Saint Frances of Hollywood

SAINT FRANCES OF HOLLYWOOD by Sally Clark

Toronto Sun

By JOHN COULBOURN

Saint Frances

Without the carrot of redemption that waits at the end, the Stations of the Cross probably wouldn't get much play in the Catholic travelogue. Redemption is also what's missing in the tragic life of Frances Farmer - both as she lived it and as it is revisited in Sally Clark's St. Frances Of Hollywood. The play opened this week at Canadian Stage's Berkeley Street Theatre Upstairs, a production of Hollywood Ten in association with Independent Artists Productions and Canadian Rep Theatre.

Now for those of you who've missed everything that's been written about Farmer, not to mention the 1982 movie starring Jessica Lange, a bit of background: A rising Hollywood star of the 1930s, Farmer ended up as one of Hollywood's most enduring tragedies instead. A socialist and a rebel, she bucked the system, and eventually, on the crest of a wave of booze and pills, landed in a home for the insane. After all the conventional therapies of the day had failed - insulin, shock and hydro - she was eventually lobotomized and died in obscurity in the 1970s.

It's not a pretty story in the telling, and it's rendered even less so in Clark's stage play, under the direction of Hrant Alianak. Presented as a sort of low-rent homage to Hollywood B-movies, intercut with clips from Farmer's films, St. Frances picks up the young star's life before she's tasted fame. Brash, youthful, brimming with hope and promise, she's rejected God, embraced socialism and set her sights on a stage career with New York's prestigious Group Theatre. But before she can join the Group, she is hijacked by Hollywood and thus begins her torturous descent to hell.

It's a sordid voyage Alianak oversees with relish, dwelling almost lovingly on the basest aspects of her excesses and abuses. Worse, he encourages his 11-member cast to fairly wallow in the melodrama of every single moment.

In the title role, Thea Gill gives a brave, if shallow, performance, tackling the sordid, often gratuitous, demands of the role with more enthusiasm than skill. As her manipulative mother, Martha Gibson is more concerned with acting than interacting, while Jack Nicholsen overlays his turn as heartless playwright Clifford Odets with a smothering patina of smarm. Only Kate Lynch, in a series of turns that includes a lovely take on gossip maven Louella Parsons and another as Farmer's asylum ward-mate, manages to rise above the fetid material to redeem her characters with something akin to humanity.

That Farmer's life was a contemporary tragedy is beyond dispute, and as such, it has relevance as a cautionary tale to the society that abandoned her.
But in her attempt to canonize Farmer, Clark creates a sea of despair and then demands that we wallow in it instead of sailing over it.

The choice, however, is still yours.

This review provided by Dario

SAINT FRANCES OF HOLLYWOOD

A RAW, SLOPPY WAIL

by Laura Kostersky

In Moo, the play that made her, Sally Clark wrote about a woman wrongly committed to an insane asylum. She continues this fascination in her new play, about the tragic life of actress Frances Farmer.

Farmer was a beautiful, promising actress who wrecked her movie career by boozing, cursing and politicking her way into the nuthouse. Clark melodramatically points the finger most aggressively at Farmer’s mother - a woman who lived vicariously through her daughter’s career. As Farmer blows her chances in Hollywood, her mother has her committed.

Much of the play is about Farmer screaming obscenities, getting _ucked by orderlies and sailors, thrown into ice baths, jolted with electricity and finally lobotomized into a childlike state. Clark doesn’t overlay these events with much interpretation. The vaguely provocative notion that Frances is some kind of modern saint, for example, (and that, like all martyrs, she needs to suffer) is just tossed aside.

In between scenes, photos and footage from some of Farmer’s old films are projected onto the back wall. Though fascinating, they are not meaningfully integrated into the play.

Despite Clark’s inherently moving subject matter, the writing lacks the imaginative flair and satirical precision of Moo. In Saint Frances of Hollywood Clark seems to have lost her wicked sense of humor and in its place offers a raw, sloppy wail of a play that does no more than chronicle psychiatric atrocities.

Thea Gill (as Farmer) looks the part, but vocally she blows only one note: husky and loud. Her breathless performance (like the script) lacks contour and subtlety, and her acting borders on ham.

from EYE WEEKLY Toronto’s arts newspaper - January 25, 1996

Sally Clark

This review and image provided by Dario