Trio and Quintet
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage TRIO AND QUINTET By Stefan Kanfer Remittance men are dubious characters whose families pay them to live elsewhere. In the 1880s they could be found in the backwaters of...
...It goes without saying that each story is heartbreaking...
...Some are worth serious money...
...Negotiations between pusher and acolyte occupy most of Act I, with close attention paid to their backgrounds...
...he sets up an elaborate scam, planning to use the stolen loot to buy and sell some cocaine...
...His mother is a "bleeding heart dominatrix"—her son's definition of a social service administrator...
...As far as she is concerned, the hell with the past...
...On the other hand, Cushman's broken gestures and mournful delivery manage to suggest far more than the script grants her, and Levy takes all the oxygen out of the room with her inexhaustible militance and acid tongue...
...But Dennis is never allowed to be still...
...It needs polish and professionalism, but within these two acts a powerful metaphor resides...
...With some rewriting and recasting, the work may yet resound intensely...
...If the deal comes off, Warren can return all of his father's money, and Dennis can pocket a handsome profit...
...There cannot be an end to speaking and writing about it...
...Like Tolstoy characters, each is unhappy in a new way: burdened with a straying husband...
...Hoeppner is called upon to look wan and beautiful, and this she does without adding to the part...
...The Second Stage production of Kenneth Lonergan's discerning tragicomedy, This Is Our Youth, examines the life of one such figure, and another in the making...
...Besides, what if Warren's father finds out about the theft...
...The former schoolmates met at a West Side progressive academy where, according to Dennis, "they think it's going to cripple you for life if you learn how to spell...
...and Yager hilariously conveys the kind of sexual insecurity that did not end with the '80s...
...Lonergan has stated, unsurprisingly, that there is a great deal of autobiography in the play—first presented in a short run back in 1996—and that as a student at the late progressive Waiden School he and his friends were very much like the creditcard mutineers of This Is Our Youth...
...Pola (Kate Levy) is a bitter, contentious figure who has just bought a one-way ticket to the Middle East...
...What Straub Sr...
...Having lost her daughter in the camps, she has transformed herself into the mother figure of the group, forever trying to make peace between implacable friends...
...Yet the cast makes them compelling, credible and in a strange way, sympathetic...
...Day and Thompson are merely adequate in roles that demand greater range for any meaningful effect...
...In fact, only one person is naïve enough to fall under his sway: Warren Straub (Mark Ruffalo), 18, a hunched, gangling shlemozzle whose father has just exiled him for substance abuse...
...All five were liberated from the death camp three years ago and are still indecisive about the rest of their lives...
...The next morning Dennis expresses shock: They should have gone to the Carlyle, the Plaza is tacky...
...In the aftermath his ex-wife fled to California, where she and her new boyfriend do "volunteer work for some sort of grape-picking civil liberties organization...
...Anomie is not the liveliest of subjects, and these are not the most likable of people...
...These are the prevalent themes of the evening, with an accent on the third indicator...
...The teen-aged loser didn't become a surgeon after all...
...A hundred years later they tended to set down roots on the West Side of Manhattan...
...In Israel she will help to construct a new nation as she builds a new career...
...From time to time the drama flashes forward to 19 8 8, to Israel and to New York where Hanna now lies in a hospital bed, in the final throes of a wasting disease...
...But Dennis is not mollified...
...In the 1880s they could be found in the backwaters of Southeast Asia or the trading posts of Africa...
...The Holocaust," wrote Aharon Appelfeld, "is a central event in many people's lives, but it has also become a metaphor for our century...
...And he returns to the phone, detailing the schemes that cannot lead anywhere but down...
...The lingerie manufacturer is a Mafioso...
...When they begin to dance, stepping all over each other's feet, he mutters, "If only society would give us a chance" in a perfect parody of James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause...
...As he sees it, his place is too small and his life too big...
...As presented, Five Women Waiting contains a play that is also waiting...
...Lonergan has given his characters little indulgence, but plenty to do and much to talk about...
...The place is a hospital dormitory in Sweden, the year is 1948, and the personnel are a quintet of nurse's aides...
...My father is not a criminal," Warren protests...
...A lesser playwright might have been content to let these questions occupy the evening...
...Between refusals he keeps dialing numbers and yelling into the phone, attempting to bring off another deal or raging at an obviously bewildered girlfriend...
...There, the money came by plastic—credit cards, underwritten by Daddy...
...This bipolar windbag not only takes drugs, he pushes them—as well as hurtself, ceaselessly booming about his gifts for persuasion and leadership...
...One by one her fellow survivors show up, in part to mourn for her, in part to relate their post-Sweden autobiographies...
...As for Dennis, how long will it take the narcs to catch up with this middleman between the Colombian cartel and students who want a line of coke...
...When the curtain descends, the trio of actors gives the impression that Dennis, Warren and Jessica are very much alive, slackers taking one step forward and two steps back until something—maturity, jail, whatever—comes along to deal them a new hand...
...While all this is transpiring, Lonergan introduces a third party and takes the play to another level...
...Warren's father also suffers from an incurable malady: He remains traumatized by the murder several years ago of his 19-year-old daughter, Warren's sister...
...Unlike her acquaintances, Jessica Goldman (Missy Yager) hopes to make something of herself...
...Clearly, both young men are grieving in one way or another, beseeching their parents for attention that will always be lavished on others...
...The young woman's aim in life is to graduate from the Fashion Institute of Technology...
...The 20-year-old Dennis Ziegler (Mark Rosenthal) would be an ideal model for the "Before" in a Just Say No commercial...
...However, playwright Michel Wallerstein is only partly successful in giving his waiting women dimension and meaning...
...Five Women Waiting is only the latest theater piece devoted to the survivors of Auschwitz...
...After all, he can always make her laugh...
...Ingrid (Adrienne Thompson) is an ex-singer and full-time narcissist, defensively posturing, more interested in her makeup and her wardrobe—or so she says—than in coming to terms with her losses...
...She swiftly develops a thing for Warren, but he is so inept that she practically has to draw a blueprint for his next moves...
...He just does business with criminals...
...Ronald Reagan has recently been elected President, and therefore, "I definitely feel evil has, like, triumphed in our time...
...Ruffalo fully inhabits his role of Holden Caulfield redivivus, the wisecracks never quite covering the catch in his throat...
...with an angry lesbian daughter...
...Hanna (Krista Hoeppner) is a trembling, model-thin neurotic, fearful of leaving her place of work, let alone the neutral country that took her in...
...Until then, Jessica wouldn't mind a little romance in her life, and when Warren flashes his bankroll she agrees to follow him to the destination of his choice: the Plaza Hotel for a night of carousal...
...Under Mark Brokaw's strong direction, Rosenthal provides a heady mix of swagger and distress...
...And E leni (Claudia Day) is a Greek of a certain age...
...let the victims bury the victims...
...Should he sell, or hang on to them in case his father closes in and reclaims the 15 grand...
...Still, the ungainly youth is not without his own kind of wit...
...It just smells funny...
...Miriam (Mary Cushman) is a wounded bird of a woman, unable to forget anything, forever hovering on the perimeter of nervous collapse...
...If so, then Jessica's prediction has turned out to be incorrect...
...Warren, for example, has brought with him a valise full of old toys ("the proceeds from my unhappy childhood...
...with nightmares that never stop...
...with a sister who waited out the War in Switzerland and cannot possibly understand the meaning of suffering...
...Never mind that whoever he is right now is rudderless and emotionally immature...
...There, the checks arrived by packet boat...
...If Dennis' detritus-filled apartment is anything like my old one on the West Side, it has an oversized bathtub with three faucets labeled "Hot," "Cold" and "Waste...
...with an inability to sustain any kind of relationship...
...Judging from the vast outpourings of analyses and fictions devoted to the subject, there never will be a terminus—certainly not in our time...
...Wallerstein, the son of a Bergen-Belsen survivor, has been rather less fortunate in his cast...
...Dennis is in no mood for him...
...An occasional user, she has dropped by to palaver and maybe buy a little something for the weekend...
...Now that Warren has committed the crime, he has second thoughts...
...Dennis' father is a celebrated artist, embittered by his losing battle with cancer...
...He has gone so far as to suggest that there is a bit of himself in Warren...
...But the star of the evening is the playwright, who summons up a world much larger than the three actors onstage...
...Could he hole up in Dennis' apartment while he ponders his next move...
...As he courts Jessica, for example, Warren notes, "Chivalry isn't dead...
...and Michael Krass' costumes cannily evoke the period of thrift shop chic...
...Still, he does need a sounding board for his egomania...
...He has been fortunate in his director: Maggie Lally, aided by Peter King's inventive low-budget set, has used the Open Door Theater (actually the basement of a church) to suggest the separate worlds of Stockholm, Tel Aviv and New York...
...At the McGinn-Cazale Theater, Allen Moyer's set is accurate down to the smudges around the doorknob and the framed pictures of the Honeymooners over the sink...
...He became a playwright with a gift for character analysis, dramatic tension and the kind of wry, ironic dialogue that jump-starts the OffBroadway season...
...With such a crowded schedule how can he possibly accommodate Warren...
...Suddenly assuming the role of Cassandra, she informs Warren, "Right now you're a rich little pot-smoking burnout, but 10 years from now you'll be a plastic surgeon.'· This is a depressing thought, "because it just basically invalidates whoever you are right now...
...does not know is that his son, on the way out the door, purloined $ 15,000 in cash...
...Jessica's political views are emblematic of the '80s West Side...
...Who knows what he'll do when he misses the money...
Vol. 81 • November 1998 • No. 13
