Resource Showmanship
POPKIN, HENRY
On Stage RESOURCEFUL SHOWMANSHIP BY HENRY POPKIN Pippin and Butleythe first a musical, the second a comedy—• are ambitious, resourceful works of showmanship. Now, showmanship is by no means a...
...His wife has not only left him but wants to marry the greatest bore of his acquaintance, and his academic protege, officemate and roommate is going off with a homosexual bore...
...Kerr must be right?Butley is not a homosexual...
...Happily, these gestures do not obscure the true values of the two productions...
...Here is our protagonist, the long-time roommate and mentor of a practicing homosexual, as naggingly protective of his protege as a homosexual partner would be, a perfect master of the bitchy conversational style often associated with homosexuality, and, incidentally, a total failure as a husband...
...He seemed to be finding a side of his character that he dared not acknowledge...
...Surely not...
...Pippin is essentially a highly superior revue, full of brief but memorable virtuoso performances, beguiling tunes, show-stopping dance numbers, and an unusually generous supply of spectacular visual effects: The facade of a castle is suddenly conjured from a slit in the floor of the stage, a severed head carries on a conversation, a large illuminated manuscript descends from on high, displaying a song that we can sing if we care to follow the bouncing ball, and a human form is enveloped by flame and destroyed before our astonished eyes...
...Still, this conclusion is not altogether satisfying either...
...Exactly what is the nature of Butley's sexuality, anyway...
...Few will care very much about 8th-century authenticity, or be concerned that Pippin failed to ascend the throne because (like his older brother) he neglected to outlive his father and not, as the script tells us, because he preferred the simple comforts of a winsome widow and her rose-covered cottage...
...From the first he had intended to bring Pippin to "a climax never before seen on a public stage"????self-destruction by fire...
...To complete the dismal circle, the gay bore and the straight bore are concluding a bit of nonsexual editorial mating: The homosexual is publishing the heterosexual's novel, while poor Butley is too busy bitching to get ahead on his study of T. S. Eliot...
...Perhaps immolation is genuinely meant to be taken as Pippin's self-fulfillment...
...Where old Miss Ryan sings about sex, young Miss Leland Palmer embodies it, even wearing a red fright wig...
...But the conception does justify the talking head, a magnificent pile of lopped limbs, and a battle sequence that approaches the dizzy heights of the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup, chanting "to war, to war...
...The difference is that while Harry, like Pippin, sought fulfillment in vain, his show had nothing else to offer, whereas in Pippin the productions along the way prevail: No one at this late hour of the 20th century could seriously accept the notion that a hero, even one from the 8th century, would regard war as an attractive enterprise...
...I believe we are to take him to be a martyr of timidity...
...he has after all been informed about his immediate predecessor...
...I suppose Pippin's is as good as any...
...I suspect the decision to elect Charlemagne's second son Pippin the protagonist of the evening must have resembled the procedure of Max Beerbohm's "Savonarola" Brown: Brown is the man who decided to write a verse tragedy on Sardanapalus, began to look Sarda-napalus up in the encyclopedia and, happening upon the entry on Savonarola, chose to compose on the grim monk instead...
...Also, his wife hints at his having tried to prove something by marrying her, and that might appear to clinch the case...
...After politics turns out to be self-defeating, our hero falls into despair...
...Bates is good, the script is clever, the laughs plenteous, and the review might end here, except for one sidelight that has created some confusion...
...Although the play's objective evidence says he is not gay, one would naturally think that he is...
...No one considers sex to be a momentary and soon-forgotten discovery of youth...
...Simon Gray's Butley is basically a collection of very funny lines brilliantly delivered by Alan Bates in the leading role...
...But that doesn't matter, since it is the excuse for bringing Irene Ryan and her illuminated manuscript on for a spirited song of love...
...Indeed, I would have been content if the trouble had been taken merely to distinguish Pippin from his grandfather, Pippin the Short, with whom the theater people seem to have gotten him confused...
...Does this simply mean that Butley is hiding in his closet, asserting masculinity in order to fend off possible accusations...
...In spite of probability, let us assume that Butley is an overt homosexual, that the publisher was not told, that Butley somehow finds this out and therefore feels safe twitting his rival...
...Now, showmanship is by no means a despicable virtue for a show, but the showmen who fashioned these entertainments apparently feared that it was either not enough or not quite respectable enough...
...Why it was necessary to attach all these wonders to the court of Charlemagne and to the tiresome old quest for self-fulfillment remains a mystery...
...More bothersome, however, is the quest-for-fulfillment theme upon which the play has strung its jewels...
...At any rate, the winsome widow foils the schemes of the master of ceremonies, so it might just as well have been an afterthought...
...Butley's annoyance with teaching English and his irritation over his wife and roommate do not, by themselves, seem entirely adequate excuses for his behavior, and some reviewers, seeking explanation, have concluded that he is a homosexual...
...Maybe so, yet the publisher supposes him to be a genuine, unambiguous heterosexual...
...When this role was played by Alec Guiness in London, what was remarkable was that this tough, masculine criminal was so convincing as a woman...
...But even suspending our disbelief this far, the theory does not work: Butley indulges his anti-fairy spleen before his roommate and his wife, and no one calls him on it...
...and Butley has been weighted down with a hero of confused, and confusing, sexuality...
...Sure enough, she succeeds, for Pippin's way of spreading sunshine turns out to be social revolution...
...That is, he nominally teaches English...
...Pippin might just as well have been any other great man's son????even Sardanapalus' for that matter...
...Like Gray's previous effort, Butley is about a man who does not comprehend his own sexual nature ????though to work that fact out practically requires the diligence of a detective...
...Butley teaches English at a college of London University...
...The main character is a hard-boiled criminal on the run who is compelled by necessity and by a deeply resented homosexual admirer to disguise himself as a woman...
...But locked in conversation with the homosexual publisher, Butley gets off a series of withering, vicious insults directed at gays...
...Are we really to believe that the stage's magic, Miss Ryan's song, Miss Palmer's dancing, and the incidental antics of Ben Vereen as the Leading Player????All seducing Pippin away from the path of Righteousness ????were somehow bad for our hero and for us...
...To our surprise, the elegant master of ceremonies, oddly called the "Leading Player," now informs us that despair had been the destined end of Pippin's quest all along...
...He diagnoses Butley's nasty talk as an instance of "affectation and bitchiness in heterosexuals...
...So Pippin has been provided with an historical habitation and half-hearted profundity, each superfluous as well as inappropriate...
...actually, he spends most of his working hours dodging his students and maliciously excoriating the world...
...Two of New York's daily drama critics assumed as much as a matter of course, and the blurb on the American edition of the play votes the same way by asserting that "he has been sharing both office and bed" with his roommate...
...Still on this strange thought revolves the show's plot, leading us to bestow credit where it is due—upon Bob Fosse's direction and choreography and Stephen Schwartz's songs, rather than on Roger O. Hirson's perfunctory book...
...And when he suspects Butley of having dodged military service by posing as queer, he mutters darkly about "people pretending to be what they're not...
...Just before Pippin arrived, a hapless Broadway musical called Hurry, Harry proved a strong argument against publicly seeking fulfillment to musical accompaniment...
...JL^futley gives every sign of being a possessive homosexual lover when he nags his roommate about his new attachment...
...If Butley had been his roommate's lover, obviously the new lover, the publisher, would have been told...
...Fortunately, the play's primary function is to entertain, and Ben Butley would be entertaining no matter which sex he decided to join...
...From the play's wee shreds of plot, it becomes clear that she is out to spoil Pippin's chances for the throne????especially when she urges him, in his quest for self-fulfillment, to "spread a little sunshine...
...Butley's one-man show of witty complaints is terribly funny, and its fun is obviously in direct proportion to Butley's wretchedness...
...And this, I feel, is the key to Butley's problem...
...With Donald Pleasence playing the fugitive in New York, Wise Child made no sense at all because Pleasence made no attempt to impersonate a woman...
...from where I was sitting, it looked suspiciously like an afterthought...
...He has plenty to complain about, too...
...Yet if it was felt that the action had to be set down in some remote, colorful period of history...
...Yet Walter Kerr, writing in the New York Times, found no hint of homosexuality...
...Gray's earlier play, Wise Child, has a partial parallel...
Vol. 55 • November 1972 • No. 23
