On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage CAPTIVES AND CLOWNS BY STEFAN KANFER Irecently addressed a conference of the Elie Wiesel Foundation, convened to examine the sources of hate. Among the other speakers was former...
...What goes through a man's mind when he tries to discern who holds him and why, wondering when release will come —or, indeed, if it will come...
...They are always accompanied by the sound of Ella Fitzgerald warbling the Gershwin tune whose refrain provides the title of the play...
...That's why I moved to Manhattan...
...Neither the director nor the cast can elevate McGuinness' play to the stratum of the first-rate, but they make the most of its tense confrontations and provocative ideas...
...Nonetheless, Holy Terror's dialogue was edgy and witty, and the title character gave manic-depressive a good name...
...For like her less gifted colleagues, Kind is trapped in a piece of bogus nostalgia about the Borough of Kings in the days of Ebbets Field and the Brooklyn Paramount, when egg creams passed for champagne...
...Of course, the fact that she is Barbra Streisand's sister didn't hurt her chances...
...Although 1 usually prefer to wait until movies are on videotape, I will gladly stand in line to see this one...
...The lighting was by Phil Monat and the sound design by Raymond D. Schilke, both of whom should have no trouble getting work in Las Vegas...
...The one man was Daniel Gerroll, and he was terrific...
...Joseph K, Vladimir and Estragon have lived here, in the sterile landscape of bewildered souls, unspecified guilt, faceless authority, and omnipresent dread...
...But no...
...they performed the kind of rough gymnastics familiar to anyone who ever saw farmers stamping out grappa...
...Director Robin Lefevre unwisely punctuates Someone Who'll Watch Over Me with interludes of a starlit sky...
...Yet we do not know what those crimes were...
...But no...
...The humble cockroach has switched its venue from the clan of the cave bear to the kitchen of the apartment dweller...
...Among the other speakers was former Associated Press Bureau Chief Terry Anderson, one of the longest-held hostages in Lebanon...
...Michael is a widower of uncertain sexuality...
...Because of the players' skill, however, the lines between prisoners begin to blur...
...Another organism from the distant past, vaudeville, was supposed to have died in the 1930s when talking pictures took over the world...
...I turned to the hoofers...
...It doesn't help them, either...
...He has the shortest time on stage and, more to the point, his part is written from the outside: McGuinness has only the vaguest idea of how Americans —particularly African-Americans...
...Vaudevillus Vulgaris merely went underground, to the auditoriums of the summer resorts and the stages of the comedy clubs...
...The supporting players all gave skillful and subtle performances, but they might as well have been props...
...McDaniel, who made his reputation as the con man in Six Degrees of Separation, is not so fortunate in the role of Adam...
...Adam smolders, maintaining his strength by doing sets of pushups...
...In a parched season, honorable intentions deserve a curtain call...
...Strange to say, in their absurdist fantasies the Masters of Prague and Paris gave their characters great credibility...
...Then she sat on the edge of the stage and palavered with folks in the front pews, a la Judy Garland...
...There has been no trial, no prosecution, no defense...
...They have nothing in common except their "crimes...
...This reliable and underpraised star has been one of the ornaments of the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National and the Old Vic...
...at every turn there were the same Borscht Belt gags about middle-aged flatulence and impotence...
...The irony tends to grate after the third, fourth and fifth repetitions...
...There were many flaws in this seriocomedy about Mark Melon, a ruthless publishing executive en route to a nervous collapse...
...But the show business coroners were wrong...
...Edward is married, the father of several children...
...Save for Charles E. McCarry's imaginative tenement set, we might be in the Poconos on a bad Saturday night...
...No matter what the progress of evolution, some creatures remain impervious to change...
...I hoped that Kind would try to establish her own identity...
...How did he stay sane when his fellow prisoners were released and he was not...
...Edward is given to emotional outbursts...
...Rock and roll at the Fox, Kielbasa and sausage and spice...
...He makes a series of calls on performers, only to find that each one is out that night—appearing at the Helen Hayes Theater in a show called Three from Brooklyn...
...Even Michael eventually thaws, joining his fellow prisoners in whimsical scenarios of freedom...
...The BQE dancers (Guy Richards, John Michaels, Damon Rusignola) are also men of Italian ancestry...
...I fatuously assumed that Italians had a unique view of human frailty...
...He was surprisingly robust, accessible and free of resentment...
...What happens to men who are held incommunicado year after year, without any knowledge of the day or time...
...As for McCowen, he gets top billing for good reason...
...The singer (Roslyn Kind) does not come from an Italian family...
...Although all three men wear drab T-shirts and shorts, they might as well be marked with numbers and caparisoned in flags to mark their different emotional states and international roles...
...The victim of wild mood swings, harsh to his subordinates, smarmy to his superiors, and antagonistic to himself...
...And now it has reappeared in the form of Three from Brooklyn...
...Each man is from a different country...
...The feeble plot concerns an attempt by Cosmo the Cabbie (Raymond Serra) to get the BQE trio into the big time...
...It seemed almost impossible to imagine him confined to a cell for upwards of four years...
...otherwise it has made no concession to the 20th century...
...I remember, all right...
...The original music and lyrics were by Steve Michaels and Sandi Merle...
...At the Booth, he fleshes out an underwritten figure, making Michael the kind of bleak but oddly appealing character who inhabits the works of T.S...
...Melon was a difficult person to like and impossible to ignore...
...Last year it surfaced in the legitimate theater, appearing under the title Catskills on Broadway...
...The playwright is obviously at home with the character of Edward: His words ring as true as an Irish penny on a mahogany bar...
...One song (I use the word "song," too, in Webster's secondary sense: "an explanation that is pointless or evasive") encapsulates the show's ineptitude: Remember the hot dogs at Nathan's Erasmus and Madison Highs, Sunday bagels and lox...
...In a dire moment, for example, Adam chants a spiritual, like some black jailbird in a '30s film...
...But no...
...In Someone Who'll Watch Over Me, at the Booth Theater, he examines the psyches of three cellmates shackled to separate walls in a Beirut basement...
...The evening 1 attended, the female comic, Adrianne Tolsch, was truly out, and her husband took over...
...We are in the territory charted by Franz Kafka and explored by Samuel Beckett...
...They pantomime the quaffing of numerous martinis, concoct movies, harmonize on Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and, in a hilarious sequence, recreate Virginia Wade's 1977 triumph at Wimbledon, starring McCowen as the victorious tennis player and Rea as Queen Elizabeth presenting the winner's trophy...
...The show was conceived and directed by Sal Richards, so he has no one to blame but himself...
...The playwright served as his own director, and he was obviously too close to his work...
...surely they would strike out on their own...
...Rea fares much better as the loquacious reporter, keeping up the collective morale by fantasizing, mimicking the speech patterns of the other two, cracking jokes, and playing games...
...For most of us these are relatively abstract questions, but the Irish playwright Frank McGuinness makes them a matter of life and death...
...Men who irritate each other almost beyond human endurance learn how to put themselves down and make each other laugh...
...What did he do to pass the time...
...speak and think...
...I use the word "comics" only in Webster's secondary sense: those who "intend to be amusing...
...The master of ceremonies (Sal Richards) yammers endlessly about his Italian background...
...When he recites a Middle English poem, or speaks about his late wife, or wonders about the latent homosexuality of prisoners, Michael is poignant and wholly plausible...
...Adam (James McDaniel) is a black doctor from the United States, Edward (Stephen Rea) is an Irish journalist, and Michael (Alec McCowen) is a British professor of medieval literature...
...Eliot...
...she sang People, her sibling's early hit...
...It had an overwrought, claustrophobic quality that might have been mitigated by another set of eyes and ears...
...McGuinness, working with a well-documented situation, cannot quite make us believe his personae...
...Michael watches his roommates with scholarly diffidence...
...When Adam speaks about the Irish ignorance of sex, Edward responds that his people invented foreplay: "We call it drink...
...no doubt she was hired to honor Mayor David Dinkins' notion of New York as a "gorgeous mosaic" of different cultures...
...McCowen's latest film, Martin Scorsese's adaptation of the Edith Wharton novel, The Age of Innocence, opens this winter...
...As Cosmo turns away, disappointed, the person in question does his or her turn in the spotlight...
...In memoriam: The Holy Terror, a play that Simon Gray revised many times in England, appeared briefly in November at the uptown Promenade Theater...
...Adam is a woman-chasing bachelor...
...I am confident that we will see him again, and for a longer stretch...
...For one thing, Someone Who'll Watch Over Me is rigidly schematic...
...this was a one-man show...
...Where Catskills had an unmistakably Jewish aura, Brooklyn loudly proclaims its Mediterranean roots...
...only punishment...
...Coelacanths still patrol the bottom of the ocean, exactly as they did 5 million years ago...
...Lefevre is far more effective when he uses Robin Don's stark set as a kind of boxing ring, heightening the drama as the men draw closer...
...so do a pair of supporting comics (Bobby Alto and Buddy Mantia...
Vol. 75 • November 1992 • No. 15
