On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage TAXING IMPORTS By Stefan Kanfer Alice (Anna Friel) is a mysterious waif with close-cropped auburn hair and a permanent pout. She pays the rent by peeling in strip clubs and...
...They're 'in love.' They have none...
...During these frantic couplings, the men and women are always suspicious that their partners have been sleeping around, causing an intricate geometry of tantrums as well as further unions and reunions...
...Despite the title, the people of The Weir are pretty much the same at the end as they were at the beginning...
...But his allegedly fresh insights are remembrances of flings past...
...A central scene is particularly effective...
...Totally deceived, the victim sends forth a series of highly explicit and kinky answers...
...Then again, no one is supposed to...
...Ah, but that does not take into account the devious mind of British playwright Patrick Marber...
...For the record, the French duke wrote his aperçu more than three centuries ago...
...Almost every exchange is comic, if unprintable, but therein lies its very weakness...
...Richardson, who was Sally Bowles in a recent revival of Cabaret, is, as always, beyond reproach...
...On a grim evening in the backwaters of Eire, three men are holed up in the local pub waiting for the wind to die down...
...Women, declares Larry, "give us imagery...
...Yet no one really wins...
...Crowley is a classic Hibernian show-off with a soul beneath his fancy wardrobe...
...Fairley is appropriately neurotic and poignant...
...With the subtlest of gestures and tones of voice the five actors work like a string quintet, sometimes melodic, sometimes atonal, always moving and authentic...
...Closer is a play of this decade, à la mode in every respect, from the unloving pursuit of gratification to the later professions of irony and candor ("I'm selfish," everyone admits at some point...
...He has a fine ear for the lilt and eccentricities of Irish speech, and his characters are observed with great respect and high color...
...Most men want a girl who looks like a boy," she says, and this strikes him as words to live by...
...Irish storytellers from Frank O'Connor to Frank McCourt have been known to use them all, beguiling theirfollowers until the most preposterous fairy tale seems as real as a glass of Guinness...
...It got held up" As the play progresses the emotions become more exposed and barbarous...
...Above their heads an enormous screen enables us to monitor the exchanges...
...Jim speaks of a dead child molester who eluded the grave that had been dug for him...
...She makes Anna elegant, diverting and wholly believable as the quarry who always contrives to have the hunter in view...
...To impress Valerie, they begin to tell spooky stories around the hot stove...
...In outline, the work resembles a Feydeau farce...
...Conor Mcpherson strains to join their company...
...They're baggage handlers...
...Listening to all this, Valerie fails to be impressed...
...His play, The Weir (the title refers to a dam built across a river to regulate its flow), also was a triumph on the West End and is now bidding for attention at the Walter Kerr Theater...
...Valerie (Michelle Fairley) causes them all to stand a little straighter, talk a little louder and put on an air or two...
...The characters do not converse so much as recite, as if they had memorized the entries in a book of aphorisms...
...But it is the cast that makes the evening flicker to life, albeit only at odd moments...
...She pays the rent by peeling in strip clubs and flirting with any male who hoves into view...
...Jack (Jim Norton) is a 60ish garage mechanic and devotee of small talk and full shot glasses...
...Enter Larry (Ciaran Hinds), a dermatologist who soon finds himself examining Anna's skin, up close and personal...
...As the trio palavers about nothin' at all, at all, a couple enters the pub and changes the climate and tempo of the evening...
...Graves is indulgence in a brush haircut and a bad suit...
...The men survive the battles...
...These achievements are all the more remarkable because they have to surmount Vicki Mortimer's stark set and unprepossessing costumes, and Paddy Cunneen's overstated mood music...
...Unlike the others, he is married...
...they have witnessed his preening many times before...
...At stage left, a furious, green-eyed Dan is hard at work at a computer keyboard, attempting to torpedo his rival...
...when she returned, she was greeted with the news that the child had drowned in a swimming pool accident...
...Her reaction does not come from a dislike of yarns about the supernatural, but from the realization that life is more terrifying and depressing than any made-up tale...
...They love dreams...
...In Closer, the British import at the Music Box Theater, we are never given a chance to sit back...
...Then, just as you're relaxing, a great big juggernaut arrives with their baggage...
...The bone-thin young woman has quit the city to live in the country because of a personal horror story...
...But before you can say infidelity, the randy Dan has exchanged women...
...Some scabrous dialogue follows as Dan signs in, pretending to be a lusty young woman...
...McPherson's winning the Olivier Award last year for Best New Play says more about the lack of original British or Irish talents than it does about his craftsmanship...
...Along comes Dan (Rupert Graves), a hack newspaperman who spends his daytime hours writing obituaries and his nights seeking affection...
...Finbar (Dermot Crowley) is a real estate speculator on the sunny side of his 40s, a local boy who made good...
...And we do withit what we will...
...Deprived of cigarettes during that time, he forsook the habit entirely as a sign of respect and fear...
...Finbar alone could not impress his neighbors...
...In fact that is all he has written, although at some junctures it is a very funny one...
...Unlike them, he struts when he walks, showing off his expensive suit, pink shirt, Italian shoes— and latest extramarital date...
...We say, 'Where's your baggage?' They deny all knowledge of it...
...And before you can say counterpoint, Alice's epidermis as well...
...Marber specifies that the action takes place in London in the 1990s, and truer words were seldom written...
...Norton is superb as the cantankerous barfly who allows self-pity to creep in when he has imbibed a bit too much...
...Her hope is that this backwater may at last provide a place of restoration and peace of mind...
...These are fin de siècle people, and despair is trendy...
...But he lacks a way of giving them a play to play with...
...Dan believes that "Desire, like the world, is an accident...
...Simple, you think...
...The cast, however, delivers powerhouse performances...
...It is not much as ghost stories go, but the narrative opens the floodgates—the weir, as it were...
...He begins to ask Larry leading questions about his sexual fantasies...
...What follows is far more violent, except that the savagery is directed toward psyches instead of bodies...
...Friel, a newcomer, has made a smashing debut as the doomed ingenue gone decadent before her 23rd birthday...
...The men, if less effective, are nonetheless memorable...
...Now she feels dislocated wherever she wanders...
...What we are watching is not theater, it is typed out prose...
...evidently she prefers to keep an emotional distance...
...Marber the playwright is not served well by Marber the director, who tends to underline nearly every speech and poses his people as if they were in a deep frieze...
...Closer was a smash hit on the West End and comes to Broadway trailing a reputation for solar brilliance and stunning originality...
...That represents the entire plot of The Weir...
...Although each is in his own flat, and the dwellings are miles apart, both men are visiting the same Internet chat room...
...His delighted publisher demands a dust jacket portrait, leading Dan to the atelier of an intriguing blonde, Anna (Natasha Richardson...
...Jealousy, as La Rochefoucauld pointed out, is born with love, but it does not always die when love dies...
...Hinds is insecurity with a stethoscope...
...Ian Rickson's direction is unobtrusive, and Rae Smith's set and costumes are appropriately dreary, abetted by Paule Constable's ominous lighting...
...Speaking of men, Alice generalizes, "They love the way we make them feel, but not us...
...The tragedy wrecked her psyche and destroyed her marriage...
...It does, however, have a superb cast interpreting the lines of playwright Conor McPherson...
...Sparks only seem to rise during the recitation of a monologue, and only Valerie's has the power to move beyond trivia...
...Think of an X-rated Dave Barry and you have a fair idea of what transpires...
...In the very first scene, Alice is shown with a bloody leg, the souvenir of an automobile accident...
...Brendan (Brendan Coyle), the owner, is an affable young chap who can see no farther ahead than closing time...
...Whenever matters seem resolved, he rings in a new intrigue, or a variation on an old one...
...Ahem makes a splendidly taciturn black Irishman...
...Moreover, the ItWas-a-Dark-and-Stormy-Night setting was a bromide when McPherson's grandfather was young...
...What gives them pause this evening is the pretty stranger from Dublin...
...the women are scarred or damaged beyond repair...
...He has the fewest lines, which tells you a great deal about the acting and all you need to know about the writing...
...Would that it were enough...
...There is no question that the playwright has tapped into the Zeitgeist, and that he can evoke laughter by the use of shock, pornography and some genuine wit...
...One day she left her five-year-old daughter safely in school...
...Finbar tells about a ghostly confrontation that frightened him so much he could not move a muscle for 12 hours...
...This coolly beautiful photographer specializes in snapshots of strangers...
...Ireland is the place of isms: Catholicism, lyricism, colloquialism, alcoholism...
...Yet Marber, who manifestly intends bigger statements with Closer, insists that he had no idea he had composed a mere comedy...
...Before you can say quickie, the couple is having it on and the journalist, now that he has discovered his muse, gets busy on a first novel...
...Coyle, the only one who has no tale to tell, won the Olivier award for Best Actor in the play...
...Jim (Kieran Ahern) is a dim, moody middle-aged handyman who still lives with his mother...
...Anna agrees: "We arrive with our 'baggage,' and for a while they're brilliant...
...Meanwhile, at stage right, Larry is also staring at his PC monitor...
...Jack begins with a narrative of fairy rings and strange, unexplained knocks upon doors...
...The intermissionless drama, if it can be called a drama at all, has no more tension than a plate of scones...
Vol. 82 • April 1999 • No. 5
