ON STAGE
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage Off-Broadway Exposures By Stefan Kanfer Paranoia is defined in the General Health Encyclopedia as "An unwarranted tendency to interpret the actions of other people as...
...In an early entry he mentions the affair with Abby...
...In 1961 she finally made it to Broadway in the Jerry Herman musical Milk and Honey, and followed that by playing an Italian mother in Neil Simon's 1963 film Come Blow Your Horn...
...She thought he was a hack in the making and said so...
...Alas, a cloud has just come along and it foreshadows doom...
...These four extraordinary performers are giving lessons in the art of acting every night of the week, except Mondays...
...by Brian Ronan's reverberating sound design...
...She toured Europe before World War II and after, entertaining survivors gratis, and enlisting in many Jewish and Israeli causes...
...In the course of their conversations, Abby spoke of her own experiences in Cape Town, where she dated a black man, and was raped by an Afrikaaner who then framed the African for the crime...
...Her wounds, made sharper by the knowledge that her time on earth is brief, are almost unbearable...
...Would that playwright Rose Leiman Goldemberg had a better sense of her subject, whom she portrays as far more self-centered than she actually was...
...Dee Pelletier), drops in with Peter (Paul Sparks...
...Worse still, his mental illness is catching, and Agnes has been infected...
...And would that director Pamela Hall had not succumbed to a case of the eûtes, making Molly, particularly in old age, too coy in her exchanges with the audience...
...After Kalich died in 1975 Molly went into seclusion, but the siren appeal of the stage was too strong to resist...
...The manager, curious about the lines outside the box office, asked some of the patrons why they had come...
...On Stage Off-Broadway Exposures By Stefan Kanfer Paranoia is defined in the General Health Encyclopedia as "An unwarranted tendency to interpret the actions of other people as deliberately threatening or demeaning...
...Steven Dietz, a Seattle-based playwright whose works have never been shown in New York before, is a variable talent...
...He was never good enough for himself, and was always digging into himself for more and more...
...Of a man and his memory, memory is the better writer...
...Rather than easing the tension, however, this liaison only seems to make matters worse for Agnes...
...Jacob Adler, the greatest actor in that theater, is almost forgotten...
...After she suffered a miscarriage and a severe depression, he made up his mind...
...Fair enough, he replies, and produces sheaves of private musings, reminiscences, thoughts, and plans written over the last two decades...
...Molly thrived there...
...She played a Jewish Peter Pan, with, as she put it, "a slight difference: Whereas Peter Pan doesn't want to grow up, Yonkele desperately wants to grow up and make a better world for our people...
...But all too soon Jerry arrives...
...At first Linda is shocked, but since it was brief, and occurred so long ago, she magnanimously forgives him...
...Doctors inform her that she has only three weeks to live...
...The others are merely born losers or lorn boozers, nursing grudges against circumstance...
...That definition is the subtext of Bug, a haunting Off-Broadway problem play at the Barrow Street Theater...
...In one production the 22-year-old Muni Weisenfreund played her father, and she had a chance to watch him as he developed a character in rehearsals...
...I like having written," a confession that used to be made by Oscar Madison on the TV version of The Odd Couple back in the 1970s...
...Years earlier Linda was a literary light...
...The baker would say, 'Mama Picon, I want you to meet Father.' And Mama answered, 'Hello, Father, how is Mother?'" Molly strung some of her best bits together with comic songs, and began entertaining between the reels at nickelodeons...
...Nine years later she was back on screen as Yente the Matchmaker in Fiddler...
...It sold out in a matter of hours...
...In every sense of the words, she has him under her skin...
...Pretty soon he had to acknowledge the truth: He had become the thing he most despised, a hack...
...everyone recognizes the Academy Award winner under his Americanized moniker, Paul Muni...
...In contrast, years earlier Michael was an unpublished nobody, a man more skilled at aphorisms than at longer work...
...His characters are convincing, and much of his dialogue bristles with wit...
...They got to know her best in Yonkele, a production Kalich had shaped to her tomboy talent...
...There are more questions and more surprises, but it would be unfair to reveal any more than I have...
...Hardly anyone recalls the Yiddish actor Muni Weisenfreund...
...She stayed on in Boston, the only place that could guarantee steady work...
...En route to the unexpected finale, that narrative makes subtle shifts of power and occasion, while three people of manifestly high IQs exchange ideas, insults and regrets...
...The couple returned to New York in 1923...
...She must...
...His book was adapted for the cinema...
...I don't know why he couldn't get more joy out of acting...
...Anything she wants, he promises, no matter how outlandish, is hers...
...When Agnes expresses doubts, he begins to detail a rambling and involved conspiracy theory...
...In a matter of hours, Agnes is similarly afflicted...
...Similarly Molly Picon, now being impersonated by Barbara Minkus in Picon Pie at the Off-Broadway DR2 Theater, is recalled not for her early roles but one of her final appearances, in the movie Fiddler on the Roof...
...So is Michael's guilt when she confronts him...
...Eventually this led to a faculty job at a university, and there she stayed—the promise frozen in amber...
...Picon Pie tells this story with consistent brio but intermittent charm...
...Emotionally battered Agnes consoles herself with the only two panaceas that have never let her down: vodka and cocaine...
...The two seem to have a great sadness in common, and a feeling that somehow each can assuage the other's pain...
...Minkus is a ringer for Molly—the right height, the identical expressions and vocal timbre...
...He's a gentleman, and undemanding...
...And she won't have to listen to any more NPR pledge appeals...
...But his daughter, Stella Adler, founded a studio that instructed the likes of Marlon Brando, Paul Newman and Montgomery Clift...
...Those events, Peter claims, are evidence of governmental scheming, biological experiments gone awry...
...She had far less regard for Linda's husband...
...Sweet (Michael Canavan...
...Somehow, effortlessly, they wind up in the sack...
...She believes every word, especially when the phone starts ringing insistently and all she hears on the other end is heavy breathing...
...He got blustery, she became nasty...
...Her first novel about a sojourn in South Africa put the young writer on the map...
...Indeed, she built a standup routine from Mama's malapropisms and gaffes...
...Therein lies the appeal of Fiction, a narrative full of surprises as it traverses time and space, evoking a first meeting in Paris, a lecture hall at a college, a cabin, a living room...
...Linda has a simple request: "Before I go I want to read your journals...
...government's top secret mind-control program using unsuspecting GIs as guinea pigs...
...Or has she...
...From there she went into Yiddish vaudeville, and after the Great War caught on with a touring company of actors...
...A series of revelations occur when Abby suddenly materializes at the front door...
...But he is also capable of such lines as "I don't like writing...
...The problem is discerning the true paranoid among the cast of losers clustered around a seedy Oklahoma motel...
...More mentions of Abby, and yet more, continuing up to the present...
...Bug is aided by Lauren Helpern's wonderfully tacky set, complete with electronic bug zapper and substandard fixtures...
...Like most male novelists, "I wish only to write about two things: injustice and women...
...Kalich rented a Second Avenue theater for one evening...
...I'm turning the theater over to new management," he told her, "and I'm taking my little star to Europe, where she will become a big star...
...Woolard's costumes are not, and John Gromada's original music and sound are used to fine effect...
...Schools, stores and theaters were shut down by the city's Board of Health...
...The violence that was hinted at in Act One goes over the top in Act Two with the reappearance of Jerry and R.C., who cannot find any evidence of bugs when they look for them, and the first appearance of a mysterious Dr...
...Like all such propositions, his is extrapolated from actual events—the notorious Tuskegee syphilis experiments on black men begun back in 1932, for example, and the mass suicide by the followers of the Reverend Jim Jones in 1978...
...Rumor has it that he has just been paroled and is headed her way...
...Although his background is shadowy, Agnes pays no mind...
...he can barely stand when they converse...
...What we have here is a series of betrayals, a sense that nothing is quite as represented...
...It unobtrusively went on with its program of wrestling matches on Tuesdays, boxing on Thursdays and Fridays, and "Jewish Theater" on Saturdays...
...There he met Abby (Emily Bergl), a rich, glamorous young woman whose parents had donated the property to the colony...
...Born in 1898, Molly was a natural clown almost as soon as she could toddle...
...By this time, of course, it's clear that Peter is not your average drifter...
...Molly also ventured into the new medium of silent movies, as a comic actress teaching yeshiva boys how to Charleston...
...Her husband wrote or produced some 40 musical comedies for her, and she augmented them with her own carefully worked out routines...
...If James Youmans' set is drab, DavidC...
...She has heard about Linda's illness and has come to commiserate...
...Doesn't Agnes realize that once a year the global elite, the most powerful men in the world, hold what is called the Bilderberg Conference...
...What can he do during this abrupt and final countdown...
...But he and Linda lived well, and their childless marriage became a love story of trust and dedication—or so it seems until Linda begins to rummage through her husband's voluminous notebooks...
...He wrote another novel and another and another...
...Yet if he's a phony, why are helicopters hovering overhead...
...For the next two years, in Paris, Lodz, Vienna, Bucharest, Molly picked up the authentic Yiddish idiom as she met and mixed with Jewish fans...
...Still, when the going is good, which is about 75 per cent of the evening, Fiction is well worth the price of admission...
...All the same, this is a welcome glimpse of an art form grown as obsolete as the running board and the typewriter...
...Zagnit makes an ideal second banana, amusing in his own right, and a strong support when needed...
...But something else is at work here, something hidden from view until the second act...
...She could look it up...
...Linda was fascinated by this account—so fascinated that she appropriated it for her own book...
...He had once seen her perform in Philadelphia and gave her a job with his little troupe of Yiddish actors...
...Director Dexter Bullard manages to make all plot twists and conundrums wholly believable, from the ominous opening to the explosive and agonizing finale (a moment in which Peter removes his own tooth is definitely not for those who have spent hours undergoing root canal...
...The transplanted Romanian believed in his wife's talent, but knew her situation in America to be a professional dead end: She would always be viewed as a piece of fluff...
...Yet the most revealing exposures are not of the bodies but the psyches of Bug's quartet of characters...
...She had indeed written a manuscript about her experiences in South Africa, and very dull they were...
...just met the shy, good-looking veteran at a party and thought he and Agnes might get along...
...Gradually, Peter's courtly manner and quiet voice win her over...
...As it turns out, Abby had met Linda way back at the same writers' colony when the young novelist was just starting out, and starting out badly...
...Molly, on the other hand, was quite happy with her own work, and this turned out to be a liability...
...They argued incessantly—and ultimately wound up in each other's arms...
...She should look it up...
...She can afford more attractive quarters, but this seems an ideal place to hide from her jailbird ex-husband, Jerry (Michael Cullen...
...In Italian bakeries," she reminisced, "there was often a priest in the store...
...Linda tries to face the terrible news with a quirky bravado—after all, she points out, there is still time for 20 splendid meals, to see new places, to have new adventures...
...Molly finagled an interview with the manager/director/writer, an immigrant named Yonkel Kalich (Stuart Zagnit...
...The larvae are now working their way to the surface...
...Recalled Picon, "We had a subscription audience before I even started...
...And what was Timothy McVeigh but one more laboratory rat controlled by the government...
...IN Fiction, at the Off-Broadway Laura Pels Theater, we encounter a pair of novelists who have been married for 20 relatively sunny years...
...we are a difficult bunch at best, and they represent us at our best—and most difficult—with seeming ease...
...Her fortunes seem to take an uptick when a lesbian friend, R.C...
...None of us, given a long hard look, will fail to disappoint...
...Time slipped by, and Michael found a publisher...
...They needed something, some bolt of energy, some new take on apartheid, perhaps a biracial love story...
...Peter is convinced the bites are evidence of the U.S...
...He starts to break out in large, itchy red blotches and says they are the exit marks of mysterious insects that have stung him and laid eggs under his flesh...
...Like most Jewish girls in that ghetto, too, she enjoyed the local sport: making fun of her elders...
...Muni, she noted, "never enjoyed his success...
...Like most Jewish girls in the Philadelphia ghetto, she deeply respected her mother, who had to raise the family alone whenher husband abruptly deserted them...
...But the ramshackle Grand Opera House under the El was so decayed that the inspectors had not bothered to enter...
...Slowly, step by awkward step, she is introduced to Peter's strange world, an arena of schemes and counterschemes...
...Agnes (Shannon Cochran), a 44-year-old waitress on a long unlucky streak, is holed up there...
...Said one, "My cousin from Bucharest wrote me not to miss Molly's Yonkele" More had seen her movie...
...Michael was adept at putting down successful writers, especially those who sold their works to Hollywood...
...This apparent act of selflessness and devotion is to have sorry consequences...
...she continued performing through her 80s...
...Totally blocked, he wangled a fellowship to a writers' colony...
...Then she reads on...
...There are hints that the stranger may be AWOL or perhaps a deserter, but what does that matter...
...The doctor claims to have tracked Peter from his days in uniform to his time in a military hospital to this Oklahoma cul-de-sac...
...Peter is absolutely bughouse...
...and by Kim Gill's costumes—even though, in Agnes and Peter's case, these are frequently shed in favor of full frontal nudity...
...She knew of, and admired, Linda's novel...
...She wants nothing to do with men anymore...
...Now in her early 20s, she had reached her maximum height of 4'11 ", making her a natural for juvenile roles, male and female...
...Her husband, Michael (Tom Irwin), is not nearly so strong...
...They plan ways to control the economies and thus the citizens of every government on the dry surfaces of the globe...
...She became a name, a personage invited to lecture everywhere...
...And for her life, which she talked about in various comedy routines as well as two chirpy autobiographies...
...He is every bit as brutal as advertised—shouting, threatening, ready to slap Agnes around, certain she (and everyone else) is against him...
...The Yiddish theater is one of those American phenomena remembered more for its graduates than its principals...
...It is not easy to impersonate writers onstage...
...R.C...
...His forecast was on the money...
...Those with a paranoid personality disorder are "suspicious, and usually unable to acknowledge their own negative feelings toward others...
...The doctor may be legitimate—but then why does he indulge in a little cocaine before going after Peter...
...Because of that auspicious beginning, the couple rented a theater and produced their own shows...
...Two seasons later Molly married Kalich...
...While many of us claim to write about the former, we are just writing about the latter...
...So are the trio of actors, especially Irwin and White...
...Playwright Tracy Letts specializes in low-rent locales and semiviolent lowlifes—his previous play, Killer Joe, was a trailer park melodrama—and his dialogue has the harsh ring of authenticity...
...Only Peter's presence seems to restrain him, and he skulks off vowing to return—and to stay a lot longer next time...
...They all became movies...
...No Yiddish theater producer in New York made an offer because her reputation had already been established—she was considered a comedienne rather than an actress...
...She was still attending the theater and acknowledging the plaudits of fans until her death at 94 in 1992...
...In the winter of 1918 she got off the train in Boston, only to find the city in the throes of an influenza epidemic then sweeping the nation...
...After a series of annoying headaches Linda (Julie White) has been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor...
...This she finds impossible to overlook...
...But she remained an exemplar of literary purity, a novelist whose work was unsullied by commercialism or self-promotion...
...by Tyler Micoleau's constantly changing light design...
Vol. 87 • July 2004 • No. 4
