On Stage
KANFER, STEPAN
On Stage A TRIO OF SOLOS BY STEFAN KANFER U?til some anonymous Greek genius invented dialogue, the stage was occupied by soloists. Now, after 2,000 years of conversation, the one person show...
...For years African-Americans have spoken derisively of Oreos, those who are black on the outside and white within...
...But Director Peter Askin has given Mambo Mouth the requisite shape and tone, and in two sketches Leguizamo exhibits an unmistakable star quality...
...Home Box Office turns out to be one of the show's coproducers (another is Mrs...
...The hell with them, he tells thewalls, "Ineverneedednobody...
...By contrast, the women's dinner consisted of beef "suggesting the rumps of cattle in a muddy market...
...Beverly may have been flat-chested, Florence recalled, but Erroll was mad about her...
...In its lampoon of two stereotypes "Crossover King" becomes a fresh and brilliant riff on the old sad song of assimilation in America...
...Who cares any more whose thigh was pressed by Lytton Strachey, what Maynard Keynes said to Clive Bell, or how many headaches Virginia Woolf complained about to Violet Dickinson...
...Louis comes on like a Spanish sentence, with the exclamation point in front...
...Loco Louis is a teen-age put-down artist ("Your mama is so stupid she trips over the cordless phone...
...Now, thanks to his instruction, they have turned into uptight executives wearing corporate drab...
...As a hired hand Leguizamo has graced a few unremarkable films and OffBroadway productions...
...Offhand A Room of One's Own, a slim volume that emerged from those two appearances, does not seemalikely premise for contemporary theater...
...One of them recalls the epochal moments in 1928 when a shy middle-aged novelist named Virginia Woolf stepped behind a lectern at Cambridge and fired some opening shots in the modern feminist movement...
...Besides, her theme is being sung by more strident and effective voices...
...To make matters worse, Mrs...
...Given supernumerary stagehands, rearscreen projections, costumes, design, wardrobe, and publicity, it cost close to a million dollars to present The Big Love —without the star's salary...
...de nos jours...
...For unlike so many in the Sisterhood, Woolf recognized that the militant feminist was just as disabled as the male chauvinist, and that sexual equality could best be won with irony, subtlety, logic, and intelligence...
...magazine has come and gone and come again...
...Made up to look like Tammy Faye Bakker in the rain, she gets the wrong end of the shtick in bouts with a window blind and a badly wrapped package, exaggerates her American accent, and postures and simpers as if she were playing for the close-up camera...
...Clothbound, this nattering cast a peculiar spell...
...Gradually the ethnicity was erased, and "now I listen to Lite FM...
...Like being Japanese...
...A priapic talk show host fills the night with machismo—"I'm not omnipresent, I'm only omnipotent"—and gives himself away by referring to his conquests as "mamas...
...Happily, only a few blocks away two performers have redeemed the notion of the theatrical solo as an art form...
...Such thoughts still seem revolutionary as Atkins warms to her theme and her character, the eyes roving until an idea is caught and pinned down, the querulous voice arguing with history and determined to be heard...
...Leguizamo invests him/her with a wild comic dignity, especially in a memory of revenge with Krazy Glue, taken on a brutal and faithless lover...
...Although Mambo Mouth occurs within a few hundred steps of the Plymouth, it might be going on in another galaxy...
...Economics has a lot to do with the trend...
...Other than Woolf's long-suffering husband Leonard, the writer never had a more sensitive editor...
...He ends as a collage of agitated hustle and bottomless insecurity, swaggering to an empty street...
...To put an end to such waste she advocated financial and emotional independence: Any woman who wanted to write works of the imagination needed "500 pounds and a room with alock on the door...
...The cast was created in improvisation classes at the American Place Theater, and some rough edges reveal their workshop origins...
...The dark suited Oriental reveals that he was once Hispanic, "obnoxious and full of street mannerisms...
...And her price could not have been cheap: Tracey Ullman is the Sammy Davis Jr...
...Jay Presson Allen and her daughter Brooke provide a stage adaptation that replaces the aura of innocence with an air of condescension...
...Yakimoto conducts what he calls a crossover seminar...
...Even so, the Plymouth Theater is no Broadway discount house...
...forever "prostrated" by depression, she managed to grind out 27 books, countless letters, plus voluminous diaries about her incapacity...
...In a sparkling passage she imagined a person called Judith Shakespeare, William's sister, who died too young, possessed of his genius but not his opportunity...
...But few bother to listen as he boasts of his sexual initiation at Nilda's Bodega and Bordello...
...The Big Love is the small potatoes...
...Allen's husband Lewis, lending new meaning to the term family plot), and this monologue may well wind up as a Special...
...As the lights catch her lank hair and equine face the illusion is wholly persuasive...
...The gentlemen's meals featured sole, partridges "many and various, with all their retinue of sauces," served with wine glasses "flushed yellow and crimson...
...You may know it by its other name, Western culture...
...One by one the layers of braggadocio are peeled away until a humiliated adolescent is exposed, lost in the fleshy mountain of an obese prostitute...
...Now, after 2,000 years of conversation, the one person show is back in style...
...Like Davis she is very closely related to theincandescent bulb, with only two states of being: On and Off...
...Good or bad...
...Actress and author are dissimilar physical types, but Atkins compensates with an inner glow and humor...
...and Jews have told many jokes about landsmen who passed for Christians so successfully that their mothers asked, "Tell me, son, are you still circumcised...
...Dessert was custard with prunes "as stringy as a miner's heart," and it was all washed down with tumblers of water...
...In some ways Florence was just as naïve as Beverly, and her confession had the pungency of Woolworth cologne: You may not have liked it, but you couldn't get it out of your head...
...Instead it is the freshest 63-year-old in town...
...At the Lambs Theater the distinguished character actress assembles her argument with precepts and examples —now funny, now melancholy, now acrimonious, now gracious, but always to the point...
...Producers are mesmerized by a script that calls for a lone performer and a single set...
...This is not the customary sentimental portrait of adrag queen...
...The British comedienne has long dominated prime-time television by singing, hoofing and doing impressions of everyone from cockney frumps to Michelle Pfeiffer...
...Virginia had doubts abouti Room...
...I have always thought Virginia's neurasthenia one of the great literary canards...
...The only thing special about it is the immense waste of energy and money...
...Behind bars an illegal immigrant vainly attempts to pass as Israeli or black Irish, and ends by ho wling, "Who'sgonnapickyourchef ssalad for you...
...Has an uneasy life in it, I think: You feel the creature arching its back and galloping on...
...Its declared purpose is the exposure of a vast racist and sexist patriarchal system...
...they spoke and ate with spice...
...The University of Missouri advises the next generation of journalism students that such loaded words as "housewife," "feminine," "pert," and "statuesque" are verboten...
...All seven flourish in the borough of Queens in New York City where they practice a variety of professions, some of them licit...
...A transvestite hooker stalks the sidewalks in a violent purple miniskirt and spike heels, tosses her fall, and does a wicked send-up of another female imposter, Madonna...
...He prods his audience: "Why settle for being Latino, when you can settle for so much more...
...Each is on display in Eileen Atkins' fervent impersonation of the author...
...Once they wore exuberant clothing, Yakimoto explains...
...Like his characters, this halfColombian, half-Puerto Rican 26-yearold bears close watching...
...Ullman is On for the entire evening of The Big Love, relentlessly carpet bombing us with her impression of Florence Aadland, mother of Erroll Flynn's last mistress...
...As the audience leaned forward she moved on to more important fare: the books by men about women, often inventive and always ignorant...
...Except for a handful of academics, we are all Bloomsburyed out...
...In the '90s everything—aluminum cans, soda bottles, newspapers, even theater pieces—comes up for recycling...
...the colleges that excluded females and then maligned them for not having brains...
...Almost 30years ago, Florence wrote a book-length apologia that became a camp classic...
...The final sketch contains enough fury to heat Spanish Harlem for the winter...
...Limbs oscillating like car aerials, a minor drug dealer fails to raise bail money from his mother, wife and girl friend...
...Which in a way she is...
...And Georgetown, formerly a university of and for vertebrates, offers a disdainful course entitled "White Male Writers...
...All the harmful flavor has been removed from their lives...
...Allen's direction has the delicacy of a whoopee cushion...
...As a playwright / actor Leguizamo is making one hell of a debut...
...When the word "God" is mentioned, for example, a picture of Louis ?. Mayer appears, centered in the MGM logo...
...She wanted the world to know that her daughter was named for Beverly Hills, and that even though the child was 15 when she met Flynn, she was still a virgin...
...All seven characters have written new lyrics to the "Song of Myself," sounding their barbaric yawps in Spanish and English...
...It hardly matters that adaptor-director Patrick Garland has omitted massive portions of theoriginal work...
...Unlike them, he is going to be rich and famous...
...Before and after photographs show a series of men and women...
...Igot more guts than a slaughterhouse...
...Woolf designed her lectures to show up the hypocrisy of male-dominated society and she began, wittily, with the college menus...
...as he delicately explained, "you can't make love to a breast...
...On that creature gallops past its seventh decade, uneasy, lively and ageless...
...Predictably, Ullman is encouraged to exhibit all of her worst TV mannerisms...
...she asked her diary...
...The people displayed in John Leguizamo's astonishing tour de force are Hispanic movers and shakers, but only of their own bodies...
...By now A Room should have been relegated to the status of a charming but badly faded antique...
Vol. 74 • March 1991 • No. 4
