nytheatre Archive
1996-97 Theatre Season Reviews

A few years ago, sometime chorus boy and madcap genius costume designer Howard Crabtree and his collaborator Mark Waldrop had a surprise off-Broadway hit with their Whoop-Dee-Do. The perceived likelihood of that happy circumstance gives their follow-up its title; happily, the sequel is an even bigger hit than the original.

When Pigs Fly is essentially a revue, built around Crabtree's splendiferous, outrageous costume designs (a centaur, the eponymous pig, Louis Seize costumes far more outlandish than anything in Victor/Victoria). Fortunately, the songs and the sketches are every bit as funny as the clothes. Standout moments include Jay Rogers in Bette Davis "Baby Jane" drag, accessorized with a giant Joan Crawford doll; David Pevsner and Blake Hammond in an engaging and surprisingly deft soft-shoe called "Light in the Loafers"; and Stanley Bojarski as a dinner theatre doyenne who has taken to writing her own original musicals, including a live-action "Quasimodo!" ("I've got a hunch we're in love!") and a surreal "Annie 3" that manages to incorporate and explode just about every cliché in the musical comedy book. My favorite: the heartfelt torch song of unrequited love, sung by a subdued Jay Rogers (in a dinner jacket): "Newt" ("In my personal Oz, you are the wizard/Your mama took one look, and named you after a lizard").

This is a gay show in both the old and new senses of that word: a joyful and exuberant celebration of the theatre and gay life, infused with the irrepressible spirit of its creator. Sadly, Crabtree did not live to see it: he died of AIDS just six weeks before opening night. But he would have loved it: this show is the most fun I've had in the theatre in a long time. Everyone involved is terrific and clearly enjoys himself. Imagine what these guys could do with Steel Pier's budget!

Here is a warm, thoughtful, funny play about people who care about each other: what a concept! The Last Night of Ballyhoo takes place in the home of Adolph Freitag, a well-to-do Jewish businessman, in Atlanta in December 1939. Living with Adolph are his sister Boo Levy and her daughter Lala, and his sister-in-law Reba and her daughter Sunny. Lala, in her early twenties, is immature, awkward, given to girlish enthusiasms, more or less unfit for any job; she and her mother are pinning their hopes for her future on the Ballyhoo, the social event of the year among the South's wealthy (German) Jewish community. In particular they are hoping to land a boy from New Orleans who once seemed to like Lala. Meanwhile Sunny, on vacation from Wellesley, plans to skip the event, until she is invited by a brash young employee of her uncle, Joe Farkas. Joe is the "other kind" of Jew--that is, of Russian heritage; his otherness is the catalyst for most of what happens in The Last Night of Ballyhoo, as the members of the family are forced to rethink many of their assumptions about being Jewish, in particular, about being the "right kind" of (German) Jew.

I fear I've made this play sound somber. It's not. Author Alfred Uhry (who wrote Driving Miss Daisy) does provides us with some interesting things to think about here, but gently; mostly this work is a loving depiction of a family coping with the most basic events of life. Reba and Boo are watching their daughters grow up; Lala and Sunny, meanwhile, are entering the adult world with all the wonder and naivete of the young; Uncle Adolph provides the sheltering center for all four. Uhry has created wonderfully quirky, three-dimensional characters, and the actors gathered here bring them to vivid life: Jessica Hecht, gawky and sweet as the offbeat Lala; Arija Bareikis, lovely and touching as Sunny, discovering love for the first time; Paul Rudd and Stephen Largay, fine as their two young men. Even better are the older generation: Celia Weston is very funny and very moving as the slightly ditzy Reba; Terry Beaver is a strong but gentle, deeply-felt presence as Uncle Adolph; and that great actress Dana Ivey is towering, indomitable Boo, a woman whose bitter disappointment with life doesn't keep her from doing her best for her daughter (or from making her brother and sister-in-law miserable). Director Ron Lagomarsino and his creative team have mounted this play with loving care. The result is the most rewarding of this season's plays: thoughtful, tender, warm, joyous, funny. Go see it.

Shortly after I saw How I Learned to Drive, I read an interview with its star, Mary-Louise Parker, who mentioned that one of the things she liked best about Paula Vogel's play is its title. "It's not called How I Learned to Hate Myself," Parker said, and here she hits exactly on why this is such a very fine, very special work. Parker plays a woman, nicknamed "Li'l Bit" by her family, looking back on episodes in her life, especially some very terrible ones when she was molested by her Uncle Peck. Li'l Bit lives with her grandparents and her mother in a household that would be too easy to dismiss as dysfunctional. These people are more or less well-meaning, but they are unequipped emotionally and intellectually to deal with this alarmingly bright and sensitive girl, let alone the damaging sexual attentions paid her by an otherwise loving uncle.

The enormous power of this play comes from its author's brave decision to present real people in all their complicated and unresolvable realness. Uncle Peck is a pedophile, but he's also the only ray of intelligence and warmth in Li'l Bit's bleak, undereducated family circle. As portrayed here by David Morse in what is surely one of the finest performances on any stage this season, he is painfully aware of the monstrousness of his compulsion and just as painfully powerless to control it: he is the most sympathetic character in the play, and that surprises us. Parker, too, is excellent, moving back and forth from girl to teenager to grown woman effortlessly, telegraphing her age to the audience with only attitude and body language. Johanna Day, Christopher Duva, and Kerry O'Malley play all the other parts, chorus-like, with tremendous skill and style. The spare settings by Narelle Sissons are perfect, too, letting the audience find the places and times of the piece in their minds, just as the deceptive simplicity of Mark Brokaw's direction and the lyric naturalism of Vogel's poetry evoke--without actually showing--the damaged souls of its two protagonists and the terrible, unspeakable events that happened between them. I love this play for its humanity and its intelligence, and especially for its uplifting message of acceptance and forgiveness. In its final image, not of confrontation but of resolve, How I Learned to Drive has something profound to teach our victimized society. And it's neatly summarized in Vogel's perfect title.

This particular moment was, for me, the most interesting in a play filled with interesting moments: it's 1950, in Houston, and an old black woman has crystallized the sad arc of her life and her former white boss's: its the same arc, after all: she hasn't put him down, just leveled the playing field. A neat spot inside a lovely scene; but what are we to make of this play? It's prettily written and beautifully acted but nevertheless disappointing. It never really gets anywhere, because, I think, it never starts off for anywhere. This is the Broadway premiere of the 1995 Pulitzer Prize play, written by the excellent dramatist Horton Foote (whose earlier works include The Trip to Bountiful and The Widow Claire). The young man of the title is a mysterious, unseen character, the roommate of the Kidders' recently deceased son. The son, who killed himself, was almost certainly gay, and was possibly being blackmailed by this young man. We never find out, nor does Foote mean for us to. This is an incident--a pivotal, catalytic one, to be sure--but just one among others: Will loses his job; Lily Dale (his wife) has given away most of her money; Lily Dale's stepfather wants to go back to his hometown before he dies; Etta Doris, that wonderful and wise maid, comes to visit.

Foote gives us patches of life here, and Robert Falls and his exemplary company make them vivid; but it's never clear what The Young Man from Atlanta is about. In the end, Will and Lily Dale, disappointed as they are, agree to go on with their lives. It's a conclusion as unsatisfying as their lives are, I guess: but Will and Lily Dale don't deserve a tragic ending because nothing in their lives has been grand enough to merit one. Oh, well: see this play to witness a fine actor at his peak (Rip Torn), plus the superbly nuanced work of Shirley Knight as Lily Dale, William Biff McGuire's serene Pete (Lily Dale's step-father), and the aforementioned scene-stealing Ms. Winde. And if you figure out what Foote is trying to get at, please let me know.

Joe has spent his entire life in the singleminded pursuit of wealth for the sake of his family, an American Dream gone nightmarishly awry; this is a play about responsibility: Joe and his generation must understand that the boys he killed--all the boys in the War--were his sons, too. But Arthur Miller, who wrote this powerful and moving work in 1947, has more than just that on his mind: this is a play about all the compromises we are forced to make to live in a dishonest world, about a country's irrevocable loss of innocence, oddly timely as we sit poised to enter a new millennium.

Barry Edelstein's remarkable and deeply-felt production of All My Sons illuminates these larger themes even while reminding us by its simplicity that this is essentially a modern rendering of classical tragedy: a family is rent by the father's devastating crimes, surrounded by a chorus of neighbors and friends who observe and comment on the action. Edelstein's company of eight actors is the finest ensemble on stage in New York today. John Cullum brings enormous presence to his portrayal of Joe Keller, providing the piece with a strong and powerful center; his absences from the stage are palpable. Michael Hayden, who was terrific as Billy Bigelow in Carousel a few seasons back, is even better here as the immensely decent, ultimately disillusioned Chris; he plays the scene in which he learns the truth about Joe with his back to the audience and it's utterly wrenching: he cannot bear to show (and we could not bear to see) the pain in his face at that moment. Linda Stephens plays a surprisingly hard, painfully realistic Kate (Joe's wife); her interpretation of this role is unusual and revelatory.

Stephen Barker Turner, who plays George, the son of Joe's partner and Joe's main accuser in the piece, elevates what could be a one-note deus-ex-machina sort of role into a fully-formed man, whose own disappointments and compromises serve as effective counterpoint to Chris's. And Stephen Stout is superb as the Kellers' neighbor Jim. At the beginning of Act Three, after Chris has found out the truth about Joe and has run away, Jim has a brief speech about how Chris has gone off to be alone to watch his star go out. I had never paid attention to this speech before; after hearing Stout's reading of it, I will never forget it.

Early in the second act, Wilson and director Marshall W. Mason give us a memorable stage picture: each of the eight characters stands around a table, spinning a dinner plate over his or her head, and spinning around his or her axis (as it were) as well, following one another in a circular procession around the table. It's ostensibly a living model of the local galaxies, constructed by one of the play's three astronomy professors as a teaching exercise: eight random bodies in space, orbiting some common center but stuck in their own individual orbits as well. But this image shows much of what Wilson wants to say about American life as we head toward the millennium. He asks: where is the grand, unifying principle in our lives? But he finds no answer: in a civilization ravaged by AIDS and street violence and poverty and the endless narcissism of the powerful--all of which are touched upon in the course of this work--life does indeed seem random and incomprehensible.

In anthropology, "sympathetic magic" is the name given to the rituals we enact in our lives to influence the cosmos, such as rain dances to summon rain or fertility rites to summon life. In this new play, Lanford Wilson hypothesizes that our lives have become sympathetic magic: acted-out versions of what we hope for or think we need, false and illusory shadows of reality. This is a difficult work, although not as bleak or bitter as I have perhaps painted it here. Mason's direction is, as usual, superb, as is the work of all eight actors, with Tanya Berezin and David Pittu particularly noteworthy as Liz and Pauly. I'm not sure I completely understand all that Sympathetic Magic has to say. But this is a fascinating and thoughtful work, the musings of one of our theatre's great poets on the end of an American century that seems about to implode.

At first the story recalls All About Eve. Lisa Morrison, an earnest, awkward graduate student, comes to the apartment of Ruth Steiner, a successful writer of short stories and professor at NYU, for a tutorial session. Lisa gushes embarrassingly about how much she loves Ruth's work, and rather brashly turns the conversation to Ruth's need for a teaching assistant and how much she would love to have that job. For her part, Ruth stays shrewd and detached--no Margo Channing, she; and in fact she compares herself to Thelma Ritter, the streetwise character actress who played Margo's knowing secretary. What's interesting about this line is that we already know enough about Ruth to know that it's not true: Ruth is posing as someone and hopes that we don't notice: she's clearly no fool and certainly not taken in by Lisa's rather obvious genuflection, but she lets Lisa do it anyway. I, for one, was hooked: what is this woman doing?

As the play's five succeeding scenes unfold, we find out a great deal about Ruth, and also about Lisa. The Eve storyline progresses but then takes an interesting twist that echoes the recent Stephen Spender-David Leavitt controversy (which involved a young writer who wrote a book based on personal incidents in the life of a famous older one). The second act is rich with incident and nuance, as Ruth and the now more mature Lisa play out and then review the nature of their complex relationship. Are they friends? colleagues? mentor and protegee? mother and daughter? Or do they remain teacher and student, the latter having been taught too well?

Debra Messing is fine as Lisa, deftly managing the transformation from gawky grad student to stunningly self-assured rising literary star. But Collected Stories belongs to Maria Tucci, who inhabits the role of Ruth Steiner with such deliberate perfection that it is hard to take your eyes off her; this is a rich, layered, enormously moving performance of great depth and emotion. As for the play itself, it is beautifully written and perfectly theatrical, all the more surprising given its rarefied subject matter. I can only echo Time Out New York's reviewer Sam Whitehead, who said about Collected Stories that it's the reason you go to the theatre. It is; so go.