Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/110292/11029930.000

Text File | 1993-04-08 | 6KB | 121 lines

                                                                                REVIEWS, Page 69

THEATER

Reborn with Relevance


By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

    WORKS: THREE NEW AMERICAN PLAYS
    AUTHORS: Larry Kramer, David Mamet, Wendy Wasserstein
    WHERE: Off-Broadway

    THE BOTTOM LINE: One evokes compassion, another fury at
injustice, and a third worldly laughter -- all cause for cheers.


    Even when The Great White Way glittered the brightest, it
would have been an exceptional week that brought the openings
of fiercely funny and trenchantly topical plays by three of the
nation's leading dramatists. But if the theater seemed reborn
with relevance last week -- thanks to Larry Kramer's poignant
gay Bildungsroman, The Destiny of Me, David Mamet's
lapel-grabbing vision of political correctness cum intellectual
terrorism in Oleanna and Wendy Wasserstein's drawing-room comedy
with claws, The Sisters Rosensweig -- Broadway was not part of
the buzz. For reasons ranging from finances to the tyranny of
reviews, the producers of all three chose to open off-Broadway.
Artistically, the week couldn't have been much richer.
Economically, the theater still seems to be passing the hat.

    The showiest piece and ultimately the most moving is
Kramer's tussle between hope and despair in Destiny. It is
enriching, but not necessary, to know that the work is
autobiographical and that its passion-spent central character,
Ned Weeks, is a stand-in for the author, who co-founded Gay
Men's Health Crisis and the more radical ACT UP only to leave
each in disappointment at their failure to save lives, not
least, prospectively, his own. Ned is as hilariously
self-congratulatory and self-critical as he was in the Kramer
play that introduced him, The Normal Heart, and Jonathan Hadary
gives the performance of the year balancing his rage and puckish
mockery.

    In style, Destiny is everything Kramer has heretofore
claimed to detest -- a nonrealistic memory play, crosscutting
between the present in a high-powered AIDS clinic and Ned's
childhood and adolescence in bourgeois-Jewish suburban
Washington. The guilt he endures, the abuse, the rejection by
even well-meaning relatives -- above all the preposterous but
persistent demand by his parents that he lead the life they
envisioned -- are all part of almost any gay adult's personal
legacy. If not always richly detailed in the writing, the
moments are staged by Marshall Mason with unusual power. As the
younger Ned, John Cameron Mitchell is touching but seemingly too
sweet and girlish to have ripened into the tough, caustic adult
Ned. But perhaps this is Kramer's deepest point -- that the
corrosive gap between boy and man was wrought by the unloving
world around him. More than a play about AIDS and death, The
Destiny of Me is a play about homosexuality and life. It is
irate, not about dying but about having been unable to live and
love.

    At the other end of the scale of suffering is
Wasserstein's wry comedy about three sisters (yes, they make
frequent references to Chekhov) whose problem is not failing to
get to Moscow but failing to stay, spiritually, in their
ancestral Jewish Brooklyn. All three are compulsive achievers.
The eldest, broodingly played by Jane Alexander, is a global
banker based in London, where the others have come to visit. The
youngest (Frances McDormand) is a tomboyish travel writer who
lives more for the escape of travel than for the art of writing.
The middle sister (Madeline Kahn) is a self-credentialed
psychotherapist who has a radio talk show, a Gracie Allen fey
charm and unyielding dreams of vulgar fame.

    The other characters include the banker's daughter, a
student whose delving into family history prompts her elders to
do the same, and four men who appear vital to these women's
lives but who are one by one sloughed off. Wasserstein is
interested in serious issues; the sisters are assimilated Jews
who only slowly reawaken to the importance of their culture and
religion, while on the periphery the men debate a host of topics
from current headlines. But in form and uproarious dialogue the
play is a commercial comedy. On that level, Sisters is a
delight and is exquisitely performed, especially by Kahn as the
ditsiest, daffiest and ultimately most devious of this
matriarchal clan.

    Mamet's Oleanna sets up an innocent-looking encounter
between a baffled and seemingly despondent college student
(played by Mamet's wife Rebecca Pidgeon) and a haughty and
fashionably iconoclastic professor (William H. Macy). His office
remarks to her, lashed to a Procrustean bed of rhetorical
propriety, wildly and perhaps willfully misinterpreted, become
her basis for bringing formal disciplinary charges. He is
accused of everything from sexual harassment to disrespect for
the learning process. But his worst crime in her eyes is the
"elitism" of daring to think that having something to impart
makes him more important than those who come to learn. Trying
to explain himself, he meets with her again, is goaded anew and
makes things worse.

    By the end, the professor resembles the broken-spirited
figures in anti communist plays by Pinter or Havel, ready to
comply with anything just to end the humiliation and pain. His
ugly spiral downward is at once outlandish and entirely
plausible, and it had this audience member virtually leaping out
of his chair in fury at the injustice and unreason. Whatever the
bumps -- and there are a few in Mamet's staging of his text --
the power to incense, like that to sadden or amuse, is reason
enough to cheer for the future of the theater.