"Those who remember Christopher Walken's riveting Public Theater Trigorin of 20 years ago—the only Trigorin who ever convinced me he was a writer—get additional discomfiture from watching [Kevin] Kline glide through the part while Walken, often only a few feet away, is giving a preposterously active, robust rendition of Arkadina's older brother, Sorin, a retired bureaucrat and quasi-invalid, two things as which it is impossible to imagine Walken." (M. Feingold, 2001)

"Christopher Walken has once again not fared well with the critics; but it is time people recognized that he is one of the great American actors. I found his Sorin to be one of the most deliberate and surprising moment-to-moment performances I have ever seen. At first glance he would seem to have been better cast in the part of Trigorin (Walken probably thought so, too). But Nichols's instinct was correct. Instead of the decrepit, disappointed invalid of tradition, Walken creates a seedy remnant of a once elegant man, with a sublime sense of humor that infects the audience with every line. His fainting scene, in which he starts a merry dance, then seems to feign tripping, falls to the ground, and lies perfectly still in the first stages of a stroke, is alone worth the price of admission (even if admission to the park is free)." (R. Brustein, 2001)

"However, I’ve always loved Christopher Walken in anything he does, and I don’t intend to stop now. Mr. Walken plays Sorin, the retired, loopy brother of Arkadina, and he plays him with his customary loopy aplomb. He’s a most graceful actor, and we miss him whenever he exits. That he’s playing the somewhat aristocratic Sorin sucking on a cigar as if he’s trying out for The Sopranos isn’t quite the point. Nor even is it too important that the Sorin we see strolling nimbly about the place or hurling himself at a sofa because that’s what he wants to do is, in fact, a sick, arthritic man confined mostly to a wheelchair.

No, the point and genius of Mr. Walken is that he’s the only actor I’ve ever seen who can be in a role and step outside it  simultaneously. It’s an impossibility, but he pulls it off. And it puts him on the dangerous edge, which is where we—with Konstantin—always prefer theater to live. We cannot anticipate Mr. Walken for a second. He adores being onstage, conveying the intimate pleasure of it. And in return, we give him our hands. He brings the stage to unpredictable life and vitality, capturing the perplexed, half-mad spirit of the dying Sorin. For all his well-known faults, Mr. Walken’s a natural—the last person you might expect to be a Chekhov actor, and the only actor onstage who truly is." (J. Heilperm, 2001)
groups.msn.com/WalkenReception/ 

A Behanding in Spokane (Gerald Schoenfeld Theater, NY, 2010) ... Carmichael

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Video

http://theater.nytimes.com/2010/03/05/theater/reviews/05behanding.html
with audioslide show

Packing Heat, and a Grudge

Sometimes, in one of theater’s more undervalued romantic story lines, an actor meets a set and — flash! — chemistry happens. The opening image of Christopher Walken in Martin McDonagh’s “Behanding in Spokane” is such a perfect, demented marriage of character and environment that you can’t help grinning like a fool.

For there before you sits Mr. Walken, looking baleful and unwashed as only Mr. Walken can, on a bed in a seedy hotel room that might have been decorated by Edward Hopper in partnership with Stephen King. (The designer of record is Scott Pask.) Man and milieu understand each other here, and they exhale a shared, crusted loneliness and a thick funk of impure thoughts and deeds. “Nothing good can possibly happen,” you think, eyeing the gloom with giddiness, “and isn’t that wonderful?”For the first few ecstatic moments of “A Behanding in Spokane,” which opened Thursday night at the Schoenfeld Theater, it looks as if the dangerous promises of Mr. Walken’s dead gaze will be fulfilled many fold. That they are not is no fault of Mr. Walken’s. His use of his signature arsenal of stylistic oddities has seldom been more enthralling.But the disappointment that shadows the face of Mr. Walken’s character — a one-handed man who has been searching for years for his severed appendage — comes to seem like a prophecy of the audience’s. The rest of the erratically enjoyable “Behanding” — directed by John Crowley and featuring Sam Rockwell, Anthony Mackie and Zoe Kazan — never matches the strange genius of its star.
 

Behanding” is the first foray into an American setting for Mr. McDonagh, who made his name by gleefully translating the dark sensibility of film noir and Grand Guignol into tall tales of rural Ireland (the Leenane trilogy, “The Lieutenant of Inishmore”). Though his non-Irish play “The Pillowman” (set in a Kafkaesque totalitarian state) was a knockout, he seems to have lost his hitherto unerring sense of direction in the busy, open country of the United States.

His hapless, bored and obsessive characters, natural liars and fantasists all, may require the insularity of a small, isolated, self-mythologizing world to flourish and self-destruct credibly. As reconceived for “Spokane” these prototypes start to seem alarmingly like figures from a conventional Hollywood caper comedy about dopey, foul-mouthed crooks who keep tripping over themselves.

A misfired scam, set up by a pair of out-of-their-league con artists, is at the center of “Behanding.” Carmichael (Mr. Walken), the man in search of the hand, has arrived hopefully at a hotel in an unspecified small town. (You feel he’s stayed in hundreds of places like this one, and they’ve all been heartbreak hotels.) He is here to meet with Toby (Mr. Mackie) and Marilyn (Ms. Kazan), who claim to have possession of that long-lost hand.

Since this is a McDonagh play, I don’t think it’s giving away much to say not only that Toby and Marilyn have no such thing, but also that they are lousy at bluffing. And that when Carmichael twigs this, the forms his anger assume will be both sadistic and imaginative.

In this case the props for revenge include a can of gasoline, a candle and handcuffs, and the obligatory gun. And, oh yes, you may as well know that, honoring a McDonagh tradition, body parts are flung in the anatomical equivalent of a food fight. Racial and sexual epithets, of a nature to make David Mamet flinch, are flung as well. In the midst of this merry savagery is Mervyn (Mr. Rockwell), the hotel manager, who apparently suffers from a serious case of death wish.

Mr. Mackie (“The Hurt Locker”), Mr. Rockwell (who has the play’s best-written monologue) and Ms. Kazan are talented, individualistic performers with impressively varied résumés. But here they often fall into formulaic styles, playing the situation more than the characters. At times, especially when a sorely missed Mr. Walken is not onstage, “Behanding” feels like a just-written “Saturday Night Live” sketch, for which the jokes have yet to be tested. (Poor Mr. Mackie is required to describe the hotel room as “Hand Central Station.”)

It could be that they’re intimidated by the presence of Mr. Walken, an actor’s actor of fabled eccentricity. In any case they don’t get in his way, which is a mercy, since Mr. Walken’s Carmichael is a scrofulous wonder to behold. For over four decades Mr. Walken has been American film’s most reliably bizarre portrayer of chilling kooks (from “Annie Hall” and “The Deer Hunter” to “Batman Returns” and “Pulp Fiction”). And some people have become allergic to his familiar panoply of tics and quirks.

But seldom does this actor only glide on surface mannerisms. There’s highly intelligent method in his madness. Or should we say Method? Mr. Walken is directly descended from Method acting’s most celebrated practitioner, Marlon Brando. And like Brando he has a turn of phrasing that makes even the most generic sentences sound worthy of serious analysis.

Pauses pop up when you least expect them, entirely shifting the weight of the words around them. Inflections rise upward when normally they would curve down. A single clause can slalom from ennui to anger. These idiosyncrasies of delivery surprise you into close attention and, ultimately, into feeling you can trace the thoughts of the man speaking.

For Carmichael that train of thought feels singularly lonely, propelled by a logic only he can understand. Variously abstracted and abruptly, frighteningly focused, he is unquestionably a man obsessed. He’s like a small-time, loopier and more selfish variation on the revenge-starved vigilantes played by Charles Bronson and Clint Eastwood, an idea nicely underscored by Mr. Pask’s man-in-black costume for him, with its too-short pants.
But Mr. Eastwood and Mr. Bronson never let us into their characters’ heads the way Mr. Walken does here. “Step into my mind,” he seems to be saying, as he stammers or curls his lip or blinks catatonically. If Mr. McDonagh hasn’t provided the kind of exhilarating, nasty fun house we have come to expect of him, we are at least allowed to spend shivery time in that shabby, scary labyrinth that exists behind Carmichael’s glassy forehead.

A BEHANDING IN SPOKANE

By Martin McDonagh; directed by John Crowley; sets and costumes by Scott Pask; lighting by Brian MacDevitt; music and sound by David Van Tieghem; technical supervisor, Theatersmith Inc.; associate producers, Erich Jungwirth and Richard Jordan. Presented by Robert Fox, Carole Shorenstein Hays, Debra Black, Stephanie P. McClelland, Ostar, Roger Berlind, Scott Rudin and the Shubert Organization, in association with Robert G. Bartner, Lorraine Kirke and Jamie deRoy/Rachel Neuburger. At the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater, 236 West 45th Street, Manhattan; (212) 239-6200. Through June 6. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.