‘Nightingale’ Sings to All, Director Believes

The distance between contemporary Southern California and Newcastle-on-Tyne during World War II, the setting for C.P. Taylor’s “And a Nightingale Sang . . . “ at the Gem Theatre in Garden Grove, cannot be measured in miles. Light-years might do.

British-born director David Herman, who staged the Grove Theatre Company’s season opener over the weekend, notes that Newcastle is the English coal-mining town near Scotland that made its mark more than a century ago stoking the furnaces of the Industrial Revolution.

Today, Newcastle remains the center of the British coal industry, surviving on a legacy of poverty, appalling environmental pollution and working-class grit. “It is a soot hole,” the director declared, recounting how he once drove through the town in a white sports car that turned “absolutely black from the filth in the air.”

Needless to say, no one even remotely describes Orange County that way. Sports cars here shine like newly minted pennies. The median household income is expected to be $45,000 this year. And the smog, at worst, dilutes an azure sky to a milky white.

Still, Herman (no relation to this reporter) believes that Taylor’s bittersweet tribute to his hometown is bound to strike a sympathetic chord. “People in adversity have a universal appeal,” the tall, sad-eyed director said during a recent interview at the Grove. “Quite apart from its nostalgic treatment of the war, the play is about people with an indomitable spirit.”

“Nightingale” certainly appeals to Southern California actors, to judge from the open casting call that preceded rehearsals: More than 300 applied for the play’s seven roles, Herman said.

The attraction simply may have been the chance to work. But surely some of the actresses were mindful that the play’s American premiere effectively launched Joan Allen’s career. Two producers saw her in “Nightingale” at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater in 1983 and brought the play to New York, where she got rave notices.

“Nightingale” revolves around a mildly bizarre family whose collective ear is cocked to the echoes of the world war across the channel. However, it focuses on Helen, an unmarried daughter in her 30s who is resigned to the conclusion (wrongly, it turns out) that her limp precludes romance.

While the play has come in for criticism as too maudlin for its own good, Herman said he wants the Grove production to communicate the idea that Helen scarcely is “a poor-me cripple.”

“There is a tendency for any actress taking the role to want to be led in a sentimental direction,” he maintained. “But women from the Newcastle area are tough cookies. I’m not sure Americans appreciate the earthy, dour sort of quality of working-class people in England.”

Moreover, it is this durable quality that he hopes will ground the play and keep it from floating off like some lighter-than-air soap opera.

Herman said he has never seen a production of “Nightingale,” which originated at a regional theater in Newcastle in 1977 and later was produced in London at the Royal Shakespeare Company.

“I simply read it three years ago and took a liking to it,” he said, recalling that he was attracted to the play because he accidentally saw a photo of Gemma Jones on the cover of the published script. She had played the lead in the London production and, said Herman, was a friend of his.

“Taylor first came into prominence in the mid-’70s, when I left (England) for the United States,” he noted. “As a regional writer, he had the chance to develop slowly and quietly. He didn’t start out like a John Osborne, who burst on the scene and became if anything a fading star.”

Cecil Philip Taylor died of a heart attack in 1981 at the age of 53. He was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and spent much of his adult life in Newcastle writing for several theaters there. Of Jewish-Scottish parentage, he was a prolific playwright who gained his greatest fame with “Good,” a chilling exploration of how a decent German professor becomes a Nazi and ends up as a storm trooper at Auschwitz.

Herman, who was born in Surrey (“a good kind of stockbroker belt south of London”), is in his late 40s. He moved to Long Beach three years ago to teach theater at Long Beach City College after a decade at Humboldt State University in Northern California. Before that, he lived in Cambridge, England, for a dozen years with actress Kay Berlet, his wife, who is playing Helen’s mother.

“Nightingale” is Herman’s third production at the Grove. The first was “The Show-Off” by George Kelly, for which he received a Drama-logue award last year. The second was the space-age version of “The Comedy of Errors” last summer at the Grove Shakespeare Festival, for which he received a few critical brickbats and considerable popular acclaim.

BOFFO BARD: Speaking of Shakespeare, this year’s summer festival was Grove’s best at the box office, according to artistic director Thomas F. Bradac. Total paid attendance for the season--comprising “Richard II,” “The Comedy of Errors,” “King Lear” and a one-man dramatization of the epic poem “Venus and Adonis”--came to slightly more than 12,000 people. That exceeded by 21% the attendance record set the previous summer. Another record: Revenue of $193,755 this summer was up more than 40%, Bradac said, because of strong subscription sales and even stronger single-ticket sales.