On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage BIG BUDGETS, SMALL TALENTS By Stefan Kanfer "O.K. Cue the Red Sea!" Cecil B. De Mille reportedly shouted while filming The Ten Commandments. The director with the oversized...
...Odds are that Mayor Giuliani will—and indeed, should—lose his battle in the courts...
...It is well that he speaks from the void...
...Aside from the hectoring quality of Blessing's monologue, Max Mayer's uninspired direction, and Linn-Baker's rather flat rendering of the argument, the evening has other flaws...
...Other times there were a hundred voluntary strippers, and on those occasions he had to overdress...
...In totalitarian societies, the government blocks dissent...
...Humiliated, Kerr left the room without a word, silently planning his revenge...
...All he had to do was go on the talk shows, shouting his support of the...
...But all that has changed with the arrival of Epic Proportions at the Helen Hayes Theater...
...For another, his Congressman was a Right-wing, gaybashing Yahoo named Therm Pooley, a legislator on the order of Jesse Helms...
...That way, Pooley reasoned, viewers would see the worthlessness of the artist and the value of the Senator...
...On the other hand, the more repellent or fraudulent the work, the likelier the artist is to be funded...
...Nazi Germany exiled or executed any writer, painter or sculptor who did not conform to the Third Reich's ideal...
...Notified that London's Tate Gallery had awarded him their prestigious Turner Prize, he replied succinctly, "Where's my check...
...The Senator was absent, and the dogwalker fought the intruder tooth and nail...
...the Brooklyn Museum, it might have sprung from the headlines...
...True, the proceedings sometimes seem more appropriate for a burlesque house than for the Helen Hayes Theater...
...After all, how could a Broadway stage represent the montage that made each De Mille movie as elaborate, distinctive and tasteless as a portrait of the Last Supper on velvet...
...Translation: cheerleader, urging thousands of unseen extras to give the performance of their lives, even if there are only two bathrooms for the whole lot of them...
...in addition to her other attributes, she possesses a zaftig figure and a marquee smile...
...The intermissionless comedy runs a mere 75 minutes—about half the length of the average De Mille property...
...When Kerr was a mere boy in Maryland, his Philistine father took him to a local museum...
...Accordingly, the Futurists sang and spoke nonsense in cabarets, made much of sexual symbolism, and often attacked the religion of their youth...
...That's just enough time for a cascade of bright sight and sound gags, dangling from the flimsiest of plots...
...For obvious reasons, theater pieces have generally ignored C.B...
...That leaves Phil and Louise in charge: two very inadequate mahouts trying to tame an elephantine production...
...A performance artist, Kerr (Mark Linn-Baker), addresses us from the Beyond, an unadorned arena with spare furniture and a drab earth-covered floor...
...Both men become attracted to Louise, and at first she seems inclined to favor Benny...
...Crowds rioted at the first performance of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring in Paris...
...If anyone doubts the ironclad regimen of that Establishment, let him try to recite the Koran while being stripped nude...
...Epic Proportions boasts a cast of thousands—played by nine high octane performers...
...and whining about censorship...
...During the course of their visit the pair dropped in on a work of performance art: a man banging a pot every seven seconds for an hour...
...No run of De Mille parody can ever be as balmy as the original...
...The unrequited lover spends hours sulking in his quarters, planning a new way to Louise's heart, and writing post cards to the folks back home in the Midwest: "Yesterday was the last day of Pompeii, and boy was I glad to see it go...
...In the end, animal and criminal plunged over an embankment—leading to the place where we came in...
...They do their damnedest to hide the shortcomings of playwrights Larry Coen and David Crane...
...She delights in eliciting fear and anger, and becomes crestfallen when the crowd fails to register "sardonic amusement" en masse...
...An eager, if geeky, acting student, Benny Berrnet (Alan Tudyk), lands a job as spear carrier...
...Director Jerry Zaks keeps the pace con brio, immeasurably helped by David Gallo's bombastic sets and William Ivey Long's ludicrously overstated costumes...
...Worse is in store...
...Kerr decided that doing this kind of material was his destiny...
...Picasso's Demoiselles D'Avignon turned off many an early collector and patron...
...Thy belly is like a heap of wheat set about with lilies...
...While Kerr spoke, he invited members of the audience onstage, asking each person to remove one article of his clothing until he stood before them, stark naked...
...In the inevitable uproar, would the voices call for First Amendment protection...
...Leading the farceurs is Chenoweth, at 29 the funniest and most inventive comedienne on Broadway...
...Last seen as Charlie Brown's little sister Sally in the musical You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, the star delivers gag lines with the kind of exquisite timing that can never be taught...
...He would dognap Pooley's prize retriever at gunpoint, and make the owner pay big time to get it back...
...Here, the Art Establishment quashes heresy...
...Goldman is "Assistant Director in Charge of Atmosphere Personnel...
...They had a high time of it, shocking the bourgeoisie and shaking up the populace, and 70 years later Kerr wanted a piece of the action in the worst way...
...The newly elected Solon then arranged a secret meeting with his victim...
...Chris Ofili, creator of the notorious Madonnaand-dung painting at the Brooklyn Museum, is a case in point...
...Moreover, Chenoweth is not strapped down and reined in for this role...
...A perky, marcelled blonde...
...As the sound of a Chesapeake Bay retriever yaps in the background, he recounts the story of a sadly abbreviated life...
...While luckier hordes prepare to invade Troy, Benny and his colleagues are assigned to suffer all 10 Biblical plagues...
...In the Soviet Union, Isaac Babel was murdered for writing short stories...
...There is where he belongs...
...For example Marinetti, Kerr's hero, entertained onlookers for a decade and then became an admirer of Mussolini...
...This ambitious farce centers on the making of a celluloid extravaganza...
...In the real world he and his act would be as safe as a singer in a Disney musical...
...Daddy was determined to show the kid every last painting and sculpture, "so that we would never have to come back again...
...Running for Senator, Pooley zeroed in on Kerr, who had received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts...
...Not at a time when, in George Orwell's felicitous phrase, "the smelly little orthodoxies" are at work...
...Then, smack in the middle of production the De Mille figure, D. W. De Witt (played by Richard B. Shull until his sudden death October 14), peremptorily retires from the movie, and indeed from cinema altogether, in order to spend more time with his vast library of pornographic pictures...
...They also despised Verdi and Puccini, whose works had been heard and seen so often they yielded nothing but ennui...
...Given those orthodoxies, Kerr protests too much...
...It is the politicians whose careers are now endangered when they cite moral objections to an art exhibit, no matter how disturbing the content...
...Using the Bible-mocking performance artist as his whipping boy, the redneck won a close race...
...For one thing, he needed the anonymity and liberal social environment of a big city...
...The director with the oversized budget and the five-cent philosophy has been parodied since the '20s, mostly by other filmmakers, columnists and comedians...
...Some time afterward, he made another discovery: He was bisexual...
...Doubling and sometimes tripling their roles, Tom Beckett, Ross Lehman and Richard Ziman adroitly play everyone from emperors to extras, and Shull caught the great man in all his two dimensions...
...But things went awry at the holdup...
...To deviate from the party line is to be mocked, reviled and if possible, overthrown...
...Sometimes he wore more garments than there were ticket holders...
...For this and other performance pieces he looked back to his esthetic hero, Emilio Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944...
...And that is the way he chose...
...Marinetti and his colleagues hated machine guns...
...Here an epiphany occurred...
...Pace the ACLU, the unfortunate facts are these: Once upon a century, artists put then careers and sometimes their lives on the line by making a statement...
...But all too soon Phil gains entrance to her tent when he demonstrates a talent for directing large groups of people—a tribute to his years of leading his high school band in parades...
...Doubling as a wisecracking actress and a worldweary lesbian costumier, Ruth Williamson wrings laughter out of the desert simply by arching an eyebrow and tossing a helmeted head...
...Although Lee Blessing's oneman play at the Second Stage was surely written long before Rudy Giuliani vs...
...novelist Boris Pasternak vanished into the Gulag...
...Under the merciless desert sun, assembled hordes build pyramids, assassinate Philistines, invade cities and establish monotheism, under the chirpy instructions of Louise Goldman (Kristin Chenoweth...
...At the fin-de-siècle, the reverse is true...
...As the exemplars of sibling revelry, Tudyk and Davidson wear well, in part because they never stand still...
...then again, have you happened to take a recent look at The Ten Commandments or The Sign of the Cross...
...The main act consisted of a narrator appearing onstage fully clothed, reciting a provocative passage from the Song of Solomon: "Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies...
...Antiregime artists in Cuba and China are still behind bars...
...So did the dog...
...Paramount among them is an absence of irony...
...Even in the benign West, creative folk have not always had it easy...
...Looking around, Kerr knew that Maryland was not the place for him...
...Who could resist so tempting a target, with his jodhpurs, his strutting selfimportance and his overblown Biblical epics...
...The year is 1932, the place, a barren stretch of land outside Tucson, Arizona...
...That worthy was one of the founders of Futurism, a movement that arose in the '20s to protest the deadly new technology and the deadening old tradition...
...I? Chesapeake it is the author rather than the performer who displays uncanny timing...
...Relocated in Manhattan, Kerr worked in a bookstore, dated men and women, and polished his performance art...
...In the second place, Senator Pooley makes an inadequate straw man...
...James Joyce's Ulysses was banned from the U.S...
...Pooley guaranteed Kerr that he could keep his grant, and make even more money touring the big cities...
...According to its sacrament, no sacred cows must go un worshiped or unrewarded, from feminists to gays to minorities to nihilistic, in-your-face performers whose favorite targets are Western Civilization and the Judaeo-Christian tradition...
...For a lark his handsome brother Phil (Jeremy Davidson) tags along...
Vol. 82 • October 1999 • No. 12
