nostrand is touching as the whore, Francey, especially in her final moment, though she clutches onto her one scene with perhaps a little too much fervor.

Julie Dretzin brings considerable intelligence to the role of Kay, the rich man's mistress who dallies with Gimpty but rejects him out of her terror of poverty. (She's particularly strong in her first scene with Leonard.) Kay's opposite number, the working-class girl Drina, is played with moving intensity by Hope Davis. The third main plot links up with the "Baby-Face" Martin scenario. Drina's kid brother Tommy, the leader of the local gang, scuffles with one of the apartment dwellers (Lee Wilkof, as lively here as he was in the recent, underrated New York revival of Waiting for Lefty), who threatens him with reformatory -- and an almost certain criminal future. The Dead End gang are the play's vaudevilleans and its most poignant thematic device. (The original "Dead End Kids" went on to Hollywood and a brief career in B movies.) Martin's boys are a mixture of Equity and non-Equity performers and apprentices -- Christopher Fitzgerald as the eruptive, foul-mouthed Spit, Sam Wright as Dippy, Gregory Esposito as Angel, Ebon Moss-Bachrach as T.B., Jack J.W. Ferver as the recruit, Milty, and Scott Wolf (a standout) in the pivotal role of Tommy. Their teamwork is seamless; both cheering and affecting, they're the heart of this show, which is the most entertaining evening I've spent in the theater in the past year.