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- <text id=94TT0492>
- <title>
- Mar. 07, 1994: The Arts & Media:Theater
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1994
- Mar. 07, 1994 The Spy
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- THE ARTS & MEDIA, Page 66
- Theater
- One And Only
- </hdr>
- <body>
- <p>Solo performers are all the rage, sometimes literally, onstage
- </p>
- <p>By William A. Henry III
- </p>
- <p> The minimal definition of drama is one actor on a bare stage,
- emoting. Perhaps not surprisingly in a century devoted to minimalism
- in every area of the arts--and lately to downsizing in every
- area of commerce--producers and performers are increasingly
- taking that definition literally. Broadway box office is dominated
- by maximalist musicals known to cynics as the helicopter show
- (Miss Saigon), the chandelier show (The Phantom of the Opera),
- the barricades show (Les Miserables) and the zoo story (Cats).
- But occasionally on Broadway, and incessantly off it, this is
- also a heyday of the one-person show.
- </p>
- <p> Topics range just as broadly as in more elaborate drama, from
- the orphanage hardships of Boys Town to the comic angst of Jewish
- suburbia, from Edith Wharton's frustrated sex life to Lynn Redgrave's
- thwarted longing for her father's esteem, from the Los Angeles
- riots to personal calamities of illness and grief. Actors vary
- from the well-established (Redgrave, three-time Tony Award winner
- Irene Worth and Regina Taylor of TV's I'll Fly Away) to the
- succes d'estime (Eric Bogosian, Anna Deavere Smith) to the yearning-for-discovery
- (Sherry Glaser, Claudia Shear, Barnaby Spring). Some play a
- multitude of characters, some just one, and several basically
- play themselves. Some, like Spalding Gray, who in January finished
- a return engagement on Broadway and is coming back in June,
- devote themselves principally to the solo form. Others, like
- John Leguizamo, who was named last season's best performer off-Broadway
- for his Hispanic family portrait Spic-O-Rama and who appeared
- in the films Carlito's Way and Super Mario Bros., seem less
- exclusively committed to the stage.
- </p>
- <p> The one thing almost all solo actors have in common is that
- they are also the authors of their shows; they seem drawn to
- the form as playwrights even more than as performers. Economically,
- they improve their prospects of getting produced because one-person
- shows involve fewer salaries--onstage, obviously, but also
- backstage--and require less scenery and costuming. Artistically,
- these actor-authors have bargaining power to keep their visions
- intact. Says Evangeline Morphos, a producer of Blown Sideways
- Through Life, Shear's account of getting and hating 64 jobs:
- "If you finance a one-person show, you basically buy into the
- creator's view of the world. The words and delivery are their
- sense of reality. And you market the personality as much as
- the play."
- </p>
- <p> For audiences, the payoff varies. When a performer's piece is
- largely autobiographical, like Shear's or Redgrave's (which
- ran eight months on Broadway and is touring the country), the
- theatergoer can get the illusion of making an instant friendship.
- When the show is a bravura display of physical and vocal transformation
- from one character to another, like Glaser's deft Family Secrets
- or Spring's intensely acted if mawkishly overwritten The Mayor
- of Boys Town, the pleasure is seeing the conjurer's trick. When
- the writing is ambitiously literary, as in Taylor's eloquent
- if not galvanically performed pseudo memoir Escape from Paradise,
- the stimulus is intellectual--discerning a family and a world
- from fragments of recollection.
- </p>
- <p> Rare performers, like Bogosian, combine many of these charms.
- His Pounding Nails in the Floor with My Forehead is part sketch,
- evoking several varieties of his trademark sociopath, and part
- musing in his own voice about the price of fame and about how
- the world seems to be going to hell just when he is getting
- rich enough to enjoy it. His command of language, including
- the rhythms of scatology and epithet, sometimes soars to the
- level of David Mamet, and his mutations are always convincing
- without any need for props or disguises.
- </p>
- <p> The richest rewards come from watching Smith, whose technique
- is to explore an explosive public event by interviewing hundreds
- of participants and then impersonating dozens of them, using
- only their distilled words. As writing it resembles journalism,
- but in performance--as she takes on all races, ages and genders--the impact is that of elegiac art. While in theory each character
- could be portrayed by a different actor, Smith regards it as
- essential to have all of them embodied by one person who also
- remains unmistakably herself, a black woman: "I think the form
- speaks to the content. It says something about how we can relate
- to each other."
- </p>
- <p> Smith burst into the national consciousness with Fires in the
- Mirror, which played off-Broadway and around the U.S., became
- a finalist for the 1993 Pulitzer Prize in drama and was adapted
- for PBS. That piece took on a confined conflict between blacks
- and Jews in Brooklyn. Her new Twilight tackles the complex sociology
- of the Los Angeles riots. After a spellbinding debut there,
- it has been revised and restaged for an off-Broadway run starting
- next week, with a transfer to Broadway planned for April.
- </p>
- <p> The scope of Twilight is far removed from the simplicity of
- one-person shows of a generation ago, mostly readings at a lectern.
- Sometimes the performer impersonated the author with costume
- and makeup, as Hal Holbrook did in evoking Mark Twain. Sometimes
- an actor merely read passages stirringly, as Eileen Atkins did
- for Virginia Woolf. Worth is now doing the same for Wharton;
- she just ended an entrancing off-Broadway run and has upcoming
- dates in Princeton, New Jersey, and at London's Royal National
- Theatre. "I am not remotely taking on Wharton's persona," Worth
- says. "I never met her. I don't know what her voice was like.
- I am giving feeling to her words. After having so much plot
- and emotion spoon-fed to them by theater or opera, audiences
- seem to like having to concentrate on those words and use their
- imaginations."
- </p>
- <p> What these shows generally lack, for all their charm, is conflict.
- Acting, an aphorism of the craft holds, is reacting--responding
- spontaneously to what another actor says or does. In one-person
- shows, that essential tension is missing. Every confrontation
- feels contrived. No villain or even annoyance gets a fair say.
- If one-person shows can feel as candid as a session on the psychiatrist's
- couch, they can also be just as narcissistic.
- </p>
- </body>
- </article>
- </text>
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