On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage RHINESTONES AND DIAMONDS By Stefan Kanfer The Booth Theater has a long and honorable record. Named for Edwin Booth, the greatest Shakespearean actor of his time, it has been the...
...She has abandoned her artistic pose, and has even begun to see someone else...
...When the film ends, the live, overdressed Edna appears onstage with a pianist (Andrew Ross) and two scantily costumed Ednaettes (Roxane Barlow and Tamlyn Brooke Shusterman...
...The debate was lively, intelligent and carefully weighted so that both sides had cogent arguments...
...He begins to question his own situation...
...Something in between, I'm afraid...
...Her daughter, Valmai, lives with a female tennis pro who breeds pit bulls...
...What seems '60s psychobabble has, in fact, a bedrock of veracity...
...Watson's literary agent...
...Beth disagrees...
...The setup is not very different from that of the Baker Street Irregulars, who insist that Sherlock Holmes is an actual personage and that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was merely Dr...
...Named for Edwin Booth, the greatest Shakespearean actor of his time, it has been the site of performances by Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, Al Pacino, Blythe Danner, Eli Wallach, Shirley Booth, Henry Fonda and many other distinguished actors...
...Her efforts resulted in failure, but they did provide an excuse for withdrawing from the world at large...
...Tom will have his fling, come home sheepishly and be a better husband when he gets over the affair...
...The onlookers are addressed as "Possums," and reminded that they are no longer in their living rooms: "To fully appreciate the show," says the star, "you must remember to face the stage...
...The last two are little more than props for the Dame's occasional patter songs...
...she says, vowing to glance up from time to time, "in strict proportion to the amount you've paid...
...And once Beth is over the shock, she too seems relieved...
...In a weak moment the guest confesses all: Tom, a fast-track attorney, has left her and their two children for a younger woman...
...For a pretty old woman...
...He finds little sympathy as he pleads for understanding...
...Two suburbanites, Karen and Gabe (Lisa Emery and Matthew Arkin), are entertaining their old friend Beth (Julie White) while her husband Tom (Kevin Kilner) is out of town on a business trip...
...Alas, this was no sign of renewal...
...To remind us of Edna's popularity in America, the curtain raiser is a montage of her TV talk show appearances with the likes of Richard Gere ("You're a turnoff"), and a rotund Roseanne Barr ("Is there anything you wish you hadn't eaten...
...He has been unhappy for too long, dissatisfied with her love, her life, her conversation—and the lack of it...
...He has been polishing and refining the Dame and the routine ever since...
...Occasionally he is too programmatic—one person makes a statement, the other neatly counters, as if in a tennis match...
...Now it's my turn for a little happiness...
...The faultless quartet is under the baton of director Daniel Sullivan, who knows his way around a small stage...
...Is it cheese...
...What have you been handling...
...Although she seems to be bothered by an allergy, the truth is that a breakdown is just a sigh away...
...Shocked, Karen and Gabe ascribe the move to a midlife crisis...
...Is it fish, Possums...
...Now Tom presents his side...
...Also in on the gag are the legion of Edna fans, who pretend that the Dame is real and that Humphries is merely her avaricious manager...
...Given this history, the Booth would seem an unlikely participant in the Las Vegasizing of Broadway...
...All these years his wife has only pretended to be a serious artist...
...These unseen people are mainstays of the comedy, along with members of the audience whom the dragon lady victimizes at every turn...
...But Humphries is no drag queen...
...Would Karen...
...Or are they part of it...
...They understand...
...In the same spirit, Edna engages in frequent give-and-take sessions with the audience...
...she demands...
...Last year 33 million visitors came to New York, and evidently most of them could not tell the difference between paste and diamonds...
...Even those in the balcony are not beyond her reach...
...But once again the playwright builds no straw men or women...
...Are responsibilities what suffocate love...
...Over the 86 years since it opened, the Booth has housed four Pulitzer Prizewinning productions: You Can't Take It With You, The Time of Your Life, That Championship Season, and Sunday in the Park with George...
...But when he enters the scene, the errant husband turns out to be far more complicated than circumstances would indicate...
...Would he also be better off running away...
...For the most part, though, he presents a truly adult tragicomedy, with enough substance for 10 current Broadway extravaganzas...
...Yet it was only a question of time before he moved on...
...The actor/author's publicity stresses that he is married with four grown children, thereby removing any hint of androgyny...
...The theater's new tenant is Dame Edna: The Royal Tour...
...Gradually she became as dependent as their two small sons, weighing Tom down with more than his share of domestic chores...
...they too have been married for a dozen years...
...Her son, Kenny, a former Qantas steward, is president of the Yvonne de Carlo Appreciation Society...
...Its stage has also been graced by such hits as The Tenth Man, Two for the Seesaw and The Elephant Man...
...It was, instead, a valedictory...
...Through huge harlequin spectacles she peers down at a lady in the orchestra...
...It was an uneasy negotiation, and the argument got nastier by the moment, until in a sudden clash they exchanged blows, wrestled—and wound up in bed together...
...An Australian by birth, Humphries developed his character back in the 1960s...
...When a theater such as the Booth is used as a midtown nightclub, it becomes a tourist trap where visitors pay $75 each to gape at a standup comic gone legit...
...Neil Patel's set design ranges from beach to bar to bedroom without a hitch...
...Then she adds, "I mean that in a caring, nurturing way...
...The late Norman is supposed to have perished from "male trouble...
...Meantime, she promises to address them as "mizzies," a derivative of les misérables—the poor of the city...
...Hardly has the evening begun when a warning resounds...
...Informed that another lady is named Alice, she muses, "What a pretty old name...
...After shaking hands with members of the audience in the front row, Edna sniffs her fingers...
...I would have gone long ago if it weren't for them...
...His costumier, Stephen Adnitt, has added his own spectacular vulgarities, as has set designer Kenneth Foy, who gives Miami Beach a good name...
...Nevertheless, it has become one of the primary offenders...
...Like its London predecessors, Dame Edna sends up the smug middle class while smugly kowtowing to it, winking and nudging all the way...
...Jess Goldstein's costumes are right to the last undergarment, and Rui Rita's lighting design is in every sense illuminating...
...She's now in a maximum security twilight home in Australia...
...His probing of four uneasy souls is skillful and intimate...
...Margulies' new work, Dinner With Friends, at the Variety Arts Theater, focuses on a very different conflict: marriage and divorce...
...Nevertheless, his humor depends heavily on a "camp" sensibility, one reason why Dame Edna played to SRO audiences for several months in San Francisco...
...Thus she can babble on about life, and then undercut her own observations: "Possums, my mother used to say that there are no strangers, only friends you haven't met yet...
...But Beth is too abstracted to take in their appraisals of pasta and wine...
...For Beth has given only one part of the story...
...A woman who refuses to recognize that both her children are gay is not likely to notice much else...
...Hello, paupers...
...Thus far Tom sounds like a typical lawyer on a television sitcom, restless and easily seduced by the nearest bimbo...
...The show stars an obtuse, self-involved housewife, played with calculated élan by Barry Humphries...
...Anyone who has ever seen an episode of Monty Python or Benny Hill knows the derivation of this character and comedy: the raucous British music hall, where subtlety is unknown and cross-dressing is a way of life...
...No wonder producers are featuring rhinestones this season...
...The ticket holders give, the Dame takes...
...Karen stops listening, and Gabe can only snipe at the man who abandoned his children: Why didn't Tom hold the marriage together for the kids' sakes...
...What is happiness, anyway...
...There is nothing inherently wrong with all of this, except that in the case of Dame Edna, she and her followers belong in a boîte and not on the Main Stem...
...Did the individual who originally had the experience own exclusive rights to it...
...He had never strayed before...
...Tom has assured her this is no brief, sudden interruption in an otherwise ordered life...
...The fortysomething couple are professional cookbook writers, glad to have an audience for their observations about Italian cuisine...
...Broadway is—or ought to be—a place where the proscenium marks a distance between audience and actors, where conversation is heard and, in Harold Ciurmane felicitous phrase, "lies like truth" take place...
...But I did, Tom counters...
...Over the decades he has acquired an acute sense of timing, and an ability to make standard jokes seem like ad libs plucked out of the air...
...The next day Tom was out for good...
...Tom seems healthier and happier as the days go on...
...The significance of this information never seems to penetrate Edna's heavily coiffed head—which is, of course, the point of the evening...
...Off Broadway is another matter entirely...
...The quartet in Dinner are entirely credible, their disagreements are poignant, and their exchanges crackle with authenticity...
...One night shortly after the split, a snowstorm held up Tom's flight...
...Donald Margulies is one of those writers whose themes are adult, and whose dialogue is concerned with putting forth ideas rather than putting down audiences...
...Beyond the easy satire of gross fashion and tacky style, Humphries' chief targets are women, preferably interfering mothers and domineering conversationalists...
...He paid a call on Beth, hoping she would allow him to sleep on the couch for one night...
...The Dame seems to be issuing a compliment, then adds in a fluting falsetto, "I used to make my own clothes, too...
...In the less profitable theater district there have always been producers willing to gamble, and playwrights with something to say...
...For Gabe these are not easy facts to confront...
...Or was it public domain...
...Possums, you get a lot more for your money downtown...
...Are he and Karen truly happy...
...Margulies provides no facile answers to these questions...
...You cannot use your remote.' Over the years Edna has acquired a deep background, including a deceased husband, Norman Everage, and a grown son and daughter...
...His last play, Collected Stories, examined the moral conflict between the professor who had loved a famous poet and the student who appropriated that life in a piece of first-person fiction...
...He is gone, Edna informs us, but his prostate is in a Tokyo museum, "still throbbing away...
Vol. 82 • November 1999 • No. 13
