On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage AMERICAN SECOND ACTS By Stefan Kanfer In A life filled with physical and emotional anguish, Isak Dinesen wrote steadily and well. No matter how bitter the circumstances, she...
...the violence that Mama sought to escape has found a victim a thousand miles away...
...the shiftless loquacious alcoholic father...
...In the block of flats where the McCourts eke out a living, one outdoor toilet does for 16 families...
...They are written and acted by the dispossessed who come across the water, struggle in the new land, and eventually record their feelings on pages and stages...
...Broughtto the U.S...
...Mickey Kelly gets the short end of the shtick as Frank...
...Based on Cristina Garcia's autobiographical novel, this two-act production has no real predecessors...
...When she does accept someone, he turns out to be a con artist selling coffins to the abj ect poor, or a local pol who promises improvements he is powerless to make...
...Alternately bawdy and disarming, Frank recollects the poverty of Limerick, the McCourt's hometown...
...The boys know that they are trapped in "a trinity of maternities"—mother, Church and Ireland—and that their only hope is emigration...
...Angela's Ashes became a word-ofmouth favorite, stayed on the best seller list for more than 100 weeks and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1997...
...It was his brother Malachy who was more familiar to New Yorkers as a soap opera actor (Ryan's Hope) and as a garrulous guest on talk shows...
...By doing what comes naturally—telling stories on radio and television, and taking roles in any theatrical production that will have him—he makes a living...
...There the brothers are permitted to sip their Guinnesses and the audience may imbibe along with them...
...Although there are vast geographical and emotional distances between the North Sea and the Caribbean, there are also some astonishing similarities...
...They recorded their experiences in books that assuaged the pain and, en route, made them literary celebrities...
...Luis Mojica's musical supervision completes the illusion of Latin sites and sounds...
...A precarious one, granted, but as he notes, it beats working...
...In her own mind she is the most important guard on the island, walking the coast in her best housedress, peering through spyglasses in the hope of discovering another Bay of Pigs in the making...
...as an infant, the art student has no personal memories of the family's native land...
...Once in a while I had a Catholic kid, kicked out of school for thinking...
...The senescent Marxist, the middle-aged capitalist, the furiously apolitical young woman talk past one another, each interpreting history according to her own lights...
...As always, the Irish have a gift for taking the language of the oppressor and making it ring like a church bell...
...Producer-director-adapter Wynn Handrnan has created a unique amalgam of drama, comedy, dance, and music to suggest the vibrant style—as well as the tragic undertow—of so much Latin literature...
...I don't think there's a Cuban family that's not affected by fallout from the revolution," she says...
...In a monologue reminiscent of Joyce's Portrait of the Artist, another cleric reminds his congregation of two boys who skipped mass, went swimming on a Sunday, drowned, and are now roasting in hell, their skin shriveling and their eyeballs popping from the heat...
...Her mother is Cuban born and bred, and incessantly chatters about the old country before the hated Fidel took over...
...In Act Two, subtitled Agua Ardiente ("firewater"), writer-performer Michael John Garces takes over...
...The daughter reluctantly agrees, and creates an image of the Statue of Liberty that no one is allowed to see until the unveiling...
...She is Cristina Garcia, whose luminous novel was nominated for a National Book Award...
...Not only should we be building urinals for the men," he bombinates, "we should be constructing arsenals for the women...
...A Couple of Blagiiards shows the secret of endurance: laughter so loud it covers the resentment and tears...
...But that hardly matters...
...Like the McCourts, Garcés has obviously been influenced by James Joyce...
...The third star of Dreaming never appears onstage...
...But that is the point...
...bullying schoolmasters...
...pompous priests...
...Frank McCourt burst upon the literary scene several years ago...
...The speaker describes himself as an unstable mix of bloods "born in Miami, raised in Colombia, gringo there, Latino here...
...F. Scott Fitzgerald's famous aphorism, "There are no second acts in American lives," could only have been uttered by someone who had no idea of the immigrant experience...
...Papa is something of a drone and one day his daughter, trying on push-up bras at a department store, spots him walking the aisles in the company of a puffy blonde...
...Sin, in the eyes of the clergy, is everywhere...
...Michael T. Judd plays just about everyone else, from Malachy to the boys' female acquaintances to priests and politicians...
...No matter how bitter the circumstances, she explained, she worked every day because "any sorrow is bearable if you can tell a story about it...
...Between the male and female monologues comes some spectacular dancing by the Venezuelan Bethina Sayegh, who makes steam form on the windows when she slinks into the room, and the Cuban Felix De Jesus, who executes some chacha and salsa steps that Fred Astaire might have coveted...
...In contrast, Malachy arrives in his brother's slipstream with no skills and no desire to acquire any...
...From the pulpit there is thunder against the "fillums," particularly those with Tarzan ("a pagan") and worse still, Ginger Rogers ("a divorcée...
...there's always the heartache of having someone beloved somewhere else...
...As its title suggests, Dreaming in Cuban concerns a family of Caribbean islanders who fled to Américain the '60s...
...By the end of Act One Pilar is back home in the City, but the place allows her no rest...
...The familiar Irish blend with the exotic Cubans as the century ends...
...Landing a job is something else entirely...
...Above all we were wet...
...the English and the terrible things they did to us for 800 years...
...But alcohol only seems to agitate his soul and elicit unhappy memories...
...Now their efforts have taken on a new form in the theater...
...In this, of course, the displaced Cubans are hardly unique...
...There the Irish man's favorite word is "was," while the colleen's favorite is "no...
...the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire...
...The Off-Broadway Triad Theater, the scene of Blagiiards, is inventively set up as a nightclub...
...Before long the Albanians will take their turn...
...In fact, America is composed of second acts...
...Now the brothers have conflated their recollections in A Couple of Blaguards...
...Virtually every group that crosses the ocean to get a green card and a fresh start tells the same story...
...But McCourt turned out to be a born storyteller who could beguile a reader in two sentences: "People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty...
...The boys' maternal grandmother distrusts anyone who is not a Roman Catholic, and precious few who are...
...Cutting across Morningside Park, she is attacked by young ruffians...
...In this piece of sibling revelry, two veteran Irish players do a splendid job of impersonating the McCourts...
...Mama proudly whisks the cloth away—only to reveal a punk Miss Liberty with an attitude and a safety pin in her nose...
...It brings in love, war, race, language, money, power, and those two lands that everyone talks about and no one understands, Cuba and Brooklyn...
...Mama demands a mural for her bakery, one that will celebrate her adopted land...
...Palavering with the velocity of an auctioneer, he relates the experiences of a nameless young Cuban-American in Spanish, English and "Spanglish...
...After a series of hilarious false starts as an off ice worker and outdoor roustabout, he finds his true calling: sloth...
...In Angela's Ashes Frank writes, "When I look back at my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive it all...
...Howard Piatt has directed with a glad hand, and Gloria Parker's set and costume designs allow the maximum number of characterizations with the minimum yardage of cloth...
...Recently, three authors demonstrated the value of that tenet...
...Act One is essentially the story of Pilar del Pino (Eileen Galindo, who skillfully impersonates every member of the family and throws in Fidel Castro for lagniappe...
...The supply of accounts is as endless as humanity and inhumanity...
...Yet Frank persists, works his way through NYU, obtains a sheepskin and begins a career of pedagogy...
...Indeed, Frank had been quietly teaching English in a New York City high school for more than 30 years before he dared to produce Angela's Ashes, a recollection of his youth in Limerick...
...At one point his nameless character downs half a dozen shot glasses of rum and delivers a brilliant, if overheated, free-association monologue...
...She follows the couple, observes them furtively smooching, but never says a word to anyone...
...Accordingly, the twentysomething Frankjourneys to New York...
...his grandfather deliberately sought out and married white women "so that he could have them and hate them...
...Once ashore he finds that unlike Limerick, "where the girls are known for the ferocity of their chastity," getting well acquainted with young women is an easy matter...
...It's a diaspora...
...For him booze is the River Lethe: He drinks "to forget, to end it all over and over again...
...Mama owns and runs the Yankee Doodle bakery in New York, catering to a belligerently anti-Castro crowd...
...His grandmother, he recalls, was one of many wives...
...Instead, she sublimates her anger by traveling frantically and painting furiously...
...Oldand infirm, scarred by acancer operation, the old lady remains a big fan of La Revolution...
...A year later he produced his own memoir, A Monk Swimming, not nearly as skilled in composition, but outrageously funny, in the tradition of Brendan Behan and Flann ?'Brien...
...His memoir had none of the customary prepublication hype...
...For Malachy, his brother's success was not only heartwarming, it was a challenge...
...Some 30 blocks downtown, the American Place Theater is arranged as another nightclub, but this one evokes a very different ethnic background...
...Adding to the persuasive atmosphere are Ryan E. McMahon's lighting designs, and Manuel Vega's stage set, an oddly appealing mix of religious artifacts, foods and art works...
...The author could have been yet another aging boyo keening over the troubles of Erin...
...The resultant skirmish is mild compared to the one that ensues when the two fly to Cuba to visit Mama's Mama...
Vol. 82 • June 1999 • No. 7
