On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage Soloists with Something to Say By Stefan Kanfer THE ONE-MAN SHOW usually presents a marriage of convenience between economy and ego. The producer welcomes the chance to reduce...
...Soon her nanny appeared...
...This confessional piece describes Wilde's misadventures with his lover Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas, whose father, the choleric Marquis of Queensberry, took Wilde to court and ruined him...
...Lady ?.: A very good age to be married at...
...That incident encapsulates the horror and waste of the apartheid regime more effectively than a shelf of editorials...
...Even when Oscar Wilde had London at his feet he was considered a master of surfaces—as opalescent as a soap bubble, and just as empty...
...The young woman takes what Afrikaaners still call "the chicken run," leaving South Africa for the U.S., where she marries and has a child of her own...
...She merely wanted to teach him a lesson...
...Instead, he assumed the air of a professor with a gift for mimicry—a gift that stood him in fine stead when he skillfully enacted both parts in an exchange from Earnest: Lady Bracknell (Interviewing her daughter's suitor): Do you smoke...
...Among the country's most neglected vocalists is the blues singer Bessie Smith (1898-1937), child of an impoverished Tennessee family...
...It's mighty strange, without a doubt: Nobody knows you when you're down and out...
...Months later, at great personal risk, Eugenie manages to find Moliseng and spirit her away...
...But, these were minor lapses in a career that has no parallel in English literature...
...Reprinted, Oscar's tales and poems found new and enthusiastic readers, and the parabola of his triumph and downfall was described in movies, books and plays...
...But Oscar Wilde has also become something he desperately wished to be: a major literary figure...
...In the end she is back on that swing, daring, against the odds, to hope for what still might come to pass in the beloved country...
...Buggy made no attempt to impersonate his subject...
...With a brick in hand she exhorts them to louder, longer protests, promising, "You will see me forever in your dreams...
...Lady ?.: I am pleased to hear it...
...Then, slowly, a rehabilitation took shape...
...Afrikaaners on surrounding farms grow more paranoid as the government weakens, convinced that the tolerant English and the liberal Jews will bring trouble by opposing the Nationalist regime...
...I have always been of opinion that a man who desires to get married should know either everything or nothing...
...What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the realm of passion...
...Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit...
...Although Sellamina is more of a beloved friend than a servant, she brings trouble to the family by giving birth to Moliseng, a baby with no visible father and no birth certificate...
...Thenlbegan tofallso low, Lost all my good friends, I did not have nowhere to go...
...It introduced young Americans to fine musicians obscured by the 40-year dominance of rock...
...But hurriedly they took him out, And hid him in a hole...
...It was a long time turning...
...In the next several years only the records of Enrico Caruso and Al Jolson outsold those of Bessie Smith...
...Jack: Twenty-nine...
...and the actor is delighted to do a solo, usually in autobiographical form...
...Happily, she avoided the obvious in a portrait that extended far beyond Lizzie to include black servants, parents and grandparents...
...Every one of them had a different personality, point of view and regional accent...
...Wilde's last major work was The Ballad of Reading Gaol, in which he recalls his punishment and indicts society for its cruelty and hypocrisy...
...When the government falls and apartheid is f inished, Lizzie pays a visit to Johannesburg and finds Sellamina...
...Unhappily, the emergence from a miserable childhood, or a debilitating disease, or a series of wacky jobs, belongs in the category of therapy rather than theater...
...Into this vacuum rushed Angelo Parrà's scrupulously researched and well-written The Devil's Music, starring Miche Braden as Bessie...
...Jack: Well, yes, I must admit I smoke...
...The evening began with six-year-old Lizzie swinging from a vast protective Syringa tree as she chirps about the magic and mystery of Africa...
...If some of the Ballad provides a scarifying portrait of prison life, far too many of the verses are mere doggerel: They hanged him as a beast is hanged: They did not even toll A requiem that might have brought Rest to his startled soul...
...The musicians performed their period music flawlessly, never yielding a quarter note to contemporary taste...
...The unending cycle of violence is more than Lizzie can bear...
...One day, they predict, the blacks will come and kill them all in their beds...
...Jack: I know nothing, Lady Bracknell...
...It began in Chattanooga and came to an end shortly after her appearance in a Memphis night club...
...Lady B.: I am glad to hear it...
...The Importance of Being Oscar was at its weakest during the subject's penitent phase in Act II...
...The program instructed playgoers, "The Trials of Oscar Wilde may be supposed to take place during the interval...
...At Playhouse 91, Gien's performance provided a classic example of perfect pitch...
...Simple pleasures are the last refuge of the complex...
...Although her vocal range was only about an octave and a half, she had interpretive skill and a powerful stage presence...
...It was a lesson she failed to teach herself...
...No doubt it would have been tempting for Gien to natter on about her native country, condemning the Nationalists and shouting hosannas to Nelson Mandela...
...Today her distinctive voice can be heard on re-engineered CDs, but the biographies that tracked her rise and downfall are out of print...
...To bolster this arguable thesis, the estimable Duke Ellington was named "America's greatest composer"—elbowing aside such nobodies as Leonard Bernstein, Walter Piston, Edward MacDowell, George Gershwin, Charles Ives and Aaron Copland, to say nothing of Richard Rodgers, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Hoagy Carmichael and Stephen Sondheim...
...When that township erupts in rage and violence during the 1980s, her daughter Moliseng, now an adolescent, leads a group of black youth...
...In 1937, marginalized, half-forgotten, she was killed in an automobile accident in Mississippi...
...Others were sadly autobiographical: Once I lived the life of a millionaire, Spent all my money, I just did not care...
...When she caught her husband, Jack Gee, in flagrante delicto with a chorus girl, she beat up the chorine and threw her off a train...
...It has taken almost half a century for Smith to be rediscovered and recognized as the great "crossover" singer who helped bring the blues and jazz to a white audience...
...Yeats judged the Ballad "almost a great poem," but this is like saying that the runner-up at Ascot was almost a great horse...
...Armed with a court order, social workers took away her young son, accusing the mother of neglect and misconduct...
...It is a chilling prophecy: Some time later Lizzie's beloved grandfather is murdered on his Natal farm, stabbed by a thief in the course of a petty robbery...
...In part this is because of Richard Ellman's great biographical appraisal, published in 1988: "Now, beyond the reach of scandal, his best writings validated by time, he comes before us still, a towering figure, laughing and weeping, with parables and paradoxes, so generous, so amusing, and so right...
...She missed, but according to Bessie this was intentional...
...So it is with great pleasure that I report on three Off-Broadway shows that not only offered masterful performances but rich, complex themes...
...There, amid children dying of complex diseases and simple dehydration, Moliseng is swallowed up by the South African bureaucracy and disappears...
...The members of the household, black and white, are terrified that the police may swoop in unannounced—which they are empowered to do—take the child from her mother, and make her a ward of the state...
...His aphoristic novel, The Portrait of Dorian Gray, was filmed...
...Technically, this was a four-person play, since the star was accompanied by an outstanding jazz trio (Terry Walker, piano...
...Subtly directed and designed by Charlotte Moore, Buggy showed why the sparkling, provocative, tragic Oscar will still be revived and analyzed when the next century rolls around...
...Then she went after Gee, pursuing him down the railroad track and firing at him with bis own handgun...
...His comedies, particularly The Importance of Being Earnest and An Ideal Husband, were revived to great acclaim...
...But it also gave unwitting credence to Ellman's view that De Profundis suffers from "an arrogance lurking in its humility...
...Some were ugly and racist: Check all your razors and your guns Do the shim sham shimmy till the risin'sun...
...A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing...
...I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance...
...Jimmy Hankins, bass...
...Offstage she was also a force to be reckoned with, knocking down many a man and woman who tried to shortchange her in salary or love...
...Pierre Andre, saxophone...
...In 1999, Gross Indecencies, Moises Kaufman's Off-Broadway documentary drama, covered the trials in microscopic detail...
...While on tour he read to the lead miners of Nevada, winning them over with his ability to consume vast quantities of alcohol: "The first course was whisky, the second course was whisky and the third course was whisky, all the courses were whisky but still they called it supper...
...Yet with all its overstatements and political correctness, the show did some good...
...It sounded celestial at the tiny Theater 3 on 43rd Street...
...In part it is because of the lobbying by the members of the homosexual community, who see Wilde as a martyr of homophobia...
...There are far too many idle men in London as it is...
...Buggy's reading was obviously meant to be poignant...
...Then came Lizzie's parents, her dislocated English mother, Eugenie, and her native-born Jewish father, Dr...
...But mostly it is because the theater pieces retain the power to evoke hilarity, and because the social criticisms continue to carry the sting of truth...
...Viewers got a taste of Art Tatum, portions of Thelonious Monk and Benny Goodman, dashes of Ella Fitzgerald sporadically interrupted by segments of Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis...
...Moreover, the documentary viewed its subject as an almost exclusively African-American art form...
...At every turn, director Larry Moss made certain that pathos never degenerated to bathos...
...The Syringa Tree, written and performed by Pamela Gien, concerned the coming of age of a white girl, Elizabeth Grace, in South Africa...
...Under Joe Brancato's tasteful direction Miche Braden conveyed just the right mix of humor, outrage and melancholy...
...A man should always have an occupation of some kind...
...Together they grieve for vanished lives and for a way of life now as obsolete as a Boer trek wagon...
...Back in 1961, the Irish actor Micheâl McLiammóir (1899-1978) arranged and recited a group of Wilde's writings, ranging from the undergraduate efforts at Oxford to the final utterances in Paris...
...And it is only the beginning of a saga encompassing the next two decades of South African history...
...As before, the show revealed Wilde's surprising scope —as well as some weaknesses that seemed more glaring on the Off-Broadway stage of the Irish Repertory Theater...
...What Bessie Smith sang was indeed labeled "the devil's music" by bluenoses of the '20s...
...And last year on the main stem, David Hare's The Judas Kiss tracked Wilde's precipitous descent...
...Kenneth Foy's inventive background and Jason Kantrowitz's evocative lighting added to the illusion of strangers in a strange land waiting to be reclaimed...
...Amusic footnote: KenBurns' episodic 19-hour PB S television show, Jazz, was all appetizers and no entrée...
...Yet she is overwhelmed with guilt, quits her job and retreats to the shadowy world of Soweto...
...The author never recovered from his courtroom exposure and social obloquy...
...That was when he wrote De Profundis...
...Wilde's epigrams were collected and quoted anew: "I can resist everything except temptation...
...Fascinating as those courtroom scenes are, it is just as well that they were omitted from The Importance of Being Oscar...
...Witty to the end, he complained to friends, "I am dying beyond my means...
...Their collusion works until the infant becomes seriously ill...
...she does not even know the perpetrator...
...With scarcely a pause, Gien turned into Sellamina, whose husky voice indicated a large black woman of great authority and dignity...
...Today, a century after his death, he has become something he never aspired to be: a celebrated gay icon...
...Exactly 40 years later the Irish Repertory Theater revived TTae Importance of Being Oscar, starring another veteran of the Irish stage, Niall Buggy...
...And, indeed, for a generation the plays were unperformed and the poetry and prose went unread...
...As usual, however, G.B.S...
...An imposing figure in every sense—she was six feet tall and weighed some 200 pounds—Smith began as a small-time entertainer but soon attracted large and enthusiastic audiences...
...Forbidden ever to see his two sons again, he fled to Europe, took the assumed name of Sebastian Melmoth, and expired in penury and misery in 1900 at the age of 46...
...What Dorothy Parker wrote in the '30s remains true today: If with the literate I am Compelled to try an epigram I never seek to take the credit We all assume that Oscar said it...
...These, combined with an appetite for booze and drugs, did her in...
...was running against the tide...
...It was widely assumed then that Oscar's works would follow their creator into obscurity...
...Sellamina had nothing to do with the killing...
...A moment later she is shot down by a white policeman...
...Which do you know...
...How old are you...
...But after swearing never to return she finds herself unable to keep her vow...
...The producer welcomes the chance to reduce budgets by paying an irreducible cast...
...Sellamina is of course inconsolable, able to do nothing but mourn for her daughter under the Syringa tree...
...In Wilde's defense, George Bernard Shaw called him a true original and felt moved to declare, "As far as I can tell, I am the only person in England who cannot write an Oscar Wilde play...
...But before Bessie took off on that fatal car ride, 15 numbers passed in review, each one a revelation...
...But Braden did the talking and the singing, cannily echoing her subject's moaning and exuberant tones as she recalled a checkered career...
...After Wilde's arrest, trial and imprisonment for "relations with men in private," his books were removed from library shelves and his plays taken off the boards...
...She drank harder, became more argumentative and refused to adapt to the new music, swing, then sweeping the nation...
...To be without papers in the old South Africa was to be, in effect, stateless...
...Columbia Records signed her in 1923, when few blacks were awarded major contracts, and she more than fulfilled the company's expectations...
...During the night Eugenie carries her off to a hospital in Soweto...
...In all, more than two dozen individuals, from the very young to the very old, from Zulus to Afrikaaners, from British to Americans made an appearance...
...touch it and the bloom is gone...
...To foil the authorities, the Graces conspire to keep Moliseng's very existence a secret...
...Isaac Grace, who insists, despite the nation's racial laws, on seating his black and white patients in the same waiting room...
...The self-styled "Empress of the Blues" carried on torrid affairs with lovers of both sexes...
...Almost as diverting were excerpts from An Ideal Husband and Dorian Gray, and from Oscar's accounts of his trip to America...
Vol. 84 • March 2001 • No. 2
