Four Postmortems
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage FOUR POSTMORTEMS BY STEFAN KANFER on Thursday morning, May 10, 1849, handbills were passed out all over Manhattan. "Workingmen," they demanded, "Shall Americans or English rule this...
...Or fast, like brawshing teeth...
...He had become an impoverished grocer with no prospects, but in her eyes he remained the symbol of corruption...
...When Broadway can no longer offer room and Bard, we are all made homeless...
...The events leading up to that "Terrific and Fatal Riot,'' as a contemporary pamphlet called it, have been the subject of innumerable histories of the theater...
...After all, the townsfolk decided, the future was at stake...
...They acted more like they knew they were celebrities and all...
...But by the '90s, The Visit could no longer depend on the Zeitgeist...
...Richard Rudnick, author of last season's brief candle, I Hate Hamlet, concurs: "Richard Nelson's play would have probably done better as either No Shakespearean Actors or Two Shakespearean Actors are Dead...
...That night the Macreadyites collided with the Forresters in Greenwich Village...
...Nor did the playwright, Abraham Tetanbaum, provide a clue as to what he had in mind...
...Whatever their other flaws, the Lunts possessed perfect timing...
...In the end, the only peoples to receive a tribute were those who saw one of its 29 performances...
...The device made it easier for performers to switch ages and sexes, and lent an odd commedia dell'arte quality to Friedrich Durrenmatt's already eerie revenge play...
...he dedicated it to the memory of his father...
...Before the sun rose some 30 men were dead, and more than 100 others lay wounded...
...As the central figure of The Visit she was even more extraordinary because she received virtually no support...
...every gesture had some English on it...
...Rocks were thrown, knives unsheathed, fires ignited...
...The offer was refused outright...
...The dispute had no connection with politics, but it was quite literally a matter of life and death...
...And both were betrayed by John Ryder (Zeljko Ivanek), a man they trusted...
...For the record, the droves who stayed away missed a Terrific and Fatal entertainment...
...Or backed it with real money...
...Actually 13 actors appeared onstage—doubling, tripling and sometimes quadrupling to fill 33 roles...
...It's hard to explain...
...The first Broadway version, starring Alfred Lunt and Lynne Fontanne, is ecstatically recalled by many critics...
...Macready preferred those who wore trousers...
...So did Arthur Miller's The Crucible, with its adolescent hysterics stampeding a New England village...
...A recent production revived the musical Rags, and gave us another chance to hear the neglected score by Charles Strouse and Stephen Schwartz...
...Mounted police moved in to restore order, got battered for their efforts, and opened fire...
...The Americans were Ned Forrest and his supporting cast, already playing Macbeth uptown at the Broadway Theater...
...the production would have enticed the 8th Avenue crowd and run as long as Oh, Calcutta...
...She chose to destroy Schill with a blunt instrument—the townsfolk of Gullen...
...Alexander has appeared in everything from sitcoms to Shakespeare...
...Jack O'Brian, of The Old Globe in San Diego, directed the stateside version with discipline and verve...
...I've found none as diverting as Two Shakespearean Actors, which opened on January 16 at the Cort Theater to a cheerful reception—and then folded like a beach chair...
...Yet the two had many similarities...
...Zachanassian knew it all the time, of course...
...They were different, though, I'll say that...
...she has played Georgia O'Keeffe, Eleanor Roosevelt and Calamity Jane, and I have never seen her give an unremarkable performance...
...At first his thespians seemed to have little in common...
...We may be indigent, protested the teacher (Tom Tammi) and the Mayor (Doug Stender), but we are not villainous...
...I have particularly fond memories of the Irish melodramatist Dion Boucicault (Eric Stolz), boozily hitting on a young actress: "Wish wish are you playing...
...Perhaps one day she will be surrounded with actors worthy of theirs...
...Crazy He Calls Me was one of those comedies that echo the "Springtime for Hitler" sequence in Mel Brooks' film The Producers...
...Ryder knew the speeches but, as it turned out, he was as short on talent as he was on loyalty...
...Nelson seldom went for the easy laugh or the facile insight: the hams as turkeys...
...Two Shakespearean Actors began at the Royal Shakespeare Company...
...They didn't act like people and they didn't act like actors...
...Nothing to do with the plot, but what the hell...
...She was an immigrant vixen in search of a husband...
...The audience stares unbelieving at the catastrophe onstage...
...Camus' The Plague had reached classic status...
...In Alexander it had an elegant, fire-and-ice actress worthy of the role...
...his impending execution seemed no worse than an imminent bill from American Express...
...Alan Brody's play was clearly autobiographical...
...She promised to restore the factories and homes, to spread a billion marks around, if only the citizens performed one small task...
...Here he is in The Catcher in the Rye: The Lunts "were very good, but I didn't like them much...
...Although the postage-stamp stage was restrictive, the nine-member cast did honor to the overriding themes of love and death...
...Director Ed Sherin made the happy decision to put everyone except his leading lady and her victim in masks...
...1 saw the couple back in the '50s and fully endorse Holden Caulfield's appraisal...
...Despite the efforts of New York's leading citizens, including Herman Melville and Washington Irving, supporters of the rival actors could not be kept apart...
...At the Walter Kerr Theater, two wholly unsympathetic characters, Yvette (Polly Draper) and Benny (Barry Miller), chased each other around Brooklyn, circa 1940...
...But this was an optical illusion...
...The rest of the cast should have suggested Mitteleuropa...
...Benny thought it over and replied, "Teeth.' And that was one of the tasteful moments...
...After a vastly successful career of prostitution she suddenly reappeared bearing a wooden leg, a red wig, an entourage of footmen and eunuchs, a black panther, and a Brazilian lover (Timothy Britten Parker...
...of Tom Lacy as a porter who cannot remember his cue, then his lines, and finally what play he is in...
...The American liked tableaux and big moments...
...Both were honorable professionals straining to make Shakespeare attractive to 19th-century audiences...
...long ago Mme...
...David Jenkins' minimalist sets allowed all 27 to move fluently from meeting halls to rehearsal halls, and Jane Greenwood's costumes flattered every figure...
...Ionesco's Rhinoceros, in which everyone sprouted homs, became a highly praised parable of fascism overtaking a populace...
...he was an American, still virginal at 35...
...The youthful Forrest (Victor Garber) possessed every requisite of a 19th-century American leading man: commanding presence, stentorian voice and a requited love affair with the mirror...
...The rest of The Visit was a countdown to the inevitable...
...How could anyone have written this mess...
...The ruthless male ingenue began with the British company and sneaked over to the enemy when Forrest dangled the part of Macduff...
...Certainly it was not laughter or perception...
...The AJT's most recent work, limited to four weeks, was an original in every sense of the word: Invention for Fathers and Sons...
...Instead they were irredeemably Middle West, a jumble of regional intonations...
...He misused a polished comedienne with the best legs on television (you can see them on reruns of thirtysomething) and furnished an excellent actor (Biloxi Blues, Saturday Night Fever) with an Eraserhead haircut and cringe-making scenes...
...Workingmen," they demanded, "Shall Americans or English rule this City...
...They had to execute the grocer...
...The literary idea of moral infection was then at its apogee...
...They were both 48, the age at which Max succumbed to a heart attack...
...How dare one man stand in the way of recovery—no, of prosperity...
...In addition to their disparate backgrounds, Forrest was notorious for his skirt-chasing...
...Perhaps he just wanted to get away from Studio City, California, where the Playbill says he lives and works...
...The English were William Charles Macready and company, debuting in their own version of the same play at the Astor Place Opera House...
...They were all desperately poor...
...With any luck we will be hearing more from Brody in a larger arena...
...It needed outstanding performances and staging...
...The aging Macready (Brian Bedford) was a splendid amalgam of snobbery and condescension...
...But he struck a universal note in poignant discussions of the price of assimilation and the cost of family ties...
...the Englishman was plummy and rum-soaked, Thane in a bottle...
...She had even brought a coffin along...
...I have no idea what the Director John Ferraro was aiming for, unless it was puremalice...
...Both believed, as Forrest said, that "Life is not half so much fun as the theater...
...inquired Yvette, in her bogus Russian accent...
...Ivanek might have executed his U-turn with a little more panache...
...Obviously he hoped to make it a critique of xenophobia, as well as a salute to what Winston Churchill, in eupeptic excess, called the English Speaking Peoples...
...The play has given way to a new project by comedian Shelly Berman, now in rehearsal...
...Gradually, the tide changed...
...How about Bimbos in Bondage...
...and of Laura Innes and Frances Conroy as the simmering wives of Boucicault and Forrest...
...He was, however, surrounded by a miraculously large and capable cast?7 in an age of two-person, one-set comedies...
...The gorgon had married many times, tasted every pleasure and enjoyed almost every sin...
...According to executive producer Bernard Gersten, the Swan of Avon's very name is death at the box office...
...Or appeared in it...
...The American Jewish Theater (AJT) has been quietly—a little too quietly—doing some of the most interesting work off Broadway...
...the same period two other plays opened and closed, one because it should have, the other because it had to...
...The effort of the Roundabout was worthy rather than praiseworthy...
...Understandably, Joel was terrified: Is the milestone to provide a headstone...
...The Visit concerned the story of Claire Zachanassian in the mythic provincial town of Gullen...
...Save for the casting of Jane Alexander, there were no other happy decisions at the Criterion Theater...
...The late Max (Len Stanger), and his living son Joel (William Verderber), met in the younger man's daydream...
...Only one indulgence remained: the murder of the man who ruined her...
...Avarice eroded conscience until Schill's own wife (Ellen Lancaster) and daughter (Parker again) could find no reason for him to live...
...She had been forced to leave home at the age of 18, impregnated and disgraced by the cold-hearted Anton Schill (Harris Yulin...
...Zachanassian had bought every valuable property and deliberately let it decay...
...In the Roundabout's limited six-week engagement, The Visit displayed an even larger cast...
...Alas, the whole affair is too sorry to lampoon...
...Act One ended with a masturbation scene: "Do you vant it slow, like a massage...
...Yulin seldom rose to mediocrity...
Vol. 75 • February 1992 • No. 2
