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Ayn Rand's Play Ideal in NYC
I saw Ayn Rand's play "Ideal" in New York two weeks ago with my fiancee and friends. It is directed by Jenny Beth Snyder at the 59E59 blackbox theater. Since the reviews of the play in the lamestream press have been what they've been, I feel obligated to say something.
I love the play and knew it well before attending. Since I had known the work only as a dry script, the main thrust of my interest was in seeing Ideal made real. In that respect I give the performance highest marks. To see and hear the play with the full immediacy and reality as the work was meant to have was very moving and was a special experience for me--one which I will never forget. We are very fortunate to have the benefit of a production to see--even Ayn Rand herself never saw the work produced. The story: the extraordinary screen actress Kay Gonda is accused of murder and disappears on a quest to find purportedly a place to hide, but in fact to find a soul with the virtue of integrity. The progression of the play is a brilliant structure, a set of variations on a theme. In each scene the audience first hears a fan letter read aloud, a letter that had been written to Kay Gonda by an admirer. We then see the letter writer in the context of his life, and see his response to the arrival of Kay Gonda herself, in the hour of her darkest need. Her presence is what Gonda intends it to be: a test of man's devotion to his own professed ideal. With each visit we see a new character, a new motivation, and a new kind of response to the dilemma posed by Gonda's presence and predicament. As Leonard Peikoff wrote in the introduction to the play, the theme of the work is "men's lack of integrity, their failure to act according to the ideals they espouse. The theme is the evil of divorcing ideals from life." The story is the quest of the stunning beauty and powerful ideal of Kay Gonda to find a soul who matches hers, who wants to live life in the way with the kind of idealism Gonda portrays on the screen. The climax of the story is the resolution of Gonda's crisis of being alone as an idealist. Given this kind of theme and drama, it is no suprise that the snarky, faux-humble New York intelligentsia has unanimously desired to dismiss the play as silly and childish. There is psychological protection going on here. A man who has let his own ideals slip doesn't care to have it rubbed in his face--so he writes a sardonic, pseudo-intellectual review attempting to poop on Ayn Rand's grand and vaunted Romanticism. The reviewers at the trashy New York Post, at the washed-up, bankrupt old socialist rag the New York Times, and the theatre-biz site backstage.com understand Ayn Rand's viewpoint about as much as she respected Stalin. Consider the ending punch by backstage.com's Snark in Residence David Sheward: ""Ideal" is far from ideal as a drama of real people in real conflict." It is against precisely that sort of "realistic" repudiation of ideals that Ayn Rand wrote the play, you moron. Now what did I think of the production? I found it very powerful overall--very dramatic and intense. I loved hearing Ayn Rand's brilliantly terse and focussed dialogue. From the point of view of what can be expected from our cynical, grey, pragmatic, unprincipled culture I think the production was as good as can be expected. I don't think the director or actors grasp Ayn Rand's viewpoint very deeply. But can you believe it--the play was performed with no postmodern irony, no anti-Ayn Rand parodying or snobbish double entendre. It was given straight, as it deserves to be. Dan Pfau, Ted Caine, and Kim Rosen deserve to be singled out as the actors who best understood the meaning of the play, and therefore best put accross their characters. Kim Rosen was, I'm afraid, miscast in the role of the bitter, nagging old mother-in-law, but she was razor-sharp in her role as Ms. Shyly--which is exactly what the play needs. In that role Rosen was excellent in her searing bluntness and in the piercing intensity of her gaze. That is what Ayn Rand would have wanted. Ted Caine was a convincing Mr. Perkins--the dutiful husband who feably clings to his ideal, but only until he is confronted with the immediate and very real onus of acting on it. The scene developing his character was very powerfully done, which is Caine's achievement. Dan Pfau plays the two roles that are most in accordance with the heroine's ideals: Mick Watts who is Kay Gonda's only annointed press agent, and Johnie Dawes, whose character is the culmination of the story. These characters have the remarkable and rare devotion to Kay Gonda's "like nothing you bastards ever dreamed of" ethos, even though both of these characters are psychologically defeated from the get-go. Pfau succeeded in conveying all the reality and complexity of these figures; he made them very ideally real. Playing a pure character, a fully integrated and whole, healthy, strong, virtuous and ideal soul--like Kay Gonda--is something I have never seen an actor do successfully. Gary Cooper failed in the film of The Fountainhead. With thousands of years of religion behind us, people are unfamiliar with and cannot feel the feelings of a pure, uncorrupted, non-sacrificial ideal. But that is what Ayn Rand's worldview makes possible and that is what her work requires. In this play, Jessie Barr played Kay Gonda as a traditional female heroine, with traditional female emotional suppleness and sloppiness. That was a disappointment because it seemed that Barr didn't understand Ayn Rand very well. But I admire her intensity even if she was missing the austerity and severity characterstic of an Ayn Rand heroine. It is important to remember that the character of Kay Gonda is, in essence, Ayn Rand herself. So an excellent way to understand the psychology would be to watch video of Ayn Rand, such as her interviews. Ayn Rand was not sloppy and "sensitive," she was penetratingly and passionately rational. I'm reminded of the story I once heard about a visitor to Ayn Rand's apartment who asked about one of her cats, something to the effect of "is that Ayn Rand?" (She thought the cat had been named after its human mommy perhaps?) --to which AR's husband replied: "That can't be Ayn Rand, she doesn't have any claws." (!) I thank Jenny Beth Snyder for directing this play. I thank her for taking it seriously. I thank Karina Martins for producing it. I thank her for taking on the herculean task of making it happen--as someone who has produced artistic events in New York I know how hard this is. I thank the cast for their efforts. And most of all, I pray that these efforts and similar ones will continue. 
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