Buried Childhoods
KANFER, ETHAN
On Stage Buried Childhoods By Ethan Kanfer The papers of Sabina Spielrein, published40 years after her murder in 1942, shed light on the life and work of Carl Gustav Jung. Spielrein, his...
...All she sees in Ricky is her own history of failure...
...So much for Hollywood...
...Feeble, yet determined, he climbs the dusty mound only to slide away...
...Ricky is both irritated and comforted...
...Actually, she is unable to speak...
...His confidence in her intellect revives Sabina and she becomes the first woman admitted to his Psychoanalytic Society...
...Were he content merely to satirize, however, Beckett would not have made Winnie the enduring figure she is...
...Beckett prefers to put metaphor first, both for comic effect and to illuminate the plight of his characters...
...Her husband Willie (David Greenspan) is at first seen only from the back...
...The curtain pulls back to reveal a room in the Burghölzli Psychiatric Hospital in Zurich, and Sabina is shown as Jung (Victor Slezak) initially sees her...
...Predictably, the evening offers laughs and farcical shrieks...
...Amid the flames, she sees her father's face, and repressed memories of incest come flooding forth...
...In time she appears at the Sixth International Psychoanalytic Congress, where she delivers a portion of her thesis "On the Origin and Development of Articulation...
...In Willy Holtzman's Sabina, at Primary Stages' new Off-Broadway home on East 59th Street, she is portrayed as Jung's muse as well as a catalyst in his turbulent relationship with Sigmund Freud...
...After their meeting at a book signing, Alison (An Graynor) accompanies Ricky back to his luxury hotel...
...She is an amalgam of voices heard in childhood, condensed into an existential cartoon...
...Faced with the brutal irony that he is rejecting her by failing to exploit her, Ricky calls her a cab...
...At Lincoln Center, Robin Williams subsequently played that role opposite Steve Martin's Vladimir...
...Just because he is hopelessly inarticulate about his craft does not mean he isn't good at it...
...When he left Brooklyn for Columbia University and a bright future, Ricky discarded his uncool best friend like an old toy...
...Back in Manhattan, Ricky discovers that success won't salvage his sinking marriage to Nina (Polly Draper...
...Did we sail...
...Sabina asks him as she prepares to depart for her native Russia...
...Finally, he embraces her as she purges herself of her grief...
...What could have been a lifeless paean to these intellectual icons instead treats them with compassion, curiosity and a healthy dollop of irreverence...
...Freud, dying of mouth cancer and forced by the Third Reich to flee his Vienna home, faces the end with a bitter laugh...
...After years of avoidance, novelist Eric "Ricky" Weiss (Adam Arkin) must return to the borough of his birth to visit his ailing father Manny (Allan Miller...
...Kim Gill highlights the characters' middle class propriety with her meticulously florid costumes...
...Slezak subtly reveals the conflicted soul beneath Jung's stiff professional exterior...
...The supporting cast is uniformly strong, although one casting choice seems odd: Draper is emotionally convincing, but looks a bit too glamorous for a struggling writer who lives in a Lower East Side hovel...
...Spielrein, his first analysand, was also his lover for a while and later became a distinguished psychoanalyst herself...
...This sequence is heavy with subtext...
...Given how laborious his every movement is, it has obviously taken him hours to dress...
...her seamless transformations and coltish vitality areajoy to watch...
...The closing scene has Ricky clearing out his father's old apartment...
...He has lived long enough to watch his direst predictions come true, but not long enough to see his curative philosophy reach widespread acceptance...
...She sits in the corner, entirely withdrawn, unable to speak or to respond...
...The second act is dominated by Sigmund Freud (Peter Strauss), who Holtzman renders as funny, opinionated, domineering, but deeply compassionate...
...She and her daughters have been herded into a synagogue along with many other Rostov Jews, to be executed by the Nazis...
...Even as he reassembles Sabina's psyche, Jung is conceiving what will become his famous theory of archetypes...
...Alison is devastated, and Ricky watches another of his fantasies turn upside down...
...When Ira departs, the novelist seeks closure through fiction...
...a fitting choice for this haunting and tender blend of midlife reflection and coming of age...
...Can Seth Bernstein, the character based on Ira, be a black kid...
...Freud...
...Holtzman wraps up the evening with a triptych of monologues...
...Jung and Freud quarrel over the use of mythic image in psychotherapy, and eventually stop talking to each other...
...Were Winnie's days here happy ones...
...Desperate to get back to Manhattan, Ricky is stopped by Ira Zimmer (Arye Gross), a childhood chum and the inspiration for one of the novel's central characters...
...He's a blond, muscular, self-absorbed (and extremely gentile) airhead...
...The playwright, as usual, is reversing the narrative technique of his forebears...
...David P. Gordon's set gives the show a painterly feel, strongly reminiscent of Magritte...
...He is an apt foil for DeLaria, whose indomitable spirit provides us with a very fresh take on a well-known character...
...He is naked, and has a bleeding lesion on his shaved head...
...Winnie is a familiar caricature, a matron on her way to the bridge club or church picnic in garish finery...
...The scene ends with a bracing display of animal dignity as Manny flatly declares that he will not be leaving the hospital...
...She convulses, the music triggering memories Jung's words cannot...
...Jung employs his new invention, word association, and divines a factual basis for her mythic ramblings...
...Warts and all, Sabina and her mentors will be hard to forget...
...If Sabina won't speak his language, he proclaims, "then I will speak to her in hers...
...Gross carefully steers clear of caricature, instead finding in Ira's stooped posture a man whose destiny is shaped by low self-esteem rather than a lack of intelligence...
...It's a variation of every encounter Ricky has ever had with Manny, who we later learn has just passed away...
...In Los Angeles, Ricky finds himself in the company of an attractive, willing groupie half his age...
...Having had to releam speech as an adult, she is able to anatomize the process...
...He dons a handkerchief and straw hat and reads the paper as if he were reclining at a summer resort...
...He speaks in pained, animallike grunts punctuated with occasional English phrases...
...Growing up in suburban Foxrock, little Samuel was likely exposed to her Celtic counterpart...
...Freud is impressed with Sabina too, as she tells him what she discovered when she "sailed the human mind...
...The absurd spectacle of a half-buried lady trying to act "normal" resembles nothing so much as a starched parishioner nattering away as if she weren't craving sex or frightened of death...
...Winnie, ever the dutiful wife, admonishes Willie to remember his shorts and not to crawl into his hole headfirst...
...There are no wild ducks or cherry orchards here, no symbols woven into recognizable human dynamics...
...Ricky reads with him, playing the role of the father, saying goodbye as the Brooklyn boy leaves home...
...What is surprising is DeLaria's range: She does not shy away from the script's bitter and mournful undertones...
...She is less and less mobile, and her mind is awash with faded memories...
...An evening spent in the company of this winning Winnie is indeed a happy one...
...She strikes Jung and hurls objects, until he leaves her to collapse...
...In the Broadway debut of Waiting for Godot, vaudevillian Bert Lahr was cast as Estragon...
...Director Jeff Cohen uses a quick baton to emphasize the strong, ranting rhythms of Beckett's poetry...
...At Paramount, studio exec Melanie Fine (Mimi Lieber) plies Ricky with flattery and bottled water...
...She is amused to find Jung is in the audience, accompanied by a darkeyed young paramour...
...Director Ethan McSweeny keeps the action moving with the swift grace of a Viennese waltz, aided by Michael Roth's incidental music...
...She flutters frighteningly between the articulate new Sabina and the babbling patient she once was...
...The old man sees something in his disciple's experiments...
...With Willie's ceremonious declaration of closure, Winnie at last finishes packing and unpacking...
...But the scene takes a startling turn as the young actor begs for a chance to read for Ricky...
...Jung ignores Binswänger's objections...
...In the second act, the mound of detritus has reached her shoulders and her confrontation with mortality becomes more defined...
...After all, Jung has taken Sabina from a state of severe depression to the point where she is able to pursue her own medical studies at the University of Zurich...
...The two are also falling in love...
...Laughs are unforced, subtle exchanges are readable even in a large Broadway house...
...Winnie brightens momentarily, only to see Willie return instantly to his previous state of senility...
...He seems oblivious, but atthe oddest of times the two connect...
...We've never been us with money before," he pleads as he angles for a second chance...
...She will never be as good a writer as he is, nor can she bear children...
...The hurt his expectations have caused Nina is strongly reminiscent of the wounds inflicted on him by his father's relentless disapproval...
...Even decades later, Jung cannot admit the truth...
...Mainstream audiences don't like Jewish stories...
...She also packs and unpacks a capacious black handbag containing, among other more mundane objects, a Browning automatic revolver...
...Here we get a glimpse of Ricky's dark side...
...Ricky can't finish the reading, and runs out of the studio in tears...
...As the titular Boy, Adam Arkin is both lovable and exasperating...
...Sentence fragments sputter out of her ("half part most excellent...
...He is chiefly interested in her as the woman behind the two men...
...Earth, the "old extinguisher," can have her now...
...Happy enough, it would seem...
...Jung's affair with Sabina raises eyebrows and Binswänger intercepts anonymous letters intended for blackmail...
...Alison emerges as a human being, burdened by a tortured awareness of how easily she could be dismissed as a clich...
...what we are hearing is her internal voice—a disordered mind searching for continuity...
...In Brooklyn, life and death are accepted on their own terms...
...To top things off, the actor being considered for the title role is TV star Tyler Shaw (Kevin Isola...
...A trip to America is planned, and Jung wants to bring Sabina (in part because his wife won't be with them...
...The title is derived from an old Irish toast, and Winnie's ramblings have a heady flavor of ladylike drunkenness...
...After coming across the word "hog" on the back of her toothbrush, Winnie repeatedly asks herself, "What exactly is a hog...
...The Manhattan Theater Club production is composed mostly of two-person scenes, and director Daniel Sullivan makes the intimacy ring true...
...ARCHETYPES take center stage in Donald Margulies' Brooklyn Boy at the Biltmore Theater...
...Binswänger (Adam Stein), Jung's pragmatic colleague, cautions him not to tread on unfamiliar territory...
...Even in death, they cannot embrace, but at least they lock eyes and join voices in a song they both recall from youth...
...She tries to tell a fairy tale of her own devising but cannot finish it...
...A fantasy Manny finally gives Ricky the praise he wants, then reverts to the shadowy father he was in life...
...He has stayed in Coney Island, taken over his father's deli married and raised a big family...
...Jung trembles with excitement as he discovers his power to cure...
...A number OF Samuel Beckett productions have featured stars who made their reputations as sketch and standup comedy performers...
...The play opens with Sabina (Marin Ireland) standing before a curtain addressing the audience directly...
...Small talk, intended as preamble to sex, ends up having the opposite effect...
...Jovial formalities are dropped, and up comes the pained question, "Why'd you push me away...
...She repeats her daily rituals as best she can, but cannot resign herself to death without one important last rite...
...Ricky's latest novel, Brooklyn Boy, is number 11 on the bestseller list, prompting Manny to comment that it would never have made it if the list were still only one through 10...
...Suddenly Tyler is focused, present, subdued, and truthful...
...Maddening script notes follow...
...The most remarkable aspect of Sabina, however, is the humor and lyricism Holtzman is able wring from scientific history...
...She brushes her teeth, does calisthenics and breathing exercises, and adjusts her fancy green hat...
...Now, at the downtown Classic Stage Company, comedienne Lea DeLaria takes on Beckett's Happy Days...
...At this point, Margulies is skating on such thin stereotypical ice that the play threatens to fall apart...
...He also suspects that Jung may be attempting to catch the attention of the famous Dr...
...Jess Goldstein's costumes and Ralph Funicello's set use drab colors and severe angles to evoke a Brooklyn that is both sprawling and confining...
...Holtzman adroitly telescopes a complex psychoanalytic journey into a few key scenes, while still conveying a palpable sense of its arduousness...
...Employing the new technique of psychoanalysis would certainly make an impression, and the fact that the patient is Jewish does not hurt either...
...Michael Sharpe's costumes and Mark Wendland's set design are purposely stuffy, suggesting the stifling atmosphere that gave rise to the psychoanalytic movement...
...With his round face and shuffling gate, he resembles nothing so much as a graying adolescent...
...This familiar tale of the Crossover Kid is made new again—not by gimmickry, but through honest and painful introspection...
...Ireland, though, has the sharpest character arc...
...This production accents the play's obliquely autobiographical content...
...a boy no more...
...Greenspan provides the show with a few much needed pauses...
...In her fantasies, she casts him as Siegfried, a rescuing hero with Teutonic features...
...A breakthrough finally comes when Sabina hears Binswänger playing the violin for relaxation...
...Ira rep resents everything Ricky is running from...
...The success that was supposed to deliver Ricky has left him orphaned and loveless, but also older and wiser...
...In an imaginary last letter to Jung, Sabina again talks of flames, but not of a hero to rescue her...
...Arkin savors each tragicomic beat as the son who, even in middle age, can't keep his buttons from being pushed by the parent who installed them...
...Every gesture and line of Willie's is labored, in contrast to Winnie's brio...
...Yet, like Winnie, he is determined to follow custom...
...Buried hip deep in a pile of rubble, Winnie (DeLaria) nevertheless goes at her bourgeois daily routine with unflagging gusto...
...In his economy, Holtzman leaves much of Sabina Spielrein's real life to the imagination...
...Like Brooklyn itself, the boyhood friend will be part of Ricky's life forever...
...Let Ricky reach for immortality...
...Against his desires, Jung tells Sabina, "I cannot be your doctor and your lover...
...Despite the years of silence, Jung offers to help with a generous donation...
...She remembers a pogrom in her hometown of Rostov, Russia...
...Freud refuses, but still regards his former protégé with affection...
...Ira, a nudnik but a loyal one, shows up with box of rugelach and a yarmulke...
...This time it is Freud who reaches out to her...
...Whether spreading wide with an infectious smile or crumpling up in a fit of tearful nostalgia, her elastic face constantly astonishes...
...Then Willie crawls onstage in a meticulous natty outfit so unruffled it looks like it has been in mothballs for years...
...Nina will have none of it...
...Strauss' Freud vibrates with a ferocious intelligence that makes his affectations (the walking stick and famous cigar) seem entirely natural...
...In a rare lucid moment, Willie answers her ("Castrated male swine, bred for slaughter...
...Freud refuses, and thus begins the deterioration of all the play's relationships...
...The charismatic Freud and the morally weak but talented Jung are the primary figures in this love story...
Vol. 88 • March 2005 • No. 2
