Tallulah Bankhead’s final film was the 1965 horror flick Die! Die! My Darling!, an attempt to capitalize on the Guignol-with-great-actresses boomlet started by What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Bankhead’s effort was less successful than Baby Jane, presumably because it wasn’t very good: a weird, mediocre movie. But Bankhead’s performance was surprisingly strong, and the movie became a camp classic.
Matthew Lombardo’s Looped, which opened at the Lyceum Theatre Sunday night, imagines a day in the looping sessions for Die! Die! at which the actress is required to rerecord a small bit of garbled dialogue but can’t seem to muster the ability to deliver one line. Valerie Harper stars as an aged, imperious, soused and sarcastic Bankhead, and Looped makes a nice parallel to the film: It’s a bad play, but Ms. Harper is excellent. Looped is a campy good time.
It unfolds in a Los Angeles recording studio in what the Playbill informs us is the summer of 1965. (This makes no sense, as Die! Die! My Darling! premiered in March of that year.) Bankhead arrives hours late to loop a single line, and bursts in, glamorously disheveled in sunglasses, a gown, diamonds and a full-length mink. (The costumes are by William Ivey Long.) “Fuck Los Angeles,” she says, launching into a screed against its freeways, its Spanish-named boulevards (“You have to be bilingual just to cross the street”) and even its heat. She’d taken her Bentley out for a spin, gotten lost and finally had to call a cab to bring her to the studio—in truth a common occurrence for the actress, though in London, where she kept the Bentley.
And so it continues, a bender of one-liners delivered with compelling relish and ace comic timing by Ms. Harper, who gleefully chews at the scenery under Rob Ruggiero’s direction. Some are Bankhead classics, some are invented. “Cocaine? Addictive? Nonsense. I ought to know; I’ve been doing it for years,” she says, pulling out her snuff box. “Touching a woman’s purse is like touching her vagina,” she tells Danny, the young (and fictional) film editor overseeing the session, after he moves her bag. “Of course, I can only fit so much into the purse.” And in the second act, after she has disappeared for three hours: “There was a huge line in the ladies’ room.” Pause, sniff. “It’s gone now.”
But a dissolute icon sitting in a room and spouting shtick laced with biography to two cardboard cutouts who serve as her foils, while amusing, doesn’t provide any drama, and certainly no plot. (In addition to Danny, who Brian Hutchison gives a quirkily square charm, there’s also the sound engineer, Steve, played by Michael Mulheren, sequestered in a control booth.)
Mr. Lombardo knows this, and so he gins up some action. And that’s the problem: While his dialogue is excellent, his dramaturgy isn’t. He creates a bizarre, alcohol-and-drug-fueled delusional flashback to Bankhead’s disastrous turn in A Streetcar Named Desire to end the first act, and in the second, he provides a lengthy and deadly exchange in which Bankhead turns therapist and coaxes a major revelation—the show’s only one—from
Danny, who has no discernible personality before this moment, and, post-catharsis, promptly abandons it again.
But we don’t need to care about Danny. Bankhead is the point, and Ms. Harper is Looped’s pleasure. It’s just too bad this vehicle, like the Bentley, doesn’t know where it’s going.
There are many questions raised by Next Fall, the comedy-drama about gay relationships and religion that arrived at the Helen Hayes Theatre late last week, but the one I couldn’t shake was this: In 2010 New York, how much sympathy can I be expected to have for a closet case?
That’s not quite fair. Hunky young gay actor Luke (Patrick Heusinger) is religious, a born-again Christian who’s not out to his equally God-fearing parents. His neurotic New Yorker partner, Adam (Patrick Breen), is, as you’d expect, godless. It’s a source of tension for them—Luke has a disconcerting habit of praying after sex and the even more off-putting habit of trying to save his boyfriend’s soul—and it comes to a head when Luke is in a terrible car accident and his Southern parents can’t know—or won’t let themselves know—about Adam’s relationship with their son.
The play, directed by Sheryl Kaller, is both very funny and deftly constructed, with alternating scenes that track the aftermath of the accident and the prior development of Luke and Adam’s relationship. Its cast—especially Connie Ray as Arlene, Luke’s pill-popping mother—is excellent. And I’m impressed that it attempts to address the chasm between religious Americans and the non-religious, a major divide in this country that deserves exploration.
But, as much I enjoyed the play, I couldn’t really buy it, because I don’t buy Adam and Luke’s relationship. There are lovely and tender scenes between the two, but their worldviews are so different—and so much time is spent fighting about that—that’s it’s tough to see how they ever made it to a third date.
In the end, it’s not Luke’s religion that drives Adam away. It’s that Luke, an otherwise well-adjusted 30-year-old gay man, won’t acknowledge his sexuality, or the man he’s been living with, to his parents. And that makes Luke, in today’s world, less a hero than a coward—and Next Fall actually less interesting than it seems to be.
The Scottsboro Boys, the second semi-posthumous Kander and Ebb musical, opened a week ago at the Vineyard Theatre, five and a half years after Fred Ebb’s death. With a book by David Thompson and directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman, Scottsboro revisits the tragic episode in which nine black boys were railroaded by the Alabama police and courts in the late 1930s, and it tells their story as a postmodern minstrel show.
It’s a familiar Kander and Ebb conceit: Chicago murders recounted as burlesque, the rise of the Nazis told as a cabaret. Here, Ms. Stroman and her talented cast—led by a charming John Cullum as the Interlocutor, the one white member of the cast, and the kinetic Colman Domingo as Mr. Bones, a leader of the minstrel troupe—subvert standard minstrel tropes, using jokey, joyous shucking and jiving to relay a monstrous tale. They take something horrible, and they make it a lot of fun—to the point where the largely white audience begins to feel guilty for being so entertained.
I suppose that’s the point—to put us in the position of white Southerners in the 1930s, who saw what happened to these boys as an entertainment—to make us simultaneously enjoy the minstrelsy and revile ourselves for it. But I also don’t quite understand why. Are there any theatergoers who don’t condemn what happened to the Scottsboro Boys? Who would view the miscarriage of justice as an amusement?
Scottsboro, a pretty and polished production, leaves you thinking. But I’m not sure what you’re supposed to be thinking about.
joxfeld@observer.com
