Last week, as threatened, I rebelled against the Life Bucolic and spent the day in Manhattan. I saw some friends, had lunch with my husband (Thai) and, since I'd refused to go when the place first opened (because, according to the newspapers, the over-crowding was insane) and because the place is right down the street from his office, I said, "Hey, let's check out Eataly."
So I finally saw Eataly, and it will probably be the only time I see it - once was enough. I mean, they had nothing that you can't get better and cheaper up on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx, and it all costs three times as much as it does on Arthur Avenue. Everything at Eataly was very slick and streamlined; it looked like a glossy food magazine photo layout. For the record, the over-crowding is still insane. The ambiance and the chichi customers reminded me of the food court underneath the Plaza Hotel, where I also went exactly once (that, too, was enough to satisfy my curiosity.)
The Big Treat I'd planned for the day was seeing The Belle of Amherst in the evening with my dear friend Carrie. We had a nice Italian meal at Amarone on Ninth Avenue, where I'd last eaten a number of years ago. It's not the finest Italian I've ever had, but the food is good and you get your money's worth, and for a pre-theatre dinner it's perfectly fine. We split an arugula salad with thin-sliced pears in a lemon juice dressing; I had the home-made gnocchi with fresh mozerella and basil in tomato sauce, and Carrie had the linguine puttanesca, and our server was very kind about letting us drag out our meal for a long, long time, because the play didn't start till eight.
After dinner we walked down Ninth Avenue. At the corner of Forty-third and Ninth, just as I was pointing westward across the street, saying, "There's the theatre," Carrie gave a little shriek and pointed eastward, exclaiming, "Oh, my God, it's still here!"
"It" turned out to be a pawnshop that is an absolutely perfect time capsule. As I'd walked around Manhattan all day, I had been getting a trifle depressed about the way nothing in New York looks the way it did when I moved there 34 years ago. For example, Times Square in 1979 was squalid, dangerous, and, consequently, marvelous. It was a lot closer to the days of Hubert's Dime Museum and Diane Arbus photos than it was to Disney. There were sex shops and junkies and prostitutes in thigh-high boots, and a tired old HoJo's that sold flaccid, greasy clam strips and hot fudge sundaes that tasted like my childhood. It was easy to walk around Times Square then, too, because a lot of people were scared to go there. And now, there are about 5,000 tourists crowding the sidewalks day and night, and the crazy people wearing the Elmo costumes are scarier than the junkies ever were.
But this - this. How had I missed this wonderful little shop all these years? It belongs back in the old Times Square - my Times Square. I must have walked past it hundreds of times. I was always too intent on getting to the play on time, I guess.
In a trance of delight, I followed Carrie into a shop packed with bric-a-brac, used books in all stages of repair - from Fine to Deplorable - all priced at a dollar to three dollars. Carrie was explaining with great enthusiasm to the two elderly men who own the place - and Brooklyn Dickensian, is the best description I can come up with for them - that she used to live in Hell's Kitchen - back in the Good Old Days I've just been describing, when it was actually Hellish - and that she had been in the habit of dropping in frequently. The proprietors were nodding back and saying, "Of course, I remember you, you haven't changed a bit. Where have you been all this time?"
The shop had been on the verge of closing, but the owners let me poke around the stacks of books, while Carrie reminisced, agreeing with her newly re-found buddies that she'd made a huge mistake by ever moving to the Upper East Side. I found a biography of Roald Dahl that I hadn't read yet (Condition: Deplorable, but for $2, who was I to quibble?) When I fumbled for my change purse, the proprietors affably waved my money aside, insisting on making a gift of the book to me. In addition, they offered "you two lovely ladies" a couple of shots apiece from the bottles of Johnny Walker Black and Absolut with which, it seemed, they were wont to celebrate the end of the workday. (We declined with thanks.) After asking us repeatedly if we were sure we didn't want to raise a toast to the Return of Carrie to the Kitchen of Hell - No? - Are you sure? - and being apprised of the fact that we had to stay sober enough to watch a play about Emily Dickinson, our amiable hosts rolled up the steel gate (remember those roll-up gates that clatter like a subway train?) and bid us Godspeed.
Now, as to the play. I knew that the fact that I had last seen this one-woman play performed by Julie Harris, back in the days when Times Square was Times Square, was going to be a problem. Julie Harris, I knew, sets a standard that is hard to equal when she creates a role. So I tried to forget her performance and her inflections of the lines, and to give Joely Richardson a fair chance. But, inevitably, I was disappointed.
Ms. Richardson, to give her her due, takes on a heroic task in holding the stage solo for nearly 2 hours. It is a tremendous feat of memorization, just for a start - all monologue, with very little action. The actress playing the part of Emily Dickinson has nothing to hold her audience's attention but the playwright's words, and the words of the poet herself, for a number of Dickinson's poems are woven in as part of the monologue. Ms. Richardson was also suffering from a horrendous head cold, and had to keep sniffling and dabbing at her nose. (I had to wonder why it hadn't occurred to anybody to write in an impromptu line about Emily Dickinson's awful, awful hay fever, and have the props department equip her with a little white lace-edged hankie.)
Perhaps the fact that she was not feeling well accounted for the way that she rushed the delivery of the lines. The problem is - her timing was off. I only saw Julie Harris in the part once, but I perfectly recall her strategically-times pauses that gave the audience time to laugh appreciatively at an understated bit of wit. Ms. Richardson barreled through her lines like a freight train, as though she was afraid that if she didn't keep it rolling at top speed, she might lose her place and forget what came next. Indeed, several times she misspoke in her haste, and had to corrected herself in mid-word. It reminded me of little Tony Buddenbrook trying to recite her catechism in the first chapter of Thomas Mann's novel:
"What does this mean?" she slowly repeated. "I believe that God..." and then,her face clearing, swiftly continued, "made me, and likewise all other creatures," - and now, finding herself on smooth ice, raced along, beaming and unstoppable - she rattled off the whole article, true to the newly published catechism of anno domine 1835. Once you got going, she thought, it was just like being on the sled with your brothers and pushing off from the top of Mount Jerusalem - your thoughts flew past you as you pelted along, and you couldn't stop even if you wanted to.
In Ms. Richardson's favor, I will say that she was at her best when declaiming the actual poems. In those moments, she showed a fine understanding of the poet's delicate poetical structures, in which Dickinson's metaphysical speculations are so often expressed through her minute observations of Nature. I would hazard a guess that, long before taking on the role of "the mysterious E. Dickinson", the actress had often read the poet, with great love, and with the sensitive intuitive grasp of sense that only a reader's great love of a writer's words can impart.
In short, a noble effort. In a nut-brown wig and the obligatory white dress, Ms. Richardson looks the part of Emily Dickinson. The lighting for the production is so exquisite that I often thought I was viewing a tableau vivant of a Berthe Morisot painting - that "certain slant of light" here is a lambent, flattering glow - it kisses the actress like a sunbeam pouring through a window on a late-June afternoon. If Ms. Richardson can bring herself to slow down and take as much time delivering her lines as David Weiner took in designing the lighting, this could yet become a memorable evening of theatre.
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