On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage OFF AND OFF-OFF BROADWAY BY STEFAN KANFER Sometime during the Roaring Twenties, Damon Runyon convinced the American public that thugs were funny. Men like Nathan Detroit and...
...But a woman with that accent and background would surely have said faigeleh...
...Preen (William H. Macy) is an overptotected WASP, no longer young but stiil Mama's little treasure, prissy rather than effeminate, and incapable of significant human relations...
...as Mark Twain noted long ago, the difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug...
...In addition to wearing bathing suits and ball gowns, each entrant has to prove that he / she has more than beauty going for him / her, and one of them goes ecological: "I am The Land...
...Gogol and Mr...
...but hey, every society needs a sustaining myth, right...
...But the Lower East Side has a more compelling attraction: the Living Theater, now in its 40th year...
...Children cut down by crossfire...
...Preen...
...Both of these archetypes have been around much too long...
...Her very title suggested a breakthrough, with its reference to the Russian surrealist...
...Pageant, a burlesque of beauty-contest hype, is an exception...
...Prohibition has been gone for almost 60 years, but that legend still finds a home in films like Prizzi 's Honor, Married to the Mob and The Freshman...
...Before Gogol can protest, Preen falls mysteriously ill and has to spend the night, the week, and then the fortnight...
...Then came opening night...
...The Woman, as she is billed, is a melancholy person of a certain age, consigned to wait out in the hall and wonder what can be transpiring between these two unwilling roommates...
...But no...
...May toys with the notion of strange friendships that can spring up in an alienating city...
...The tone of the entire production is only a hemidemisemiquaver away from the real thing: Miss West Coast, for example, is "an est graduate interested in tie-dying wall to wall carpeting...
...Preen is time...
...Tom Bynum's set of ladders and fragmented walls adds to the illusion of an evening spent across the river Styx...
...And Gogol can barely find enough coherence to slam the door on the only lady in his life (Zohra Lampert...
...Gogol and Mr...
...Humanity was the first of such ventures, and the best...
...Other entendres are similarly double...
...Drug pushing...
...Christianity and capitalism appear to be his only interests...
...Essentially this is a one-joke comedy, the joke is a dishonest one, and besides, it has been told many times before...
...Storch's vast comic energy is immediately missed, and therein lies the trouble with Breaking Legs...
...At the upper Broadway Promenade Theater Director John Tillinger keeps the amiable cast moving con brio, and he almost gets away with the caper...
...Meanwhile, Angie gets her own ideas of drama when the professor massages her foot, thereby propelling her into multiple orgasms...
...Here was a performer/ writer who had set the tone for bold extempore comedy way back in the '50s, when she and Mike Nichols ornamented clubs, television and thetheater...
...His Eastern European intonations fade away and return in the manner of a weak FM signal, and his lethargy is infectious...
...Or are they unwilling...
...Sweating and palavering copiously, he makes the mistake of trying to con the con men, and gets dispatched late in the first act...
...Loan sharking is their main source of income, supplemented by some legit businesses, among them an Italian restaurant...
...Macy moves tentatively like a child in the dark, but when the occasion calls for sudden action—as when a folding bed falls on him —he can move like Michael Jordan...
...Into the garlic-scented dining room steps an English professor, Terence O'Keefe (Nicolas Surovy), who has just written a play...
...Men like Nathan Detroit and NicelyNicely Johnson suddenly became emblems of a gangland populated by benign naifs, who would rather shoot off their mouths than their guns...
...and the parodies of cosmetic commercials are explosively comic...
...They would have to be: The Living Theater has been reduced to performances in a reconditioned store...
...No doubt that is why directors Elena Jandova and Martin Reckhaus set their metronome for a few ticks above frantic, and never let up or down for a nanosecond...
...TOMPKTNS Square Park made all the news when Mayor David Dinkins decided to take it back from the squatters...
...His life may be something to laugh about, but not his death, and certainly not the men who arranged it...
...All very obvious, very fast and, despite lapses of taste, very funny...
...Lively or menacing arguments ought to ensue...
...Humanity stimulates the cerebrum...
...Most of the seven men in the cast are uncommonly skilled—especially Miss Bible Belt (Randl Ash), who lampoons both Jim amd Tammy Bakker...
...For a brief, exhilarating moment I thought that Elaine May would salvage things with her new work, Mr...
...The newspapers and the evening news tell a very different story about the underworld...
...A series of lame ideas (like those in The Will Rogers Follies), and safely distant problems (cf...
...Preen counters by proclaiming his own received ideas...
...Its plot is hardly more than a peg on which to hang ideas and attitudes...
...a man is judged guilty and sentenced to die...
...the headlines trumpet of international murder and money...
...The rarely performed playwright is Walter Hasenclever, an avant-garde German who flourished immediately before and after World War I. While his friends Oskar Kokoschka and Franz Werfel conducted their experiments in other cultural areas, Hasenclever attempted to tincture the mystical ideas of Emanuel Swedenborg with a distinctly Teutonic acrimony and cynicism...
...Gogol is so lonely that he keeps Preen a virtual prisoner, hiding his glasses and his clothes...
...Never heardofit...
...it is the speeches that ultimately undo him...
...Occasionally these are worth repeating: "The man who tells the lie must continue it...
...Not a chance...
...Humanity, its current production, carries on in the great tradition of its founders, Julian Beck and Judith Malina...
...A corpse rises from his grave to wander for one last day among the living...
...At the Blue Angel Theater in mid-Manhattan, the Miss America pageant is belatedly receiving the sendup it has always deserved...
...Yet after Preen recovers and makes his escape, he returns to nurse his ailing warden...
...A sixtyish widower with no visible means of support is puttering around when a vacuum cleaner salesman pays an unwanted call...
...Sitting on hard benches sans intermission has the opposite effect on the sacroiliac...
...Or in this case, between a play and a plaything...
...Lampert, that wonderful and underemployed actress, at least has the proper Yiddish spirit...
...When one of the Wiseguys wishes Terence well, he shouts, "break your legs...
...As he caroms around an unnamed city he attempts to elicit some altruism and decency from a society obsessed with profits and violence...
...Faced with a bankruptcy of incident and insight, Director Gregory Mosher creates some diversion with lively sight gags...
...Unfortunately, she is undone by the playwright...
...Every time the authorities get ready to administer extreme unction to this institution it manages to find new energy and new audiences...
...Gogol (Mike Nussbaum) is a tired Jewish radical, sequestered behind books and pamphlets...
...Surovy is the embodiment of academic ignorance, and as the calorific Angie ("I was prematurely mature") Giosa manages to be simultaneously common and radiant...
...It is all as remote as 1918, and as familiar as this morning...
...Otherwise his conversation is as cluttered and dim as his apartment...
...All this is expressed with single, loaded words: "Justice," "Pregnant," "Money," "War," and with kinetic movements that suggest a ballet in the third circle of hell...
...Two legs is better...
...whenever Preen finds the energy to debate he gets queasy and has to lie down...
...Mike was right about da seckind ack...
...Do you hear me cry when you pierce me with your tools...
...The only thing that gets killed in Mr...
...the poor beg vainly...
...Wrongly suspecting a sexual liaison between the men, The Woman accuses Gogol of being "a fleg...
...They include a bathroom flood that forces Gogol to play a living room Noah...
...Lost in Yonkers) have paraded on and off Broadway, the halt leading the bland...
...Nussbaum makes the most of his slapstick...
...The most depressing characteristic of this season has been its timorousness...
...the second was a great favorite of Alfred Hitchcock, who usually turned him into a murderer...
...In a small, effective role, Larry Storch plays Frankie, a pathetic loser who owes the boys a bundle, plus the vigorish he can never pay back...
...Drag shows are usually precisely that —dull and often hostile caricatures of women, performed by actors with too many sibilants, too much makeup and too little talent...
...In less than two hours the audience is presented with 19 actors, 24 scenes and five acts, all of them effective...
...Once again there is an unusual author, vibrant young performers, and maximum discomfort for the audience...
...A child starves...
...Playwright Tom Dulack, himself a professor at the University of Connecticut, uses this premise to serve up an antipasto of Mafia jokes and intramural theater gags...
...Vince Gardenia is, as always, hilariously furrowed with self-importance...
...But toying is all that May does over two stagnant acts...
...The first can be found in any number of Isaac Bashevis Singer's tales...
...Bosco, usually seen in Shavian comedies, lets his remaining hair down while stomping across the stage in a pageant of sharkskin suits, pinkie rings and extravagant takes...
...Reminded of the proper shibboleth, he explains, "Break a leg is good...
...In the course of his stay, both men submit thumbnail autobiographies...
...Themafiosi conceive an extraordinary notion: They will become Broadway backers, principally because the nominal restaurant owner has a daughter, Angie (Sue Giosa), with the hots for the prof...
...Da seckind ack needs woik" says Mike during the second act, articulating a line that probably antedates Euripides...
...If the pace faltered for an instant the play's magic would dissipate...
...The signs were promising...
...the wealthy gorge themselves...
...Gogol labels himself "a remarkist: I make remarks...
...This year's theatrical contribution is entitled Breaking Legs...
...That's why the incumbent is always re-elected...
...The gangsters here are three New England small potatoes: Lou (Vincent Gardenia), Mike (Philip Bosco) and Tino (Victor Argo...
...At the Mitzi Newhouse Theater in Lincoln Center, May offers familiarity in place of audacity, and doodles instead of dialogue...
...and a temporarily blinded Preen stepping in unfortunate places—particularly a plate that holds pancakes and syrup...
Vol. 74 • May 1991 • No. 7
