On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage Family Affairs By Stefan Kanfer In his view, the death of one person was a tragedy, but the extinction of a million was a statistic. He uttered other memorable thoughts, among...
...In every school Sylvia attended there, she impressed teachers with her quick mind and her excellence as a painter and writer...
...But rather than face his wife's tears, he assures her that she has been right all along, that revelations of the Doctors' Plot do not indicate a bias against the Jews but against the Soviet leader...
...The others merely mark time...
...That's an FBI man's job...
...Intelligent, creative, productive, yes...
...It is cruel yet accurate to say that her final act was an effective career move...
...Too late, he discovered that he had contracted late-onset diabetes, a disease that could have been controlled by doctors...
...Sierros has the bearing, if not the speeches, of a leading man...
...The first, an older man named Emil (Larry Bryggman), she encounters on the Brooklyn Heights esplanade...
...Hughes was movie-star handsome...
...The straight world yields little but hypocrisy, betrayal and death...
...I've marched with my mother more than I've gone to the movies with her," she tells him...
...A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen...
...Big things were predicted...
...Alexander, who has directed his play with intelligence and sensitivity, occasionally dips into paperback Freud, with too-obvious references to Oedipal and Electra complexes...
...I do it exceptionally well...
...Without losing her assumed identity, she impersonates Otto, the physicians, Ted Hughes, and the many subsidiary characters who often became the subjects of her poems...
...Stassos' only son, Billy (Peter Gaitens), tries to find love with a series of men...
...At which point, your liberal succumbs to his classical role as a reforming handmaiden and sells out to the ruling class...
...At her mother's insistence Sylvia underwent electric shock treatments, a still nascent therapy...
...How could Jews, of all people, have defended someone whose final intent was to murder their coreligionists...
...The monologue begins on the last day of Plath's life...
...Her mother, Naomi (Jan Maxwell), is a willful ideologue...
...And the G-man eventually gets Rose to make some unwitting and revealing comments about her family...
...Family problems of a different (but not wholly unrelated) sort are at the chaotic center of the New York Theater Workshop stage adaptation of Michael Cunningham's first novel, Flesh and Blood (1995...
...Her father, a biology professor of German descent, died when she was eight, in 1940...
...I do it so it feels real...
...Hecht, as the repressed daughter who wants only to please, and Plimpton, as the brat who wants only to provoke, make the most of difficult parts...
...Paul Tazewell's costumes are functional, as is Christine Jones' set design— except when director Doug Hughes uses a forest as the scene of a chaotic Greek chorus...
...In the novel all this is told with some fluency and grace...
...The Communist Party of the U.S., the readers of its official newspaper, the Daily Worker, and their fellow travelers all parroted the Party line: The Russian leader was a secular saint...
...Naomi refuses to recognize the truth about Stalin and thus becomes the embodiment, in lyricist Lorenz Hart's phrase, of "the self-deception that believes the lie...
...His three children find no comfort in their comfortable Long Island surroundings...
...The most convincing moments occur between Maxwell and Savage, and between Savage and Bryggman—not only because these are the best written, but because they are performed by first-rate actors...
...But she published short stories and a novel, and won a Fulbright fellowship to Cambridge University...
...How could otherwise intelligent people have allowed themselves to support an atrocious dictator who, in the end, may have caused more deaths than Hitler...
...Here it underlies almost every speech and incident...
...In contrast to her parents...
...That is a small error...
...Feiffer's own feelings are never made clear...
...before the age of 30, she contracts AIDS...
...Her bosses at the magazine agreed with the professors: This was a young woman with enormous promise...
...But also angry, confused and fatally egotistical...
...He saw "Daddy" as an exercise in self-pity and predicted, "After all the noise abates and judgment returns, Sylvia Plath will be regarded as an interesting minor poet whose personal story was poignant...
...Manifestly, the playwright most closely identifies with Rose, the innocent surrounded by bad friends of every sort...
...His intentions toward Rose are merely avuncular, but as it turns out, his life and career are not what they appear to be...
...But the devil is in the details...
...All this is told in chopped-up bits— some three dozen scenes—that never quite cohere into valid drama...
...But Naomi's cynical brother is of little use...
...British poet Stephen Spender noted that even the best of Plath's works "have little principle of beginning and ending, but seem fragments, not so much of one long poem, as of an outpouring which could not stop with the lapsing of the poet's hysteria...
...Does he hold the Stalinists in contempt...
...He called the Soviet leader "the greatest living statesman," and went on to tell his readers that Stalin was writing "a heroic chapter in the life of humanity...
...And why not...
...By any measure Josef Stalin was a moral monster...
...Searching for answers, she consults her Uncle Morty (Mark Feuerstein) when he flies in from the Coast for a visit...
...What hardly anyone knew was that Plath had been grappling since childhood with severe mental illness...
...The couple married and promptly began a contest to see who could write the better poem and appear in the more important publication...
...What is certain is that absolutists like Naomi and Shelly have never really disappeared from American life...
...Torn, the daughter of actors Rip Torn and the late Géraldine Page, is never less than luminous as Plath...
...In the end...
...After graduation she attempted to kill herself...
...The titles give a sense of her psychological condition: "Thalidomide," "Fever 103," "Death & Co.," "Cut...
...The play is three and a half hours long, and contains little more than a catalogue of despair, relieved by brief episodes of kindness and affection mostly between gays...
...Here, for example, is Shelly defining a liberal as someone who "has his feet firmly planted in midair...
...true liberalism), and a notion that they alone can identify clear and present dangers to the Republic...
...he writes Westerns in Hollywood, and seems more interested in studio politics than in geopolitics...
...I guess you'd say I've a call...
...The plot is simple enough: Constantine Stassos (John Sierros) is a Greek immigrant with the Midas touch in every sense of the word...
...He uttered other memorable thoughts, among them "Death solves all problems: no man, no problem," and, on the subject of extracting confessions from his enemies, "Beat, beat and beat again...
...The only enduring fondness between couples occurs in the union of Billy and his lover Harry (Peter Frechette...
...In his autobiographical drama, A Bad Friend, Jules Feiffer makes an attempt to answer these haunting questions...
...A liberal is on the side of the people only until the point when the struggle objectively demands an organized response...
...In midwinter, after a long depression, she began to write poem after poem in a furious burst of creativity...
...According to interviews he has given, Feiffer grew up in a household of so-called progressives (read Communist sympathizers...
...The decision is in our hands now...
...After a leg was amputated the once-domineering, now mutilated man willed himself to die (or so it seemed to Sylvia...
...When a few intrepid investigators tried to expose Stalin's attempt to destroy Ukraine's peasantry, an effort that caused the death of some 7 million people, Duranty did all he could to ridicule them and cover up the crime...
...Rose (Kala Savage) is a young woman coming to maturity in a household of Communists who sees the world in red and white...
...The rest of the cast, and the remainder of the scenes, are never less than competent, yet cannot offer more than the two dimensions of cardboard characters...
...To a naive American audience she seemed the essential madwoman/oracle who had sacrificed herself on the altar of art...
...The cast struggles manfully and womanfully with material that lives on the page but expires on the stage...
...to stay out of Europe...
...Hounded by HUAC...
...It was not the first time...
...At their exchange of vows, Jamal shows up in a dress, as homage to Cassandra...
...At the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater large images of a benign-looking Stalin hover above the stage...
...Sylvia's mother, who never remarried, raised the girl and her younger brother in Wellesley, Massachusetts...
...As she goes over this ground her voice occasionally quavers, and then dips into rage and final ly madness—only to recover as she speaks of her days in college, the writing of her novel, The Bell Jar, the unhelpful psychiatrists, and the marriage to Hughes that began with passion and ended in all-out war...
...Or does he feel that they were gradually pushed to the wall, initially by poverty and then by the Red Scare and the blacklists of the 1950s...
...And it may well entice the curious to the library, where they can examine Plath's poems for themselves...
...Shelly (Jonathan Hadary), is one of Lenin's "useful idiots.' He is capable of rationalizing whatever occurs in the Soviet Union, no matter how ghastly, ranging from the Moscow Trials to the Gulag...
...The process caused great pain and offered only temporary surcease...
...And the poem "Daddy," in which the author sees herself as the victim of a brutal Nazi father, was required reading for 1960s rebellious campus youth: An engine, an engine...
...Cunningham has made no secret of his homosexuality...
...But the main focus of the work, as Edge demonstrates over and oxer again in two harrowing acts, is always Sylvia Plath...
...The believers remained tene after Stalin's death in 1953...
...Critic Irving Howe was having none of Plath's impersonation of a Jewish casualty when she was neither Jewish nor a concentration camp victim...
...At Smith College she continued to shine...
...Dressed in gray, surrounded by the same shade, she starts by calmly recalling the events of her childhood—going back to the days when she, her brother and parents seemed at peace, then forward to the cataclysmic months when Otto Plath began suffering symptoms he attributed to the early stages of cancer...
...Edge has two principal virtues...
...And here is the present-day rabid conservative, Ann Coulter, acting up in her column: "Despondent over the success of the war in Iraq, liberals tried to cheer themselves up with the politics of personal destruction—their second favorite hobby after defending Saddam Hussein...
...Deliberately ignoring them, he continued with his work...
...One of the most notorious was the New York Times Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty...
...In the late 1960s critic George Steiner proclaimed her a Master, and went on to write that Plath's final poems were "both representative of our present tone of emotional life and unique in their implacable, harsh brilliance...
...Times change...
...Of course, there is a very large gap between poignance and permanence, minor and major...
...Chuffing me off like a Jew...
...Shelly finally acknowledges Stalin's crimes...
...These polar opposites have two things in common: a loathing of thought unencumbered by ideology (i.e...
...Then again, Plath invites such allusions with lines like "Every woman adores a fascist" and the clear inference, stated many times in her oeuvre, that in wedding Ted Hughes she had married her father...
...Gaitens, who wrote this adaptation, is a far better actor than writer...
...His reportage won a Pulitzer Prize...
...At a party she met Ted Hughes, later to become England's Poet Laureate...
...Latein 1962, separated from her abusive husband after a series of battles, some of them physical, Sylvia settled in London with the kids...
...That personal story is what Angelica Torn relates in Edge, at the DR2 Theater...
...The Hugheses had two children, a son in 1960, a daughter in 1962...
...Rose finally finds two confidantes...
...They went on praising their hero even in 1956, when Nikita S. Khrushchev detailed his predecessor's crimes—includingaDoctors' Plotmeant to frame Jewish physicians for treason...
...He was also a competitive bully...
...her weak father...
...The poet's merits will be argued well into this century (indeed, the debate will intensify when the film, Ted and Sylvia, starring Gwyneth Paltrow, opens next year...
...It allows the audience to see a superlative actress at the height of herpowers...
...Uncle Morty eventually gives evidence against his own sister...
...And there is worse to come...
...extremists remain...
...It was love/hate at first sight...
...By the second hour, credibility is nowhere to be found...
...Her phenomenal industry kept the demons at bay, but on February 11,1963, inspiration and energy ran out— and her attempt at suicide did not fail...
...The young, persuasive Fallon (David Harbour) wants to know all about Rose's family and its political beliefs...
...He had contempt for his own family members, prompted the suicide of his first wife, refused to attend his mother's funeral, caused millions upon millions to starve to death, and in his last days, engineered what was to be the largest mass murder of Jews since Hitler's...
...When Hitler violated the pact, they dutifully jumped through the hoop, suddenly calling for America to join Russia in the fight against Nazism...
...Emil is an impostor...
...Immediately after the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed a nonaggression pact in 1939, these lockstep Stalinists abruptly became peaceniks, signing petitions and ads advising the U.S...
...Constantine's long-suffering wife, Mary (Cherry Jones), is unable to stop his rages, his womanizing or his cruelty...
...Moreover, they can be found on the extreme Right and on the doctrinaire Left...
...This presentation of Flesh and Blood is a big one...
...She interpreted his demise as a personal act aimed against her...
...The child's real father, a manifestly heterosexual black man, has of course vanished...
...In his 1999 Pulitzer Prizewinning The Hours, gay men and women were part of the proceedings, but sexual orientation did not dominate the work...
...Equally disturbing are her meetings with a well-dressed, smooth-talking fellow student...
...He makes a fortune in the new world— and then proceeds to wreck his family...
...Yet even while his crimes were being committed he had passionate defenders, not only in his home country but in the U.S...
...While still an undergraduate, she served as guest editor at Mademoiselle...
...The eldest, Susan (Jessica Hecht), escapes to an unrewarding marriage with Ben (Sean Dugan...
...Rose is a question mark rather than an exclamation point...
...Then the backlash began...
...Wisdom and compassion are the exclusive property of a drag queen, Cassandra (Jeff Weiss), who becomes the father/mother figure to Zoe's illegitimate child, Jamal (Airrion Doss...
...Sad to say, the Timesman was not alone...
...Ranging from youth to middle age, Jones is, as always, attractive and intelligent...
...I began to talk like a Jew, I think I may well be a Jew...
...I do it so it feels like hell...
...He is a painter/photographer—or so he claims...
...Below, a family conflictisplayed out in the 1950s, the time of the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg trial, as well as the heyday of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee...
...Had he lived it would have taken place...
...Indeed, as late as 1969 Lillian Hellman, one of Stalin's most prominent American apologists, claimed that publisher Roger Straus was a "malefactor" because he issued the revelatory works of Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn...
...Weiss manages to produce a few laughs in a role that has become as bromi die as the whore with the heart of gold...
...Within a few years the name Sylvia Plath was elevated to the pantheon of great American women poets, alongside Emily Dickinson and Marianne Moore...
...Jerry Zaks' direction, Douglas Stein's set design and William Ivey Long's costumes are efficient rather than illuminating...
...What can be agreed upon is the fascination of a doomed personality...
...Onstage the misery of the Stassos clan soon becomes ostentatious, ludicrously self-indulgent, and finally tedious...
...THE MOSTimportantthingto keep in mind while watching Edge, Paul Alexander's one-woman drama about Sylvia Plath, is that the poet was deranged...
...Her autobiographical lines caused widespread frissons: Dying is an art, like everything else...
...The youngest daughter, Zoe (Martha Plimpton), flees to a nether world of promiscuity and drugs...
Vol. 86 • July 2003 • No. 4
