Sex is a very difficult thing to accomplish onstage. I hear
it’s as common as cherry pie backstage, but that’s nothing to do with us.
Onstage sex is tricky. People, after all, are watching.
Voyeurism doesn’t suit the communal activity of theater.
Movies are different; movies are more private. There are dirty movies, no dirty
plays. They try . Remember all the
fuss about Nicole Kidman, the real live very briefly naked movie star in The Blue Room ? Thrilling, wasn’t it? You
can’t get it out of your mind!
Nah …. At its ballyhooed best, the adaptation of Arthur
Schnitzler’s disturbing 1900 drama Reigen
(which became Max Ophüls’ movie La Ronde )
was undangerous, not erotic, modish, not carnal. It became what’s acceptable in
an anemic culture-a light sex comedy of manners, or something tamely, acceptably voyeuristic. The early plays
of Harold Pinter were charged with an erotic subtext. Christopher Hampton’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses was nice and
weird. Patrick Marber’s Closer , the
first cybersex play in dramatic history, on the other hand, was essentially
about everything but sex. It satirized it instead.
You have to wrack your
brains to recall a sexy play. And if you do, it’s no good. Which brings us
reluctantly to Richard Nelson’s sexual coming-of-age story, Madame Melville , starring Macaulay
Culkin, at the Promenade Theatre. The former child superstar-forever lumbered,
it seems, with his Home Alone
movies-is boldly trying to bust out of his own adorable screen myth, though
with spooky results. Now 20, he seems to convey both innocence and insolence in
an apparent split identity, like someone stiffly uncomfortable in his own
smooth skin.
The character he’s playing, however, is uncomfortable, an awkward schoolboy, as sensitive and pure as a
poet in the making. Mr. Culkin plays a middle-aged American, Carl, who recalls
his 15-year-old self being deflowered in 1966 by his literature teacher at the
American School in Paris. Mr. Nelson’s Madame
Melville is a memory play about sex and eroticism-as well as adolescent
yearning and loneliness, art and books, beauty and growing up. But I regret
that this fine dramatist, who also directs, overreaches in a slender,
intermissionless drama while adding a dollop of comforting sentiment that’s
wholly uncharacteristic of him.
Mr. Nelson is the
playwright who’s made a brilliant specialty of the perverse Anglo-American
relationship, with such wryly intelligent dramas as Some Americans Abroad and New
England . His recent Goodnight
Children Everywhere , about a family in wartime Britain, was exact in every
near-Chekhovian detail and contained an offstage scene of youthful eroticism
that was the more disturbing for its refined, gentle restraint. But alas, Madame Melville mostly overstates its
central coming-of-age theme, to the point of turning into a boisterous sex
comedy that might have been tailored for Broadway had it not been written by
Richard Nelson. Quotations from the Kama
Sutra get the biggest laughs. Other references-Bonnard, Bach and Joan of
Arc, if you please-are too consciously weighty even for a horny, eager kid like
Carl, the unexpected guest in the adult world of arts and letters. And while
I’m moaning, even the prominently displayed new poster of Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle jars like a brightly lit neon
signal spelling out the words “1960’s Intellectual France. See Also: Truffaut.”
It’s no one’s fault here
that any play set in Paris automatically declares its superior calling card to
the gullible classes. Look at the pretentious work of Yasmina Reza, if you
must, or proceed to Neil Simon, of all surprising people. Mr. Simon’s Broadway
hit, The Dinner Party , is set in
Paris with French characters-the better to convince us the play is brimming
stylishly with sexy-sexy ideas about marriage and life and the big wide
existential monde out there. Come on!
It’s about as French as Felix Unger. Not that it matters. Everyone knows it’s Felix Unger, and Everyone
likes him.
Mr. Nelson is in a
different category to the journeyman boulevard dramatist. Yet Madame Melville’s
book-lined Parisian apartment strangely possesses no atmosphere of anything
authentically French-including the books. The set by Thomas Lynch could be more
or less anywhere. It might be the apartment of a lucky graduate student. But
then its owner, Madame Melville (the excellent Joely Richardson, using a
hypnotic Anglo-French accent), appears for a bewildering chunk of the action in
pigtails. Pigtails! Ms. Richardson is young enough without being made to look
about the same age as Macaulay Culkin. Yet Madame Melville is supposed to be in
her 30’s-a somewhat seasoned lady who fancies a naïve, willingly seduced boy,
age 15. Their relationship should appear to be illicit, not safe or basically
wholesome and embarrassed. But if the lady possesses little more than the
giggly, dithery flirtatiousness of a pigtailed teen out to get the simpering
schoolboy, where’s the eroticism and what’s the fuss?
It’s true that memory distorts. But so much? The boy, now
middle-aged, looks back in nostalgia to his night and day with the woman who
changed his life (and set him on the road to becoming a writer). The echoes of
Tennessee Williams in the opening moments comfort and intrigue us. The first
sight of Macaulay Culkin, seeming to greet us stiffly with a half-smirk on the
face of a fallen angel, intrigues us the more. And perhaps Mr. Nelson’s
distorted sense of Madame Melville is deliberate. The hero remembers his first
love and infatuation much younger than she really was, as a painter filters
shapes through the dying light.
If so, the sophistry is
too much to sustain in a memory play that otherwise spells out everything else,
including-we learn manipulatively at the curtain-the early death of Madame
Melville from cancer. The dramatist always writes elegantly, but the clichés of
melodrama are uncomfortably present. The heroine is less the enigmatic mystery
we’re led to believe, more a petulant tease who’s just split up with the
married math teacher. Madame M. is also an aspiring novelist, writing an
earnest version of Joan of Arc. Her
friend and neighbor, Ruth (the winning Robin Weigert), is a concert violinist
and dropout Jersey girl in Paris who’s fleeing a stormy marriage. She’s a
thirtysomething quasi-bohemian who discovers she’s got crabs. And into this
free-spirited place steps Macaulay Culkin’s sweet and innocent schoolboy Carl,
whose parents are worried.
Mr. Culkin doesn’t look sweet and innocent to me. He’s far
more interesting than that. He seems odd and trapped and insinuating, capable
of dissolute things. He should have seduced her! If the roles had been reversed
and Mr. Culkin’s Carl had seduced an innocent Madame Melville, we would have
been onto something. But not the play Mr. Nelson wished to write.
