Time Warps
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage TIME WARPS By Stefan Kanfer William Faulkner once told the Paris Review, "If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of...
...Ruth, usually closemouthed about her past, finally yields...
...Visiting Ruth's Greenwich Village apartment one afternoon, she encourages the graying lady to speak of a bygone liaison...
...Here is a part of Ruth's authentic recollection: Ruth: There was the great poet Delmore Schwartz, mad prophet, squandered genius, son of 'Europe, America and Israel....' He was only 44 but there was something ancient about him, something terribly mortal and immortal at the same time, if that makes any sense...
...On the other hand, Jessica did die under mysterious circumstances...
...Ruella is forced to submit to extortion...
...The playwright has stated that Collected Stories derives from the occasion when novelist David Leavitt ripped off the memoirs of his erstwhile friend, Stephen Spender...
...But William Carden's direction is brisk and his cast is beyond reproach...
...He took that famous picture of the falling soldier during the Spanish Civil War...
...But later Morrison writes a novel, Miriam's Book...
...This is the crux of Donald Margulies' 1996 play, revived by the HB Playwrights Foundation and acted with precision at the Lucille Lortel Theater...
...This summer has provided two examples, Joyce Maynard's solipsistic tell-all memoir of her relationship with J. D. Salinger, At Home in the World, and Paul Theoroux' ungrateful portrait of his former guru, V S. Naipaul, Sir Vidia's Shadow...
...He said about his work, 'If it isn't good enough, I didn't get close enough.' And the same could be said for fiction...
...Graham hulks with the high style of a Grand Guignol villain...
...Frantically, she enlists the aid of Harold (David McCallum), the hotel's security officer...
...Harold is only too happy to help, as long as he can line his pockets en route...
...Whoever he (or it) is, this particular exporter has learned his lesson well...
...Morrison, indignantly refusing, quotes the professor's dictum that nothing is off limits to fiction...
...Instead, under the guise of farce, he audaciously experiments with time and space...
...The ailing old man seems less interested in diversion than in confession...
...You know the photographer Robert Capa...
...Words are all that matter...
...Processed though it is, this latest work from Alan Ayckbourn Ltd...
...A Small Family Business occurred simultaneously on several floors of a house...
...Sad to say, many other examples could have been chosen...
...Ayckbourn—and possibly a great many more...
...As the beleaguered lady of the evening, Parker is both poignant and brash, a mixture she used in her previous off-Broadway star turn, How I Learned to Drive...
...Lisa: Oh, yeah...
...Lisa: Even if it's my father's...
...This work Ruth does not view with equanimity...
...As an added twist of the knife, she has told it in the first person...
...I, a girl half his age, would see him through seven of his final seasons in a variety of roles: lover, nurse, mother-confessor, muse...
...The hell with secret confessions and fellow feeling...
...Almost anyone could learn by watching Ruth in aggressive motion—or better still, sitting immobile and listening ravenously...
...The room is the same, but Ruella is now alive and awaiting the arrival of her middle-aged husband...
...If Japanese car manufacturers taught the West anything, it is the importance of quality control in any rapidly produced product...
...hardly a year goes by without some acolyte turning on a benefactor...
...At 44 he had lived too long but would not die soon enough...
...Poet, madman, raconteur...
...Caparisoned in leather and studs, she is there to service a decrepit client, Reece (Tom Beckett...
...Upon reading the bound galley, Sterner reacts like a high priestess struck down at the altar...
...Alan and a Mr...
...No matter...
...Still, the mistake is understandable...
...What sheltered Jewish girl from Detroit, what self-styled poet, what virgin, would not have succumbed...
...Playing Lisa, Simons skillfully rises from rawboned coed who makes every declaration a question ("Oh my God, that makes so much sense...
...Poopay describes the incident that took place back in the future...
...On the face of it, the notion sounds plausible enough...
...But unlike Simon, he rarely restricts himself to plays about middle-class expectations...
...More recently, New Yorker author Janet Malcolm declared that when a journalist conducts an interview, chances are someone is being sold out...
...If you have a story to tell, tell it...
...Zero in on it and don't flinch, just do it...
...Translation: Whatever a writer encounters—a topic, a place, an individual—automatically becomes fair game...
...To that end he hands Poopay a strange handwritten paper...
...and the wry McCallum seems not to have changed a hair since his days as Ilya in the '60s TV series, The Man from U.N.C.L.E...
...He seemed to possess so much wisdom and yet, even then, even that first sleeting night, he seemed doomed...
...For if she fails in her mission, all three women will be as dead as vaudeville, an art form that is readily recalled by the goings-on at the Variety Arts Theater...
...As he closes in for yet another kill, Poopay heads for a closet, slams the door—and abruptly finds herself thrust 20 years into the past (i.e...
...Great thinker, good poet, drunkard extraordinaire...
...How the Other Half Loves shuttled between two dinner parties on consecutive days, with the same guests and very different outcomes...
...But the title is a misnomer and never catches on...
...In time the young woman enters the literary world with a collection of well-received short stories...
...The intimate reminiscence seems destined to go no farther...
...Poopay (Mary-Louise Parker), a self-described "specialist sexual consultant" visits a hotel suite...
...For like Simon, the Briton is a prolific master of situation comedy who is forever discussing matters of life and death—and then covering them with jokes, as if embarrassed by his own gravity...
...Although the play ventures into the field of social and political commentary—the London of the future seems to be engaged in a long-running civil war— Communicating Doors generally goes no deeper than the veneer on the hotel furniture...
...Lisa pays close attention but says very little...
...How dare this young woman seize on private confidences and retail them, incident by incident, as if they were her own...
...To humor the younger woman, and to allay her own fears, Ruella enters the magic closet...
...I would love him and despise him, worship him and wish him dead...
...Convinced that Poopay was telling the truth, Ruella attempts to alter her own fate and those of the young Reece and the younger Jessica...
...She emerges in the year 1978 (the time machine tends to go in reverse...
...Hodges is an angular farceur on the order of Carol Burnett...
...For without asking, Lisa has appropriated the Steiner-Schwartz romance...
...You've got to get in there and shoot...
...As a 22-year-old innocent she had an affair with Delmore Schwartz, self-promoting, self-destroying intellectual and loudmouth of the '50s (and, incidentally, the centerpiece of Saul Bellow's novel Humboldt's Gift...
...No wonder Hagen is one of the most respected acting teachers in America...
...And here is the result of Lisa's ransacking: Lisa: (Reading from her manuscript at the 92nd Street YMHA): Emmet Levy...
...These bear the marks of her teacher's guidelines, and if Steiner admits to a little jealousy she also expresses pride in the student's achievement...
...Margulies has enlivened the artistic debate with a sharp ear, rare intelligence and finely honed wit...
...Whose life is it anyway...
...the present day...
...We begin in the year 2018...
...This old lady is worth any number of odes...
...It would, I think, be more accurate to call Ayckbourn the British M. C. Escher, whose drawings stand perspective on its head...
...Every now and then a publicist tries to market Ayckbourn as "The American Neil Simon...
...Serfroom Farce jumped around three bedrooms, set alongside each other...
...And I was pretty then, too...
...A writer (or a factory) by that name has become one of Great Britain's most effective cottage industries, turning out 53 plays within the last couple of decades, plus more productions scheduled for London and New York...
...The notorious and the legendary Levy...
...With a light touch (and heavy makeup), Beckett adroitly plays a man in various decades...
...Ruth: Right...
...In Collected Stories this arguable point is advanced by Columbia professor and short story writer Ruth Steiner (Uta Hagen), as she examines the work of her most worshipful and most promising pupil, Lisa Morrison (Lorca Simons): Ruth: You can't censor your creative impulses because of the danger of hurting someone's feelings...
...The Norman Conquests trilogy, for instance, covered the same events from three different viewpoints...
...She wants the book destroyed before publication...
...Buckley makes the most of a small, decorative role...
...Julian (Gerrit Graham) is Reece's psychotically protective bodyguard—who actually did away with wife number one, Jessica (Candy Buckley) and wife number two, Ruella (Patricia Hodges...
...The potential murderee listens doubtfully...
...Their hilariously agitated movements are paced by director Christopher Ashley, who employs David Gallo's spooky set and Jess Goldstein's costumes to fine effect...
...Reece just doesn't seem the type to terminate people with extreme prejudice...
...the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of old ladies...
...This is the story of those seven seasons in heaven and hell, so many years ago, when I was a girl of 22 and lost my heart to a beautiful dark angel...
...to cunning yet not entirely unsympathetic artist...
...No sooner has she read the incriminating document than a menacing personality enters the room...
...Ruth: Even if it is...
...As for the 79-year-old Hagen, she leaves no doubt about her title as grand dame of the American theater, subtly changing Ruth from imperious sage to obsolete relic, like a fine purse slowly emptied of its contents...
...Ray Recht's scenery seems more skeletal than need be, and Mirena Rada's costumes are no more than serviceable...
...The stories remind her of her own debut, made so many years ago...
...In detail it describes how Reece got rid of his wives...
...remains a lot funnier than half the productions uptown, downtown and all around...
...They both briefly mime falling backward...
...In Ayckbourn's latest American production, Communicating Doors, characters exist in three separate time periods...
...This admonition is not lost on Lisa...
...Or is she...
...A current theory holds that Alan Ayckbourn is the pseudonym of at least two playwrights, a Mr...
Vol. 81 • September 1998 • No. 10
