| . | 02/16/2010
A Cable From Gibraltar
By: Eugene Paul
Part of the process of developing a play until it reaches a state deemed ultimate by the playwright, the director, and the producer – not the cast, necessarily – is getting it before willing audiences, who provide their collaboration by being plumbed for their responses: good here, not so good there, uh-oh, hook them earlier, hook them later, what’s missing, that really works, and, overall, shaping the arc of the play, the meat of the play, the action, the words, the heart. It ain’t easy. Debates have never settled which is more difficult to bring off, comedy or tragedy or all else in between. What, then, about outside the parameters? Such as absurdist, where fools rush in…?
A Cable from Gibraltar treads where angels are said to fear, those heavenly folk and those even more heavenly, loaded folk. Playwright Daniel Meltzer has dared to try an absurdist approach and it comes off – in his first act which is a play in itself, entitled crudely, I’ll Show You Mine if You Show me Yours, set in a hospital nursery. We meet F, a sleeping baby. She is disturbed by the arrival of another baby wheeled in. He’s an M. Says so on his wrist. Curious, nosy, cannot stand all that light and noise. Wants to get back into the nice dark, warm, wet. With his pipe. Sophisticated F – she’s been around for hours – has trouble answering all the questions M seems filled with. They know they’re F and M but not much else. Then, M finds he has another pipe down there. F doesn’t. Of course, the audience needs to be complicit in this folderol and director Robert Kalfin has expertly captured their attention through the balance of cunning performances he has elicited from his babies. Great, hulking Roger Clark is over the top absurd as M, not stinting ever, no subtleness, laying it all out. Which would be indigestible if it were not delicately balanced by delicious Jeannine Taylor, an utter delight as F. Constant refrain of giggles from constant audience attention as the absurdist froth bubbles along ever effervescent. Everything works. Wow.
Then comes the second act, A Cable from Gibraltar, the longest, most complicated of the three. The babies (we recognize them), have grown up, comfortable in their evening formal clothes, barefoot, fishing off their separate piers at midnight. Obviously meeting cute. In due blasé course, they abandon their fishing—for each other? – and have lunch together in a café. We’re in Neo-Coward country, mocking the venue, the attitudes, the forms, including a faux French waiter and a fausse French waitress who make a false French bollix of everything at great length and diminishing returns. The play goes out the window if there were a window. Nor has any but the faintest of linkages been established to the babies we know they were, even though they do not. We have all lost our way, which may be the intention but, unfortunately, we need substance; the froth has hit the fan.
Third act, also a play within itself, The Sixty Years War, set in a battleground, has our still recognizable blustering man and our still recognizable, quietly charming woman trigged out as generals, each in a wheel chair, each in a marvelously awful gray wig, each attended by faithful retainers Deborah Radloff, also bewigged but still recognizable as that saucy fake French waitress and David Csizmadia, wigged but still that fake French waiter. He’s with the female general; the old saucy one is with the old male general. Everyone is still brashly over the top except our quiet, contained woman, still a center of sensibility, general or no. We find linkages to those long ago babies, which hold us. The second childishness is not pro forma; the man is more idiotic, more blustery, more emotional; the woman is deeper, softer, stronger. And something magical happens, however briefly: we care, we are touched, now, in this absurdist reduction underlaid with the author’s suppressed rage. How did we get here? Is this where brand new babies with a whole world before them have to end up? In sixty years of killing each other? Sixty years? Or six hundred? Or six thousand? Playwright Meltzer has hit his stride again. Even the fake Frenchies make nonsensical sense.
Medicine Show Theater, 549 West 52nd Street. Tickets: $18, $14 seniors and students.Smarttix.comor 212-868-4444. Thu-Sat 8 pm, mats Sat 2 pm, Sun 3 pm.
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