On Stage
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage Wrong Mistakes By Stefan Kanfer DOUG WRIGHT first heard of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf from the Berlin bureau chief of U.S. News and World Report. It was 1990, just after the...
...This is supposed to relate to Kissinger's war against the peasants of East Asia, the U. S. battles against the American Indians and, finally, the Nazis' genocidal policy against the Jews...
...In recognition of his accomplishments he was voted Most Valuable Player in 1951, 1954 and 1955...
...Once again Charlotte was endangered, yet this time he decided to organize a kind of resistance, running a gay restaurant and bar in his cellar...
...The current revival at the Acorn Theater is self-congratulatory, infantile and amorphous...
...This is like déjà vu all over again...
...Two years later Wright was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship...
...Little has changed in its expansive new home at the Lyceum Theater on Broadway...
...This inability to make moral distinctions would be of little import if Aunt Dan and Lemon received the fate it deserved: an undistinguished opening, swiftly followed by a closing notice...
...There is a purpose to all this...
...in all the piles of acquisitions there were no examples of kitsch...
...The fledgling writer flew to Europe and wangled an introduction to von Mahlsdorf (né Lothar Berfelde...
...Evidently von Mahlsdorf, always discreet about his liaisons, was perceived as a guardian of German culture...
...Louis, better known to the local populace as Dago Hill...
...His eye was unerring, his taste flawless...
...Then, 16 games into the 1985 season, he unceremoniously fired his manager...
...It's too crowded...
...Baseball is 90 per cent mental...
...For people with even a vague knowledge of the 20th century, the play can be easily dismissed as self-indulgent twaddle...
...Then, when all are seated, she coyly relates her life story...
...The playwright is best known for Quills, a drama about the Marquis de Sade and his final days in an insane asylum...
...As playwright Tom Lysaght indicates, there were many valleys along with the peaks...
...He makes Charlotte intensely real: at times pitiable, at times reprehensible, but never without an acrid wit or a revealing anecdote...
...they are bright, well made, and worth looking at...
...how can you evaluate me...
...Others may have suffered similar fates...
...were a straightforward bunch is, of course, pernicious nonsense...
...I made a wrong mistake...
...AGE HAS NOT withered, nor custom staled Aunt Dan and Lemon...
...and he was amusing in Woody Allen's Radio Days...
...The evening gives us a new understanding of the man who saw a fork in the road, took it, and ultimately came back home where he belonged...
...for his film acting than for his stage work...
...Flashbacks reveal Aunt Dan as one of those people who collectedpeople...
...Lemon's mother (Melissa Errico) attempts to argue with her old friend, but it's useless...
...Many another player and manager has been in the same fix, but Yogi was one of the first, anditwenthardest with him...
...But no...
...Dan steamrollers over all objections...
...The Yankees, starved for a second-string catcher, were persuaded to buy his contract...
...As a playwright, however, he is nationally and deservedly obscure...
...DerekMcLane'sdeceptivelyplainset, which gradually reveals scores of timepieces and chairs, helps to summon up the past, as do David Lander's fluid lighting and Janice Pytel's stark costumes...
...Charlotte died last year at the age of 75...
...Perhaps it's all sentiment, but Gazzara's unaffected shuffle and gravelly voice makes us believe it...
...From 1949 to 1955, surrounded by such glamorous teammates as Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris, he led the Yankees in runs batted in for seven straight seasons...
...About anything...
...What began as a simple conversation widened into a long autobiography, narrated over the course of two years...
...Not only did Charlotte detest what the Nazis were doing to German culture, he had actually murdered one of them...
...the title, for example, is the answer Charlotte gave his mother when she informed him that "dress-up" was all very well, but he was now 40 and it was time he thought about getting married...
...He carries the rosary that was in his mother's hands when she passed away...
...This was no ordinary account of a Berliner who made it through the epoch of the Nazis, and after that, the iron rule of the Communists...
...He was unpolished, but coaches thought they had spotted a natural talent...
...In itself this was the greatest perversity of all...
...The Third Reich took great pains to hide the death camps from the world, and even lied to its own soldiers and civilians about what was going on...
...Shawn's implication that in the United States hypocrisy reigns supreme, whereas Hitler & Co...
...the revival is an Off-Broadway hit, its "limited run" extended deep into March...
...He recalls Joe DiMaggio and the burden of fame that fell on his son, who died only a few months after the celebrated Yankee Clipper was buried...
...These remarks, and a lot more, are given fresh interpretations in Nobody Don Ì Like Yogi, a disarming and vastly entertaining one-man show at the Lamb's Theater...
...The good news is that, save for Johnston and Errico the performances are on a par with the writing, and thus more suggestive of a high school pageant than of a serious production...
...Yogi installed Dale at third base, infuriating Steinbrenner, who felt the kid was a "good stick-no glove" infielder, and one whose drug problems were not behind him...
...But since we do have to do it, why not be truthful about it and why not admit that yes, yes, there's something inside of us that likes to kill...
...Nobody Don't Like Yogi takes place on that Day...
...The memories flood back...
...The protagonist of the new play is separated from Sade by two centuries, but both were real-life characters, both were narcissists whose personalities were a mix of obsession and deceit...
...He was also the greatest bad ball hitter of his epoch, swatting pitches under his ankles or around his eyes...
...In an age of inflated salaries and egos, the guy who played for the love of the game and a chance to live the good life in suburban New Jersey seems a priceless souvenir of a better era...
...Is that why he eventually chose to leave Germany and spend his last years in Sweden, away from prying curiosityseekers...
...Wright was not sure, and when he came to write the von Mahlsdorf story as a theater piece, he did not attempt to glamorize the person he had first regarded as a gay icon...
...He is abetted by Paul Linke's unobtrusive direction, Tony Walton's evocative set and the suit Yogi refers to as "Navy brown," and by Tony Melfa's sound design, which brings back the roar of the crowd as well as the echoing emptiness of a locker room at the close of the business day...
...It was 1990, just after the collapse of the Wall...
...Ever prudent and secretive, he managed to stay under the radar of the oppressors by using the Joycean mix of silence and cunning...
...In its first Off-Broadway presence 18 years ago, it was smug, puerile and shapeless...
...Postwar, he wangled a tryout for a minor league team and won the catcher's spot...
...Even so, Berrà is more celebrated today for his sentences than for his stats...
...In a long, concluding monologue Lemon twitters: "Now when people say,'Oh, the Nazis were different from anyone, the Nazis were different from anyone,' well, maybe that's true in at least one way, which is that I imagine they observed themselves very frankly, perhaps, in the act of killing, and admitted how they really felt about the whole process...
...It was one of the team's greatest bargains...
...To those who know nothing about history (alas, a growing number of young Americans) the unripe drama may seem chock full of insights...
...he was lively in Vanya on 42nd St., a filmed version of Chekhov's play in rehearsal...
...Raimondo takes a long, melodramatic time to die, and Shawn means to show us that snuffing out a human life is not a simple thing...
...Therein lies the strength of I Am My Own Wife, a full-length portrait of Charlotte...
...Inher equal opportunity assemblage are folks of every race and creed...
...Family members were encouraged to spy on one another, and no one's private life was beyond the prying eyes of the Stasi, the Communist secret police...
...Ben Gazzara, a veteran performer better known for unsympathetic roles (End as a Man, A Hat Full of Rain) inhabits the part with great restraint, stressing Berra's innate dignity and droll point of view even in the worst of times...
...In her view, the former Secretary of State is heroic, a man whom she regards as valorous in defense of his countrymen, who never allows himself the weakness of compassion, who pushes for war in Vietnam and Cambodia in order to save us all from Communist hegemony...
...Meanwhile, on another part of the Acorn's little stage, one of Dan's friends, the demimondaine Mindy (Brooke Sunny Moriber), has learned something disconcerting about her lover Raimondo (Carlos Leon...
...Save for an aggressive vegetarianism, there is nothing to tell...
...The difference is that in Quills Sade is repugnant even when he thinks he's charming, and in I Am My Own Wife von Mahlsdorf is compelling, even when he regards himself as humdrum...
...To his credit, Wright never did...
...He simply recorded what he saw, organized the material into a coherent narrative, and presented it as a one-man show, first at Playwrights Horizons where it was a smash hit...
...He learned the art of furniture restoration as well as curating, and in time his home became a private museum well known to collectors and connoisseurs...
...I imagine that they said, of course it's very unpleasant, and if we didn't have to do it in order to create a way of life that we want for ourselves, we would never be involved in killing at all...
...The bad times began when he locked horns with the team's principal owner, George Steinbrenner...
...Hardly any remark is without its wry interest...
...As if that were not enough, he managed teams in the American and National Leagues, and won pennants in both of them (Yankees inl964,Metsinl973...
...He is a snitch for the narcotics police, and has turned in several of her friends for selling the stuff...
...These indicated that one Charlotte von Mahlsdorf had been a key informant, furnishing the names of those who sold antiques on the black market...
...Playwright Wallace Shawn is better known across the U.S...
...Seething, Berrà vowed never to return to the Stadium as long as King George was on the throne...
...He was also one of the most gifted catchers ever to play the sport...
...This Fraulein/Herr was, after all, a gender bender...
...The vow was broken in 1999, after Steinbrenner quietly apologized for his actions 14 years before, and asked Yogi to throw out the first ball on Opening Day, April 5,1999...
...Yogi enjoyed a 17-year career as a player, and when his playing days were over signed on as Yankee manager...
...With the collapse of the USSR, a trove of records was suddenly brought to light, including long-hidden files of the Stasi...
...East Germany initiated a fresh set of restrictions and installed a different kind of terror...
...Yogi came from a poor family in a tough Italian district of St...
...The other half is physical...
...Teammates, managers, sportswriters and fans all came to find him irresistible...
...Eric Becker's costumes provide a break from the evening's general effect...
...Even when Charlotte tries to evade questions about his collaboration with the secret police, his outraged dignity has a point: "You never lived under such people...
...From the start I Am My Own Wife has enjoyed the gifts of Jefferson Mays, whose tour de force performance includes the impersonation not only of Charlotte, but of 34 other people, ranging from Nazi bureaucrats to American soldiers to Stasi officials to pushy European and Asian journalists on deadline...
...The regimes and rulers under which he lived held such people to be enemies of the state...
...This is the reason why, with all the distractions of television, cinema, DVDs, and streaming videos, people still look to the theater for the grand illusion—for what the late Harold Clurman's called, "lies like truth...
...Moving about a suddenly liberated East Berlin, the newsman ran across an aging transvestite with a strange tale to tell...
...Caparisoned in a plain black dress and string of pearls, he was left undisturbed even as other homosexuals were rounded up, imprisoned or executed...
...Combined with Mays' star turn and Moisés Kaufman's strong direction, they demonstrate the power of the stage...
...When you come to a fork in the road, take it...
...Like film producer Samuel Goldwyn in an earlier era, Yogi became known for his on- and off-the-field malapropisms, some of them genuine, some of them concocted by waggish PR men...
...The squat, balding performer starred in the overpraised My Dinner with André, which consisted of two men palavering trivially for two hours...
...Was Charlotte the fortunate survivor he claimed to be, or was he a betrayer of trust, a sellout who would do anything to maintain his lifestyle along with his possessions...
...For one thing, he was understandably proud in 1984 when a trade was made that brought his son Dale to the Yankees from Pittsburgh...
...You can observe a lot just by watching...
...In his wallet are pictures of his parents, along with photographs of the woman he married more than 50 years ago, their three children and nine grandchildren...
...I didn't really say everything I said...
...Nobody goes there any more...
...Lawrence "Yogi" Berrà was stumpy, awkward and inarticulate...
...The youth's athletic skills were just beginning to cohere when World War II began...
...Nothing has changed except the cast...
...Or did he...
...Late one night, as the elder Berfelde slept, Charlotte beat him to death with a rolling pin...
...The nightmare of the Hitler years came to a close in 1945, but a new horror was soon to take its place...
...The glory days are recollected, along with the down times, but never with a spirit of self-aggrandizement...
...His strategy was both ingenious and bizarre: He collected fin-de-siècle antiques—Victrolas, early recordings on cylinders and one-sided 78 rpm records, clocks, watches, bureaus, chairs, tables, gewgaws of every kind and description...
...The trouble is, not one of them has an interesting thing to say...
...A? THE TAIL END of the 1946 baseball season, a rookie catcher came to the big leagues from the Newark Bears, a Yankee farm team...
...After a jail sentence, abbreviated because of his youth, Charlotte picked up where he had left off, cross-dressing, amassing and conserving objects from the past...
...And yet Charlotte outlasted them all...
...Berrà once went 148 straight games without making an error, and caught two no-hitters as well as Don Larsen's perfect game in the 1956 World Series...
...The 74-year-old wanders through the place where he put on the pinstripe uniform and went to work...
...The young man blossomed under the tutelage of the great Yankee catcher Bill Dickey, and became a superstar two years later...
...Berra joined the Navy and at the age of 19 participated in the D-Day landings...
...Berra relates anecdotes about Mantle, Roger Maris, Casey Stengel, flawed men who have his everlasting regard...
...To compensate for their lack of conversational appeal, Dan fills the air with words about her favorite subject: Henry Kissinger...
...Her solution: make love to him, spike his drink, and then, while he's drugged, strangle him, wrap the corpse in plastic and dump it on the street...
...In speaking about the past, Yogi is all the more remarkable because of his guilelessness...
...Otherwise they won't come to yours...
...She's right up your alley," he told his friend in a transatlantic call...
...Derek McLane's red plush background is as irrelevant as the play itself...
...You should always go to other people's funerals...
...One of them had been a close friend, a homosexual who went to prison where he was cruelly used and eventually driven to his death...
...He humiliated Yogi by ordering Dale to be benched...
...In each case his pitch is perfect, his varied accents clearly and credibly presented...
...Moreover, Scott Elliott has directed with a maximum of chaos and a minimum of physical coherence, often keeping his best actors in profile so that they cannot express their lines effectively...
...He was on the money in every sense of the word...
...And so, to keep us awake, she speaks of her late "courtesy Aunt" Dan (Kristen Johnston), a big, good-looking blonde adventuress who had been around and loved talking about the past...
...Life was difficult and the temptations many...
...But Yogi's was a religious home, and his hardnosed parents made sure he ran with the right crowd...
...As even Yankee-haters know, Yogi was a genuinely humble man, with an overpowering sentiment and belief in family loyalty...
...Years before, his vicious wifebeating father, a low-level Nazi official, had threatened to kill the boy because of his strange ways...
...The Lemon of the title is a thirty something woman (Lili Taylor) who greets the audience with stares as they file in...
Vol. 87 • January 2004 • No. 1
