In September 1995,
Sarah Schulman and I started writing a weekly theater column
for New York Press, a free paper in Manhattan. We had written
a pilot version of this column for a LGNY and wanted a wider
circulation. The editors of New York Press liked the idea of
what they called a he-said-she-said column. We wrote the
column for half a year before they fired us because we
didn’t succeed in making theater any less boring than it
already was to them. We considered it a revolutionary
experiment in theater criticism. Unlike most reviewers who
convey the impression that there is only one possible opinion
-- theirs -- on the show at hand, we demonstrated each person
sitting in the theater is entitled to her or his own
perspective and judgment on what they’re watching. Here is
my side of the conversation; Sarah published most of hers as
part of her book Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS, and the
Marketing of Gay Culture. -- Don Shewey
“Shame Sex: Brave Insights
Vs. Stupid Lies”
*Floating Rhoda and the Glue
Man*
by Eve Ensler; directed by
Ariel Orr Jordan
HERE, 145 Sixth Ave.,
647-0202
I love sex, and unlike the
title character who makes the same declaration in the first
sentence of Paul Rudnick's hit play and movie *Jeffrey*, I
haven't given it up for fear of AIDS. But I have noticed
there's an undeclared epidemic that interferes with a happy
sex life nearly as much as the dreaded virus. It's called
shame, and it attacks just about every spot along the
gay-straight continuum, from Here to Zone DK.
Gay men, for instance, will
pay money to go to a sex club, thereby presumably declaring
their willingness to touch and be touched intimately by
strangers in public -- then they'll cram into the tiniest,
darkest corners as if to hide the desires that brought them
there in the first place. You'd think they'd been persecuted
by church and state for centuries, or something. The AIDS
Prevention Action League recently threw a "Save Our Sex
Party" at Zone DK that attempted to tackle both epidemics
at once by plastering the joint with provocative pro-sex
posters, handing condoms to everyone who entered (most people
pocketed them for home use), and staging safe sex demos
(surprisingly cuddly, maybe because staying hard enough to,
uh, achieve penetration onstage is a rarer talent than we
know).
The party aimed at embodying
the best parts of APAL's smart 16-point manifesto: "The
solidarity of gay men with each other is essential...We do not
deal with our grief and dread [about AIDS] only as
individuals; we need the public gay world as a resource of
survival and must fight to protect it...We must therefore
resist those who confuse public sex with unsafe sex and who,
in the name of prevention, are attacking our bars, bathhouses,
sex clubs and other public venues, where many men find
pleasure, safety and contact with other gay men." The
party was fun, yet despite the high concentration of HIV
educators and pleasure activists on hand to dispense
shame-busting smiles, eye contact, and friendly words, there
was a lot of the Same Old Shit: high-velocity alienated
cruising and frenzied passion in tight dark corners -- what I
call the Crock Pot Syndrome. APAL gets an A for effort, but
fighting sex shame is an uphill battle.
Playwright Eve Ensler
undertakes something similarly brave with *Floating Rhoda and
the Glue Man*, which plunges into the sticky mess of sex more
directly and honestly than you usually see in the theater.
Barn spies Rhoda at a showing of his erotic paintings, but
she's inexplicably devoted to a misguided men's movement
acolyte named Coyote so she sends her best girlfriend Terrace
on a date with him instead, which only serves to remind
Terrace how much she hates penises and sends her into the arms
of a horny lady doctor named Storm who's already had a zipless
fuck with Barn.
The first act left me in a
daze of mixed feelings. Much of the writing thrilled me. Like
Wally Shawn in his great plays *Our Late Night* and *Marie and
Bruce*, Ensler turns her characters inside out, so raw, vivid
language pours out of their civilized yuppie exteriors. She
nails the disgusting way therapy has poisoned the way we talk
about our inner lives. And she cleverly theatricalizes the
dissociations that happen during sex: Rhoda and Barn (Myriam
Cyr and Dylan McDermott) have stand-ins whom we watch thrash
around in bed while they coolly dissect their feelings. At the
same time, her malicious mockery of men infuriated me; the
idea of men expressing their feelings is presented as a
ludicrous joke, and all wife-battering is laid at the feet of
Robert Bly. Before the show, Sarah and I had just been arguing
(as is our wont) about some positive stuff I'd written about
the men's movement, and at intermission she turned to me and
said, "I'm on your side now. To attack something, you
have to present it accurately first." Mostly, though, I
was disturbed at how rapidly the play flickered back and forth
from insight to stupidity.
Then the second act got
completely derailed. We're led to believe Rhoda wants men to
connect with her, but it turns out sex revolts her. She sets
up situations that reinforce her sex shame, and then she
blames men for it. This really comes out in an idiotic S&M
scene that wilfully misrepresents leathersex as brutal and
coercive. I hate it when artists dabble in taboo or queer
sexuality to titillate audiences and then retreat to
stereotypical bourgeois condemnation of what they've just been
exploiting for their own profit. The play limps to an
implausibly sweet ending in which Barn, otherwise a cipher,
explains why he puts up with Rhoda's neurotic behavior: he
seeks damaged women so he can put them back together (hence
the title).
I'm being nitpicky about the
script's failings. They barely register while you're watching
the show, which looks like a million bucks and plays like a
speeding locomotive. The best thing director Ariel Orr Jordan
does is prevent the play from descending into some yuppie soap
opera. He keeps the stage picture constantly surprising and
charged. Mark Beard's orgiastic mural and two live musicians
frame an Alice-in-Wonderland dreamscape within which the
actors (especially Cyr, McDermott, and Tara B. Hauptman as
Terrace) nimbly track Ensler's ever-shifting emotional
currents without trying too hard to "explain" or
"unify" their characters.
*Floating Rhoda*'s not a
great play, and I detest the lies Ensler perpetrates about
men, but you know what? I prefer theater like this that shakes
me up and keeps me arguing for hours to one that sends me home
under the illusion that everything is hunky-dory.
September 27, 1995
“Identity Crises: Inner
Lives, Multiple Personalities” : Funnyhouse of a Negro
and The Emperor Jones
When I was growing up, my
father could enrage me with a single word. It wasn't
"faggot" -- he never hurled that word around or at
me. But I took "nigger" just as personally, maybe
because I identified with the targets of his redneck scorn. He
couldn't understand why the word was offensive. Where he came
from, it was common parlance. It only got him into trouble
once that I can recall. We were sitting around watching
"American Bandstand," and he said, "Look at
that white girl dancing with that nigger." My sister
said, "That's not a nigger." "Sure it is,"
he insisted, "nigger or Portuguese." My mother,
who's Portuguese, came steaming out of the kitchen: "Who
are you calling a nigger?"
This year the word is
inescapable, in high culture and low. The kids in *Kids.*
Quentin Tarantino going on about "Dead Nigger
Storage." I noticed the *Times*, in a magazine piece
about Elvis devotees, cleaned up Sam Phillips' famous line
"If I could find a white boy who could sing like a
nigger, I could make a million bucks," but still reported
every scurrilous comment from the Mark Fuhrman tapes. I can't
help it. When I hear the word "nigger," I tune
everything else out for a while until I get my equilibrium,
the way other people get mesmerized at babies or animals or
the first hint of sex. I flinch, I get scared, I duck for
cover. Who gets to use it? How much self-awareness makes it
acceptable?
The "niggers" flew,
without PC apologies or just-kidding italics, in the two shows
Sarah and I saw this week. In Adrienne Kennedy's 1964 *Funnyhouse
of a Negro*, which inaugurates an all-Kennedy season by the
Signature Theater Company at the Public, the title character
(alternately known as Negro and Sarah) is breaking down in her
walkup apartment. Attended by multiple personalities,
including Queen Victoria, Jesus, and Patrice Lumumba, she
obsesses to suicidal extremities about the
"disaster" of her kinky hair and the tragedy of her
skin color. Though her mother "looked like a white
woman," her despised father is dark, a "black
beast" of the jungle, "a nigger who eats his meals
on a white glass table." Kennedy takes us deep inside a
brain that bell hooks would call "colonized" by
"white supremacist capitalist patriarchy," but the
playwright makes no such sociopolitical noises. If anything,
she presents Negro-Sarah's madness as her psychic birthright
-- equal opportunity self-loathing.
*Funnyhouse* makes a
fascinating double bill with her 1976 *A Movie Star Has to
Star in Black and White*, in which a young black woman's diary
entries about her travels, family crises, and artistic
aspirations merge with her favorite scenes from Hollywood
movies. This time the colonizing works both ways. Clara
doesn't separate herself from Bette Davis in *Now, Voyager,*
Jean Peters in *Viva Zapata,* or Shelley Winters in *A Place
in the Sun.* Yet they speak her words, their glamor and
celluloid immortality providing a structure for her own
chaotic narcissism. As theater, these brief, delicate plays
teeter on the edge of preciousness. The language is poetic and
repetitive, the action dreamy and minimal, and the characters
bloodless. The actors move like dancers or figures in a
painting, subordinated to the plays' continuous inner
monologues; the white people in the first play and the men in
the second occupy the margins and almost never speak. Still,
they dramatize something that otherwise you don't get to see
-- the brainstorms and dream life of a black woman turned
inside out.
*The Emperor Jones* is a
textbook example of Eugene O'Neill's early expressionistic
drama and his love for thick dialect. In the Wooster Group's
production (at the Performing Garage through October 8),
rapid-fire speeches about "dese fool bush niggers"
and "dese ign'rent black niggers heah" blaze from
the mouth of the title character, a railway porter turned
island despot originally played by Paul Robeson and here
impersonated by Wooster vet Kate Valk. Yes, in drag. In
blackface. In Kabuki costume. Director Elizabeth LeCompte
continues to test, almost scientifically, how many extreme,
alienating theatrical effects you can load onto a play without
losing the audience's emotional identification. I believe it's
her commentary on television, the most manipulative medium on
earth which tricks us into perceiving it as unmediated
reality. The blackface-as-mask, Brechtian stage management,
ambient video, and sudden eruptions of Polynesian dancing are
LeCompte's way of digging a cool, distancing moat around the
bonfire at the center of the show, which is Valk's amazing
performance as the Postmodern Nigger of white America's
nightmares. Simultaneously playing a character of tragic
dimensions and exposing the vitality of historically racist
coon-show depictions of blacks, she's explosive as a volcano,
precise as surgery, disturbing as a hurricane.
October 4, 1995
“From a Jack to the
King”: Mathew in the
School of Life
"Television does not
vary," the *New Yorker*'s George W.S. Trow wrote in
*Within the Context of No Context*. "The trivial is
raised up to power in it. The powerful is lowered toward the
trivial. The power behind it resembles the power of no-action,
the powerful passive. It is *bewitching.* It interferes with
growth, conflict, and destruction, and these forces are
different in its presence. 'Entertainment' is an
unsatisfactory word for what it encloses or projects or makes
possible.
"No good," Trow
concludes, "has come of it."
John Moran's *Mathew in the
School of Life*, directed by Bob McGrath and performed by
Ridge Theater at the Kitchen through October 29, could be a
theatrical investigation of Trow's ideas about television's
impact, especially his idea of "the cold child," the
blank sadist with the short attention span who is formed by TV
and who is its ideal consumer. *Mathew* ostensibly shows us
three days in the training of a robot by that name, who is
attended by a nurse-nun-mother figure named Lucy (as in *I
Love*?) and a harsh paternalistic technician named Fred (Flintsone?).
We see several different actors playing these characters, but
it's not really clear if these are multiple versions of one
character or if, in the show's reality, all robots are named
Mathew, all nurses are Lucy, and all technicians Fred.
Mechanical reproduction is, in fact, the primary vocabulary of
the piece, which Moran calls an opera. Instead of a script,
the show is based on a sound score created by Moran which
mixes recorded dialogue with thousands of digital samples. The
actors mime and lip-synch every line, gesture, echo-y
footstep, and beer-can placement on the tape. Perhaps this is
meant to illustrate Jean Baudrillard's assertion that, in
today's media-saturated culture, "The real is not only
what can be reproduced but *that which is always already
reproduced.*"
I'm bending over backwards to
give some intellectual credence to *Mathew* because I would
like not to believe that I wasted an evening watching
something really obvious and half-baked, but I'm practically
getting a hernia from the exertion. In some ways the show
seems to reflect something I've been thinking about watching
my sisters and nieces raise their broods: nurtured from day
one on a steady of diet of sugar and adrenalin, endlessly
replayed Disney videos, relentlessly violent cartoons, the
nightmare of *Sesame Street*, kamikaze video games, and a boob
tube that seamlessly fuses sitcom laugh tracks, evening-news
tragedies, and Coke commercials, it's a miracle any kid makes
it to 20 without a psychotic shootout at the supermarket.
I don't think that's
ultimately what Moran and McGrath had in mind, though. The
composer's program notes goes on about how cool it is that he
used 100 different samples to create a 45-second sequence --
for him, the show is a kind of high-tech stunt. Meanwhile, the
director describes the title character as "an android
built to absorb human suffering" and slips into the slide
show a key line from the gospel according to St. Matthew (also
the source of the pop-gospel musical *Godspell*) -- so he
seems to think he's making some kind of sci-fi Bible story. I
think the audience is supposed to be dazzled by the barrage of
visual images (slides, films, clown masks, fancy lighting) and
energized at having to connect the dots themselves. I'm
usually pretty good at reading these high-tech po-mo
spectacles. I even like doing it. But this show bored me
silly, because aside from the inevitable and gorgeous tableau
of Lucys in the sky with diamonds, the rewards were slim.
Laurie Anderson can slap up a
giant photo of a wall socket with a wolf howl on the
Synclavier, and it's both funny and emotional. Philip Glass
churns out lots of scores, some for great shows and some for
shitty ones, but at least the music delivers a visceral kick.
*Mathew in the School of Life* reminded me more of Lypsinka's
pantomiming gal singers, which has always struck me as a
dubious achievement. It's an arty version of those shows that
minutely recreate episodes of *The Brady Bunch.* I know
there's an audience for stuff like that, but it leaves me
cold.
October 11, 1995
“Three Trips to the Diva
Bank”: Patti LuPone
on Broadway
Divas are not famous for
their good taste. Divas thrive on excess and extravagance. We
love them because they are too much: too loud, too tough, too
needy, too fat, too weird. They flaunt what we try to hide
about ourselves. Poor choice of material, fragile health, and
devoted cults of hyperemotional women and homosexual men come
with the territory. They wear gowns no mere mortal could get
away with.
Patti LuPone wants to be a
diva real bad. You can tell from her limited-run concert
appearance on Broadway. As soon as the lights go down, the
queens start screaming. She shows up first in silhouette, her
head in profile tilted up, her hair cut a la Simply Streisand
circa 1965. She drags out four black chorus boys and a long
canary boa to sing "Ain't Nobody Here but Us
Chickens," like Bette Midler's lounge-act alter ego
Vickie Eydie, and she dishes herself and others in dry patter
that smacks suspiciously of Midler's secret weapon, Bruce
Vilanch. And like Judy Garland she knows how to work her crowd
into a frenzy at the end of the evening, so much so that she
can't tear herself away. She has to have the fake closing
number, the surprise closing number, the real closing number,
the reprise, the post-curtain call "impromptu"
send-off. Stay all night and do what, honey?
LuPone gets halfway to the
Diva Bank but two things hold her back. One, she's not just a
personality but a real actress with Juilliard-instilled
expertise. Not only can she make mouthfuls of intricate lyrics
come out lucid and conversational, she can give her 4000th
rendition of "Don't Cry for Me, Ike and Tina" and
still wind up with wet cheeks -- that's technique. Two, she's
surrounded by queens with way too much taste to let her
indulge the more vulgar aspects of her diva-lust. A few
moments in the second act, during the parade of her famous
show-stoppers (from *Evita*, *Oliver*, *Les Miz*, etc.),
unleashed the flavor of LuPone's singing that makes me cringe,
a steely, clenched-fists bray that passes for peak emotion.
This is where she departs from Streisand. Barbra's at her best
when her voice soars; it opens your heart wide. LuPone's best
voice is a sweet, light soprano with Joan Baez's tendency to
hit just below a note and modulate up; her belting voice can
be like a dentist's drill -- you can't wait for it to stop.
Aside from those few moments,
though, *Patti LuPone on Broadway* is an astonishing exercise
in understatement. She practically murmurs a pair of Kurt
Weill tunes ("I'm a Stranger Here Myself" and
"It Never Was You"), pulling the audience down to
cabaret intimacy. With the help of director Scott Wittman,
musical director Dick Gallagher, and several arrangers
(including the great Marc Shaiman), she sprinkles pop gems
among the show tunes. James Taylor's "Looking for Love on
Broadway" turns into a showgirl's shy confession, and in
a medley of Bob Telson's "Calling You" and Brenda
Russell's "Get Here," LuPone locates the yearning
curve that links the two tunes. Best of all, when she sits on
the floor in her poofy black skirt to sing "Sleepy
Man" from *The Robber Bridegroom*, backed by a minimal
bass-guitar-piano trio, you can't believe how quiet a Broadway
musical can get. After all the overmiked, overproduced Cameron
MacIntosh spectacles of recent years, it's a thrill just to
hear a great singer sit still and sing beautifully.
Understatement is not the
usual hallmark of a diva, though, so LuPone faces a bit of a
dilemma. Her musical artistry centers on a simple and elegant
gift, but there's a trashy Taylor Dayne side of her that
creeps out in her show-stopper belting and makes her adoring
fans roar, and who can resist that? The tug-of-war between
these two personas was the subterranean drama I observed
watching *Patti LuPone on Broadway*, which otherwise is
essentially a revue, a classy version of the kind of TV
specials they don't make anymore. It lacks the
triumph-of-survival narrative that made Lena Horne's similar
Broadway foray so memorable, but she does milk her getting
axed from *Sunset Boulevard* for all its worth. By the time
she gets to the line "I've come home at last," the
claque goes crazy. She's not Judy Garland -- as Sarah points
out, she's not tragic enough -- but I predict slap-fights at
Marie's Crisis over who does a better Norma Desmond, Betty or
Patti.
October 18, 1995
“Tennessee Schmaltz Hides
the Truth”: Suddenly
Last Summer
Elizabeth Ashley in a
Tennessee Williams play will pique my curiosity anytime. Her
performance as Maggie in Michael Kahn's Broadway 1974 revival
of *Cat on a Hot Tin Roof* branded my impressionable young
theatergoer brain with an erotic presence that still sizzles
in memory. She gave the kind of wild, generous, unpredictable,
sexually radiant, *dangerous* performance that you hardly ever
see. Some actors and lots of rock stars try for that charisma
and either burn themselves out or pull back and look way too
calculated. Imagine Courtney Love's voluptuous feistiness
mixed with John Malkovich's demented intensity, and you might
get close to picturing how Ashley inhabited the role of
Maggie, one of Williams' many portraits of women pent-up in
social circumstances too puny for their restless imaginations.
In 1987 at the WPA Theatre
Off-Broadway, Ashley tackled Williams again, this time playing
the role Tallulah Bankhead originated in *The Milk Train
Doesn't Stop Here Anymore*, an eccentric matron dying on a
mountaintop in Italy who's dictating her memoirs to a
secretary and obsessed with achieving salvation by sleeping
with a young poet who stumbles onto her doorstep. It's one of
those Williams plays that confuses people with its
vacillations in tone between campy archness, low comedy, and
poetic headiness just on the verge of going overripe. Director
Kevin Conway wisely steered Ashley to a performance that
revealed, underneath a lot of fruity plumage, a stripped-down
soul with a yearning for God as naked as a prisoner's for
bread.
Now Ashley's on Broadway
again in *Suddenly Last Summer*, a surprisingly popular
Williams play these days. It was on TV not long ago with
Maggie Smith as the enraged mother of the deceased poet
Sebastian Venable and Rob Lowe (!) as Doctor Sugar, whom she
hires to lobotomize her niece Catharine (played by Natasha
Richardson) so she'll stop telling those awful stories about
watching Sebastian get eaten alive by street urchins in a
Spanish seaside town. JoAnne Akalaitis staged a bizarre
production last year in Hartford that skipped the surface
melodrama and carved deep into the mythological heart of The
Monster Mother and The Queer Poet. The setting, Sebastian's
garden, was an insanely artificial green-and-gold miniature
golf course designed by Salvador Dali with Violet Venable
(played by former Broadway comedienne Anita Gillette) in her
blazing vermilion gown and orange-frosted hair looking like
human lava.
Watching *Suddenly Last
Summer* at Circle in the Square, I couldn't stop thinking
about Akalaitis' version, which had not only startling images
but a concrete idea -- that the force of repression is a
built-in human instinct no less powerful than the liberation
of truth-telling. My mind was in Hartford because Harold
Scott's slow, deadly production had no images and no ideas to
speak of. It simply plunked the play down on Circle's awkward
theater-in-the-round and marched it through a plodding,
naturalistic reading that exposed all its flaws and none of
its febrile poetry. I cringed for the cast, good actors all,
uniformly ill-directed. For some reason Ashley looked like a
hunchback slathered with Man Tan, and she spoke in such an
ornate and leisurely Louisiana accent that it practically
doubled the show's running time. Jordan Baker bravely tried to
play the almost sexual excitement of Catherine's insistence on
saying what nobody wants to hear, but in such a leaden
production she just came off looking fussy and hysterical.
I was surprised at how much I
enjoyed the curtain-raiser, *Something Unspoken*, which had
also accompanied *Suddenly Last Summer* when it first appeared
on Broadway in 1958. It turned out to be a little lesbian
domestic drama that had never shown up on my queer-theater
radar before. Myra Carter, an aged British actress whose
brilliance New York discovered when she opened in Edward
Albee's *Three Tall Women* a couple of years ago, plays Miss
Cornelia Scott, a genteel Southern bulldyke trying to
remote-control a meeting of the Confederate Daughters into
electing her as their president. When she's not on the phone
with her stool pigeon, Miss Esmeralda Hawkins, Cornelia is
desperately trying to tone down her characteristic crustiness
in an effort to solidify what she's belatedly realizing is the
foundation of her life, her love for her
"secretary"/companion Grace (played by Pamela
Payton-Wright), whom she has taken for granted for 15 years.
The bathetic setup is deftly undercut by the performances,
which steer clear of tired butch-femme cliches, and Theodore
Mann's efficient direction. Mann smartly coaxes out the humor
of Williams' wickedly precise observation of Southern society
ladies. Denied the presidency, Cornelia announces that she
couldn't have served anyway because of her pressing duties to
the Colonial Dames, the Huguenot Society, and the Daughters of
the Barons of Runymede.
October 25, 1995
See other NYP columns: 1-5, 6-10,
11-15, 16-20, 21-27
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