On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage AUTUMN IN NEW YORK BY STEFAN KANFER ATRIM, MIDDLE-AGED MAN, Greg (John Cunningham), enters his West Side apartment with a nubile female in tow. Sylvia (Sarah Jessica Parker), who has...
...facelifts and a mastectomy have done nothing to sweeten her temperament...
...In the title role Parker whuffs, snorts, crawls, and jumps with the lunatic vitality of a canine...
...The debate begins, inhibitions dissolve in alcohol, and with each succeeding drink the debaters grow louder, funnier and more revealing...
...The previous year they lost their adult son to leukemia—or so their story went...
...he was the no-neck Jewish wiseguy, unpolished, street smart, a zircon in the rough...
...So begins one of the most original comedies on the current Off-Broadway scene...
...Anne is essentially a theater performer...
...She has a small but discernible talent, and next time out she should let it speak for itself...
...When the dog is to be sent away, for example, and the couple is at its lowest point, the three suddenly burst into song—Cole Porter's "Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye I Die A Little...
...The great stone face stopped broadcasting and the clubs folded...
...it is an oddly affecting moment in an evening of hilarity...
...On the few occasions when he reluctantly leaves home for the office, Kate and Sylvia have spats rather than discussions...
...For Sylvia is not a young woman, even though she is being played by one...
...Why did they move from the suburbs if not to get away from encumbrances like this...
...Can this marriage be saved...
...As for Terry, after all these years she is still the repressed Catholic kid, forever searching for the passion she will never find with Marty or anyone else, principally because kvetching is the only thing she has to offer in exchange...
...As always, he listens impassively, and then politely assists the grieving pair to the door...
...Terry and Marty were deeply moved...
...The lights go up and a gust of snow abruptly appears at the window...
...The male diners are old pros, Reddick is a young one, and Meara is no slouch at delivering her own lines...
...Recriminations follow...
...According to Emily, Mathew turned his back on the child, but is now "the gay activists' poster boy," telling the world that he stuck by his son...
...The server's omnipresent smile suggests the reason for his forbearance: Soon it will be closing time, and everyone will have to leave...
...this well-fixed, long-married couple actually hate each other...
...Exclaiming loudly about the exotic sights, sounds and aromas, she reaches fever pitch just as the man's wife walks in...
...James Youmans' scenic design and Jane Greenwood's costumes create the illusion of surreality, and David Saint's direction is firm without being intrusive...
...Renee and Phil, Terry and Marty try to resume their table talk...
...Indeed, last season he adapted several short stories under the title A Cheever Evening...
...She is now on her third husband without much in the way of workman's compensation...
...Today Jerry plays a paternal role on the television hit Seinfeld...
...The dog cannot elevate its conversation beyond a desire to jump on the couch, and the wife cannot meet Sylvia eye to eye without lowering herself in every sense of the word...
...Alas, none of the trio is able to dampen Greg's animal spirits, and soon it becomes impossible to tell the difference between the walker and the walked...
...All three are played by the protean Derek Smith, who gives new meaning to the term "supporting actor...
...This is a comedienne whose timing and looks have improved with age...
...Isn't the definition of freedom that period of time when the kids grow up and the dog dies...
...I WELL REMEMBER when the comic team of Anne Meara and Jerry Stiller burst onto the scene an eon or two ago...
...These patrons, with all their problems of age, all their worries about ungrateful children and diminishing powers, will they ever be able to say as much...
...As it develops, the self-confident Renee has fought a losing battle with the clock...
...Maritally, Stiller and Meara stayed the course...
...As the quartet palavers, Raziel displays a high threshold of offense...
...she could be seen last year in Anna Christie, and this year in her own comedy, After-Play, at Theater Four...
...But none can quite match Barbara Barrie's ability to inhabit a character and make a dry, offhand remark seem as if it were a quote from Noel Coward...
...and as Kate, Mariette Hartley conveys a wry pathos unseen in New York since the days of Eve Arden...
...The evening starts in a warm, friendly manner: Both couples have attended a hit play, and they begin to discuss what they have seen...
...Their autobiographical routines began with the problems of courtship, then went on to the rich fields of marriage and child rearing...
...Again and again his saintly patience is abused...
...The somewhere is limbo, a place very much like New York...
...A moment's hesitation, one false turn and the entire evening could collapse...
...her aggressive barks ("Hey...
...Greg strikes up the bond, and then finds himself as emotionally dependent on Sylvia as she is on him...
...Phil's child by a former marriage has been a druggie, a wastrel and an all-around embarrassment...
...And the people we have heard and seen are no longer living, but not quite dead, their chatter still echoing in the void...
...She has never been in this place before and she feels like a stranger in a strange land...
...Three people attempt the role of mediator: amacho dog walker, Tom, who warns Greg that pets can sometimes ruin a relationship—and has the divorce to prove it...
...And Sylvia's outfit, complete with kneepads and clinging exercise clothes, completes the illusion of lady as pooch...
...The patrons make mistakes in their orders and accuse him of the error...
...But Jane Greenwood's costumes are what carry the night...
...Every available minute is spent on long strolls with his new friend...
...In a fashionable dining place a black waiter, Raziel (Lance Red-dick), claps his hands...
...And where are we, really...
...She played the shy redheaded colleen just out of parochial school...
...The dialogue of any four plaintiffs, no matter how risible, sooner or later begins to pall...
...Menopause has darkened her psyche ("I had my last Tampax bronzed ages ago...
...Emily herself openly despises homosexuals...
...Meara has read, sat through or been in enough plays to know that conversation must be interrupted by action...
...There is a bit of Outward Bound mysticism here, a soupcon of Terrence McNally homo-philia and bathos, a dash of Neil Simon sitcom gags...
...Cunningham's Greg is the classically confused wanderer in the middle of the journey...
...and her avid and scatological pursuit of a cat seem to me a precise translation of the way my own mutt speaks on similar occasions...
...Fred Allen once predicted that Ed Sullivan would last as long as other people have talent, but he was wrong...
...with the right part she will be a Broadway superstar one of these seasons...
...When they return from their gambol she is allowed to take up as much space in his conversation as in his living room...
...The program gives a clue: "A restaurant somewhere...
...Soon his boss loses significance, then his job, and finally his wife...
...As every canine training manual notes, dogs usually fix on one person and thereafter become almost inseparable from the beloved...
...It is a pity that up to now her most memorable performances have been in the Kodak commercials with James Garner...
...The couple's wardrobe contains exactly what such people would wear to work, to walk and to bed...
...Then Raziel's time and place will be his own...
...Phyllis, a boozy dowager who has known Kate forever and has put down Greg for almost as long...
...Kate (Mariette Hartley) is shocked, yet she makes no personal remarks, no sexual accusations, no outbursts of jealousy...
...Who is he...
...Two couples enter, reunited after a long separation...
...professionally, they went their separate ways...
...The trouble is, Meara has actually composed several plays in one—a characteristic of new and uncertain writers...
...A stray dog Greg ran across on his lunch break and has decided to adopt...
...As usual, John Lee Beatty has provided an imaginative set, which Ken Billington has expanded with canny lighting...
...Terry and Marty (Meara and Merwin Goldsmith) are New Yorkers connected to the theater and television...
...After-Play's comedy, and its apt reflections on the process of aging, are ingeniously amplified by a first-rate cast...
...Sylvia (Sarah Jessica Parker), who has wild hair and a personality to match, restlessly traverses the living room, sometimes nuzzling him amorously, sometimes retreating and sulking, gazing out with large forlorn eyes...
...Renee and Phil (Barbara Barrie and Larry Keith) are comedy writers in from the coast...
...Naturally, Kate finds the situation intolerable...
...Even so, Sylvia has its poignant interludes...
...Raziel, with a strangely self-satisfied look, sits down to enjoy some solitude and a quiet drink...
...In her authorial debut Meara writes about what she knows: show business and middle age...
...Together they updated Abie's Irish Rose and worked the clubs and the Ed Sullivan show for more than a decade...
...It spoils nothing to state that Gurney has written a farce, not a tragedy...
...and Leslie, a psychotherapist of dubious gender...
...A loud automobile crash is heard offstage...
...she even attacks Raziel for being one, and therefore a spreader of disease...
...Marty has just lost his aged parents in an automobile accident...
...Sylvia is given the power of speech ("Even when you hit me I love you")?but only with one person at a time, and only when no one else is in the room...
...He is to be saluted for giving Greg, Kate, Sylvia—and the rest of us—a new leash on life...
...His mother, having recently divorced his father, was driving?and ran over the old man before totaling the car...
...Raziel assumes the blame and moves on to the kitchen...
...There is also, happily, a plentiful helping of Anne Meara...
...Here the process works two ways...
...A mongrel...
...But every time she puts her foot down it lands on Sylvia, who yelps for help and promptly gets defended by Greg...
...But this evening booze has loosened their tongues, and after one more cocktail the truth tumbles out: The lad died of aids...
...But that hesitation, that turn, never occur thanks to the spirited direction of John Tillinger...
...So a little more than halfway through the journey she brings on another couple, Emily (Rochelle Oliver) and Mathew (John C. Vennema...
...With its subtle shuttle from E flat to C minor and back again, the melody falls between lullaby and lament...
...Phil was indifferent to the drama, as he is to practically everything else, and Renee found every act and every character "shallow and manipulative...
...Although Sylvia retains some of Gurney's preoccupations, the tone at the Manhattan Theater Club at City Center Stage I is as light and refreshing as a Perrier...
...A. R. Gurney has made the province of the wasp his turf, and most of his plays have a melancholy, Cheeverish undertow, suggesting a background of name schools and good breeding, followed by a superabundance of scotch, neurotic squabbles and failed middle-class expectations...
...But after various exits to the John and demands for more booze, only to find that the bar has closed, they exit into the cold night...
...the robust young animal is, quite literally, a bitch...
Vol. 78 • September 1995 • No. 7
