On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage THE SOUND OF SILENCE BY STEFAN KANFER In 1879 Johan Martin Schleyer, a Bavarian pastor, invented an international language. Missed communications were the way to misunderstandings, he...
...She inquires: "Is that like horny...
...Lowell Ganz...
...My difficulty with Fool Moon is that it has to be described...
...Chaplin became an international superstar without uttering a word...
...peace would follow in a few short years...
...His full frontal direction allows no subtlety of emotion...
...Hospitalized, he discourages colleagues and relatives from even contemplating a visit...
...Dean Ravenswaal protests that he is through with love and lust...
...put-downs only serve to bind her to the aggressor...
...In what Hollywood writers call a "back story," it develops that Anita was an abused child...
...She must find a life of her own, expunge the memory of a brutal parent, break free of the past...
...Dominic has neither social grace, nor wit, nor style, nor reality...
...all he does here is hulk and yell...
...Gestures don't work on the page...
...Actually, there has only been one period in history when every country responded to a single language: from about 1905 to 1928...
...none caught on...
...Now that might be something to behold...
...ome mail order catalogues have begun to offer pre-stamped luggage...
...Dominic represents all of them, force against reason, brutality against decency, death against life...
...Bill Irwin is the most celebrated elective mute of our era: He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, and a few years ago the MacAr-thur Foundation gave him one of its "genius" awards...
...It is called Babel...
...The supermime now regards Munich as his home base...
...He exists solely to give Ravenswaal an opportunity to dilate on tyrants the world over, men who seize what they want and ruin what they take...
...On such an evening England's Poet Laureate, Colley Cibber, saw a performance of a "dumb-show...
...Anita must resist this sort of inhuman punk, urges the dying Dean...
...From time to time, other artificial languages were proposed as panaceas...
...Shiner's vigorous mugging, and his collection of felt hats, recall the eccentricities of Chico and Har-po Marx...
...Where have we heard this laundry list before...
...Only Scott escapes with his reputation intact...
...The Dean becomes a bullish aggressor, prodding his reader with insults...
...They still do—given half a chance...
...Among them were my grandparents, who spoke it when they didn't want me to understand what they were talking about...
...Not to be outfarced, Irwin, dressed as a waiter in a claw hammer coat, suggests the fluid slouch of Grou-cho...
...Both men use the extravagant gesticulations of Art Carney and Jackie Gleason in The Honeymooners, and both of them can do the moves of Chaplin, Fred Astaire, Laurel and/or Hardy, W.C...
...In the next decade a Polish Jew, Lazarus Zamenhof, offered much the same argument with his language...
...All along, the playwrights, Garry Marshall and Lowell Ganz, shamelessly pander to ticketholders by smirking at the secretary's ignorance of life and art...
...As for Shiner, his portrait of a '20s movie director in mid-melodrama is one of the funniest routines since The Jazz Singer came along and broke the silents...
...What the nations had to do was adopt Volapuk as their second tongue...
...Their work is brisk and un-repetitive, their visual puns sharp, and their gymnastics impeccable...
...David Shiner is less familiar...
...Because Marshall and Ganz have no second act to speak of, they bring on Dominic De Caesar (Tony Danza), the aforementioned thug...
...The group specializes in blues, ragtime and the kind of outrageous musical jokes that recall Spike Jones, a looney-tune bandleader of the 1940s...
...Although he was born in the U.S., he moved to Europe 12 years ago...
...Actually, it is...
...Merendino, however, has trouble with anything over one syllable...
...All were mal...
...Rolling his sightless blue eyes in desperation, growling oaths, howling at the heaven he refuses to believe in, he gives the play an authority it has not earned...
...For in those days audiences spoke fluent mime...
...Or A League of "Their Own, written by...
...all he wants to do is lie back and listen to classic literature...
...Why he chose to appear in such a second-hand vehicle is a mystery...
...A Buster Keaton two-reeler could play in Nairobi, Shanghai, Paris, and New York and get the same laughs at the identical pratfalls...
...A nurse known only as Nurse (Kelli Williams) continually hounds and prods him with medical tests and pills...
...Only after two world wars did it subside into an idee fixe held by scattered fanatics...
...Yes, sitcom fans, at bottom—which is one sixteenth of an inch from the top?this theatrical production is really an anthology of used scripts, tricked out with an opulent and totally unbelievable set...
...The former Dean of Hofstra University has never been Mr...
...In some sort of reverse English, he too becomes bound by sympathy and responsibility...
...The designer, David Jenkins, has either (a) never seen the ward of a New York City hospital, or (b) assumes that college professors are funded by opec...
...He has also knocked Anita around when the spirit moved him, and of course this has made him irresistible to her...
...Whether he has stage presence remains to be seen...
...Danza, a former middleweight boxer, is a lightweight comedian familiar to fans of the TV series Taxi and Who's the Boss...
...The orchestra and mezzanine chortle knowingly: This young lady may steam up the windows when she enters a room, but they know who Helen Keller and Stendahl are...
...Fields, and, of course, Marcel Marceau...
...But he neglected to tell us the name of the village...
...Still, at 66, Scott has become an imposing curmudgeon with white hair and beard...
...His wishes are denied by two women...
...This is damaging in the case of Gertz, who, in the words of Dominic, possesses "a rear end that could make a dead man dance," but who does not have the ear for a Brooklyn accent or the technique for grief and rage...
...I was being facetious," he says after one outburst...
...Fool Moon has some weak points: Irwin's double portrait of Harlequin and Pantaloon relies too much on Bill Kel-lard's bright costumes and not enough on comic invention...
...Anita Merendino (Jami Gertz) provides another kind of interruption...
...The tragicomedy carries surface evidence of culture: blasts of Beethoven's Ninth, a cranky professor who talks in philosophical riffs, an uneducated young woman who reads to him from volumes of Baudelaire, Eliot and Keats, a developing Pygmalion and Galatea relationship, the issue of feminism...
...Yet these are very small flaws in a sparkling night that might have occurred 200 years ago, when theatrical pantomime was at its zenith...
...Now, even though you have never left your living room, your suitcase can imply previous visits to Gstaad, Sardinia and the Dalmatian coast...
...Peter Ravenswaal (George C. Scott), a childless widower, is struck blind by an unnamed and fatal disease...
...Forget about lingua franca, he said, and concentrate on electronics...
...Then there is Born Yesterday (1950), in which the untutored Judy Holliday is persuaded to break away from the loutish Brod-erick Crawford...
...Words will have to do...
...How about "hilarious," "poignant" and "timeless...
...But as the play pushes on the labels begin to peel away, revealing a shabby piece of merchandise...
...Television was about to rescue us from self-destruction, showing us our common humanity by turning the world into a " global village...
...Jones is one of many bygone personalities quoted in the shortest two hours on Broadway...
...That was the heyday of silent comedy, when the vocabulary of comedians was composed of gestures...
...AH I remember from their conversations is "bon'' for good, and "mal" for bad...
...Well, you could start with the 1936 film, The Petrified Forest, where the intellectual Leslie Howard puts down the criminal Humphrey Bogart with a few pretentious speeches...
...Indeed, his decline began from the day his voice resounded in movie theaters...
...In the 1960s Marshall McLuhan saw a new way to end disputes over land and ethnicity...
...They work wonders...
...She is Act One's uninvited guest, a raw but warmhearted secretary whose pro bono activities include reading to the sightless and performing various sex acts for the needy...
...Williams is similarly shortchanged...
...He was absolutely right...
...It was that French master who brought mime to millions some 40 years ago...
...Shiner's interau-dience comedy depends on the standard forms of European vaudeville: intimidation and embarrassment...
...One moment the stars are German Expressionist characters meeting on the street, expanding into their floppy suits or contracting down to stick figures . Next moment they are stepping to the tunes of the Red Clay Ramblers, a highly disciplined five-man band...
...This collision of American and Continental styles at the Richard Rodgers Theater gives Fool Moon its kinetic verve...
...Sunshine...
...Alas, most Americans saw him only on the Ed Sullivan Show, where Marceau did his rather obvious Man Leaning Against the Wind, Man Trapped in a Glass Booth, and Man Performing Unsophisticated Shtick on the Ed Sullivan Show...
...By intermission, Ravenswaal has agreed to lend Anita $300 to rescue her boyfriend, a small-time Mafioso on the lam for beating up the wrong guy...
...Nobody listened...
...He described it as " a connected Presentation of Dances in Character, wherein the Passions were so happily expressed, and the whole Story so intelligibly told, by mute Narration of Gesture only, that even thinking Spectators allow'd it both a pleasing and a rational Entertainment...
...Case in point: Fool Moon, a sheaf of sketches, blackouts and audience-participation skits by two wordless comics...
...Talk about coincidence...
...Marshall, a deft man around a sound stage, has almost zero theatrical technique...
...The patient wants to be alone to ponder the absurdity of life before it ends...
...Or you could refer to more recent productions stressing feminine independence, like Pretty Woman, directed by, of all people, Gary Marshall...
...Perhaps he is auditioning for the part of Sheridan Whiteside in a revival of The Man Who Came to Dinner...
...Shiner and Irwin see no need for pandering to the lowest common denominator...
...Watching Irwin get into his hat by placing it on the floor, then jumping into it headfirst, made me yearn for instant replay...
...His idea of drama is strictly from prime time: Light it bright and don't look back...
...She wonders if Ruby Keeler is the blind and deaf girl, andif Casey Stengel wrote The Red and the Black...
...Wrong Turn at Lungfish bears a strong family resemblance to those bogus items...
...He was far more persuasive, and Esperanto enjoyed a vogue for several generations...
...Missed communications were the way to misunderstandings, he argued, and misunderstandings led to war...
Vol. 76 • March 1993 • No. 4
