On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage BROADWAY IN TWILIGHT BY FTEFAN KANFER "I'M NOT DISCOURAGED-that's not the right word—but I'm disappointed." The speaker is Gerald Schoenfeld, chairman of the Shubert Organization,...
...The results are not what she and Rob wanted to hear: The baby boy will be "like David...
...Small wonder, then, that Terry spends so much time yearning for his far less complicated and much more attractive sister-in-law...
...Around the spare, sparkling set of Joe Vanek, and under the stylish direction of Patrick Mason, all six were full of grace and verve...
...Like the others, it was a limited run—too limited in my judgment...
...Indeed...
...Without looking up from the page he informed her, "Madam, I am civilization...
...Rob's views tend toward pro-choice...
...and 2) the most overworked artistic theme of the '90s, homosexuality...
...This work may be fictional...
...Written as the standard yenta and overworked husband of a thousand sketches and films, the Golds barely exhibit two dimensions...
...Its first two salvos have already misfired...
...The spirit of another Irishman...
...observed James Joyce in Ulysses...
...Berna turns out to be a manic depressive, subject to violent mood swings that make her variously suicidal, euphoric and incomprehensible...
...The hypothalamus is the question," she replies...
...Their prosperity is a mask...
...Groh had the crumpled, complicated air of a man who could neither take his son nor leave him...
...In last year's Dancing at Lughnasa he told the story of five sisters, refractions of Ireland whose animal spirits were fatally repressed by custom and Church...
...Into his strange stew Friel drops some other mystical ingredients, among them a Druidical stonepile and a cross festooned with discarded clothing...
...As he browsed in a bookstore an elderly lady accosted him because he was not in military uniform...
...The drama had far too many flaws, but no antecedents...
...The same could not be said for his latest work, which lasted just nine performances...
...These vary from Beethoven sonatas (frustration) to "Happy Days Are Here Again" (merriment) to the folk tune (melancholia) that gives the play its name...
...As they await the ferry, the couples nip at the picnic booze...
...We never throw out a book—even one by Joseph Campbell or M. Scott Peck, MD...
...Perhaps the best of them had the least experience...
...Joyce was also present in this work, as Rosenblatt reeled off scores of titles in a brilliant free-association riff...
...But affection was not the only emotion on hand: Revulsion was always just around the corner...
...For just as Godot never arrives to greet Vladimir and Estragon, so Carlin the ferryman never appears to take three couples to their intended place of revel: an uninhabited island a few miles out to sea...
...Still, that was no fault of the performers...
...The six people have gathered at a Donegal pier to celebrate the birthday of Terry (Donal McCann...
...You'd be killing me...
...Almost all of the brief evening was devoted to an examination of books and book lovers...
...There is a chill in the air...
...If they had been able to express themselves with nonstop dialogue, the outcome might have been theatrical...
...Carlin, for instance, stands for Charon, the boatman who carried the dead across the river Styx...
...Moving with more ease on the small stage than upon the small screen, the actor/writer reminded me of a remark said to have been made by an Oxford student in 1916...
...The plot hinges on the arguable theory that homosexuality is embedded in the genes and therefore detectable in the laboratory...
...En route to its finale Twilight ludicrously invoked the music and symbols of Wagner, comparing the agonies of the gods with the miseries of these hu-manoids...
...I have always found Wotan a monumental bore, but he never resorted to one-liners...
...They were Rob Stein, a Jewish physician (Michael Spound...
...Friel had produced an original...
...and Suzanne's gay brother David (Raphael Sbarge...
...Brian Friel, now considered Ireland's leading playwright, has made his reputation by holding up his country to the looking glass shards...
...By inserting one letter, Tolins bounced an amusing pun off Wagner's "Twilight of the Gods...
...Black really is an accordionist who was making his acting debut...
...But these highly polished performers refused to go the way of cliche...
...Off Broadway enjoyed a better start, although one of its wittiest new-productions can no longer be seen...
...That leaves Terry and Berna...
...Is abortion the solution...
...More out of curiosity than fear, Suzanne agrees to undergo amniocentesis...
...Under the sleight-of-hand of director Wynn Handman, the PBS essayist once again provided a seamless evening of anecdotes and insights...
...Terry's finances are in a state of imminent collapse...
...The time is the near future, the place a Manhattan apartment...
...What is the point of a minihit if it closes before a curious audience can catch up with it...
...a flamboyant turf accountant (i.e...
...Samuel Beckett, hung all about the Plymouth Theater...
...Soon their tongues are loosened, and the revelations begin...
...In addition to being a clotheshorse and a knockout blonde, Angela serves as the author's mouthpiece, invoking parallels between the Greek myths and the Irish predicament...
...In the beginning was the word," he noted, "and in the end, television...
...rattled off his technical information with all the zest of a pharmacist reciting contraindications...
...Manifestly the play was meant to be staged in the twilight of its title...
...It is a symbol of Irish art...
...That seemed to have exhausted his powers of invention...
...The question, he assures her, is hypothetical...
...By the second act, nervous coughs were detonating all around the mezzanine...
...bookmaker) who boasts of plans to buy the island as a retreat—or possibly something more commercial...
...The elder Golds waver one way, then another, leaving their daughter confused and desperate...
...Scarpone was his mirror image, a woman who accepted what she could not understand...
...Frank, a blocked writer, begins by bombinating about his new book, a tome called The Movement of Time and Its Effect on European Civilization...
...As for Arvin Brown's direction and John Iacovelli's set, they were of a piece: overwrought and about as deep as veneer...
...But Tolins is really after something else?gags...
...And George is nothing less than a modern Dionysus, encouraging all those around him to lose themselves to wild bacchanalia...
...In Twilight's terms this means the child is due to become a blond, shallow chap who talks incessantly about opera, his lover, and the parents who didn't understand him...
...Accompanying the host are his wife Berna (Ingrid Cragie), her sister Angela (Catherine Byrne), Angela's husband Frank (John Kavanagh), Terry's sister Trish (Marion O'Dwyer), and her husband George (Robert A. Black...
...The colloquy should have been resonant and moving...
...we reviewers can take care of ourselves, and Simon is adept at the martial arts of back-chat and gibe...
...Suppose instead of Bill Clinton, Hillary Rodham had zeroed in on Alan Dershowitz...
...Occasionally the discomfort was relieved by the performances of Groh and Scarpone...
...Describing his fellow bibliophiles Rosenblatt noted...
...Grey, the ingenue of such films as Dirty Dancing, was incapable of projecting either her thin voice or her undernourished character, so that the only thing pregnant about Suzanne was the pauses...
...If only I hadn't taken your temperature that way...
...Frank, for all his scholarly airs, is only a luftmensch living on Terry's handouts, and on the pittance his wife gets from teaching the classics to indifferent schoolchildren...
...her unabashedly middle-class parents, Walter and Phyllis Gold (David Groh and Judith Scarpone...
...For George, a failed concert pianist, is dying of cancer...
...The cracked looking glass...
...But Spound (whatever happened to vowels in surnames...
...The Twilight of the Golds concerned the misfortunes of a doomed quintet...
...Meanwhile, Schoenfeld is not the only one to be disappointed...
...Yet the portrayal of a musical mute was more than a trick...
...Is the bad news a harbinger...
...the novice actor embodied Yeats' indelible image of affliction, a coat upon a coat hanger, and it lingered long after the curtain came down for the last time...
...Ever since then his disciples have been giving us broken reflections of the land and its people...
...Young man...
...The first play had two excuses: 1) a green author, Jonathan Tolins, 27...
...In the same way that Twilight of the Golds strains for Wagnerian significance, Wonderful Tennessee reaches for classical stature...
...his pregnant wife Suzanne (Jennifer Grey...
...When Angela cursed the proceedings as a "useless, endless, unhappy outing," her remark was greeted with impolite applause...
...More than a few, though, would have been excised from the Senior Show at a junior college...
...Along the channels of the Information Superhighway, book lovers are civilization, and Rosenblatt is among the most civilized of us all...
...At the Booth Theater, however, most of those involved appeared to be operating in the dark...
...Trish and George are a better adjusted couple, but their happiness is literally short-lived...
...In an especially low moment, Tolins goes after all critics, with particular attention paid to John Simon...
...Instead, Tolins kept interrupting the crossfire with a series of monologues—the equivalent, obviously, of operatic arias...
...The air fills with warnings about social opprobrium, the incessant danger of aids, the possibility of a grandchildless future for Rob and Suzanne...
...certainly it will never be completed...
...The play was entitled Wonderful Tennessee, but might just as well have been called Waiting for Carlin...
...For example, after one of Rob's tedious medical dissertations, David asks Phyllis whether she would have aborted him under similar circumstances...
...An accordion provides the keys to self-expression and he lugs it everywhere, playing selections appropriate to the occasion...
...Most of them are good enough for a prime time sitcom: "I raised you funny," Phyllis reminds David...
...The elders did what they could with theirs, and Sbarge brought his off with considerable charm...
...Bibliophilia was Roger Rosenblatt's third one-man show at The American Place Theater (the second was performed by Ron Silver...
...Musing on the First Lady's recollection that she met her future husband in the library of the Yale Law School, Rosenblatt offered a horror movie scenario...
...The speaker is Gerald Schoenfeld, chairman of the Shubert Organization, lamenting the start of the 1993-94 Broadway season...
...This consists of attacking Frank, ripping his shirt to rags, then lapsing back to normality...
...his throat is almost worn away...
...But let it go...
...Watch this space...
...David, naturally, argues the case for the Right-to-Lif-ers: "Don't you see...
...she demanded, "what are you doing to save civilization...
Vol. 76 • November 1993 • No. 13
