I am having what passes for Mad Excitement around here. Instead of trundling up in the Saab to troll the dusty aisles of Home Depot in search of renovation materials for the new house in Rockland County, I am actually going to the theater to see not one, but two Off-Broadway comedies within 24 hours. Ah, the giddy whirl of metropolitan life! How I shall pine for la vie culturelle when I am dolefully pushing my shopping cart up and down the spacious corridors of the local Stop'n'Shop! Gentle NYC Readers - do not fail to P.M. me if you have a kind heart and a sofa bed.
Last night's little bonbon, entitled The Mystery of Irma Vep, is a vintage Charles Ludlam number that I saw the last time it made the Off-Broadway rounds, about fifteen years ago, and the thing I most vividly recalled, aside from the insanely rapid costume changes by the two actors who played more than half a dozen different roles, and the fact that I laughed myself silly, was that I would never have believed that an imaginatively idiosyncratic pronunciation of the word sarcophagus could have brought down the house and left me weeping with mirth.
If you know Charles Ludlam's work at all, you know it's all about grossly exaggerated parody and mash-ups of iconic genre classics. The creepy estate inhabited by Lord Edgar, Lady Enid, and - perhaps? - the ghost of Lord Edgar's late, lamented first wife, Lady Irma Vep (which is an anagram for...? that's right, kids, got it on the first try!) is called Mandarcrest. Which gives you an idea of the kind of subtlety involved.
"The play is written for two actors who, between them, play eight characters of both sexes. In order to ensure cross-dressing, licenses to perform the play include a stipulation that the actors must be of the same sex. The show requires a large number of sound cues, props, special effects and quick costume changes. Some 35 costume changes take place in the course of the two-hour show."
In short, you get an awful lot of bang for your buck, and the two actors playing eight different characters do not have to bother going to the gym while the play is running, as each actor in his turn gets more than enough exercise either bursting out of an Egyptian tomb, strangling himself with his own right hand, which has just turned into a fabulously fake furry werewolf paw, while gasping, "No! No! Help! For the love of God, save me!" and trying to drag the werewolf paw away from his throat with the (still momentarily) human hand, and shortly thereafter hurling his wooden leg (which has has just amputated offstage while in his character as the werewolf) into the middle of the drawing room while the other actor is struggling out of a maid's uniform and into riding boots and a pith helmet while keeping up a running patter just offstage, all in under thirty seconds.
The plot is best summed up as, "A lot happens." There are giddy forays into Rebecca, vampire lore, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, and even a brief flirtation with James Joyce. Jane, the sinister parlourmaid (part Nelly Dean, part Mrs. Danvers) intones, "When I makes tea, I makes tea, and when I makes water, I makes water," to which Lady Enid, a dutiful student of Ulysses (or at least, one who made it through the first chapter) replies with a simper, "Well, God send you don't make them in the same pot." Lord Edgar apostrophizes his late, lamented Irma in the same terms an unfilial Stephen Dedalus addressed to his departed mother as a "Ghoul! Chewer of corpses!"
We become aware that the playwright is also an admirer of Wuthering Heights early on, when Lady Enid, (as embodied by the actor who also plays the one-legged stablehand Nicodemus) burbles about filling her arms with heather. In proof of the axiom that that good writers borrow, great writers steal, three entire speechs are later lifted wholesale from the Emily Brontë opus, and the well known "He shall never know how I love him: and that, not because he’s handsome... but because he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same...My love for (him) resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being!" produced roars of laughter when Lady Enid substituted Nicodemus for Heathcliff.
Nicodemus, in his turn, voices Heathcliff's surly denunciation of Edgar Linton and is consoled by Jane the Parlourmaid in the encouraging words of Nelly Dean - "You're fit for a prince in disguise. Who knows, but your father was Emperor of China, and your mother an Indian queen? And you were kidnapped by wicked sailors, and brought to England. Were I in your place, I would frame high notions of my birth; and the thoughts of what I was should give me courage and dignity to support the oppressions of a little farmer!"
The second generation of the denizens of Wuthering Heights and of Thrushcross Grange is frequently omitted by Hollywood so I found myself the only one in the audience who was whooping with glee at the following exchange, which is lifted verbatim from Chapter 2 (lines that are originally uttered by Young Cathy and her nemesis, the priggish servant Joseph) between Jane and her admirer Nicodemus, who has vainly been trying to cop a feel:
JANE: You scandalous old hypocrite! Are you not afraid of being carried away bodily, whenever you mention the devil's name? I warn you to refrain from provoking me, or I'll ask your abduction as a special favour. Stop, look here - (taking a long, dark book from a shelf) - I'll show you how far I've progressed in the Black Art -- I shall soon be competent to make a clear house of it. The red cow didn't die by chance; and your rheumatism can hardly be reckoned among providential visitations!"
NICODEMUS: Oh, wicked, wicked! May the Lord deliver us!
JANE: No, reprobate! you are a castaway -- be off, or I'll hurt you seriously! I'll have you all modelled in wax and clay; and the first who passes the limits, I fix, shall -- I'll not say what he shall be done to -- but you'll see! Go, I'm looking at you!"
Exit NICODEMUS, muttering "Wicked! Wicked!"
Robert Sella managed to infuse Nicodemus with just enough Marty Feldman to invoke Young Frankenstein while still making the performance entirely his own. As Lady Enid, he rendered the dewy ingenue quality of the Helpless Female Victim so dear to horror audiences everywhere, while imbuing her with a daffy charm that was part Dody Goodman. His turn as a jaded tomb-raiding Egyptian Guide who produced a lit cigarette from the interior of his fez while mispronouncing standard English to hilarious effect was superb, particularly when the Guide in turn morphed into the somewhat nymphomaniacal resuscitated Egyptian princess, "She-Who-Sleeps-But-Will-One-Day-Awaken."
Arnie Burton as Jane/Lord Edgar was delicious, whether primming up his mouth in disapproval of it all, casting languishing glanced at the portrait of Lady Irma, frisking with the leap of a spring lamb over the very large, very fake dead wolf he had just dispatched with a silver bullet, or salivating over the salacious rhumba of the recently-revived Egyptian princess, who is shaking her false bosom all over the stage and all but inviting her archaeologist rescuer into the sarco-PHA-gus for a little old Twopenny Upright. By the time s/he is pursuing Lady Enid about the stage, brandishing a plastic meat cleaver and uttering wild cries of, "Ha-ha-HA!" we don't know whom to root for, because at this point we adore them both and want to see them keep carrying on like this for at least another hour. As I said earlier - this is a physically taxing play that has an enormous amount of physical comedy and must drain the actors of energy by the end of each night as effectively as Lady Irma drains the blood of her victims. Seated in the fourth row of the orchestra, I could see the sweat literally streaming down Arnie Burton's face by the time he and Robert Sella were taking their well-earned bows to the strains of Michael Jackson's Thriller.
It was an excellent night, and now we will see what an afternoon of rhymed couplets at The Heir Apparent will bring.
No comments:
Post a Comment