On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage PAST IMPERFECT BY STEFAN KANFER WENDY WASSERSTEIN has yet to become a Nobel Laureate. But she has been given just about every other honor: the Pulitzer Prize, plus the Tony, New York...
...In the recent past its members have dramatized Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, mixed As You Like It and the adventures of Pretty Boy Floyd, and presented Peer Gynt: The Movies, a unique amalgam of the Ibsen classic and the misadventures of Errol Flynn...
...Clearly, this is the path to oblivion, and Jack is all set to ride it to the end...
...I used to date Wharton, but that was before I knew what I wanted...
...A lawyer takes an interest in the case, and before long Jack Black has the ear of an understanding judge...
...Didn't he write ILearned Everything But Hand-writing in the First Grade...
...Wasserstein had exceptional fortune in 1977...
...I've seen hop joints, wine dumps, thieves' resorts, and beggars' hangouts...
...But their energies, abetted by Alex Miller's enthusiastic banjo playing and Kennon Rothchild's stark set, give the evening a down-home authenticity that more practiced companies could not hope to provide...
...Unfortunately, Susie hangs around for the rest of the evening spouting similar lines, all of them fatuous...
...Millions now believe that its grants are used exclusively to support HIV positive performance artists who smear themselves with chocolate or slash their skins onstage...
...No weight rooms in those prisons, no telephones or books...
...We read all the basics: the womb-penis inner-andouter-space nonsense, The Feminine Mystique, Sexual Politics, Mabel Dodge's diary...
...HEIDI: A little...
...It has the Snoopy calendar on it...
...her cast included Swoosie Kurtz, Jill Eikenberry, Glenn Close, and Meryl Streep...
...On Stage PAST IMPERFECT BY STEFAN KANFER WENDY WASSERSTEIN has yet to become a Nobel Laureate...
...Wasserstein found herself acclaimed as Broadway's mistress of comic apergus and off-the-wall allusions...
...I tell you, Heidi, it's rough...
...But this is also the epoch of vigilante justice...
...GORGEOUS: Try Learning to Love Again, Learning to Live Again...
...Here is one of the sisters, apart-time broadcaster and full-time yenta, discussing an author of self-help books with her older sister's suitor: MERV: I've heard of Pearlstein...
...Rita (Jessica Lundy) is the wild one, waving the books of Germaine Greer and igniting verbal grenades in the dorms: "We need to talk about masturbation...
...But she has been given just about every other honor: the Pulitzer Prize, plus the Tony, New York Drama Critics Circle, Drama Desk, and Outer Circle awards...
...An entire character resides in those words...
...Do you think women will lose their relevancy in five years...
...Susie (Robin Morse) advises a catatonic freshman (Danielle Ferland), "If you have any questions or you just want to talk about psychology, knock on my door...
...Upon release he finds that the old friends are under arrest or dead...
...and I am going to write about them...
...At 401 found myself a solitary, capable journeyman highwayman, an escaped convict, a fugitive...
...The Irondale Ensemble Project, which depends on very modest infusions of NEA money, is one of those quiet Off-Broadway companies devoted to researching Americana and giving it a new theatrical life...
...HEIDI: I'm planning to start my family at 60.1 hear there's a hormone in Brazil...
...With the single exception of the Rabelaisian Lundy, the actresses are depressing when they should be comic, and unintentionally funny when the playwright means them to be moving...
...The errors are understandable...
...An elderly gorgon, Mrs...
...Given the extravagant critical welcome and the outlandish box-office success of these plays, it was inevitable that someone would want to revive Wasserstein's early work...
...He was recently indicted...
...You don't know what it's like to have absolutely no idea who you are!' Despite their maturity, most of the characters in the play are struggling with who they are...
...At 25 I was an expert house burglar, a nighttime prowler...
...We have seen this kind of ingenuous narrative before, in the books of the Beat Generation...
...An exchange in Heidi is typical: SUSAN: Are you writing...
...Scaled down to fit the narrow confines of Playhouse 125, deep in the heart of Chelsea, You Can't Win follows the winding trail of Jack Black...
...The second was assuming that a 17-year-old drama, Uncommon Women and Others, wouldremain fresh...
...Jack experiences it all, from savage beatings to surprise gifts-like a stash of opium donated by a fellow inmate...
...All this is punctuated by announcements from an unseen Voice (Forrest Sawyer) ironically declaiming from the college catalog: "Just like the pot of honey that kept renewing itself, an educated woman's capacity for giving is not exhausted, but stimulated, by demands...
...One untried path remains for the aging wanderer: going straight...
...She tells us in her Introduction to theprinted text of Rosensweig: "One of my favorite people in this play confesses...
...Even in Wasserstein's salad days she had an eye for the revealing detail...
...He is even allowed to choose the jail for his last year in stir...
...The older Jack (Terry Greiss) begins to narrate the story of his life...
...SUSAN: I just broke up with my boy-friend...
...Only 26 months on every bestseller list...
...Samantha (Mary McCann) is, in the words of her creator, "like a Shetland cable-knit sweater, a classic...
...But an unexpected blessing comes his way...
...Instead she comes on like a standup performer at the Improv, and one half expects an exposed brick wall to materialize at her back: "Whenever I see a boy with a yarmulke, I think he has a diaphragm on his head...
...I am going to write about them as I took them, with a smile...
...Plumm (Rosemary Murphy) enforces decorum: "I can't permit you to come to tea in pants...
...some are Off-Broadway plays with all the political content of a Western film...
...The Irondale players are at times as unpolished as the upbeat protagonist...
...The latter seems more accurate to me...
...The time is the early '70s...
...He's fabulous...
...Muffet (Haviland Morris) is given to arch soliloquies: "This class isn't half bad...
...The Iron-dale adaptation, by Joshua Taylor and Jim Niesen, turns Black's picaresque autobiography into an Off-Broadway Nicholas Nickleby, with seven actors playing scores of parts...
...After its New York run, You Can't Win will be shown at a theater festival in St...
...Jennifer von Mayrhauser's costumes seem wittier than the dialogue, and Heidi Landesman's set is more convincing than the people it surrounds...
...It's not fair to the other girls...
...No wonder the cultural backslide continues, despite the tectonic shift to the Right...
...Riding the rails, he falls in with some larcenous characters who know how to crack safes and steal horses...
...some are exhibitions of 19th-century American painters...
...To that day, even her detractors can look forward...
...Wasserstein's next smash tried to evoke the existential atmosphere of Chekhov's Three Sisters...
...It might interest those critics to learn the Irondale company's travel bill is being paid, in part, by a grant from that notoriously radical company, Exxon...
...Honestly, I've been to more fertility lunches...
...No matter how sober her intent, Wasserstein the philosopher is continually undone by Wasserstein the gagmeister...
...Uncommon Women sounds promising enough, with its cast of eight lively undergraduates at an unnamed college for women...
...His accountant is evil...
...To Jack it is a happy ending...
...Women and Bran...
...I shouldn't have said that...
...He's 56, he's still married, and he doesn't want to start another family...
...To some it is a sad finale to a vigorous life...
...Audiences fell hard...
...One can already hear the wails from the Senate: The romance of an American thief presented to the Russians...
...Women and Madness...
...The usual...
...At 44, Wasserstein has plenty of time to write plays commensurate with her reputation...
...I'll be struck down by a burning bush...
...I've never been to that one...
...Kate (Stephanie Roth) is a careerist already on the prowl for a corner office...
...MERV: Of course...
...A combination of background music and anecdote carries us along, from Jack's mischievous boyhood to his sojourn in reform school...
...Actually, who they are is comediennes, like almost all of the playwright's women...
...Incorrigible but strangely innocent, Jack goes over the wall to become a tramp...
...That he does with a vengeance, and winds up as a librarian, of all things, in a small California town...
...At the Lucille Lortel Theater in Greenwich Village the luck has run out...
...And I at least want to keep my options open...
...Like Car 54, Where Are You...
...Jack pushes on, acquainting himself with fences who deal in stolen goods, prostitutes who take advantage of his good nature and his occasionally fat wallet, opium dens and, more than once, the inside of state prisons...
...Before my 20th birthday I was in the dock of a criminal court, on trial for burglary...
...Just backbreaking labor on the rockpile, solitary confinement for those who sass the guards, and for the surliest, the straitjacket...
...As this production shows, only her most uncritical fans should look backward...
...That was the first mistake...
...Petersburg...
...GORGEOUS: Rabbi Pearlstein is a great man...
...Leilah (Joan Buddenhagen) is a budding anthropologist with her eyes on the sarcophagi-and the men-of the Middle East...
...Despite Carole Rothman's crisp direction, these personalities never mesh...
...Few of her colleagues have greater appeal...
...Although shock waves of feminism are reverberating in its classrooms, the college sticks by its tradition of Gracious Living, a rite of Earl Grey, finger sandwiches and gossip...
...Women and Art...
...The others are as carefully varied as a bomber crew in a World War II movie...
...After hearing the account of brutalities behind bars, the court abbreviates the prisoner's long sentence...
...Holly (Julie Dretzin), the requisite Jewish girl, is supposed to be a poignant ousider...
...This real-life adventurer flourished, failed and ultimately triumphed around the turn of the century...
...Most NEA grants, however, are used to fund very modest and uncontroversial productions...
...And, indeed, Jack Black's autobiography was a favorite of Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, who freely ransacked the author's bittersweet song of the open road...
...In her two big hits, The Heidi Chronicles and The Sisters Rosensweig, the playwright created a new, self-mocking feminist...
...San Quentin, your honor," Jackreplies...
...All these kudos lead to two possible conclusions: Either Wasserstein is one of the most original and brilliant talents of our age, or contemporary theatrical standards are so debased that a sitcom writer can be elevated to superstar status...
...I got the calendar as a present from Kenny at Harvard...
...Every other woman I know is either pregnant or just miscarried...
...When I left school at 141 was as unsophisticated as a boy could be," he recalls...
...Some are marionette shows that travel the public school circuit...
...From there on, things tumble downhill with increasing velocity...
...No wonder the dollar is down...
...At 301 was a respected member of the 'yegg' brotherhood...
...Their newest work is far less eccentric than its predecessors...
...AIDED BY some of the day's most self-destructive talents, Jesse Helms has persuaded too many Americans that the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is a subversive organization...
...As he does, the younger self (Paul Ellis) surfaces...
...often a gun blazes and a friend goes off to hobo heaven...
Vol. 77 • November 1994 • No. 11
