Out in the Arts

by D.L. Groover

DO-GOODERS GONE BAD

Theatre New West mounts a Silver black comedy

Party of five (l–r): Aaron Thacker, Dennis Draper, Rebecca Tindel-Bivens, Foster Davis, and Nora Stein star in The Altruists. Photo by Joe Watts.

No Nicky Silver play should go unseen, so scurry over to Theatre New West where his latest, The Altruists, is blistering the paint. If you need a push, remember that Silver is the playwright of The Food Chain, Raised in Captivity, and Fat Men in Skirts, among other acid-tinged satires. He, along with Harry Kondoleon, were practically house playwrights at the late/great Ashland Street Theatre, but since that venue imploded two years ago, perhaps we can hope that TNW will pick up the slack and keep the prickly work of these gay writers alive on the bayou.

True to form, The Altruists renders its scathing cartoon of the human dilemma in primary colors, but its dominant hue is black. Silver’s work—always in your face—is not to everyone’s taste, but if you go with it, the bile he spews is wickedly funny. Here we have a tale of New York City leftists who manage to screw everything up, including their own hapless lives, and bring down everyone around them. Deliciously politically incorrect, Silver’s surgical strikes cut to the bone and take no prisoners.

The horribly dysfunctional characters include gay social worker Ronald, whose distaste for the downtrodden never stops him from attempts at saving them, including his latest, last night’s trick; Ronald’s neurotic soap opera actress sister, Sydney, who pumps three slugs into the back of her lover and then tries to pin it on Ronald’s hustler; lesbian activist Cybil, who always winds up sleeping with men; and slacker Swallow, who never tires of marching for causes he couldn’t care less about.

Under Joe Angel Babb’s direction, Nora Stein, Rebecca Tindel-Bivens, Foster Davis, Aaron Thacker, and Dennis Draper portray the pretentiously lost loonies. If you have not seen any Nicky Silver, The Altruists (through May 24) should smack you good and hard. Though not the gold standard of his former work, this mean little comedy should still keep you laughing, and thinking, long afterward.

MAE, WE HARDLY KNEW YE

If you squinted real hard, you might have believed you saw Mae West in the Stages production of Claudia Shear’s Dirty Blonde. Sooner or later, though, your eyes would have to focus. When they did, goodbye illusion.

Susan O. Koozin’s portrayal of pneumatic Mae was a fair facsimile—with the old tottering Mae especially affecting. But admit it, the only person who could ever really do West was impersonator nonpareil Charles Pierce. Fictional biographies about celebrity icons are notoriously difficult to pull off. Remember Gable and Lombard? Jill Clayburgh as Carole Lombard was hard enough to swallow, but James Brolin as Clark Gable? Impossible. Icons are unmatchable. Only Faye Dunaway got it right in Mommie Dearest.

Shear cuts her losses by keeping sexy Mae on the edges of her story. The play isn’t really about Mae, but two lonely losers who idolize West’s toughness, her sass, her guts. Every time we start into Mae’s bio, up pop Jo and Charlie to interrupt and tell us their story. We don’t want to know their story. They get in the way. They’re boring. They’re not Mae West. We want more of The Drag and Sex, West’s pioneering and jail-inducing Broadway plays that brought her notoriety and stardom in tandem. We want more Hollywood gossip, more of her hermetically sealed later life. We certainly want less of Jo and Charlie.

The bio material, sketchy because of all time lost with Jo and Charlie, is nonetheless evocatively portrayed. The physical production, with its red velvet proscenium curtain and various playing areas to evoke Mae’s bedroom, theater backstage, or a Chinese restaurant, is imaginative. And the costumes are sumptuous, just the way Mae would have liked them. Any time that Jo and Charlie aren’t center stage, the play takes off, thanks to the myriad characters acted by Jeffrey Gimble and especially Philip Lehl, who steals the show with all his different guises.

One of a kind, Mae West created her persona of sex-is-fun and stuck with it to the end. She became a movie star at 40 and landed in Hollywood’s pantheon pre-packaged, without the need for handlers, publicists, yes men. She became her image and never strayed from it. What that did to her psyche is difficult to know, but Dirty Blonde didn’t clarify a thing.

AND KEEP IN MIND:

Speaking in Tongues

Through May 25

Stages Repertory Theatre

713/527-0123

Interweaving two couples‚ infidelities in Act I with five other characters in Act II (played by the same actors), marriage, faithfulness, and murder get all mixed up in very theatrical fashion in Andrew Bovell’s 1996 Australian mind game of a drama. Strangers connect, while devoted couples split in this theater with a capital T. Scenes and dialogue overlap, and clues and heartaches are scattered along the way, so pay close attention. Provocative and intriguing.

City of Angels

May 9–24

Masquerade Theatre

713/861-7045

In ’40s Hollywood, screenwriter Stein adapts his detective novel for the screen. This reel life, in glorious black-and-white film noir, comes alive while his Technicolor mundane world seems ever more lifeless. The two realities, two musical scores, two casts, and two endings mix and match in Cy Coleman, David Zippel, and Larry Gelbart’s 1990 multiple Tony winner. Life imitates art in this extremely clever hardboiled movie gangster parody.

Deathtrap

May 9–31

Country Playhouse

713/467-4497

In Ira Levin’s gay black-comedy shocker, a dried-up playwright schemes to get his own name on the title page of his talented student’s work. It’s campy fun as the dead come alive, the spider becomes the fly, and the bitchy humor and homoerotic situations rush pell-mell toward yet another murderous climax.

Hamlet

May 23–June 22

Alley Theatre

713/228-8421

The world’s greatest play is so good it can take anything the auteurs wish to throw at it. Olivier threw Freud, Burton a smoldering violence, Gielgud painted with intellect, Barrymore a theatrical passion, and Branagh glitzy film technique. Whatever happens to this great Dane, it’s not to be missed. There’s nothing in the world like hearing this most sublime poetry enacted live.

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