The Stillborn Lover
17 July 2003

Richard Chamberlain is spending the month of July in the Norman Rockwell setting of Stockbridge, Mass., where the Berkshire Theatre Festival, one of America's most famous summer-stock companies, is celebrating its 75th year, and television's once-hunky Dr. Kildare is celebrating a few things himself. In his personal life, he is nearing 70 and currently the author of Shattered Love, a highly publicized autobiography in which the blond, blue-eyed, all-American king of the miniseries officially comes out of the closet and describes the torturous years he wasted hiding his homosexuality from the world to protect his career as a Hollywood heartthrob. Onstage, Mr. Chamberlain is starring in a new play entitled The Stillborn Lover as a gay Canadian ambassador who has spent his entire career in the diplomatic corps living a lie. Awash with ironies, the similarity to the star’s own life has not gone unnoticed. Maybe this explains his attraction to a powerful and liberating role in a play that is otherwise something of a muddle. At any rate, he still cuts a fine figure onstage, and he is not alone. The distinguished cast also features top-drawer performances by Keir Dullea, Jessica Walter and the sensational Lois Nettleton. This is not your grandma's straw-hat circuit.

The Stillborn Lover, which is a major attraction in the kelly-green Berkshires through July 26, is an American premiere by the late Canadian novelist Timothy Findley, who died in June 2002, before he could polish, fine-tune and save this unwieldy work from its present state of insufferable longwindedness. And the role Mr. Chamberlain is playing to the sold-out audiences of shocked fans who remember him from The Thorn Birds and Shogun works up a lather primarily because he is playing it. He is Harry Raymond, Canada's ambassador to Moscow and one of the country's most respected career diplomats, who is suddenly called home following the brutal murder of a Russian male prostitute. No explanation has been given for his abrupt departure from the Soviet Union, but there is secret evidence that links the ambassador to the victim. Meanwhile, Harry and his wife Marion (Lois Nettleton), who is suffering from the early grip of Alzheimer's, are temporarily held for interrogation in a "safe house" in Ottawa by Harry's best friend Michael Riordan (Keir Dullea), a cabinet minister whose ambition is set on becoming Canada's next prime minister. The scandal in Moscow has served as a tourniquet to the flow of their long-standing friendship, and as political storm clouds gather, even Michael's sympathetic, sophisticated wife Juliet (Jessica Walter) finds herself torn between her loyalty to old friends and her desperation to become Canada's next first lady. In the extensive oratories that fill the gaps between the occasional flashes of genuine emotion, everyone sounds off on every topic except the ones the audience craves for clarity. While Harry is under surveillance, a buffed military policeman continually strips down to total frontal nudity -for what purpose? Seducing Harry into a confession? And what is it that he is supposed to confess? There is no proof that he had anything to do with the murder in Moscow. It isn't even clear what threat his sexy Russian lover posed in endangering national security. There is a revelation that Harry attended Cambridge with famous espionage agents Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean. Is he a spy? Meanwhile, the real secret is the wife's sordid role in this mysterious scenario. Watching the husband she loves dying of denial, procuring and offering him young men from Cairo to Nagasaki, was she collaborating with secret agents out of neglect, jealousy and resentment, in order to frame him?

The Stillborn Lover asks many questions, but provides no satisfactory answers. It's a play full of question marks. Worse yet, director Martin Rabbett has staged it in a series of stilted tableaus on an annoying Japanese set constructed on raised levels behind pillars with sliding doors, overlooking a river. Strange metallic music and the cries of seagulls intrude at the most indelicate moments, while exasperating white columns completely obscure some of the actors' best scenes from the audience's view during their most important revelations. The set is a logistical nightmare. But despite a multitude of obvious physical and dramaturgical problems, the cast manages bravely to reveal the duplicitous nature of the diplomatic corps, while Mr. Chamberlain gamely probes the plight of a lonely, sacrificial homosexual who has spent his whole existence as unfulfilled as an unsharpened pencil or an unread book. Self-described as a "stillborn lover," passing through other people's lives on a diplomatic passport, and forced by the silly, self-serving rules of a society of hypocrites to deny himself the truth of his own identity, Ambassador Harry Raymond and actor Richard Chamberlain become the same conflicted person. Rarely has one actor found one role in one play in which the passion is so personal. This is why The Stillborn Lover is a play that is flawed but still worth doing, and why a summer drive up to the Berkshire Theatre Festival is a trip worth taking to watch Richard Chamberlain do it.

© 2003 Rex Reed