More Vintage Reviews from the Archive

 

[As I reported in “Some Vintage Reviews from the Archive” (15 March 2021), I wrote reviews for the New York Native, a biweekly gay newspaper published in New York City from 1980 until 1997, in the late 1980s and early 1990s.   

[The notices were relatively short because the paper ran reviews in pairs, so there were two plays covered in most columns.  (For most of the reviews republished here, the companion play has been omitted—though it may have been posted in another location on Rick On Theatre.)

[I covered mostly Off-Off-Broadway and occasionally Off-Broadway, and sometimes, the artists in the productions, including the dramatists, were prominent—or, at least familiar to theatergoers.  For “More Vintage Reviews from the Archive,” I’ve collected some of those notices.]

ARISTOCRATS

by Brian Friel

Manhattan Theatre Club

Theatre Four

15 May 1989 

[My review of Irish playwright Brian Friel’s Aristocrats was part of "Family Problems," which also included a review of The Rug of Identity (posted in “‘I’m So Confused . . . !’” on ROT on 4 July 2012) in the New York Native of 15 May 1989.

[Friel (1929-2015) was a popular short story-writer and dramatist who was considered by many as one of the best playwrights in the English-speaking world.  His plays produced on Broadway included Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1966; revived, 1994), The Loves of Cass McGuire (1966), Lovers (two one-acts: Winners and Losers; 1968), The Mundy Scheme (1969), The Freedom of the City (1974), Faith Healer (1979; revived, 2006), Dancing at Lughnasa (1991; Tony for Best Play, 1992), Wonderful Tennessee (1993), Translations (1995; revived, 2007).

[Many of these plays were also presented Off-Broadway.  In addition to Aristocrats, which won a 1989 Drama Critics' Circle Award and a 1991 Lucille Lortel Award, Friel’s drama Molly Sweeney also received a Drama Critics' Circle and a Lucille Lortel Award for OB runs, both in 1996.]

Family and relationships play an important role in a serious vein in Aristocrats, the 1979 play by Brian Friel.  Compared by some to Chekhov’s plays, particularly The Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard, and bearing the mantle of Friel’s Irish predecessors William Butler Yeats and Sean O’Casey—both invoked here—Aristocrats, as staged by British director Robin Lefèvre, takes a very careful look at a disintegrating aristocratic Irish Catholic family.  With some wonderful performances, most notably from Dubliner Niall Buggy, on a John Lee Beatty set so evocatively real you can smell the must and mildew, Aristocrats tries to make the O’Donnell family of Ballybeg stand in for all of Ireland, their problems being analogies for those of a whole people.

Despite the richly textured work of cast, director, and designers, however, the cross-over never really happens.  As a study of an eccentric, all-but-decayed family desperately in need of new, peasant-stock blood, the details are often fascinating in themselves.  Son Casimir’s possibly imaginary family and his fuzzy-at-best memories of past O’Donnell glories are so charmingly evoked by Buggy I wanted them to be true.  The vitality and strength of Willie Diver (John Christopher Jones) is so refreshing and robust, I wanted him to come to the rescue of the family and its moribund manor. 

The minutiae—some fantasy, some real—of the O’Donnell history so lovingly laid out for the scrutiny of Tom Hoffnung (Peter Crombie), an American sociology grad student, give the play the impression of weightiness.  The script, unfortunately, never ties it all together into something that makes the family and its fate greater than the sum of the wonderful parts. 

The researcher-catalyst doesn’t ever seem more than a contrivance and a foil to point out the historical inaccuracies in family lore.  The impending wedding of daughter Claire (Haviland Morris) to a much older man and the alcoholism of daughter Alice (Margaret Colin) never provide the apotheosis I was led to expect. 

The enigmatic appearances of crazy Uncle George (Thomas Barbour) end up being little more than a brief joke.  In the end, the death of District Judge O’Donnell (Joseph Warren), supposedly marking the end of an era like the sale of the Ranevskys’ cherry trees, just puts a period at the end of a run-on sentence that was finished long ago.

[Aristocrats was first performed at the Abbey Theatre, the National Theatre of Ireland, in Dublin in 1979.  The Manhattan Theatre Club revival started previews Off-Broadway at Theatre Four (55th Street between 9th and 10th Avenues – no longer functioning) on 11 April 1989 and opened on 14 April; the production closed on 24 September.  There was a revival of Friel’s play in New York City by the Off-Broadway troupe Irish Repertory Theatre in 2009.

[The MTC presentation won several performance awards and two for Friel’s play: the 1989 Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Foreign Play and the 1991 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play.]

*  *  *  *

“HELLO, BOB”

by Robert Patrick

La MaMa E.T.C.

First Floor Theater

29 October 1990 

[I’ve mentioned Robert Patrick’s “Hello, Bob” several times on ROT.  The review was part of the column "Broadway Revisited" (with the review of the musical Two By Two [see below] in the New York Native of 29 October 1990.

[Patrick (b. 1937) was the most prolific playwright of Off-Off-Broadway back in the early ’60s when that cultural venue was just emerging in Greenwich Village and the East Village (see my articles “Greenwich Village Theater in the 1960s,” 12 and 15 December 2011, and “Caffe Cino,” 11 and 14 September 2018).  A list of his plays is way too long to reproduce here, but his biggest success in terms of public attention was Kennedy’s Children, presented on Broadway from 3 November 1975 to 4 January 1976.  

[As you’ll read, “Hello, Bob” is about the repercussions of the mainstream success of Kennedy’s Children on playwright Patrick.  He particularly lambastes Shirley Knight, who received a 1976 Tony as Best Featured Actress In A Play, for her performance in the play.  I have quipped that Knight ought to consider suing for defamation of character for the things Patrick says about her in “Hello, Bob.”]

Robert Patrick’s current play has two connections to his 1974 piece, Kennedy’s Children.  First, like Kennedy’s Children, “Hello, Bob” is a series of monologues; second, all the monologues relate in some way to the success of Kennedy’s Children and the effect of that success on Patrick.  The links end here, however. 

The threads that keep Kennedy’s Children cohesive—the interwoven speeches as each character, however unconnected to the others, take and then relinquish focus; the omnibus setting of the bar to which the characters retreat out of the rain—are absent from “Hello, Bob.”  Here the twenty-one speeches, sometimes one side of elliptical conversations with an invisible Patrick, range in time from 1975 to 1981 and take place, in Act I, all over New York and, in Act II, around the country.  The only adhesives are an unseen and unheard Patrick and the frequent allusions to his unnamed Broadway play.

Further, whereas Kennedy’s Children considered “the death of the idea of heroes as guides for our lives,” according to Patrick’s note in the published text, “Hello, Bob” seems only to be concerned with praising Patrick—the man, the artist, the Samaritan, the lover.  There are many references to Patrick as a “great guy” and to his “great play.”  Over and over again, he is shown to be a tireless teacher, dauntless crusader for noble causes, and unwavering friend.  Everyone loves “Bob.”  In one bit, a cabby, declaring himself straight, offers to jump into the back seat for a little off-the-meter fun “just because I like you.”  In another scene, Bob’s lover, about to leave him, proclaims Bob a “wonderful lover” and offers a quickie before departing.  Everyone is ready to sacrifice something for this terrific man; even a New York Times reporter risks his job to inform Patrick that his interview will be edited to make him look foolish. 

Under the author’s direction, a four-actor ensemble performs the monologues, with Patrick’s “favorite actress,” Carol Nelson, subject of a recent Native profile, taking all ten female characters.  With a minimal setting of black metal folding chairs and a couple of cafe tables on a black-painted, two-level stage, the actors must evoke not only their characters, but the locales and, often, a mimed Patrick’s presence as well.  (This last seems most troublesome for the cast.  Patrick keeps changing height, from a very tall standing figure to a very short seated one.  In one piece, Nelson holds Patrick’s invisible hands as if they are as flat as paper.)  Except for their costumes and their words, few of the characters are clearly delineated or imaginatively portrayed.  Arnold, a working man on a bus, has a generalized southern accent to indicate an uneducated, red-neck bigot—and he’s from Maine; Wren, who spent some time in Ireland, produces a cartoon brogue. 

Characterization is not deeply grounded, either.  Wren, for instance, relates what ought to have been a horrific experience: being tied to a bed next to her IRA lover while he is executed.  She tells of being unable to free herself “from dawn till noon” while his blood soaks her gag and flies feed on his brains leaking out of the hole in his head.  Nelson pauses not a moment, catches her breath not once, gulps back not one gasp during the description.  The audience reacted more viscerally than does the actress.

Disjointed and undifferentiated as the moments are, one is amusing.  Edmond Ramage delivers an evocative telephone monologue as Tennessee Williams.  Ramage endows “Tennessee” with wry humor, a perception of the absurdity of the worlds of art and journalism, and a neat sense of revenge.  I cannot vouch for the accuracy of the portrayal, but as theater, this was, for me, the most interesting character and most intriguing scene of the evening.

[Robert Patrick is mentioned often in my early Rick On Theatre article “Is Waiting For Godot Trash?” (17 April 2009), on which the playwright also left several Comments.  He also figures in my two-part report “Caffe Cino” (11 and 14 September 2018).

[“Hello, Bob” was produced at Manhattan’s East Village La MaMa E.T.C. (Experimental Theatre Club) from 11 to 28 October 1990.  It was developed in several Off-Off-Broadway theaters before being presented at La MaMa.  A 1995 production of “Hello, Bob” was presented at Chicago’s Retro Theatre and a 1996 revival was mounted at L.A.’s Lionstar Theater.  (Patrick’s complete play is available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ1K8wNcNmI.)

[Kennedy’s Children was produced at Playwrights Horizons from 30 May to 9 June 1973 before it transferred to Broadway’s John Golden Theatre.  Under the direction of Clive Donner, it began previews there on 30 October 1975 and opened on 3 November; it ran for 72 regular performances and five previews, closing on 4 January 1976.  Kennedy’s Children was nominated for the 1976 Outstanding New Play Drama Desk Award.]

*  *  *  *

TWO BY TWO

by Richard Rogers, Martin Charnin, and Peter Stone

Triangle Theatre Company

Church of the Holy Trinity

29 October 1990 

[The other half of "Broadway Revisited" (see above) is this notice for Two By Two, a 1970 Broadway musical with music by Richard Rodgers (1902-79), lyrics by Martin Charnin (1934-2019), and book by Peter Stone (1930-2003).  At the Imperial Theatre, the show ran from 10 November 1970 to 11 September 1971, for 351 performances.  Danny Kaye played Noah; also in the cast were Joan Copeland (Arthur Miller’s younger sister), Marilyn Cooper, and Madeline Kahn.

[The creative team, adapting The Flowering Peach, the play by Clifford Odets (1906-63), was led by the great stage composer Rodgers, former partner of Lorenz Hart (1895-1943) and Oscar Hammerstein II (1895-1960), whose output includes classic American musicals such as The Girl Friend (1926), A Connecticut Yankee (1927), Jumbo (1935), On Your Toes (1936), Babes in Arms (1937), The Boys from Syracuse (1938), Pal Joey (1940), Oklahoma! (1943), Carousel (1945), State Fair (film, 1945 and 1962; stage, 1996), South Pacific (1949), The King and I (1951), Cinderella (TV, 1957; Broadway, 2013), Flower Drum Song (1958), and The Sound of Music (1959), among many others.

[Charnin wrote the lyrics for the musicals Mata Hari (1967), Annie (1977), Cafe Crown (1989), and Annie Warbucks (1993).  Stone wrote the book for Kean (1961), 1776 (1969), Sugar (1972), Woman of the Year (1981), My One And Only (1983), The Will Rogers Follies (1991), and Titanic (1997). (Stone also wrote the screenplay for my favorite thriller movie, 1963’s Charade.)]

The Triangle Theatre Company’s twentieth-anniversary revival of the Richard Rodgers-Martin Charnin-Peter Stone musical, Two By Two (1970), is a small, gentle pleasure.  The story of Noah and the flood, adapted from The Flowering Peach (1954) by Clifford Odets, is an old-fashioned musical, and perhaps not one of Rogers’s greatest scores, but it is fun and sweet, and excellently performed in the small space at the Church of the Holy Trinity.

On a tiny set designed by Bob Phillips, with a lopsided hut the size of an outhouse at its center (there is an outhouse, too—even smaller), painted purple and green and gray, the cast of eight portrays the family of Noah (Kip Niven) and Esther (Meredyth Rawlins) as a bickering, disrespectful, loving, prototypical Jewish family.  If Noah sounds a little like Billy Crystal’s old Jewish man, he is less caricatured and warmer of heart.  Niven’s love song to his dying Esther is a real two-hanky moment.

Most remarkable in this production are the voices.  While all the performers sing creditably, standouts are Tom Lloyd as Japheth, who has the strongest voice and the most character when he sings, and Mary Lee Marson as Rachel.  Also excellent singers are Bryan Batt as Ham, Wendy Baila as Leah and Lindsey Mitchell as Goldie.  Singling these out should not detract from the nice ensemble acting of the cast on the sometimes cramped set.

If Two By Two isn’t one of the all-time great American musicals, it is still nice occasionally to return to the old-time shows when you could sing the songs and for which the term “musical comedy” was coined.  The Triangle show is such a respite.

[Triangle’s revival of Two By Two ran at the Church of the Holy Trinity (East 88th Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues) from 4 to 28 October 1990.  The show is a favorite in community theaters and church groups, and there’ve been a number of revivals over the years with stars such as Milton Berle (The Muny in St. Louis, 1971) and Shelley Berman (National Tour,1972-73).

[Odets’s Flowering Peach, the last original play by the playwright produced in his lifetime, ran at the Belasco Theatre in the Theatre District from 28 December 1954 to 23 April 1955, 135 performances.  Staged by the author, the play starred Menasha Skulnik, a Polish-born star of the Yiddish theater, as Noah.]

*  *  *  *

MAMBO MOUTH

by John Leguizamo

American Place Theatre

3 December 1990 

[My review of John Leguizamo’s Mambo Mouth was paired with my notice for Invitation to the Beginning of the End of the World (Invitation to the Beginning of the End of My Career) by Penny Arcade in a column entitled "Come To The Cabarets" (see “Penny Arcade: Two Performances,” 15 November 2013). The two reviews appeared in the New York Native on 2 December 1990.

[Mambo Mouth wasn’t a play, but a stand-up routine in the vein of popular monologuists of the time like Whoopi Goldberg (Broadway event, 1984-85) and Danitra Vance (see “Short Takes: Some Unique Performances,” 28 July 2018).  Born in Bogota, Colombia, Leguizamo (b. 1964) is an actor, writer, and stand-up comedian who drew on his youth in Queens, New York, for the characters he played in his monologues.

[Today, Leguizamo works mostly as an actor in film, television, and theater, but in the ’90s, he was a stand-up comic with a growing reputation.  He’d been creating his own material since the 1980s, trying it out at the performance art spaces on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and in the East Village.  This eventually became Mambo Mouth which was his breakthrough as an autobiographical monologuist; the reviews launched that aspect of his budding career. 

[Leguizamo’s texts have been published, including Mambo Mouth (Bantam, 1993), which was also recorded for HBO and aired in 1991, giving the performer a national audience.  He performed all across the country to excellent reviews.  (His other published texts are Spic-o-rama [Bantam, 1994] and Freak [Riverhead Trade, 1998]; all three, plus Sexaholix, are collected in The Works of John Leguizamo [Ecco, 2008].)]

On the tiny stage of the American Place Theatre’s SubPlot, a cabaret in the theater’s basement that’s more a passageway than a room, John Leguizamo creates seven Latino characters during his hour-and-fifteen-minute Mambo Mouth.  Aside from costumes and a few props, he does this mostly with a superb physical sense of his characters.  Leguizamo is, according to his biography, an actor (rather than a writer or comic), and though I haven’t seen his film or stage performances, I’d bet he’s a terrific character actor.

[On the film website IMDb, Leguizamo is quoted as saying that he often plays supporting—that is, character—roles “[b]ecause you get to be free.”  He added, “There are more, better written supporting parts than there are leading parts.”  I don’t know the source of this quotation however.]

Directed by Peter Askin, Mambo Mouth is pretty straightforward.  One by one, Leguizamo presents his characters in brief scenes: Agamemnon, an oily Latin-lover type hosting “Naked Personalities,” “the most dangerous show on public access TV”; Angel, a street punk busted for knocking one of his many girlfriends around; a young teenager telling his friend that he just became a man at Nilda’s Bodega & Bordello; an illegal immigrant caught in an INS sting; a streetwalker consoling a friend; a stoned-out street vendor who calls himself an “Inca god” selling ointments and artifacts; and, in his cleverest persona, “The Cross-Over King,” a Latino who “became” Japanese selling the concept in a slide lecture.

There’s some Spanish in Leguizamo’s routine, and there were a number of Hispanics in the mixed audience, but his material is readily accessible to all of us—especially if you watch TV.  Leguizamo’s brief is to use Latin stereotypes to bust them open and his characters—except the last one—are recognizable from our pop culture. 

Along with his thorough and natural physical portrayals, Leguizamo’s lines are clever and pointed.  They are also often vulgar and belligerent.  Agamemnon, for instance, tells us his father dismisses him with “Out of a hundred thousand sperm, I can’t believe you were the quickest!”  The knife-wielding hooker regularly threatens to cut off the “peepee” of anyone who annoys her.  Sex, sexuality, and the genitals are the most common focus, as if they were the only forces in these people’s lives.  

Mambo Mouth is billed as “A Savage Comedy,” but it isn’t always really funny.  It’s clearly not meant to be.  Underlying the humor is a base of anger and bitterness, and, disturbingly, an apparent self-hatred which ultimately made me uncomfortable.

[In a 1991 interview with Glenn Collins of the New York Times, Leguizamo said, as if in response to my last comment above, that counselling sessions at Manhattan’s Youth Counseling League “helped me to get over my rage and my negativity toward myself."

[In another interview, he told the Los Angeles Times’ Patrick Pacheco, “Writing this play was like an exorcism . . . from the self-loathing and all the ugly things that I feel I carry around in myself . . . .”

[Mambo Mouth began performances at the American Place Theatre (on 46th Street west of 6th Avenue) on 8 November 1990 and, after a short hiatus, transferred to the Orpheum Theatre in the old Yiddish theater district along 2nd Avenue (between 6th and 7th Streets in the East Village) on 4 June 1991.  Altogether, the show ran 187 performances, closing on 25 August.  It later played in LA.

[Directed by Peter Askin, the performance piece garnered the 1991 Obie Award for Leguizamo’s performance and the 1991 Outer Critics Circle’s John Gassner Award  for his writing.  Productions have been mounted all over the country, as well as abroad, Other actors have performed Leguizamo’s texts, such as Peter J. Mendez who did Mambo Mouth in Baltimore in 1997 and Riley Faison in 2015 at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.]

*  *  *  *

LYNDON

by James Prideaux

John Houseman Theatre

28 January 1991 

[I reviewed James Prideaux’s Lyndon, a one-man bio-play about Lyndon Baines Johnson, the 36th President of the United States, as part of “Talking Heads,” combined with my review of Steeplechase by Eric Stephen Booth, in the New York Native of 28 January 1991.  (The playwright described Steeplechase as “a 21st century black gay love story.”)

[Prideaux (1927-2015) was principally a writer for film and television, but his best-known stage work was The Last of Mrs. Lincoln (1972), which won him a 1973 Drama Desk Award for Most Promising Playwright.  It also won Julie Harris a Tony for Best Actress In A Play for her performance in the title role.

[Several other of his plays were performed on the summer straw-hat circuit with stellar casts and his TV movie, Mrs. Delafield Wants to Marry (1986). was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Drama/Comedy Special.  It starred Katherine Hepburn as the title character, for which performance she was also nominated for an Emmy.  Prideaux’s memoirs are entitled Knowing Hepburn and Other Curious Experiences (1996).]

Laurence Luckinbill’s performance in Lyndon is remarkable.  While he may not look or sound exactly like the real LBJ, he doesn’t look or sound like LL either.  With the aid of an incredible make-up job (designed by Kevin Haney and taking a 2½-hour session with costuming), he completely convinces you that you are watching someone real up on the stage.  His gestures, movements, and business, his inflections, phrasing, and rhythm are all natural and unforced. 

The experience was not unlike that of watching Pat Carroll as Gertrude Stein or Hal Holbrook as Mark Twain.  It’s mesmerizing to watch Luckinbill, especially when he dons Johnson’s signature Stetson, as he reminisces on the former president’s political career from the late ’20s through his announcement in 1968 that he would not run again for the presidency. 

There is some serendipitous juxtaposition of history with current events when Johnson discusses the Congress’s 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, the escalation of the war in Vietnam, and the protests in Lafayette Park across from the White House.  [President George H. W. Bush had led the U.S. into the Gulf War against Iraq, August 1990-February 1991, on the strength of a U.N. resolution and weakly supported Congressional authorization.]  

In the end, however, I am left with the question of why this man’s life is worth dramatizing now.  Unquestionably, the mid-1960s were a dramatic and tumultuous era, but, despite some excellently mimed moments, Lyndon is essentially all talk as Luckinbill, directed by Richard Zavaglia, meanders around the simplified, gray-toned Oval Office set.  James Prideaux’s play, drawn from Merle Miller’s book, Lyndon: An Oral Biography (1980), is really a living history lesson, perhaps more moving for those of us who remember the events than for those born after Vietnam became little more than a bad dream. 

I also can’t shake the feeling that Prideaux and Luckinbill have sanitized the LBJ image, making him a more endearing, grandfatherly figure than he really was.  Though the reminiscences contain several admissions by Johnson that he made some deals and occasionally voted against his own beliefs on issues like civil rights and desegregation, the timbre of the performance is one of calm, thoughtful deliberation and righteous governance for the benefit of all Americans. 

That’s not the LBJ I remember, nor the man whose reputation for back-room infighting, self-interested wheeler-dealing, and even downright vindictiveness was reportedly well deserved.  President Johnson was not one of the nicest men to occupy the White House, though, by God, he got things accomplished.  Such is not the figure embodied by Luckinbill on the stage of the John Houseman Theatre.  Still, the fiction presented is an extraordinary performance for its own sake.

[James Prideaux’s Lyndon opened at the John Houseman Theatre (demolished in 2005) on Theatre Row on 10 January 1991 and closed on 3 May.  Luckinbill was seen in an earlier version, called Lyndon Johnson, on the Public Broadcasting Service on 8 April 1987.  (Jack Klugman portrayed LBJ in an earlier version of Prideaux’s play in 1984 at the Eisenhower Theater in Washington, D.C.’s John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.)

[My reference above to Hal Holbrook’s Mark Twain was to the actor’s one-man portrayal of the writer in Mark Twain Tonight!, seen on Broadway originally in 1966.  I saw it on CBS TV in 1967.  Holbrook won both a Tony and a Vernon Rice Award (now the Drama Desk Award) for his Broadway performance; he was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Single Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Drama for the TV version. 

[(Dick Smith, a special make-up effects artist, won the Emmy for Individual Achievements in Art Direction and Allied Crafts – Makeup for Holbrook’s transformation from the 41-year-old actor to the 70-year-old humorist—a four-hour long application.)

[The mention of Pat Carroll as Gertrude Stein was a reference to the actress’s one-woman, Off-Broadway play, Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein at the Provincetown Playhouse in 1980 for which the actress won two 1980 acting honors: the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actress in a Play and the Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Performance.

[While I was watching the performance, I kept saying to myself, ‘Gee, Stein’s a really interesting person.  I’m so glad I got to meet her’!  When I realized what I was thinking—that that was actually Gertrude Stein in front of me—I was mighty glad I didn’t say that out loud so my companion and others near me could hear how deeply I’d fallen under Carroll’s spell.

[I don’t write fan letters, but I sat down and wrote one to Carroll and said that if she ever took on students, I was ready to sign up!]

*  *  *  *

ROAD TO NIRVANA

by Arthur Kopit

Circle Repertory Company

18 March 1991 

[Reviewed alongside Vivian Gornick’s A Fierce Attachment (adapted by Edward M. Cohen), Arthur Kopit’s Road to Nirvana was part of the column I called “Creating the Self—and Other Fictions” in the New York Native of 18 March 1991.  (Attachment explores the relationship between a liberated, intellectual journalist and her mother, a working-class Jewish socialist—with Tovah Feldshuh playing both parts.)

[Kopit (1937-2021; the dramatist died on 2 April at 83, while I was preparing this post) came to the theater world’s attention in 1962 with Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad (as much for the length of its title as for the content of the absurdist drama)—which won the Vernon Rice Award (now known as the Drama Desk Award).  He was nominated for another Drama Desk Award in 1979 for Wings (see my report on a later production on 26 November 2010).

[Kopit was a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist—for Indians (1969) and Wings—and a three-time Tony Award nominee: Best Play, Indians (1970); Best Play, Wings (1979); and Best Book of a Musical, Nine (1982).  He was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame in 2017.]

Arthur Kopit’s Road to Nirvana was first produced as Bone-the-Fish (1989, Actors Theatre of Louisville), a title reminiscent of Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow (1988) to which Kopit’s play is a reaction.  In fact, Kopit has said that the inspiration for Road to Nirvana was the casting of Madonna in Speed-the-Plow: “I became interested in the phenomenon of Madonna, partly because she was cast in this play and couldn’t have been cast in a high school play.  I wondered what it was like to be that powerful as a pop star, that untalented as an actor and yet mysteriously talented.”  The Nirvana of his play’s title is Kopit’s take on Madonna, with a little Shirley MacLaine thrown in.

But Nirvana doesn’t show up until the second act.  Until then, the play is about Hollywood deal-making at its most venal.  Not filmmaking; deal-making.  Have you ever heard anyone say, “I’d cut my wrists to get that . . . “? or “I’d eat shit for that . . .”?  Well, in Road to Nirvana, they mean it literally.  Jerry (Peter Riegert) is so desperate to get back into making feature films, he agrees to everything his old partner, Al (Jon Polito) demands to get in on the deal of a lifetime—a film, called Moby Dick, that is the life story of rock phenom Nirvana (Amy Aquino). 

Nirvana, it seems, has been a) strung out for so long, and b) reincarnated so many times, that she can’t remember her real life, so she wrote Moby Dick, changing Ahab’s name to hers and the whale to a giant cock.  Al and Lou (Saundra Santiago), his new partner and lover, want to make this flick so badly they’ll do anything to get the deal.  Eventually, so does Jerry, but he has to sway Nirvana.  He does this finally by agreeing to one last humiliation.  I’ll give you a hint: Have you ever heard anyone say, “I’d give my left nut . . . “?

The cast, under Jim Simpson’s sure direction, performs these absurdities with complete conviction, handling Kopit’s occasionally Stoppardesque dialogue stylishly and firmly.  They toss around obscenities, one in particular, until they are meaningless and make you believe completely in even the most meaningless phrases.  (James Puig’s performance as a confused and abused servant should be noted.  Never saying more than two words, Puig communicates volumes with a single look.)  

Trouble begins at the second act when the play splits into two.  Act one is fast, funny and absurd, but act two slows considerably, covering much of the same territory.  The character of Nirvana isn’t as ditzy or flaky as we are led to believe she would be.  She’s just a manipulative and paranoid control freak.  

If the second-act set, designed by Andrew Jackness, weren’t so exotic—a Roman bath-cum-Mayan temple—there would be little of interest save the not-so-surprise climax.  The act doesn’t so much end as stop—but, then, anything following a surgical castration would be (ahem) anticlimactic.

[Arthur Kopit’s Road to Nirvana opened at the Circle Rep’s theater in the West Village on 13 February 1991; it ran for 54 performances, closing on 31 March.  The play had been commissioned by the Actors Theatre of Louisville and premièred there (as Bone-the-Fish) in 1989. 

Between the ATL début and CRC production, Road to Nirvana was presented at the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, in 1990.  Subsequent productions were mounted in L.A. (1991); Chicago (1993, 1997); Burbank (1993); Herndon, Virginia (1994); and Venice, Florida (2015).

[Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow’s première was produced by Lincoln Center Theater at Broadway’s Royale Theatre (now the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre) in 1988.  Directed by Gregory Mosher, the artistic director of LCT, the cast included Madonna, Joe Mantegna, and Ron Silver.  It ran 23 previews and 279 regular performances and won the Tony Award for Best Actor In A Play and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actor In A Play, both for Silver.

[Frank Rich wrote in the New York Times: “Madonna serves Mr. Mamet's play much as she did the Susan Seidelman film ‘Desperately Seeking Susan,’ with intelligent, scrupulously disciplined comic acting.  She delivers the shocking transitions essential to the action and needs only more confidence to relax a bit and fully command her speaking voice.”

[Frederick M. Winship of United Press International deemed, however, “The role of Karen, a young woman with no past that we know of, is an impossible one and Madonna has too little talent or theatrical imagination to make something of it, even with Mosher’s expert help.

[He continued, “She is rigid, almost as though she is terrified to be on stage.  Her voice has a one-note quality that becomes boring and her characterization is limited to superficialities that only establish Karen as an overly intent, patently naive young woman who is all too ready to admit she has done ‘bad’ things to establish rapport with a man all too ready to seduce her.”