TIME: Almanac 1995

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Text File | 1995-02-24 | 3.5 KB | 78 lines

<text id=94TT0742> <title> Jun. 06, 1994: Theater:A Comedic Lee Harvey Oswald </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1994 Jun. 06, 1994 The Man Who Beat Hitler </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> THE ARTS & MEDIA/THEATER, Page 64 A Comedic Lee Harvey Oswald </hdr> <body> John Malkovich intriguingly adapts a J.F.K. conspiracy novel By William A. Henry III In all likelihood the Warren Commission was right: there was no conspiracy behind the murder of John F. Kennedy. But almost from the moment of the murder, works such as Barbara Garson's Shakespearean satire MacBird!, Richard Condon's gothic novel Winter Kills and Oliver Stone's film JFK have suggested the story makes a better myth if Lee Harvey Oswald were a cat's-paw instead of a gnat who changed history. The major boon to conspiracy theorists is that the facts do not fit neatly into the Warren Commission scenario. Unfortunately, they fit even less neatly into any alternative, which is why theorists are often driven to suppose that two or more plots intersected. That is exactly what Don DeLillo envisions in his vivid 1988 novel, Libra, which has been adapted and staged by John Malkovich for Chicago's Steppenwolf troupe. Oswald is variously buffeted by communists who hate Kennedy, CIA renegades bent on a better Bay of Pigs invasion and Mafia overlords whose motives are as shadowy as their methods. As history, the explanations are no more satisfying than any others. As literature, the portrait of Oswald's strange world--especially his bizarre mother--is richer, spookier and eerily funnier than anything else on the subject. This dark humor translates to the stage much more effectively than the political narrative, which Malkovich renders murkier, overstressing the mysterious deaths of minor figures a dozen or more years after they could have spilled the beans. He relies heavily on video footage, words projected onto screens, rows of chairs suggesting a government hearing, booming sounds and other techniques reminiscent of the Wooster Group. At the center are four beguiling caricatures, three of men whose alleged homosexuality is linked to misdeeds. Oswald is made a dizzying blend of soldierly submission and insolent sneer, animal cunning and dimwit suckerdom by Alexis Arquette, a film actor (Last Exit to Brooklyn, Threesome) and sometime drag performer under the sobriquet Eva Destruction. In the most jarring scene, he is half-seduced, half-raped by David Ferrie, a fey father figure and apparent conspirator. Ferrie, whom Malkovich has said he would have liked to play if he were not directing, is a tour de force for Laurie Metcalf in a far cry from her Emmy-winning role as the title character's sister on TV's Roseanne. Metcalf is even more startling in her other role as Oswald's ranting, self-justifying mother Marguerite. Although she created a monster, she blames everyone else; in this through-the-looking-glass world, she may have a case. Rick Snyder's Jack Ruby is a guileless goof, jitterbugging with nervous vacuity, forever asking the strippers at his nightclub if he is effeminate. A Mob intermediary tells him he will be a hero if he kills Oswald. He is, instead, another dupe. Malkovich rightly considers this an unfinished work. It is full of intriguing moments, but it is more confusing than revelatory. </body> </article> </text>