[As I wrote in the introduction to “Yet More Vintage Reviews from the Archive” (24 May 2021), I reviewed plays in the late 1980s and early 1990s for the New York Native, a biweekly gay newspaper published from 1980 to 1997 in New York City.
[My beat was mostly Off-Off-Broadway and occasionally Off-Broadway, and Native reviews were fairly short since the biweekly usually covered two productions in most columns. (For the reviews republished below, the companion play isn’t posted here—but it can be found somewhere else on Rick On Theatre.)]
JUNGLEBIRDby Martha HorstmanRed Moon EnsembleNat Horne Theatre31 December 1990
[My review of Junglebird was part of “Money, Money, Money” with Smile & Lie, a pair of one-act plays from Alarm Dog Rep: Power Lunch by Alan Ball and Tribes by P. Kevin Strader (posted in “Some Vintage Reviews from the Archive” on 15 March). The original column appeared in the New York Native on 31 December 1990.]
Martha Horstman’s Junglebird is a slight Cinderella comedy of the ’90s. Lorni (playwright Horstman) shares Denise’s cramped apartment with her (Jamie Richards) and Denny (Paul Mullins). She cleans and cooks, and looks after Denise’s bird-like mother. She loves Denny, a pencil salesman with execrable clothing taste, but he spurns her for Denise, a thrift shop clerk who lords it over both of them.
Denny and Denise each have impossible pipe dreams. His is a fool-proof “gotcha” sales technique that will succeed every time, with any product. She fancies rubbing elbows with Jackie O [who would die in 1994 at 64], changing the apartment’s color-scheme with new junk from the thrift shop.
Lorni, a drudge and a char, cleans other apartments in the building despite the abuse the tenants heap on her. She endures the ignominy because she seems to know no better, and because she suffers from mild agoraphobia. All this may change, however, when the lottery ticket Denny has bought for Denise wins the big jackpot.
The performances, directed by Seth Gordon, are nicely grounded and believable. Horstman, puffy-faced and shlumpy, mopes about the apartment like a forlorn, oversized puppy. Mullins’s sharp, whiny voice accentuates his nerdy appearance as he obsesses over his possessions. Richards’s would-be princess is sharp-tongued and snappish, almost barking out her lines.
The play promises some off-beat fun in the beginning, but the first act never defines the focus and the action begins to seem attenuated. In the second act, when the lottery ticket emerges as the main plot element, the action settles even more into a groove. The characters become as sad and threadbare as Lorni’s clothes, and the promise of wackiness evaporates. Junglebird feels like a one-act inflated beyond its ability to sustain its flimsy premise.
Bob Phillips’s fragmentary apartment set is haphazardly furnished in ’50s flea-market tastelessness and Jonathan Green’s costumes perfectly suit each character. Nancy Collings’s lights and Terry Richardson’s sound design (including some weird whistling by “Bursteins”) provide appropriate atmospherics.
[Junglebird was presented at the Nat Horne Theatre (442 W. 42nd Street) on Manhattan’s relatively newly established Theatre Row. It opened on Friday, 30 November 1990, and ran Thursdays through Sundays through 15 December. It was first read in Red Moon Ensemble’s New Plays Series in July and August 1987 at the Contemporary Theatre in Tribeca.
[The Red Moon Ensemble , which defined itself as a nonprofit theater company that explores new works, was formed in 1985 by 40 alumni of University Park, Texas’s Southern Methodist University. (Though a business address is still listed online for Red Moon, I can’t confirm that the Off-Off-Broadway theater is still in operation.]
* * * *STEEPLECHASEby Eric Stephen BoothBooth Enterprises, Inc.The Center28 January 1991
[The column “Talking Heads” included the review below and Lyndon by James Prideaux, posted in “More Vintage Reviews from the Archive,” 19 April 2021. They were first published in the New York Native on 28 January 1991.]
Steeplechase, produced in a staged reading as a kind of backers’ audition, is designated in the program as “a 21st century black gay love story.” Well, it is a love story of sorts, and it is gay, but whatever makes it “twenty-first-century” and “black” is undiscernible. The cast, of course, is black and Hispanic—Booth Enterprises, Inc. (whose president is author Eric Stephen Booth) is “dedicated to producing . . . gay minority art”—but the play never mentions any minority themes or concerns.
It does mention just about everything else, however. Steeplechase, the third Booth Enterprises production, all authored by Booth, himself, is kind-hearted and compassionate, dealing as it does with love in the age of AIDS. It includes all the requisite references: the obligation to practice safe sex, the importance of fidelity, the evils of drug and alcohol abuse, the destructiveness of codependency, the demands of moral responsibility, etc. If there’s a hot-button, Booth pushes it.
He also explains it at length in wordy exposition that takes the place of real dramatic action. Everyone’s background, beliefs, concerns, fears, thoughts, and secrets are spelled out in the dialogue, usually in one- and two-minute speeches.
In fact, between the limitations of the staged reading (which Booth noted in a curtain speech is “close to a full production”) and the overladen dialogue, the actors have nearly nothing left to do but emote. Instead of acting, they are reduced to holding each other’s hands, stroking each other’s faces and putting their arms around each other’s shoulders.
Since director Michael Thomas-Newton misses no opportunity for his cast, usually seated side by side, to engage in these shows of affection, Steeplechase becomes a play about hands.
The story of Steeplechase is simple enough, and, given the amount of exposition, pretty predictable. Gil (John Pettress) and Louie (Carmelo Ortiz), both recovering alcoholics, are committed, caring lovers. Gil’s cousin Caesar (Lawrence Joseph), a heavy drinker, declares himself in love with a new man. Louie’s best friend Teddy (Henry Sanabria), a volunteer at an AIDS clinic, reveals that Louie’s former lover has just tested positive for HIV, but still engages in unprotected sex.
At a party for Gil, Caesar brings his new lover, who turns out to be Brad (Brocton Pierce), Louie’s ex. During a fight, Caesar collapses from an alcohol-induced ulcer and is rushed to the hospital where Louie and Teddy urge Brad to acknowledge his condition and convince Caesar to be tested for AIDS, symptoms of which he has begun to show. Except that no network would air it, it’s a perfect black, gay “Afterschool Special.”
[Steeplechase was produced by Booth Enterprises at The Center (better known as the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center), 208 West 13th Street in Greenwich Village. It ran Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, 12-15 January 1991. Booth produced another showcase of the play in October 1992.
[Eric Stephen Booth-Driver-Robinson (b. 1952) is a native Brooklynite and graduated with a B.A. in Speech & Theater from the City College of New York. He worked on Wall Street, at the Connecticut Post in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and he’s a licensed massage therapist..
[In 1984, he wrote, directed, and co-produced his first play, The Struggle, at the Puppet Loft in New York City’s Tribeca. After that, Booth went on to write, direct, and co-produce seven Off-Off-Broadway plays: Metamorphosis, Steeplechase, Je Ne Regrette Rien, Butch Queens, Toy Soldiers, Olodum, and Forbidden Fruit.
[Booth also had two gay public access TV shows on in the Bronx, Strange Fruits and Fruta Extrana. In 2005, his first film, Forbidden Fruit was showcased at the Toronto Film Festival. The Nemesis Horizon Project: Reptilian Logs, Booth’s first book, is the first of four series of titles.]
* * * *A FIERCE ATTACHMENTby Vivian Gornickadapted by Edward M. CohenJewish Repertory Theatre1 March 1991
[This review was part of “Creating the Self—and Other Fictions” with Road to Nirvana by Arthur Kopit (republished in “More Vintage Reviews from the Archive,” posted on 19 April 2021).]
In A Fierce Attachment, adapted and directed by Edward M. Cohen from Vivian Gornick’s memoir, Fierce Attachments, Tovah Feldshuh performs an unusual task: creating two distinct characters simultaneously. Cohen’s play explores the troubled—and troubling—relationship between Gornick, a liberated, intellectual journalist, and her mother, a working-class Jewish socialist.
Feldshuh must become both Gornick and Gornick’s image of her mother. There are other “characters” in A Fierce Attachment, but the daughter and mother are the focus of this one-actor piece, early in which Vivian predicts, “One of us is going to die from this attachment.”
Feldshuh switches facilely between the roles, even recreating conversations, though she is clearly more comfortable as the daughter. Her Vivian is natural, relaxed, and committed, talking directly with the audience over her desk or from the edge of the set, an open, Conran-style livingroom-kitchen-office designed by Ray Recht.
At the performance I saw, Feldshuh even responded to the audience’s reactions a few times, even though Cohen told me later she wasn’t supposed to. As the mother, however, the actress is more forced. Using a slight old-world Jewish accent that sometimes sounds like an impression of a Billy Cristal character and occasionally stooping like an arthritic crone, the mother now and then becomes a cliché rather than a real person. It is important to remember, though, that this is the writer’s image of her mother, not necessarily her actual mother.
Altogether, A Fierce Attachment is an engaging performance as Feldshuh’s Vivian fights through the often stifling relationship with her mother to realize that “one has to live one’s life.” Granted, that’s something of a cliché, too, but, as Cohen pointed out, at base this is a feminist play without the polemics. What Vivian finally understands is that “I begin and end with myself.” Platitude though that may be, it is a hard-won revelation to someone who has to discover it for herself.
The production is not without problems. Brian Nason’s lighting changes inexplicably and abruptly, though there may be some idea of passing time Cohen has not carried over into Feldshuh’s acting, and the actress occasionally walks in and out of shadow as she darts about the set. More significantly, there is a repetitiousness about the mother-daughter clash that might warrant reducing the hour-and-forty-five-minute two acts to a ninety-minute single act.
Vivian’s stance toward her mother also seems to shift, particularly when she discusses her with someone else, from antagonism to defense. This ambivalence, though certainly reasonable, is not investigated in A Fierce Attachment.
[A Fierce Attachment was staged at the Emanu-El Midtown YM-YWHA, JRT’s sponsor, on East 14th Street; neither the Y nor JRT still exist. The show ran 20 performances from 16 February to 17 March 1991. Vivian Gornick’s memoir was first published in 1987, but Edward M. Cohen’s stage adaptation was premièred in this JRT production.
[JRT, a theater “committed to producing theater that details the Jewish experience in America in the English language,” was founded in 1974 by longtime artistic director Ran Avni; it closed its doors in 2004. The Y, formed in 1960 by the merger of two other community organizations, was moved out of the East Village facility, which was demolished after 1991.]
* * * *ANGEL AND DRAGONby Sally NetzelVillage Theatre Company20 May 1991
[My review of Angel and Dragon was incorporated in the column ”Skin Deep and Heart Shallow” along with Pageant (book and lyrics by Bill Russell and Frank Kelly, music by Albert Evans; posted as “Pageant (1991)” on 4 August 2014).]
Angel and Dragon explores the relationship of two women from 1890 to 1935 by dramatizing an isolated moment in their lives each decade. The two, painter Maggie Irving (Barbara Bercu) and poet Anna Forbish (Susan Farwell), meet and live out their romance in Paris, but the play is bookended by two scenes in New York ten years after Anna’s suicide.
Because the play starts in 1945, then zooms back to 1890, it resembles a female version of Tom Stoppard’s recent Artist Descending a Staircase, but it lacks the imaginative twists and turns and linguistic vibrancy even of that lesser Stoppard. Maggie and Anna are decidedly ordinary women, despite their artistic professions and unorthodox love.
Actually, the problem lies in that love: I never believed it. Yes, hedonistic, libertine Anna, the “Dragon” of the title (the metaphor is from some dream drawings Maggie makes), is possessive and controlling. Yes, sincere, naïve Maggie, the “Angel,” is jealous and abandoned. But these are just clichés as written by Sally Netzel and acted by Farwell and Bercu.
The heart of the story ought to be the love of these two women through nearly fifty years, but the play I saw was about character traits, not relationship. Bercu, when she wasn’t trying to be old, was the most relaxed and convincing human being onstage; Farwell often reminded me of Jane Alexander as Hedda Hopper in the 1985 TV movie Malice in Wonderland, all nasally hauteur and arch sophistication.
Everyone, including the writer and Gigi Rivkin, the director, tries too hard to evoke period rather than the intimate friendship between two people. This inclination is manifested in Ismael Hernandez and Jillian Maslow’s costumes, which are too pristine to look like anyone’s real clothes. This is especially so of Anna’s, which are so flamboyant they call attention to themselves rather than enhance her character.
There is a third person in each of Anna and Maggie’s scenes, which take place in the painter’s studio. A model—a different one each time, all played by Michelle Berke—is always present, though she has little to do, spending her stage time silently reading, eating, rolling bandages—even sleeping. I wondered what was the point of having her present at, but not active in the life of two sometime lovers. I never figured it out (but I kept thinking of Nicol Williamson’s problems with I Hate Hamlet; perhaps Berke should have walked offstage occasionally).
[Sally Netzel’s Angel and Dragon was mounted by the Village Theatre Company at its home theater at 133 W. 22nd Street in Manhattan’s Chelsea Wednesdays through Sundays, from 1 to 26 May 1991. (It was presented in rotating rep with Frontiers by Meir Z. Ribalow.) Netzel’s play also ran previously at the TOMI Theatre on the Upper West Side in June 1983.
[Sally Netzel has written over 30 plays, most produced around the country (and published by the Dramatic Publishing Company and the Pioneer Drama Service), including three musicals and 10 plays for children. She is the co-author of a novel, Midsummer, and author of a book of short stories entitled Rosinante’s Sallies: Animal Fables for Adults and another novel Bohunk Humoresque.
[A member of the Dallas Theater Center in Texas for 15 years as resident playwright, director, actor, and producer of plays for children, Netzel is a recipient of the Outer Critics Circle’s John Gassner Award for Playwriting. She holds a master of arts degree in theater from Trinity University in San Antonio, where she also served as an associate professor of acting.
[The Village Theatre Company was formed by a troupe of actors in 1987. (I haven’t been able to confirm if the company’s still producing or, if not, when it closed.)]
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