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| L-R: Katharine Cullinson, Austin Pendleton, and Richard McElvain in PLAYING SINATRA at Theater For The New City. Photo by Jonathan Slaff. |
Bernard
Kops, an 87 year old immensely talented and prolific playwright, has written
more than 40 plays for stage and radio, nine novels and six volumes of poetry. Despite his well-deserved European
recognition, to date few of his plays have been produced in the United
States. Fortunately, that oversight is
now in the process of being at least partially corrected: his Playing Sinatra, which originally
opened to rave reviews in London in1991, is finally receiving its American premiere
at Theatre For The New City on First Avenue and East Tenth Street in downtown
Manhattan. And it is just terrific. Indeed, it is difficult to understand why it took
so long for it to get here.
Theatrical
history is rife with plays dealing with dysfunctional siblings, in many
instances focusing primarily on sexually repressed spinster sisters. Think The
Glass Menagerie or The Rainmaker. Playing
Sinatra is a play of that genre but one packing even more of a wollop. It is The
Glass Menagerie or The Rainmaker
on steroids. Imagine The Glass Menagerie as it might have
been written by Jean Genet or The
Rainmaker had it been penned by Harold Pinter and you’ll get some idea of
what I’m driving at.Since
the death of their parents just a few weeks apart, Sandra Lewis (Katharine
Cullison), a middle-aged spinster has lived with her brother Norman (Richard
McElvain), a sometimes violent
bookbinder whose agoraphobia may be the least of his mental ailments in
their cavernous ancestral home in Streatham, London.
Norman
appears to be content with his life as it is.
He seldom leaves the house and busies himself with his bookbinding and with
his fancied gourmet cooking (which, if truth be told, amounts to little more
than microwaving TV dinners which are transformed in his mind’s eye into haute
cuisine). He remains the boy he once
was, albeit now in a man’s body.
Sandra,
on the other hand, does leave the house on a daily basis to work at a tedious
office job and she, at least, has not given up entirely on life. Indeed, she even may have been exploring the
possibility of selling or moving from their home. .In a way, she is the
opposite of Norman, not a girl trapped in a woman’s body, but rather a
middle-aged sexually repressed woman who never allowed the young girl she once
might have been to emerge. Today, the
only things that bind the siblings together are their shared history, promises
they made to their deceased parents, and a mutual passion for the life and
music of Frank Sinatra. It is in
Sinatra’s lyrics that they find what others might discover in Ecclesiastes.
When
Phillip de Groot (Austin Pendleton), an American and self-described “seeker”
arrives on the scene, his disruptive influence on the lives of Sandra and
Norman is immediately palpable. But will
Phillip be Sandra’s “platonic lover,” her savior, or her destroyer. He’s certainly nothing like Laura Wingfield’s
“gentleman caller” (a la The Glass
Menagerie) and whether or not he’ll turn out to be the likes of Lizzie
Curry’s Bill Starbuck (a la The Rainmaker)
remains to be seen.
Cullison
is absolutely wonderful as Sandra Lewis, at one moment capturing her distraught
angst and sexual frustration, in the next portraying her fear of men seeking to
get into her knickers, moving on to exhibit her deep devotion to her brother
(which almost appears to border the incestuous), only to affirm her dream of
finding in Phillip the “platonic lover” she has long sought. McElvain is equally good as the mentally
disturbed Norman, whose delusional quirks run the gamut from a damaging
agoraphobia, to a compulsive love of Sinatra, to momentary ourbursts of violence
to repressed homosexuality. And Pendleton
is just grand as the enigmatic and manipulative Phillip who, chameleon-like,
manages to allow the other characters and the audience to make of him what they
will.
This
is one hell of a play and deserves a longer run. Go see it.
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