Artists and Models
KANER, STEFAN
On Stage ARTISTS AND MODELS by Stefan Kanfer Oscar Wilde was working on his drama of Salome and John the Baptist in 1891 when he came across a Romanian acrobat in Paris. Suddenly he knew how...
...And Pacino, freed from the Dance of the Sugarplum Inverts, inhabited the role instead of visiting it...
...Predictably, Jonathan's presence sets off a series of explosions, sexual from Patricia who still wants him, esthetic from Nick who believes that anything painted after the Renaissance is junk...
...It was typical of the playwright to turn everything upside down, especially his talent...
...In a series of flashbacks the painter's integrity, and his Jewish identity, are gradually eroded by insatiable ambition...
...But those works seemed gimmicky to me...
...The star responded by giving an interpretation only the translator could love...
...Lusting for his stepdaughter, for example, Herod offers her, "a collar of pearls set in four rows...
...This is hardly the first play to move time around like sand in an hourglass...
...Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written...
...Acker-man made little attempt to utilize the arena stage: Players entered and declaimed...
...This was misleading...
...Didn't an artist have a right to use whatever and whomever he saw and heard...
...They are like unto moons chained with rays of silver...
...If Cioffi seemed a bit too well nourished for a man one step from homelessness, he conveyed just the right mix of desperation and hubris...
...Every now and then, though, they come to the surface, assailing Jonathan with guilt, reminding him of what he was and what he still might be...
...Colin is a restive and overheated ex-lover...
...Jonathan wants it for his retrospective...
...But did a man have an exclusive on his experiences merely because he went through them...
...His first two books remaindered long ago...
...It was the only fresh air to be found in this affected, hothouse production...
...It is all in the oy of the beholder...
...the little Orpheum Theater has never seemed so wide or deep...
...Yet if Grete's interrogation is tinged with anti-Semitism, it is also tinctured with truth...
...For the man who engendered wit and exhaled epigrams was wholly incapable of creating tragedy—except of course in real life, where his homosexuality caused him to be tried, imprisoned and hounded out of England six years after he completed Salome...
...You stole my life...
...As if to compensate for her on-screen inertia she danced up a tornado, flinging aside veils until she stripped to the buff in order to get her erotic/homicidal wish: the head of John the Baptist in a silver charger...
...Robert Allen Ackerman's intermissionless production was tricked up with moody, not to say petulant, lighting by Arden Fingerhut...
...Happily, Salome was not the only work to display Pacino at Circle in the Square...
...Together, they and the cast provide an oddly stimulating evening...
...The sole exception was Salome herself...
...And as a Jew hasn't he been thoroughly assimilated by American society and his shiksa wife...
...Manheim felt violated...
...Of the cast of 24, not one character was credible, and their exchanges provided the aural equivalent of saints painted on black velvet...
...It represents the life and affection she left in America...
...No doubt Pacino chose to appear in the twin bill because it made him seem versatile...
...Wilde wrote Salome in French...
...They are even as half a hundred moons caught in a golden net...
...the art work now hangs in the married couple's loveless bedroom...
...Chinese Coffee revived Pacino's reputation and even added some new luster...
...Now, without permission, he had used them in his novel, substituting false names and fictive details...
...On alternate nights he appeared in another and totally different work, Chinese Coffee, sensitively directed by Arvin Brown...
...Certainly the performer received little aid from the director...
...Levine is either a doorman or a novelist, depending on the time of day...
...John, but at least Lee caused a breeze as she whirled around...
...Why not destroy it before the critics do...
...and James Youmans' set is a triumph of minimalism, suggesting the city and the country with a few brilliantly chosen props and hues...
...If you had a side view of the royal couple, that was pretty much what you saw for the entire evening...
...Surrounded by a twittering court of soldiers, Romans and Jews he stressed sibilants and pressed the loud pedal, garbling the lines as he pronounced them: "Only in mirrorsss is it well to look, for mirrorsss do but show us masksss...
...the element of time had very little to do with the point of the play...
...Sight Unseen's new lead is not quite as incisive as the original production's Jonathan...
...Thou shalt be as fair as a queen when thou wearest them...
...Patricia is unwilling to give it up...
...To my mind, the definitive answers to those questions were given almost 50 years ago by William Faulkner: "The writer's only responsibility is to his art...
...De Vries speaks fluent body language, alternately subservient and lethal as he goes after his rival...
...Zack Brown contributed a stark set and inconsistent costumes...
...But he lacks the necessary air of a cheder boy who cracked his shell at great psychological cost...
...But this was subterfuge...
...he wails...
...The detonations continue at Jonathan's London gallery...
...He is too big for summer camp...
...Michael Bloom directs with energy and invention...
...Just two Greenwich Village luftmenschen, Harry Levine (Pacino) and Jacob Manheim (Charles Cioffi), discussing the meaning of life and art...
...On the ivory breast of a queen they have rested...
...Throughout, Salome showed how right Whistler was...
...The problem of the artist receives closer attention in the Manhattan Theater Club's current production of Sight Unseen...
...it was then rendered in English by his disastrously ungifted intimate, Alfred "Bosie" Douglas...
...Beneath the mocking pose, scoffed the painter, Oscar was really "bourgeois malgre lui...
...Lee made her television debut as the deceased Laura Palmer in last year's trendy failure, Twin Peaks...
...But why put a career at risk in the first place...
...the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of old ladies...
...Long ago Jonathan painted Patricia in the nude...
...Jonathan protests: Such inquiries are intolerable from a Fraulein...
...Through the years of their friendship Levine had taken secret notes on his pal's autobiographical riffs...
...Here, the structure pertains to the art itself: half objective, half abstract, with points that may—or may not—be fashionable, and may—or may not—have to do with Jewish memory...
...In decency, Salome should have been buried along with its author, or allowed to live only as the libretto for Richard Strauss' vinegary opera of the same name...
...They decided to give the thing another life, and persuaded Al Pacino to play the role of Herod Anti-pas, Tetrarch of Judea, in a limited engagement fundraiser...
...Still, playwright Ira Lewis refreshed the old cafe debate with meaty speeches and witty asides...
...and Laura Linney makes a spectacularly bitchy Valkyrie...
...Vitus than St...
...If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate...
...In a flash forward he squirms as a German reporter, Grete (Laura Linney), asks incisive and embarrassing questions...
...Donald Holder's lighting has just the right bite...
...Actually, his Herod was on a level with Milton Berle in drag...
...He is, however, surrounded by capable performers who give Donald Margulies' lines the emphasis and timing they deserve...
...A trendy American painter, Jonathan Waxman (Adam Arkin) takes temporary leave of his pregnant wife and comes to London for a one-man exhibition...
...You will find yourself discussing the themes of Sight Unseen long after the house lights—the Orpheum's and your own—have dimmed...
...In the '30s George Kaufman and Moss Hart told a story backwards in Merrily We Roll Along (Hal Prince turned it into a musical with equal unsuccess...
...Its style is turgid, he complains, its personae disagreeable, its situations implausible...
...Harold Pinter's Betrayal did the same thing a couple of generations later...
...When it was finally produced in France (Wilde was in Reading Gaol at the time) the pseudobiblical work turned out to be garish, stilted and unintentionally farcical...
...The real queen of Salome was Pacino...
...Now aggressive, now defensive, now snarling, now guilt-ridden, he became the master of moodswings who ignited films like The Godfather and Dog Day Afternoon...
...Or did human relations impose a higher morality...
...So did David Hare's Plenty...
...The program stated that Herodias, Herod's wife, was played by Suzanne Bertish...
...No large cast here, no fool's gold or Victorian grandiloquence...
...Anyone who saw Adam Arkin in I Hate Hamlet knows that he can be a forceful presence...
...One night he impulsively journeys north to visit his ex-lover Patricia (Margaret Colin) and her husband Nick, a rural archeologist (Jon De Vries...
...Manheim has just read his friend's latest manuscript, and predicts even worse results...
...Suddenly he knew how the murderess should act: "I want her," exclaimed Wilde, "to dance on her hands...
...Manheim is a photographer whose world has lost its focus...
...But the managers of Circle in the Square are pitiless...
...The star belongs in first-class fare...
...The Jews were caparisoned as if by Rembrandt, the soldiers were right out of a Schwarzenegger film, the doomed Baptist (Arnold Vasloo) derived from Pre-Raphaelite paintings, and Salome (Sheryl Lee) and her seven veils would have been at home in The Thief of Baghdad...
...Lar Lubovitch's choreography for that epic moment was more of an homage to St...
...Perhaps this was the only way to survive...
...Jonathan claims that his profession and his religion make him an outsider, but as an artist hasn't he been thoroughly co-opted by his corporate patrons...
Vol. 75 • July 1992 • No. 9
