Do you miss "Dallas" and "Dynasty"?
At the Old Globe, of all places, you can satisfy your craving for lurid, big-hair, Reagan-era melodrama with "Cornelia," in which a pair of conniving climbers spar over sex and politics with the soap-operatic relish of TV's Ewings and Carringtons feuding over sex and oil money.
But if it's serious theater you're after, the new play "Cornelia" by Mark V. Olsen ain't it.
That the couple clawing and cavorting onstage are based on the race-baiting Alabama governor, George Wallace, and the beauty queen runner-up who became his second wife, somehow makes this empty spectacle of ambition, seduction and manipulation all the more disappointing, a nearly camp throwback to those '80s television serials.
Director Ethan McSweeny, who's been two for two at the Globe's small Carter Stage with "Body of Water" and "In This Corner" in seasons past, scores again on the main stage, at least in the casting and pacing departments, with "Cornelia."
But despite a remarkably nuanced, often potent performance by Robert Foxworth as George Wallace and a vigorous tour de force performance by Melinda Page Hamilton as the desperately driven, increasingly delusional Cornelia, the script skates along the surface of the days of these lives, and the writing lacks the resonance, menace and social significance that might make their story worth watching.
Given Foxworth's history with Shakespeare's villains and heroes (Iago, Macbeth, Claudius, Brutus among them), this fine actor brings a fullness, and now and again an ambiguity, to the role that the episodic, anecdotal writing doesn't sustain.
Similarly, countless moments occur in which you imagine what Tennessee Williams might have done with the tawdry glamour of Cornelia, a pathetically insecure Southern belle who thinks she can parlay her charm as a water-ski queen at Florida's Cypress Gardens into a political career.
Unfortunately, however, these Wallaces were real people, and the real-life attitudes their rise reflected -- and the political damage they inflicted on their state and the country -- might have inspired some deeper artistic contemplation. "Cornelia" is no documentary, nor was it meant to be; but it lacks the dramatic weight of its subject matter.
Olsen picks up The George Wallace Story in 1970. At that point, Wallace's first wife, Lurleen, is dead and he is campaigning for his second term as governor. The divorced Cornelia, 20 years his junior and the niece of his former political rival, Big Jim Folsom, has set her sights on him. After a secret sex-fueled courtship, they wed.
The overlong play sweeps over the seven years of George and Cornelia's fraught marriage, but the writer Olsen wisely introduces just three other characters: Cornelia's crazy alcoholic mother, Ruby Folsom, played truly larger than life and always entertainingly by Beth Grant; George's campaign-manager brother (and Cornelia's nemesis) Gerald, played in an energetically servile yet serpentine way by T. Ryder Smith; and Gerald's wife, a starchy, underwritten role handled well enough by Hollis McCarthy.
Cornelia narrates much of the tale, with John Lee Beatty's realism-to-fantasy set filling in details of the backstory. Her drive to return to the Montgomery mansion where she grew up when her uncle Big Jim was governor brings on a floating house. Her mother's run-down country shack slides on and off. A stage-filling electoral map shows George Wallace's surprising (and scary) success in the 1968 and 1972 Presidential primaries.
One high point for actor Hamilton comes with her warm and intimate rendition of the Tammy Wynette classic, "Stand By Your Man." George sits helplessly in the wings while his aspiring, mad-with-envy wife carries on, taking up his precious airtime. It's the beginning of the violent end of their relationship and apparently, too, the start of Cornelia's decline into a kind of madness.
(Any similarity to the great climactic onstage crack-up of the fragile country singer in Robert Altman's fabulous 1975 film "Nashville" may not be coincidental.)
Still, despite the all-pro acting and design work and its sporadic entertainment value, in the end "Cornelia" is shallow and forgettable. The clanging, dissonant original music by Steven Cahill and the shrill sound by Paul Peterson only underscore the creaky melodrama of this ambitiously produced world premiere.
"Cornelia"
When: 7 p.m. Sundays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays; 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays; 2 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays; through June 21
Where: Old Globe Theatre, Balboa Park, San Diego
Tickets: $29-$76
Info: 619-234-5623
Web: www.theoldglobe.org
