On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage FRONTLINE VS. FLAPDOODLE BY STEFAN KANFER There are two Larry Kramers. One is the quiet, intense author of fiction, plays and film scenarios, including a memorable adaptation of...
...Lawrence novel Women in Love...
...Or do surroundings have nothing to do with homosexuality...
...Reckless liaisons follow, with fellow students, teachers and colleagues...
...Destiny's cast gives even more than it gets...
...And Frechette could scarcely be bettered as the man who first counsels Ned to go "straight," but ends up envying his brother's stubborn integrity...
...Joseph Dougherty's adaptation reverses the process, closing things down and confining the action to a few unpersuasive locales, among them the Bethesda fountain in Central Park and a suite at the Waldorf...
...to schoolboy scriving, to dressing up in his mother's clothes...
...Richard, a Yale graduate who never realized his promise, has settled for a civil service job that gradually grinds him into dust...
...Its shock troops personify the noisome In-YourFace style—bursting into St...
...Only one component remains unaltered from the original: Kazan...
...Tim Curry, the show's centerpiece, displays a polished stage presence as well as a powerful voice—hardly a surprise, since he was Mozart in the Broadway production of Amadeus and has recorded four albums...
...In the Coca-esque role, Andrea Martin has the only showstopper, a number entitled "Professional Showbizness Comedy...
...They always produce the same unhappy result...
...The gags about gagwriters have grown whiskers by now, and the vein of ethnic humor has been strip-mined by a dozen TV sitcoms...
...Now he can only warn the gay world that tantrums are no substitute for responsibility...
...It comes, quite appropriately, from Walt Whitman's poem, Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Rocking: Never again leave me to be the peaceful child I was before what there in the night, By the sea under the yellow and sagging moon, The messenger there aroused, the fire, the sweet hell within, The unknown want, the destiny of me...
...Which is often...
...Author/activist/aids victim Ned Weeks (Jonathan Hadary) has just assumed another role: guinea pig...
...The youth has exactly the right mix of exuberance and insecurity, tripping over his own intelligence, putting himself down before anyone else gets a chance to do it...
...it may be just another false lead...
...But a funny thing happened on the way to the broadcast studio...
...But he is unaware of what the difference is, or how to cope with it...
...Next time out, this underrated Englishman ought to choose something better to do with his time and skills...
...Neither Thommie Walsh's musical staging nor Patricia Zipprodt's costumes are anywhere near as amusing as they ought to be, and Thomas Lynch's oldfangled sets magnify the show's weaknesses...
...Kramer's tocsin sounds from the front lines, and there is not a soul among them who can afford to ignore it...
...What he does offer is a series of witty, tormented exchanges between the protagonist and the objects of his scorn...
...The film's hilarity derived from a collision of British superstar and Stone's Jewish family, headed by his zaftig mother, Belle(Lainie Kazan...
...Or simply another example of Federal waste during the Bush years...
...Happily, some of the cast members are far superior to their material...
...defensiveness provides the subtext...
...The subject of nurture vs...
...Flynn had a reputation for pub-crawling, skirt chasing and rehearsal avoiding...
...The author admits that a good many of his followers are now "'problem kids' I often no longer recognize, often don't like, who give me a lot of lip and grief, but of whom I'm fiercely proud and protective and fight like an angry mother to defend when they're in trouble...
...Josh Mostel, playing the head writer, suggests the bulky yet lithe antics of his father, Zero...
...It is supposed to root the musical in time as well as place...
...I think it unlikely that the problem kids of act-up will understand or even attend The Destiny of Me...
...Melina Root's costumes and Dennis Parichy's lighting add verisimilitude, and Peter Kater's incidental cello music suggests melancholia without its concomitant, self-pity...
...Instead the portrait reminds us that My Favorite Year is not only about the Eisenhower era, it could have been produced 40 years ago...
...Ned decides to roll the dice...
...And should have been...
...To keep the actor from going on one of his celebrated binges just before showtime, a young writer was ordered to keep him on a short leash, well away from women and liquor...
...What rankles most is not the waste of money, labor and talent, but the fact that the producers were aided by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA...
...Delia Vida (Bruce McCarty) has devised a new treatment for men who are HIV positive...
...After that, Ned's destiny is never in doubt...
...The TV program was broadcast live, and it needed precise timing and reliable performers...
...One is the quiet, intense author of fiction, plays and film scenarios, including a memorable adaptation of the D.H...
...In a fever Ned confronts his young self (John Cameron Mitchell), growing up in wartime Washington...
...Ned's older brother, Benjamin (Peter Frechette), is preoccupied with the pursuit of athletic and academic prizes...
...John Lee Beatty's stage design is imaginative and fluid, shuttling easily from the '40s to the '60s to the '90s and back again...
...In the writers' office, for instance, a painting of the 34th President stares out at the audience...
...Did Mama's coquettish manner encourage imitation by her little boys...
...nature has been debated for decades, and Kramer kicks it around for three acts without offering any resolution...
...They have raised the consciousness of hundreds—and turned off thousands more...
...Peter O'Toole was Alan Swann, the bibulous actor...
...A pity...
...The same might be said of director Ron Lagomarsino (Driving Miss Daisy), who gives the project velocity without ever getting it off the ground...
...One night Richard happens upon his son in drag, leading to a pivotal scene of outrage, bewilderment and violence...
...As his old friend, David Niven once recalled, "Errol was totally dependable—he would always let you down...
...Was his militant personality and homosexuality formed in the family crucible...
...That attitude informs Kramer II's latest play, The Destiny of Me, at the Lucille Lortel Theater...
...It went backstage to show the neuroses and pitfalls of big-time comedy, and featured an outstanding cast...
...The epitaph Ned speaks for himself will echo long after the curtain rings down for the last time: "I wanted to be Moses, but I could only be Cassandra...
...Director Marshall W. Mason, who only a few weeks ago was at sea with The Seagull, is masterly here...
...In that case, why isn't Benjamin gay...
...With hundreds of regional theaters in need of support, what business does the NEA have with Broadway flapdoodle...
...Shelley makes her oddly sympathetic and wholly credible as she ages 40 years in the space of two hours...
...Is this an attempt to neutralize the Mapplethorpe scandal...
...The older Ned attempts insult comedy, defiant monologues, explosive confrontations—anything to keep from looking in the mirror and confronting the one person he did not want to become: an authentically tragic figure...
...A pandemic is loosed upon the earth, and the obituary page grows longer by the week...
...After being stifled for an act and a half by the Caesarean King Kaiser (Tom Mardirosian), she breaks out with a festival of gestures, imitations and jokes, suggesting the hit that might have been...
...Mark-Lin Baker played Benjy Stone, the naive guardian...
...As Benjy, Evan Pappas is an ingratiating newcomer with strong pipes and a vital stage presence...
...Other than Belle, nothing is the same, and very little is improved...
...At a government-funded hospital outside Washington, D.C., Dr...
...It may work...
...Except for this single interlude, as the narrator openly conceded, he has been unlovable for a lifetime...
...Everyone on every floor is dying...
...Lip and grief are the main ingredients of this autobiographical work...
...Patrick's Cathedral in the middle of a mass, blocking out the scheduling signs at Grand Central Station, shouting down politicians and doctors, all in the name of aids activism...
...Did he lack a male role model...
...this is the new Lourdes...
...Settling into bed, he considers his past in a series of flashbacks...
...Their quarrelsome parents, Richard and Rina (Ralph Waite and Carole Shelley), are even less attentive...
...Traditionally, plays are brought to the screen, where they are "opened up" to include exteriors...
...With the onset of puberty Ned finds various methods of expression, ranging from theatrical outbursts ("The Glass Menagerie is great, and they gave the Pulitzer to a play about an invisible rabbit...
...Hours of therapy provide little help...
...In both versions, she is the mistress of the malaprop: "Welcome to my humble chapeau...
...After some unchallenging early years, the hyperkinetic kid senses that he has become "different...
...the early 1950s, Errol Flynn was booked onto Your Show of Shows, starring Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca...
...The other Larry Kramer is the founder of the organization called act-up...
...Kramer, by the way, is not as egomaniacal as the title suggests...
...The playwright had hoped to lead his fellow sufferers out of their predicament by assaulting an indifferent government and a recalcitrant church...
...Is it predetermined, residing in the DNA, waiting to come out...
...In any event, the procedure will be lengthy and excruciating...
...Ten years later My Favorite Year has been resurrected, this time as a musical at the Vivian Beaumont Theater...
...the first version said it all...
...Out of that incident a couple of Hollywood scenarists concocted that surprise smash of 1982, My Favorite Year...
...When we first see the narrator, he is wiring himself up to a machine that monitors blood and body chemistry...
...That, however, did not stop a trio of Broadway adapters...
...Rina, for example, might easily have emerged a Freudian caricature...
...The one man who returns Ned's affection dies a year after the affair begins—bequeathing his companion the aids virus...
...The more virulent his reaction to the medicine, the more vivid his memories become...
...Oni Faida Lampley is poignantly effective as a black nurse whose backchat keeps her from falling apart...
...Rina spends her days in charity work, doing good for humanity, while she ignores her home, husband and sons...
...There was no cinema sequel and no reason to make one...
...A strong score might have helped, but what we get are unmelodic tunes by Stephen Flaherty and flat lyrics by Lynn Ahrens...
...the contemporary scene is obviously his metier...
...Good as those performers are, though, they cannot rise to the level of Hadary and Mitchell as different aspects of the same spiky narrator...
Vol. 76 • January 1993 • No. 1
