On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
Choice Cuts Off Broadway By Stefan Kanfer Early in the 19th century much of lower Manhattan was destroyed by a catastrophic fire. Financial losses amounted to over $20 million, an...
...That will leave the eldest, Maggie (Martha Plimpton) to continue as shop manager...
...With variations, the production has been touring the country for a decade, and has now settled into the confines of the Century Center for the Performing Arts...
...Berger has not worked out the mystery as fully as he might have...
...One Thomas Hobson (1544-1631) insisted that each customer take the horse nearest the door— in other words, he gave no choice at all...
...Fennyman, I think you might have hit upon something...
...In Albany, state authorities permitted New York City to float a $6 million bond issue, and more money came in the form of low-cost loans...
...Parodies of Shakespeare began in the 17th century when a rival playwright, Robert Greene, called the Bard "Shake-scene...
...More bad news is en route for the paterfamilias...
...A couple of years ago, our narrator begins, he was a librarian living a quiet, lonely life...
...Flaws and all...
...Together, she informs him, they will open their own shoe store and make their own independent fortune...
...My third example is Underneath the Lintel at the Soho Playhouse...
...The latest entry in the Let's-Kid-the Iambics-Off-the-Swan-of-Avon sweepstakes is performed by Peter Ackerman, Jeremy Shamos and David Turner...
...With his emporium running like Big Ben, and the young women apparently intimidated by his tantrums, the old man is free to spend leisure hours—which is to say almost all day, every day—at the local pub...
...In this new season, three examples show the extraordinary range available to theatergoers, and at very reasonable prices...
...the beauty of the world...
...And these are just the men who come to court his second and third daughters...
...Equally astonishing, Off-Broadway, with its out-of-the-way locales and small venues, proved to be more vital and variegated than before...
...Guildenstern: Though it can be done by luck alone...
...No, this little travel guide was taken out 123 years ago...
...Why now...
...How much is that, Mr...
...Frees: Oh, Mr...
...Frees: But I have to pay the actors and the author...
...One day was very much like the next: books in, books out, palaver with an ambitious colleague, dinner at the café, then home to a tiny apartment...
...The catch was that the parodists had to speak and move with the velocity of sound—and that one of them had to be totally unenlightened about the subject, a device used to bring the audience up to speed...
...This is a master performance to be compared favorably with Charles Laughton's in the 1953 film adaptation...
...Fair A Ibany to Somerset must eke his route...
...Miller: Oh, God, fair cousin, thou hast done me wrong...
...Frees: What's it called...
...As the determined Maggie, Plimpton is tight-lipped and assertive without losing her femininity, and Wilson and Carr trail prettily in her slipstream...
...Maggie has a whim of iron and quickly dismisses her rival...
...This was not your average overdue book, good for a fine of five or six days...
...Fennyman: But this time, it is by Shakespeare...
...Come, sir, artfoppish G the mouth...
...To cap off the evening the crew reprises the entire play, this time boiling it down to 45 seconds, and then for lagniappe does Hamlet backward...
...The other, acting as the therapist, recites in unison, "Cut the crap, Hamlet, my biological clock is ticking, and I want babies now...
...Let's say we open in two weeks...
...I didn't like it...
...the paragon of animals...
...Fennyman: It's a crowd tickler...
...inform, in moving, how express and admirable...
...She'11 soon see about that...
...Financial losses amounted to over $20 million, an astronomical sum in those days—so astronomical, in fact, that all except three of the city's 26 fire insurance companies declared bankruptcy...
...Rosencrantz: Heads...
...One is Hobson's Choice, a social comedy that had its debut back in 1915 on London's West End and enjoyed a robust run that War year...
...It is as if the great playwright and poet were speaking beyond the grave...
...Banging on the door leading to the workshop below, she summons a skilled young leatherworker, Willie Mossop (David Aaron Baker...
...During the operation, the trio suddenly freezes the action to examine Ophelia's psyche...
...The real meaning of Complete Works comes during a Hamlet episode, when Turner reads one passage "straight," sans wink or nudge: What a piece of work is aman...
...At first he plans to marry off the younger ones, Alice and Vickey (Amy Wilson and Katie Carr) to candidates that he intends to choose in his own good time...
...Fennyman...
...But the ambitious owner of the American Hotel next door wanted to expand his holdings, and made an offer Hone couldn't refuse...
...In director Jeremy Dobrish's shaky hands the evening is roughly divided in halves—50 per cent genuinely funny, 50 per cent strictly junior varsity...
...As a couple of innocents are plucked from their seats and asked to run and scream on cue, Long divides the rest of the audience into two parts...
...In time, Stoppard did more of the same in his scenario for Shakespeare In Love, loading the movie with sly references to producers and backers...
...Penny extra for cushions...
...the monument endures...
...What I ate most is a lawyer...
...No Broadway spectacle, no film, and certainly no television program could hope to spend so much time speaking obliquely of history and identity...
...Manhattan real estate, valued at $ 143 million in 1835, was worth $233 million one year later...
...in apprehension how like a god...
...Enter Alan Bennett...
...Aha, a hit...
...Former New York Mayor Philip Hone was house proud...
...Then a life-shaking event occurred...
...A shabby, unshaven Dutch intellectual (T...
...Baker is hilariously inept, then slyly confident when Plimpton makes a man of him...
...The title alludes to a traditional English phrase, deriving from the policy of a Cambridge livery stable owner...
...Pandemonium reigns supreme for most of the show, particularly in the second half, devoted to an evisceration of Hamlet...
...His job is taken over by a coworker...
...Fennyman: Share in the profits...
...One group is required to shout a line from the play: "Get thee to a nunnery...
...The blow only serves to strengthen the resolve of the once-hesitant Willie: He abruptly declares his love for Maggie, his eagerness to go through with the ceremony, and his determination to open a competing place...
...And yet, four days after the flames were extinguished the Stock Exchange resumed trading...
...He has a strange story to tell us, and he is determined to do so even if he has to pay for the privilege...
...When he finally made up his mind to say something she was gone...
...Find the actors, rehearsals...
...There is a clue in one pocket...
...But the girls have privately decided to take charge of their destinies...
...On most evenings David Turner impersonates the ignoramus (for some performances other actors substitute) reading from a thesis that confuses the Bard and Hitler: "In 1939 Shakespeare invaded Poland...
...And anyway, he didn't want to speak up at the time...
...Then, with surprising speed, Broadway came roaring back to life, complete with investors, bigname performers and overflow audiences...
...given the Librarian's garrulity, too much is left unsaid...
...David Warren has directed with the crispness of a British drill sergeant, abetted by Derek McLane's inventive sets and Laura Bauer's period costumes...
...Frees: I think I've seen it...
...Amid the sudden rush to construct, property values skyrocketed...
...The livid Henry Hobson plots an elaborate revenge...
...Frees...
...This unwashed, untutored, underpaid, and uncouth youth now gets the shock of his life: He is to be her ticket to freedom, for Maggie has chosen Willie to be her husband...
...Quickly enlightened by his fellow buskers, the know-nothing falls in with the plot...
...The travesty ends, like so much of Shakespeare, with a deadly duel...
...First to rebel is Maggie...
...Barrister Albert Prosser (Darren Pettie) and his client Freddy Beenstock (Austin Lysy) proclaim their plans to carry off Alice and Vickey in the very near future...
...Call it, uh, 200 cushions...
...How did it suddenly appear in his institution...
...Jonathan Miller: Come, sir...
...The elegant home he had purchased in 1821 for $25,000 stood across the street from City Hall, and he had intended to stay there for the rest of his life...
...Fennyman: Play takes time...
...Do thee to Wessex, Exeter...
...Underneath the Lintel shows why Off-Broadway theater remains New York's great proving ground for ideas and talents...
...Go ahead, he seems to say, make all the fun you want, be as vulgar or impudent as you like...
...Or weeks...
...Has the Librarian become the object itself, a kind of secular convert doomed to traverse the globe...
...Or is it a symbol of the myths, maledictions, false rumors, and prophecies that have followed the Chosen People for centuries...
...Meantime, business is booming for the newlyweds...
...In addition, 400 backsides at threepence...
...But this is a Victorian comedy/ drama, so he has no more chance for victory than did his predecessor, Ebenezer Scrooge, a man who also earned a just comeuppance...
...A century and a half later a comparable drama is being played on a similar stage...
...Yet weep we not: this fustian life is short...
...Naturally, he hits the ceiling— and then the young man...
...Bennett: Now hath mortality her tithe collected And sovereign Albany to the worms his corps committed...
...Unmarriageable, say's her father...
...In our time Beyond the Fringe did one of the most inventive send-ups, treating Shakespeare as a branch of nonsense literature: Get thee to Gloucester, Essex...
...Frees: There's never any...
...Is the book a metaphor for the Wandering Jew...
...How noble in reason...
...The Complete WorL· spares nothing in the oeuvre as the actors cross-dress in Elizabethan apparel and sneakers, operate puppets, and engage in swordplay, wordplay and interplay, sometimes with the audience...
...The Atlantic Theater Company on West 20th Street has provided a lesson in revitalization...
...He traces the little scrap of paper to a Chinese laundry, where a pair of trousers has remained unclaimed for decades...
...His only regret was never marrying...
...It starts in his native Holland, where he finds an unclaimed laundry ticket rucked in the pages of the Baedeker...
...Let the playgoer—and the city— take note...
...I most royally shall now to bed, To sleep off all the nonsense Vvejustsaid...
...While the earth was still warm, workmen began to dig foundations for new buildings...
...Then there was Tom Stoppard's play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, with its doomed, coin-tossing title characters who have no idea that they are in Hamlet, or what the play is about: Guildenstern: There is an art to the building up of suspense...
...Mistaken identities, shipwreck, pirate king, a bit with a dog, and love triumphant...
...They have never stopped...
...a strange volume turned up...
...Frees: Twenty pounds to the penny, Mr...
...After all she's 30, and thus, in Hobson's view, well past the bridal age...
...And next most is an employer of a lawyer...
...Fennyman: Romeo and Ethel the Pirate's Daughter...
...The Librarian (no other identity is given) was checking books in the overnight slot and behold...
...The Greek Revival got under way, with marble hauled from Pompeii to downtown Manhattan...
...Thus the opening of Glen Berger's unique intermissionless play...
...This leads to another clue, and another, and another...
...With the use of a blackboard, a carousel of slide photographs and a trunk of mementos, he relates his tale...
...in action how like an angel...
...Pettie and Lysy sparkle as the swains, even if their English provincial accents slip once in a while...
...The city's resilience proved to be as tangible as stone and as vital as the populace...
...That's what, 500 groundlings at tuppence a head...
...This proves to be a fateful error...
...They fight again...
...Of all things I 'ate," he likes to boom...
...Say, two performances for safety...
...The supporting roles, particularly those of Peter Maloney as a censorious doctor and Christopher Wynkoop as Hobson's only friend, are miniature delights...
...Ah well...
...When these words are spoken the silence is so complete you can hear a pun drop...
...At the end even his pension is gone, and he has unearthed only one fact: The person who took out the book was Jewish...
...And Scroop, do you to Westmoreland, where shall bold York Enrouted now for Lancaster, with forces of our Uncle Rutland Enjoin our standard with sweet Norfolk's host...
...I have turned myself out of doors," he was to write, "but $60,000 is a lot of money...
...In the process his meager bank account dwindles to nothing...
...And so it was—at first...
...Ryder Smith) has hired a lecture hall for one night...
...Fennyman: Of course not...
...A year later Henry's store is headed downhill...
...Graffiti is soon washed away...
...Or even months...
...That leads the Librarian to ponder the meaning of the Wandering Jew, an anti-Semitic legend concerning a Jewish merchant who stayed underneath the lintel—the doorway—of his house while Jesus struggled with his cross...
...From then on all three are swept up in a cascade of comedy—even the tragedies are funny in their hands—and matters progress from bad to verse...
...Throughout the fall, Manhattan reeled from the aftershocks of 9/11...
...Peter Cook: No, sir, a miss...
...As the unwilling courtier...
...From a mild curiosity about the Baedeker, the Librarian gradually becomes obsessed...
...Frees: Good title...
...Monty Python followed with its own loony pastiches, most notably in the troupe's film, The Life of Brian, and in assorted TV sketches...
...His namesake, Henry Horatio Hobson (Brian Murray), a prosperous widower with three grown daughters, is a blustering autocrat at home and an oleaginous salesman in his shoe store...
...But his girlfriend was not quite the right type...
...Yet Smith impersonates the character so well, and Randy White has directed so expertly within Lauren Helpern's claustrophobic set, that the shortcomings are easily forgiven...
...MY second example is The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged...
...As the lodestar of an outstanding cast, Murray combines the timing of Jack Benny with the rumbustious affect of W.C...
...Let's on to Pontefract to sanctify our court...
...Once the wedding day is settled, Hobson gets the news of his eldest daughter's defection...
...Dying) Now is steel twixt gut and bladder interposed...
...how infinite in faculty...
...It was the antic notion of playwright/assassins Adam Long, Daniel Singer and Jess Winfield that Shakespeare's 11 tragedies, 16 comedies, seven histories, and assorted sonnets could be squeezed down to an hour and a half (plus a 10 minute intermission...
...Cook hits Miller...
...The stock market shuddered, tourism precipitously dropped, and the theater (always an indicator of the city's economic health) seemed on the verge of collapse...
...No use for the dimwitted Ada Figgins (Aedin Moloney) to protest that she and Willie have an understanding...
...In pursuit of his elusive goal, the man who has never left his little town feels compelled to traverse the dry surfaces of the globe, meandering off to various parts of Europe, Asia and the United States...
...Fennyman: Correct...
...Fields—droning cadence, poached-egg eyes andall...
...It is set in Victorian Manchester, where class distinctions were as rigid as walking sticks...
...Fair Sussex, get thee to Warwicksbourne, And there, with frowning purpose, tell our plan To Bedford's stilted ear, that he shallpress With most insensate speed And join his warlike effort to bold Dorset's side...
Vol. 85 • January 2002 • No. 1
