On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage French Dressing By Stefan Kanfer FOR more than three decades Neil Simon has been America's most imitated playwright. From Barefoot in the Park and The Odd Couple in the 1960s to...
...Manifestly Simon looked closely and listened hard...
...Although this seems to be a new development, it actually is as old as mass communications...
...The phenomenon has hardly been a guarantee of sound government, but it has furnished playwrights with surefire material...
...Understandably, he mistakes the two popinjays for waiters...
...In an even smaller role, as Sue-Ellen Gamadge, head of the party's women's division, Elizabeth Ashley is mordant and hilarious...
...André is divorced from Gabrielle, Claude from Mariette, Albert from Yvonne...
...But that arena has recently undergone profound changes...
...Despite the temptations to imitate what is currently in fashion, Simon would do well to heed the words of another Frenchman, Marcel Proust, who observed that "It is better to trust one's own talent, no matter how imperfect, than to ape another's, no matter how accomplished...
...It no longer looks the same, and neither does its fare...
...The third guest is the sixtysomething André (Len Cariou), an elegant, imperious men's wear retailer...
...In failing to reach his target Simon can place little blame on John Lee Beatty, who has created a magnificent room complete with vaulted ceiling, or Jane Greenwood, whose costumes are chic or comic, depending on the need...
...The whole evening might thus have a grand romantic outcome...
...Withfew exceptions, the most successful comedies of that period issued from his typewriter or from those of his acolytes...
...Hockstader relishes this last vestige of power: Whoever gets his endorsement is bound to win the nomination...
...Another reason The Unexpected Man is taken seriously is Reza's deserved reputation for writing big parts...
...Which one was Richard M. Nixon...
...Mabel Cantwell (Christine Ebersole) is an emptyheaded young blonde with an iron permanent and the knowledge of scandal in her husband's past...
...The three missing guests turn out to be the leggy, fortyish blonde Mariette (Jan Maxwell...
...Of all these dramatists and comedy writers, the last has been the most acute...
...The Dinner Party, like almost everything the playwright does, rests on autobiography...
...And we are off and running...
...Even your energy is a view of the world...
...What perverse mind planned this nexus of the exes...
...A pity that all this talent couldn't have been used for a worthier outfit than the emperor's nouveau ensemble...
...His rival, Senator Joseph Cantwell (Chris Noth), is a ruthless young pol who never met a principle he couldn't compromise...
...The mystery is soon solved, only to create another puzzle...
...After all, à Paris the puerilities of Jerry Lewis are considered Chaplinesque, the Stalinism of Jean-Paul Sartre sagacious, and the maunderings of Jacques Derrida profound...
...Understandably, actors would kill for a role that allows them to speak uninterrupted, without so much as an intermission to break the audience's concentration...
...I like to say that, had it not been for me," he boasted in a tongue-in-cheek memoir, "Ronald Reagan would never have been President...
...Yasmina Reza's overpraised comedy of friendship and esthetics has been a hit in 20 languages, so it comes as no surprise to see her oneacter...
...Your disinclination to do the sensible thing is a view of the world...
...When The Best Man first opened, a great guessing game began...
...Cantwell's problem is a homosexual incident that occurred years before when he was in the Navy...
...Both of these middle-aged gentlemen have failed to read their invitations closely...
...It will deceive thousandsmore...
...Cariou is as wily and imposing as ever...
...He has sharper ones in the current version of the comedy/drama...
...Only anonymous writing can hope to avoid failure...
...Although Cantwell is far better looking than Tricky Dick, his deviousness and appetite for office are Nixonian from the get-go...
...The place is the Democratic Party convention in Philadelphia...
...None of the trio has the faintest idea why he has been invited to this party, or the identity of the other guests...
...It comes as no surprise to learn that the play has wowed thousands...
...At 73 he remains a bright, industrious figure and the lesson was not lost on him...
...and his career was hugely revived, while the rejected Reagan, at loose ends, became Governor of California...
...I've never found anything in any of your books that doesn't express in a completely personal way your view of the world...
...In the '30s, radio conveyed Franklin D. Roosevelt's sonorous tones to the 48 states and made him the first Presidential broadcasting star...
...the only sadness he can talk about is his own...
...Who can say anything remotely coherent about anybody's life...
...Fiveby-Five than a Trumanesque pol, but he knows how to hold center stage in a small, pivotal part...
...Maxwell has the tone and aura of a sophisticated femme du monde...
...Still, he went on doing things his way, and his way was Broadway...
...While she is vamping André, why not reignite their burned out amours...
...Who can say anything remotely coherent about life in general...
...Nevertheless, the man is no pushover...
...The grandson of a U.S...
...Aiming, perhaps, but missing at practically every turn...
...The Woman (Eileen Atkins) recognizes her seatmate...
...Will the wives effect a truce...
...I think we're aiming for a much higher form of absurdity...
...The two additional couples are a subsidiary part of her scheme...
...Senator from Oklahoma and a close observer of the Kennedy clan (he and JFK's wife shared a stepfather), Vidal wrote with an insider's knowledge and a gadfly's irreverence...
...Her intermissonless one-set play may have been as deep as veneer, but her minimalist dialogue sparkled like shards of glass...
...Hockstader may respect Russell's IQ, but dislikes his hesitant style ("Sometimes you're so busy thinkin' how complex everything is, important problems don't get solved...
...The others, out of boredom or terror, follow suit...
...Albert: "Do you know that primates are more successful at choosing mates than we are...
...It has already played in Paris and London, and now surfaces in New York, but not on the Main Stem...
...Harry S. Truman...
...Insults detonate, wisecracks abound, social mistakes are played for all they're worth: Gazing at a huge mural, Claude inquires, "Do you like Fragonard...
...From Barefoot in the Park and The Odd Couple in the 1960s to Lost in Yonkers and Laughter on the 23rd Floor in the 1990s, his long shadow fell across the theatrical scene...
...Now, in what her guests acknowledge is "an Agatha Christie situation," she takes the lead in a tell-all session about her marriage...
...We hear his thoughts as he conjectures about who she is, where she's going, what she wants out of life...
...But Paul Parsky (Alan Bates) soon veers away from her and toward his favorite subject: himself...
...A generation later, John F. Kennedy's telegenic appearance gave him international celebrity...
...Mark Thompson's icy, high-tech set and Matthew Warchus' minimal direction are models of restraint...
...Thank God and the Founders that we only have to go through it once every four years...
...Melvyn Douglas played the part...
...She has also bribed them to lock the doors from the outside...
...Vidal supplied no answers in the old days...
...You cover your tracks, you personally invent protective misunderstandings, because you're haunted by the fear of being understood...
...In general, the play is well served by the principals...
...Will there be a battle of the smears...
...THE object of Simon's sedulous admiration, Art, opened in Paris in 1994 and won the city's heart...
...Russell's dark secret, it turns out, is the nervous breakdown he suffered some years back...
...Replies the unworldly Albert, "Not before dinner...
...The most talked-about comedy of the last few seasons, for example, was not a Simon production...
...The two individuals don't converse until the final moments, when Parsky lays himself bare as: "A selfish little busybody who's never been able to turn a single moment into eternity, which is the mark of a poet...
...As is evident from these selections, The Unexpected Man uses words sparely, if at all...
...Did I write what I wanted to write...
...Second on the scene is Albert (Henry Winkler), owner of a car-rental establishment and a Sunday painter...
...Somuch so that: "If I have to prove myself worthy of whatever devil has dropped me down in this compartment, I'm forced to admit I'm madly in love with you and that in another life—since I wouldn't like to embarrass you—I would have taken off with you, on any kind of adventure....' As is evident from this exchange, The Unexpected Man is almost totally empty of content, an appropriate definition of French theater à la mode...
...In a stream of self-consciousness he vents his inner thoughts about love and art...
...The short, vastly overweight Durning looks more like Mr...
...The rest of the 16 member cast is unfailingly persuasive under the brisk, if unsubtle, direction of Ethan McSweeny Theoni V Aldredge's costumes and John Arnone's set design evoke the surfaces of a more innocent time...
...But this time Simon is not content to leave hell enough alone...
...too, can be relied upon for silence...
...Or is there a wild card-yet to be played...
...Complicating the picture are the candidate's spouses, and the privileged information they have about their marriages...
...for bringing the sitcom to the Main Stem...
...He may despise Cantwell's Right-wing philosophy, but he admires the take-no-prisoners approach ("Just because he's a bastard don't mean he wouldn't be a good candidate...
...Wounds and inadequacies are confessed, aspirations expressed, sexual fantasies revealed...
...Reading your interview, I finally grasped something unexpected...
...Vidal keeps the suspense taut until the final moments, and then furnishes a surprise ending...
...On a train bound for Germany from France, a well-tailored man of 60 and an unnamed haughty woman of a certain age share the same compartment...
...He continually mars the dialogue with mechanical similes ("I feel like G m talking to a machine that spits out poisoned tennis balls,") and arch commentary ("The party is already farce...
...probe beneath that surface to remind us that politics has never been a fragrant business, and that today's open convention and yesterday's smoke-filled room are appallingly similar...
...The TV sitcom veterans,Ritter(Three's Company) and Winkler (Happy Days) prove to be very much at home on the stage...
...Thanks to some adroit staff work, each man becomes privy to the other's vulnerability...
...the young and debilitated redhead Yvonne (Veanne Cox...
...Who knows the first thing about anybody's life...
...In Faber and Faber's edition of the play, Parsky's riffs are printed as if he were speaking free verse: "The biography of a writer...
...But the usually hilarious Cox is required to do balletic gymnastics that ill accord with Yvonne's introverted persona, and as Gabrielle, Fuller is kittenish where she should be feline, mewling when she should purr...
...Politics is show business, complete with scripts, directors, makeup artists, and claques...
...won prizes...
...The passenger is a minor novelist, bitter, disappointed, but not wholly ignored by the press and the public...
...Sheer hypocrisy...
...The mere word "psychotherapy" would be enough to ruin him (Vidal anticipated Thomas Eagleton by more than a decade...
...Claude: "That's because there are not as many lawyers in the jungle...
...When Reagan's agents proposed him to me, I said that although he was a good actor, I didn't think that the audience would accept him as a politician in the Adlai Stevenson mode...
...As he does, we learn a few particulars...
...for writing Jewish and casting goyish...
...Spraining the long arm of coincidence, she is currently in the process of reading Parsky's latest fiction, The Unexpected Man...
...Absolutely ridiculous...
...He has been married five times, and the talk of broken dreams and catastrophic unions has a certain authenticity...
...Atkins, whose prior impersonations include Virginia Woolf, Major Barbara and Electra, can do nothing wrong onstage...
...En route he is unfailingly entertaining and frequently wise...
...Adlai E. Stevenson...
...All they know is that three people are still to come, since the table is set for six...
...The cast is about 80 per cent right, the fault, in part, of John Rando's thoroughly unsubtle direction...
...The result is The Dinner Party, an intermissionless one-set play, French in every sense but one: It was written in English by an American...
...and the zaftig brunette of a certain age, Gabrielle (Penny Fuller...
...Most are featureless, and many have the sound of paperback Freud...
...To effect this, she has bribed the restaurateur to leave the food and drink and keep the waiters away...
...And therein lies a world of difference...
...He went on to describe the difficulties he had in casting The Best Man back in 1960...
...Cool, intellectually inclined William Russell (Spalding Gray) possesses an acid wit reminiscent of the time when undergraduates wore buttons with the legend "Madlai for Adlai...
...The action takes place at a four-star restaurant in contemporary Paris...
...afraid to say anything aloud, she addresses him in her mind: "You said in an interview that ideas about the world were, strictly speaking, of no value in the practice of literature...
...It was Art, written by Yasmina Reza, a French woman...
...The fiftyish Alice Russell (Michael Learned) is a wife in name only: The couple has been living separately, and she agrees to appear at William's side only for political purposes...
...But a sudden shyness grips her...
...Your allergy to nuance is a view of the world...
...Both men seek the approval of exPresident Arthur Hockstader (Charles Durning), a tough old bird who made it to the White House by pretending to be the quintessence of the Common Man...
...Two men vie for the nomination...
...Parsky is, in fact, a fine writer, and a deeply moving one...
...The party, it develops, has been contrived by Gabrielle in hopes of enticing André back into her arms...
...From time to time Simon was criticized for facility—more than 25 plays in as many years...
...By contrast, the revival at the Virginia Theater heavily underlines all clues to character...
...She heard about them from the divorce lawyer who handled her case, and an idea sprang to mind...
...Hence the success of such Broadway shows as Howard Lindsay and Rüssel Crouse's State of the Union, Irving Berlin's Call Me Madam, Dore Schary's Sunrise at Campobello, and the current revival of Gore Vidal's The Best Man...
...As Parsky, the redoubtable Alan Bates is once again elegant in diction and appearance...
...Gray and Noth are wholly credible as rivals who teeter on the edge of mutually assured destruction...
...First to arrive in the private room is Claude (John Ritter), failed novelist turned seller of rare books...
...André to Gabrielle: "Your womb became a receptacle of all my self-loathing...
...Aware of a scandal in her husband's past, she can be relied upon to keep quiet about it...
...How can your complete works, your contribution added to the world—and by the way, all the great laws of nature work on the principle of subtraction—how can your complete works be anything more than a mishmash of approximations of constantly shifting boundaries...
...His appraisal is much too harsh, insists The Woman...
...As the recent election made all too clear, politics doesn't merely mimic show business...
...The Unexpected Man, garnering serious attention...
...It seems as unsuitable and ungainly as Albert's rented dinner jacket...
...Learned lends a dignity to the proceedings, and Ebersole is both funny and strangely pathetic as her counterpart...
...Each male guest is—or, rather, was—related to one of the females...
...All the same, the one most responsible for the evening's disappointments and inconsistencies is the author himself...
...Vidal & Co...
...The Off-Broadway Promenade Theater is the venue for this collection of monologues masquerading as a play...
...Formal dress was not specified, yet here they are in their tuxedos...
...An adept writer of middle-American dialogue, he has chosen this time to produce a Simonized knockoff of a French design...
...A generation after that, a professional movie actor rode into the Oval Office...
...Egomaniacal as he may appear, the playwright had a point...
...Surprisingly enough from a master laughsmith, none are particularly funny...
...for manufacturing rat-a-tat comebacks instead of complex characters...
...Its success was repeated on the West End, on Broadway, and later in most of the cities of the West...
...No, never...
Vol. 83 • November 2000 • No. 5
