On Stage
SAUVAGE, LEO
On Stage SPRING SALAD BY LEO SAUVAGE IF a real-life episode whose salient quality is its bizarreness is being milked for a Broadway theatrical production, one hopes that those responsible...
...Eiko Ishioka's transvestite costumes for Wong are impressive, and her symbolic scenery has class—even if she is not too successful atevokingaParisian jail...
...Beneath the transfigured Sophoclean trappings, the real show is "The Gospel at Broadway...
...The story, juxtaposing various fragments taken from Sophocles, is equally jumbled...
...The practice of " indentured servitude," whereby British debtors and deportees obtained passage to America in return for signing over their future labor for a fixed period of time, came into existence in 1619...
...Most of the meditating—or premeditating—that goes on in the play is done by the Chinese opera singer, who is given the name Song Liling (B.D...
...So I may be a minority of one, but in my view the flaws and failings outweigh the merits in both productions...
...In the spring of 1986, French security agents arrested Bernard Boursicot, a former low-level diplomat who had once served in China, together with Shi Peipu, his mistress of 20 years...
...LuciaHwong's score deftly insinuates Chinese melodies into Puccini's music...
...Those who still feel that way will be moved by Delroy Lindo's ostentatiously drawn-out enactment of an epileptic seizure at the Ethel Barrymore...
...for Monsieur—in the title...
...Like the superb Tango Argentino of a few seasons ago, Oba-Oba is winning the plaudits of New York audiences...
...The play is said to be a meditation on the ways the West and the East misunderstand each other...
...From the more revealing of the flashbacks, one infers that the occidental diplomat's experience would have been much the same had he been dealing with, say, a deceptively shy Greek dancer...
...They have been greeted with some of the most laudatory adjectives in the English language...
...Strange as it seems today, critics and spectators used to regard the pathological accuracy with which students of Lee Strasberg's Actor's Studio mimicked, say, the withdrawal symptoms of a drug addict as the peak of dramatic art...
...For others, this and smaller realistic touches, such as the running water in the kitchen sink, may at least serve to divert attention from the fact that all the characters in Joe Turner are stereotypes (unlike, it should be noted, the ones in August Wilson's earlier and much better Fences, still running at the 46th Street Theater...
...But a very enjoyable evening can be had by tuning out the narrative and simply listening to the joyous gospel singers and choirs perform Bob Telson's musical arrangements...
...We are further informed that, with 64 actors and singers, it has the largest cast in Broadway history...
...I recall the name of General William Westmoreland cropping up somewhere, although I could not say why...
...No complaint either about Jamie H.J...
...While making rich use of such familiar dances as the samba and bossa nova, the Rio de Janeiro company that has brought us this "extravaganza" presents a dazzling display of every African-derived aspect of Brazil's culture...
...Since that was presumed to give him a point of access to Chinese society no one else at the consulate had, he was suddenly elevated to the rank of viceconsul and put in charge of intelligence...
...M. Butterfly is conceived not only as a fictionalized account of the Boursicot-Shi affair, but also as a reversal of Puccini's 1904 Madama Butterfly— with the tall, white Westerner as the victim...
...Several times an enlarged poster purportedly illustrating Mao's influence on French intellectual life is lowered...
...We are told that it "reconceives Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus as parable-like sermons on the ways of fate and particularly on a happy death...
...Guan's martial arts intermezzo in the style of the Beijing Opera...
...his portrayal of Song Liling qualifies him for inclusion in the ranks of the great female impersonators who became famous after World War I. John Lithgow, heretofore mainly a character actor, manages to hold his own until the epilogue, when the author and director irresistibly drag him down with them...
...Either "Monsieur Butterfly" has been overcome by his love for Song, or he has committed hari-kari—it's hard to say which...
...In David Henry Hwang's M Butterfly, alas, what we are treated to is an utterly unrestrained pseudo-psychological melodrama...
...Oedipus is metamorphosed into a visiting pastor who, strangely enough, builds his sermon on ancient pagan legends...
...On Stage SPRING SALAD BY LEO SAUVAGE IF a real-life episode whose salient quality is its bizarreness is being milked for a Broadway theatrical production, one hopes that those responsible will stick to a satiric/absurdist approach and dispense with pretensions to sentimental or esthetic profundity...
...The other production that has been received with unrestrained enthusiasm is The Gospel at Colonus, now installed in the Lunt-Fontanne Theater...
...Like his real-life counterpart, he had been a minor bureaucrat in the French consulate in Beijing when word got around that he was romantically involved with a member of the opera company...
...There is little drama in this " dramatization" of the Oedipus tale...
...This "new musical," set in ablack Pentecostal church, had its debut at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1983 and was broadcast on PBS in 1985...
...What Gallimard really misunderstands, though, is how a man relates to a woman and vice versa...
...Yet s/he apparently has few misconceptions about the West, and still fewer about the man s/he has been duping...
...Among other recent openings on Broadway, two in particular promise to be Tony Award contenders at the end of the season...
...The Boursicot figure is here called Gallimard (a famous name in French publishing whose choice is nowhere hinted at...
...Hwang seems to have decided the audience would not be very curious about the sexual stratagems that have supposedly beguiled Gallimard into believing he is sleeping with a woman...
...Handy...
...But Dexter gets hopelessly entangled in the complications of the second act, and he hits bottom in the last half-hour, a rather grotesque epilogue...
...The incredible pretext of this play, recently unveiled at the Eugene O'Neill Theater, came to light in a news report out of Paris two years ago concerning a curious case of "cohabitation"—albeit not one involving President François Mitterrand and Prime Minister Jacques Chirac...
...The most exciting event on the Great White Way during the last few weeks, I would argue, was the arrival of ObaOba at the Ambassador Theater, after a triumphal tour of Europe...
...He nearly justifies it during the first half of M. Butterfly, delicately advancing the special relationship between Gallimard and Song...
...That leaves one area perhaps worthy of serious dramatic examination, and the playwright ignores it as well: Why in 1986 would a Frenchman whose diplomatic career was behind him prefer to pass for a complete idiot rather than admit his homosexuality...
...The playwright's embellishments are another matter...
...The Chinese elements in M. Butterfly are ornamental, spectacular and altogether exterior to whatever meaning Hwang and director John Dexter might be trying to get across...
...It is set in a black boarding house in Pittsburgh circa 1911, yet what it really takes you back to is the period several decades ago when unrelieved "verism" dominated the American stage...
...This fantasy, directed at the pace of a solemn ritual, has Song Liling shed his feminine make-up and opera costume to appear as an elegant yuppie, complete with fashionable suspenders...
...Wong...
...Altogether it is a stunning production...
...The rest of the cast is given nothing to say by Hwang and nothing to do by Dexter...
...Finally, he moves upstage and collapses face down...
...and The Five Blind Boys of Alabama, who frequently back up Fountain...
...His role is shared by seven individuals: Morgan Freeman, who narrates it...
...More interesting than the slice of life served up by Wilson's new work is the historical footnote that furnishes its point of departure...
...Then, just as methodically, Gallimard dons the magnificent garments Song has left on the floor, transforming himself into an enormous Chinese transvestite...
...The stage is indeed overcrowded...
...In addition, there are a few ridiculously simple-minded sketches about Mao Zedong and his Cultural Revolution...
...What we get too often is a congeries of Method-acting exercises...
...What propelled this otherwise not very extraordinary story into the headlines was an additional pair of revelations: first, that the soprano in question was in fact a man, and second, that the diplomat-paramour never, during their long and intimate relationship, had the slightest inkling of this—or so he insisted, at any rate...
...Joe Turner's Come and Gone, at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, is the latest play by August Wilson to have emerged from the Yale Repertory Theater under the direction of Lloyd Richards...
...As for the baby Song convinces him s/he has had (surely the most preposterous unexplained item in the actual news story) the play shows Chinese intelligence officers supplying it to their agent...
...Hwang has tossed into his inverted Butterfly various politicalhistorical allusions that are intended to modernize the 1904 libretto, but the result is a mere hodge-podge...
...That was the same year the first Africans were imported to Virginia—officially as "bound servants," not slaves...
...The inspiration and the title for Joe Turner's Come and Gone was drawn from a blues ballad about a trafficker in humans written by the legendary Memphis songwriter W.C...
...Wong...
...Indentured servitude was abolished before the end of the 18th century, but it was revived for a time after the Civil War as a legal cover for one-time slave traders to continue to sell blacks to plantation owners, if only for seven-year stints...
...John Dexter has made quite a reputation for himself both on Broadway and at the Metropolitan Opera since his directorial debut 15 years ago...
...And for good reasons: beautiful women dancers, highly acrobatic men, outstanding musicians, "rhythm beaters" playing strange instruments indigenous to different parts of Brazil...
...Despite its basis in this incident, there is nothing French about M. Butterfly, save the "M...
...if it is meant to suggest the period 1968-70, however, it should have omitted the expression Front Populaire, associated with the mid-' 30s, and the reference to Le Temps, a paper that ceased publication in 1944...
...Shi, an erstwhile soprano with the Beijing Opera, was accused of having been a spy for the Communist regime during the American phase of the Vietnam War, and Boursicot was charged as her accomplice...
...Director Lee Breuer, who is also the author of the book and lyrics, must function mainly as a traffic cop—not something he is much good at, judging from all the hurly-burly...
...Kudos is due B.D...
...Clarence Fountain, who sings it...
...Two decades later Gallimard (John Lithgow) is in a Paris prison, relating these and subsequent events to us by means of flashbacks...
...Unfortunately, in striving for realism Wilson and his director sacrificed the poetry of the blues...
Vol. 71 • April 1988 • No. 7
