On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage Enigmas and Egos By Stefan Kanfer THE OUTLINE of Edward Albee's life is a matter of record: The infant is taken in by affluent parents in 1928 and named for his adoptive...
...After all, the female of the species is called Stevie...
...It is the playwright...
...Moreover, his ending—out of Medea by way of the barnyard—is so bloody ludicrous that it might have been written by a parodist, rather than the real Edward Albee...
...Instead, he fills his text with smirky, selfreferential in-jokes (lines about "Big Alice," for example), foggy allusions and portentous comments, as if he had no clear idea about the meaning of his own play, other than to make audiences scratch their heads...
...No, what Martin is experiencing is something far less mundane...
...Wheeling over phones, dealing with his secretary (Lauren Klein), the producer tells the story of his life— and a great story it is...
...Top billing Monday, Tuesday you're touring in stock...
...Usually written by one person and acted by another...
...What emerges clearly as the evening goes on is that Samuel Goldwyn, despite the malapropisms, is actually a man of taste and style...
...these are the things people did to me...
...What if the boy is actually on her wavelength...
...What makes her story all the more remarkable is that she was drunk most of the time...
...It is the rest of The Goat that proves wasteful of a talent gone astray yet again...
...For this she is mocked by her contemporaries, save for one simpatico schoolmate, Angel Martinez, who likes to take photographs of his gringo friend...
...Martin makes the mistake of confiding this infatuation to his oldest friend, Ross (Stephen Rowe...
...Sam Goldfish, late of Warsaw, sold leather gloves in New York until the epochal day he invested in a two-reeler called Squaw Man, directed by a youngster named Cecil B. De Mille...
...Martin is undergoing a midlife crisis...
...In 1960 he impresses Off-Broadway critics with such one-acters as The Zoo Stotymd The Death of Bessie Smith...
...I take this to mean Lahr, a theater critic based in London, wove the performer's stories into a coherent whole, and that she then edited his edit...
...ALTHOUGH technically Goldwyn is a twoperson show of the ? variety, the title character has 99 per cent of the action...
...Thus playgoers and critics get no help when they debate the real identity of the two couples in Virginia Woolf Albee's most commercially and critically successful work...
...Feature films are being elbowed aside by the new kid in town, television, and across the nation movie palaces are shutting down by the hundreds...
...Speaking in a pseudopoetic, ostentatiously sensitive style, Samuel dilates on a number of events designed to give meaning to the evening...
...Kaye wants to sing the duet with himself...
...This muddy, undigested treatise has nothing to say and says it in two interminable acts...
...Are they a representation of the playwright's parents...
...He also comments memorably on the egotism and idiosyncrasies of his stars...
...As she speaks eloquently of her late and happy marriage and too-early widowhood, Stritch shows not a trace of selfpity...
...Even so, it must be conceded that those involved with his latest work could not be bettered...
...This is not good enough...
...A difficult child, Edward is booted out of various prep schools...
...Then he experiences pangs of remorse...
...After all, the mogul's past productions include Wuthering Heights, Dead End, and the distinguished postwar film, The Best Years of Our Lives...
...After dismissal from Trinity College for truancy, he moves to Greenwich Village and pursues a writing career...
...of earlier ones in Michigan where she was a student at the Convent of the Sacred Heart...
...At 74, Albee still has time to get back on track, but the hour grows late and his tale of animal magnetism is not going to be of much help...
...Then Farley Granger, the second lead, wants to back out of the picture...
...Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer's lighting is nearly as luminous as the star...
...And now comes The Goat at the Golden Theater, his first Broadway production in more than a decade...
...As director Billy Wilder has commented, "You don't get to be Sam Goldwyn just by saying, 'Include me out.'" It is testimony to this power that Dwight D. Eisenhower, who is readying his campaign for the Presidency, is in town for the weekend and he and Mamie are staying with the Goldwyns—where else...
...This is a man who, through a combination of indomitable will and native intelligence, has become the admired host of presidents and kings...
...As always, Albee remains cryptic...
...she confesses that she remained a virgin until the age of 30...
...At 63 the playwright is poised for reclamation...
...His leading lady, Moira Shearer, has just announced that she's pregnant...
...The hymn of survival from Follies, "I'm Still Here," is particularly apt: Black sable one day, next day it goes into hock, But I'm here...
...Joseph G. Aulisi's costumes are exactly right, too, for a man who thinks Yiddish but dresses British...
...First you're another sloe-eyed vamp, Then someone's mother, then you're camp, Then you career from career to career, I'm almost through my memoirs and I'm here...
...That said, director Gene Saks has done a terrific job of recreating a mood and a man, David Gallo's set has precisely the right mix of ostentation and sentimentality (including a Picasso oil that Goldwyn hates, but keeps in a prominent place because his beloved wife gave it to him for a birthday present...
...Hailed as America's leading playwright, reviled as an overpraised Wunderkind, he responds only through his work, shrinking from autobiographical and textual investigations...
...I've gotten through "Hey, lady, aren't you whoozis...
...Goldwyn recognizes that it is endgame for the machers who built the business, that mortality is in the air...
...He helps to arrange a show of Angel's photography...
...If Louis B. Mayer had pockets made of oilcloth he would steal soup...
...As he spritzes, Sam iterates the famous Goldwynisms that have endeared him to columnists: "If people don't want tocome to the theater, you can't stop them...
...Checking his blood pressure, ordering his executives and exhibitors about, the last of the Jewish Pharaohs pushes on with an odd dignity and an unquenchable appetite for life...
...It seems that the architect went househunting for a summerplace some months back...
...He has every reason to worry...
...of her posture as one of Broadway's most promiscuous babes (and it was a posture...
...The object of a mind deranged...
...Bacon, who has made a specialty of playing iconoclasts and wiseguys on film, is wholly miscast as the humorless former Reverend...
...Stritch's candid memoir of those years on the boards...
...There is no schadenfreude here...
...Wow...
...For Hans Christian Andersen Danny Kaye has been given a dozen solos and one duet with his female costar...
...Director Michael Mayer does what he can, but his skills cannot shield the fact that An Almost Holy Picture is almost wholly disastrous...
...He not only distorts his observations, but subverts his own powers, for it is not the riddles of philosophy that bring his talent to life, but the ways of cruelty and humiliation...
...Goldwyn could have usedmore suchmoments...
...Are the straight couples actually a pair of homosexuals bitchily, if hilariously, tearing each other apart...
...No one should write his autobiography until he's already dead...
...He is a man who wishes "to remain an enigma at all times," observes director Peter Hall...
...At the age of 76, she still has the distinctive raspy voice of a 30-year-old, and the legs to match...
...A symbolic plea for tolerance, not to say indulgence of any practice, no matter how bizarre...
...I got through all of last year and I'm here...
...He rips it off the wall...
...Gentle now serves as church groundskeeper somewhere out West, living with his melancholy wife Miriam and their afflicted little daughter, Ariel...
...Tiny Alice (1964) raises further questions...
...The sole triumph is Seascape, for which he receives the Pulitzer in 1975...
...Is the work a meditation on identity, or is it, as Philip Roth contends, an elaborate exercise in pseudoprofundity...
...It might have been given more color and dimension, but playwrights Marsha Lebby and John Lollos too often go for the easy laughs...
...In the majority of cases A is an ego trip of more interest to the creator than to the audience, while B is a complex and artful expression, pared down to the bare minimum...
...A knocked-up dancer is just what I need," fumes the producer as he begins to ransack the casting guides for a replacement...
...and of her failures in Hollywood, are told with extraordinary charm and flawless timing...
...Just when Goldwyn manages to restore calm to his studio, word comes that Louis B. Mayer has been booted from MGM, a studio that got rid of Sam decades ago...
...Is the couple another pair of gay men in disguise...
...The string of bombs includes^// Over, The Lady from Dubuque, The Man Who Had Three Arms, and adaptations of The Ballad of the Sad Café, Everything in the Garden and Lolita...
...But I'm here...
...What a looker you were.' Or better yet, "Sorry, I thought you were whoozis, What ever happened to her...
...These are the kinds of jobs I had...
...Nine children have been killed in a school bus accident —how could one trust God after such a horrific event...
...A: The Autobiographical...
...As he stepped from the car to admire a rural landscape, he looked about him...
...Other than acknowledging that he is gay, Albee neither apologizes nor explains...
...A six-man band, led by Rob Bowman at the piano, gives the foreground music a distinctive lilt and bite...
...Indeed, she finds the affair so sickening that as she confronts Martin with the sordid facts she practically destroys their house, smashing plates and desecrating art works to punctuate her tirade...
...Indeed, the name Goldwyn became synonymous with well-crafted scripts, first-rate direction and glittering stars...
...It is not the people in them or around them who are at fault in this peculiar, not to say queer, production...
...The program states that the show was "Constructed by John Lahr" and "Reconstructed by Elaine Stritch...
...The actress/singer has a stage history as long as Albee's, and filled with many more hits...
...I've run the gamut from A to Z, Three cheers and dammit, C'est la vie...
...these are the things I did to myself...
...A nanny goat with a nametag reading "Sylvia" was munching on some grass nearby...
...It was called Hollywood...
...By way of contrast there is An Almost Holy Picture, also in the ? category, at the American Airlines Theater...
...A take-charge TV newsman accustomed to dealing with crises, Ross informs Stevie that her husband is having an affair with a female who chews her cud...
...That is not enough to redeem Heather McDonald's windy and tedious monologue, which makes the grievous error of quoting The Glass Menagerie, thereby demonstrating the difference between a real play and a bogus one...
...In their supporting roles Rowe and Carlson are similarly adept...
...Paul Tazewell has outfitted her with a flattering rehearsal costume of shirt and black stockings— though it becomes a little too stark after the first act...
...She understudied Ethel Merman in Irving Berlin's Call Me Madam, went on to be featured in Rodgers and Hart's Pal Joey, then starred in dramas and comedies by the likes of Albee, William Inge, Tennessee Williams, and Neil Simon...
...But Goldwyn carries on, maintaining a quasi-religious faith in the power of celluloid...
...Built around the title character, the play concerns a married couple, the famous 50-year-old architect, Martin (Bill Pullman), and his attractive wife of many years, Stevie (Mercedes Ruehl...
...Errol Flynn, arrested for consorting with teenage girls, is "a man with a brain and a penis, but just enough blood to run one at a time...
...The emblem of a farce turned into tragedy by the actions of a jealous woman...
...Who is she...
...At this time I'm like the Prisoner of Zelda...
...Man and ruminant stared at each other...
...One back scratches the other...
...What if the significantly named Ariel and Angel are really seraphs come to earth...
...Yet this season one show proves the exception to the rule: Elaine Stritch At Libert)· at the Neil Simon Theater...
...Stritch did a fine job, abetted by George C. Wolfe, usually the most ostentatious director in town...
...Visiting the Cape Cod gallery, Samuel is shocked to find that in one of the pictures his daughter is nude...
...It is not the sudden burden of interviews and publicity—he has just won the Pritzer Prize, the highest award his profession has to offer...
...Is he implying that society has no right to make demands on anyone's sexual orientation...
...Under David Esbjornson's crisp direction, Pullman establishes a poignant character and Ruehl delivers her acidulous lines with enormous brio...
...Is the older pair, George and Martha, meant to imply a critique of America by using the names of the Founding Father and his wife...
...The boy has been out of the closet for some time, and both parents seem models of liberality...
...how dare this interloper mock the child's distress...
...A neighboring studio, the once-mighty RKO, has just been acquired by Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz—an indication of Hollywood's condition...
...The play is subtitled Who Is Sylvia...
...Mark Wendland's set is shockingly unimaginative, and Kevin Adams' lighting is every bit as lusterless as the play it is supposed to illuminate...
...Are the horrific heiress and her lover in an incubus-succubus situation...
...And B: The Narrative...
...and it's a fair question...
...At this moment of the intermissionless drama, Albee is at his best: Stevie's lines are, if scatological, explosively comic, and Martin's defense is, if implausible, oddly poignant...
...Stevie does not find bestiality the least bit amusing...
...A New Mexican woman tells him how to negotiate with the Almighty in her own strange way, but he prefers silence—except when talking to, or rather at, the audience...
...She appeared in films with Woody Allen, Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon, and capped her long career with major roles in two Stephen Sondheim musicals, Follies and Company...
...Every now and again she breaks out in song (18 all told...
...Granted, there are many of these scattered throughout the evening...
...The child has lanugo, a disease that causes fine blonde hair to grow all over the body like a coat of fur...
...Brushing aside the bad news, he holds to his belief that you're only as good as your last picture and schedules a multimillion-dollar musical, Hans Christian Andersen...
...Yet when Goldwyn mentions that he went to night school to learn English, and that he is wounded when people make fun of his speech, he seems appealingly vulnerable—still a greenhorn underneath the expensive trappings...
...Thereafter his career undergoes a 40year roller coaster ride with far more valleys than peaks...
...As Sam, comedian Alan King takes what could have become a caricature and offers a full-length portrait...
...Save for some gardening and the emptying of a basin of water, stained with the blood Ariel draws when she attempts to shave herself, there is no action, no story, no consequence, no interest from opening curtain to closing one...
...Nevertheless, Albee stubbornly and courageously persists in his work and in 1991 wins another Pulitzer with Three Tall Women, a long-running, graceful triptych of a dying lady...
...The film became a smash and he relocated to a place where the weather was reliable and the land cheap...
...Here he works with an almost invisible hand, taking advantage of his star's gritty inflection, mobile face and articulate body language to produce a work of art...
...Nor is it the fact that he has a gay teenaged son (Jeffrey Carlson...
...The actor's saving grace is his virtuosity: He ably impersonates various Hispanics, his wife, his daughter, and an old prelate...
...With rare exceptions, Albee's efforts repeatedly fail at the box office through the '70s and '80s...
...On Stage Enigmas and Egos By Stefan Kanfer THE OUTLINE of Edward Albee's life is a matter of record: The infant is taken in by affluent parents in 1928 and named for his adoptive grandfather, a partner in the Keith-Albee Theater Circuit...
...But all this glory, all this name-dropping will mean nothing if Sam's newest effort fails at the box office...
...THERE ARE two kinds of one-man (and one-woman) shows...
...The author, of course, gives no hints...
...The year is 1952 and Sam Goldwyn (Alan King) is watching his world crash around him...
...John Arnone's interior is elegance without distinction, but Elizabeth Hope Clancy's costumes are fitting in every sense...
...Not this time...
...The sleepy California village woke up when Goldfish (later Goldwyn) arrived, accompanied by other Polish immigrants and nvals, Adolf Zukor, Louis B. Mayer, Jack Warner, et al...
...This lugubrious oneman show presents the story of the Reverend Samuel Gentle (Kevin Bacon), a former Episcopal priest who has lost his faith after a series of tragic circumstances...
...It was love at first sight...
...two years later he receives a Pulitzer Prize nomination for his first full-length play, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf...
Vol. 85 • March 2002 • No. 2
