On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage TIME--AND AGAIN BY STEFAN KANFER HESIOD was the first to note that "right timing is in all things the important factor," and his observation has held true for two millennia. The latest...
...The first, "Sure Thing," sets the tone...
...He ordered a Daily News...
...Listening to this, I realized the validity of what was being said...
...Mark (Stanton) presents a negative image...
...Homosexuals, including her son ("He just packed up his attitude and left me"), are referred to contemptuously...
...She knows all about the syndrome...
...Without any evidence, B is included in that disgraceful company...
...Like so many of his characters through the decades, he is going out the way he came in...
...and the marvelous cast, who could give lessons in timing to a Rolex...
...In a schoolroom, Dawn (Wendy Lawless) takes lessons from a fast-talking instructor (Stanton...
...Bing...
...no wonder the couple is headed bedward at the fadeout...
...The young one, C, is full of romantic expectations, whirling on a dance floor, speculating about a series of beaux, planning a vibrant and happy life...
...loved Bananas...
...What's it like...
...The latest and mer-riest proof can be found at the John House-man Theater, where playwright David Ives scatters insights, puns and gags with the ease of a man emptying change out of his pockets...
...The two men are joined by the waitress (Lawless...
...Here again is the once-famous amalgam of bitchiness and poignance...
...Shocked and horrified at the trials of senescence, she wonders whether A is being mistreated or merely handled with the firmness she deserves...
...Baker moves easily from terror to radiance and back again...
...Ives is on weaker gound when he experiments with history...
...the kosher deli only had tongue, etc...
...The penultimate piece, "Philip Glass Buys a Loaf of Bread," is a predictable mix of paronomasia ("Phil Lip Gloss") and pastiche, with the composer's repetitive musical tics rendered in chants: "Philip, Philip, kneads, needs, bread, bread...
...I couldn't endanger my situation...
...After years of commercial and esthetic disappointments, Edward Albee is once again Off-Off-Broadway...
...Like her two listeners, A was a tall woman (although age has made her bones shrink a little...
...Even then Trotsky fails to acknowledge the truth until she shouts, "Can't I get it through your skull...
...A's testimony is more than C can bear...
...Variations on the Death of Trotsky" features the old revolutionary (Countryman) in Mexico, the day after his assassination in 1940...
...In "Words, Words, Words," three chimpanzees roam their cage...
...The comedy has since moved to 42nd Street, where it will enjoy a long run...
...It's not always a bad scene, Al claims...
...At a restaurant, two friends are discussing their states of mind...
...Who remembers The Lady from Dubuque, The Man Who Had Three Arms, Finding the Sun...
...But "The Philadelphia" returns the playwright and his cast to bursts of inspired nonsense...
...I had recently been in a "Washington," a state of mind in which the victim cannot find a Secretary who wants the job...
...As she becomes used to this punning tongue, the wordplay picks up velocity: English is Johncleese, Isadora means the door, and there are references to phenomena like Rin Tin Tinnabula-tion...
...Faulkner...
...Known only as A, she is attended by B (Marian Seldes), a grim middle-aged factotum, and by C (Jordan Baker), an attractive young lawyer who is there to straighten the old lady's tangled finances...
...B is the older and wiser one, having compromised her dreams for decades of imprisoning security...
...they are, rather, the former selves of A, at the ages of 52 and 26...
...Having understood the language, Dawn is offered coin granulations...
...Velcro, Harvard U?" means "Welcome, how are you...
...Work a few hours in the morning, rewrite and polish in the afternoon, then take a break for papaya and some masturbation...
...Betty reacts negatively when Bill speaks of his origins: "I come from Cleveland...
...But she has spoken too soon and too late...
...He is fondly recalled—but not as fondly as the horse trainer who seduced her and, of course, had to be fired after a month of furtive adultery...
...A rich and self-centered nonagenarian (Myra Carter) is failing rapidly...
...When he returns, The Boy (Michael Rhodes) can simply sit wordlessly at her bedside, his body language pronouncing the elegy for the mother he can neither leave nor love...
...He'll sell his life story to the movies and make a mint...
...Through the years, she suspected every servant of pilfering...
...That locale proves satisfactory, and he presses on to confess that he hated early Woody Allen movies—Bing...
...A platform before the castle...
...The gaffe never happened...
...Bing...
...His first full-length work, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf...
...A lanky young man, Bill (Robert Stanton), wanders into a coffee shop...
...Time is annihilated, and the three tall women interact...
...Too many of Albee's major works have failed on the main stem, and lesser plays have not prospered Off-Broadway...
...Although the Playbill resume mentions his nine previous Off- or Off-Off-Broadway plays, Ives was in fact an unknown before All in the Timing opened far downtown...
...A bell sounds: Bing...
...She reads from the 1993 Encyclopaedia Britannica, describing his murder...
...For A is a collection of resentments and prejudices...
...Amid the chatter come scholarly insights, hilarious vulgarities, and even allusions to Danny Kaye movies ("The pellet with the poison in the pestle with the vessel"), until Kafka gobbles up the final peanut and returns to her assignment...
...He stops at a table where a pretty girl, Betty (Nancy Opel), sits alone with her book...
...The production of Three Tall Women at the Vineyard Theater may help to correct that impression—but just barely...
...She wrinkles her nose and turns away...
...Nothing is working for him this morning...
...Elsinore," she begins...
...Bill is given a second chance: "The Sound and the Fury...
...The interlude has been erased...
...Mark wants to know...
...They are not individuals after all...
...A is a kind of Queen Lear, having outlived her friends and be-comeestrangedfromheronly child...
...Set up a schedule for yourself," the simian advises...
...Although they are included in some anthologies of the American theater, an entire generation now regards the 65-year-old playwright as a supernova, a star that burned out long ago...
...Police" is used for "please," "bell jar" for "good day...
...The young playwright of the early '60s, he began his career with small but auspicious Off-Broadway efforts like The American Dream and The Sandbox, both about the sorrow and bitterness of old age...
...James Noone's bedroom set is merely functional, but Muriel Stockdale's costumes amount to a fifth character, commenting on the passages of time and the alterations of personality...
...If this were 1962, Three Tall Women would herald the arrival of a playwright as promising as David Ives...
...Al knows why: His pal is in a "Philadelphia," a state of mind that occasionally hits New Yorkers...
...Pittsburgh...
...He teaches her a modern Esperanto based on words with similar sounds or intentions...
...All in the Timing is composed of six surreal miniplays, united only in their treatment of time as a substance that can be sliced, poured or frozen...
...He peeks at the dust jacket and attempts an opening: "The Sound and the Fury...
...He sits at his desk spouting anachronisms to his wife (Opel)?I'm sorry I couldn't be more in touch with my feelings"—and refusing to notice the hatchet buried in the back of his head...
...Albee went on to earn two Pulitzer prizes (for A Delicate Balance and Seascape) and to write many original plays, plus adaptations of other people's writings (including Carson McCullers' The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, and Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita...
...His reward for all this industry has been a latter-day neglect...
...and Carter manages to be querulous and comic in the same short breath, dropping her voice an octave to confide a secret, then rising to an eerie cackle as she recalls her husband's indiscretions and her own sexual misadventures...
...After a few minutes of turning out stuff like "k-k-k-k-k," Swift petulantly observes that "writing is a mug's game anyway," while Milton turns the gathering into a story conference, warning his colleagues that desultory habits are no way to come up with the tragedy of the Great Dane...
...the set and costume designs of Bruce Goodrich and Sharon Lynch, who take the title comically...
...I had a good deal," she explains...
...Jews are to be used but never trusted...
...But we have been through all that with Albee, and this elegant minor effort gives very little reason to cheer...
...In Act II, as A lies on her deathbed, B and C are revealed as something far differ-ent from their first appearances...
...Her late husband was a small man with a glass eye and a lot of money...
...Blacks are niggers...
...Enter Bernardo...
...Al (Ted Neustadt) is euphoric...
...1963), focused on ambition and self-deception, dazzled Broadway audiences, won critics' awards, and announced the arrival of a major talent...
...In this enchanted cafe time has become a benefactor, not an enemy...
...One could hardly wait to see his next production...
...Even though they are in Manhattan, such people feel displaced, as if they have been abruptly transferred out of town...
...Indeed, "The Universal Language" could not have been written without the precedent of Finnegans Wake, and its mention of those who are Jung and easily Freudened...
...Seldes gives the play its gravitas...
...So it goes for the rest of the sketch...
...The trio is part of a laboratory experiment, acting out the famous hypothesis that if monkeys worked at keyboards long enough, they would produce Hamlet...
...the vendor never heard of the paper...
...In appreciation, he and I should acknowledge the inventive direction of Jason McConnell Buzas, who takes the title literally...
...Named for literary figures—Swift (Stanton), Kafka (Opel) and Milton (Michael Countryman) —they pick fleas out of their pelts, swing on a rubber tire and bang away at typewriters...
...Under Lawrence Sacharow's subtle direction, the trio of actresses find every possible nuance in the text...
...She has been in a "Cleveland" all week...
...He wanted a pastrami sandwich...
...Whatever happened to Edward Albee...
...Act I concerns A's infirmities and incontinence, as she rails against her weak bones and failing memory...
...She rewards him with a smile...
...He himself is in a "Los Angeles," where everyone is laid back and everything is cool...
...Although the spirits of many literary figures are in attendance, James Joyce is clearly the evening's master of ceremonies...
...Hemingway...
...B variously prods and pampers her, while C is the observer...
...There is no way, she vows, that she will come to this sort of end...
...Westchester County...
...Like death, without the advantages," she informs him...
...His girlfriend has left him, he has lost his job, but so what...
Vol. 77 • February 1994 • No. 2
