On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage QUESTIONS WITHOUT ANSWERS BY STEFAN KANFER A Acurrent story: A boy asks his father what "business ethics" means. The man responds: "Someone comes into my shop, hands me a bill, buys a...
...Acting students should be lining up around the Westside Theater to attend...
...He was born Marcus Hershkowitz of very religious parents...
...But did it really...
...Barbara has been asked to address them...
...No theatrical device is used to prompt their speeches...
...Austin and Ruth step out on the terrace to examine Boston harbor and rekindle their old flame...
...He didn't want to disappoint them by refusing the gift...
...Everyone plumps for the later life romance to catch fire, particularly the principals...
...Traditionally, these conundrums have been used to stage debates between opposing forces...
...Would Austin have done the same...
...finds herself beset with doubts...
...For one thing, his name is not Kenneth Hoyle...
...Nevertheless, as the lights dim he prepares to do their bidding...
...Although Shelley's British bite seems a bit unvarying, no one is better at mining laughter from a line...
...Esther...
...Here the unadventurous gentleman is Austin (Josef Sommer), a 60ish Bostonian of impressive lineage and impeccable manners...
...Marion, Roy's wife, who regards Florida as an outpost of limbo...
...Nancy, a power lesbian on the prowl...
...His most recent one, Later Life, makes a low bow in the direction of that Ur-wasp, Henry James...
...Seemingly without regret, he remarks that all the Talmudic baggage has been left behind...
...And yet, and yet...
...As soon as he leaves I realize he gave me a $ 10 bill instead of a single...
...Hoyle seems to take com fort in the terminations, as if they justified his very existence...
...Yet he is not apparently cruel or self-deceptive...
...and Julia, a manic violist and friend of Ruth...
...Everything else in his play is fresh, relevant and disturbing...
...they simply look out at the audience and begin...
...As the evening progresses, Austin's proper Bostonianism shows itself as something other than layers of politesse, applied since prep school...
...The label is open to many interpretations...
...Is conscience innate, or is it a matter of social training...
...On Ben Edwards' snug set, Anderman ranges from desperate to confident, from insecure to whimsical without missing a heartbeat...
...Questions again, but no answers...
...When she ran away he tracked her down to this terrace...
...There are more disturbing revelations in Scene Two...
...So should the rest of the town, before winter overtakes Sommer, and he goes off to play another corruptible cop...
...Monk, whose comic timing almost saved last season's Redwood Curtain, is at once touching and funny, a group of women housed in one generous body...
...To them business ethics will always be an oxymoron...
...The work is illuminated by two actors at the top of their form...
...Playwright Jon Robin Baitz (who two seasons ago gave us The Substance of Fire) has something else in mind...
...Roy, an arthritic eager to trade Boston for Florida, even though his grandchildren live down the block ("Glad when they come, glad when they go...
...Like the James character he is unusually intelligent, pleasantly successful??and fatally tentative...
...Among the women are Sally, the hostess...
...Rifkin is particularly adept at playing a tortured figure in the process of finding himself, a sort of monkey with a man on his back...
...Certainly Hoyle's career is defunct...
...he is scheduled to return soon...
...Over two decades she has performed her assignment well, at home and overseas...
...The product is not only overpriced and tainted, it has claimed many victims...
...Ted, a transplanted Southerner in doubleknits...
...The pair had a brief, unconsummated romance in Capri some 30 years before, when he was a young naval officer and she was a student on holiday...
...From Ibsen to Shaw to Arthur Miller and on to the present day, they have probed and dissected the conflicts between money and morality...
...Just a hint of redemption as Hoyle tape-records a letter to his mother and begins to croon to the senile old lady in Yiddish...
...Austin, the most cautious person at the party, nonetheless finds himself drawn to this woman he courted and lost so long ago without ever realizing why...
...Should I tell my partner...
...THOSE who believe the wasp influence has vanished from America have only to look at Warren Christopher and the State Department...
...He is not sure, and neither are we...
...He has also given his players a cornucopia of roles within roles and scenes within scenes...
...Is compromise an honorable position, or is it the first step toward the destruction of the soul...
...This lapsing into tongues is an old theatrical gimmick that Baitz should have avoided...
...Most of those nations cannot tell how badly they are being ripped off by the American exporter...
...Has freedom come too late...
...Whether it is or not, Kenneth is liberated from his terrible job and his odious employers...
...Duane, a computer hacker who sees everything in microchip terms ("My wife just slipped off the screen...
...I give him 50 cents change...
...The shock waves are still reverberating as the lights dim...
...Scene Three, in a hotel room in Oaxaca, is named after the Mexican holiday, "The Day of the Dead...
...How does one maintain principles in an unethical environment...
...Ruth, who began the evening half in love with the old town and the new man...
...As for Sommer, this splendid actor has been seen too often as a detective on the take (Witness) or a dour paterfamilias (Joseph Kennedy in A Woman Called Jackie...
...That is why this very morning, she informs us, she departed from her prepared speech to warn the women about their own depressing futures...
...Except for Boston and his banking career, he has committed himself to nothing...
...In 3 Hotels, at the Circle Repertory Theater, Baitz offers a trio of confessional monologues...
...Neither friends nor family loom large in his consideration...
...Or was the tragedy a rationale for behavior that began long before??an eroding of sensibility, a progressive moral blindness...
...But he loves her...
...She reflects on the life of a company wife who must be cheery without being pushy and subservient without being mousy...
...Barbara believes the latter was the case...
...The Master's story, "The Beast in the Jungle...
...Playwrights are more easily shocked by corruption...
...Now comes the question of business ethics...
...Scene One, entitled "The Halt and the Lame," takes place in a Moroccan hotel...
...When her husband phones from the airport, offering her champagne cocktails and a long weekend in Vegas, she wavers...
...All it cost her was a life and a son: Several years ago, the Hoyles' teenage boy, Brandon, was stabbed to death on a foreign beach, killed for a watch his parents had given him only a few days earlier...
...The locale is St...
...Hoyle, who works for an American company, has been sent to its Tangiers office to address some colleagues...
...Entitled "Be Careful," it, too, takes place in a hotel room...
...He has been invited to a large party in order to meet Ruth (Maureen Anderman), an available lady of a certain age...
...The man responds: "Someone comes into my shop, hands me a bill, buys a newspaper...
...Joe Mantello (one of the stars of Angels in America) has directed with crisp efficiency...
...Ted's nonstop drawling mate...
...Given the cynicism on Wall Street and beyond, it is comforting to know that people like Baitz and company are doing their best to mind the store...
...The men include Jim, a professorial chain smoker alternately composing dithyrambs to tobacco and attempting to go cold turkey...
...Anthony Heald, who originated the parts, has departed to make a film...
...It is also a time for Kenneth to reflect upon the fate of Brandon, and upon the infants who died because of company avarice...
...Ruth finds Austin quite the most attractive man she's ever met...
...Or are the religious authorities right when they insist that no sinner is unsalvageable...
...Through Julia we learn that Ruth's latest husband (she has had three) is a compulsive gambler and all-around lout, who lives off his estranged wife's credit cards...
...In this lean-and-mean period of the '90s he performs his assignment frequently, at branches all over the world...
...In its place he has sought a career in a nonsectarian concern, whose senior executives worship profits and expansion...
...Not that Austin believes in psychiatry...
...In this role, under Don Scardino's firm direction, he does the impossible, passionately portraying a man without emotions...
...Barbara's ad-libs took care of that...
...Thomas, Virgin Islands, where the wives of young executives have been summoned for their indoctrination...
...Yes, the man is a sponger and a rowdy...
...No two intruders are alike...
...his grown children, worried about their father's increasing glumness, offered him two sessions as a Christmas present...
...Loy Arcenas' multicultural set and Brian Mac-Devitt's canny lighting are a point...
...One with a German accent, he hilariously decides, is the Henry Kissinger of baby formula...
...The leads, however, cannot be faulted...
...Even his courteous demeanor turns out to be the result of Prozac, prescribed by a therapist...
...His communiques will vary from man to man, but the bottom line will be identical: You're fired...
...The murder, Barbara recalls, "turned Kenneth to stone...
...Nonetheless, he has provided a rare evening of witty, polished dialogue...
...Like her husband, she is a superb mimic, recreating every inflection of the chirpy young things, and of the matrons whose husbands have climbed the slippery slope to vice presidencies...
...Despite the S&L scandals, despite the incumbents forced from office by charges of political payoffs, there are still many who identify with the dilemma of that candy store owner...
...and Walt, Austin's old prep school chum, who tries to sell Ruth on an affair with his friend ("Sex is like squash, and he's the finest player in his age category...
...Is he past reforming...
...But every time either of them makes an advance, the dialogue is interrupted by a series of insensitive guests??all played by Carole Shelley and John C. Vennema...
...His own situation is appraised with candor: No longer young, he is trapped in a big job with a sick company...
...And those who think it is gone from the literary scene have only to attend the plays of A. R. Gurney...
...The first and last are delivered by Kenneth Hoyle (Ron Rifkin), the middle one is by his wife, Barbara (Debra Monk...
...With great amusement he imitates their speech patterns and impudently mocks their attitudes...
...Vennema needs help from Jennifer Von Mayrhauser's costumes and toupees to create the illusion of an entire chorus...
...It specializes in manufacturing a milk substitute for infants in Third World countries...
...concerns a protagonist waiting for something or someone to change his carefully measured life??who ultimately finds that while he was waiting, life itselfpassed him by...
...Despite the exotic locale, a commonplace event is about to occur...
...As the executive pours himself martinis, he begins to reveal bits of his background...
...And it may be the occasion when the Hoyle marriage is laid to rest...
...Gurney leaves his leads dangling, content to let the audience decide their fate...
Vol. 76 • September 1993 • No. 11
