Wasps and Fishes
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage WASPS AND FISHES By Stefan Kanfer "Our children are not WASPS. They're the children of WASPS." In those sentences, Ellen (Joyce Van Patten) neatly encapsulates the theme and...
...They don't even have to fight," she notes...
...There is a bad 20 minutes to come, however, and every one of them is like root canal work...
...The third segment, "In and Out of the Light" takes place in the offices of Lawrence Kesselman DDS (Alan Arkin...
...Translation: Gurney is an Off-Broadway writer capable of creating a small, wholly believable world, not a Main Stem and West End tragedian (or comedian) on the grand scale...
...Or in ours...
...he hollers, in one of the few risible moments...
...The strangely enriched vocabulary of both crooks is briefly amusing ("This is sophistry...
...In the situation that follows, complete with slapstick, push ups and loopy drunken dialogue, both women jockey for position...
...One upon a time, in the heart of the heart of the country, there lived a number of talented young men and women...
...The production by the Manhattan Theater Club at the City Center demonstrates that there is life m the old genre yet...
...The quartet comprises the entire cast of Power Plays, an evening of one-acters at the Promenade Theater...
...The visit is not by chance...
...The middle work is hardly substantial enough to be called a sketch...
...De Recha (Alan Arkin) is an aging delinquent, much obsessed with doing nefarious deeds by the book...
...Ellen is the wife of John (Josef Sommer), a modestly successful Off-Broadway playwright—and clearly a stand-in for the author...
...A species of fish has the power to change its sex: When threatened by a more powerful male, the weaker male automatically becomes a female...
...The elements of farce are all here: the satyr in a smock, the bimbo who can't stop spouting clichés about "closure," the terrified patient, the bewildered youth...
...Her threat, though, is only the beginning of his troubles...
...This is not surprising from the scenarist of Birdcage, a movie featuring Gene Hackman in drag...
...This is OK by young Lefty (Arkin's real-life son Anthony), except that he has no idea who wrote that book, or what it says...
...The title derives from a newspaper article Ms...
...Director Jack O'Brien treats the themes and people of Labor Day with delicacy and tact, aided by Michael Krass' costume design and Ralph Funicello's evocative set...
...It is in the last category that these two now present themselves, and their children...
...Some, like Gilda Radner and John Belushi, went on to have tragically brief careers...
...Throughout the years of their long marriage, Ellen has always read his plays before they were produced...
...Exactly...
...In the process, one will lose her femininity...
...Harry, for example, has two pieces of information to confide...
...At first Lefty resists, then slowly, inexorably, he gets drawn into De Recha's obsessive mishagas...
...Like power, and for that matter, play...
...As for Berlin, she spends the evening impersonating the kind of vexatious, superneurotic female who starred in the early Woody Allen films...
...Two thugs meet in a dimly lit warehouse...
...The sudden pained smile, the external fragility that masks an iron whim, the bewildered air of a man waiting to hear the duration of his life sentence—all are conveyed with slight, eloquent gestures and telling facial expressions that are the emblems of art...
...They just measure...
...They performed on stage without scripts, ad-libbing their way into prominence as members of groups named Compass and Second City...
...The second revelation is presented first, and the doctor is appalled...
...Good plays, I would wager...
...He has hungry eyes for his new dental assistant, a pneumatic blonde named Sue (May...
...The rest of the cast follows his lead, in the mistaken belief that loud equals funny...
...In the future, "Virtual Reality" will be much performed by amateur theater groups...
...The conceit is inventive, vivid and well done...
...The second problem is more complicated...
...Occasionally Gurney overstates his case...
...What to do...
...Another daughter, Ginny (Veanne Cox), has chosen this moment to tell her father that he hasn't the faintest idea who she is or what she thinks or what her aspirations are...
...Cox, last seen in these parts as a hilariously nervous bride in the musical Company, is no less adroit here...
...For all of its well-bred angst, deep down Labor Day is an unfashionable comedy of manners about two subjects: what happens when the artist's responsibility to his work collides with his obligations to his family, and what happened to that group called White Anglo-Saxon Protestants...
...VanPatten is an ideal partner, alternately tough and lyrical...
...The older people in his comedy/dramas are unfailingly polite ("I was brought up never to interrupt," says John), self-deprecating ("That's the trouble with being married so long: Your wife steals all your best lines...
...She has a bone to pick with him...
...tomorrow he will learn the results...
...Aside from showing a pair of long, ageless legs and an expertly padded rear, May is only a pale imitation of the neoclassic dumb blonde—an ancient concept even in the days of Jayne Mansfield...
...The younger son has just been jailed for giving a traffic cop a hard time...
...There are only a few redeeming aspects to the evening...
...and as writer, director and actor the elder Arkin manages to sustain the ominous atmosphere for a good 10 minutes...
...The cast of Labor Day performs flawlessly within the limits of that world...
...Hollers" is the operative word...
...But May has written each part in capital letters, as if subtlety were beyond the audience...
...One of them is a neurasthenic patient, Wanda (Berlin), who could make Prozac nervous...
...Asquith, a high voltage executive whose clothing, vocabulary and office appurtenances suggest power breakfasts and megadeals...
...Wanda insists on being treated now, and since she was the dentist's very first New York patient, he cannot refuse her...
...Michael McGarty's sets are imaginative and varied, and Michael Krass' amusing costumes supply ingredients missing from somuchof Power Plays...
...During a takeout dinner, augmented with wine from an office cabinet, the secretary confides her plan: In America, the way for nonentities to enter the history books is to kill somebody famous...
...A daughter, herself the mother of two small children, has become hopelessly smitten with her garage mechanic...
...It's like the beginning of one of his plays...
...First, he doesn't want to carry on the family tradition of dentistry...
...He wants to confide a couple of deeply held secrets...
...If John has violated the quartet's privacy, she will leave him...
...Indeed, he begins to visualize specific items: false beards, bungee cords, gas masks, even a hurricane lantern...
...Too long...
...This last item is significant because he subsequently trips over it, causing us to hear the noise of a crash...
...He is a closet homosexual...
...As the characters start to lay out the plot, one of them even takes a leaf from Pirandello: "You and me, standing around, setting the scene...
...When Dennis suggests bringing in a new character from the Asian Rim, or perhaps Rwanda, to make the new play more important, John snaps, "And I'll top it off with a profoundly moving speech about the Holocaust...
...The former exotic dancer seems eminently seducible, and he avidly reserves a table for two at Le Bernadin...
...For too long, Harry (Anthony Arkin) has been keeping his father in the dark...
...Is the sound effect in his brain, or in De Recha's...
...In those sentences, Ellen (Joyce Van Patten) neatly encapsulates the theme and substance of Labor Day, A. R. Gurney's latest and most defensive play...
...To effect this miracle, changes must be made that will turn the work into a commercial property—and, in the process, destroy its basic nature...
...Each of John and Ellen's offspring is troubled in varying degrees, too...
...In addition, his hot young director, Dennis (Brooks Ashmanskas), plans to bring Robert Redford back to Broadway in the new play...
...It is no wonder that he excised that character more than a decade ago...
...It contains malevolent threats, discussions of reality and illusion, and dialogue that derives from Beckett, Pinter and Mamet, without the necessity of paying royalties to those gentlemen...
...De Recha wants to go through a pantomime of the job to come, including the opening of imaginary packing cases and the listing of their contents...
...But she has not been vouchsafed a glimpse of the new one, and she wants to know why...
...You used gesture and inflection to your advantage...
...Others, like Elaine May and Alan Arkin, have endured and prevailed—acting, writing, directing in television, films and theater...
...In this chaos, Arkin fils is at least ingratiating...
...The curtain raiser and finale are by May, the middle piece by Arkin, who directed all three...
...Colby is exactly the type of superannuated collegian one encounters on Long Island wearing a tee shirt with the legend, "Beer: It's Not Just For Breakfast Anymore," and Ashmanskas manages to be both ruthlessly ambitious and oddly sympathetic...
...Asquith has read and taken to heart...
...Ellen suspects that this new play is more than a little autobiographical, that in fact it uses the life stories of their four grownup children...
...Using these standard ingredients of soap opera, Gurney has created a very different kind of entertainment...
...Kesselman's shy, sensitive son has chosen this point in time to take a leave from dental school...
...Any acting student of any age could take lessons from the speech and movement of Sommer...
...In the two-character opener, "The Way of All Fish," May plays Ms...
...But before the doctor can close his deal, two problems intervene...
...The writer's study, a former chicken coop, looks like a place where plays were actually written...
...His answers are indirect, vague, evasive...
...Just as John Cheever found poetry in the commonplaces of suburban life, Gurney takes the components of exurbia and uncovers the mirth and sorrow inside the showcase of privilege (in this instance, a farm in northwestern Connecticut...
...Arkin's direction is a step down from the Borscht Belt, where shouting punch lines, leaping onto ladies and lying down on the floor in a simulated heart attack were guarantees of big yocks...
...John recently had a cancer scare and new tests have been ordered...
...Second—now then, class of 1998, what would be the most modish secret imaginable...
...it has been a long time since the palmy days in Chicago...
...Has one man's fantasy overtaken the onlooker...
...Do you know how hard it is for a gay dentist to get straight patients...
...and ironic...
...As for the oldest son, Ralph (James Colby), he is the most immature of the four, hardly the one to replace his father as head of the family should the medical report turn out badly...
...That makes it unique in this overdone, overwrought evening...
...The offspring look to be approaching 40...
...Arkin never speaks when he can shout, never walks when he can stomp, never seethes when he can have a full-blown tantrum...
...Attempts to modernize this ancient sketch are as predictable as the pratfalls...
...Her secretary, Miss Riverton (Jeannie Berlin, May's real-life daughter), is a nobody who wants to be somebody, but who has no discernible talents...
...The playwright also defends his own turf— an area he staked out some 25 plays ago...
Vol. 81 • June 1998 • No. 7
