On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage STRONG PERFORMERS BY STEFAN KANFER ELDERLY PEOPLE often complain that they remember their childhood precisely, but can't for the life of them tell you what they had for dinner yesterday....
...The Attorney (Paul Guilfoyle) and the Attendant (Gerry Becker) are seated at a bare table in what appears to be a dungeon...
...This is going to be a very difficult negotiation...
...Although this is called the curse of old age, it ought to be counted as a blessing...
...In one of her few light moments Dorothy ponders the multitude of client phone numbers...
...And why not...
...In the end nobody wins, except an audience willing to wade through a lot of nonsense for some old-fashioned laughter...
...Bessie declares, "I'm not black, I'm brown...
...Phyllis has reasoned that the Other Woman must be her friend Carol (Lavin), and after slugging down several shots of vodka ("Chateau Absolut," as she refers to her favorite booze) she summons the trai-toress to her apartment...
...And yet those characters are usually played by the same troupe, calling for an almost impossible virtuosity...
...Central Park West gives events a reverse spin and hands Allen's fans a surprise...
...These were women born to challenge injustice and to lead by example...
...Augustine's College in Raleigh, North Carolina, a segregated institution where his wife, the daughter of a black slave and her white common-law husband, served as an administrator...
...I'll tell you the truth...
...I think I'm better...
...An Interview contains some amusing hate-the-lawyer exchanges, sharply delivered by both men...
...Did he bury that mower...
...Carol decides to be the mature one in this miserable little crowd: "Sam and I just fell in love," she explains...
...The world first learned about these very real people in their double autobiography, a surprise bestseller in 1993...
...Strangely enough, in the little zoo called Death Defying Acts the performers are almost flawless, and Michael Blakemore's direction is a delight, brightly supported by Robin Wagner's sets and Jane Greenwood's costumes...
...The kind mother used to make—when she watched the early Woody Allen movies...
...Act One opens with the sisters addressing the audience as if it were an honored guest in their modest home in Mt...
...A few entries should suffice...
...Both of the self-styled "maiden ladies" are skilled at the business of remembering...
...Freed...
...Breaking through her catatonic depression, she manages to reach Hotline, an organization dedicated to talking people out of their suicidal impulses...
...1930: Anglo-American Grant Wood paints 'American Gothic' and African-American painter William H. Johnson receives the Harmon Award...
...Only one other black woman could display a similar diploma in the 1920s...
...Nevertheless, she rarely raises her voice...
...There they will find a unique chronicle of historical events occurring within the Delany sisters' lifetimes...
...Preen, she is capable of many comic turns, but not a well made play...
...So begins a fusillade of put-downs, beginning with Phyllis' husband and "that industrial strength firehose he keeps behind his fly," and moving on to Carol's promiscuities: "They should put your diaphragm in the Smithsonian...
...We didn't want to hurt anybody " The penultimate joke is on her: Sam has decided to end the affair in favor of yet another amour...
...They spend about one tenth of the play cataloging the plaints of old age, and nine tenths summoning up their extraordinarily productive careers...
...A century of bias has left her undiminished, anxious to get on with things...
...The anecdotes do the shouting for her...
...You have to love your wounds," they stated...
...Affirmative action was not a buzz term to them, it was a way of life...
...She is even impatient with her sister's cadences—if Sadie takes too long coming to the point, Bessie rushes in to complete the sentence...
...Henry Beard Delany went on to college and divinity school and eventually became the first Bishop of his race in the Episcopal Church...
...That was when her husband, Sam (Guilfoyle), announced that he had fallen in love with someone else...
...They go out of their way to refer to themselves as "Negroes" or "colored...
...Given the playwright's limitless self-absorption, one would think a play touching upon the theme of adultery would flatter the aging roue and satirize his wife...
...The evening continues with Elaine May's Hotline...
...Vernon, just outside New York City...
...Lining up a night of one-act plays presents a similar problem...
...Like all public facilities it was forbiddingly marked "Colored" and "White...
...The air is filled with an awkward silence...
...Lavin plays the role with enormous energy and adroit physical comedy...
...And the darker you are, the harder it is...
...Did the Attorney borrow a lawnmower he fai led to return...
...Pressed about her current state of mind, she explodes, "Can't you tell by now...
...I'm unpleasant...
...It tasted just the same...
...Drinking her in, Howard awakens to new possibilities...
...Or she was until this morning...
...And yet the Delany militance had a civil tone and temper that has all but vanished from current political debate...
...Thomas Lynch's revolving set creates islands of serenity within the stately Booth Theater, and Judy Dearing's costumes are true to the spirit of the aged...
...Bessie went her one better...
...IN RANDALL JARRELL'S VIEW, "Putting together an anthology of short stories is like starting a zoo in a closet...
...The Delanys' father, born into slavery, had one exceptional break...
...1918: Spanish-American actress Rita Hayworth is born in Brooklyn...
...Even before the marquee went up, old admirers were heard to complain, "Why doesn't he write funny the way he used to...
...When she first began the project, the Delany sisters told her the secret of longevity...
...Those connoisseurs wishing to sample political correctness in extremis have only to turn to page 35...
...The answers are not nearly as important as the locale...
...Eventually Sam appears, and so does Carol's shlepper of a husband, Howard (Becker), who spends most of his time giving an excellent imitation of Woody Allen on Prozac...
...Bessie will have no truck with accommodation...
...The irony is that the sisters want nothing to do with such labels...
...Are you really this dumb or is this some new technique...
...not even a one-acter...
...I'm just as good as anyone else," she asserts...
...For many years he taught at St...
...Phyllis (Debra Monk) is a highly successful psychiatrist...
...Pause...
...In the main, however, it has the aura of a finger exercise—a one finger exercise—that has sat too long in the playwright's bottom drawer...
...The Delanys' 10 children grew up in a high moral atmosphere, and every one of them rose to a position of prominence...
...Enter the 22-year-old Juliet (Tari Signor), who turns out to be a former patient of the long-suffering Phyllis...
...Dorothy (Linda Lavin), an unhappy hooker, is thinking about ending it all...
...Sadie, the first to speak, never loses her lofty dignity...
...This is not to diminish her sensitivity or activism (she was one of the protesters at the Capitol Theater in 192 5, when it showed Birth of a Nation...
...On an afternoon when no one was looking, Bessie recollects, "I sneaked over and had a taste of that White water...
...The briefer they are, the louder their message...
...She is the curator of her grievances, forever taking them out, dusting them off, and retelling a story about their acquisition...
...His master dared to teach Negro children how to read and write, despite the laws in the Confederate South making the transmission of such knowledge illegal...
...It would be unsporting to give any more details, save to say that the place gets infernally hot...
...is oneof her typical questions...
...Conversely, the laundry list of hyphenated Americans diminishes everyone it touches...
...She attended Columbia University, and against incalculable odds graduated from its Dental School...
...The humorist Josh Billings once said that he never knew a centenarian to be remarkable for anything else...
...1955: White-American Jonas Salk develops polio vaccine...
...Then the Elaine Mayhem begins...
...Happily, the actresses who impersonate the Delanys stick to the script and not the screed...
...Dorothy is hostile both to those who have hurt her and to those who would offer aid, particularly the bungling teleshrink Ken (Becker) and his colleagues (Guilfoyle and Paul O'Brien...
...As Sadie, Gloria Foster has an elegance of speech and a way of moving that records the years but defies the gravity pulling at her body and soul...
...As the world knows, Allen has recently been involved in a messy child custody battle and a relationship with a very young woman...
...It all reminded me of last year's New Yorker cartoon, in which a dog frantically pursues a cat...
...For this lady of the evening, anguish is omnipresent...
...In addition to an exquisite sense of timing, she folds her face like a fine leather purse every time she delivers a good line—and she has a festival of them...
...Gogol and Mr...
...Those watching from the orchestra and balcony may feel the same way...
...She may be...
...Sadie was the first black teacher of domestic science in New York City...
...Her manner is lenient and reasonable, no matter how bitter the memories of racism...
...1978:1...
...The conversation begins and, as is usual with Mamet, immediately becomes filled with cryptic and threatening words...
...Certainly she is better than the notes in the Playbill, apparently prepared by the show's producers, Camille O. Cosby and Judith Rutherford James...
...It is the playwrights who are responsible for the yawps, screeches and bestial behavior...
...So is the work of adapter/director Emily Mann...
...It isn't hooking that bothers her, she concludes, it's the paperwork...
...The caption reads "Canine-American chasing Feline-American...
...Comparing the shade of her skin with Sadie's, Bessie goes on, "I'm darker than she is...
...Take, for example, the incident of the large water fountain in downtown Raleigh...
...The playwrights are bound to have disparate styles and characters...
...Juliet is the classic Allen waif, a true believer in the person she talked to last...
...Woody Allen's latest work concludes the program...
...her kid sister Bessie (Mary Alice) is 101...
...Her remarks amplify the tragedy of racial discrimination...
...As he begins to hit on the young lady she grows confused, breaks down, abandons Sam and seeks counsel from the one person she can trust: Phyllis, upon whose couch she will appear tomorrow morning...
...As May proved with last season's Mr...
...The elderly siblings in Having Our Say are wise enough to separate the trivial from the significant...
...Pause...
...Mann has honored and returned that affection...
...Age has slowed her down to a hobble, but her speech is marked by impatience...
...They have been at it since the 19th-century...
...A pity he never met the Delany sisters...
...M. Pei, a Chinese-American, designs the National Gallery of Art...
...When we listen to a veteran of World War I, a survivor of the Holocaust, the children of slaves, what we want is an eyewitness account of the distant past...
...As the skeletal Bessie, Mary Alice steals the evening...
...That's the way I was brought up...
...Who cares about last night's entree...
...David Mamet's An Interview raises the curtain at the Off-Broadway Variety Arts Theater...
...She is disgruntled with the slow pace of the civil rights struggle, and the lack of leadership since the death of Martin Luther King Jr...
...Sadie Delany (Gloria Foster) is 103...
...Even so, Dorothy is too pathetic to be truly funny and too abrasive for our sympathy...
Vol. 78 • May 1995 • No. 4
