home
***
CD-ROM
|
disk
|
FTP
|
other
***
search
/
TIME: Almanac 1990
/
1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso
/
time
/
111389
/
11138900.026
< prev
next >
Wrap
Text File
|
1990-09-19
|
2KB
|
37 lines
THEATER, Page 120Downbeat Duo
THE LISBON TRAVIATA
by Terrence McNally
Two gay male buddies, poised at the uneasy boundary between
youth and middle age, sprawl in an overdecorated apartment and dish
the dirt about opera singers. None can meet their fierce standards
except Maria Callas (a performance by whom provides the play's
title). They admire her for blending technique and emotion and,
more deeply, for enduring a sad life and lonely death. Other
artists, they say, impersonate the passion and hysterics of opera;
she lived them.
One of the obsessive fans (Nathan Lane) is extravagantly camp,
a walking aria of loveless lament. The other (Anthony Heald),
casually straight in manner but for an occasional nervous flutter
of his hands, has a thriving career as a book editor and a cozy
home life with a physician. They amount to a before-and-after
picture of homosexuals in the age of liberation. The campy one,
very '50s, is witty but a self-denigrating cartoon; his friend,
very '80s, acts relaxed even when disclosing that his relationship
is turning into an "open" one. The twist in Terrence McNally's
midnight-dark comedy, which opened off-Broadway last week, is that
the seemingly enviable, self-possessed character lacks the
emotional resources to deal with the breakup of a relationship.
When the action shifts to his minimalist pad, where he
surprises his lover in bed with a boyfriend, he caroms between Noel
Coward worldliness and Edward Albee combat, hinting at suicide,
half attempting murder. In earlier versions of the play, the bloody
pathos of opera found a parallel: the abandoned man stabbed his
lover, then held him in a last embrace. That ending felt arch. This
one feels anticlimactic, void of release. So does the end of an
affair, an event McNally chronicles with specific detail and
authentic, universal pain.