Culture Watch
In this issue:
THEATERThe Waverly Gallery is a wise play about the ravages of time on the mind, and Eileen Heckart gives a career-capping performance.
FILM
Brutality and innocence fatally collide in a haunting entry from Britain,
The
Last September.
AND CONSIDER THIS
Margaret Sanger explains it all in this reissue of her autobiography;
the jazz legend Mary Lou Williams gets the star treatment in a new book
about her life in music.
A Slow, Dark Descent
The Waverly Gallery by Kenneth Lonergan
Directed by Scott Ellis
If death is an undiscovered country from which no
traveler returns, extreme old age can be a dark no-man's land with no clear
horizon. That arid and lonely wilderness is traversed by Eileen Heckart
in a fine new off-Broadway play and her character, Gladys Green, is touching,
maddening and admirable, often simultaneously. When first seen, Gladys
is an independent-minded and garrulous widow, oblivious to her increasing
deafness, the repetition of her comments and persistent questions and the
rolled-eyed exasperation of her family. Gladys is making a slow and agonizing
descent into senility, and they are helpless to stop the ravages to her
once sharp mind.
Gladys had been a typical sort of New York
City Jewish woman of a bygone era: bright and energetic, well-educated,
a lawyer and an art lover and an enthusiastic activist for all sorts of
liberal causes. If you needed anything done, just go to Gladys. She was
someone with a genuine liking for people and an inexhaustible curiosity
about them. For years she has been running the little out-of-the-way Waverly
Gallery in Greenwich Village, supporting artists, giving them space to
show their work less because of the quality than because she liked them
and wanted to do something to further their career. Now that she's in her
late 80s, Gladys is barely holding her own. Few, if any customers venture
in, but following about a familiar daily routine in the neighborhood she
knows so well and keeping the gallery running gives her stability and a
sense of purpose.
It's a precarious balance for the entire family
that's abruptly overturned when the owner decides he needs the space for
his adjacent hotel and tells Gladys' daughter Ellen that the old woman
must vacate in a few more months. Ellen, her husband Howard and her
son Daniel argue over what's to be done, sure that Gladys can't hear what
they are discussing. Unaware of their conversation, she prattles on about
her own concerns, but suddenly catches a phrase about someone going to
be kicked out. Fear flickers across her face, and she asks who it is. Caught
out, they hurry to answer that it's nobody she knows. The moment encapsulates
the family dilemma: they want to spare her from the reality at any cost,
while they dodge the one single truth about her increasing mental deterioration.
Little by little, the woman they know is disappearing, her mind and vivid
personality vanishing. All the parts are there, but they are jumbled
together. "If I ever get that way," Ellen tries to tell Daniel, but he
stops her before she can finish and won't hear it. You won't, he tells
her, no, you won't. When she was young, Ellen would probably have said
the same thing to Gladys.
Playwright Lonergan takes a clear and unyielding
look at dementia's savage destruction, and his drama is emotionally moving
without for a minute being maudlin. Director Scott Ellis skillfully moves
his actors around the small stage of Manhattan's Promenade Theater with
scenes taking place in the gallery, Ellen and Howard's apartment, Gladys'
apartment and a hallway of the building in which both Gladys and Daniel
live. At one point, Gladys wakes in the night with a bad dream and walks
down the hall to awaken Daniel. He manages to get her back to her own door.
She appears again, but we realize there's been a passage of time and Gladys
is more confused and fretful than before. He returns her to her own place,
but once more there is a sense of passing days and now she no longer recognizes
him. In a movie, such a transition would be done with makeup changes
and in several takes. Here, the actress crosses the stage and the sad,
subtle transformations takes place before our eyes.
The Who's Who entry in the program
states that Eileen Heckart "has three sons and two granddaughters. She
also has an Oscar, two Emmys, a Hollywood Golden Globe, a New York Drama
Critics Award, four Tony nominations, three Honorary Doctorates and has
been inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame.'' It doesn't list the scores
of plays, films and TV programs she has been in since the '50s, and it's
hardly necessary. It's enough to know that at 81 she has long been a master
of the actor's art. Through her, we see all the dimensions of Gladys, a
good a generous woman: her pride and stubbornness, compassion and vulnerability
and above all her full humanity and ferocity for life. With their complex
and fully dimensional performances, Waverly Gallery's cast of six
achieves the best kind of ensemble acting, but Gladys is the focal point
and so it's Heckart's play. Ever so slightly, her Gladys becomes more forgetful
and more fragile, a hand tremble increased, the legs grow stiffer, the
body weakens. And in Heckart's eyes we can see the futile struggle to make
sense of the world and comprehend the terrible thing that is happening.
Through a Glass Darkly
The Last September Directed by Deborah Warner
The Anglo-Irish aristocracy were in tatters by 1920, and their existence
was fast coming to a close. That's tragedy enough, but the greater
tragedy was that they dare not notice it. The Last September, adapted
from a novel by Elizabeth Bowen, concerns a family in Ireland's County
Cork in 1920, and it has a melancholy, Chekovian feel. These are people
gripping a past while it is rapidly turning to dust in their hands. In
their country house, Sir Richard and Lady Myra (British actors Michael
Gambon and Maggie Smith) go about life as usual with a kind of foolish
bravery. He busies himself with gadgets, and she worries over the roses
and the insurgency of ants making their abode on the house's front step.
The couple are unfailingly gracious and courteous, politely but firmly
upholding class divisions, inviting friends for an afternoon of tennis
on the lawn, and showing concern that Sir Richard's orphaned niece Lois
not get seriously infatuated with the young British captain who is in love
with her. He doesn't, concludes Lady Myra, have the look of money.
Brutality surrounds their false serenity. Soldiers
are being murdered by local Irish rebels, and the most violent among them
is Peter Connolly, a local lad who had been a friend of Lois in earlier
years. As Lois, British actress Keeley Hawkes has the fresh beauty and
child-like naturalness before the camera of the young Audrey Hepburn.
Despite knowing that Connolly is a killer, she is attracted to him, and
what begins as a harmless game of defying authority turns ugly. Innocence
is betrayed, and Lois unwittingly becomes the cause of another's
death. As a family guest and catalyst for the final horror, Irish actress
Fiona Shaw shines with the brilliance and cold cheer of a well-cut diamond.
The inability to see what is all around is a constant
visual theme of director Warner, a stage veteran whose first film this
is. A glass garden ball refracts images upside down, people are seen
through windows, reflected in mirrors or polished surfaces. Lois carries
around a telescope so she can see close-up what is in the distance.
In the evening, guarded by British soldiers, the family dines by candlelight
inside their glass conservatory. They can be seen, but do not see out.
Books:
Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography
(Cooper Square Press; 504 pages; $14.36)
When American women's health is discussed today breast cancer and heart disease are the major subjects. Not very long ago, the only issue for women everywhere was birth control and the toll numerous pregnancies took on women's physical and mental well-being. The heroine of the movement to change the thinking and give women--not men--the power over reproduction was Margaret Sanger. In this paperback reissue of her autobiography, she recalls her life as an advocate for women who was prepared to go to jail for her beliefs, and did. Her passion was kindled while watching her mother collapse under the weight of bearing and trying to care for eleven children, and Sanger's lifelong commitment to her cause was matched only by her prodigious energy. She was a radical woman and her cause was women.
Morning Glory by Linda Dahl
(Pantheon; 528 pages; $21)
Female singers have made a lasting impression on the development of jazz, and I don't have to tell you who they are. The remarkable woman whose theories, compositions, arrangements and driving piano style influenced America's musical art form was Mary Lou Williams. Her 50-year career and spiritual quest, with as many downs as ups in both, is documented in this solidly researched biography of her life and times. Author Dahl knows her subject and is painstaking in spelling out the history of jazz and Williams' role. The result may strike readers as dry, but it could be the perfect companion to the 22 numbers on the about-to-be issued BMG/RCA Victorremastering of her The London Session. Williams worked with the greats--from Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington to Miles Davis and Thelonius Monk--and people used to say that she played piano like a man. Think of it this way: wouldn't it be the highest compliment to say of a man that he played like her? Only you, Mary Lou.
