We're approaching that time of year when theater awards are handed out left and right. So let's bestow an imaginary one right now. In the category of hardest-working actress on Broadway, the winner is -- drum roll, please -- Joan Rivers in " Sally Marr . . . and Her Escorts."
The play, which opened last night at the Helen Hayes Theater, purports to be the story of Sally Marr, a comic of small repute whose chief claim to show-business fame is that she is Lenny Bruce's mother. What most people will find far more interesting, however, is that the woman tearing about the stage in a wardrobe resembling an exploded salad bar is, in her more widely publicized incarnations, a finely turned-out talk-show host and the purveyor of her own line of jewelry.
Is Ms. Rivers also a great actress? No, she is not. But she is exuberant, fearless and inexhaustible. If you admire performers for taking risks, then you can't help but applaud her efforts. " Sally Marr" asks her to dig down deep and dredge up some elemental emotions. Ms. Rivers backs off from none of them. In her portrayal of a gutsy woman who has hit the skids more than once in her 80-odd years, there is a childlike sincerity that exerts its own spell in the end. Between Ms. Rivers and Ms. Marr an understanding obviously exists.
Ms. Marr, in fact, provided Ms. Rivers and her husband, Edgar Rosenberg, with the recollections and stories -- and, presumably, some of the jokes -- that are the raw material of the play. Ms. Rivers, Erin Sanders and Lonny Price, who also functions as the director, have shaped them into a glorified one-woman show that starts out in the auditorium of Our Lady of Esperanza High School, where Ms. Marr is teaching a night course titled "How to Die on Your Feet: The Art of Stand-Up Comedy." Cha-cha lessons, she informs us, lest we've come to the wrong place, are across the way, and A.A. is meeting down the hall.
The first 10 minutes, which allows Ms. Rivers to lecture the audience directly and shoot off some sure-fire one-liners, are flat-out hilarious. Talking about her boyfriend, a younger man, Sally says: "I gave him 'The Joy of Sex' for his birthday. He colored it in." (Frankly, that sounds suspiciously like vintage Rivers to me.) The play, though, intends to be more than just Vegas revisited. The tip-off comes early on, when Sally goes into her theory of comedy. "You don't start with funny and make it funnier," she explains. "Comedy comes from pain."
Lesson over, the scene switches to a hospital emergency room, and the pain comes rushing on. Battered and near death, Sally lies on an operating table. At 82, she has just been raped by a burglar. As doctors labor to keep her breathing, her life, a sorry history of hardship and holding on by the fingernails, flashes before her eyes. All the people in it -- the father she worshiped, the husband who left her, the show-biz riffraff who passed for her family and, of course, the rebellious son she defended like a tigress -- are played by the titular escorts. None speak. Moving among them, as if among ghosts, Sally does all the talking, experiences all the emotions and draws all the conclusions.
It is the play's contention that without Sally Marr, a kind of dirty-mouthed Mama Rose, there would have been no Lenny Bruce. Her outspokenness blazed the way for his iconoclasm; from her hatred of hypocrisy sprang his. She was even there when he made his first tentative steps as an M.C. in strip joints to coach him on the intricacies of comic timing and lend him some of her material. "Lenny Bruce opened the door for every modern American comic, right?" she says, putting her checkered past into perspective for us. "So, in a way, you could say I gave birth to George Carlin and Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy and Lily Tomlin and Robin Williams and Bill Cosby and Gilda Radner and David Letterman."
Well, I suppose you could say that. Given the evidence in " Sally Marr, " though, the claim seems a bit inflated. Did she actually barge into a men's room and proposition the local rabbi, who had demanded $250 to officiate at Lenny's bar mitzvah? Then tell him off when he rejected her offer? For her son's 11th birthday, did she take him to a burlesque show, justifying it as both "a little culture and . . . a lesson in anatomy"? And did she, in reality, exhort him at the outset of his career to quit telling jokes and "talk about things people really relate to"?
It is probably best to keep in mind that this is a mother speaking, and that mothers, even Lenny Bruce's, get carried away. Still, " Sally Marr" never seems particularly authentic as biography, a shortcoming the authors excuse by noting that their script is only "suggested by the life of Sally Marr. " Yet viewed simply as a play, it amounts to little more than a string of blackout sketches, culminating in a punch line or a punch in the stomach. Punch lines, the star knows inside and out. As for the sudden explosions of rage or the terrible feelings of abandonment, you have the eerie impression they're Ms. Rivers's as much as they're Sally Marr's.
Mr. Price has dressed up the proceedings, and not just with the escorts (Jonathan Brody, Ken Nagy and Valerie Wright), who are busy all night long in their multiple guises, but also with scenic projections by Wendall K. Harrington that are very nearly as active. An onstage band provides honky-tonk music, and Phil Monat supplies lighting to match. Periodically, the operating table is propelled about the stage to remind us that Sally's life hangs in the balance. While the swirls of activity stop short of the nightmarish, they impart an inexorability to events that don't necessarily possess it on their own.
Nevertheless, all the fancy production values could probably be disposed of with no discernible loss. It's Ms. Rivers, after all, who drives the patchwork script forward with the same manic energy that informs her stand-up routines. Her well-lacquered appearance notwithstanding, she has always had a combatant's mentality. (What is her celebrated call to gossip -- "Can we talk?" -- but the opening gong in her personal battle against sham?) She may not be Sally Marr, as Hollywood ads used to boast. But, like her, she has played the lounges with "a two-rape minimum," had a husband abandon her, known crushing failure and lived to tell the tale.
I suspect that's what this oddly confessional evening is really all about.
Sally Marr . . . and Her Escorts
By Joan Rivers, Erin Sanders and Lonny Price, suggested by the life of Sally Marr. Directed by Mr. Price; set by William Barclay; production costumes by David C. Woolard; Ms. Rivers's costumes by David Dangle; lighting by Phil Monat; music by Tim Weil; sound by Jan Nebozenko; projection design by Wendall K. Harrington; dance sequences by Lynne Taylor-Corbett; technical supervisor, Neil A. Mazzella; production stage manager, Martin Gold; associate producers, Joel Brykman, Kevin Duncan, Randy Finch, Sandra Greenblatt and David Young. Presented by Martin Richards, Robert Cole, Ron Kastner, Sam Crothers, Dennis Grimaldi, Kenneth D. Greenblatt and 44 Productions. At the Helen Hayes Theater, 240 West 44th Street, Manhattan.
