Morgan Freeman in Odets' 'Country Girl'

BY LINDA WINER | linda.winer@newsday.com

April 28, 2008

Frances McDormand, Morgan Freeman and Peter Gallagher star in the Broadway revival of Clifford Odets' "The Country Girl" at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre. (Newsday / Ari Mintz / April 27, 2008)

Forget reports of real backstage drama at the revival of Clifford Odets' 1950 backstage drama, "The Country Girl."

Whatever troubles did or did not propel Mike Nichols' staging to last night's opening - including a star unable to remember lines and a director willing to cut entire scenes - the result is a subtle, engrossing and deeply straightforward shaping of a far-from-perfect script.

It's tempting - but I'm relieved to say, ultimately irrelevant - to look for pop-psych echoes in Nichols' attraction to a work about the Broadway director as savior. And whatever problems Morgan Freeman had with his lines during previews, and I don't doubt that he did, the intimations of weakness appear to have added layers of useful fragility to this sublimely confident actor's portrayal of a has-been who can't remember the words to his last chance for a comeback.

But "Country Girl" cannot be a star turn. Nichols has directed a carefully-calibrated three-star turn, with Frances McDormand as Georgie, the disappointed wife of Frank Elgin, whose career disappeared in a bottle and a bluff. The third side of the triangle is the terrific Peter Gallagher, the most aptly cast of them all, playing the workaholic hotshot director as if channeling Jerry Orbach's dark New York way with a fast-talking dream.

Unlike "Come Back, Little Sheba," the season's other visit with common-man 1950 naturalism, this one rises above the soaper ingredients with an unpredictable majesty of spirit. Odets, writing long after his social-realism heyday in the '30s, tells a bread-and-butter/inside-baseball story with language that feels lush without calling attention to its poetry.

At times this staging, revised a bit by playwright Jon Robin Baitz, the actors seem more interesting than their characters. But Nichols keeps picking away at these people until, quietly, the relationships click into the complex ways we perceive one another and ourselves.

Nichols decides not to keep us guessing about the motivations of Georgie, who, since she has the title, has formerly been treated with far less clarity. McDormand, with her strong jaw and no-nonsense intelligence, doesn't have Grace Kelly's glamour in the 1954 movie with Bing Crosby, or the wacko undercurrents of Faye Dunaway in the 1974 teleplay with Dick Van Dyke.

Instead, we know nearly from the start that this Georgie is the rock, the handler who knows her husband better than anyone and keeps him from self-destruction. She has her hands full with this much-older and, not incidentally, black Frank - who has Freeman's deep, querulous voice and a dangerous pride beneath his towering shambles.

The rest of the actors - including Chip Zien as the cynical producer - capture the romanticism and brutality beneath the cliches of the genre. Tim Hatley's sets create an intentionally constricted angular look at the grimy life away from the lights of a Broadway hit. Taped music is heard while a big old red-velvet curtain moves heavily across the stage to change scenes. And - talk about layers of backstage echoes - Bing Crosby sings.

THE COUNTRY GIRL. By Clifford Odets, directed by Mike Nichols. Jacobs Theatre, 242 W. 45th St. Tickets: $76.50-$100. Call 212-239-6200. Seen at Saturday afternoon preview.