Dumbed down
The Graduate, stripped of its seditious intelligence and humor, trips and falls onstage.

By Rob Avila

IF TERRY JOHNSON'S stage adaptation of The Graduate is trying to seduce me, it's doing a disappointing job of it. The fumbling production rubs me the wrong way. My belly felt like an alligator's at its touch, alternately lulled to sleep and provoked to snap.

Naturally, I didn't expect the play to be exactly like, or even as good as, the film, and probably no one else does, either. The show's handlers promote it as a star vehicle, implying that the originals (novel and film) have been refashioned (awkwardly and halfheartedly, it turns out) to gain a greater vantage of the character of Mrs. Robinson – played here by a certified star, Jerry Hall, certainly one of the firmer sets of legs onstage.

But the disappointment reaches beyond the tedium of a production that tries to be breezy but only manages to be slight; one where the Beach Boys' "Wouldn't It Be Nice" predominates over Simon and Garfunkel's "Sounds of Silence." One despairs at seeing a work of subversive art twisted into its opposite by a shallow impostor.

Bowdlerized Broadway-wise, Charles Webb's 1962 bestseller and, more memorably, Mike Nichols's brilliant film receive the dubious compliment of being converted into a cloying bit of accessible theater. A satire that worked by engaging our intelligence ends up as a parody that tries to bludgeon it. The stage antics wink at us with laugh lines and iconic scenes we all know by heart, while turning their meaning 180 degrees around and assuming we won't know the difference.

Through no fault of Ms. Hall and her suitably sultry, predatory Mrs. Robinson, it's as if the sex and seduction in the story line had been thought up by the ad department, since the play produces no real sense of them, playing largely for laughs the scenes that in the film were also fraught with a sweaty, even spooky tension that only heightened their marvelous humor.

By shifting the center of the story in the direction of Mrs. Robinson, the safety of family melodrama is effectively substituted for a darkly comic satire of all institutional authority from the family on up. Johnson has added several scenes (stewarded in this touring production by director Peter Lawrence) whose function may be to give us more characterization, but which take a dull hatchet to the essential boundary between the world of the parents – representatives of a catatonic, morally bankrupt society, infecting young and old alike – and Ben Braddock's sublime alienation. For instance, we get a drunken heart-to-heart between Mrs. Robinson and daughter Elaine (Devon Sorvari), and a sober one between Ben (Rider Strong) and his father (likable William Hill), each meant to build sympathy for the traditional, if dysfunctional, nuclear unit. There's even a silly and anachronistic scene in which Ben and his desperate parents sprawl uncomfortably on beanbag chairs before a long-haired, barefooted psychiatrist (John Leonard Thompson) in a half lotus.

Johnson, with supreme confidence, actually ventures to tack on his own ending, giving in to a doubly regrettable urge to imagine what happens after Ben and Elaine get off the bus and to make sure that whatever it is conforms to a formulaic happy ending. Moreover, in imagining Ben and Elaine wallowing in the faux innocence of their childhood in a chaste hotel bed, the scene betrays a contemporary conceit, though not one loyal to the spirit of the original (with its rejection of a deadening social order and the platitudes that mask its purposeful breeding of pliant mediocrity). Instead, our heroes derive supreme pleasure from retreating into bed like playful siblings with a box of Froot Loops.

Forced to grow up too fast, Ben and Elaine reclaim their childhood. But far from being an indictment of society, their dilemma never seems to stretch much beyond the front lawn. When Ben calls his parents and their entire social world "grotesque," he merely sounds typically adolescent, immature and rather unsympathetic. It's significant that a recent Harper's Index recorded the average age most Americans now give for the start of adulthood as 26. By this reckoning Ben and Elaine are indeed entitled to several more years of childhood. And one expects they will soon reconcile and conform to their parents' world.

Johnson substitutes today's overgrown adolescents, in the form of a gratingly bland couple, for the baby boomers Nichols left at the back of the bus – who not only left the nest but also chopped down the tree. The final scene in the film worked in part because of the ambiguity it allowed. Who knew what would happen to them now that they had turned instinctually and irrevocably on the only world they had ever known? But that suspended moment, as they sit mutely side by side staring ahead, invites back the music that had opened the film, "Sound of Silence," a song whose esoteric, prophetic imagery already suggests an awakening consciousness that makes return impossible.

Interestingly, in the stage version we only ever hear the opening guitar riff to the song, never the words. They're quashed along with the existential angst and social bite of the film. The play closes instead on the romantic and upbeat opening stanza of Simon and Garfunkel's "America." America indeed. Unable to register silence, we're left merely dumbfounded.

The Graduate plays Wed/3-Sat/6, 8 p.m. (also Wed/3 and Sat/6, 2 p.m.); Sun/7, 2 p.m., Curran Theatre, 445 Geary, S.F. $37-$75. (415) 512-7770, www.bestofbroadway-sf.com.