On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage PRIVATE AND PUBLIC SELVES BY STEFAN KANFER BRIAN FRIEL's gift is an ability to write big parts for actors. His curse is the inability to give them enough that is worth saying. The...
...But he has more memorable incidents to recall, and not all of them are so lighthearted...
...Nevertheless, the writing was a springboard that got Ullett out of bed and on the road once more...
...He stopped performing, and signed on as a copywriter at the J. Walter Thompson agency, where some sadist assigned him to the Gallo wine account...
...have goddamn pity on every goddamn bloody man jack of us...
...For several months Jordan played himself...
...The best that Friel can add are some Freudian overtones, made in the standard Hibernian mode: "Once upon a time a boy and his father sat in a blue boat on a lake on an afternoon in May...
...The hell with all strong silent men...
...Milo O'Shea), an unemotional retailer, gripes to—or at—anyone who crosses his path...
...She's the one to watch...
...When Madison Avenue palled, Ullett went back to show business, and won a starring job in the hit musical Me and My Girl...
...Many examinations later, a doctor told him he had non-Hodg-kin's lymphoma...
...Sullivan had no idea what they were talking about, nor did much of his audience...
...Ordinarily, one would not expect this news to inspire situation comedy...
...Friel attempted to refresh the theme with a technical device, and, indeed, the dialogues between self and soul are often reminiscent of Yeats' valedictory...
...In this revival, as in the initial presentation 28 years ago, the problem is the problem...
...There, Gar confronts his Private Self (Robert Sean Leonard), a nonstop monologuist with opinions on everything and judgments about everyone...
...Yet the Public and Private Gars cannot disguise the fact that the basic message of Philadelphia is old hat...
...each of us is all the other has...
...After all, more than a century ago Thomas Carlyle spoke of "that domestic Irish giant, named of despair...
...At his ebb ("I lost 26 pounds in a month...
...and he—he couldn't take his eyes off her...
...In 1941 Marianne Moore sighed, "I am troubled, I'm dissatisfied, I'mlrish...
...As soon as a scene expands, as in the invasion of Gar's friends in Act Two, the thread of continuity is broken...
...Since the days of Sean O'Casey, the dilemma of The Young Irishman has been preserved in amber: Stay in the country of your birth and wind up like your parents, bewildered by love, warped by lace-curtain poverty and religious dogma, or choose exile and lose the romantic beauty of the countryside as well as the chiming lyricism of everyday Irish speech...
...O'Shea is the prototypical burnout, alive only in his fierce, shiny eyes...
...was buried with her...
...Through it all he smiles and sings, accompanied by an exuberant and versatile cast...
...The current revival of Philadelphia, Here I Come, first presented on Broadway in 1966, encapsulates all of his subsequent plays...
...He has since returned to Hollywood, ceding his place to Mark Baker, an ingra-tiating performer who lacks the final conviction of a man who knows whereof he piques...
...There are only the two of us...
...He began feeling rundown, unfocused...
...But rather than simply tell us that, he contrived to engage a blue-grass composer, Joe Patrick Ward, and have him write more than a dozen numbers about growing up Southern, bewildered and homosexual...
...When the pair descends, only the Public Self is perceived by others...
...From 1,500 miles away Mama makes calls that drive him bananas?She knows how to push my buttons because she installed them"—and the twin sisters layer on the guilt...
...The booming speakers fragment into a group of soloists, all singing a different tune...
...Upstairs in Gar's little room, a livelier drama gets under way...
...the unseen, unheard Private represents, according to the text, "the man within, the conscience, the alter ego, the secret thoughts, the id...
...And Charles E. McCarry's production design is a festival of domestic tackiness: driftwood lamps, gold lame upholstery, picture frames decorated with seashells...
...it took a disease to show him that his title can be taken two ways...
...Several failed marriages and affairs taught him nothing...
...Soon afterward, the team split...
...The weirdest thing about this weird concept is that Jordan was right...
...Downstairs, life goes on as usual...
...The abrupt shifts in tempo, the mix of pratfalls and wicked satire, the explosive musical interludes provided the fastest hour on TV 1 sought that special kind of lunacy for more than a decade—until I stumbled upon a shard of it at Primary Stages on 45th Street, under the title Laughing Matters...
...Back in 1916 Joyce acrimoniously described his homeland as an old sow that eats its own farrow...
...Have pity on us...
...The '60s were an Anglophilic period, H&U had "the magic of the accent," and that got them on the Ed Sullivan Show...
...Cordell Stahl, Joe Pichette and Matthew Bennett are, variously, a clerk, a monster, a medical specialist, a preacher, a commercial director, and others too humorous to mention...
...Sample: Ullett as beggar: "Help the meek...
...The efforts at reform are, of course, catastrophic...
...With it we can get through the worst of times and fashion the best of times, as Ullett proves six nights a week, plus matinees...
...Circumstances do not improve when the youth goes west to make his fortune in Hollywood...
...The truth eventually goes Public, with poignant results...
...Joe Dowling has a fine sense of composition as long as there are only a few people onstage...
...As such he has a high time prancing about, jeering at S.B., mocking the local Canon (Leo Leyden), footnoting Public's failed romance with the village beauty (Miriam Healy-Louie...
...In the fictive village of Ballybeg, 25-year-old Gareth "Gar" O'Donnell (Jim True) packs up, preparing to quit Ireland for a job in an American hotel...
...If only the script were as illuminating...
...He is in nearly every scene, from a flashback with Gar's volatile American aunt (Ai-deen O'Kelly) to a raucous gathering of his contemporaries, men who noisily advertise their own traveling plans—and who will remain in Ballybeg forever...
...The one-man show stars Nick Ullett, the funnier half of Hendra and Ullett, a comedy duo that started at Cambridge (like the Pythons), then came to America...
...The women, Terri Girvin, Karen Murphy and Blair Ross, slickly switch from grandmothers and town characters to twins and passersby...
...He also wanted the world to know that he is gay in every sense of the word...
...WHILE WE'RE on the subject of situation comedies, one of the genre's overlooked character actors recently decided to present his autobiography in musical form...
...But Ullett is not an ordinary situation comedian...
...What he speaks about are laughing matters—his songs and anecdotes set off a steady avalanche of mirth...
...And here he is, two and a half years later, fully recovered but understandably wary, knowing that the crab may scuttle back at any time...
...For one thing, the material was too far out...
...In layman's terms, cancer with a good survival rate—if he had his bone marrow removed and irradiated, and if he stayed in isolation, away from his wife and children, for months...
...As in the recent productions of his Dancing at Lughnasa and Wonderful Tennessee, the playwright is flattered by his players...
...I suppose the networks have enough malignancy without importing any references to it from outside...
...THERE HAS BEEN a great vacuum in my Sunday nights since Monty Python hung up its spikes...
...They were 10 years too soon...
...The narrator's recollections of thuggery among the grape arbors of Marin County are worth a row of tickets...
...Friel has been less lucky in his director...
...Although Leonard's performance cannot bear comparison to Donal Donnelly's in the original production, he creates an ideal physical foil for the thwarted energies of True...
...He lands a job on a cop show, only to have the director roar, "I want Sly Stallone, and you're giving me Paul Lynde...
...The supporting cast of Americans and Irish provides the requisite pathos...
...and why can we not even look at each other...
...Hendra as choleric pedestrian: "Why the hell should I help the meek...
...More significantly, laughing matters...
...The dialogue and the plot are just as risible...
...Promising" is not the word one would have attached to the pro-ject...
...The men are no less adaptable...
...But their appearance, recalls Ullett, turned into a horror show?The Night of the Living Ed...
...Born and bred in an unfashionable section of Memphis, he comes from a family of wildly disturbed people, and he wanted to world to know it...
...Without it we are victims of circumstance and fate...
...he strikes me as a one-play writer...
...The score of Hysterical Blindness is to white trash what John Philip Sousa's works are to the Armed Forces...
...Please help the meek...
...Still, Dowling has been fortunate in his support...
...Ullett's career careened out of control in the '70s...
...Droll as Jordan is, I doubt he will have much more to say in the future...
...Predictably, the show never made prime time...
...John Lee Beatty's sets cannily expand the stage of the Criterion Theater, Catherine Zuber's costumes display the appropriate shabby gentility, and Christopher Akerlind's lighting is alternately as moody and bright as the Gars themselves...
...Shortly after childbirth she perished, and the best part of S.B...
...Then an unfunny thing happened to him on the way to the theater...
...Well, for one thing, you inherit the earth...
...this is a great disease if you like throwing up a lot"), he persisted in writing a witty script about his miseries and actually got some development money out of a TV producer...
...Director Carolyne Barry, who helped to develop the material, makes ingenious use of the minuscule platform at the Playhouse on Vandam...
...For three acts Private is a man of unbridled mischief...
...Flanagan acts, as the stage directions have it, "as if her feet were precious," and as if her words were too...
...Memphis is filled with grotesques unseen since the days of Carson McCullers: a manically adulterous minister, rival-rous twins, booming Good Of Boys who take one look at the mincing young Leslie and decide that he should quit baton twirling in the local parade and go out for football...
...These would be sung by four men and four women, on the assumption that what they chanted would be more hilarious than it looked on paper...
...Ward's music is derivative, but in this case familiarity breeds content...
...Leslie Jordan, a veteran of too many commercials and sitcoms, is perhaps best remembered as Candice Bergen's dithering secretary on Murphy Brown...
...The O'Donnells' long-suffering housekeeper, Madge (Pauline Flanagan), provides a bridge of chatter linking the suffocating present and the gilded past, when Gar's mother and father were in love: "She was 19 and he was 40 and he owned a shop, and he wore a soft hat, and she thought he was the grandest gentleman that ever lived...
...His father, S.B...
...All very sad, even tragic, but more than a bit stale by now...
...Hendra was last seen editing the late National Lampoon...
...Leslie seeks counsel and gets "The Therapist from the Black Lagoon...
Vol. 77 • September 1994 • No. 9
