Paul Sand | The Pilot Who Crashed the Party / 2022

the man who fell to earth

by Douglas Messerli

 

Paul Sand (writer and director) The Pilot Who Crashed the Party / Odyssey Theatre, April 28, 2022 

Comedian, actor, and playwright Paul Sand’s most recent play, The Pilot Who Crashed the Party—which received its premier workshop performance last evening, April 29, at the Odyssey Theatre in Los Angeles—might be best described as an odd mix of the absurdist-like work of Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth (undergoing a Broadway revival even as I write) and a late Edward Albee play such as Me Myself and I.

       Like Wilder’s world, Sand presents us a gathering of individuals who, like most of us today after two years of a pandemic disease and a war in Ukraine, may soon find that we have “come through”—the phrase that D. H. Lawrence uses to describe his and his lovers’ psychological and emotional survival—a number of individual crises; but in surviving, each of them are now focusing very much on Albee’s “me myself and I,” fixated on their superficial lives despite their closely knit little society.

      The occasion of their rainy night celebration is the 50th birthday of Sally (Jacqueline Wright) who is hosting the event in her Santa Monica Mountains home. With her is her housemate/companion Daniel (Lee Boek), best friends movie actor Laura (Megan Rippey) and Laura’s ex-husband, a bisexual gadfly Ilo (Irish Giron), and their friend Valerie (Debra Lane) who seems to be in charge of the meal and celebratory cake. Sally has hired a violinist (Yennie Lam) to accompany the evening meal and after dinner games, at which point the audience enters into their presence.

      The game they appear to be playing as the work begins is a kind of live-version of the old board game Clue, in which the celebrants must guess which of their party has just killed one of their guests, in this case Ilo playing the dead man, a knife in his back as he sits dead at the dinner table.

       This is clearly Daniel’s forte as he picks up an almost invisible thread from the oriental carpet, examines it, and traces it back to the red tab of a Band-Aid which Sally has placed upon her finger after cutting herself on the knife. But before they can truly close the case, the dead man announces that he simply has to go to pee, rises, and closes down the game.

       Once more the night has become a rather dreary one, despite their clever talk and games, since the rainstorm seems to be one of those that descends upon the city only once every other decade. The creek below the mountain upon which Sally’s house sits has already overflowed its banks and turned into a torrent of mud, and the houselights are blinking of and on.

        And as if a heavenly force had determined that very night to punish this little Sodom, the large-windowed villa is buzzed by a small airplane several times before crashing into the house, a wing landing upon the very dinner table where moments early they were all gathered. A moment later the pilot, dazed and confused knocks on their door. At the very moment of the crash they also lose their lighting and the use of their single telephone, cellphone reception in the mountains being unavailable.

        Before he can ever explain who he is, the young man (Sol Mason) collapses, as the startled houseguests and their hosts carry him off to a bedroom and Sally rushes to read her medical encyclopedia about remedies for brain hemorrhages.

        Fortunately, the young aviator awakens to explain that his name is Anthony but that he can remember nothing else. He knows the names for objects and their purpose, but can’t recall whether or not he has a home or in it a worried wife. He seems to be convinced that it was his car that crashed into the house, not an airplane, particularly since he has never flown as far as he recalls and, as Erica Jong explains it, has a fear of flying.

       Leaving him to get some rest the party guests re-gather to try to imagine how they might proceed, only to have Valerie recall that someone with a head injury should never be permitted to fall asleep since it may result in a coma. Accordingly, they rush in to pull him from his bed and throughout the rest of the play insist that he cannot for one moment sleep.

       Realizing that with the storm none of them will be able to leave that night, Sally assigns the bedrooms to each guest, and arranges that they alternate a watch over their incredible guest.

       That quirky plot device allows them each to get better acquainted with their handsome guest, as one by one they tell him their histories accompanied by the dramatic musical renditions of the hired girl, who herself attempts to follow the pilot around and charm him a bit like a gypsy violinist in a Hungarian restaurant.

       Their stories, obviously, also help us to get to know the characters better, although it quickly becomes apparent that the tales they tell, even though they appear to be autobiographical, reveal more about the inner imaginations of these figures than their true lives.

        Sally, for example, tells him a long yarn of a romantic adventure she has had in a small Brazilian town with a gaucho, replete with a white horse and a large silver buckle circling his denim pants. The tale sounds more like the kind of narrative one might hear on the famed Brazilian TV soap operas, so popular in South America, more than a real-life experience. But it is certainly entertaining and perfect for actor Wright’s flair for the theatricalization of the old kind of  melodramatic thee-a-ter!! She quickly becomes convinced that the unknown guest, like her, is a true romantic, suggesting—when they later play the game of “guessing the guest’s name”— that he has to an “ Erik.”

       Down to earth opera singer Valerie believes it must be Bart, while Ilo, who keeps the young man entertained with stories of his and Laura’s travels through Italy where, he claims, they served as lovers to a wealthy polyamorous couple, insists that their guest is obviously gay, even if he hasn’t yet come out of the closet.

       Laura insists that, like herself, he is deeply suffering inside, having been tortured by having lost, as she has 2 ½ times, someone whom she/he deeply loved.

       But Daniel, who disappears throughout much of this play, has the strangest theory as to the origin of the young man. He insists that he is a threat to them all, having come to kill them; and, confronting the young man, he claims to not only know who he is but why he has been sent, which he maintains is from an FBI or CIA cell, knowledge he has gleaned from having served in Peru and other spots where spies have trained and been assigned. He knows, so he claims, because he himself has served just such a role, and now they have sent someone to get rid of him.

        His paranoia becomes so overwhelming that ultimately he pulls a gun on the stranger threatening to kill him, the pilot saved only when Daniel’s friends restrain him and take away the gun.

        As morning finally arrives and the storm abates, the pilot’s wife, Bess (Caroline Quigley) arrives to claim her errant husband, who she insists has long been a reckless adventurer, wrecking several airplanes and disappearing for months at a time. But he is also a well-known orthodontist with boys and a large dog at home. The moment he sees his wife, the Pilot remembers everything of his basically banal life—except for his adventurous moments of course. And he now has no memory of his amorous adventures that night with Sally.

        The couple leave behind the stunned party guests, hardly believing the truth about the pilot who has so seemingly altered their own lives, Sally is particularly shocked. So disappointed with truth, they can hardly imagine that the woman really was his wife, that he has kids and a large dog home awaiting him. And then...well they now can’t find Daniel. Where could he have gotten to? They check out the entire house, the garage, and from the large window they search the landscape below without finding him. Maybe Daniel was not as paranoid as it seems. Perhaps Daniel was right?

       If the play begins sounding a bit like Wilder mixed with Albee, by the end we perceive that it is perhaps much closer to an earlier “absurdist-like” play of the 20th century, a work that, as the darkness of World War I began to settle over a frivolous European world, would eventually change everything, creating the angst and chaos that helped, in turn, bank the flames for World War II and its aftermath. That play, George Bernard Shaw’s great comedic drama, Heartbreak House (1920), spoke of a heartbreak very different from the kind of which Valerie speaks, of a universal devastation of the soul the likes of which we are confronting still today.

       We doubt the disappearance of one seemingly mad man from the Santa Monica Mountains will have much effect outside of this mad household, but symbolically it expresses just how little it takes to spark terror among allies when one recalls that it simply took the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand Austria, heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne by a Bosnian Serb student, Gavrilo Pincip—the Duke journeying through Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, recently annexed by Austria-Hungry—to bring about the War that killed 15 to 24 million people, although perhaps a quarter of the imprisoned soldiers may have been killed by the flu pandemic of 1918. 

      And what if Daniel is truly a CIA spy, the pilot an interloper sent to get rid of him? It doesn’t take much for madness to embrace any individual, as these birthday celebrants make clear, particularly when people begin to remake others over in their own images of themselves.

      Sand’s play perhaps needs a little tightening of its various entanglements, and maybe another director or Sand himself will be able to energize his other performers to balance the mercurial performance of Wright; as it is she tends to dominate a work in which the other talented actors seem waiting their turn to shine. Finally, as wonderfully frightening as the rain, lightning, and thunder is upon the stage, it needs to be tuned down just a little so that we can fully hear the witty script.

     But these are minor quibbles about a play that is quite remarkable otherwise. I think this would also make a perfect film or TV drama.

 

Los Angeles, April 30, 2022

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (April 2022).

 

 

Charles Strouse, Bob Martin, and Susan Birkenhead | Minsky's / 2009

warm up

by Douglas Messerli

 

Charles Strouse (music), Bob Martin (book), and Susan Birkenhead (lyrics) Minsky's [based on the film, Arnold Shulman, Sidney Michael and Norman Lear (writers), William Friedkin (director) The Night They Raided Minsky's (from the book by Rowland Barber)] / Ahmanson Theatre, Los Angeles / The performance I saw was on February 10, 2009

 

With a score by the noted Broadway composer Charles Strouse (Bye Bye Birdie, Annie, Applause and other musicals), a book by Bob Martin of The Drowsy Chaperone fame, and directed by Michael Ritchie (The Drowsy Chaperone and Curtains) the production of Minsky's, over 10 years in the making, represented the possibility of good old-fashioned musical fare, and, if nothing else, promised a highly enjoyable evening. And in that sense, this Los Angeles production did not disappoint. Certainly it tried hard to please.

      The problem is just that. Martin writes out of a nostalgia for Broadway musicals and older forms of theater. And as most of such nostalgia-based assemblages do, he readily posits the old saw that when times get tough (as they were for the Depression era New York lower East Side National Winter Garden Theatre, the home of Minsky's burlesque—and, with a wink and nod, we all know are equally for us today) it's important to return to the old values of theatrical entertainment: God damn it, kids, we're going to put on one hell of a show!

     The leading actors, ensemble, set-designer, costume designer, and light director do just that. Unfortunately for Martin and the musical's producers, today is not 1930, and even then, we are reminded, burlesque, the subject of this love letter to past entertainments, was already near death. Perhaps had Martin simply reproduced some of burlesque scenes and sketches, we might have been titillated—as we were in the original movie—at the very least. But his book has emptied the plot of almost everything that could give heart to his work, replacing it with a shell of sugary sweetness that even the most gushing sentimentalist (I have admitted to crying for joy during many musicals in my life) might have found cloying.

     Billy Minsky's theater is having hard times; not only are the audiences for his burlesque performances dwindling, but Randolph Sumner, a self-appointed destroyer of all that defines the joys of life—he warns his daughter Mary not to smile too much—has begun to direct his energies to closing down The National Winter Garden.

 

     A driven man, clearly in love with theater and those performing on the stage they describe as "Home," Billy is nonetheless dissatisfied with life and seeks out the help of a psychiatrist. Meanwhile, the straight-lipped Mary Sumner finds herself in a similar position, and, in one of the best scenes in the musical, meets up with a parallel session (the matching pair of "shrinks" later fall in love), after which—through the machinations of a blind man more out of a Buster Keaton movie that a burlesque sketch—they meet up and immediately fall in love.

      Both the lead actors, Christopher Fitzgerald and Katharine Leonard, are superb performers, but it is hard to draw the audience into their characters when they have already been treated as such cardboard types. We know the truth will have to come out, that Billy is not a fellow reformer, but, in fact, is the devil Minsky himself. And the lies he has told Mary will obviously separate them for a while from the natural course of love, but....

      That's just the trouble, we know the entire story before it has even begun. The rest of this musical, accordingly, has little to do but to strut its beauties around the stage in numbers like "Cleopatra," "Bananas," "You Got to Get Up When You're Down," "Workin' Hot," and "God Bless the U.S.A." and, in one predictable if excellently performed piece, get "Tap Happy." It is as if the entire musical Gypsy were centered upon the performances of Tessie Tura, Mazeppa, and Electra, the three Minsky strippers of that work. But then, those three were actually strippers and their gutsy performances were far more interesting and downright shabby than the cleaned-up dances of this musical as presented in "Keep It Clean." Who'd a thought that Disney's The Lion King could be sexier than a musical about burlesque? 

     Despite my cynical remarks, however, I must admit that the wonderful Minsky's cast danced their hearts out, flashed winning smiles, and did everything in their not so diminished powers to keep it all going. At moments, true theater poked out its puny head, particularly in the musical's wittiest song, "I Want a Life," sang with deadpan humorlessness by Minsky's nerdy bookkeeper (John Cariani) and the daughter of Minsky's backer, a dour little woman whom he is desperately trying to get off his hands (Saturday Night Live's Rachel Dratch). Together they harmonize about a life where "a button is something to sew on" (an earlier song explained that in burlesque parlance a "button" is what ends an act) and "...where pies are [just] dessert." As they briefly minuet about one another, it almost appears that, despite their preferences for humdrum living, they may break into dance; yet the two stubbornly stand in place: "And where no one will dance."

     Yet all of this seemingly endless energy depressed me even more. Like Mary Sumner, early in the work, I just couldn't get a smile onto my face in reaction to their spectacular engagement with life. A kind of gloom had set in.

     Because of the vacuous story and characterizations, the dances and songs of Minsky's seemed always to be a warm up that generated no spark. There was, alas, no fire in this work's idolizing heart.

 

Los Angeles, February 11, 2009

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (February 2009).

 

Jule Styne, Arthur Laurents, and Stephen Sondheim | Gypsy / 2008

a necessary vacuum

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jule Styne (music), Arthur Laurents (book), Stephen Sondheim (lyrics) Gypsy / New York, St. James Theatre / the performance I saw was on the evening of May 10, 2008

 

My brief summary of the plot of Gypsy in the essay above clouds the fact that it is nearly impossible to say anything coherent about this musical. Words seem out of place in a work centered around such a stock figure as this notorious “stage mother.” Better to just sit back and watch this monster (a word taken from the Latin, meaning “to show”) than to attempt to describe what one is being shown.

     Most of the women who have played this role—Ethel Merman, Rosalind Russell, Angela Lansbury, Tyne Daly, Bette Midler, and, in the recent production I attended, Patti LuPone—had long played powerful women before they attempted the role (Bernadette Peters is perhaps the exception). For Mama Rose is the kind of dominating woman who, before the operetta is over (and I think of this American musical as having more links to opera than many other musical works), must devour nearly all the other characters on stage, even the audience itself, to get the attention she craves. Ultimately, these performers, like full force hurricanes, leave little in their paths except the shy, naked girl who has no choice but to retreat into the mind she has never been permitted to develop.

      The audience can do little but sit in stony silence or madly applaud! As if witnessing the death dance of the mad Medea or the passionate self-willed rape of Salome, one recognizes Rose’s last long screed (“Rose’s Turn”)—performed supposedly in an empty theater where we sit as voyeurs—as something nearly unbearable to watch. Her daughter’s lame response, “You could have been great, mama,” is a death knell to this woman born too early and come to performance too late. “Could have, would have,” Rose bites back, knowing that despite all the living she has done vicariously through her daughters, she stands alone on the stage, bowing to an imaginary audience. The fact that we sit there, madly applauding her desperate lament, only reiterates the fact that, within the drama itself, she faces the silence of death.

 

    Yet, as I title the next essay, “What a way to go!” Despite her utter selfishness, Rose has also been utterly, unintentionally selfless, destroying her children and lover at the very moment of building their characters into the kind of strong-willed pioneer woman that she herself is. Gypsy Rose Lee may seek all of her life for the love her mother was unable to provide, but, as she herself admits, she will now live her life by herself in her own manner. Her new identity has transformed the poor little untalented girl that once stood behind it.

     What is remarkable about Patti LuPone’s substantial performance, particularly when she opens her mouth in song, is that in her characterization of Rose we understand, perhaps for the first time, that she was able to hold on to her children and agent-lover Herbie for so long because she was not only willful, powerful, and deter-mined woman, but a siren, a beautiful female who could lure any man, woman, child into her clutches far better than Gypsy will ever be able to seduce her male audiences. It is no accident that Gypsy’s allurement lies in her being a refined lady who stands at a remove from the audience she entertains, an unattainable goddess of love. For Rose, contrarily, is the last of the red hot mammas, a course, down to earth, sexual predator who is nearly impossible to resist. Perhaps only the Midler performance came close to this.

     I never saw the Ethel Merman production, but after seeing this version of the musical play, it now seems hard to imagine such a rock of flesh as having been able to entice anyone to do anything, let alone perform loony amateur skits, as Baby June and Louise did, year after year. One understands in LuPone’s performance why Herbie can “never get away” from her, staying on until the last shred of human decency is dropped, like Gypsy’s long white gloves.

 

New York, May 11, 2008

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (June 2008).

 

Domenico Gaetano Maria Donizetti, J. F. A. Bayard, and J. H. Venoy de Saint-Georges | La fille du Régiment / 2019

marie gets her man and her gun

by Douglas Messerli

 

Domenico Gaetano Maria Donizetti (composer), J. F. A. Bayard and J. H. Venoy de Saint-Georges (libretto) La fille du Régiment / the production Howard Fox and I saw of the Met HD Live presentation was on Saturday, March 2, 2019

 

Even the often traditionalist Metropolitan Opera—although far less conservative over the past many years under the guidance of Peter Gelb—recognizes when it has an innovative comic hit, as they do in this year’s production of La fille du Régiment, directed by the wonderous “child-like” Laurent Pelly (who also did the costumes) and conducted by the performer-behind-the-baton Enrique Mazzola. The Met itself celebrated the near endless ovations at opera’s end with a convention-like confetti-spray of paper placards each saying “bravo” and “brava.” And flowers I haven’t seen since the Maria Callas days.

       And then there was the absolutely glorious singing of the two leads, South Africa’s Pretty Yende (as Marie) and Javier Camarena (as Tonio), who beautifully belts out 9 high C’s in his famous aria “Ah! mes amis, quel jour de fête!" The Met has again loosened up its previous ban on encores, even encouraging the standing-up applause, while Camarena, tears flowing from his eyes in appreciation, goes through those high C’s all over again, making it almost impossible for audience to have clear eyes. Asked in an intermission discussion how he is able to achieve that, the rather modest Camarena simply explained that when you’re rehearsing such a role you sing those high C’s far more often, until your voice becomes raw.

     Perhaps the great Peruvian-born singer Juan Diego Flórez (who Howard saw in another production of this opera) is just as talented, but there is something about the slightly chubby Camarena’s excited possibility of marrying this obviously black woman that says so much about great theater’s ability to transform our visions. These two characters prove the term, “the willing suspension of disbelief,” as both rather handsome individuals turn themselves through their singing into the beauteous creatures represented in the libretto of J. F. A. Bayard and J. H. Venoy de Saint-Georges.

     Yende might have been equally applauded for her “Il faut parir, mes bons compagnons d’armes” and, in Act II, her lovely lament of having to leave all she has loved behind.

      As if the joys of these two lovers were not enough, we have before us the always beloved Stephanie Blythe as the slightly selfish and oafish Marquise of Berkenfield (more of a speaking role than a singing one, which, given Blythe’s soaring voice, is a bit disappointing), Maurizio Muraro (as Sulpice)—who it was announced was suffering from a cold the day we saw the H.D. live-video transmission, but who seemed still to carry his role to near-perfection—and  then, as if allowing us a spicy topping, presenting actress Kathleen Turner in the entirely-speaking role of the proud Duchess of Krakenthorp, declaring her frustrations alternately in rather American accented French and English.

 

    The very athletically-conceived first act, and the mockingly artificiality of Pelly’s vision of Act II with the servant’s molding themselves to the walls and furniture they are cleaning, made for great fun. And then, in Act 1 there was Yende’s sudden surprise, when, upon perceiving her confused love for Tonio, she mutters unintelligible words—in this case spoken entirely in the language of the Zulus, including the languages noted clicks. This production seemed to contain nearly everything one needed to become a kind of classic vision of the Donizetti opera.

      Yes, some of this is simply silly and, particularly in Act II, a bit over-the-top. But it’s fun always. This is the kind of opera to which anyone might bring their children or grandchildren—although on the rainy day we saw it, the movie-theater audience was made-up, once more, of grey-white-purple haired women and their husbands, many of whom came armed with their walkers. We, alas, are not far from those descriptions. Although I know the Met cameras must seek them out in their before curtain coverage, there seems to be many younger people attending the New York opera house itself. Opera desperately needs those young people!

      And then there is this strange tale about a young abandoned child adopted, evidently without any abuse, by an entire military unit of lusty young men. She grows up virtually as an indentured servant, endlessly washing and cleaning their underwear and cooking their meals. Marie might as easily be described as a kind of slave, a Cinderella who is never invited to the ball. 

      Yet being the “daughter” of an entire military unit, she is also allowed a great deal of freedom, unforced to play the proper young woman, even encouraged to be an independent-thinking tom-boy, who openly grumbles and rebels about anything she doesn’t like. If she cheerily accepts her endless washing, ironing, and potato-peeling duties, she perceives herself also as a kind of Joan of Arc, a military woman working alongside of these men to help France, singing “Salut à la France” to rile up their patriotic fervor that might see them on to war with the terrified peasants of Tyrolean Italy. 

    She is a wild thing, ready at any moment to carry a gun—a kind of Annie Oakley of the day shocked suddenly into love by the equally radical Tonio, a milder Wild Bill Hitchcock who, as a Tyrolean, dares not only to enter enemy territory in search of his love, but to join up with them, later becoming a kind of French hero.

      Once the local Tyrolean Marquise, really a kind of wealthy bourgeoise, perceives Marie as being the long-lost daughter of her sister and dresses her up in a new gown while attempting to teach the girl proper French and Italian melodies and manners, Yende really does remind one a bit of Doris Day’s Oakley, all dressed up to entice her “Wild Bill” Tony. You might almost expect them to break into a chorus of “I Can Do Anything Better Than You.” One might even describe the 9 high C’s of Tonio in Act I as a kind of “I can outdo you” in reaction to Marie’s infectious singing.

       In fact, Marie’s Tonio rides in to save her, this time in a absurdly anachronistic machine-gun tank to rescue her from the dead society (which almost reminded of the audience I describe above) into which she is being forced to marry.

      We know this gutsy young girl will never be able to survive as the wife of the conveniently absent son (like Tonio, a tenor playing at the Metropolitan) of the Duchess of Krakenthorp; yet when the Marquise suddenly admits to Sulpice that she, in fact, is the mother of Marie, the girl, unwilling, agrees to sign the marriage certificate.

    Suddenly, the memory of her youthful sexual follies almost rejuvenates the Marquise, as she declares that Marie should marry the man her daughter loves instead of marrying into the dead world of her own memories of her beloved Robert.

      It is somewhat amazingly, accordingly, that a 17th century Opéra comique might speak so strongly about feminist aspirations, military incompetence, and patriarchal and matriarchal demands that speak to our own time. In a far more comic manner, this strong woman reminds us of more tragic women of opera such as Brünhilde, Carmen, Salome, Electra, Princess Turandot, and so very many others who attempted, often successfully but more often forced into death, to rebel against patriarchal domination. Marie gets her man and her gun; she can now keep her wild identity while swooning into the arms of her soldier lover.

 

Los Angeles, March 5, 2019

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (March 2019).