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Monday, December 9, 2019

ONE NOVEMBER YANKEE Starring Harry Hamlin and Stefanie Powers at 59E59 Theaters

L-R: Harry Hamlin and Stefanie Powers in ONE NOVEMBER YANKEE. 
Photo by Matt Urban at NuPOINT Marketing.

One November Yankee, constructed by Joshua Ravetch (and I use the verb “constructed” rather than “written” advisedly) is simply too clever by half.  Currently enjoying its New York City premiere at 59E59 Theaters on East 59th Street in midtown Manhattan, it is really three intricately inter-related plays in one and is rife with puns, foreshadowings, coincidences, allusions, and pretentiously predictable analogues.

Taken as a whole, the tri-partite play is the tale of one airplane and three sets of siblings: Ralph and Maggie, Harry and Margo, and Ronnie and Mia.  The roles of Ralph, Harry and Ronnie are all played by Harry Hamlin and the roles of Maggie, Margo and Mia are all played by Stephanie Powers.

The plane in question is a Piper Cub with the tail number 1NY (whence the play’s title One November Yankee).  It is piloted by Margo, a rather ditzy librarian who crashes the plane in a remote corner of a New Hampshire forest, having run out of gas, having removed the plane’s locator beacon for repair and never having re-installed it before taking off, and having neglected to file a flight plan.  The only other passenger on the plane is Margo’s brother, Harry, an aspiring novelist who is on the verge of publishing his first novel (entitled A Very Troubled Journey With a Very Unhappy Ending).  A pair of self-described Jewish intellectuals, they were en route to their father’s wedding in Florida (to his second wife-to-be) when the plane went down.

Five years later, Maggie, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, arranges for the museum to grant her brother, Ralph, acclaimed as one of the top three modern artists in the world (at least everywhere outside of New York), a $75,000 commission to mount an installation at MoMA.  The installation that Ralph designs is a replica of the crashed Piper Cub 1NY which he entitles Crumpled Plane and which is intended to symbolize “Civilization in Ruin.”  If the New York critics like it, his reputation will be made.

The analogies between Ralph and Maggie on the one hand and Harry and Margo on the other are obviously much too blatant to be missed.  Both Ralph and Harry are insecure creative artists; their sisters, Maggie and Margo are pedestrian pedants, a librarian and a curator.  Both Maggie and Margo are on their third marriages and each has a son. But just in case the analogy between Ralph/Maggie and Harry/Margo is missed, the most trivial likenesses in their stories are underscored again, and again, and again….
    
Thus, Ralph, while placing the finishing touches on his installation, inadvertently gets red paint on his brand new shirt just as Harry’s brand new shirt is similarly covered with blood after the crash.   Margo extinguishes the flames from the crash with a fire extinguisher that turns out to be just like the one Ralph places on a pedestal as part of his exhibition.  Harry speculates that his chances of being rescued are like those of a “needle in a fucking haystack.  Like that artist Kantano.  His stuff depicts how small we are.  Inconsequential.  Dust.”  And Kantano, as it turns out, is one of the two artists Ralph most admires and one he beat out for the MoMA commission.  And on and on and on.

But if you’ve got any disbelief left to suspend, we still have the third sibling couple – Ronnie and Mia - left to deal with.  They are hikers who, as luck would have it, happen upon the plane’s wreckage five years after the crash, in the very month that Ralph’s installation is being unveiled at the MoMA.  And (wouldn’t you just know it?), discovering the wreckage affects them even more deeply than one might have imagined since they lost their own brother, Danny, in a different plane crash and haven’t yet really come to terms with that.

One November Yankee delivers several messages.  One is that art imitates life which imitates art which imitates life which…but you get the point of that one.  Another is that all sibling relationships are love-hate relationships, fraught with jealousy, misunderstanding, animosity and a remembrance and lack of forgiveness for any sin one’s sibling might ever have committed, knowingly or unknowingly.  And a third is that art is whatever artists or elite art critics say it is – or maybe that it’s really the other way around: maybe it’s that some “art” really is trash or debris and not “art” at all no matter who says it is.  Perhaps a line should be drawn somewhere – for starters, say, by denying that spattering elephant dung on a picture of Jesus Christ constitutes “art” – notwithstanding the fact that some self-proclaimed art critic might say it is. I’m really not sure what the play’s position on this one is.

Harry Hamlin and Stefanie Powers are both very fine actors, fully capable of delivering outstanding performances in a variety of roles but, sadly, you wouldn’t know it from this production. Ralph, Harry and Ronnie may all have been assigned different personae and costumed differently but I saw little differentiation in the way Hamlin performed what should have been three distinctively different roles.  And the same was true of Stefanie Powers in the roles of Maggie, Margot and Mia.   I suspect that that might have been Joshua Ravetch’s doing (although I really do not know this for a fact): as both playwright and director, he may have sought to emphasize the universality of the human condition (which might also explain the overuse of foreshadowings, coincidences, and analogues) even at the expenses of delivering more nuanced performances. If so, I guess he succeeded but at a serious dramatic cost.