Bayou Anguish, Yuppie Angst
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage BAYOU ANGUISH, YUPPIE ANGST By Stefan Kanfer There are two kinds of regional theater: the productions staged out of New York, in what the networks are pleased to call "flyover...
...Her child is driving her nuts, and Harris is driving her bananas...
...Instead, he prefers to bounce zingers off his friends: "A date with Jim is worthless...
...The regions Plunge plunges into are all too familiar: a hotel in Manhattan and a restored farmhouse in the plush hills of Western Connecticut, where a group of Kenyon College alums briefly and disastrously reunite...
...Her sibling, Sherelle, is an emotionally ravenous soul, afflicted with breast cancer, seeking a miracle remission from preachers in Galveston...
...I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding...
...Alas, for far too much of the script, the reverse is true...
...Various truths begin to emerge...
...One lonely night she links up with a kind farmer, Urus...
...That Galj our manages to look attractive in it is one more tribute in an evening full of accomplishments...
...Suddenly candor becomes the operative word of the weekend, and before long Harris lets Val know that he had a night of whoopee with the hostess, allegedly Val's best friend...
...The ur-Ivy Leaguer has the cultural depth of a tabloid...
...Still, playwright Christopher Kyle is not without wit, and if his characters are unsympathetic the people who play them are worth watching...
...A vibrator and a good book would be better...
...A couple of gentlemen enter the picture, and their intent is dubious...
...What cannot be forgiven are his humane characteristics...
...Inez has little direction to her days—until she comes across an abandoned baby in a cow pasture, names the little boy Beau, and takes him home to raise...
...All this comes out in a conversation with Matty, who expresses shock, not because of the adulterous activity but because the object of her affections is so uninteresting ("You might as well be dating your personal shopper...
...Here is a man who doesn't know when he's not wanted, even though Clare does everything but hang a sign on herself reading Nolo Me Tangere...
...An office temp, Jim has been led on by the ever-flirtatious Clare...
...She is married to Grady, a stolid alligator farmer who decides that the reptile eggs must never be overheated, "otherwise they turn out retarded...
...The evening begins in a New York City hotel room...
...but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech...
...he is not only altruistic and tolerant, he refuses to recognize any of his wife's foibles...
...It is a tribute to Galjour, a native of Bayou LaFourche, Louisiana, that she makes these people and these incidents plausible, poignant and sometimes outright hilarious ("I think I saw Jesus," "Was he alone, or with family...
...At first glance the area appears to be a gothic backwater, forever in the path of hurricanes, doomed to be as poor and obscure tomorrow as it was yesterday...
...Because that group has yet to be heard from on political, social or moral issues—in short, on anything that counts —Plunge concentrates on feelings...
...Clare should mix Metamucil with her booze...
...This is the play's one credible moment: Clare's preference for losers as lovers indicates beyond any doubt that she did not sleep her way to the corner office...
...Matty, a gentleman bitch, is being supported by his mother, who wants him to become an Episcopal minister...
...Earlier in the evening she left her room key on the table...
...The first, Inez Dantin, is a placid raconteur in her mid-30s capable of a kind of folk poetry...
...Not for long...
...In the process he gets himself hooked by Inez on one of her periodic fishing adventures...
...On Stage BAYOU ANGUISH, YUPPIE ANGST By Stefan Kanfer There are two kinds of regional theater: the productions staged out of New York, in what the networks are pleased to call "flyover country," and those presented on or off Broadway that concern the fortunes and follies of people physically and psychologically remote from Gotham...
...This is a place where alligators are raised for leather and food...
...Here Clare and Harris are joined by his chatty, personable mate, Val (Jessica Hecht), and anothervoluble college chum, Matty Bonham (Bruce Norris ). The guests have barely begun to settle in when Jim appears at the door...
...He mistook this as an invitation, realizes his mistake, and exits blushing...
...Every one of them is a new version of those weepy, narcissistic people on TV's Thirtysomething...
...The same can be said for every other yuppie on stage...
...Val wed for security, and would like to make a go of the marriage for the child's sake, yet there are certain drawbacks...
...The fish were so close you could smell the scales...
...Once again she sends him packing, with the information that even though she is a vice president in her father's firm, she earned her way to the top...
...Matters do not improve when Jim Mackey (Timothy Olyphant) bursts in...
...In her audacious one-woman show Anne Galjour not only plays eight different men and women of varying ages, she also tells a novel-length story, complete with subplots, comic interludes and catastrophic acts of God...
...After a company conference, the young banker Harris Nyquist (Taylor Nichols) and his boss, Clare Dunn (Ashley Crow), attempt a liaison...
...Incensed, Val makes plans to leave...
...As for the Nyquists, it turns out that Val is not the loving mother and wife she appears to be...
...Her guide through this Louisiana parish, director Sharon Ott, makes full use of the small stage, helped by Kate Edmunds' smart, imaginatively designed set, Kent Dorsey's ominous lighting and Steve LeGrand's sound effects of peaceful and inclement weather...
...Happily, Hecht and Norris take up the slack, aided immeasurably by the professionalism of Crow, Nichols and Olyphant, who give better than they get...
...For the last several months, for example, she has been involved with a lesbian lover...
...The results are not pretty to see...
...Laura Hazlett's costume design consists of one extremely unflattering dress, but perhaps this is what passed for fashion in the bayou country...
...Having finally slept with Clare, he has assumed, again incorrectly, that his presence is wanted...
...Very rapidly, the pressure in the room becomes equal to that in the Mindinao Deep...
...We are in the territory of The Big Chill, a 1983 film that focused on the Vietnam generation and how its various members protested, adapted or sold out...
...Her cast of characters range from the French-influenced bayou dialect to localized Louisiana intonations...
...Meantime, there are lives to be lived—and they are singular lives indeed...
...The most pressing question of the evening is not whether Val will leave her husband for good, but whether she will abandon her environmental causes in order to take a job at Con Ed, where she can "finally use that law degree"—a decision that prompts the reply, Who cares...
...Should she choose an abortion and keep searching for cures...
...This could be overlooked...
...It turns out to be a dud, principally because Harris cannot stop thinking about his wife, depressed and unresponsive since the birth of their child several months ago...
...But the ramshackle houses and narrow careers are about to change...
...In the most disappointing re-entry since the comet Kohoutek, Jim returns, flowers in hand, to win back the woman who never wanted him in the first place...
...This may be enough to drive a pop album or a Presidential speech, but it is insufficient to support a comedy of manners...
...It never seems to occur to her—or to the playwright—that her extramarital involvement is a far more grievous and wounding occurrence than Harris' unfulfilled fling with Clare...
...As if this were not enough, there is the matter of Jim...
...rattlesnake carcasses are stored in the refrigerator too, in case company drops in and dinner has to be rustled up...
...Next scene, that very place...
...one feels that if these people ever came to the surface they would double over with the bends...
...And she has plenty...
...Two sisters are introduced...
...The resultant pregnancy becomes a literal matter of life and death...
...Rob Odorisio's set is a remarkable evocation of bad-taste urban and high-style bucolic, and Jennifer Von Mayrhauser's costumes are funny without being vulgar...
...Oil lies beneath these sodden acres, and petroleum companies have begun to sniff around...
...that way she could get "a buzz and a high colonic all in one...
...Ron Lagomarsino directed this evening at Playwrights Horizons with the same pace he applied to the Broadway hit The Last Night of Ballyhoo, which is to say about four beats slower than it should be...
...Matty pledges secrecy and, of course, promptly spills the information to anyone within earshot...
...Chief among them is that she doesn't love Harris and probably never has...
...The story unfurls in the Louisiana wetlands, a few decades back...
...All are impersonated so subtly that Galjour would be well advised to precede her play with the kind of caveat Mark Twain posted at the opening of Huckleberry Finn: "The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guesswork...
...This play features members of Generation X, now in their early 30s...
...Marlon Skinner is a scuba diver looking for oil...
...I was awakened by the cow's rough tongue...
...All this occurs against a background of approaching winds and rains, the harbingers of a storm that threatens to destroy everything and everybody in its wide swath...
...From time to time she touches up the figure, complete with paint and eyeliner...
...Or should she give birth, knowing that the act is certain to be fatal...
...That is her principal virtue, and her pals are scarcely an improvement...
...Eventually, even his thick hide is pierced and he stomps out...
...Alligator Tales, at the Manhattan Theater Club, falls into the second category...
...Clare consoles the embarrassed Harris: Never mind, we'll all feel better after a group of us spend a weekend at my summer place...
...The smooth-talking Web Pitre comes on with an offer for some property owned by the Dantin sisters, dangling more money than they have ever dreamed of— and far less than the place is truly worth...
...Rosetta Cheramie, a lady of a certain age with busy, nervous eyes, speaks incessantly of tending the grotto where her statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary is located...
...He has researched the subject and found that there are more Muslims than Episcopalians in the U.S., and therefore to pursue a clerical collar would be "a dead end...
Vol. 80 • October 1997 • No. 16
