Parodies and Parables
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage Parodies and Parables By Stefan Kanfer Postmodern painting and sculpture are threatening the theater's satirists. What stage parody could top the vulgarity and insensitivity of...
...As beneficent and handsome as Hugh is malign and narrow-eyed, Miles wants to reclaim his home and resume his romance with Lady Edith...
...Papa very seldom writes a passage without some humor in it, somewhere, and I don't think he ever will...
...Will: Rauschenberg is a giant...
...Third Guard: That's right...
...In his earliest work, Steve Williams experimented with such typically surrealist devices as totemic imagery, often incorporating assemblages of unrelated objects...
...Like everyone else, including the family cat, they will wind up in purgatory, a place, Frisch shows us, that seems very much like Europe some 70 years ago...
...As the leader of the servants, Robert Anthony Jones is a bit over the top, but his physical comedy is so genial that he can be forgiven his excesses...
...Prince Edward (Dennis Michael Hall), miserable in his cloistered life, yearns to be out among his people...
...Mirroring Evil is a dangerous exhibition," enthused one of them...
...Third Guard: Crazy bastards...
...First Guard: Did you hear what the guy kept screaming as he shot the painting...
...Gottlieb Biedermann (Laurence Luckinbill) is a self-satisfied haute bourgeois living in a threatened city...
...Frisch attempts to outline this process from start to finish, and to a great degree he succeeds...
...They function as a Greek chorus, commenting on the tragedy they are unable to prevent...
...Danger is often unforeseen...
...Hugh's brother Miles (Rob Evan), thought to be a casualty of the Crusades, has come back unannounced to England...
...complete with objets, is a grand joke in itself...
...At first resistant, Biedermann is melted by the visitor's flattery and offers an upstairs room...
...Fashion, like fascism, is about a loss of identity...
...Indeed, The Prince and the Pauper proved that Twain could write historical fiction filled with emotion—and that the comic spirit would never be far away from the poignant scenes...
...An exchange of costumes is effected...
...Trapp: The traditional aim of reductionism has been to push painting to its farthest limits by reducing it to its barest essentials...
...Three undergraduates...
...Susy was a discerning literary critic...
...Nevertheless, the dozen-member company is not only genial but versatile...
...And Yves Klein did them in blue before you were born...
...Hugh has already conned Lady Edith (Rita Harvey) into marrying him, and he has bigger and more evil plans afoot...
...and a work entitled "GiftGas Giftset," featuring cans of Zyklon ? gas stamped with Chanel and Hermes labels...
...What stage parody could top the vulgarity and insensitivity of Mirroring Evil, for example, recently presented at New York's Jewish Museum...
...He plans to intimidate the Pauper into going along with his wicked schemes...
...It was too late for warnings...
...Agnes Vaag has offered sculptures incorporating animal skeletons...
...Bob: I love him too, but...
...Sachs' asininity was matched by the preening, self-congratulatory air of the catalog for the exhibit, written by professors and saturated with jargon—"transgressive," "bisociation," "dialectics of memory," etc...
...hell had come to earth...
...Blakey: You're right...
...Knechtling (Emily Mitchell...
...My favorite quote from that debacle wasprovidedby Tom Sachs, an artist who turned a hatbox from Prada, the trendy Italian designer, into a pop-up concentration camp...
...Second Guard: Well, they know they can get away with it over there, so that just encourages them to be violent...
...Carol: I've never heard of anyone shooting a painting...
...The Prince and the Pauper boasts a pair...
...They usually attack them with knives or axes...
...Tink: She was holding one of the little skeletons up to her mouth and was licking it, nibbling on it, running her tongue over it...
...Liz (Jordin Ruderman), Carol (Lael Logan) and Blakey (Elizabeth Bunch), yammer about an incident: Liz: Heard it on the radio this morning...
...Enter an itinerant peddler, Sepp Schmitz (Herbert Rubens), begging shelter for the night...
...That he lives next door to the gasworks makes the firebugs' intentions all the more ghastly—when the house goes up in flames, so will the entire city...
...Taking in a guest is his atonement...
...The intellectuals who remained were either neutral orjoined the National Socialist Party...
...Before you can say "switcheroo" Edward is out and about, and Tom is barking orders to his staff and making national policy...
...Arsonists have been at work, burning down the houses of the wealthy...
...Meanwhile the Pauper, Tom Canty (Gerard Canonico), is victimized by dire circumstance and tyrannized by his avaricious father, John (Michael McCormick...
...The sight of totalitarianism at work, coupled with service in the Swiss Army, furnished him with a new perspective...
...Cursed is the ground for thy sake.' It's what Adam said to Eve after she ate the apple...
...as are Theresa Squire's costumes...
...The rest of the cast, from Emerick and Mitchell's small female roles to the larger one of the firemen's chorus, are without flaw under the crisp, intelligent direction of Joe Grifasi...
...It is a death warrant...
...Alas, the score is not quite up to the skills of those who deliver it...
...The Firebugs is a presentation of the Colleagues Theater Company, whose stated purpose is to "identify and develop performance opportunities for the mature and seasoned actor and to provide training opportunities in theatrical craftsmanship for gifted high school graduates...
...Blakey: And then there was the guy that wrote slogans all over "Guernica" with a can of spray paint...
...Max Frisch was a Zurich Swiss who became an architect to please his parents, and a writer to satisfy himself...
...Only the real thing (as in Mirroring Evil) could be more absurd...
...Two dilettantes, Bob Lamb (Brennan Brown) and Will Willard (Tony Hale), glide in: Bob (looking at the dead white canvases): Ad Reinhardt was doing these in black 20 years ago...
...Almost all are moral parables, commentaries on contemporary life and politics...
...and he misspelled everything, remember...
...Carl Forsman has staged her dialogue con brio—there's at least one detonation of laughter per minute, produced by a lively and highly polished cast of 21...
...The trio moves on...
...Things have changed, said another: "Mothers can't guarantee safety, nor can museums...
...For Sepp and Willi are in fact the firebugs, and they gradually take over the house, tyrannizing the servant, Anna (Shannon Emerick), and enlisting the aid of an intellectual known only as the Professor (Michael Lipton...
...Soon Sepp is visited by his better dressed friend Willi Eisenring (Don Amendolia...
...A pair of museum security guards (Tony Hale, Nathan Guisinger) discuss the incident at the Uffizi with the guard of Broken Silence (Jimonn Cole): First Guard: Violent bastards...
...The book, by Garzia and Ray Roderick, supplies gags rather than wit...
...I'VE GOT TO WRITE THIS DOWN...
...Obviously The Firebugs is a symbolic tale of fascism at work...
...And then at some point, the structure of the museum would just end and everyone would suddenly be outside...
...That something is usually as fatuous as the objets d'art themselves...
...Carol: If I designed a museum there would be no art on display ...just windows...
...However, Roderick (doubling seems to be the order of the day at the Lamb's) directs with panache, aided by Dana Kenn's grand, imaginative set and Sam Fleming's twinkling costumes...
...In other words, giving those over 50 some big roles in serious works, and those in their 20s a chance to learn from the pros...
...The idea of indicating a magically demarcated environment for his sculptures (she indicates the length of the clothesline) appeared early in his work...
...All the while, Biedermann remains in deep denial, refusing to recognize the threat around him, even after the guests bring in barrels of fuel...
...His name means "fresh" in German, and that word still applies to some portions of his oeuvre...
...But the real truth is that museums can and do guarantee safety—to the artists...
...A hooded man pumped 18 bullets into the Venus figure at the Uffizi...
...He is also held back by his adviser, Hugh Hendon (Stephen Zinnato...
...the theater pieces, however, continue to be revived and discussed...
...But as it develops, he is motivated as much by guilt as by generosity...
...And then the guards will be hired to watch the people watching each other...
...I hate you!' Trapp: Her perceptual gifts are extraordinary...
...Steve Williams has built life-sized dolls and hung them on a clothesline...
...It's pure Rauschenberg, but without the emotion...
...Bob: Rauschenberg is the giant...
...This notorious exhibit included a concentration camp made of Legos...
...As the centerpiece of this production at the Neighborhood Playhouse, Luckinbill is outstanding: at first an amalgam of smugness and vanity, then gradually and subtly giving way to bewilderment and rage...
...Moreover, the evil one has not been fooled for an instant by the Prince's replacement...
...In the title roles Rubens and Amendolia have the kind of chemistry I haven't seen since the days of Peter Loire and Sydney Greenstreet...
...Will: Wait a minute, I love Rauschenberg...
...Neil Berg's music rarely produces a memorable tune, and his lyrics, written with Bernie Garzia, are little more than serviceable...
...The summer approaches, and save for the pricey Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King, there's precious little theater to take the children and grandchildren to...
...The boys are not only accomplished performers, they also sing terrific close harmony...
...crazy bastards...
...Carol: There's something so alienated about shooting a painting...
...The curator, Chloe Trapp (Kate Hampton), enters to explain the vision of Zachary Moe...
...yourself...
...The man was never a natural dramatist, but he was capable of making his people chillingly plausible and his plot sadly credible...
...a trick photograph of a well-fed young man holding up a Diet Coke while surrounded by the emaciated Jews of Buchenwald...
...You'll stand in line and pay admission...
...Like an architect...
...Papa was, of course, her father Samuel L. Clemens, a.k.a...
...Edward summons the beggar to his chambers and realizes the two could almost be twins...
...In slicing away residues of imagery that have lost their relevance, the artist seeks to transform the apple into a diamond...
...Nathan Heverin's set...
...Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor who performed medical experiments on those of "racial inferiority...
...Spiffed up in a bright new revival at the Off-Broadway Connelly Theater, the freeform comedy actually seems more relevant than before...
...Hugh hears of his brother's return and intends to have him terminated with extreme prejudice...
...With the exception of the juvenile leads, everyone plays at least two parts, several actors play three, and one, Aloysius Gigl, impersonates six different people of varying ages and social positions...
...Into the museum come foreign and domestic tourists, photographers, philistines, esthetes, adolescents, critics, and security guards, all with something to say...
...While all this transpires, the action is sporadically interrupted by a band of firemen (Peter James Kelsch, Andrew Donovan, Hollis Huston, Nate Lombardi and Robert Ierardi...
...By the time the alarm bells went off, the terror apparatus was in place...
...If there is a more admirable goal in Off-Broadway theater, I have yet to see it stated...
...An American would never shoot a painting...
...Born in 1911, he became a journalist in 1933, just as Hitler assumed power, and two years later went to see the Third Reich for himself...
...red spray paint...
...Therefore, let us be grateful for small blessings—particularly Masters Hall and Canonico...
...His wife Babette (Ruby Holbrook) is appalled: Suppose Sepp is one of the firebugs...
...I screamed...
...Nonsense, Biedermann assures her...
...Cosseted by headline-hungry curators, bankrolled by clueless foundations, fawned on by pretentious academics, they enjoy a liberty and license unparalleled in American history...
...But this being a Twain fiction, monkey wrenches are soon thrown into the gears...
...It was filmed three times, dramatized on innumerable occasions, and is now the basis of a vivacious new musical at the Lamb's Theater...
...By the 1950s Frisch had established himself as a novelist and went on to write fiction and plays that caught the world's attention...
...A friend of sculptress Agnes Vaag, Tink Solheim (also Lael Logan), drops in and recalls an evening she spent in the woods with Agnes, searching for rodent skulls...
...this...
...In Germany the Nazis used the complacency of the middle class, which convinced itself that nothing very bad was under way—after all, this was the country of Bach and Goethe...
...So Tina Howe's scathing Museum is neither as anti-intellectual nor as anti-art as it was painted upon its debut in 1978...
...Much of the prose now seems dated...
...One day the Prince spots a guard (Wayne Schroder) roughing up a young beggar at a palace gate...
...The plot is splendidly simple: Two boys, one regal, the other a commoner, are lookalikes...
...they'd actually become the view, the objects on display...
...The Firebugs is typical in its themes and mordant outlook...
...Willi, too, prevails on Biedermann for a little food and a roof over his head...
...Not so long ago the businessman cheated his best employee and continues to refuse aid to the man's widow, Mrs...
...I'm using the iconography of the Holocaust to bring attention to fashion," he explained to the untutored...
...It is rare to find any actor under the age of 12 who can deliver his lines with any sort of conviction...
...The book, immensely popular from the day it was first published in 1885, has never gone out of print...
...I hate you...
...flattering busts of Dr...
...She turns her attention to another artist...
...In an unspecified institution, the group show Broken Silence displays the works of three artists...
...Much back-and-forthing occurs—too much for a musical on a small stage —before rewards are given and comeuppances meted out...
...But she was never to be as wildly amusing as in this frontal attack on the arty for arty's sake...
...Howe went on to write more serious and better made plays that have solidified her reputation as an Off-Broadway star (Painting Churches, Coastal Disturbances, Pride's Crossing, etc...
...The next thing I knew, she was hitting me with her fist, socking me hard all over my body, screaming and crying, ? hate you...
...Of the dozen, Evan, Zinnato and Harvey display the most operatic voices, but every member of the cast is a belter of note, and all of them can tell a joke...
...Mark Twain...
...But upon his father's death he is restrained by the burdens of the throne...
...Zachary Moe has painted white-on-white acrylics...
...to see...
...She dropped the little thing and turned white...
...According to 13-yearold Susy Clemens, "The Prince and the Pauper is full of touching places, but there is almost always a streak of humor in them somewhere...
...They're all nuts on religion over there...
...He returned to Germany in the postwar period and met Bertolt Brecht, whose ideas of epic theater powerfully influenced him...
Vol. 85 • July 2002 • No. 4
