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Photo Vincent Guadazno
The actors took turns in the strangely twisting — or was it twisted? — reading that inaugurated The Provincetown Theater last weekend. |
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Tom (Jeff Biehi) and Frank (Tim Warmen) find out their tryst was long on lust and short on truth in “The Direct Line Play.” |
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‘Direct Line’ opens theater with plethora of playwrights
Sue Harrison
BANNER STAFF
As the 16 actors file onto stage and take their seats on folding chairs with their scripts on music stands in front of them, the audience couldn’t dream of the tale about to unfold. The Provincetown Theater jumped into its premier season with “The Direct Line Play,” a dazzling assortment of mostly associated vignettes written by 25 different playwrights, some of them the biggest names in theater.
The play was produced as a reading by the Provincetown Repertory Theatre. The result, as you would imagine, is partly delightful, partly a little tortured, some politics, some history, a lot of laughter and a healthy dose of lampooning the town that has been called the birthplace of American theater.
The staging was simple, a line of chairs in front of a wall of Dan Joy drawings depicting Provincetown. The actors — with the exception of Provincetown’s Tim Babcock — came from Boston, New York and as far away as London. The casting was great and director Phyllis Newman did the nearly impossible by pulling these disparate bits into a mostly cohesive whole. The premise of the play’s creation is that one playwright begins by writing a short scene and then sends it on to the next playwright who writes a second scene, theoretically flowing from the first, and then passes it on down the line.
The only condition was that the play begin in Provincetown. It did and in fact stayed in Provincetown except for a brief foray into heaven when the recently deceased Dick Cheney got a chance for a chat with Jesus.
In the first scene by Terence McNally, Tom and Frank — tricks from the previous night who are making serious but not truthful moves on each other — wander the dunes exclaiming the beauty, the history, the myth of the place. Did Marlon Brando walk all the way to Race Point and back with Tennessee Williams without speaking a word, one wonders? We get a little history. (Who knew that the Outer Cape was ruled by cannibal, lesbian Native Americans prior to the Pilgrims’ arrival?) And somehow it’s no surprise when Eugene O’Neill suddenly appears and starts to talk about his time on the Cape. Like a wraith he appears and reappears throughout, sinking deeper into drink and fog, both metaphorically and actually.
The story quickly ratchets up with playwright John Guare as a Dwight arrives and announces that he is married to Tom. Before you can blink, Tennessee Williams takes center stage in a terrific turn by Pablo Schrieber. I could almost smell the magnolias and then Tennessee morphed into Hennessey, the Yankee builder who is about to desecrate the sacred dunes with a honeymoon hotel.
As the play continues, Dick Cheney and his wife Lynn appear with several billion dollars and two women with no marriage prospects who had been kidnapped from their New York apartments and brought to Provincetown to marry the gay men and keep marriage as it should be.
Now we are off and the play scarcely slows down as subsequent playwrights introduce a psycho killer with a serious dislike of almost everyone except his pals from the gun show. (A great performance by Christopher Innvar.) He kills the Cheneys, freeing their daughter Mary to come and marry her lesbian lover Anna who is about to have twins. That birth leads to a rant about the demands of motherhood and presto, the gun guy is back with Tennessee. He then kills Mary and reveals himself to be not a madman but worse, a dramaturg.
Exhausted yet? Don’t be, there’s plenty more.
Anna, the mother of twins turns out to be the high school sweetheart of Frank, one of the original gay guys and in a who-cares disregard for time, she says that the twins are his though their relationship was clearly many years ago. Anna further says her mother left when she was a child and had a sex change and before you can take that in, she discovers that Dwight is her mother, now a man and gone gay.
End of Act One.
It’s hard to imagine what the remaining dozen playwrights could add to this tangled tale, and though they struggled, the second act did not succeed in the same way. There were shining moments but the weight of absurdity allowed for little else to be packed on and it felt as if the playwrights themselves were tired and daunted by what had come before. Yes, we met Jesus, yes the Cheneys came back — and died — again, we got the CIA interceding, Tallulah Bankhead reincarnating as herself, the twins threatened by coyotes and even a town crier. Any of the second act elements might have worked, but when piled on top of what already had transpired often just felt like too much.
Regardless of that, it was an apt and entertaining way to introduce the new theater.
Upcoming Provincetown Theatre Company productions include “Seven Shorts,” “The House of Blue Leaves,” the fall Playwrights Festival and a new comedy by Meryl Cohn. The Rep will present “As Bees in Honey Drown,” a benefit reading of “The Valley of the Dolls” and “The Mystery of Irma Vep.”
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In the Arts
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Jul 1st, 2004