'Stendhal Syndrome' (2004)

[Last night, Friday, 14 June, WNET, the Public Broadcasting System outlet in New York City, aired Terrence McNally: Every Act of Life, a documentary about the life work of the playwright, as part of the PBS series American Masters.  At the same time, McNally's 1987 play, Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, is currently playing at the Broadhurst Theatre on Broadway with Audra McDonald and Michael Shannon.  I thought it would be a good time, therefore, to post an old play report from my archives of a production of one of his plays—actually two one-acts—which I saw in February 2004.  Think of it as a sort of tribute to McNally on the occasion of the début of his TV biography.  I suppose it’s a funny kind of tribute—since I didn’t like the plays!

[Note that this report was written long before I started Rick On Theater, even before I began writing the reports I sent to my out-of-town friends that eventually gave birth to the blog.  It’s much simpler and has none of the features I’ve incorporated since I launched ROT, most notably the review survey.]  

I saw the new Terrence McNally play (well, plays—they’re two one-acts) Friday night, 27 February [2004], presented by Primary Stages at 59E59 Theaters, Theater A.  Ben Brantley’s review of Stendhal Syndrome in the New York Times on Tuesday, 24 February, and John Lahr’s half-review (he omitted the first play) in the March issue of the New Yorker both found great import in the second piece, Prelude & Liebestod, in which Richard Thomas plays a Leonard Bernstein-like conductor.  While he’s conducting the Richard Wagner piece of the title (the final, dramatic music from the 1859 opera Tristan und Isolde; the title literally means “love death” in German), we hear his thoughts and, to a far less extent, the thoughts of his wife (Isabella Rossellini), his first violinist (Michael Countryman), the soloist (Yul Vazquez). 

You know what?  I think Brantley and Lahr had their heads up their asses when they saw the play.  It’s self-indulgent crap as far as I’m concerned.  Like the first play, Full Frontal Nudity, about a group of American tourists in Florence viewing Michelangelo’s David with their guide (we hear their thoughts, too—but they also speak aloud and it’s very hard to distinguish which is which sometimes), I have to wonder what McNally’s point is.  The critics both dismissed the first play (Lahr didn’t even review it), and they were right to do so—it’s uncohesive nonsense, but both saw great things in the second, comparing it to McNally’s best work like Master Class (1995) and Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune (1987), but I don’t see it.  I have no idea what he’s trying to tell me.

I hate to think I’m a prude these days, but both plays were extremely vulgar, and the second piece was nearly pornographic.  (The Conductor—that’s what he’s called—has a lengthy and graphic description of a bisexual bondage seduction that actually made me squirm.  I’m very glad I didn’t see this with my mother!)  Both critics, who glossed over this somewhat (though Lahr did quote one or two of the vulgar lines from another part of the dialogue), actually found the vulgarity a dramatic asset as it contrasted with the sublime (recorded) music of the Wagner (the sound work was from David Van Tieghem).  

Brantley even mentions that great talents often have great libidos (and small minds), but he doesn’t specifically mention Wagner in this context.  To be honest, I had a little trouble listening closely to the extended passage at issue here—there may have been some remark I tuned out.  (Neither critic said so, but I presume the same point applied to the contrast with the sublime Michelangelo in the first piece.  I imagine you can guess where some of the vulgarity comes from in this piece.  We don’t really see the David, by the way—it’s in the audience; we see selected and changing projections of various parts of it, which was an interesting technique technically/theatrically—but to little effect dramatically from my perspective.  Let’s put it this way: the means didn’t justify the end.)

(There must be something wrong with me—when I admire the David, the part I think of most vividly is the hand with the rock in it.  It’s just so real and alive-looking—it’s hard to believe that it’s carved from marble.  It’s the most remarkable example of the consequences of Michelangelo’s study of anatomy.)

Brantley and Lahr were right about two things: Thomas’s performance was the best bit of acting in the production and the second piece was a better play than the first.  My problem is that neither of these facts made a bit of difference to my enjoyment of the evening.  

Thomas’s acting was far more virtuosic than anyone else’s, but his was the only role that demanded or allowed that level of performance.  The rest of the cast did fine, professional, competent jobs in roles—they all had two each, by the way; Thomas had only the one—that didn’t require more than that.  

The fact that the first play was diffuse and unfocused, a jumble of ideas and bits than didn’t cohere into anything, and the second was better structured and unified is, for me, a purely dramaturgical conclusion.  I didn’t like it any better.  

(In fact, I got more pleasure, inadvertently, from the first piece.  At least it made me reminisce about the last time I was in Florence and went to see the David.  It was the summer of 1969.  We stopped in Florence on the way from Rome to London, and I’d been to Florence before, so I didn’t need the “tour” being offered.  I went directly to the Accademia and “watched” the David—that’s how I feel about that statue: “I’ll go watch the David.”  Because Michelangelo’s sculptures are alive—they move.  No joke.  Anyway, this had nothing to do with McNally’s play—it was just nostalgia.)

All in all, it was an extremely disappointing experience.  That’s two out of three for Primary Stages—the opener, A. R. Gurney’s Strictly Academic (also two one-acts), was eminently dismissible, too.  That leaves only one more in their season, Boy by Julia Jordan in the spring. 

By the way—I had never heard of the “Stendhal Syndrome.”  I wonder if it’s a “real” thing (like the Stockholm Syndrome).  It’s supposed to describe the rapturous effect some artworks have on the viewer/listener, a phenomenon the writer Stendhal (1783-1842) observed.  I wonder if it’s something McNally made up, or if it’s real.  [See note below.]

This was the New York stage debut of Isabella Rossellini, by the way.  (For those who don’t know, she’s the daughter of actress Ingrid Bergman and filmmaker Roberto Rossellini, and half-sister of Pia Lindström.)  I think it may also have been her English-language stage debut as well.  She did quite a good job, but she’s still having some problems with the words now and then—she stumbles and gets tongue tied. 

[I finally got around to Googling “Stendhal Syndrome”—I found nothing in regular encyclopedias or other reference works—and guess what?  It’s a real thing—and it was first described by Stendhal!  Whether or not anyone credits it as an actual psychological disorder is a judgment call, I guess, but it was later described in the 1970’s by a shrink in Florence who had observed it in numerous patients.

[It has been compared to the Jerusalem Syndrome (which I remember reading about before) in which fundamentalist Protestants, for the most part apparently, enter into a religious frenzy after being in Jerusalem for a day or so and visiting some of the biblical sites.  (They apparently start dressing in white robes and wandering the Old City preaching and praying.  They’re not dangerous, says the doctor who ends up treating them at a clinic in Jerusalem, but they do get fanatical.)

[I was in Jerusalem—Christmas 1982.  (I did a trip to Israel and Egypt shortly after the peace treaty was signed.  I sent Christmas cards from Bethlehem—the post office has a special window just for that!—and someone took a photo of me in front of the traditional birthplace of Jesus beneath the Church of the Nativity, because my actual birthday is 25 December—his isn’t; it’s just when many Christians celebrate it.)  I was overwhelmed by something, but it wasn’t religious ferver.  It was a sense of “ancientness.”  Jericho really got me—very, very old things do.  I felt the same overpowering feeling of being in the presence of ancient things at Stonehenge and Tenochtitlan in Mexico also.  Medieval stuff doesn’t cut it—it has to be older than that. 

[There’s also an Italian thriller flick called The Stendhal Syndrome (that’s the English translation, of course) from 1996.  (One of the principal characters, a female detective on the trail of a killer who gets trapped in the Uffizi Gallery, suffers from the psychosomatic disorder.)

[I rather like the idea of art making people a bit mad.]