Theater Feedback
New This WeekAround TownMusicFilmArtTheaterNews & FeaturesFood & DrinkAstrology
  HOME
NEW THIS WEEK
EDITORS' PICKS
LISTINGS
NEWS & FEATURES
MUSIC
FILM
ART
BOOKS
THEATER
DANCE
TELEVISION
FOOD & DRINK
ARCHIVES
LETTERS
PERSONALS
CLASSIFIEDS
ADULT
ASTROLOGY
PHOENIX FORUM DOWNLOAD MP3s

  E-Mail This Article to a Friend
Dial 911
A double bill inspired by catastrophe
BY CAROLYN CLAY

Speaking Well of the Dead and The Crazy Girl
By Israel Horovitz and Frank Pugliese, respectively. Directed by David Wheeler. Set by Jeremy Barnett. Lighting by Jeff Benish. Costumes by Molly Trainer. Music by Barry Wyner. With Jill Clayburgh, Lily Rabe, and Joe Pacheco. At Gloucester Stage Company through August 4.


It’s difficult these days not to view all the art we see, from Shakespeare to sit-com, through the prism of September 11. But playwrights Israel Horovitz and Frank Pugliese, both of whom live in Lower Manhattan, have constructed a double bill, now in its world premiere at Gloucester Stage Company, that’s set in the immediate wake of the catastrophe and concerned with questions of truth and safety. Is it ever possible to discern the former? Is the latter a thing of the Elysian past? Horovitz’s Speaking Well of the Dead and Pugliese’s The Crazy Girl share a predetermined theme — as well as a cast that includes Oscar-nominated actress Jill Clayburgh and her daughter with the playwright David Rabe, Lily Rabe. Yet the two works are not equally successful. Horovitz’s family drama is flawed but perceptive and germane. Pugliese’s, despite its larger concerns, is so strident and muddled that one wonders why, when all these related people were artistically hugging one another, playwright Rabe wasn’t brought into the embrace.

I should note that both plays, under the direction of the venerable David Wheeler, are well acted by a charming and piquant Clayburgh and a showboating Rabe supported by the solid Joe Pacheco. In Horovitz’s one-acter (which alludes to the Odysseus myth), Clayburgh is Penelope, wife of John, who has died in the collapse of the World Trade Center towers. Rabe portrays the couple’s college-age daughter (studying at Ithaca, natch). Flashbacks reveal that both women possess, though each believes the other ignorant of, the knowledge that dad was having an affair and about to fly the familial coop. The work piggybacks on the World Trade Center disaster, but Horovitz strengthens the connection by setting the flashback scenes at Windows on the World, the Olympian eatery in the towers that makes everyone feel " high. "

Horovitz’s handling of the edgy, intimate relationship between mother and daughter is astute: communication often seems about to surface but loving lies remain more comfortable. And Clayburgh’s wielding of the spurned Penelope’s feminine bluntness is delightful. What pushes the play toward schmaltz are the dead John’s canoodling conversations with wife and daughter, à la To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday. It’s fine, indeed part of the healing process, to talk to the dead. But the tough truth (lots tougher than a husband’s affair) is that the dead don’t talk back. Still, this is a sweet play, pained yet buoyed by its understanding that family jockeying survives even death.

Pugliese’s The Crazy Girl, by contrast, is as full of holes as rant. It provides a bravura acting opportunity for Rabe, whose Jeanie is a disturbed if impassioned young woman beset by the voices of the world’s mostly female victims. But even in that department, the playwright (best known for Aven’ U Boys, which won an Obie) ambushes the actress by burdening Jeanie with hysterical raving. Beyond that, the play has two problems. It doesn’t make much sense, and it presents the voice of compassion, for which it advocates, as lunatic.

Clayburgh’s self-effacing Stacey is a Long Island native living in western Massachusetts. As the play opens, she is nervously enduring a surprise visit by daughter Jeanie, who lives in Cambridge with her boyfriend, a university-campus policeman named Paxton, and is recovering from a breakdown. In the weeks since September 11, Jeanie has stopped taking her medication, and that’s made her more susceptible to radio transmissions from the world. In addition, she’s had a fight with Paxton, whose (male) reaction to the events of September 11 was to load his gun. When it turns out that the fight may have been violent, father Larry is called in to demonstrate the volatile, frazzled behavior it is implied led to Jeanie’s instability in the first place.

Any number of dramatic leads are thrown out but not followed up on. Besides which, Jeanie’s equilibrium-destroying attunement to the plight of the planet has hardly been triggered by September 11; she has been hearing victims’ voices since the Challenger explosion. Moreover, she is clearly, relentlessly nuts — though Rabe, adopting a swaying wide-legged stance that suggests a person pummeled by psychiatric drugs, makes us feel her pain. Pugliese seems to want to reach beyond personal and national tragedy, to include sufferers, among them Afghan women, beyond the collective " We. " Why, then, make their messenger one you want to shoot — at least with some Lithium?

Issue Date: August 1 - 8, 2002
Back to the Theater table of contents.

  E-Mail This Article to a Friend