#1
Posted: 4/2/14 at 2:48pm
First preview last night, Rita's last line, "What the Hell?" says it all. George's wife, and the only woman in the play, earth-mother to the seven men, echoed our sentiments in the audience, the only difference, she was in the spotlight-we were in the seats. A play with promise and some really fine acting needs emergency intervention. The take away, the inherient irony and pathos in men who have spent years dressing as women, hoping to be alluring, but because they cling to their hetrosexuality, can only flirt, never consumate and are enthrall to these feminine selves they have so carefully groomed that their relationships with their wives are thwarted. As Rita describes her relationship with Valentina, it's like living with a in-law, she doesn't really like. But the pathos and tragedy of these repressed men never comes across. The fulcrum of the plot, an envelope of poronographic homosexual photos seized by the local post office is so convuluted and mechanical that it doesn't work to bring about a real denoument or self-revelation by any of the characters. Some fine acting by Nick Westrate mostly silent and through body language communicates what could be but its never exploited. The characters are mostly ciphers, John Cullen is almost unrecognizable and his lines seem to have been given to him mainly because he was on stage. Reed Birney as Charlotte is the antgonist and Patrick Page more or less the protagonist but other than great acting and real ability on high heels, there's no resolution between these two. Larry Pine is a presence, supposedly as a tragic figure, but mainly he gets alot of lines--he had to call for them a couple of times and one of the loudest prompters I've ever heard shouted them out--But Fierstein doesn't develop any of them, settling instead for sermonizing at the end of act one and ending act 2 with George, Bessie, the comic relief character, Rita and George left on stage with the judge's daughter excoriating them for ruining her family's life for the last 20 years by allowing her father a place to cross dress. The speech is so full of outworn cliches and her costume, I know its the sixties, but ...the other actors are excused--supposedly not back from the hospital where they had--but never mind. This is Fierstein's other look at transvesites, not the boyant but poignant Au Cage, or the ebulient Kinky Boots. These are sad, repressed, constricted, unhappy men, imprisioned by what each of them says makes them free to breathe. I wish he had looked harder.
