On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage LIVES IN THE THEATER BY STEFAN KANFER "We are the latter-day Lunts," chortled Rod Steiger a generation ago when he and his wife, Claire Bloom, were appearing together onstage and on...
...And if Jackson is a bit meatier than she was in a '50s revival of The Cherry Orchard, she still has a fortune in cheekbones, and a smile to ignite the little arena stage of the Kaufman Theater...
...and I saved her from the crime of poverty...
...I ran for the bus in these shoes...
...If their back-chat is sometimes X-rated and always hilarious, the humor smacks of the gallows...
...Each of these works makes different demands...
...Wallach has appeared in many Williams vehicles—sometimes, admittedly, as sliced ham (see the film Baby Doll, for example...
...This raconteur chooses a different approach...
...She holds one aloft: "You think this is a prop...
...Major Barbara is something entirely different...
...The artist for whom Shear modeled was not only talented he also uttered one of the great aphorisms: "Art should have an odor...
...All the other crimes are virtues beside it...
...Things are no better on Jackson's side of the net...
...Shaw lived to 95, and though he trumpeted the values of vegetarianism, staying active in the theater was the real secret of his longevity...
...How about Anne Jackson and Eli Wallach...
...It is the words from Major Barbara...
...Not all the situations were so brutalizing...
...he, too, moved with the agility of a cloud on springs, and coaxed comedy from misery...
...these are women cheated by circumstance and abused by pimps...
...Together the Wallachs impersonate the battling couples of Terrence Rattigan's Harlequinade, Murray Schisgal's Luv and Shaw's Major Barbara...
...For a moment she hesitated...
...Then the face and body suddenly rose up before my eyes: Zero Mostel...
...She recreates an entire chorus line of ladies of the evening, complete with individual accents, expressions and gestures...
...Shear tells us, she studied fencing, languages, modern dance...
...Shear derives her strongest material from her lowest moments...
...In order to keep in shape...
...Later, as she lists her varied efforts at self-improvement, an altogether different character begins to emerge...
...Given this ex to grind, he burbles ecstatically of true love the second time around...
...The husband ad libs a few leaps, hoping to create the impression of youth...
...She even volunteered for an Outward Bound adventure, clinging to a rock face while she babbled incoherently...
...He, too, was a generously proportioned performer, taking up many cubic yards of space...
...But he was also a memorable figure in The Rose Tattoo, and his anecdotes about that production, along with his imitation of the Master three sheets to the wind, constitute one of the high points of the night...
...As for Bloom, who still acts with great delicacy and occasional brilliance, she is now married to novelist Philip Roth...
...so is Ann Keenbauch's skeletal set design...
...Finally, she recalls, she was offered a bit part in a soft-porn movie...
...Food, clothing, firing, rent, taxes, respectability, and children...
...Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy made a fair bid to become America's most prominent acting couple, but they have been absent from the theater for years...
...This, however, was telemarketing with a difference...
...Judging from their bright retrospective, In Persons, they are still crazy about each other...
...The 66th is certain to be in the theater, and I can hardly wait for it...
...Today Steiger can be glimpsed on TV talk shows, speaking poignantly of his clinical depression...
...As the actress bounced around, recounting her adventures with amazing grace, she kept reminding me of someone I could not quite place...
...On most of them, there was a tyrannical boss or a tyrannized colleague advising her to escape from the grind and get a life...
...Only fools fear crime: We all fear poverty...
...Then the parochial school graduate leaped without a net...
...A Avery different kind of retrospective takes place at the New York Theater Workshop...
...May In Persons be an audition as well as a fond look backward...
...Luv, Schisgal's one and only good play, features two urban neurotics, an ebullient man and his former wife who meet by accident...
...Shortly afterward they met again, this time at the altar...
...Nevertheless...
...Shear represents the entire cast, plus producer and director, as they run through a topless, bottomless and brainless production that never quite rises from the cutting room floor...
...But his boast is pure fiction, and a few moments later he breaks down, wails "I can't lie to you...
...She is also in debt to her imaginative clothing designer, Jess Goldstein...
...Are the plaintiffs doomed to find misery wherever they go...
...Two generations later they remain hard at work...
...And a black transvestite, who worked the phones alongside her, told Shear to stop thinking exclusively about herself because life "ain't that kind of party...
...I lifted them from your spirit...
...They are only the accidents and illnesses of life: There are not 50 genuine professional criminals in London...
...As for Jackson, she solos in a delightful impression of the aging Enid Bagnold, a grande dame of the British theater, who lectures on the virtues of sexual passion (and its absence...
...Shear owes a great deal to her director, Christopher Ashley, who developed this unique theater piece...
...Why not...
...Barbara: Do you call poverty a crime...
...No romanticism or bathos here...
...None of them are for film roles...
...So America has to look for another husband and wife team to be the Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt de nos jours...
...Barbara: The seven deadly sins...
...On Stage LIVES IN THE THEATER BY STEFAN KANFER "We are the latter-day Lunts," chortled Rod Steiger a generation ago when he and his wife, Claire Bloom, were appearing together onstage and on screen...
...Shaw's moral fervor was cloaked in comedy, and the Wallachs are his natural descendants and ideal interpreters...
...Yet Shaw, as usual, places the best arguments in the mouth of his antagonist...
...She even grew a mustache...
...she inquires...
...Change one word—London—to the name of any American city, and Shaw's words might have been written this morning...
...Undershaft: The worst of crimes...
...They poison us morally and physically...
...and the minimalist choreography of Nafsia Sharriff...
...She informs him, accurately, that his gestures are more suggestive of senility than juvenilia...
...Replies Wallach: "I should have given her shaving cream...
...To the tune of "Nice Work If You Can Get It" she bursts onstage to recall scores of previous occupations...
...Like many another hopeful, Shear planned to pay the rent by doing odd jobs until she got her big break in the theater...
...Are you happy...
...Anne answers back as Dorothy Parker: Oh, life is a glorious cycle of songs A cycle of extemporania And love is a thing that can never go wrong And I am Marie of Romania Martin Charnin's direction is crisp and witty...
...some of these jobs were very odd indeed...
...With her 65th job she has finally found one...
...Here the couple are the warring Undershafts, father and daughter...
...In Harlequinade an aging theatrical couple attempts a most inappropriate vehicle: Romeo and Juliet...
...After all, Shear and Shear alone experienced those previous 64 assignments...
...After all, Eli is only 78, and Anne is 10 years his junior...
...Eli is the light versifier Samuel Hoffenstein: Your little voice so soft and kind, Your little soul, Your little mind...
...The Wallachs follow with an imaginative poetic duel...
...Blown Sideways is essentially a one-woman show...
...Undershaft: Yes, the deadly seven...
...Her new husband is a rug potato, a man who shuts out the world by sitting on the floor and putting a paper bag over his head...
...From Maupassant to Andrew Dice Clay, bordello stories have been a staple of popular entertainment, usually accompanied by winks and nudges...
...As soon as he acquired a new mate she turned slothful, sloppy, unattractive...
...the dark, suggestive set of Loy Arcenas...
...They met for the first time in an Off-Broadway production of Tennessee Williams' This Property Is Condemned...
...She became, among many other things, an artist's nude model and a telemarketer, the jargon term for people who annoy you by selling things over the phone...
...and makes a confession...
...They are even denied the consolations of sex...
...Fireworks follow, all of them painfully funny...
...Shear sought work as an actress...
...Schisgal provides no answer, but when the Wallachs pose them, his questions are unfailingly, achingly mirthful...
...Nothing can lift those seven millstones from Man's neck but money...
...That way, you couldn't live with a bad painting in the house...
...Blown Sideways Through Life is devised and enacted by a hurricane named Claudia Shear...
...they force us to do away with our own liberties and to organize unnatural cruelties for fear they should rise against us and drag us down into their abyss...
...At the 900 number of a Manhattan whorehouse, she described the fees, the hookers, and the various services they would perform...
...He is an arms manufacturer, she is a selfless worker in the Salvation Army...
...Jackson advises: "You should have given her understanding...
...During a chatty, civilized evening, the couple salute a surprising number of playwrights...
...She recalls some freaky choices of makeup and wardrobe: layer upon layer of foundation, eyeliner, blush, mascara, accompanied by red pants suits with a peplum, and garish green stilt heels that cost $100...
...But there are millions of poor people, abject people, dirty people, ill-fed and ill-clothed people...
...But it is not their light touch—or the Wallachs'—that provides the key to this memorable and valuable evening...
...Shear merchandised flesh...
...Or is there hope for that grand event, double divorces followed by a reconciliation...
...What you call crime is nothing...
...by now it bores them to tears...
...Savoring the memory, she dons dark glasses, speaks the local patois, wiggles her eyebrows and matching accessories at various males, and receives many propositions...
...One summer in Italy...
...1 enabled Barbara to become Major Barbara...
...a murder here and a theft there, a blow now and a curse there: What do they matter...
...If Wallach has lost a step or two when he whirls her about in a scene from Anouilh's The Waltz of the Toreadors, he retains his impeccable timing and that familiar throaty purr...
...and the spirit cannot soar until the millstones are lifted...
...the original music of Richard Peaslee...
...they kill the happiness of society...
...Like the best humorists...
...Undershaft: I saved your soul from the seven deadly sins...
Vol. 76 • October 1993 • No. 12
