From Indignities to Inner Dignity
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage From Indignities to Inner Dignity By Stefan Kanfer The evening of October 18,1979, novelist and critic Mary McCarthy appeared on Dick Cavett's television show. The host asked...
...Vixen Fox (Mary Birdsong) and Heidi-the-Ho (Linda Halaska) are flashy porn bimbos, and Jimbo J (Eric Elice) is their bisexual leading man...
...But this handful of attractions is not enough to rescue Imaginary Friends from its appalling lack of judgment...
...Shoddy as it may be, the structure of Adult Entertainment is not its worst feature...
...They begin the drama with Mitch (Jon Tenney) worshipfully evoking the past, when he first journeyed from Michigan to Massachusetts...
...That said, Adult Entertainment at the Variety Arts Theater does allow the gifted Danny Aiello a few moments to demonstrate his talent to amuse...
...In the title role the veteran Epstein is more than a performer...
...When we first meet them, they are deep in the doldrums...
...According to one biographer, Hellman defended the Soviet Union far beyond Communist Party chief Nikita S. Khrushchev's revelations about Joseph Stalin's atrocities...
...Perhaps, the group concludes, some outside help is required...
...Every time he could opt for easy sympathy, he chooses another course, surprising audiences with a subtle gesture, an inner dignity, a groped-for and suddenly recovered phrase, a delicate sense of life's evanescence...
...Gogol and Mr...
...Davis, a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is a hardline Communist who remains beguiled by the USSR's political morality...
...Would that it had a script commensurate with that talent...
...freedom, McCarthy stood for truth and Hellman represented dishonesty...
...The rest of the act is every bit as cluttered and uninspired...
...The heroine of that true incident, however, was a refugee named Muriel Gardiner, whose valor Hellman had brazenly appropriated as her own...
...That's what's so moving...
...A fraud is a fraud," insists Fact...
...In May's conceit, this clueless band of performers is transformed by the experience of literature...
...The host asked his guest if she could think of any overrated American writers...
...All tookplace on Tuesdays, hence the title...
...Their cable TV show is not thriving, and single-entendre movies like Saving Ryan's Privates just aren't going over the way they used to...
...In fact, pom stars are acutely aware of their degrading business...
...On the central issue of the 20th century, totalitarianism vs...
...All this is not only disappointing, it is surprising—not because of May, whose lapses are nothing new, but because of her director...
...She demanded $2.5 million as compensation for damages to her reputation...
...Broadly directed by Jack O'Brien, the Imaginary Friends alternately chatter and chant, too often addressing the audience with arch winks and nudges, as if they were doing a two-act on the old Albee circuit...
...Robert Morgan's costume designs, which move fluidly from one era to the next...
...Finally, they convince him that art and commerce are not mutually exclusive—but only after an overplayed scene in Jimbo's apartment, where the stud teeters on a window sill, high on acid...
...We also leam that Gerry's girlfriend has dumped him...
...This is, after all, her 70th year...
...Gerry's script is not up to their newly acquired standards: its motivations are questionable, its allusions insufficient, its personae undeveloped...
...Lillian has only one great passion: the hardboiled detective story writer Hämmert, whose radical politics become her credo...
...As if to make up for the lack of dimension in her cardboard characters...
...Hellman had friends in high places...
...Mary, who has many admirers and has had several husbands (including the influential critic Edmund Wilson), is too independent to take up anyone's politics but her own...
...The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others...
...Guy (Danny Aiello) is the vulgarian heir to his late brother's blue-movie business...
...None has amounted to anything as bright as the work she performed in her debut...
...Replies Fiction: "What if it takes a fib to get the folks to applaud...
...The public ate them up...
...Well, there were several: Pearl S. Buck, John Steinbeck, Lillian Hellman...
...Another biography said the writer appropriated the royalties that her lover, Dashiell Hammett, had intended to bequeath to his daughter...
...Hellman was wealthy...
...No musicalizing, no comic turns, no glib impersonations can change history...
...This is the equivalent of the standard drunk scene in old movies...
...Adult Entertainment, May's latest production, is more of the same: a grab bag of diverting ideas that never gel, and that create a vaguely unpleasant effect before the final curtain...
...Back in 1971, Stephen Sondheim and James Goldman's Follies examined a group of chorines in dramatic flashbacks and production numbers...
...from the fervent response, one would have thought that Ralph Waldo Emerson had been reborn...
...Ephron represents them as mirror images of each other...
...Even the leading ladies act on a basic principle: never apologize, always explain...
...She obeys —and thenceforth values fiction over fact for the rest of her life...
...Would Ephron have written a play with music about two celebrated photographers, Leni Riefenstahl, the Hitler apologist, and Margaret Bourke-White, the Roosevelt Democrat...
...and Jerry Mitchell's nimble choreography, which considerably lightens the evening...
...Play after play (Mr...
...Hence lines like McCarthy's: "In 1963 I published a bestseller called The Group...
...As the cops can tell you, the remainder often end up as druggies, suicides or mental cases...
...These make Schwartz more credible than the book and play...
...storytelling, that's the big one...
...Actually, they were the kind of sentiments found on bumper stickers, greeting cards and daily calendars: "Life is a series of pulls back and forth...
...Lillian's nanny instructs the child to shut up about what she has witnessed, and to let her parents' marriage proceed undisturbed...
...The pornucopia of players attempts to entice Gerry back to the fold...
...Other assets include Michael Levine's rich crimson backgrounds, which underline the feminine anger—and the Bolshevik undertones of the Hellman story...
...Wracked by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the old man became more debilitated by the day...
...FOOM TIME TO TIME a slim VOlurne, usually freighted with bathos, emerges from nowhere to become a word-of-mouth bestseller...
...Ephron obviously regards McCarthy and Hellman as the moral equivalent of the left hand and right hand of the American spirit...
...With McCarthy's death in 1989, various theories were put forth about the roots of the conflict between the two women...
...It was made into a movie...
...Enter Gerry DiMarco (Brandon Demery), a Yale graduate with intellectual pretensions...
...In 1982, ignored by the generation of emerging Yuppies, he committed suicide...
...He remembers dancing with a delicate skill that vanishes while we watch...
...For the shortcomings, Albom has no one to blame but himself, and his collaborator, Jeffrey Hatcher...
...The story was later made into the film Julia...
...Morrie, for instance, is fond of quoting Auden's line from "September 1, 1939": "We must love one another or die...
...It was tiresome then, and it is tedious now...
...Imaginary Friends contributes to that collective amnesia...
...Mary is beautiful...
...The Playbill quotes the playwright: "There were a million things these two women disagreed about, but truth vs...
...Then one night, he saw Schwartz speaking to Ted Koppel on Nightline...
...Alas, that promise has never been fulfilled...
...Preen, Taller Than a Dwarf) has shown glints of originality, film after film (Heaven Can Wait, The Birdcage) has been fitfully amusing...
...Then why attend Tuesdays With Morrie...
...May has chosen to present pornographers as childlike innocents, folks involved in a trade that harms no one and leaves its practitioners unblemished...
...Act Two is a disappointing downhill slalom...
...It is unlikely that the decision would have gone in Hellman's favor anyway...
...In much less than a masterwork...
...Albom recorded those utterances until a week before Schwartz's death in 1994...
...Jeannie Berlin, Elaine May's daughter, shows that she was not chosen for nepotistic reasons...
...In fact, Stalin was as demonic as the leader with whom he once signed a nonaggression pact...
...They are anything but...
...Under David Esbjornson's firm direction, the younger actor gives his character a freshness and depth that go far beyond the text...
...The next time Albom was in the Boston area he looked up Schwartz...
...Still another cited an outrageous theft in Pentimento, where Hellman recalled sneaking money into Nazi Germany for a Socialist friend...
...there is a master at work...
...Fortwo reasons: Tenney and Epstein...
...What we are unlikely to witness is any improvement in the author's oeuvre...
...His adolescent humor never matured, and all too soon he fell into irrelevance...
...Rutgers historian William L. O'Neill, for example, noted that "to old anti-Stalinists such as McCarthy everything in Scoundrel Time was false...
...To that end Gerry asks each member of the group to start reading modern and ancient classics...
...Art historian Meyer Schapiro observed that Partisan Review, the magazine that introduced McCarthy to the New York literary community, "stood for perhaps a more accomplished style of writing and a more knowing audience than Hellman achieved...
...The fiction shelf includes such phenomena as Love Story, Jonathan Livingstone Seagull and The Bridges of Madison County...
...Yet as his body diminishes, his words grow louder, and they are repeated and amplified by Mitch as if they were holy writ...
...Mary is its deadly enemy...
...All this and more is related on the stage of the Ethel Barrymore Theater—and that's one of the many troubles with/maginary Friends...
...Fearful that the literary past is receding from national memory, Ephron feels it necessary to explain who everybody is, from Hammett to Wilson to Rahv to the British poet Stephen Spender, each played with admirable verve by Harry Groener...
...If these are the kind of people who impress Mitch, it is no wonder that his book and play are not deep enough for veneer...
...Frosty Moons (Jeannie Berlin) is a former sitcom actress, now reduced to X-rated roles...
...Within minutes the young Ivy Leaguer comes up with the solution to their financial woes...
...No doubt someday we will also be treated to more appealing sets than the glitzy ones designed by Neil Patel, livelier rear-screen projections than the blaring videos provided by Carl Casella, subtler costumes than those designed by Suzy Benzinger, and wittier music than the passages composed by Bryan Louiselle...
...By now Mayhem is all we can reasonably expect...
...A few speculated that there might be something sexual about the combat, since Hellman claimed she had a romance with Philip Rahv, the editor of Partisan Review and one of McCarthy's early lovers...
...But the chorus can, and on occasion Marvin Hamlisch's music and Craig Cornelia's lyrics let them provide some witty commentary, as when two characters, Fact and Fiction, perform a duet...
...Tuesdays With Morrie has now been given new life on the stage of the Minella Lane Theater...
...This is an audacious notion, but hardly an original one...
...Hellman (Swoosie Kurtz) is a Southern girl who spies her father in an adulterous relationship...
...They're both right, and they're both wrong...
...Politics seemed to be its main cause...
...Morrie (Alvin Epstein) rums out to be a rail-thin, agreeable soul, light on his feet and heavy on the pontification...
...Though Jones bears a strong resemblance to McCarthy, and Kurtz conveys Hellman's monstre sacrée with panache, their major arguments are reduced to bitchy exchanges—and besides, neither can sing a lick...
...A long-simmering feud thus broke out into the open...
...They believed Hellman had compounded her original sins as a fellow traveler by writing a book that misrepresented the era, ignored her own guilty past, and defamed the intellectuals who had been right about all the matters on which she herself had been so wrong...
...Five characters initiate this sendup of pornography and its practitioners...
...And, McCarthy was pleased to see, after Hellman left the scene a slew of unflattering articles and books about her life and career were published...
...Hoffman enjoyed 15 minutes of fame as the impudent spirit of the socalled Yippies in the 1960s...
...If you're always battling against getting older, you're always going to be unhappy, because it's going to happen anyhow...
...Albom, a Detroit-based sportswriter, had lost track of his old teacher for more than 20 years...
...It was a novel about a group of women who'd gone to Vassar together...
...When she learns the truth, the resentful girl comes to value veracity of every kind over mendacity of any kind...
...McCarthy was not...
...In his recent book, Koba the Dread, Martin Amis is at great pains to recount the evils of Stalin, whose mass murders have been obscured or excused over the decades...
...McCarthy (Cherry Jones) is a Minnesotan whose relatives refuse to disclose some horrific news during the influenza epidemicof 1918...
...The septuagenarian was not being interviewed for anything he had accomplished in academia, but because he was slowly dying of Lou Gehrig's Disease and was articulate about his condition...
...The nonfiction shelf holds books like Tuesdays With Morrie, Mitch Albom's memoir of the days he spent in the company of Morris Schwartz, a retired Brandeis professor...
...McCarthy never bothered to cultivate the powerful...
...A memorable phrase, but one the poet himself repudiated as inherently false...
...Once you learn how to die, you learn how to live...
...She also denounced the publisher of Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn as a "malefactor" and declared, "If you knew what I knew about American prisons, you would be a Stalinist, too...
...The second, and larger, difficulty is the presentation of the two lives as vaudeville...
...It is the first and last time she refers to it...
...The comedy briefly flourishes...
...He will be the auteur of their new film, a "sort of Merchant-Ivory" pom feature worthy of the Cannes and Sundance film festivals...
...And Demery is a name that we will see again, in better things...
...Citing Shakespeare, Flaubert, Thornton Wilder, and Arthur Miller, each assumes the air of a professional critic...
...Lillian is a defender of the Soviet Union...
...She is never mentioned again...
...On the face of it, the fight was unbalanced...
...both owe their early prominence to the men they slept with...
...Three years later he put them into Tuesdays With Morrie, highlighting the professor's aperçus and admonitions...
...May abruptly furnishes them with "back stories," related in monologues...
...But his mind continued to glow with the light of wisdom—or so it seemed to his listener...
...These, he maintains, will provide them with the proper background for their project...
...Flaine May has been labeled "promising" as a writer ever since she and Mike Nichols did their glittering improvisations on Broadway some 45 years ago...
...Jane Fonda played Hellman and was so awed she couldbarely articulate her lines...
...In this play with music, the two women, who barely met in real life, encounter each other in limbo...
...Hellman had written a string of commercially successful plays and films, as well as three best-selling memoirs, An Unfinished Woman, Pentimento and Scoundrel Time...
...In general, a public figure—especially one who posed for a Blackgamma mink coat ad—is considered fair game for any criticism, no matter how outrageous...
...We learn, for instance, that Heidi-the-Ho has a child...
...The ones with talent, or luck, graduate to better lives...
...she can tell the few jokes that come her way with impeccable timing...
...Yet in the end McCarthy won a victory of sorts: The plaintiff died in 1984, before the lawsuit came to court...
...Then, furious at the monster he has created, Gerry walks out, leaving the quintet holding the gag...
...That began a series of 14 visits...
...Even though the production offers the same Hallmarkphilosophy, it has the benefits of a first-rate director and a flawless two-man cast...
...He concluded that "we must love one another and die" came closer to the truth...
...The object of his devotion materializes...
...he is an artist...
...Stanley Donen has been responsible for some of Hollywood's most audacious and pleasing comedies (Singin 'In The Rain, Two for the Road wvi.Bedazzled...
...But some thought snobbery had more to do with the argument...
...While Mary was delirious with flu her mother and father perished of the disease...
...Morrie's pupils at Brandeis included Abbie Hoffman and Angela Davis, a fact that Mitch finds glamorous and exciting...
...McCarthy coiled and then struck at the last named: "Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.'" Hellman, who was watching, furiously sued for libel...
...His films have always been marked by tongue-and-groove construction and impeccable taste, assets that are missing in Adult Entertainment...
...What should have been a oneacter becomes a lengthy exercise in unbelievable plot turns and repetitive farce...
...Hardly...
...Nora Ephron, better known for her slick Hollywood romances (When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle), uses all these motives in Imaginary Friends, her seriocomic overview of the HellmanMcCarthy contretemps...
...McCarthy was a respected literary figure, but with the exception of one novel, The Group, her work earned meager royalties...
...But there are also myriad differences: Lillian is, to be charitable, unprepossessing...
...There are similarities between the two: Both experience their first successes at the age of 29...
Vol. 86 • January 2003 • No. 1
