Is Anyone Else Watching "The Nance" Right Now? — Page 3

I too, was very glad PBS showed this. This is exactly what Public Television needs to do more of. And I thought the show was very effective. It reminded me of Cabaret where the frivolity and camp suddenly gives way and you realize the seriousness of the characters' predicament.

And thought Orsini did a fine job- I saw him as a naive kid who, under the influence of his first love of an older, more sophisticated partner, blossoms. His vocabulary growing by leaps and bounds (sometimes leading to awkward and unneeded deployment of $50 words) seemed very true to life.

PBS showed an interview with Bean & Lane after and two points resonated: One, that in their initial encounter Chauncey lists the options ahead, ending with "Or you can leave and never have to look at my ugly face again." That's the whole key to the character right there.

Second, he points out that after Chauncey's arrest, the gay humor is all very ugly and degrading- before that it had been very light and self-deprecating but never mean. It's as if now that Chauncey sees the stakes at hand, his character isn't funny to him any more.

Arthur Kopit and Leonard Bernstein, two very different artists with very different aesthetics both used a phrase to describe when a play or a piece of music stops being its own organic entity and becomes a manipulation of the writer.

Bernstein would listen to a young composer's work with his eyes closed, breathing along with the notes and words, nodding, smiling, furrowing his brow. Then all of a sudden he would stop--and stop the composer in midstream--and say, "No, no, no, no, no. I can feel the hand"--he would pronounce that word ominously--"the hannnnnnd of the composer at work. I don't want to feel that. I don't want to see that. I don't want to hear that."

Similarly, Arthur Kopit would say "That's the moment in the second act that the author took over."

I never stopped feeling the hannnnnnd of Douglas Carter Beane in this telecast. The burlesque numbers were so on-the-nose comments on the action that there was no joy in discovering the connection, as there is in Cabaret. The politics was mechanical: neither Chauncey or Cady Huffman's character ever explained how they came to their diametrically opposed positions--they were just there to argue. There were indeed gay conservatives back then (there still are), but back then most of them came from moneyed classes or were hangers-on among the moneyed classes. It would have been unusual during the Depression for a working-class gay to have been such a Republican...so unusual, as a matter of fact, that it would have been a subject for discussion among his friends. The sexual politics seemed inorganic and hand-of-the-author as well. The Chauncey who was so fiercely non-monogamous didn't really square with the Chauncey who was so fiercely anti-New Deal. It just didn't fit together. And the character of Ned, as others have posted, seemed to just have different issues from scene to scene, rather than grow and mature. (This despite a winning and adorable performance.) And I really didn't believe that Efram was both the manager of the theater AND the partner in the "nance" act AND a homophobe...it was really asking too much of the actor.

And what were those two group scenes in Chauncey's apartment, one in each act? They were not really very believable at all.

The hand of the author was visible in all the abrupt changes, all the things that "came out of left field."

But those actors were all terrific. I just wish The Nance had been a better play.

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The camera's constantly moving—in and out, soaring up and around and down and in again and out again is very distracting. That's not the way we view a play. For a change, I'd love to see a televised play with the camera plopped in the middle of the orchestra, just far enough back to take in all the action, and left there for the duration, to approximate the experience of seeing a play in a theater.