“Craig Lucas’s
Fractal Symmetries”: Blue
Window
In her book about Sylvia
Plath, *The Silent Woman*, Janet Malcolm -- a writer at the
peak of her powers -- confronts her frustration with the
limitations of narrative storytelling, its inability to
contain the universe, the elusiveness of The Truth. "At
the end of [Jorge Luis] Borges's story 'The Aleph,' the
narrator goes to the cellar of a house, where he has the
experience of encountering everything in the world. He all at
once sees all places from all angles: 'I saw tigers, pistons,
bison, tides, and armies; I saw all the ants on the
planet....I saw the circulation of my own dark blood.'
Writer's block derives from the mad ambition to enter that
cellar; the fluent writer is content to stay in the close
attic of partial expression, to say what is 'running through
his mind,' and to accept that it may not -- cannot -- be
wholly true, to risk that it will be misunderstood."
One of the most impressive
things about playwright Craig Lucas is that he's definitely a
fluent writer with a lot "running through his mind,"
and yet he manages in his plays to suggest, at least, a
headcount of all the ants on the planet. *Blue Window*, his
1984 play currently being revived at Manhattan Theatre Club,
ostensibly portrays seven yuppie-ish Manhattanites before,
during, and after a casual Sunday-night dinner party. The
characters aren't a random assortment -- they're all white and
around the same age -- but they're not a fixed posse, either.
Everybody knows the hostess, Libby, better than they know each
other, but they don't necessarily know her very well either.
Tom is a high-school chum who brings his girlfriend Emily.
Alice and Boo live upstairs. Norbert is her sky-diving
instructor. Griever's in her therapy group. A pretty tiny
slice of life, right?
But if the surface of the
play seems mundane -- New York partygoers eating and drinking,
talking smart and silly, being awkward and disagreeable -- the
structure is dizzyingly complex. The same chic apartment set
serves as home for all seven characters, so in the pre- and
post-party scenes we witness multiple overlapping
conversations, fragments of one echoing off another. Lucas
writes plays as a form of chaos theory. He's the Benoit
Mandelbrot of American drama, adapting to the stage
Mandelbrot's practice of fractal geometry. *Blue Window* is at
once a microcosm -- the grain of sand in which Blake invited
us to see the world -- and a world unto itself. Each piece,
each character, accomplishes in miniature what the whole play
tries to do.
Here's an example. The first
lines we hear are Tom, who's sketching out a new song on his
guitar and describing it to Emily: "I like the fact that
it doesn't go anywhere...Like I did this (*chord*) and I did
that (*chord*) and then this happened (*chord*) and this
happened (*chord*) and so what?" He's talking about his
song, but Lucas is also letting us know what he's up to. By
the end of the play Tom has finished composing the music but
is still sketching out the lyrics to the song. In the interim,
though, at the party Emily has been very quiet, listening and
deflecting attention; she's a secretary at "just a
company" and feels intimidated by the brainy, insecure
party-chat about Eugene O'Neill, Cecil Taylor, and the corpus
callosum. Someone passes a joint. Emily takes a hit, suddenly
the light changes, and the rest of the party fades away while
she gets up and sings a song. It's Tom's song, but she's
telling the story of her life, her mother's bad marriage, her
own unsatisfactory affairs with men. It resembles one of what
Frank O'Hara called his "I-do-this-I-do-that poems,"
from a woman's point of view: honest, matter-of-fact,
downbeat. She finishes the song, sits down, and we don't hear
a peep out of her for the rest of the party.
That moment in *Blue Window*
always blows me away. I saw the original production and the
*American Playhouse* TV version, both directed by Norman Rene,
and I still can't believe a playwright would have the audacity
to stop a play dead in its tracks, a play that's not a
musical, and have a character sing a song that tells the
audience things the other characters never find out. But it's
brilliant. It shows us something theatrically, makes us feel
something, that can't be told narratively. How many times how
you encountered that kind of still-waters creature at a social
gathering and wondered what's going on inside that noggin? Or
clammed up yourself, in a marijuana haze or not? And then at
the end of the play you realize the song stands for -- but
doesn't explain, because it's inexplicable -- some man/woman
thing, something Tom's trying to figure out that Emily already
knows.
On top of that, it's not even
Lucas's song. It's an obscure number by art-song composer
William Bolcom called "The Same Thing" that his
partner Joan Morris sang on one of their live albums. In the
play Lucas offers both a critique of the song -- taking it
apart to see how it works -- and an homage to it. The
narrative compression and emotional tone that Bolcom achieves
in a two-minute song, Lucas attempts to sustain for a
90-minute play.
All this would be just so
much clever technique if it weren't also terribly moving.
Without saying it in so many words, *Blue Window* conveys the
same idea put forth by Jungian psychology and Emersonian
philosophy, chaos theorists and environmental activists: Life
seems random but everything is connected, even if we don't
know how. As Whitman put it, "A vast similitude
interlocks all." Simultaneity and interconnectedness are
the themes Lucas returns to again and again in his small but
exquisite body of work. In *Missing Persons* a woman
obsessively relives her casual last glimpse of her runaway
husband. In *Reckless* a woman on the lam keeps landing in
towns named Springfield. Three women live their entire
lifespans over lunch in *Three Postcards*. The souls of a
young woman and an old man swap bodies in *Prelude to a Kiss.*
Watching these psychic overlaps reappear in Lucas's work is a
pleasure in itself, like tracking Harvey Keitel through a
string of Scorsese movies.
I enjoy plays as puzzles, the
kind you have to piece together retroactively after you leave
the theater. Not everybody does. All three daily newspapers
trashed *Blue Window*. What fools these mortals be. All I can
imagine is that they weren't able to see the brilliance of the
play through the haze of a just-okay production. I had high
hopes for Joe Mantello's staging at Manhattan Theatre Club
after the exhilarating opening sequence. To the beat of a
jazz-funk instrumental counted off in Italian, the seven
characters wordlessly whirled through their Sunday afternoon
routine, activating the stage space and establishing
independent characters in short order. As soon as they started
talking, my enthusiasm leveled off. This may sound like an odd
thing to say, but the actors' voices bothered me, two of them
especially. David Warshofsky as Tom started off with a booming
voice that sounded blustery and forced, at odds with his
laconic musician talk. And Ellen McLaughlin as Alice, a very
talkative lesbian writer, got on my last nerve. McLaughlin
played the angel who crashed through the ceiling, as well as a
weary dyke nurse, in Tony Kushner's epic *Angels in America*.
When I first saw it in San Francisco, McLaughlin gave a fine,
touching performance, but by the time the play got to Broadway
she'd acquired a harsh, brittle edge. She'd turned into Nurse
Ratched. The same shrill, keyed-up delivery crept into *Blue
Window* so I found myself cringing when it came time for her
to speak. Manhattan Theatre Club is a pretty intimate space,
and you wouldn't think the actors would have to shout to be
heard. On the other hand, the subscriber audience is full of
alte kockers, so maybe they do.
The original production of
*Blue Window* was developed in collaboration with director
Norman Rene and a company of wonderful actors, who are
indelibly stamped on my memory, especially Brad O'Hare as
Griever, Matt Craven as Norbert, Maureen Silliman as silent
Emily, and the great Randy Danson as Libby (I saw her in the
MTC audience at the matinee I attended). Facing such stiff
competition, the MTC actors that come off best are the trio
who ultimately form the heart of the play, if such an
aggressively decentralized play can be said to have a heart.
J. Smith-Cameron plays Libby, the neurotic hostess for whom,
we learn later, the party was a painful but effective healing
ritual. David Aaron Baker inhabits Norbert, who says almost
nothing but turns out to be the perfect container for Libby's
pain. John Benjamin Hickey (who went unacknowledged for his
excellent performance, under Mantello's direction, in Terrence
McNally's *Love! Valour! Compassion!*) plays Griever, the fag
who's kidding himself into thinking he and Libby could be an
item. Hickey is sexy dancing in his underpants, hilarious
imitating Diana Ross while blowdrying his hair in the bathroom
mirror, and agonizing to watch as his fantasies about Libby
shatter in a post-party phone call. Rather than playing the
hell out of their roles, these actors almost back away from
them. They get out of the way and let the delicacy and
strength of the play radiate through them.
February 21, 1996
“High Rent, Low Rent”:
Rent
The first act of *Rent*,
Jonathan Larson's rock musical version of *La Boheme*, takes
place at an East Village squat on Christmas Eve. The second
act opens on New Year's Eve and ends the following Christmas
Eve. *Rent* will forever be known as the musical whose
35-year-old author died of a heart attack on the eve of its
first public performance -- on the eve, clearly, of his
breakthrough as a shining star in mainstream musical theater,
which needs all the new talent it can get. Near the end of the
show, in the pileup of characters and accelerating plot twists
and romantic reunions and melodic reprises, the young
filmmaker who more or less narrates the story flips on a
projector showing footage he shot in the opening scene. As it
flickered against the back wall of the stage, visually saying
to the audience "Remember how all this began?", I
had the eerie sense of the author's presence, conjured like a
genie from a bottle. This hovering wraith only added to the
show's sickening sense of interrupted trajectory, broken
hourglass, down in flames. It's a feeling all too familiar to
New Yorkers, especially in the theater, especially in the East
Village, haunted by the Huck Snyders and the Ron Vawters and
the Harry Kondoleons, gone too soon.
The perpetual
eve-of-destruction, though only occasionally glimpsed in
*Rent*, provides an authentic foundation for what is otherwise
an unabashedly romantic update on the scenes from bohemian
life that inspired Puccini's opera. Musician Roger, fresh out
of rehab (his girlfriend April left him a suicide note saying
"We've got AIDS"), shares the attic of an abandoned
building at 11th and B with filmmaker Mark upstairs from Mimi,
a 19-year-old junkie who "dances" at the Cat Scratch
Club when she's not handcuffed to the bar. Their pal Collins,
black anarchist professor of computer-age philosophy, gets
rescued after a mugging by Angel, a drag queen and drumming
master. Roger and Mark's former roommate, Benny, has been
buying up East Village real estate, including the squat and a
nearby performance space. A protest concert is staged by
Maureen, Mark's ex-girlfriend who left him for a black lesbian
lawyer.
Not well-versed in the
standard repertoire, I only figured out afterwards how closely
Larson followed Puccini's scenario. Watching the show, I kept
getting irritated at the way Larson persisted in using scenes
from real life to tug my emotions and then betraying them with
leaps of ill logic. If Collins is an MIT professor, how come
he's homeless? If Benny brings his Wall Street investor to
Life Cafe, how come the guy is shocked when Maureen moons him?
In real life the guy wouldn't be satisfied unless someone shot
up in front of him. Mark's agent keeps bugging him to come in
and sign those contracts with ABC -- do you know how hard it
is to get an agent? But this is why I'm not very good at
musicals -- I'm way too literal-minded. You can't ask those
questions. This isn't a documentary. Larson hasn't created
gritty, rounded characters, he's manipulated types, in the
grand tradition of French farce, Broadway musical comedies,
and TV sitcoms. And he's done it well, if you like that sort
of thing.
Much more to my taste is
Larson's score, positively abundant with melody. A lot of what
tries to pass for rock music in the theater is pretty
embarrassing. The best music in *Rent*, especially the songs
that spell out the relationship between Roger and Mimi, draws
on the emotional pull of classic rock ballads -- some cross
between hormones and us-versus-them, "Thunder Road"
and Ashford and Simpson crooning "Is It Still Good to
You?" What really makes the music work are the
arrangements by Steve Skinner and Kenny Brescia, which center
on lyrical rock guitar rather than the staccato keyboards that
usually signify "rock & roll" in the theater.
And the vocal arrangements, especially when the entire
15-member ensemble lines up across the front of the stage and
lets go, are overpowering.
Director Michael Greif has
assembled a cast of new faces whose passion and energy become
*Rent*'s secret weapon. Individually but especially together,
Adam Pascal's Roger and Daphne Rubin-Vega's Mimi tear down the
house. Jesse Martin as Collins is a terrific singer, simple
and unjive. I couldn't help feeling that Anthony Rapp was a
little white-bread as the Jewish filmmaker-narrator, and Idina
Menzel's Tori Amos posing was one more version of
let's-make-fun-of-pretentious-performance-artists. For me the
runaway star of the show is Wilson Jermaine Heredia as Angel,
who alone transcends the schematic outline of his character
and, underneath a ton of makeup and fun drag, exudes both
natural warmth and a sense of secrets-held-back. At the
curtain call I felt the vicarious excitement you get from
seeing young companies in shows like *Hair*, *A Chorus Line*,
and the movie *Fame*. But did the show really move me? Look,
my eyes are dry.
February 28, 1996
“The Unbeloved Country”: A
Fair Country
Judith Ivey has been a
reputable New York stage actor for more than 15 years. She
made a big splash in the mid-'80s and won Tony Awards playing
hilarious, potty-mouthed strumpets in *Steaming* and David
Rabe's *Hurlyburly* on Broadway. She did some movies and spent
time in TV-land building up a nest egg without ever quite
hitting syndication paydirt. Now, with her devastating and
mercurial performance in Jon Robin Baitz's *A Fair Country* at
Lincoln Center's Mitzi Newhouse Theater, she has served notice
that she's hit a new level of acting mastery. It's thrilling
to watch her move into position as the next generation's
successor to legendary performers like Gena Rowlands, Shirley
Knight, and Geraldine Page -- artists whose extraordinary
power derives from the chemistry between a disciplined
intelligence, messy emotion, and radiant theatricality.
In *A Fair Country*, Ivey
plays Patrice Burgess, who gave up a promising career as a
museum curator to marry Harry (Laurence Luckinbill), who works
as a sort of cultural diplomat in one of those international
arts agencies that are little more than a CIA front. It's
1978, and she's stuck in Durban, South Africa, hating her
life. Hating the heat, hating having to squelch her
intellectual ambitions to play hostess for an endless stream
of polite receptions, but mostly hating the moral agony of
enacting this grotesque charade while pretending not to be
propping up an unjust and repressive society seething with
racial tension. She's not on any kind of preachy high horse.
She's simply having a nervous breakdown in public.
Patrice likes to see herself
as victimized by her devotion to serving her husband and her
two sons. Meanwhile, she's got her high-strung gay son Gil
(Matt McGrath) hopelessly hot-wired to her emotional needs.
She's frosty as hell to her pugnacious college-age son Alec
(Dan Futterman) who's visiting from Columbia Journalism
School, and she's got her husband tiptoeing around in fear of
sparking her next ragefest. She's stunningly insensitive
without ever being stupid. Just because she can't help her bad
behavior doesn't mean she's not aware of it. As she tells a
visitor, "I lost a lot of credibility when I beat the
shit out of our African maid." She attempts to
rationalize that particular altercation, which ended with the
girl being dragged away by the police, as a simple
disagreement between tempestuous human beings, rather than a
black-white thing. But her protests only underscore the
feebleness of well-meaning white Americans' efforts to impose
the happy-face of tolerance on a society build on race hatred.
Surveying this household on
the verge of a meltdown, Harry knows he has to do something.
It seems that the quickest way to transfer out of his job
schlepping Burl Ives around Somalia is to agree to his
Washington superior's pressure to perform some "very low
level of non-covert activity." Namely: taking notes on
Alec's friends, underground organizers for the African
National Congress. Next thing we know, the Burgesses are
celebrating New Year's Eve in Holland, and the radio
broadcasts Harry's smarmy "Voice of America"
commentaries. Shades of Lawrence Welk. Is everybody happy?
You can guess what happens.
The play's conclusion is a litle predictable and
philosophically lightweight. But I don't hold that against the
playwright. Most political plays go heavy on the
good-guy/bad-guy drama. The oppressors are bad! Those who
struggle against them are good! In *A Fair Country*, as he did
with *The Film Society* and *Three Hotels*, Baitz brings us
inside the lives of people caught between intentions and
consequences with no easy moral markers. Baitz spent his
adolescence in South Africa living the kind of life portrayed
in *A Fair Country* (including, apparently, blowing the
neighbor's son in the bike room), and I'm grateful to his
plays for providing a window on that peculiar, privileged
existence. They're both tough and compassionate.
As a theatrical experience, I
found *A Fair Country* to be almost continuously surprising.
The characters' emotional volatility and their fast-paced
sophisticated conversation kept me off-guard and listening
hard. I loved Baitz's use of minor characters -- Alec's blonde
girlfriend who spouts all the usual platitudes about the
"natural beauty" of South Africa, and the black
servant who sees Patrice's blowup with the maid only as a
potential job opportunity for his cousin Ginger. Teagle
Bougere plays this role deliciously, moving among the
fractured Burgess family crooning "Gin-gah! Gin-gah!"
as if to hypnotize the family into hiring her. The whole cast
is excellent. Under Dan Sullivan's direction, they don't spend
any effort trying to make the audience like them, and I like
that.
The show, like the family it
depicts, revolves around the mother, a role that offers many
temptations to play a strident, cliche monster-mother. Judith
Ivey's flesh-and-blood performance is a gift to Jon Robin
Baitz, and likewise his play is a gift to her.
March 6, 1996
“Up in a Hole”: Floyd
Collins and The
Green Bird
Tina Landau and Adam
Guettel's musical *Floyd Collins* at Playwrights Horizons is
based on the true story of a Kentucky farmhand whose hobby was
exploring caves until the fateful day in 1925 when he got
trapped in a narrow underground passage. A local reporter's
on-the-scene story got picked up by newspaper syndicates so
for a couple of weeks strangers all over the country followed
every minute detail of the rescue operation, which failed to
pull Floyd Collins out alive. When the show was over, I felt
certain that writer-director Landau and lyricist-composer
Guettel meant for this story to stand for something, to have
some larger significance, and I worried that I was too dense
to figure out what it was. I could swear I'd just seen a
two-hour musical about a guy who got stuck in a hole.
There were several things I
really admired about the show. It was very oddly shaped, for
one thing. After an expository opening "Ballad of Floyd
Collins," the next 20 minutes consisted of a single
sustained musical solo for Floyd (played by the appealing,
open-faced Christopher Innvar) as he explores underground,
finds a gigantic cavern, and fantasizes about how rich and
famous he's going to be when he turns the place into a big
tourist attraction. It's a kind of bravura setpiece for actor
and composer, like Billy Bigelow's "Soliloquy" from
*Carousel* (written by Guettel's grandfather, Richard Rodgers)
except at the top of the show instead of closing the first
act. I liked it that Guettel had the guts to do that. He also
uses the cave setting to build musical passages around echo
effects, which I've never seen before.
While some of the score
hovers in the vicinity of generic hoedown, much of it shoots
for an ambitious hybrid of opera (Virgil Thomson), Broadway
(Roger Miller's *Big River*), and folk ballad (a la Kurt
Weill's tiny folk musical, *Down in the Valley*). The music is
beautifully arranged and sung. One singer in particular stood
out for me. As an actor, Theresa McCarthy, who plays Floyd's
sister Nellie, recently released from an insane asylum, is
shrewd: she plays Nellie as smart, not simple, too smart for
her surroundings, but she signals her off-ness by never quite
making eye contact with anyone else. As a singer, though,
McCarthy is awesome. Whenever she sang, I couldn't believe I
was hearing such liquidly perfect singing. I felt like I was
on drugs. Martin Moran also distinguished himself as the cub
reporter, Skeets Miller, whose big scoop engenders not
careerist conniving but a surprising love and concern for the
doomed Floyd.
What to make of the show as a
whole? When I think Landau and Guettel are trying to "say
something" about media circuses and how they exploit
human tragedies for profit, it seems melodramatic, obvious and
tired. When I think the creators are intent on stretching
musical theater form, I respect the effort but I don't really
care. The more I think they're just trying to tell this
particular story with all its peculiar shape and
inconclusiveness, the more I admire it the way I admire Paul
Schrader's film *Patty Hearst*, as a subversive narrative. No
happy ending, no thus-we-see conclusion. Things happen, we
search for meaning, and sometimes we have to stretch our minds
to deal with lack of meaning. That's a lot more lifelike than
most conventional stories.
A couple of blocks farther
east on 42nd Street, the extraordinary director and designer
Julie Taymor has mounted another one of her spectacular
productions, an adaptation of Carlo Gozzi's commedia dell'arte
piece *The Green Bird*. It's the first splashy opening at the
New Victory Theater, whose gorgeous renovation is also the
first successful step toward making the Deuce safe for Disney.
Any doubts I had that the Times Square cleanup is part of a
plan for strict social control flew away when an usher
insisted that I spit out my chewing gum. How insulting.
*The Green Bird* is an
elaborately plotted fairy tale about royal-born twins raised
by a poor couple. The twins magically regain their riches, yet
they're not satisfied until they can own certain otherworldly
treasures: singing apples, dancing water, the mysterious green
bird. The show is ravishing to look at. Steeped in the masks
and puppetry and magic-making of Balinese theater, Taymor
creates a stunning picture, sweeps the stage clean, and
creates another and another, all night long. I don't think
I'll ever forget the Singing Apples: three women suspended in
midair, their bodies sheathed in long green tunics, with shiny
red plastic apples for heads. Taymor doesn't simply manipulate
her actors like figurines, either. They are kinetic bundles of
joy, especially -- in this production -- Derek Smith as the
insecure king, Kristine Nielsen as his long-lost wife, Andrew
Weems as his comic servant, and Erico Villanueva who, as
Dancing Water, performs an acrobatic one-man *Swan Lake* in
act two.
The formal beauty of Taymor's
designs and the conventions of commedia-style acting sometimes
work against dramatic immediacy. *The Green Bird* is
essentially a sly adult fable about greed, and one extremely
applicable to 1996 America, where the richest one percent of
the population has more money than the bottom 94% put
together. The production didn't really drive this point, or
any point, home. Sitting in the cozy new playhouse with an
opening night audience full of happy, well-meaning
benefactors, I couldn't decide if pulling its punches was the
production's way of being cowardly or clever.
March 13, 1996
“The Mark of Greatness”: Hot
Keys
What becomes a legend last?
An Off-Off-Broadway star, that's what. To the downtown people
who know who he is, Jeff Weiss *is* a wizard, a true star, a
legendary writer and performer who's been doing it for 30
years and has amassed a devoted cult of audiences who can't
wait to see his work and actors who are thrilled to be in it.
Meanwhile, there are queens who can whistle the overture for
every musical that ever opened and closed on Broadway who
wouldn't know Jeff Weiss from Mahmut Celalettin.
And you know what? It's one
of the things that makes living in New York exciting. You can
show up at midnight on a chilly street corner in the East
Village, and there's a line down the block of people waiting
to get in. People from other shows, people from the
neighborhood, people you've seen for years, people you've
never seen, and nobody is clutching the *New York Times*
review or some critic's choice saying run-don't-walk. You've
heard Jeff Weiss is doing his show again, and you've got to be
there.
The first time he did the
show in August of 1966 at La Mama, he called it *That's How
The Rent Gets Paid.* The following year he did it at Caffe
Cino under the name *A Funny Walk Home*. He won his first Obie
Award in 1969 for *The International Wrestling Match*, again
at La Mama. But these were all variations on the same show --
"The Confessions of Conrad Gerhardt," a performer
who likes to pick guys up pretending to be a Finnish gymnast
named Bjorn and who gets suspected of being a serial killer.
Weiss eventually started calling the show *And That's How the
Rent Gets Paid Part 2* or *Part 3* or *Part 4*. The first time
I saw it, at the Performing Garage in 1980, he played all the
parts himself. The next time I saw it, at the Garage in the
late '80s, he had a full cast of downtown stars mixed with
unusual non-actors. All these shows were done in collaboration
with his life partner, Carlos Ricardo Martinez. When they
didn't have bookings at other theaters, they would put on
shows at their storefront on E. 10th Street for anyone who
showed up.
Around 1990 the show evolved
into *Hot Keys*, a long-running comic serial with multiple
continuing storylines, episodes that change every week, and a
fixed set of musical numbers composed by Carlos. The
unabashedly queer sitcom sketches Weiss writes are perverse,
filthy, and played for laughs, like the "I Love
Mallory" sequence in Oliver Stone's unnerving *Natural
Born Killers*. Eros rules in this universe. Every human action
turns out to be driven by some sexual fetish, some humiliating
desire, some outrageous passion. And yet the tone of the show
stays unswervingly sweet, like an East Village version of
Garrison Keillor's *Prairie Home Companion*, complete with
tall tales and special guests.
No matter how over-the-top
the stories get, they remain deeply human. Partly it's his
game-for-anything casts. Brilliant Off-Broadway actors Mary
Shultz and Jonathan Walker go way out on a limb for Weiss,
playing a runaway suburban wife and a detective who likes to
have his pink panties ripped off by men of color. And when
Scott Hudson plays Quince, the tutor for a Southern family who
falls into frenzied foot-worship around the albino servant
Willy (Sturgis Warner), Hudson's ability to maintain dignity
with a giant naked foot in his mouth takes the audience far
beyond easy laughs to the depths of sweaty obsession.
Weiss asks just as much of
himself. In one skit, he plays Mocky Seibert, who runs a
mail-order business in soiled underthings. The heart of the
sketch is a gross-out exchange among him and his boys about
what's the easiest shit to bag (answer: rare steak and baked
potato). The real point of the scene, though, is when the
aging queer/father-figure has to deal with the moment when his
straight boys won't kiss him goodbye anymore. In another scene
Lester Battersall -- most often found staging
drug-sex-and-drag orgies in his Jersey basement with wrestlers
from his son's junior-high school -- goes shopping in Soho.
Ken Leung is riotous as the ever-accommodating store clerk
who's willing to fill Lester's special order: canary yellow
longjohns with appliqued semen dribbles and shit stains. Or as
Lester puts it: "underpants that say, 'I'm here, I'm
queer, and nothing works.'" The pathos of aging has
rarely been rendered with such a disturbing mixture of
poignance and hilarity.
I could go on for a long time
telling Jeff Weiss stories. His free-flowing inventiveness
explains why *Hot Keys* can go on for three or four hours. It
always ends, though, with the "love theme," a
gorgeous ballad that sounds like a happy ending until you pay
attention to the words: "Please, let love pass me by/Love
is not nature's golden rule/Fall in love and play the
fool." So true!
March 20, 1996
“Bland Injustice”: Sleep
Deprivation Chamber and Getting
Away with Murder
I knew in advance that *Sleep
Deprivation Chamber*, the play Adrienne Kennedy wrote with her
son Adam, was based on a true story -- an ugly incident in
which Adam was stopped by a Virginia policeman for a broken
taillight, brutally beaten, and then charged with assaulting
the officer. How could such a thing happen to a nice Irish
family? (*Not*.) I almost didn't want to see the play at all,
since I figured I knew "what happened." In the
event, I was on the edge of my seat most of the time, and I
left feeling upset and shaken. *Sleep Deprivation Chamber* is
the kind of brave, terrible social document that changes your
body chemistry like a blood transfusion. Your cells are
different afterwards.
In the play, the mother is
called Suzanne and the son is called Teddy. She is teaching in
Ohio when he, a student at Antioch, is stopped, beaten, and
arrested in the driveway of the family's suburban home. The
first half of the play focuses on her frustration and panic at
not being there. She composes letters to Gov. Wilder and any
other politician she can think of, begging them to intercede,
sending them pictures of Teddy as a child in Ghana, telling
them about her family's history of working for justice. Asked
to write two letters, she writes 17. She can't help herself.
But it doesn't help her son's case. Trazana Beverley
beautifully portrays Suzanne as an intelligent college
professor who lectures on Aristotle and *Hamlet* and who also
goes uncontrollably hysterical when her child is threatened.
The second half centers on
Teddy's trial. Suzanne stays in her hotel room, banished lest
her hyper emotions get on people's nerves. Although the trial
seems to proceed straightforwardly, Kennedy masterfully toys
with interruptions and reveries that keep the heat of tension
going and widen the picture of what's at stake. You keep
waiting for someone to say, "Wake up, America! Racist
white cops are always stopping black motorists and beating up
young black men and pretending they're not!" But things
like that are never said in courtrooms, they're only said in
corny courtroom dramas that want to skip over the grueling
minutiae and go straight for the flashy conclusions. Jonathan
Fried is fantastic as Officer Holzer: he does that big, blond,
open-faced thing that miscreant cops and fag-bashers like to
pull on the stand. "I was frightened for my life. He
tried to look at me. He touched my sleeve. I had to batter him
beyond recognition."
The play is a deceptively
simple poetic documentary. It spells out in minute detail what
happened to the Kennedy family while the ordeal was going on,
without the tranquillity of hindsight. Adrienne Kennedy
structures her plays like diaries. Thoughts and dreams and
emotions perpetually spin in midair, and the qualities she
captures best are unsettling ones: confusion, panic, fear, and
hysteria. This makes for an oddly shaped piece of theater, one
that seems "wrong" by conventional theater
"rules." Yet the script, and Michael Kahn's
microscopically attentive direction, artfully reflects the
psychic jumble of lived experience. It made me realize how
much of the time we walk around naively expecting our lives to
have the tidiness of Sunday-school stories where people are
nice to each other and things work out fine.
Teddy gets acquitted, but
it's not a happy ending. At the end of *Sleep Deprivation
Chamber*, the whole driveway incident -- which we've seen in
snatches -- is acted out from beginning to end (Rodney King
live?). You get it that this is what the family is left with,
not a sense of triumph but a nightmare they just can't shake.
*
Murder mysteries occupy their
own universe, and my spaceship doesn't go there. Because
detectives supposedly rely on their deductive powers,
crime-solving stories are supposed to be extremely logical.
But they never are. They always stray into a contorted kind of
cleverness that depends on the suspension of disbelief, and I
just end up irritated.
Check out the setup of
*Getting Away with Murder*, the new "comedy
thriller" by Stephen Sondheim and George Furth that
opened and closed on Broadway last week. A retired Manhattan
shrink has reduced his practice to seven clients, whom he sees
*for free* because they're guinea pigs for his new book. They
have individual sessions with him *on Saturday*, at his office
in an otherwise *abandoned building on West End Avenue*, and
then return for *group therapy Saturday night*. The whole
group shows up, but the shrink is missing. After walking in
and out of his office for half an hour, they finally discover
him on the couch, beaten to death. Their first thought is: the
tabloids will have a field day with this. All seven turn out
to be *New Yorkers terrified of media exposure*. So rather
than report the murder, they decide to solve the crime
themselves, since the culprit is clearly among them. When they
find out whodunnit, these New Yorkers are all *willing to shut
up in exchange for political favors*.
On a plane ride or curled up
at sleepytime, a reader might overlook such a pileup of
improbabilities and take the story as a mindless diversion. In
the theater, more is required. Improbability, of course, can
also signal a departure from literal reality into the symbolic
realm. The authors clearly believed they were making a
symbolic statement about power and corruption. The play ends
literally with a bonfire of the vanities and someone yelling,
"What's happening to this city?!" It's so shallow,
though, the audience cringed and left the theater snickering.
March 27, 1996
“Private Lives, Unseen
Lives”: No One Will
Be Immune
Think about a guitar. A
hollow gourd on a stick with a hole in it, several strings
fastened to knobs that stick out. It's an awkward-looking
wooden box. Now picture a musical score, some pieces of paper
full of lines and black dots. Nothing sings until someone
picks up the instrument and plays the notes. If the player
stumbles or the guitar is crude or the notes are dumb, you're
aware of each element as separate. But if all three are pretty
good, what comes out is a heavenly sound produced by
player-guitar-notes but transcending all of them.
When he first started writing
plays, David Mamet was seen as a super-duper tape recorder who
captures the fumbling, repetitive, incomplete, evasive way
that "people really talk." On closer examination, it
was necessary to recognize him as a poet whose plays come to
life through a carefully selected language that you'd never
get just transcribing two guys in a bar or a junk shop. *No
One Will Be Immune*, the evening of five one-acts at Ensemble
Studio Theatre through April 7, conveys a strong impression I
hadn't experienced before of Mamet the musician.
Mamet's is not a theater of
spectacle. You almost never see the set change in his plays.
He writes for actors. He knows actors. He teaches actors. He
marries actors. He loves actors. Most of his major plays have
enough plot and conflict and quotable lines to work as
dramatic literature. His short plays, on the other hand,
including the five not-so-easy pieces at E.S.T., are radical
experiments that start and stop *in medias res*. They would
probably seem pretty baffling and inconsequential if you read
them. They're like lines and notes, they're flat sheet music.
It takes actors to unleash the music.
Really, though, it's the
other way around. They unleash the actors. Mamet's plays spend
almost no time trying to create the illusion of some other
time or space. They focus intently on the inner lives of the
characters, which allows the actors to do what they do, which
is...a mystery. What is acting? It's not explaining. It's not
illustrating. It's not mime. It's really living, under very
specific conditions, with a minimum amount of pretending. It's
pretty mysterious, really, just like music. The composer
writes the notes, but good musicians don't play notes, they
play music. A playwright writes the words, and the actors
don't just say them, they live the life that the words come
out of, which in Mamet's case often have surprisingly little
to do with what the words are saying.
Case in point: in *Joseph
Dintenfass,* the title character is having a late-night chat
with Claire, who's just arrived for a visit along with
Joseph's son Michael, who is upstairs asleep. She's nervous,
he's shy, she's tired, he's curious, they're attracted to each
other and afraid of their attraction -- you get all these
things even though they never say any of them. They're having
a somewhat pretentious philosophical conversation. They say
things like "People have a horror of existence" and
"We insulate ourselves about a new experience" and
"He's not sensitive, he's expressive, that's what I'm
like, sensitive."
James Murtaugh isn't an old
hand at Mamet; his Joseph sounds a little stiff and formal.
Kristina Lear as Claire is a natural. She takes to Mamet like
Kiri te Kanawa doing Mozart. A torrent of talk flows out of
her, and it all makes sense, even when she's doing her best to
cover up her feelings. Mamet throws in a lot of hesitation and
repetition. "And then, and then, and then he told me
where he went." Lear doesn't physically act out the pause
or mental wheel-spinning that the repetition implies, anymore
than a river stops and tries to move a pile of rocks in its
way. She flows right over them.
The ultimate David Mamet
actor is W.H. Macy, a deceptively mild-looking little redhead
behind whose goofy face lies a killer Bugs Bunny who's
mastered the evasion and control-freakiness inside Mamet's
staccato dialogue. He is to Mamet's plays and movies what
Woody Allen is to Woody Allen's movies. (You can witness his
sweaty-palm perfection onscreen right now in the Coen
Brothers' *Fargo*.) Under the impeccable direction of E.S.T.'s
Curt Dempster, though, David Rasche proves himself in Macy's
class. In fact, if Rasche's mother had wanted to arrange a
showcase of her son's dazzling talents, she couldn't have done
better than *No One Will Be Immune.*
I started paying attention to
this underacknowledged comic actor when he first did Mamet's
*A Sermon* in an E.S.T. one-act marathon years ago. The play
is nothing more than a hilarious string of homiletic non
sequiturs. "And what of love? Love is the mucillage that
sticks the construction-paper pumpkins in the scrapbooks of
our lives." But I've never forgotten how Rasche delivered
it with a preacher's jovial self-satisfaction and a standup
comic's hair-trigger sensitivity to audience response.
The current show at E.S.T.
opens with *A Sermon* and closes with *No One Will Be Immune*,
the longest of the five pieces. Rasche plays a guy who had a
premonition the plane he was on was going to crash, so he made
a fuss and got off. Then the plane did crash, and now he's
undergoing a relentless, rather cryptic paranoid inquisition
by some kind of official (played by the also-brilliant
hatchet-faced Byron Jennings). Confessing, backpedaling,
defending himself, digressing, he switches among 17 different
emotions without transition, inducing in spectators a
bewildering mixture of laughter, sympathy, and fear. The only
word for his performance is virtuosic.
April 3, 1996
See other NYP columns: 1-5,
6-10, 11-15, 16-20,
21-27
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