Fantastic Voyages
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage FANTASTIC VOYAGES BY STEFAN KANFER Alomst every Neil Simon work is marked by two conflicts: one between male and female, the other between the playwright's technical skills and his...
...Yet, given Guare's themes, and the coliseum structure of the Vivian Beaumont Theater, it is difficult to see what other direction Sir Peter could have taken...
...they believe their sudden infatuation will go on forever...
...she was wed to a Congressman...
...Is Paulina so deranged that she can no longer distinguish between truth and fantasy...
...And what if the doctor is guilty...
...Still, because Dorfman's play has no recognizable connection with history, geography or humanity, it may be the most appropriate part of the production...
...Gerardo will act as the defense attorney...
...Thein-ventiveness of Nichols' bits of business notwithstanding, this is not a comedy, and the laughs invariably come in the wrong places...
...They include his first wife, the late, light-hearted Julie (Kate Burton...
...A totalitarian leader has been deposed, his regime replaced by liberal democrats...
...his psychiatrist Edith (Joyce Van Patten...
...Four Baboons Adoring the Sun takes on the mythologies of love, death and childhood by tracking two American archeologists, Philip (James Naughton) and his former student, Penny (Stock-ard Channing...
...Nothing and no one will dissuade her...
...In this highly artificial construction, everything is telegraphed well before it occurs...
...A silent coda brings the trio together at a formal concert where they exchange meaningful glances—meaningful to them, not to us...
...In the program for Death and the Maiden...
...Actually, it doesn't last two days...
...Kate Burton is lovely and affecting both as a child-bride and as a woman of 35, the age at which Julie died...
...In a frenzy of Classical enthusiasm, Penny has assigned every child the name of a Greek god...
...On Stage FANTASTIC VOYAGES BY STEFAN KANFER Alomst every Neil Simon work is marked by two conflicts: one between male and female, the other between the playwright's technical skills and his limitless self-absorption...
...All that's missing is "Oh, Antie Em, there's no place like home...
...What's the big surprise...
...Only Eros is unmoved...
...Michaela is a winning child, and Pollan has some fine moments in a grief-filled meeting between the grown daughter and the mother who died too young...
...They have been eavesdropping on phone conversations and reading personal letters...
...Her freshness and timing evoke the Elizabeth Taylor of National Velvet, before the photographers and the publicity and the Violet Eyes to Die For...
...But Angela Goethals is the one to watch here...
...Down and Out in Beverly Hills, What About Bob...
...I'll die if I don't make a change and have love in my life,'' she decided (this is Broadway's planting season for self-help cliches), and took up with her old professor...
...The hour is late and the doctor is exhausted...
...Everybody dies," he chants...
...Is the prisoner trying to squirm out of his past...
...He is Eros (Eugene Perry), and although everyone else has a speaking part, the god of love gets to sing his rhyming lines...
...Alda is, as always, a guileful purveyor of charm...
...The background of the play evokes New York, but don't let that fool you...
...Dorfman's one note is irony, and it is always presented with heavy hands: Death and the Maiden, for example, is the title of the doctor's favorite Schubert quartet...
...Will his warden exact an illegal revenge—and thereby become a criminal herself...
...Once again Simon is gazing into the mirror, autobiographically examining his profession, the death of his own first wife, his failed second marriage, his daughters...
...Miranda (Gene Hackman), stops to give him a lift home...
...Released from his gag—though not his ropes—the doctor vigorously protests his innocence...
...John Guare writes on a slant...
...Gene Saks, who usually directs in italics, has staged Jake's Women with subtlety and tact...
...and, of course, Maggie herself...
...Fifteen years before, she goes on, Miranda and his thugs imprisoned and violated her...
...Shaver does a magic turn as a bride moving through a doorway—only to appear minutes later at the bitter end of an eight-year marriage...
...The pair deserted their spouses, married and headed for a dig on the enchanted isle of Sicily...
...Young Ms...
...Dreyfus does his famous sputtering husband, cf...
...Gene Hackman, who spends most of the time in bondage, has the greatest star power and the fewest lines...
...The Broadway version at the Brooks Atkinson Theater has been misconceived from start to curtain...
...In that case, Jake/Simon has not been affected by middle age problems...
...She is to be the prosecution, judge and jury...
...The claustrophobic rooms evoke no country and no country house on earth...
...Jake addresses the audience as if it were an old friend, bringing on wives, relatives, shrink, and a date (Talia Balsam) to flesh out a gag or press home a point...
...suddenly matured by the tragedy, she can see herself becoming like them, ordinary, incapacitated, disenchanted...
...This coyness sets exactly the wrong tone for the evening, and Director Mike Nichols amplifies it for two acts...
...Naughton, Channing and most of the children lend credibility to a story only Joseph Campbell could love...
...California is its spiritual locale...
...his yenta sister Karen (Brenda Vaccaro...
...Penny's son Wayne (Wil Horneff) and Philip's daughter Haley (Angela Goethals) are 13...
...Wayne's is Icarus, and as befits the new label he wanders fatally close to the sun...
...Jake's consciousness has been raised by a pair of tardy revelations, articulated in a manner that suggests their importance is second only to the Dead Sea Scrolls...
...His fall off a mountain top leaves Haley even more devastated than the adults...
...He seems persuasive...
...I doubt that you could find a larger waste of energy, intelligence and talent anywhere outside of an advertising agency...
...With a different cast and director, and a bitterly serious outlook, the play has become a hit in London's West End...
...Following a series of feminine wisecracks about Jake's inability to reach out and touch someone, a reconciliation occurs...
...Joyce Van Patten has a canny, underhanded delivery that prompts Jake to observe: "You're not an analyst, you're a mother with a diploma...
...But Dorfman has not the slightest idea how to construct a drama or a mystery...
...A) "We have to get in touch with our feelings," and (B) "We have to forgive those we love before we can forgive ourselves...
...She fires a warning shot and repeats her intentions...
...Or is this a case of mistaken identity...
...His work has no armature, no catharsis, no revelation, no real ending...
...Six Degrees of Separation got behind the masks of race, money and society by following the adventures of a young man who pretended to be Sidney Poitier's son...
...He was once married to an unresponsive woman...
...Trouble is, the imagined characters tend to run away with Jake's words, allowing some uncom for table truths to break through...
...Yet we have seen this diary of a mad housewife before, notably in Fatal Attraction, where she was more terrifying and just as implausible...
...Under Peter Hall's baton, these mon-keyshines appear to be an opera-less libretto...
...She heard his voice last night and recognized it...
...But his wife is armed with a pistol...
...Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman states that his tragedy occurs in a country that "is probably Chile" but may in fact be someplace else...
...the couple advocates full disclosure about their once-clandestine romance...
...Are these apercus the best the playwright can offer after two and a half hours of introspection...
...Close is all technique, hitting her marks accurately, manufacturing tears at precisely the right moment...
...I hope she has better luck with men...
...There we find them and their nine children—four of his, five of hers—plus an unseen stranger...
...Eros knows that extinction awaits all lovers...
...As it happens, the kids already know everything...
...And once again he fails to bring it off, although we do get some bright chatter and expert performances...
...Santo Loquasto has managed to suggest the interior of a SoHo apartment and a writer's mind, and his costumes ingeniously flatter or caricature according to the need...
...Or, for that matter, after a career of some 25 plays and 18 films...
...And he has a point...
...Gerardo persuades him to stay the night...
...While her husband slept, Paulina crept into the guest room, knocked out the visitor, tied him up and gagged him with her panties...
...Today she is going to put him on trial in her own kangaroo court...
...For despite his knowing stagecraft Simon has little to say, and says that little bromidically...
...When Gerardo awakens hetriesto intervene, less for humanitarian purposes than to avoid a scandal...
...Now he sits, helpless and mute, as she explains her actions...
...Among those offenses were the imprisonment and rape of his wife Paulina (Glenn Close), one of the country's many walking wounded...
...Gerardo Escobar (Richard Dreyfus), an ambitious lawyer, has just been named to the President's committee investigating crimes and misdemeanors of the previous administration...
...At Maggie's insistence, Jake agrees to a trial separation...
...We never learn whether Paulina is crazy or if Miranda is culpable...
...Her fate was even worse...
...Next morning Miranda awakens to a nightmare...
...It seems anticlimactic to mention Tony Walton's stark set...
...Then again, so does Paulina...
...En route to Senora Escobar at their beach house, the lawyer has a blowout...
...She insists that Miranda is indeed the war criminal, the medical experimenter, the sexual tyrant...
...There are enough moral dilemmas here to fuel a dozen plays, and at least onew hodunnit...
...He is bound hand and foot to a kitchen chair...
...One waits in vain for more or better music than the tunes that are supplied by Stephen Edwards...
...he has been afflicted by New Age bumper stickers...
...At the theater that bears his name, Simon introduces the prosperous 53-year-old novelist Jake (Alan Alda), whose second wife Maggie (Helen Shaver) wants to change their address to Splits-ville...
...Since "reality is abummer," Jake argues, why shouldn't he retreat into his head, writing dialogue for people and making them speak it on cue...
...In Jake's Women, the ladies win...
...Brenda Vaccaro prompts as many laughs from her outfits as from her putdowns...
...Suddenly single, he uses his febrile imagination to conjure up the most significant women in his career...
...Goethals is going to be a beautiful and much sought-after actress...
...Can this marriage be saved...
...Eros is the only one without illusions...
...A total stranger, Dr...
...his daughter Molly at the ages of 12 and 21 (Genia Michaela and Tracy Pollan...
...So does narcissism, and not for the first time...
...He believes in keeping secrets from children...
...Nothing happens to astonish the playgoer, except for Willa Kim's bright costumes and Tony Walton's hugely inventive set, which includes a mountain range, a volcano, an airport, and the giant sculpture of four baboons staring into the sky, "their eyes burnt out because they've seen their god...
Vol. 75 • March 1992 • No. 4
