Theater of the Inane

...and Jake Dengel's Lenny was a run-of-the-mill homosexual, from his lilting voice to his mincing step...

...And by that test Ulysses fails miserably...

...A synopsis will give you the idea...

...Innaurato's earlier works, The Transfiguration of Benno Blimpie and Gemini, also had their false moments, but these were overwhelmed by a genuine power, plus the urgency of a voice that had a great deal to say...

...John, holder (like Innaurato) of an MFA in playwriting from Yale, was accidentally neutered by surgeons while at that noble institution...

...I'm scared of all of myself...

...Send only envelopes to your friends, that the good spirits may fill them...

...No, that's bathos of the rankest kind, rendered fouler for being uttered by a patently phoney character...

...Homosexuality is so important to Innaurato, in fact, that he has provided a discussion of whether American theater is dominated by "nihilistic faggots" who write because "they can't come...

...Such willed bonhomie can possibly be explained as bid to get to Broadway, although even the Great White Way's patrons, willing to put up with anything if it is cloying enough, would be hard pressed to sit through Ulysses...

...Never has such drivel, such high school literary magazine lyricism, been perpetrated on an audience: "I realize you are not accustomed to the visions of a man of color with a gift...

...This time-honored device invariably has been used, first, to rouse the audience from its stolid belief in a distinction between drama and life, dreaming and waking, madness and sanity, illusion and reality...

...Steve's mistress, Doris, is a perpetual bedwarmer...

...Lest we think Innaurato's assessment of humanity is completely dour, he has given us a foil: Mae, the black cleaning woman...

...The place is a hall in Chapel University, Detroit...

...Don't ever forget I have large sad eyes...

...That's the music of every inch of our insides, praising this life...

...William Hurt, however, made the stupid and disagreeable role of John more stupid and disagreeable, and flubbed countless lines...

...Existence is strife" is the gist of Innaurato's message...

...This hackneyed conception is matched by hackneyed characters...

...Gradually the hall and its almost all white inhabitants are severed from the larger world...

...Innaurato is more loyal to the subject of homosexuality...

...Oz Scott's direction, David Mitchell's scenery and Victor En Yu Tan's lighting design were responsible for a photograph's gorgeous look...

...The theatergoer deserves to be enlightened, or at least entertained, not quizzed...

...We are human beings come with nothing but thrusts and blood...

...Left to themselves, the stranded resort to Jewish cannibalism—eating each other's hearts out...

...When not busy climbing onto the backs of the literary giants, it is clubbing its audience with half-baked Big Ideas, vulgar melodrama and whopping cliches...

...Along with the title's bow to Homer and James Joyce, there are references, verbal or visual, to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and King Lear, Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, and Gunter Grass' The Ple-bians Rehearse the Uprising...

...Marshall Mason's direction was adequate, and John Lee Beatty's set was better than that...

...Stuart Humphreys, Jack Davidson gives the one believable performance, a moving portrayal of a man life has embittered almost beyond endurance...

...Doubtless there were others, but the tedious catch-the-writer-quoting game should be saved for English professors...

...The cast was tawdry, as was the direction, and the set—a brick wall with a lamp stuck in its middle—unpleasantly reminded me of motel facades throughout Ohio...

...There are three superlative performances here, a high number for any production...

...The Circle Repertory Theater's acting was neither here nor there, which is to say, invisible...

...Despite this energy spent telling us that homosexuality is a crucial issue, the climax of the play incredibly insists that sexuality does not count...

...Inside, various drama graduate school teachers and professors are rehearsing a fulsome piece about an American soldier in Vietnam...

...Outside, apart from the war dividing America, there's a riot going on, complete with evil-sounding black voices, bombs, machine-gun fire, and the heavy-handed tweet-tweet of little birds...

...Trish Hawkins was a colorless Emma...

...As Dr...

...And Ulysses' sole functioning heterosexuals, Doris and Steve, are its sole truly unlikeable characters as well...

...Like the flower, I can bloom, be a whisper of sunlight...

...Happily, he is not violent ("I kill only for money") and he settles for Princess (she has no say in the matter...

...The story concerns three black women—an ethereal dancer, a raunchy demimondaine and a cold high society type—in love with an ambitious black photographer who is convinced that what women want most dangles between his legs...

...Certainly, to judge by a photograph: a study in cruelty—hex followup to For Colored Girls, etc.— she has hardly a shred of talent to call her own...

...so do all women, who are drawn to the meanest fellow (Edwards identifies nasti-ness with elan) with the amplest supply of bedroom tricks...

...but not before Martin has revealed to Princess that what he does for a living is, gasp, kill people...

...I can't let go, I can't hold on...

...God in me...

...he watches TV, drinks brandy and ignores his wife, Princess...

...Even the program notes are not immune...

...The sexy and lithe Michele Shay is a fitting Ariadne for him, a blend of innocence and strength that never ceases to please...

...Actually, they are less characters than caricatures, problems or traumas incarnate...

...to be, to be-ing, to know, to reveal, to have truth and love and integration of my-selves, a wholeness—as within without...

...He is incapable of affection but quite capable of cruelty, having himself been a victim of his father's hatred and society's injustice...

...Ntozake Shange would be apalled by the Negro Ensemble Company's The Offering, a work marking the debut of a young black playwright, Gus Edwards...

...and, second, to illuminate the larger action...

...Bob Tyrone, an aged, once no-good black, now retired, leads a boring life...

...I am soil, I am seed, I am fire, I am hope...

...While Albert Innaurato walks about in the Emperor's clothes at the Circle Repertory, Ntozake Shange, whose name, to paraphrase Wilde, is pronounced as it is not written, haughtily strolls in the Empress' at the Public Theater.' Shange is making a handsome career out of being a black woman, chiefly preying, I suspect, on the sympathies of white critics and audiences...

...On Stage THEATER OF THE INANE by dean valentine If allusions a play made, Albert Innaurato's Ulysses in Traction would be the hit of the off-Broadway season, instead of the puny and lifeless affair that it is...

...He has, too, a nearly perfect body, and when we tire of the gobbledygook he must spout, we can take comfort in admiring it...

...If Winston appeared in them, 10 Shange plays would not be too many to sit through...

...But the evening's real revelation belongs to Hattie Winston's Claire, a woman whose loneliness initiates Shange's one memorable monologue—simultaneously bitchy, sensual, funny, and heart-rending...

...we are all brothers...

...Sharon Madden and Ken Kliban were unspeakable as Doris and Steve...

...It is fortunate for Shange and for producer Joseph Papp that the players are much better than their self-descriptions...

...In the last act, Bob suffers a heart attack and dies, and Edwards thus disposes of whatever dramatic tension existed in the situation...

...Stu, the director, is an alcoholic obsessed by failure...

...indeed, he rarely misses a chance to drag it in...

...Hence, when insults are to be landed, the coup de grace is delivered below the belt...

...She is gritty and down to earth, as blacks are wont to be when whites create them, and to her belongs the uncertain distinction of describing the road out of the surrounding Sturm und Drang: "And between us—we'll find something to praise...

...Emma, the prop-person, is a failed artist and all-too-successful lesbian...

...Ginny remains in New York to attend dance classes...

...His thesis is that black men have just one thing in mind...

...Take, for example, the opening scene—the play-within-a-play...

...Martin leaves for Las Vegas with Princess, she presumably having understood that the young triumphs over the old...

...Martin, a toothy, amiable black sharpie, and his white dumb chorine girlfriend, come to visit Bob, who it turns out taught Martin everything about surviving in the world...

...The longest scene, moreover, pits the limp-wristed Lenny against the merely limp John...

...But a photograph's gravest flaw is language...

...Yet the device, once introduced, is rapidly shorn of its purposes and degenerates into an extended—albeit funny—parody of David Rabe and Ron Cowen...

...Innaurato includes it hoping to whet our appetite for serious drama, or perhaps to prove he did not receive his MFA for nothing...

...There intelligibility stops...

...Much of the blame must rest with the author for having created a bunch of laughable—or sickening, depending on your mood —grotesques, but fine acting can often transcend a script's limitations...

...Steve, the macho chairman of the department, bears responsibility for the death of his son, who shot himself with his father's gun...

...Lenny is an aging teacher of homosexuality and acting...

...I have not the faintest notion how the multitudinous vignettes that comprise the play are related, why one woman dressed as an alfalfa field did an African dance, why publicity shots of the actors were flashed onto the set, or how Alexander Dumas, often mentioned, fits into this mess, other than his having been black and famous...

...Avery Brooks' photographer has a jive hubris that tenuously controls his violent suffering...

...Of course the older man still has some life in him, and he spirits Ginny into the bedroom...

...In Ulysses urgency and content have everywhere been replaced by pseudo-profundity...

...This is sheer Grand Guignol, not "the brutal urban world suffused with menace, sexuality and the ever-present threat of violence" that a flyer accompanying my program claimed...

...One actress writes of herself: "On the move, on to go...