"A Child is Being
Beaten"
By Charles McNulty
A Day in the Death of Joe Egg
By Peter Nichols
American Airlines Theatre
227 W. 42nd St.
Box office: 212-719-1300
Life (x) 3
By Yasmina Reza
Circle in the Square
50th St. west of Broadway
Box office: 212-239-6200
The figure of the abused child has haunted modern drama from its
beginnings. Woyzeck’s illegitimate child in Büchner's
masterpiece is perhaps the first born in a veritable orphanage
of damaged children. Consider the casualties of Ibsen’s
neglectful, narcissistic parents--poor half-blind Hedvig and crippled
Little Eyolf. Or the memory of Lopakhin’s bloody-nosed youth
in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. Edward Albee,
to cite perhaps the most extreme case in contemporary playwriting,
has returned to the fantasy of the beaten child with the ritualistic
fixation of one of Freud’s patients. From The American
Dream through Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
to The Play About the Baby, he has mutilated, murdered,
or rendered nonexistent the offspring of his protagonists. And
Sam Shepard has made a career tracing the filial aftershocks of
paternal brutality. In his essay “A Child is Being Beaten,”
Freud says that the fantasy of child abuse is (surprise, surprise)
a symptom of our incestuous natures. But more often than not the
presence--or lingering palpable absence--of a wounded child onstage
sheds light on a traumatic grown-up reality that can no longer
be repressed. Sophocles notwithstanding, marital and professional
discord rank higher as dramatic subjects than Oedipal angst.
Two plays receiving attention this spring season on Broadway employ
background portraits of injured children to comment on adult relationships
in the throes of crisis. Peter Nichols's 1967 somber comedy A
Day in the Death of Joe Egg, being revived by the Roundabout
Theatre, revolves around a married couple trying in hyperactively
vaudevillian ways to cope with the permanent reality of their
severely handicapped daughter. Yasmina Reza’s Life (X)
3--a French comedy with fuzzy philosophical (and not so fuzzy
commercial) aspirations--features the intermittent crying of an
offstage boy who refuses to be assuaged by his parents’
efforts to shut him up. Though the violence these children encounter
differs in kind and degree, each case opens a portal to something
unassimilable in the demands of mature intimacy and love.
Nichols, who has written the more interesting of the two works,
manages to transcend the autobiographical origins of his drama.
The playwright is actually the father of disabled child, but thematic
substance (as opposed to historical fact) structures his story.
Maudlin self-pity and sentimentality--the two risks inherent in
the material--give way to an expansive tragicomic truth. What’s
more, Nichols’s willingness to look beyond suffocating realism
to more elastic metatheatrical models helps make what is admittedly
not the most promising of subjects (a spastic ten-year-old’s
effect on a marriage) compulsively engaging and surprisingly upbeat.
Bri (Eddie Izzard) and Sheila (Victoria Hamilton) have spent the
past decade raising their daughter Josephine, a helplessly brain-damaged
girl whose adorable face is the only thing standing in the way
of the label “vegetable.” Not endowed with a distinctive
personality, Josephine (Madeleine Martin) has a series of farfetched
identities imposed on her by her parents, who cope with their
pain through comic routines. The roster of different “Josephines”
includes a concert pianist dying of consumption, “a drunken
bag” given to pipe-smoking and bottle-throwing, and “a
Coach tour lady” with seasick pills in her bag and a hatred
of foreigners. The little girl’s frequent groans, of course,
have nothing to do with the maniacal act unfolding before her.
The stress on Bri and Shelia’s marriage is evident everywhere,
from Bri’s short fuse with the students he unhappily teaches
while waiting for his big break as a painter, to Shelia’s
defensive wall of busyness. Their cluttered house physically captures
the nature of the couple’s internalized domestic conflict,
with Shelia’s green thumb and love of animals giving the
place a comfy, lived-in quality, though it is frayed and flea-infested
as a result. Clearly, caretaking has had its dilapidating effects,
and nowhere more so than in the romance department. To Bri’s
frisky afternoon advances, Sheila responds with a reminder that
Joe, soon to be arriving home from school, has to be “fed,
bathed, exercised, put to bed.”
While prankster Bri finds ways of sublimating some of his rage
and channeling it into his disturbingly wacky paintings (including
wearable sandwich boards displaying front and back images of Wild
Bill Hickok), Sheila takes things out on herself. Her recent venture
into amateur theatricals is a way to escape not only relentless
household chores but also her own punishing guilt. Under her husband’s
prodding, she admits to feeling responsible for her daughter’s
condition: “I think it was partly because I had been promiscuous,
yes, and my subconscious was making me shrink or withdraw from
motherhood, all right!” Ever the sacrificing wife and mother,
she offers herself up as a reason for the blameless domestic tragedy.
Yet Sheila’s humanity, burdensome though it can be, is the
source of her empathic insight. Sensing the depression underneath
Bri’s compulsive mirth, she reveals that she joins in the
steady stream of jokes mainly to please him: “If it helps
him live with her, I can’t see the harm, can you?”
Bri calls his wife “a truly integrated person” who
“embraces every living thing.” Sheila, on the other
hand, is forced to question the psychological development of a
man who can’t stop making light of grim reality. “Watching
someone as limited as Joe over ten years, I’ve begun to
feel she’s only one kind of cripple,” she confides
wearily to the audience. “Everybody’s damaged in some
way. There’s a limit to what we can do. Brian, for instance,
he goes so far--and hits the ceiling. Just can’t fly any
higher. Then he drops to the floor and we get self-pity again…despair.
I’m sure, though, if he could go farther--he could be a
marvelous painter.”
The second act brings the couple’s strained intimacy to
the breaking point, when Bri, pushed to the edge by a vicious
combination of unfounded jealously, paternal despair, and sexual
frustration, pretends at first to have murdered Joe, then takes
steps to attempt the deed in earnest. The build-up, aided by a
series of somewhat caricatured guests, amounts to a systematic
piling of final straws. Pam (Margaret Colin) and Freddie (Michael
Gaston), a neighboring couple dripping of bourgeois conventionality,
intrude on the scene with coercive notions of normal life. Freddie,
a model of well-intentioned but emotionally obtuse British resolve,
tries to persuade his friends to place Joe in an out-of-sight
residential school and adopt a “proper working child.”
He also goes to great patronizing lengths to assure Bri that he
has no intention of seducing Sheila while they are in rehearsal
together. Meanwhile, Pam, who can’t abide anything “Non-Physically
Attractive (“N.P.A” for short), shudders with the
prospect of having to see the “weirdie.” Compounding
matters is Bri’s mom, Grace (Dana Ivey), alternately coddling
and castrating, who remains willfully oblivious to the fact that
her son is trying to do away with her helpless granddaughter.
The dark farcical spiral presents a Freudian smorgasbord of surreal
pathology.
Nichols’s play is less a case study of parents dealing with
an extraordinarily handicapped child than an ingeniously theatrical
portrait of two people trying to sustain a connection in the face
of ordinary emotional impairments. Hence, the real casualty is
bound to be the couple’s marriage. Bri, unable to bear the
burden of his own conspicuous weakness, makes his final cowardly
getaway as his wife momentarily attends to her cats. All the gags
in the world cannot prevent him from recognizing what he heartbreakingly
lacks--the capacity for daily sacrifice demanded by family.
One of the signal accomplishments of Nichols’s play is the
wicked contrast of tones. Joe Egg moves sharply between
music hall shtick and poignant drama. Laurence Boswell’s
brisk staging keeps pace thanks to the gamely versatile leads,
Izzard and Hamilton, who are reprising the roles they created
in London. Izzard, the droll standup comic who was formerly given
to wearing rumpled articles of female drag, lends an improvisatory
keenness to everything he does. A stocky bloke forever on the
verge of paroxysms of common sense, he is both Everyman and Odd
Man Out, an object at once of flattering identification and out-and-out
scorn--in short, the perfect embodiment of Bri’s conflicted
nature. Hamilton, profoundly touching in her character’s
persevering goodness, holds her own in the comic pas de deux,
which are enacted in such a freewheeling manner that it often
seems as though the script has been temporarily discarded for
impromptu free-association.
Far less impressive is Life (X) 3, a gimmicky comedy
that replays the same failed dinner party in a trio of slightly
different variations. The action begins with a French couple,
Sonia (Helen Hunt) and Henry (John Turturro), bickering over their
crying six-year-old who, forlorn in an offstage bedroom, desires
a snack even though he has already brushed his teeth and been
put to bed. Sonia is adamant about imposing discipline, while
more pliant Henry would rather sacrifice oral hygiene for his
son’s happiness. The inevitable attempts at appeasement
only exacerbate the child’s tantrum, as every proffered
apple slice and chocolate biscuit gives rise to more elaborate
demands. At the pitch of an increasingly violent parental crisis,
the doorbell rings. Hubert (Brent Spiner) and Inez (Linda Emond)
have arrived a day earlier than expected for a dinner in which
Henry’s professional fate hangs in the balance. As the new
couple enter the fray of indulgence and denial, the stakes are
quickly raised from bedtime snacks to professional and sexual
enticements.
The outcome of Henri’s nervous ambitions--he’s a research
scientist hoping to redeem his flagging reputation with a new
paper on the Milky Way--is revised in each of the segments, with
the first leaving him disappointed and humiliated, the second
disappointed but fiercely proud, and the third successful but
despairing. The rest of the characters, though given little fertile
distinction of their own, mutate accordingly. More a protracted
sitcom with a faux intellectual sheen than a well-wrought philosophical
farce, Life (X) 3 never manages to make good on its triplicate
conceit. It’s far less fun than even the recently over-praised
German cult film Run Lola Run, which at least enhanced
its reiterated situation with increasingly melodramatic high jinx.
With Reza, the experimental form is really just a cover for boulevard
banality.
As profitably shown in her Paris-London-New York gold mine Art,
Reza has the knack of being witty yet unresonant--her laugh lines
vanishing with the alacrity of dime-store bubbles. Though there’s
something characteristically geometric about her dramaturgy, her
latest effort raises questions about whether her vision lacks
even schematic clarity. Her attempts at metaphysical lyricism,
at least in Christopher Hampton’s translation (“Where
would the universe be without us? A dreary, black place without
an ounce of poetry”), fail just as dismally. An inchoate
psychological interest perhaps resides behind the juxtaposing
of a whining, tyrannical youth and the cacophony of wrangling
adults, yet the work distills its central insight into ciphers.
The vacuous note is emphasized by Matthew Warchus’s no-man’s-land
production, which offers a pseudo-Paris marked by French names
and the occasional spot of Gallic lechery. (Hubert, the Frenchman
from central casting, tries to sign Sonia up as his mistress with
varying success in the three installments.) Mark Thompson’s
generic set offers a contemporary apartment living room--anywhere
the rents are presumably high--cordoned off with beams of fuchsia
light that add just a subtle Twilight Zone hint. One
should perhaps be grateful that no one took anything too seriously.
Stolidly glamorous, urbane, and perfectly at home with aggressive
one-liners, Hunt remains as unchallenged on stage as she is on
the small screen. She expertly delivers, in short, another two-dimensional
boob-tube role. Turturro, perhaps sensing the play’s deficiencies,
tries upping the theatrical ante. Always in dervish motion, he
uncoils his rubbery body like a slingshot with every barbed delivery.
Yet only Emond finds any real dramatic substance as the stomped-on
wife. Responding to the dry put-downs of Spiner’s Hubert,
she endows her character with an inner dignity that’s the
gift of a mature actress who intuitively understands the ageless
quality of our distraught screams.
[A theater critic for the Village Voice,
Charles McNulty is the head of Brooklyn College's MFA Program
in Dramaturgy and Theater Criticism.]
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