Saturday, May 18, 2019

Dramaworks Scores a Comic and Heartbreaking Rendering of ‘House of Blue Leaves’


Palm Beach Dramaworks’ season concludes with its production of John Guare’s Obie Award-winning play, The House of Blue Leaves, another outstanding PBD theatrical achievement.  On one level there is a manic zaniness, a laugh out loud plot, but below that there is the characters' inherent desperation.  Their lives are out of control.  PBD's production unpeels all these disparate layers achieving exactly what Guare must have envisioned, giving us a play completely relevant for our own time, and for all time, demonstrating the futility of equating happiness with fleeting fame.

The plot is an ingenious situation comedy about a zookeeper who lives in his own menagerie in a Sunnyside Queens apartment in 1965.  Artie Shaughnessy is also a mediocre songwriter which he and his girlfriend, his downstairs neighbor Bunny, see as a ticket to stardom if they could only ditch his “crazy” wife Bananas in a mental institution.  They are hell-bent to go to Hollywood where his boyhood chum, Billy Einhorn, has become a famous director. 

There, Artie presumably will become a famous writer of musical numbers for film, but just to make sure, Bunny insists they must get the Pope’s blessing during his trip from the airport, past their apartment on Queens Blvd, ultimately on his way to Yankee Stadium for a speech in 1965.  (No kidding, the Pope made such a trip then with the world hoping his visit would help end the Vietnam War).  Everyone wants in the action with the Pope, three Nuns who wind up in the apartment and the Shaughnessy son, Ronnie, who has gone AWOL from the military to “take care of” the Pope (if you know what I mean).  Also arriving is Billy’s hard-of-hearing girlfriend, the movie star, Corrinna.  Why?  Because Billy too will soon arrive in NY as they are planning to go off to Australia for Corrinna’s ear operation (“Australia’s the place for ears!”) and to film Billy’s Australian epic, entitled, what else, “Kangaroo.”  Did I miss anyone?  So sets the stage for a dramatic denouement while many animals in the Central Park zoo are giving birth simultaneously.

Vanessa Morosco, Elena Maria Garcia, Bruce Linser
Photo by Samantha Mighdoll
Here are all the elements of farce superimposed on the tragedy of a world gone inexplicable, which encapsulates the entire play in an absurdist undertow.  The cast frequently breaks the fourth wall, engaging the audience directly, yet another unusual technique employed by Guare.  This works brilliantly because it feels so natural.  And how many playwrights compose their own songs and lyrics for a non-musical drama, with Artie frequently and frantically compelled to perform a lick or two on the piano?

In full disclosure, I lived in Brooklyn and Manhattan in the 1960’s and was born and bred not far from the same Queens Blvd in the play, near where the playwright himself grew up.  It’s very personal to me, the geography, but most of all the events transpiring just at that time; the horror of the Vietnam War, the assassinations of JFK, RFK, MLK, Malcolm X, the transformation from the placid decade of the fifties to one of upheaval and anxiety.  These were assimilated in our popular culture, our theatres, our literature, our newspapers and airwaves.  They lurk below the surface in Guare’s idiosyncratic The House of Blue Leaves.  It was not terribly unlike today’s wacky world, but without the Internet and social media.  Yet, celebrity worship, fame and the quest for notoriety are among the play’s driving themes.

Director J. Barry Lewis punches up the hilarity level so the audience starts laughing at the first glimpse of Artie, but to make this play work, he walks that fine line between slapstick and poignancy.  In particular, Artie and his wife Bananas are not one dimensional characters, but fully fleshed out vulnerable human beings we can all relate to.  Lewis knows exactly how to engage the audience to feel for them as well as laugh at them.  A frenetic chase scene through the Shaughnessy’s cramped apartment demonstrates Lewis’ mastery of split second timing to squeeze every ounce of hilarity from his characters.  And at those moments where pathos is called for, he is at the top of his game in wringing all the emotion out of his players and audience alike.  It is another J. Barry Lewis directorial master class.  

Bruce Linser is Artie Shaughnessy, the struggling songwriter who is a zookeeper by day and lounge piano player/singer on local amateur nights.  Linser is well known locally as a musical director and an accomplished actor as well.  This is a tour de force role for him.  He not only successfully brings his musical training to this part, but as an actor he brilliantly displays the vulnerability of a man who is out of control in his life, manipulated by the demands of his girlfriend Bunny who has beguiled Artie to reach way beyond his abilities.  He is also the victim of an American Dream of fame gone haywire.  There is a deeply touching desperation in his portrayal of Artie, a man who more than once says “I’m too old to be a young talent” with such comic sadness. 

Linser is especially effective in suddenly changing course, showing true love and care for his unstable wife, resisting attempts to institutionalize her on the one hand, but ultimately relenting to Bunny’s demands and his own need to escape.  He thus finds her a “home” which he describes to Bananas as one where there are beautiful blue leaves on the trees.  He looks at her lovingly and at times holds her with the love of yesteryear.  Linser makes Artie an everyman tragic figure, succumbing to the demands of his exterior world.  Artie, who frantically sought a blue spotlight when we first meet him playing the piano at a Queens Blvd lounge, gets his blue spot at the end, the metaphor full circle. 

Elena Maria Garcia, Bruce Linser
Photo by Samantha Mighdoll

Besides Artie, the most fully realized and developed character in the play is Bananas, played by Elena Maria Garcia, whose antics on stage are belied by sudden clarity of thinking, sometimes the only really sane person as the fool was in Elizabethan drama.  As with her son, there is a shame based scar from her past, but in her case, her imaginary past.  Garcia sits on the edge of the stage and tells the story to the audience which culminates in her being humiliated on TV, Garcia achingly relating “Thirty million people watch Johnny Carson and they all laugh. At me…I’m nobody…Why can’t they love me?”

In some ways, the character of Bananas could be compared to Mary Tyrone or Blanche Dubois from conventional award-winning dramas.  Although essentially a comedy, Garcia brings her character into the tragic realm with her acting and Guare’s incredible script.  Like Mary Tyrone, Bananas is a victim of drugs, not morphine but psychiatric drugs which deprive her of the ability to feel.  Her fear of leaving the apartment for treatment relates to those drugs: “I don’t mind feeling nothing as long as I’m in a place I remember feeling.”  Shock treatments add to her disorientation and fear of institutionalization.

It is a role that cries out for an actress who can sustain detachment, looking blank and uncomprehending, yet grasping the significant moments.  She is a woman fighting for her life.  Garcia's performance is heartbreaking as she struggles to stay home and to help her son Ronnie as well.   Her facial expressions while other actors are engaged speak volumes of pain and even insight.

The comic fulcrum of the play is Vanessa Morosco’s performance as Bunny Flingus, Artie’s downstairs neighbor and wife in waiting, as soon as they can get rid of Bananas.  Morosco’s portrayal of Bunny is primarily played for laughs which keep coming.  She has a burning ambition for Artie (and therefore herself) to make it big in Hollywood with the help of Artie’s friend, Billy.  Morosco is a gifted physical comedian as she struts in her high heels and leopard tights or skin tight skirt.  Guare gives Bunny some of the best comic dialogue in the play, but even when not delivering lines, the audience is primed to crack up by Morosco’s gestures alone. 

Vanessa Morosco, Bruce Linser
Photo by Samantha Mighdoll
Bunny admits to being a bad lay and will sleep with Artie at the drop of a hat.  But she is holding out something much more special for her marriage: “My cooking is the only thing I got to lure you on with and hold you with.  Artie, we got to keep some magic for the honeymoon.”  As a leitmotif, this comes up again and again and has a bearing on a twist in the plot later.  It is hard to believe another actress could give this role that sexy, zany, eccentric punch that Morosco delivers so effortlessly.

Austin Carroll plays Artie and Bunny’s son, Ronnie, who opens up Act II with an audience heart to heart about his damaging experience when he was a 12 year old boy.  He had heard that Billy Einhorn, his father’s best friend from Hollywood, would be visiting NYC to cast his movie, “Huckleberry Finn.”  He secretly prepared himself for an “audition” and Carroll then manically demonstrates the memory of that night, laughing and crying, wildly dancing across the stage concluding with a hilarious dying swan ballet gesture.  Billy just assumed from his bizarre behavior that he was mentally challenged and that humiliation set Ronnie on a course for revenge, his objective to be on the cover of Time magazine.  The Pope’s arrival gives his delusions flight.  More fodder for the absurdist tilt and the theme of seeking fame or in this case infamy.

As the Pope is parading by on Queens Blvd, Billy’s girlfriend, Hollywood starlet, Corrinna Stroller arrives. PBD veteran of untold productions, Margery Lowe, dials up the laughter as her hearing aids give out and she pretends to understand people, perplexing other characters by her amusing inappropriate responses.  

To add to this farce, suddenly three nuns show up, played by Elizabeth Dimon, Irene Adjan and Krystal Millie Valdes.  If the first two names sound familiar it is because they have appeared in many South Florida productions, including PBD.  It was fun to see them in cameo roles.  It is Valdes’ PBD debut as “the little nun.”  All three nuns seek their own moment of fame and surround the TV so they can have photos taken of them “with” Jackie Kennedy or Mayor Lindsay.  As Adjan exclaims “Mayor Lindsay dreamboat!  Mayor Wagner ugh!”  But when they spy Corrinna, they really lose it.  More celebrity worship, with the “A list” celebrity, the Pope himself appearing on the “sacred shrine:” a black and white TV with a rabbit ear antenna. 

We finally meet Billy, the successful Hollywood director, played by PBD veteran Jim Ballard.  Reclining on the couch he says, “Good to see you Artie” with teabags covering his weary eyes.  Ballard is convincing as a Hollywood mogul, one who must surround himself with people and admiration, delivering the supremely ironical line to Artie: “You’re my touch with reality.”  And some foreshadowing: “Love is all Bananas needs.” 

Pierre Tannous plays the Military Policeman who comes to round up Ronnie and throw him in the military brig and Tim Bowman the Institution Orderly who Artie called to pack up Bananas for the Funny Farm. 

Palm Beach Dramaworks’ technical crew work hard to bring off this absurdist comedy with a relatively large cast.  Brian O’Keefe’s costumes more than meet the challenge and I suspect the award-winning Designer had a ball conceiving them, particularly Bunny’s over the top 60’s garb.  Such a pastiche of leopard tights and pink sweater with plastic booties and later her gold speckled black high heels with a skin tight skirt and dazzling brocaded waist-cinched jacket take your breath away.  You simply cannot imagine her looking any other way. 

Bananas’ outfits, by contrast, solidly reflect her broken mental state, particularly the old flannel nightgown and “shmata” blue sweater and frayed robe which reflect her disheveled personality, a sharp contrast to her one appearance in an elaborate dress with fake flowers and multiple crinoline petticoats doing a runway fashion walk saying “it’s a shame it’s 1965.  I’m like the best dressed woman of 1954.”  Billy’s outfit screams Successful Movie Mogul, with his suede jacket, cream silk scarf, and huge gold chain hanging on his chest.  And of course, unremarkable Artie is irresistible in his serviceable Zoo Keepers khaki shirt  and other nondescript clothes of a typical hard working put-upon sixties man.


Scenic design by Victor Becker showcases the shabby apartment that might have seen better days when Bananas was well and could keep up with the housekeeping.  Now it simply reflects the exhausted state of the tenants who are barely hanging on.  Their apartment is oddly pressed up against another apartment house with Ronnie’s bedroom seemingly built into that building, and has an outside fire escape at an odd angle neither going up or down – a hat tip to the absurdist sense of reality.  The space allows just enough room for a hysterical chase around and over the furniture.  Even the wall photos reflect a happier time when Bananas and Artie and Billy and his wife would frequent hot spots in the city.

Steve Shapiro’s sound design is branded 1965 by music such as “Hard Day’s Night” and sound clips of the Pope’s speech in the background.  Shapiro also “plays” Corrinna’s hearing aid breaking down with an exaggerated piercing sound which early hearing aids made, all part of the hilarity.

Lighting by Kirk Bookman is mostly full on with characters bathed in light, with appropriate lighting for the opening lounge scene and then finally the blue spotlight turning into a stage bathed in blue for the dramatic conclusion.

Shows like this are rare with realism, absurdism, comedy, and tragedy coexisting, toggling from one to another and, equally rare, a theatre company that can find that exquisite delicate balance.

"When famous people go to sleep at night, it’s us they dream of, Artie.  The famous ones – they’re the real people.  We’re the creatures of their dreams.”…..Bunny Flingus
 
PBD Cast and Crew on Opening Night







Monday, May 13, 2019

There Will Never Be Anyone Like Her


Doris Day is dead.  Ann and I have been dreading this moment and no sense repeating all the accolades that will be posted and written, all deserved.

But to me, a piece of me has died. The only way I can put it is I loved her public persona.  I felt the same way when John Updike passed away, one who occupied my reading life and made sense of the changes in America, decade by decade. Can it be he has been gone ten years now? 

Doris Day occupied my idealized fantasies of the girl next door during the same period, fresh, wholesome, shorn of pretense.  This is something that cannot be faked.  She was radiant, buoyant, and whenever I needed a pick me up, all I needed was to watch, yet again, one of her films as her inherent goodness was infectious. 

Her talent was peerless.  I don’t think anyone in film could match her for her ability to act, sing, and dance, especially in the comic realm.  She was the whole package, and projected a special kind of lovable personality.

One theatre/film critic, who will remain nameless, has criticized her as being merely an average singer.  Perhaps her voice was not exceptional.  Nor was Sinatra’s.  But there was that something else that made their singing extraordinary.  Sinatra’s phrasing and ability to capture his audience as if he was singing to you might be the best way to describe his gift.  Doris’ was to project her golden personality in song.  Just listening to one of her recordings, I see her radiant smile in my mind.

We’ve usually heard her with big bands but she would have made it as a cabaret singer if movie land did not appropriate her for their own in some 40 films.  One of those was a biopic where she played cabaret singer, Ruth Etting, with Jimmy Cagney, demonstrating both her acting ability and cabaret style in “Love Me or Leave Me” (1955).  Or one can hear her with pianist AndrĂ© Previn on the 1962 album “Duet” and appreciate her gift for singing without the silver screen prop, that sparkling personality still shining through.

In a world sorely in need of rectitude and hope another “companion” of ours has passed, but at least we have her films and recordings to remind us of what can be.  RIP Doris Day.

Friday, May 10, 2019

Maybe There is Hope


Why?  Because baseball continues to reflect and give voice to the American Dream.  Work hard, have talent, succeed, in spite of ethnicity or humble beginnings.  It stands as a bulwark against the tide of dystopian xenophobia promoted by no less than the President of the United States.  It is rule based and while it has succumbed to instant replay challenges, pitch clocks, and exotic statistical metrics, it has essentially changed to remain the same.

There used to be a similar familiarity about the checks and balances of our three branches of government, comforting as a citizen, but we now have a disrupter in the White House, someone who has no sense of history, a disdain for culture, and who measures everything in clicks, sound bites, and winning and losing.  And now he is set to ignore an equal branch of government, Congress, and apparently Republicans there are willing to be accomplices, their sacred vow “to affirm support for the Constitution” relegated to mere hollow words.  If baseball was played this way, players might as well refuse to return to the dugout after strike three is called, saying the people want to see hitting, so let’s make it 4 or 5 strikes before one is called out.  Just tweet it and it shall be.

The recent political developments would normally envelop my blog with multiple entries, as well as more on gun control because of the recent tragic Colorado school shooting, However,with the publication of my book, Waiting for Someone to Explain It, I vowed it would serve as a cathartic statement on such topics, thus allowing my writing life to return to some kind of new normalcy as well.

“As American as apple pie” frequently gets conflated with baseball.  The baseball of my youth was mostly all white players with Jackie Robinson breaking the color line in the National League in 1947 and Larry Doby the American League a few months later.  As an adult I once sat next to Roy Campanella  (who came up to the Dodgers the year after Robinson) at a luncheon; it was sometime in the 1980s.  He was in a wheel chair because of the automobile accident that ended his playing years.  We briefly talked about the old days, not about race, but about baseball.  He was interested in my childhood dreams of pitching but of course I tried to turn the discussion to him, but he was reticent in that regard, I think there was an inherent sadness about missing his buddies, and his last years in baseball. After Jackie Robinson he was the second black player inducted into the Hall of Fame.  I remember his humanity and putting up with me and my questions.

I think of him from time to time especially as the landscape of American baseball changes to reflect our immigrant heritage.  It is truly an international sport and it is no more apparent than here in the United States.  One wonders, if baseball could change and still be the great sport of yesteryear, why not America?  Isn’t that what it means to “make America great?”

And it is nowhere more apparent than in the Miami Marlins’ farm system.  As the Marlins’ CEO (and one of my favorite Yankees of my adult life) Derek Jeter said: "We want Miami to be the destination for top international talent.  This organization should reflect the diversity of the South Florida community."  And indeed it does.

Although we’ve already seen a few Jupiter Hammerheads’ games this season, the Marlins’ Class A+ team in Jupiter, this was the first opportunity to write about one and although Wednesday night’s game involved dropping a 5-1 decision to the St. Lucie Mets, it was notable in other ways.

The first thing that caught my eye after the singing of the National Anthem was the image of the American flag in the background with the Hammerhead’s pitcher, Edward Cabrera, standing in the foreground waiting for the sign.  

He joins the ranks of players from the Dominican Republic, boasting probably more professional baseball players per capita than any place on earth.  We’ve truly, rightfully assimilated the best of the best on the field.  We just need to do so as a nation of citizens.

I was looking forward to seeing him pitch; a highly touted, skinny 6’4” ballplayer who can routinely throw in the high 90s.  His young, 21 year-old body still has time to fill out and will make him even more formidable.   During his last start he had struck out 13 and now has more than 20 scoreless innings to go along with his 1.50 ERA.  While he pitched well for 2 innings (scoreless, and 2 K’s), apparently he had a fingernail problem and had to leave the game.  But one sees how he gets his speed from his whip like delivery.  Edward Cabrera is a player to watch for MLB action, or at least moving up a notch in the minors this year.

He was replaced by Daniel Castano, a lefty who caught my fancy, my being a lefty with baseball dreams which never went beyond my teenage years.  When the Miami Marlins traded away Marcell Ozuna, they got three highly ranked minor leaguers and sort of as an afterthought the left-handed pitcher Castano was thrown in.  He’s labored in the minors but has good control.  His low base on ball to strike out ratio is an attribute of a more mature pitcher.

In five innings he allowed five hits and four runs, although two were unearned, and he struck out five. His ERA is still around 4.00, but his mechanics were powerful, mustering up speed and good breaking stuff.  He was at the low end of the draft (picked in the 19th round) and he is one of the “old guys” on the team at the age of 25.  He’s listed at 6’4” but seems smaller as at 230 lbs he is stocky.  Somehow I think this guy has some chance of making the majors.  Here he is in action:

But that is not the end of the multicultural story.  The shortstop Jose Devers, only 19 years old, is another Dominican.  Disappointingly, my New York Yankees traded him to the Marlins.  He is now one of the high ranking shortstops in the minors, hitting around .370.  If the name sounds familiar, he’s the cousin of Red Sox third baseman Rafael Devers.  How cool would that have been if the NYY held on to him for the Sox / NYY rivalry?  During Wednesday night’s game he went 2 for 4. 

Also on the team is the highly touted 22 year old Cuban Victor Victor Mesa who the Marlins signed for about $5 million, along with his 17-year-old brother, Victor Mesa, Jr. for $1 million. To my knowledge, the latter is yet to play minor league ball, but his older brother looks like he has the right stuff.  They’re sons of the famous Cuban baseball player – you guessed the name, Victor Mesa.  Here’s Victor Victor at bat:

Finally that game was the first rehab assignment for one of the Marlin’s regulars, Garrett Cooper, who unfortunately made a bush league error playing left field and seemed to have difficulty getting back into the grove, but the last I looked he was batting over .500 so I can only assume he’ll be joining the parent club soon.


It was one of those special Florida nights, a cool breeze and on the field the kind of multiculturalism which is to be embraced, not feared.