On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage ODD COUPLES BY STEFAN KANFER IN 1966 a modest volume appeared in bookstores, received some respectful attention, and then vanished. Its title was The Collected Works of Jane Bowles, as...
...The people he helps the most are Margaret Civil (Frances Sternhagen) and Katharine Brynne (Zoe Caldwell), suburban Connecticut friends who have decided to leave their husbands at home and tour India on their own...
...In the recent past, Katharine's son (Fisher Stevens) was killed by six black thugs in a vicious gay-bashing incident...
...They are supposed to exude charm...
...This is one versatile deity...
...Half an hour into the proceedings McNally's hidden intent emerges from the closet...
...the brilliant Southern California backgrounds were designed by her friend Oliver Smith, and the cast included Judith Anderson, Mildred Dunnock and Jean Stapleton under the direction of Jose Quintero...
...Caldwell exhibits the strength of star power in a basically unsympathetic part...
...One can hardly blame them...
...Sternhagen, who graces everything she touches, conveys exactly the right mix of certainty and bewilderment...
...For the most part, though, Bowles' grotesques move through that landscape lethargically, saturating the air with noise that could be mistaken for dialogue, just as Philip Glass' incidental music fills the night with monotony that could be confused with melody...
...Never mind...
...I had to go or I couldn't face myself in the mirror tomorrow if I hadn't gone because that was the one thing I was afraid of.'" A loony, no doubt, but clearly a loony with style...
...So I presented her to the man, she rubbed even more fat over her face, and smiling obliquely, gave him her greasy hand, saying as if to reassure him: 'I have a spiritual side.'" William Burroughs treasured her eccentricities: "We are sitting at a beach terrace restaurant...
...As with his previous play, Lips Together, Teeth Apart, the subtext is homosexuality in present-day America...
...Katharine, in an orgy of self-abnegation, attempts to embrace him...
...In the program Akalaitis writes that the text of In the Summer House "provides an emotional ambiance for the story of a daughter's struggle with her mother that can be ferociously felt and highly ridiculous at the same time...
...Happily, the leads recite it flawlessly...
...When she returns home, she finds that her husband has been killed in an automobile crash...
...Akalaitis mounts one scene well, when the large cast assembles on a beach behind their individual walls of sunglasses...
...It has been staged by JoAnne Akalaitis without a scintilla of its style...
...Many of the exchanges are lively, and the comedy-drama is staged with great verve...
...Katharine could never accept his lifestyle...
...Constable seeks the consolations of alcohol...
...The plot concerns two middle-aged neurasthenics, the Californian, Mrs...
...A troupe of delightful little Indian puppeteers appears in the second act...
...Of the two young women Arenal comes off best, partly because Rocha is called upon to twitch around like a butterfly with one wing...
...A lesser set designer might get by with sliding panels and a large shower-curtain scrim...
...Jane was seated, legs akimbo, in front of the fireplace, gnawing on a mutton chop...
...Sometimes mother and son converse...
...They make her even more incoherent than she was in her sober days...
...Yet behind all the sprightly talk is the agitprop as before...
...If her analysis is correct, the director has realized the last 50 per cent of the playwright's intent...
...houses break your heart...
...To effect a posthumous reconciliation, Ganesh brings on the ghost of the young man...
...En route, the ladies run across a pair of American tourists, both suffering from aids...
...Paul once recalled their expatriate days in Tangier:" A rather staid English couple whom we did not know called on us...
...In a thankless role, Conroy at least looks the pan of a waspish boozer...
...Where did you leave your shoes?' Paul asked her...
...Actually the author was very much alive?she died in 1973—but her reputation had already begun to fade...
...Jane was a child with a bad game leg, who longed to be a grownup and didn't know how, so she drank, one-upping your litanies of victimization as you drank with her...
...At other times he simply addresses the day in a series of short soliloquys...
...at one point the youth even materializes enough for Katharine to see him, and the two enjoy a brief fox-trot...
...Paul Bowles composed a more appropriate score for the first production...
...Total opposites in temperament and dress, the women share a single attribute: the inability to get along with their daughters...
...even now she can barely talk about it...
...In his high moments, McNally displays a literate, almost Shavian wit...
...Ganesa (variously known as Ganesha and Ganesh) is the Hindus' elephant-headed, human-bodied god of wisdom and good luck, worshiped especially as a remover of obstacles...
...In the end, Ganesh has fixed nothing—or has he...
...And George Tsypin's set evokes a bizarre, sunwashed country...
...His people discuss race relations with a desperate honesty, and the topics of old love and friendship are analyzed without condescension...
...John Tillinger's direction is elegant, and Santo Loquasto's costumes provide a series of surprises...
...For one thing, Katharine is maddeningly disorganized...
...Why?' 'Because that was the one place I didn't want to go.' 'Then, Jane, why did you go?' 'You ought to know,' she answered...
...Jane stayed out all night and came home at dawn shoeless...
...I only like old men!'" A Little Original Sin, Millicent Dillon's entertaining biography, describes a typical incident...
...Two mature ladies also provide the core of Terrence McNally's A Perfect Ganesh, but they are very different and far more appealing characters...
...instead they reminded me very much of Raymond Chandler's cranky description of a Mexican band: "Whatever they play it all sounds the same...
...The badly served play, which once seemed so odd and daring, suddenly appears to be an embarrassing sediment from the past, more appropriate for a museum than a stage...
...From Ming Cho Lee we have a right to expect something more inventive...
...But Dominic Cuskern, as the unfailingly cheerful Ganesh, rights the balance...
...Grieving for her daughter, Mrs...
...Constable (Frances Conroy...
...As if that inadequacy were not enough, almost every role has been miscast...
...Molly Cuevas (Alina Are-nal) is a shut-down, glowering young woman who spends her time brooding in a tiny summer house, stage left...
...A little Arab boy nudges through the fence and holds out his grubby paw...
...Then, all too soon their relationship begins to deteriorate...
...For reasons that are unclear to me they take no bows and do not appear in the credits...
...I wish Fisher Stevens were up to his many roles: invalids, clerks, mendicants, tourists...
...Perhaps there is some hope for a rapprochement with the past...
...That style could be discerned in her work, particularly her only play, In the Summer House, with its collection of feverish outsiders, most of them refractions of the author's psyche...
...she turns and says, 'Oh, NOOO...
...In the course of the production's nonaction, Vivian dies in a fall—offstage, of course—from one of the surrounding cliffs...
...Yet, for all the amusing chatter about exotic and domestic manners, A Perfect Ganesh is not really about Connecticut or India or religion or the disparity of East and West...
...Occasionally, a memorable line can be heard: "I like public places...
...still, she made her reputation in Woody Allen movies, and that is where her talents seem most suitable...
...Vivian Constable (Kali Rocha) is a wired, fluttering teenager who is unable to light anywhere, emotionally or physically...
...Or was it an accident...
...Molly gets married?again offstage, of course—to Lionel, who understandably wants to spirit her away from all this...
...When necessary, he even moves the props...
...But she cannot make herself do it...
...First time out, 40 years ago, Bowles was extremely fortunate...
...Its title was The Collected Works of Jane Bowles, as if it were a posthumous affair...
...At the City Center Theater he is all of the above, moving his trunk about, helping travelers and essaying a number of subsidiary parts...
...Still, the boys deserve to be recognized in print...
...Schreiber is so vapid I was surprised to find that he threw a shadow...
...The women are not the same individuals who left only a few weeks before...
...Eastman Cuevas natters on, eventually relieving the eyes and ears of the audience by going away to wed a Mexican...
...she was a fixture of the '50s, like her more celebrated husband, the novelist-composer Paul Bowles...
...She keeps losing pieces of her luggage, her wardrobe, and, finally, her temper, taking it out on her roommate...
...Alas, her luck has run out...
...Her disorganization, her self-pity, her defensively anti-intellectual stance, her irksome dread of any immediate decision, be it whether to go to Sweden tomorrow or what to choose from the menu tonight, were balanced by a magical gift for making you feel you were the sole creature in her universe...
...Confrontations and arguments are constant, interrupted by Ganesh, unseen by the ladies, who provides a running commentary...
...They and their marionettes are not only appealing, they are the only players who are not required to push the gay agenda...
...Where have you been?' She told him she'd been wandering around the docks all by herself...
...Much could have been made of that, but Bowles drops the question until the final moments, and Akalaitis gives the second act the tension of an uncooked taco...
...Eastman Cuevas (Dianne Wiest), and her visitor, Mrs...
...Perhaps they are too young to stay up until curtain call time...
...The rest of the cast consists of Molly's suitor, Lionel (Liev Schreiber), and a group of Mexicans who sing, dance and otherwise attempt to fill in the blanks of a long, unlovely evening...
...She had only one enemy, Molly...
...Meantime Margaret, a well-bred proper sort, is repelled by the country that Katharine finds enchanting...
...Wiest does the best she can with an insufferable character...
...A leprous beggar appears, asking for alms...
...Death is very much in the atmosphere: One scene has Margaret confessing to a perfect stranger that she lost her son many years before in a childhood accident...
...It always has nice open vowels and a drawn-out sugary lilt, and the guy who sings it always strums on a guitar and has a lot to say about amor, mi cor-azon, a lady who is linda but very hard to convince, and he always has too long and too oily hair, and when he isn't making with the love stuff he looks as if his knife work in an alley would be efficient and economical...
...Everything begins well...
...Was the girl pushed...
...Composer Ned Rorem, who knew the author well, found that although Jane was "madly exasperating, she was quickly forgivable too...
...The current production, at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theater, will also be remembered for a long time, but for all the wrong reasons...
Vol. 76 • September 1993 • No. 10
