Real Artists and Con Artists
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage REAL ARTISTS AND CON ARTISTS By Stefan Kanfer A successful French dermatologist. Serge (Victor Garber), radiates a newfound pride and self-confidence. And why not? He has just...
...as Leopold, Bowcutt is as wary and skittish as the birds he so avidly studies...
...Our beleaguered century has since seen many trials bearing the same label, from Nuremberg to Beverly Hills to Oklahoma City and beyond...
...Scrambling back and forth in time, the narrative takes us first to the arrest, then to the home of Leopold (Jason Bowcurt) as the crime is contemplated...
...In their minds they were Nietzschean Übermenschen: young, homosexual, rich, brilliant and, as such, exempt from the social contract...
...But both buyers and sellers are far warier and more sophisticated than they used to be...
...Although he has declared his clients legally innocent by reason of insanity, he suddenly shifts direction and enters a guilty plea...
...Matthew Warchus, who directed the likes of Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay in the London production, has a musical sense of timing...
...One of the two had accidentally dropped a pair of glasses near the scene of the crime, a passerby happened upon them, and within days experts traced the spectacles back to their owner...
...By placing the future of Leopold and Loeb in the hands of a judge ("I would rather try to convince one man than 12") the counselor—a lifelong opponent of capital punishment—angles for long sentences rather than public execution...
...But the main triumph of the evening belongs to director Ethan McSweeny, who has taken Logan's collage of events, reportage and speculations and made it a strangely compelling play—a real work of art, for those who are in the market...
...In the first place, the Abstract Expressionist painting itself is all wrong for'90s Paris...
...The one-color canvases of, say, Barnett Newman, belong to '50s New York, when it was still possible to shock the public...
...everyone in the cast seems to have stepped from the front page of a 1920s Chicago Tribune...
...Their distraught parents hired the most prominent defense attorney in America, Clarence Darrow, setting the stage for what the press called "The Trial of the Century...
...What is he, after all, but the undereducated manager of a stationery supply house...
...Christopher Hampton's translation from the French is fluent and idiomatic, and Mark Thompson's costumes and set design have the elegance of illustrations in a coffee-table book...
...They received what Darrow had angled for, life sentences...
...He died of natural causes in 1971...
...Moreover, when the inevitable reconciliation occurs (Serge allows Marc to disfigure the canvas), the event seems wholly unmotivated...
...On May 21, 1924, two University of Chicago students entered the annals of infamy...
...Leopold had a more fortunate end...
...As Richard "Dickie" Loeb, Solomon is all charm and self-deluded guile...
...Within the exceedingly restricted limits of AR?, the actors do very well indeed...
...Not only that, he has obtained it at the bargain price of 200,000 francs (about $40,000...
...To prove it, on that spring afternoon they coaxed a 14-year-old into their car, bludgeoned him to death and abandoned the corpse in a marsh...
...They amply demonstrate that keyhole reportage was here long before the coming of television talk shows and People magazine...
...These men have not only mocked each others' taste, they have savagely attacked each other's likes and loves, wives and girlfriends, professions and amusements...
...Less than two weeks from the date of their "perfectmurder," both boys signed confessions...
...Apart from his opinion about the painting, Marc differs from Serge only in an addiction to homeopathic pills...
...The John Houseman Theater is small, but John Logan's play effectively covers every tragic detail...
...Yvan, distracted by his own approaching nuptials, wants to maintain good relations with both opponents...
...Granted, works of art are still validated by their price tags...
...Unfortunately, Yasmina Reza is not the one to give us that play...
...Nonetheless his two friends ask him to arbitrate...
...The killers then sat back and grinned behind their hands as the police detectives stumbled around and came up empty...
...Public record shows that the pair were not executed...
...Since then, the market in paintings and sculpture has risen and plummeted like an elevator in the Eiffel Tower...
...Have Serge's pockets been picked by an unscrupulous gallery owner, as Marc proclaims...
...Or is Serge right...
...Alda is the personification of wounded arrogance ("I've been replaced by this painting and everything it implies...
...Is Marc a philistine, fearful of anything new and daring, stuck forever in the bland, secure esthetics of the past...
...Yvan differs from the better educated pair only in his chapfallen look, and in one long monologue about the politics of families...
...the cast at the Royale Theater often reminded me of the cello, violin and piano in a Haydn trio...
...For the same reason the Titanic story continues to attract audiences...
...The reaction is not exactly what Serge expected...
...Several months later, a judge ruled that crime a justifiable homicide...
...The duel of these two antagonists gives the play an added power and resonance...
...These he pops at every opportunity—a comic device that wears itself out within a quarter of an hour...
...The reason for the happy ending is as manipulative as it is simple...
...agitating public opinion, he seeks to hang these "overprivileged monsters...
...The winks and nudges, the struggle for power within the relationship, Loeb's oedipal impulses and Leopold's schizophrenic feelings about sex are there for all to see...
...One reporter sneered, "Richard Loeb, who was a master of language, today ended a sentence with a proposition...
...Costume designer Tom Broecker has obviously paid a great deal of attention to photographs of the period...
...The fate of those who succumb to hubris— shipwrights, terrorists, premeditating murderers—never loses its grip on the popular imagination...
...To that end he affects to find truth on both sides—a stance that only serves to irritate Serge and Marc...
...As their prosecutor, Pannell is outstanding as a Chicago Javert, cold as the wind off Lake Michigan...
...Whether she has the wit or intelligence to create such a drama is moot...
...The Leopold and Loeb case has been dramatized before, notably in the play and film Compulsion (based on the autobiographical novel by Meyer Levin, a Chicago-based contemporary of the criminals), and in Alfred Hitchcock's movie Rope...
...Moment by moment the old relationships deconstruct right in front of our eyes...
...A pity that the score is never equal to the players...
...The smirks would soon congeal on their faces...
...So are the scurrilous actions of the journalists (Paul Mullins, Howard W. Overshown, and Jurian Hughes, doubling as a confused coed who once dated Loeb...
...Reza's lines, though, are about as deep as the text in one of those volumes...
...Twelve years after he went to jail he made unwanted advances to a cellmate and was stabbed to death...
...After such knowledge, what forgiveness...
...Long-simmering resentments are unearthed, backgrounds are scathingly critiqued, fault is found with families and personalities and habits—all because of this monochromatic abstraction...
...It was also a time when insecure parvenus were easily fleeced by merchants...
...Each blamed the other for wielding the fatal weapon...
...certainly ART fails to live up to the promise it dangles at the opening...
...Beaming, he shows the work to his friend of 15 years, Marc (Alan Aida), an aeronautical engineer...
...Lou Stancari's compartmentalized set design owes a great deal to the sculptures of Louise Nevelson, but he adds a few canny details of his own, including a stuffed owl, some old headlines and, chillingly, a menorah...
...These con artists sold not only merchandise, they sold an idea: The more expensive the work, the greater its creator...
...An interesting subject for a playwright: Someone puts oil on canvas, it is then represented by a gallery, a patron buys the work, and suddenly it takes on a life and character of its own, upsetting all those who surround it...
...Furious, the DA goes all-out against his opponent's stratagem...
...Why should a 75-year-old homicide still be of interest...
...He became a model prisoner, allowed himself to be used for medical experiments, conducted classes, upgraded prison libraries...
...He has just acquired the oil painting of his dreams...
...In the second place, Reza has not written her bickering copains with much attention to detail...
...The leading players are no less effective...
...Early on, the defender senses that his battle is hopeless...
...After that it was only a matter of hours before questioners cracked the alibis of Nathan Leopold andRichardLoeb...
...If there is any doubt about the durability of the Leopold and Loeb case, Never The Sinner dispels it...
...Marc takes a close look at the objet d'art—a white-on-white canvas measuring 5' by 4'—and exclaims, "You paid 200,000 for this piece of shit...
...But those works were produced in the 1940s and '50s, when references to homosexuality had to be heavily cloaked or excised altogether...
...For Richard Loeb the judge's pronouncement was quite literally true...
...and Molina, a walking shaggy dog story, neatly pilfers every scene he enters...
...With that put-down we are off and limping in the three-man play, ART, at the Royale Theater...
...The third member of the trio is Yvan (Alfred Molina), a dark-voiced, sad-eyed bourgeois who openly confesses that he knows nothing, and wants to know nothing, about art...
...It spoils nothing to reveal the outcome of the trial...
...The move is made in order to avoid a jury trial...
...Now we watch the ravening press chasing after personal details about these two rich Jewish kids, now we are with Loeb (Michael Solomon) considering his list of candidates for sudden and violent death...
...After 38 years behind bars he was paroled and left for Puerto Rico, where he became an X-ray technician...
...No matter how unpleasant the personal skirmishing, this intermissionless 90-minute sketch aims to send its audience out in a feelgood mood...
...From this point Never The Sinner becomes a matter of life and death in every sense, played out in the shadow of the gallows...
...This speech, delivered expertly, is nowhere near as funny as an average solo on Frasier, available gratis every Tuesday night on NBC...
...With candor rather than prurience, Never The Sinner ventures all the way out of the closet...
...Now we follow the rumpled and low-key Darrow (Robert Hogan) as he makes his moves, now we track the neat, zealous District Attorney (Glen Pannell), closing in for the kill...
...And as Darrow, whose argument was the capstone of his career, Hogan does the part justice in every sense of the word...
...Does he hate the painting, or is he jealous of it, because it signifies Serge's recently developed independence from received ideas...
...Garber, a rising star who can now be seen as the ship's designer in the film Titanic, balances adroitly between self-assurance and insecurity...
Vol. 81 • February 1998 • No. 3
