Women at the Edge
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage Women at the Edge By Stefan Kanfer Her biography is as unlikely as the saga of her adopted country. A family of Ukrainian Jews immigrates to Milwaukee in 1906. The youngest...
...intervenes does the tide of battle turn...
...A case in point is Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, now at the Music Box Theater...
...Several Pollitts are aware the patriarch has terminal cancer...
...He also has a low-grade contempt for his second son, the weak-willed Gooper (Michael Mastro), Gooper's conniving wife Mae (Amy Hohn) and their five "nonecked" children...
...Beatty, one of the country's great character actors, is magnetic as Big Daddy, alternating between blowhard assurance and the excruciating acknowledgment of his mortality...
...Brick's sadness has been prompted by the recent death of a teammate, Skipper, who also descended into a boozy haze...
...John Lithgow, always an intelligent actor, does well in a bloodless part, even though his assumed British accent occasionally slips down to his ankles...
...Something's left out...
...For an actress to portray her on the stage more than an adroit makeup job is needed...
...Young and old mutter about "mendacity," until various truths spill out on Big Daddy's 65th birthday, causing the predictable chaos and wounds...
...Edward reads from various diaries ofthat misadventure, allowing him to impress us with his grasp of the tragic vision and to observe, ominously, "When it's a matter of survival, people show no mercy...
...he shows us Golda Meir's unbridled ambitions, the sacrifices she demanded from her family in order to serve the larger cause of the State...
...Less than a year later she is elected a member of the Knesset, then becomes Minister of Foreign Affairs and, upon the death of Prime Minister Levi Eshkol in 1969, is chosen to succeed him...
...Still, after her death in 1978 at the age of 80, even her foes recognize her as one of the most influential women of the 20th century...
...So wrote E.M...
...The country was then able to defend itself with conventional weaponry...
...Omitted, of course, was Brick's latent homosexuality, never fully discussed in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, but manifest to ticketholders, even half a century ago...
...That Tovah Feldshuh has these qualities in abundance is obvious from the first moments of Golda's Balcony, her remarkable one-woman show at the Helen Hayes Theater...
...This is the first of many concealments disfiguring the Polliti family...
...But he also presents a figure whose guileful negotations and forcefui arguments made her the midwife at Israel's birth...
...The greatest impersonation of all, though, is the one of Golda...
...Only when the U.S...
...What once took courage on the part of Williams (and his director and actors) has become a Broadway bromide...
...What is known is that after a phone call from Meir, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and President Richard M. Nixon abruptly agreed to airlift supplies and ammunition to Israel...
...Manifestly, Nicholson is not only a believer in the power of verse...
...Ashley Judd (Smoke...
...En route to that goal, Feldshuh summons up an entire cast of personalities with language and gesture: Meir's mother, husband Morris, Jordan's King Abdullah, Moshe Dayan, Kissinger, all seem to pass before our eyes...
...Jamie is a complete cipher, inserted into the proceedings so that his parents can bore someone besides themselves and the victims who paid to enter the Booth Theater...
...The fact that she has memorized a lot of verse allows her to drop couplets here and there, brightening the lady's otherwise drab language...
...He should have summoned a few men in white suits with a net and a straitjacket...
...It's the longueurs in between that turn this two hour and 45 minute production into a treadmill of declamation and self-pity...
...Despite its intellectual pretensions, at bottom (which is about one inch from its top...
...There has seldom been so vivid an illustration of the difference between talent and mastery...
...Say something, anything," bleats Alice, "just as long as it's real...
...His idea of a good time is doing the London Times crossword puzzle...
...It is the contention of playwright William Gibson (Two for the Seesaw, The Miracle Worker) that if matters had worsened, Golda Meir would have chosen the Samson Option—she would have employed Israel's arsenal of atomic weapons to inflame the entire Middle East rather than allow her country to be annihilated...
...The youngest child is a girl of eight...
...In fact, she and her husband Brick (Jason Patrie), a onetime pro football star, barely communicate with each other...
...As the curtain rises, the 75-year-old PM is frantic...
...The Labor government appoints her ambassador to the USSR...
...After college she works as a schoolteacher, meets and marries Morris Myerson, a mild-mannered scholar, bears two children and makes plans to relocate in Palestine...
...historians debate the possibilities and strategies to this day...
...Daniel Sullivan directs this lugubrious mishmash at a pace appropriate for an Elgar funeral march...
...What she lacks is neurotic fervor, an absolute requirement of Williams' female protagonists...
...he is also an enthusiast of the daytime television clich...
...But there has been one profound change...
...Her legs made up to look swollen and arthritic, her face wrinkled by a lifetime of struggles and woes, Feldshuh miraculously conveys the undiminished dignity of a remarkable woman walking on the world's stage...
...Brick: What's wrong with it...
...Maria Bjömson's set and Jane Greenwood's costumes evoke the South of Tennessee Williams' plays and, in the process, underline its antiquity...
...Then, in October 1973, the combined armies of Syria and Egypt launch a surprise attack on Yom Kippur eve...
...While little Golda's classmates are absorbed by American history, she has become intoxicated with the ideals of socialism and Zionism...
...The meager plot ebbs and flows...
...Whether this romance will work out is conjectural...
...hers is kvetching about the fact that his idea of a good time is doing the London Times crossword puzzle...
...But there is deception here as well...
...he is surprisingly effective in the scenes of brooding silence, less so when required to mutter lines like, "Maybe it's bein' alive that makes people lie, an' bein' almost notalivemakes me sort of accidentally truthful...
...And victims they are...
...As she stews and frets in her office, Golda's fevered mind ranges back to the days of her youth in America, her early yearnings for a Jewish homeland, the frictions and accommodations of her marriage, the political infighting, the battles with so many, ranging from Jewish conservatives to English soldiers to Arab intriguers and Islamic fanatics...
...Big Daddy: That story...
...Edward tells Jamie he feels like a foreign agent: "Iwasa 'sleeper' inmy own marriage...
...Twenty years ago the production failed...
...It is not that the Englishman can't feel—it is that he is afraid to feel...
...So he has given this duo a high-toned, studious aura...
...Such liberty cannot be claimed by Jamie, who feels compelled to listen as Mama natters piously about her belief in the Christian religion, about the betrayal of her husband, about her encroaching loneliness...
...Alas, nothing much has altered in the interim— the text is more or less the same, and Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, is still the focus of irrational loathing...
...Big Daddy expected the worst...
...Compassion...
...What to do...
...Maggie Polliti (Ashley Judd) is a beautiful young woman whose in-laws believe she's pregnant...
...There is no fault to be found with the elder Pollitts, however...
...Actually, he can't stand her voice, her relentlessly cheerful personality, her dreadnaught figure...
...The gossipy, self-deceiving Southern ladies, the roaring, unkempt studs, the families corroded with secrets and lies—all have a musty air about them these days, like souvenirs brought downstairs from the attic and dusted off for public display...
...Predictably, Edward has sought comfort elsewhere and, he confides to Jamie, has lately fallen in love with the mother of one of his students...
...As for Edward, he is a public school teacher and amateur historian, obsessed with the defeat ofNapoleon in Russia and the Emperor's wintry retreat from Moscow in 1912, when most of his men died in the snow...
...Y'know I think that Maggie had always felt sort of left out so she took this time to work on poor dumb Skipper...
...The gnarled, 71 -year-old grandmother is the first (and thus far the only) woman to lead Israel...
...The current version, which began Off-Broadway, is likely to run for years, on Broadway and then on tour...
...He, poor Skipper, went to bed with Maggie to prove it wasn't true, and when it didn't work out, he thought it was true...
...A subsequent board of inquiry clears Golda Meir of direct responsibility for Israel's unpreparedness, but she is never quite able to emerge from the shadow of near-defeat...
...He has been married to Big Mama (Margo Martindale) for decades, and professes a genial pleasure at their longtime relationship...
...the medical report has been falsified...
...Today, in the era of Angels in America, Love...
...Alice has not a single redeeming feature...
...She reminds them that "at the bottom of the pot is blood...
...He must not express great joy or sorrow, or even open his mouth too wide when he talks—his pipe might fall out if he did...
...Playwrights like Terence Rattigan (Separate Tables) made a very good living by showing such folk on the stage, and now William Nicholson attempts to claim his piece of the English Numbness franchise...
...Chaplin is about as interesting as a stage prop, but this, too, is Nicholson's fault, not the actor's...
...The drama's 1955 debut was a Broadway sensation...
...Her reputation as a strong and canny politician seems secure...
...At the time, he sought to wrap her in his coat...
...During a visit to her in-laws, Maggie keeps demanding an answer, but Brick refuses to address the subject, no matter how mercilessly she prods him...
...First time out, Anne Bancroft was Golda...
...From the start she yowls about a lack of feeling on her husband's part, bitches about his inattention, complains about their lackluster lives, all in a tone that indicates the poor man has become a cruciverbalist as a way to maintain his sanity, an asset she has obviously lost or misplaced...
...He has been taught at his public school that feeling is bad form...
...Feldshuh catches every nuance of this complicated figure, aided in no small part by Scott Schwartz' lucid direction, Anna Louizos' impressive and constantly altering set, and Howell Binkley's brilliant lighting effects...
...The situation she describes as a "hot tin roof" is tenable because she grew up poor, and, she reminds Brick, "You've got to be one or the other, either young or with money, you can't be old and without it...
...This is the second presentation of Golda's Balcony in New York...
...Big Daddy: Not completed...
...The trouble is, he's actually too good for the role: Cat on a Hot Tin Roofwas never meant to be about him...
...Nicholson is aware that no one would pay to see an ordinary British couple break apart...
...The Retreat from Moscow is the theatrical equivalent of a Yardley item: imported English soap...
...For as it turns out, to get Edward's attention a few weeks back, Alice stripped to the buff on the playing fields of his school before embarrassed witnesses...
...Narc) is your average hunk...
...As for Big Daddy, he himself is a walking lie...
...Two movie actors give the play some star power...
...now he roars with glee and self-satisfaction upon hearing that all he has is a spastic colon...
...Doomsday beckons...
...Back in 1955, Brick's revelatory exchange with his father was thought of as the outer reaches of candor: Brick: I lay in a hospital bed, watched our games on TV saw Maggie on the bench next to Skipper when he was hauled out of the game for stumbles, fumbles!—burned me up the way she hung onhis arm...
...But at least he will be free from the grating voice of his loony wife, which increases in acrimony and volume when she learns of the liaison...
...Whether the PM used the nuclear threat or not, no other Israeli politician has ever been so persuasive in so brief a time...
...For the past few weeks the garrulous old coot has been afflicted by severe intestinal pains...
...No literary allusions or historical references from this young man...
...Gibson is not a hagiographer...
...Golda Meir found it difficult enough to be herself in real life...
...En route, it goes without saying, she scatters poetic excerpts like Robert Frost's line about other "finalities besides the grave...
...The Retreat From Moscow has so many of the requisite ingredients for the intimidated Anglophile it might have been constructed from a kit...
...Anthony Page directs without much subtlety, underlining every revelation as if the people in the orchestra and balcony might have trouble comprehending the author's intent...
...Much admired, she presides over a cease-fire agreement with Egypt...
...Valour...
...And Jamie observes, "Women love, badly, and men are good, but don't love...
...As Big Mama, Martindale is a convincingly poignant victim, a minnow in a whale's body...
...There is a third person in this melodrama: the couple's grown son Jamie (Ben Chaplin), who lives some three hours drive from his parents and wisely visits no more than four times a year...
...Still, there is no denying the occasional flashes of lightning that occur when the playwright furnishes the cast with long, well-worded speeches...
...Audiences were stunned by the frankness of its language and the audacity of its story...
...Big Daddy: Are you satisfied...
...it was supposed to concern Maggie and Brick, and they are both dwarfed by Beatty's towering performance...
...Skipper broke in two like a rotten stick—nobody ever turned so fast into a lush—or died of it so quick...
...verbally, Edward shows no more enthusiasm for the new lady than the old one...
...By contrast, the plays of Tennessee Williams, no matter how masterful or lyrical their passages, are beginning to show discernible signs of age...
...and the current Take Me Out, gays and lesbians have emphatically exited the closet...
...Now—are you satisfied...
...he's too drunk to sleep with her at night, and too melancholy to talk to her during the day...
...Forster, whose novels are overloaded with stiff-upper-lip Brits, whose lack of passion dooms them to lives of young numbness, anesthetized middle age and, finally, regret in old age for the chances they never took and friendships they never bothered to cultivate...
...John Lee Beatty's bare trees and Jane Greenwood's drab costumes merely underline the deficiencies of this overpraised play...
...Brick: With what...
...The other members of the cast are never less than competent—or more than that...
...My dream was simple," she recalls...
...Frida) invests Maggie the Cat with a great deal of glamour, and she gets the accent right...
...She is soon absorbed inMapai (Labor) Party politics, shortens her name to Meir, proves to be a driven, phenomenally successful fundraiser in the U.S., often leaves her family to pursue the exotic notion of an independent Jewish state, has numerous love affairs, rises slowly through the political ranks, and eventually realizes her cherished dream when Israel is recognized by the United Nations...
...Jason Patrie (Sleepers...
...At Golda's insistence, the Myersons finally make the move in 1924...
...It requires a rare intelligence and technique...
...The one other person of interest to Big Daddy is Maggie, simply because she refuses to despair...
...What was the cause of this mutual alcoholism...
...Alice is compiling an anthology of poetry, although there is no indication that she has a publisher, an editor, or even a theme in mind...
...Gibson did not invent this version of the Yom Kippur War...
...Brick's wealthy father, Big Daddy (Ned Beatty), is the head of the clan, and no one dares to contradict him for fear of being left out of the will...
...Atkins is, at best, grating, completely unable to overcome the banalities of the script...
...A fiftysomething couple, Alice (Eileen Atkins) and Edward (John Lithgow) have been married for a long, cold stretch...
...Make a new world...
...Just about the only blood relative the paterfamilias can stand is Brick, even though the young man's addiction to alcohol appalls him...
...Poured in his mind the dirty, false idea that what we were, him and me, was a frustrated case...
...Aware that some outsiders regard her as "Momele Golda who makes chicken soup for her soldiers...
...Little does Big Daddy know that Maggie the Cat, as she calls herself, stays in the marriage as much for status as for love...
...the unstable amalgam of idealism and power that marked and marred her later years...
...the enemy has begun its invasion, thousands of Israelis are doomed to die in battle, and Israel itself may not survive the week...
Vol. 86 • November 2003 • No. 6
