Leaps of Faith
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage LEAPS OF FAITH By Stefan Kanfer The Academy and the cancer ward share many of the same terms: "exam," "study," "test results," "research," "analysis," "course." Yet as playwright...
...But while the body held up, the mind continued to deteriorate...
...Crofoot appears in white shirt, tan trousers and clumpy black shoes, the outfit of the asylum inmate...
...one must go to writers like Rilke and Kafka to equal it...
...It's a comma, a pause...
...The Runaway Bunny may indeed have home truths as valuable as those in Donne's sonnets, but the scene is too contrived for credibility...
...In the role of a lifetime, Chalfant (last seen in a variety of personae in Angels in America) holds the stage of the small MCC Theater off Broadway, vulnerable and exposed in every sense of the words...
...Lvov eventually tired of the dancer's bouts of depression and religious hysteria, and handed him off to Serge Diaghilev...
...After many difficulties de Pulsky achieved her goal, and in a jealous snit Diaghilev dismissed the Ballet Russe's lead performer...
...With the original punctuation restored, death is no longer something to act out on a stage, with exclamation points...
...Not insuperable barriers, not semicolons, just a comma...
...To provide a narrative thread, Crofoot employs the dancer's own prose culled from his diaries, jottings remarkably free of anger or self-pity...
...In one arena the words concern illumination and explication...
...Bearing, for example, is exactly a half-century old—not 49, not 51...
...To keep the dancer from injuring himself, colleagues had him confined to a Swiss sanitarium...
...After one particularly agonizing test Bearing wails, "I wish I had given him an A!") The hospital claims to alleviate suffering, but the only mercy in evidence comes from an ill-educated nurse, Susie Monahan (Paula Pizzi...
...Dancer/playwright Leonard Crofoot uses these biographical details to recreate a one-man show character rich in energy and insight...
...I walked on and suddenly stopped, seeing a precipice without a tree...
...A professor of English Lit...
...Vivian Bearing, PhD (Kathleen Chalfant), is familiar with both the university and the hospital...
...I thanked the tree...
...Derek Anson Jones has directed with sensitivity and scrupulous attention to detail, moving his cast in and out of rooms with the crispness of real Intensive Care Unit personnel...
...Vaslav was born in 1889, the son of Polish dancers...
...He is proud of having received an A- in the Donne course—although when Posner went on to medical school he left his humanity back in the Humanities department...
...On a visit to his in-laws during World War I he was sentenced to house arrest: Budapest officials convinced themselves that he was an enemy alien...
...However, as Cyril Connolly once observed, there is no force in nature like that of a woman searching for a husband...
...With all its flaws, Wit is a distinguished debut, and a promising beginning for the '98-'99 season...
...I do not know who most needed the warmth...
...Death—capital D—comma—thou shalt die—exclamation point...
...Nijinsky never performed in public again...
...he seemed to belong to the long-vanished epoch of Rasputin, Tolstoy and Rimsky-Korsakov...
...This is not a perfect evening...
...Still, these are the forgivable mistakes of a tyro...
...By now he should be as forgotten as the Muscovite actors who originally appeared in Chekhov's plays...
...In due time the younger brother would also wind up in a sanitarium, not because of any external trauma but because of what went on within his fevered brain...
...So it is, and so is much of Edson's absorbing play...
...Kelekian is an MD, Bearing is a PhD...
...As directed by Dom Salinaro, the subject of Nijinsky Speaks is persuasively triumphant, melancholy, audacious, despairing—the classic bipolar genius at a loss to explain himself...
...none were successful...
...He had no talent for management, though, and the enterprise collapsed at his feet...
...Within its intermissionless two hours ironies appear at every turn...
...Edson gets an A- on both counts...
...Edson is a new playwright and she seems anxious to include all she has experienced as a hospital worker in an oncological unit, and as a teacher in Atlanta...
...It's highly educational," she says dispassionately...
...Actually, Nijinsky was as innocent of espionage as he was of life in general...
...If, as John Barrymore once laented, a stage actor's life is written in water, a ballet dancer's life must be inscribed on the wind...
...I understood that God had stopped me because He loves me, and therefore said: 'If it is Thy will, I will fall down the precipice...
...Yet he remains one of ballet's most enduring legends: the faun who, it was said, leaped into the air and stayed there until he decided to come down...
...each performer is wholly convincing in medical and/or university roles...
...The most important dance impresario in the world, Diaghilev had no talent himself, but he possessed an uncanny ability to spot and promote it in others...
...Bearing: Life, death...
...and (2) "the ability to make lively, clever remarks in a sharp, amusing way...
...As the treatments grow more drastic, Bearing's thoughts slip back to a childhood of reading to her distracted father...
...But the fall may not have been the cause of his aberrant behavior...
...His work in that ballet, and in Stravinsky's controversial The Rite of Spring, made him a worldwide celebrity...
...Her support could not be bettered...
...His work came to the attention of a highly placed aristocrat, Prince Lvov, who assigned himself the dual parts of patron and lover...
...With great calm she addresses the audience, telling us what we will see, from the first phases of her treatment to her final day on earth...
...specializing in the poetry of John Donne, she comes to an unnamed clinic suffering from advanced ovarian cancer...
...If you go in for this sort of thing, I suggest you take up Shakespeare...
...Undaunted, Nijinsky founded his own company...
...It's a metaphysical conceit...
...Or one must go to the Harold Clurman Theater, where through an amalgam of movement, monologue and music, Crofoot provides a glimpse of an icon and gives him the dimensions of a man...
...Ilona Somogyi's costumes are all too accurate, as is Michael Chybowski's pitiless lighting...
...The intern was once the professor's student...
...Under the onslaught she makes an effort to remain indomitable, taking comfort in the verse of her beloved 17th century sonneteer: Death be not proud, though some have called thee Mighty· and dreadful, for thou art not so...
...On tour he came to the attention of one Romola de Pulsky, a Hungarian woman quite willing to overlook the dancer's sexual preferences as long as she could share the limelight with him...
...This way, the uncompromising way, one learns something from this poem, wouldn't you say...
...Even in adolescence Nijinsky's athletic and interpretive abilities projected an ethereal quality...
...Dressed in one of those hospital gowns designed for maximum humiliation, and hiding her chemotherapy-caused baldness beneath a red baseball cap, Bearing is the very essence of valor...
...Webster's defines wit as (1) "intellectual and perceptive powers...
...Past, present...
...In the end, en route to visit a great-grandchild, the aged Professor Ashford drops by to read a children's book...
...Forewarned, we still cannot look away as she is slowly robbed of her independence, her dignity and, finally, her formidable intelligence...
...it received my warmth and I received the warmth of the tree...
...It felt me because I caught hold of it...
...I see...
...She has no family to clutter up her life, and not a single friend visits her...
...Harvey Kelekian (Walter Charles), intends to treat the malignancy in an aggressive manner, armed with every surgical, chemical, biological, and radiological means at his command...
...Neither man is cruel by intent...
...The best neurologists and psychiatrists tried to cure him...
...She becomes, instead, a subject for experimentation...
...one doctor seeks the newest facts, the other, the oldest verities...
...Gardner's edition of the Holy sonnets reads: And death shall be no more comma...
...Life, death, Soul, God...
...in another, they are a matter of life and death...
...If it is Thy will, I will be saved.'" This is an instance, said Jarrell, of "what I call pure narrative...
...I was on the edge of a precipice...
...Upon graduation from the Imperial Ballet School he joined Russia's leading dance company and immediately became a star...
...Under the old maestro's guidance Nijinsky scored his last triumph in 1916, choreographing Strauss' Till Eulenspiegel in New York...
...She at least keeps the hospital from using so-called "heroic" measures to save Bearing for a few more heartbeats, another procedure, an additional entry in the doctors' notes about terminal illness...
...For those whom thou thinkst thou dost overthrow, Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me...
...But as they go about their business Bearing ceases to be an individual to them...
...Nevertheless, since that date he has grown steadily in reputation, an exemplar of the mad virtuoso redeemed by his art...
...It's wit...
...Myung Hee Cho's set shrewdly utilizes the curtains around hospital beds to effect scene changes...
...These gymnastics strongly suggest the animal magnetism Nijinsky must have displayed onstage...
...Yet as playwright Margaret Edson demonstrates in her new drama, Wit, context is everything...
...Most people were astonished to read his obituary in 1950, when he died in a London asylum...
...Nijinsky went on to illuminate Debussy's choreographic masterpiece, Afternoon of a Faun...
...Everything is a bit too neat...
...The premier danseur leaves no visual record, save for the occasional filmed performance of interest to specialists rather than the general public...
...I am learning how to suffer...
...Death thou shall not die...
...Better still, she helped to work out a reconciliation with Diaghilev...
...Nijinsky became his lover, as well as a leading dancer in Diaghilev's Ballet Russe in Paris...
...It is very simple, really...
...Predictably, Diaghilev was outraged by her pursuit...
...He founded his reputation in Imperial Russia when a Tsar sat upon the throne...
...Nothing but a breath— a comma—separates life from life everlasting...
...In this battle he is aided by a brilliant young adjutant, intem Jason Posner (Alec Phoenix...
...Her specialist...
...But Vaslav Nijinsky is an exception...
...He began to speak and act with increasing irrationality, and de Pulsky arranged her husband's release...
...From there she wanders to undergraduate days when a college professor (Helen Stenborg) explicated a text—and pointed her life in a new direction: Professor Ashford: In the edition you chose, this profoundly simple meaning is sacrificed to hysterical punctuation: And death—capital D—comma— shall be no more—semicolon...
...Poet Randall Jarrell was particularly fond of one passage: "I started to go down a dark road, walking quickly, but was stopped by a tree which saved me...
...His older brother Stanislav tumbled from a fourth story window and several years later was committed to a mental institution...
...Yet as he recalls the high points of his career he makes vaulting physical and mental leaps...
Vol. 81 • October 1998 • No. 11
