I came here seeking the answer to the absorbing question: Whatever happened to Orson Bean?
I discovered what seems to be happening to all of us.
Including poor Anton Chekhov, whose “Three Sisters” Bean has reduced to two, and one of them doesn’t have any clothes on.
Bean, no relation to England’s weirdly antic “Mr. Bean,” but just as funny, was one of the most inimitably witty comics in what we like to think of as the Golden Age of Television (because it was). This was the era of the classic and great “Ed Sullivan Show,” the always engaging “Jack Paar Show” and Bean’s own clever variety show, “The Blue Angel.”
Instantly recognizable by his crewcut, Ivy League manner and dryly rendered New England accent, the wickedly funny, Cambridge, Mass.-bred sage of Parkinsville, Vt., was also a fixture of TV drama–“Philco TV Playhouse,” “Playhouse 90,” “Studio One” and “The Kraft Television Theater.” Bean also starred for 20 years on Broadway: “Mr. Roberts,” “Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter,” “Nature’s Way” and “Subways Are For Sleeping.”
Then there was a game show called “To Tell the Truth,” and appearances on Johnny Carson’s late night show, but, to employ a television control room phrase, he more or less faded to black, at least in my perception, disappearing into the same void that swallowed up Dave Garroway, Henry Morgan and Wally Cox, among myriad gifted others.
I missed Bean terribly.
Actually, it turns out Bean didn’t disappear into a void at all. Rather, he disappeared into “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.” For that Wild West soapster’s six seasons, the whiter-haired, more heavily set Bean has played Jane Seymour’s folksy frontier storekeeper. I never knew.
“It’s better than heavy lifting,” Bean said. “It’s a show immensely popular in the Midwest and Texas, but not widely watched in Washington, New York and L.A.”
As he has not left TV, neither has Bean disappeared from the theater. He and his actress wife Alley Mills–remembered as the strikingly blond mom on “The Wonder Years”–have been partners in the Pacific Resident Theatre, a repertoire company in fun-loving Venice, Calif.
“The TV show I do is the day job that enables me to work with this theater,” he said. “That’s all I live for. That’s what I care about. There’s no dough in it. Nothing to do but lose money. But it’s all from the heart, and that’s why it’s so much fun.”
Lots and lots of fun, I must say. Bean, Mills & Co. have brought one of their plays–a romp called “The Quick-Change Room (Scenes From a Revolution)”–to New York. It’s playing at the Intar Theater in that stretch of smaller theaters along far west 42nd Street I consider New York’s new theater district–as opposed to the old one by Times Square, which is rapidly being transformed into a stage musical version of a Disney theme park.
“I love this play to distraction,” said Bean, who directs it, while wife Mills stars. “I almost felt as if God had put it in my lap to put it on.”
Written by onetime Milwaukee theatrical impresario Nagle Jackson, “The Quick-Change Room” is about a very traditional old state repertoire theater company in what was the Soviet Union, and what happens to it when said Soviet Union collapses under Mikhail Gorbachev and Russian cultural life becomes inundated by Boris Yeltsin-style capitalism.
The same kind of crass, commercial capitalism, in fact, that is turning Broadway into a theme park.
This repertoire theater had specialized in the classics, most notably Chekhov, and under communism, its seats had always been packed–but for a reason.
“The tickets were cheap, the theater was warm and the theater cafe was the only place in town where you could get real ham and German cheese and coffee,” said Bean.
But with the ruthless realities of capitalism replacing state support, the theater falls on very hard times. The bean-counting bookkeeper becomes boss and entrepreneur, and takes drastic measures to boost the bottom line.
To make Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” more cost efficient–in keeping with other downsizing measures he’s taken–he reduces it to “Two Sisters.” To attract the largest possible audience, he incorporates a nude scene, advertises the play with a girlie poster and turns the work into a musical.
(Ours, mind, is the country that saw Stephen Sondheim make a musical about Lee Harvey Oswald, John Wilkes Booth and other “Assassins”–and that devotes segments of network “news” shows to Ellen DeGeneres’s sex life and professional political bickering by Democratic husband James Carville and Republican wife Mary Matalin.)
“I think it’s a universal play,” said Bean. “I think everyone everywhere has got the same kind of feeling of what the hell is going on? I think everybody feels that way. I think they do in America. What the hell is happening? The old values don’t work. The new ones have not yet become apparent.”
I certainly agree. But I’m afraid I must confess. I like Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” much better with two–and that nude scene.
