Theater Review—

A Tour De Force For Redgrave, ‘Mandrake Root’ Offers

An Evening Of Fine Entertainment For Audiences

 By Julie Stern

“Go and catche

a falling starre,/

Get with child

a mandrake root,/

Tell me whereall

past yeares are,/

Or who cleft

the Divels foot…”

 NEW HAVEN — This song by the 17th Century poet John Donne provides not only the title, but more importantly, the multi-layered theme of Lynn Redgrave’s new play The Mandrake Root, of which she is both the author and the star. The work is now premiering at New Haven’s Long Wharf, and thanks to interest from the first night of previews (never mind the official opening night), the production’s run has already been extended by one week.

Using her own mother, the British actress Rachel Kempson, as a jumping off point, Redgrave has fashioned her play around the character of an 80-year-old former star, her relationship with her grown daughter, an American novelist, and the damage done by a lifetime of family secrets and denial.

Using a non-linear approach that floats seamlessly back and forth over sixty years, the play builds on both the symbolism of the mandrake and the despair of the aged woman who looks back on her life and wonders where the past years are, while still refusing to acknowledge responsibility for her own choices.

Rose Randall is the aging actress, recently widowed by the death of her husband, the famous producer Sir Robert Randall. On a recuperative visit to her daughter Sally, who lives in Santa Barbara with her teenaged daughter Kate, Rose is an outrageous bundle of selfishness and senility that is as side-splittingly funny as it is excruciatingly painful.

What comes out in a series of scenes alternating between present and past, California and London, is that  the marriage was a sham: Sir Robert was homosexual, and used the marriage to Rose as a way of bolstering his public image. Knowing that she loved him, Robert ordered his friend and best man, Alistair McKay, to keep her satisfied.

But because Alistair was already married, and didn’t want to hurt his wife or children, he made Rose promise to keep their ongoing relationship a secret. Even though they both loved each other, Alastair warned Rose that if she ever left Robert, he would end the affair forever.

Thus Rose was trapped, imprisoned by the needs and demands of the two men in her life. The happiness she yearns for seems as impossible and unreachable as Donne’s images in the centuries-old poem.

The mandrake root  Donne refers to, and to which Rose continually compares herself,  is a plant fraught with Biblical and medieval mythical significance. Because it is a forked root that resembles the human female form, it was considered by turns an aphrodisiac, a fertility drug, and an emblem of the dark spirits.

The common belief was that it could only be uprooted safely in moonlight, after proper prayer and ritual. Human hands were not allowed to touch it (a black dog was supposed to pull it up) and when it came out of the ground it was supposed to utter a shriek that would drive mad the people who did not block their ears to the sound.

In his song, Donne lists catching a falling star and getting a mandrake root pregnant as typical impossible tasks, along with being able to tell where the past years have gone. For Rose, who imagines she hears the shrieks precipitating her own madness, the mandrake symbolizes her own sexual desires that are continually frustrated and tormented by the two men in her life.

The image of “getting with child” carries over to the ambiguous paternity of Sally, who chose to have her own daughter fathered by an anonymous donor from of sperm bank, and Kate, who at the age of 16 has come out as a lesbian. Both of them are clearly weighed down by the baggage of Sally’s childhood, when she was a witness to her father’s drunken liaisons, and played second fiddle to her mother’s lover.

What makes the play work is the eventual resolution, in which, with the dark secrets out, the three women can come to terms and reach out to one another in the last years of Rose’s life. Reconciliation and closure is possible, and with it, healing.

Lynn Redgrave gives a stunning tour de force of a performance as Rose, and she is well matched by Pippa Pearthree as the wistful, long-suffering Sally, who writes about experience instead of having it.

Similarly, the other five actors in the cast — Angela Goethals as Kate,  Henry Stram as Sir Robert, Mark Chamberlin as Alistair,  Jeanne Paulsen in a series of minor roles (nurse, nun, housekeeper, friend, etc) and Miranda Valerio as the child, Sally — work beautifully under the direction of Warner Shook.

(The world premiere of The Mandrake Root will, as of press time, now continue to March 18. Tickets are $15 to $45 each, with student, senior and group discounts, and limited rush tickets available. Contact Long Wharf Theatre, at 203/787-4282, for curtain schedule and ticket reservations.)