On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage TWO QUARTETS BY STEFAN KANFER no' man's land'; n. 1. a piece of land, usually wasteland, to which no one has a recognized title. 2. the area on a battlefield separating the combatants....
...Spooner (Christopher Plummer) is a bard gone to seed...
...The bone here is fame, and the four dogs who quarrel over it are a veteran performer, Collette (Ann Magnuson...
...The trouble is, Victor has come to regard his work as sacrosanct and refuses to make any alterations...
...precedes his two-act expose with citations from Virgil: "O accurst craving for gold...
...a conniving ingenue, Brenda (Arabella Field...
...Otherwise, he warns, the movie will go "straight to video if it gets off the shelf...
...Screenwriters are notorious for biting the land that feeds them...
...The brightest moment occurs when the two men recall their palmier days of sexual conquest...
...Of the two men, Hirst has suffered the most ravages...
...Or second...
...it is quite another for him to drop hints and suggestions throughout an evening that seems nothing more than a conjurer's trick...
...John Patrick Shanley the director compensates for the shortcomings of John Patrick Shanley the playwright...
...with this production she either rises to star status or sinks to Shirley Mac-Laineish character roles, forever playing "somebody's aunt with cancer...
...He begins by congratulating his companion for a lifelong pursuit of fitness...
...Or perhaps...
...For all the authority in Hirst's voice, he turns out to be at the mercy of his servants...
...So she wheels out her own formidable arsenal of gossip and flirtation...
...For the project to be completed, the script must be vastly reduced in size and concept...
...Bradley finds Collette's overacting "so grotesque it's Kabuki...
...Every member of this quartet has at least one hilarious solo, but Magnuson fares better in the catfight, and Arkin is the best at being the worst...
...From Northern Exposure on television to I Hate Hamlet on Broadway, he has played vulgarians so often and so well that it now seems second nature to him...
...His reputation for producing bombs has become legendary, and his ability to secure financing is growing more precarious by the hour...
...3. an indefinite area of operation, involvement, jurisdiction, etc...
...Plummer is very much the first violin, tremulously stating and restating his melodic lines...
...Pinter has often earned his kudos...
...Made aware of their diminishing opportunities, Collette and Brenda begin to fight for every line...
...Spooner takes in this revelation with a minimum of distress...
...Perhaps the fumes of booze have created a relationship where none exists...
...Perhaps Spooner wants to join this pair of thugs, to insinuate himself onto the staff so that he, too, can rip off the estate...
...But the movie Bradley has just put into production is already over budget...
...He was born for the era of de-constructionism, when the text is merely the real estate and the commentaries are the elaborate structures upon which so many academic careers depend...
...He needs a hit the way Dracula needs plasma...
...The ambiguities, coupled with interludes of fresh and genuine humor, sustain the evening...
...Betrayal, for example, was nothing more than a melodramatic love triangle...
...To disguise it, the playwright applied a reverse spin: The habitual adultery took place in the first scene, the seduction in the middle, and the introductions in the last...
...Happily, the conjurers in this case are the inspired director, David Jones, and two old pros at the top of their form...
...then again, even the Budapest got tired of doing war horses every bloody night...
...Indeed, he burbles on, when the young Spooner was competing in various athletic contests, Hirst busied himself by seducing the poet's wife, Emily...
...No wonder he has become the professors' darling...
...Or is he...
...The two have just run into each other at a pub, and Hirst, ever the host, has invited his indigent colleague to come home with him for a drink...
...Hirst (Jason Robards) is a booming, strutting, wealthy man of letters, a public building in trousers...
...Each actress closes in on Victor, promising him fresh sexual delights if he will increase her part and diminish her competitor's...
...a loutish producer, Bradley (Adam Arkin...
...Does he believe it...
...His script has only the vaguest structure...
...Meantime, Brenda excuses her tantrums with bogus memories of abuse, having been "incested" when she was a child...
...Homer: "Victory shifts from man to man...
...The plot, if it can be called that, features two elderly gentlemen...
...It is unclear...
...The ambitious Brenda promises that by next year "you'll be hearing this voice in Dolby...
...But this literary attitude is pure swank...
...he scarcely recognizes that Spooner is a classmate from long-ago Oxford...
...He is an alcoholic, barely able to stay away from the bottle for three minutes at a time...
...The sometime scenarist (Moonstruck...
...True, the producers who went from Poland to Polo in one generation have vanished, the studio system has collapsed and the multiplex has replaced the movie palace...
...The very title is open to a variety of interpretations...
...Or does he ascribe it to the imaginings of a senile fool...
...No matter...
...From his earliest efforts he has specialized in menacing silences, elliptical dialogue and a vague but pervasive malaise...
...It takes quite a while to discover that he supports himself by cleaning up tables at a local tavern...
...A cinematographer is characterized as "an idiot, I hope, savant...
...Plus ca change, plus c'est la mime shows...
...Shanley has a fine ear for sound stage patois...
...Dressed as an unlaundered Edwardian, he wanders about dreamlike, speaking of his gracious upbringing and dropping literary names with a resounding clunk...
...From the opening curtain, Shanley takes a clear and malicious delight in the rapacity, hysteria and back-stabbings that continue to characterize the present-day film colony...
...On the other hand, more than a few Pinter plays were notorious for their gimmickry...
...Abetted by Wood and Seitz, they provide some of the subtlest and most rewarding moments of this season...
...In their light I recalled an apercu of Fred Allen that has lost none of its salinity—or validity—in 50 years: "You can take all the sincerity in Hollywood, place it in the navel of a fruit fly, and still have enough room for three caraway seeds and a producer's heart...
...A proper exhumation could take place," he says in the manner of a solicitous friend—or an anxious undertaker...
...Perhaps it is a battlefield where these two aging souls are about to have their last engagement...
...To anyone at all...
...The internecine battle sends up enough sparks to ignite a highly diverting evening...
...and a novice screenwriter, Victor (Reg Rogers...
...But this is Pinterland, and things are never what they appear to be at first glance...
...His memory has sadly eroded...
...It is one thing for a playwright who seems in control to be ambiguous...
...and Cicero: "I would rather be wrong with Plato, than right with men such as these...
...Those knights of the realm could lend significance to a reading of bumper stickers, and it was widely assumed that no other leading men could come close to their magisterial interpretations...
...I wish the group was interpreting a classic equal to its skills...
...Spooner is modest...
...One would be wrong...
...Unless, of course, he can convince Bradley to depose the director and give Victor the job...
...They spoke with an odd, musical effect that offset the air of foreboding with moments of lyricism and poetic anguish...
...Perhaps, Spooner suggests, it is death, a condition "which never changes, which never grows older, but which remains forever icy and silent...
...Perhaps Spooner is only pretending to be an old Oxonian so that he can cadge a few more drinks...
...As the lights go up, Bradley is in full panic...
...Brenda has the heavier weaponry: She is some 10 years younger, and she is sleeping with Victor...
...Hirst is all braggadocio...
...Alive...
...She has been a New York actress, and in his view, "theater is the Outback of the entertainment business...
...One would think there was nothing left to say about the excesses and egomania of movie folk...
...Webster's New World Dictionary ALL OF HAROLD PINTER'S plays could be grouped under the heading of "Enigma Variations...
...Result: threats, temptations, recriminations, backstabbings, four miserable people, and one piquant comedy at the Lucille Lortel Theater...
...Collette, however, has greater motivation: She is in mid-career...
...Yet all that has only made the arena more vicious and depraved, as John Patrick Shanley demonstrates in four dogs and a bone, the latest report from the frontlines of Celluloid City...
...Santo Loquasto's bright set and Elsa Ward's impudent costumes wittily fan the flames...
...When No Man's Land was originally produced in 1975, the play was carried by its stars, Sir John Gielgud and Sir Ralph Richardson...
...He lives in a North west London town house, complete with elaborate appointments and a staff of servants...
...For that matter, was Spooner ever married to Emily...
...And therein lies the trouble...
...Foster (Tom Wood), ayounghomo-sexual factotum, is stealing his time, space and money...
...In such dramas as The Caretaker and The Homecoming he created characters as memorable as Samuel Beckett's...
...So is everything else...
...No Man's Land, at the Roundabout Theater, presents both the high and the low Pinter in one hypnotic evening...
...Perhaps it is first nature, although the few times I have seen him on talk shows he seems to be the soul of calm and discretion...
...After all, the leather door is heavily padded, and there is a high brick wall just outside the huge picture window...
...From A Star Is Born through Sunset Boulevard to The Player, the film industry has remained the cherished target of its scribes...
...Robards is the cello of this quartet, thrumming his lines and filling the air with dark undertones...
...encounter follows encounter without resolution or crescendo...
...He seizes every opportunity to threaten the writer, bulldoze the performers and con the investors...
...He makes an offer: He could go through Hirst's photo albums, identifying the faces his host can no longer name...
...Briggs (John Seitz), an intimidating butler, barks the orders his boss meekly obeys...
...Is David Jenkins' vast sitting room a wasteland, perhaps an asylum of some sort...
...Apparently neither Robards nor Plummer has heard the news...
Vol. 77 • January 1994 • No. 1
