Style Becomes Substance in 'Far From Heaven'

The SpeakEasy Stage is currently presenting the Boston premiere of Far From Heaven, a new musical by the creators of "Grey Gardens," (Scott Frankel and Michael Korie). Based on the Todd Haynes' film that was a Sundance sensation (where it premiered in 2002), the film is stylized without being stilted and complex enough in its performances to earn its protagonist, Julianne Moore, an Academy Award nomination.

Haynes' film is based on the later melodramas of the German ex-patriate Douglas Sirk, who settled in Hollywood in the 1940s and formed a successful relationship with gay producer Ross Hunter and Universal Studios in the 1950s. With such titles as "All That Heaven Allows," "Written on the Wind" and "Imitation of Life," Sirk was the studio's biggest money-maker during the period.

Still, he was a critical failure. Reviewers considered his subjects insignificant because they revolved around unimportant issue, like love triangles and domestic situations; they had the same stigma as soap operas do today. Critics felt his style was unrealistic and obvious.

"I was trying to give that cheap stuff meaning," said Sirk in the book "Sirk on Sirk," "and in a way, strangely enough, it came off."

The devices Sirk used to interpret and develop the popular 1950s genre know as melodrama (vivid colors, characters reflected against glass and mirrors, and composing his subjects within frames - like window and doorways), became much admired in the late 1960s and early 70s, but they were not well regarded in his own time.

"Far From Heaven" explores social taboos amongst the societal conformation of the Eisenhower era. Without being ironic, it imitates Sirk's melodrama or "woman's film." Haynes admitted this was a "dated" way of telling stories, but he wanted to "reendow a worn-out genre with something genuine."

"Richard Greenberg's [musical] script follows Haynes' original pretty carefully," says award-winning director Scott Edmiston, who returns to SpeakEasy for this play. "It has many changes in location and would read to you pretty much like a film script, though some of the scenes have been translated into song."

Set in the mid-1950s, "Far From Heaven" follows a Connecticut housewife Cathy Whitaker, whose world is thrown off-balance when she discovers her husband, Frank, has sex with men, bringing her to have intimate feelings for her African-American gardener, Raymond Deagan.

The plot is primarily based on "All That Heaven Allows," a Sirk film that reunited Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson from the hugely successful "Magnificent Obsession" the year before.

In it Wyman plays an older widow that becomes involved with her working class gardener. This raises the eyebrows of her upper middle class friends in the tended Connecticut community where she lives.

Though Sirk made a name for himself in film, he was first and foremost a man of the theatre. His career began in Hamburg Germany staging Moliere, Ibsen, Sophocles, (and probably his favorite) Brecht. His early films in Europe were like his theatre; he did an adaptation of Ibsen and material that resembled the dark and stylistic work of his contemporaries, the German Expressionists.

However, the intellectual nature of Sirk's plays was scrutinized and censored by his government. Though his son became a child film star for the burgeoning Third Reich, and he was offered a fine career creating propaganda for the Nazis, he did not fit into his society. The reason for this, in no small part, may have been that his wife was Jewish. The theme of loving someone that society deems unfit would figure prominently into much of Sirk's later melodrama.

Before he fled Germany, Sirk realized two things: he could no longer pursue theatre - he had to make films - and he couldn't do subjects like Ibsen and Brecht. He had to make movies that were mainstream and popular. As he suspected, in Hollywood, Sirk was given melodramas to direct, though he "had no taste for them."

"Part of what Sirk did that was so brilliant," says Edmiston, "was he took the [genre of melodrama] and used it as a critique of American society. It was less a love story and more about the individual in conflict with her society."

In order to translate the very filmic experience of "Far From Heaven" the movie into a stage adaptation, Edmiston prepared by returning to the stylistic methods of Sirk's melodramas - techniques Sirk himself called "my stage style."

We see this "stage style" clearly in the Sirk, Haynes and Edmiston's use of music, expressionism and irony.

"Melodrama means music plus drama..." emphasized Sirk. The music in Sirk's film is bold and lushly orchestrated. It indicates to the audience the larger-than-life emotions they should feel within the scene.

The music Haynes used in "Far From Heaven," by Elmer Bernstein, resembles the music in "All That Heaven Allows" the score is lush and romantic. Piano and violins, evoke Rachmaninov and Brahms.

For the musical, composer Scott Frankel draws from a wider pallet and combines many varying musical styles, giving each main character a musical theme. "[The music sung by the character Frank] has an angsty angularity to it," says Edmiston. "It has a certain kind of Leonard Bernstein-like, 20th Century jazz quality. Cathy has warmer, lusher, more romantic ballads. And Raymond has a little more bluesy sound, of course. It tends to be freer and more like pop music."

Frankel's music probes the inner thoughts and psychological inner-workings of the character, much like Sirk's did in his final film and biggest hit, the 1959 "Imitation of Life" (featuring Lana Turner and John Gavin).

In this film a girl named Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner) is unable to come to terms with her racial identity. She passes as white, but her mother is African-American. Ashamed of her origins, Sarah Jane hides her mother from her peers. Until one day, in a dank alley, her boyfriend discovers her secret and brutally beats her for not being "white" like him.

Sirk uses brassy, percussive, undulating jazz music to highlight the underlying self-deception and violence of this scene, which becomes even more ferocious with a crescendo in the music.

It was this scene that Haynes had in mind when a young girl in "Far From Heaven" suffers a similar fate, though the music he ended up using is nowhere near as bold.

But the added songs are only a part of the musicalization of the film script.

"A lot of the dialogue scenes are underscored," says Edmiston, "and in places, they've taken the dialogue directly [from the film] and musicalized it. It's not a conventional song and it doesn't rhyme, yet it gives those scenes the heightened quality of melodrama."

This is fitting as Sirk has his roots in expressionism rather than realism. Or as Haynes in his director's notes to "Far From Heaven" said, Sirk takes the "evenness and bright colors of the woman's film" and adds to it a "conflation of film noir shadows."

After Cathy discovers Frank kissing a man in his office, the dialogue in the confrontation scene between husband and wife is the same in the movie as it is in the musical. Still the movie holds to conventions of realism; Julianne Moore delivers her lines quietly and with introspection. While the pace, pitch and dynamics imposed upon the lines by Scott Frankel's score gives this conversation moments of marked fortissimo. This makes a realistic portrait that resembles the "Mona Lisa's" smile in the movie come off expressionistic on stage, more like Edvard Munch's "The Scream."

The typical trait of expressionism is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective. It distorts physical reality radically for emotional effect in order to evoke mood or ideas.

Haynes represents Sirk's expressionism through camera angles. When Frank's sexual behavior is in-line with his culture the camera is balanced, flat and even. But when he pursues sex with men, and when his wife catches him in this behavior, the camera is thrown off-kilter, in wild dutch angles.

Edmiston uses blocking and production design for his expressionistic canvas. Cathy begins the play completely covered a vibrant red that subdues itself into pink in the party scene when she mirrors her peers. Nevertheless, she carries the reflection of her fondness for Raymond in her clothing (the floral print in her gown reflects the natural world where she interacts with her gardener), and the cut of this garment begins to show her, for the first time, as a sexual being.

Frank, however, sits alone on a couch, stage left, while everyone else at the party stands on differing levels stage right. The asymmetrical weight of Frank's society looms over the gay man and crushes him. It's no wonder that he comes out snarling and clawing like a trapped animal.

It's interesting that a number of artists have adapted "All That Heaven Allows" since Sirk realized the script the script to be a poor "nothing of a story." Somehow this narrative persists, perhaps because critics and admirers now imbue it with irony.

"The studio loved the title..." said Sirk. "They thought it meant you could have every thing you wanted. [But] I meant it exactly the other way round. As far as I am concerned, heaven is stingy."

We tend to look at the overwhelming positivity of Eisenhower era with an ironic eye. For Edmiston, the idea of "Heaven" lies in our blind optimism.

"Cathy starts out by thinking she's in Heaven;" notes Edmiston, "she thinks her life is perfect. Then through the course of the drama, she has a fall from grace. In the final moments of the play, it's as though she's landed on earth for the first time. And she's happy to be here with all of life's ambiguities and compromises."

But how do you reflect on a time period ironically without making a parody of your subject?

"When I tried to impose some style on the play," says Edmiston, "it almost felt like we were making fun of the 50s. That's something that Haynes didn't do. He respected the characters and told their story with truth. Truth can have subtlety and truth can be very big. As long as we [as a company] communicate the truth of the characters, and the truth of the situation, we really won't have to worry about [insincerity] too much."

"Far From Heaven" continues through October 11 at the Boston Center for the Arts. For tickets and more information, please go to www.speakeasystage.com.