The last time I attended an Off-Off-Broadway show, it was work-related. I had to endure an indulgent piece of performance art that my colleagues genuinely enjoyed. Afterwards, I couldn’t even offer a wan compliment about the lighting, because much of the play had been performed (intentionally) in the dark. It had been the kind of play that made even a devoted arts consumer like me wonder if there were just too much funding out there.
I ventured to the Bowery last night for fun. My schedule in New York coincided with the opening of my college friend Elyse Singer’s latest production with The Hourglass Group, and I happily snapped up a ticket to the sold-out opening night when a cancellation came through. Even though I trusted Elyse and had faith in the source material for “The Beebo Brinker Chronicles,” setting foot in the tiny 4th Street Theater made me just a little nervous. The sense-memory of bad East Village performance art was vivid.
And it instantly dissipated. From the opening moments of the play, I knew I was in good hands. Actors in lurid red spotlights evoked the covers of lesbian pulp novels as they spoke ripe, stylized narration. Although seen through the lens of our time, the production put forward the arch dialogue and limiting social milieu of Ann Bannon’s fiction with unabashed sincerity. The result was a thoroughly engaging – and often funny – 90 minutes of gay cultural history, relationship drama, and period detail.
Leigh Silverman’s smart and economical direction makes the most of the tiny stage, effectively conveying seedy queer bars, railway stations, Greenwich Village bedrooms and tony Uptown apartments with a few stools, bed linens, and minimal props (mostly liquor bottles and highball glasses). The cast is uniformly solid and comfortable within the style of the piece. As the eponymous Beebo, a butch and worldly lesbian, Anna Foss Wilson has a pretty swagger that recalls Hilary Swank in “Boys Don’t Cry.” Her passions bounce convincingly from lust to abuse. As the naïve and confused Laura, the nuanced Marin Ireland displays appropriate hysteria over her sexual struggle, and ultimately achieves a credible maturity. In multiple roles, and especially as the sexpot straight girl who teases Laura, Carolyn Baeumler brings refreshing bursts of campy va-va-voom. Bill Dawes gives a sympathetic reading of the straight husband and father left behind by Autumn Dornfeld’s closeted Beth, who yearningly seeks some kind of redemption after abandoning Laura and her true self nine years ago.
I know this is a lesbian piece, but as a 40-year-old single gay man, I have to admit I was drawn to David Greenspan’s Jack, a pre-Stonewall homosexual struggling for fulfillment after 40. At once the self-appointed tour guide of the Village’s gay scene and an uncomfortable resident within it, Jack has a bitchy wit that hides his character’s loneliness. He ends each sentence directed at a woman with “, Mother,” the way a movie tough guy might call his friends “Pally.” He and Laura find a solution to their woes in a marriage of convenience. With election-year grumblings about gay unions bubbling again to the surface, I couldn’t help thinking that the answer these characters find isn’t so misguided, quaint, or remote. Just ask a certain wide-stanced Senator.
The fluid and effective adaptation by playwrights Kate Moira Ryan and Linda S. Chapman deserves a broad audience. I wish them, and Elyse, a successful run. In a small-world moment, it happens that the playwrights were friends of my friend and fellow Russel Wright collector, the late Jaye Zimet, whom I met the first time I visited Manitoga (see previous blog entry). In addition to dinnerware, Jaye avidly collected lesbian pulp novels and had authored a book about their cover art with a foreword by Beebo creator, Ann Bannon. The production was dedicated to her memory, and I have to believe she would have loved it.
As well, the play seems to have dislodged some weird emotional trauma. I dreamt last night of my deceased father, with whom I had never fully reconciled after coming out. In the dream, he was scolding me for talking about my sexuality with friends at a movie theater. Listening to his harangue, I stood in a kitchen boiling chicken and frozen clams. Let the Freudians have their fun with that.
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