Rick Harmon
Special to the Advertiser
Published 2:35 PM EDT Sep 12, 2019
Few have heard of Buzz Goodbody, the female director who crashed through the glass ceiling in 1975 by directingwhat some considered the best “Hamlet” of her generation. This is a fact playwright Susan Ferrara’s “Buzz” is likely to change.
Ferrara has created an intelligent portrait of Goodbody, who used the non-traditional casting of Ben Kingsley as the young prince of Denmark, a corrugated tin storage building as her stage and an unwavering belief in her theatrical instincts to turn “Hamlet” into a hit during a time when the world of theater was dominated by male directors.
Add superb acting and directing to this inventive, well-written play, and it’s a coup for the Alabama Shakespeare Festival to have the world premiere of “Buzz” on the stages of ASF – well actually in ASF’s industrial-style scene shop, made to represent the storage building where Goodbody staged her “Hamlet.”
Well-known actor Carrie Preston directs, keeping the play incredibly tight – it runs a mere 90 minutes – while still leaving time for her to draw wonderful performances from her cast.
Elizabeth A. Davis gives a compelling performance as the young director, undaunted in the male-dominated industry. Ferrara has made it a wonderful role, devoid of triteness. “Buzz” avoids clichéd characters. It isn’t aboutstereotypical bad guys protecting the glass ceiling, but a woman of such intense drive and vision that she must succeed despite obstacles society has placed in her path.
There are wonderful scenes between Robert Emmet Lunney as Mentor, the artistic director, and Davis. We seeLunney’s character begin to realize how good a director Goodbody is; the slow but growing appreciation of herdirecting style, how she uses different approaches to improve actors’ performances and how she can spot actors’ potential, even when they cannot see it themselves. The artistic director is a reasonable man, a man of compromise, yet he has huge fights with Goodbody because her vision of what the play should be is so strong she cannot compromise. Zuhdi Boueri is great as a young Ben Kingsley (although the play lists him just as “Hamlet”), who has to be continually convinced by Goodbody that he is good enough to take the role.
The entire cast is excellent with Greta Lambert as the costumer Ms. Cut, Tarah Flanagan as the actor Miss Soft, Christopher Gerson as the scenic designer Mr. Babble, Zack Calhoon as Leonard and Sam McMurray as Sidney.
There are also great scenes with Spencer Davis Milford, in a man-we-love-to-hate role playing Goodbody’s main competitor to be the Royal Shakespeare Company’s main director. The male director makes safe choices and doeswhat the establishment wants to rise to the top, while Goodbody makes it to the top because she refuses to listen to anyone other than her own artistic voice that tells her what the play should be and which actors should be in it.
Like Goodbody, Preston and Ferrara are not risk-averse. “Buzz” has the expected scenes of Goodbody at work in the theater but also uses a variety of methods to draw parallels between the female director and “Hamlet,” Shakespeare’s famous tragic hero that Goodbody is trying to bring to the stage. Like Hamlet, Goodbody is driven to the point of compulsion. While Hamlet is driven by revenge, for Goodbody the play’s the thing. Theater is an all-consuming commitment, a passion for which she is willing to sacrifice all if she can achieve her goal.
The way the parallels are drawn are inventive and challenging. Throughout the play, two men on a hydraulic lift represent both the gravediggers from “Hamlet” and theater archivists. The archivists show that the greats of theater, similar to “Hamlet’s” Yorick, have been buried and forgotten – a metaphor to Goodbody, who was the first woman to direct at the Royal Shakespeare Company and one of only a handful of women directing theater in Britain in the 1970s, but is not remembered as she deserves to be.
But the gravediggers are only one of the play’s many interesting ideas. As Goodbody’s story is told in a series of non-chronological scenes, dates flash on a large sign with Shakespearean quotes, acting almost as emotional markers in Goodbody’s life. Lights consistently flare up and burn out in bright explosions of breaking glass either mimicking Goodbody’s brain synapses firing as she comes up with more ideas and insights or perhaps foreshadowing the play’s outcome.
If there is a complaint, it is that unlike “Hamlet,” which builds to its grand conclusion, the climax of “Buzz” seems a bit too quick and lacks the degree of emotional impact that we might expect.
But this is a small flaw in a brilliant play. It’s a play that ignores standard biography. It looks at none of Goodbody’s relationships with anyone outside the theater. In “Buzz,” theater is Goodbody’s life, a love to which she gave all and a love the world of theater should not forget. This is a wonderful play that deserves to be seen.
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