Israel
Horowitz, a very prolific writer with more than 70 plays to his credit, has the
distinction of being the most produced American playwright in French theater
history. Appropriately enough, his
latest play, Out of the Mouths of Babes,
currently premiering at the Cherry Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village, is set in
a Paris loft where four women meet to pay their last respects to the recently
deceased centenarian professor whom they all loved at some time in their
respective lives, and who, in turn, loved all of them at some time in his own.
Estelle
Parsons is perfectly cast as Evelyn, the 88 year old grand dame of the group
and one of the deceased professor’s oldest and earliest wives who shared his
bed back in the Big Band era of the1940’s.
Judith Ivey is equally well cast as Evvie, twenty years Evelyn’s junior,
and the only one of the four who never married him (by her choice, not his, as
she remained his lover in the hipper 1960’s when their music centered on the
Beatles and their ilk rather than Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald). Janice (Angelina Fiorellisi), the craziest
and most self-destructive of the lot, was younger still and arrived on the
scene later, but she did succeed in teaching him to play Chopin’s Etudes (which
does come in surprisingly handy as the play approaches its close). Finally, Marie-Belle (Francesca Choy-Kee),
young enough to be his granddaughter and the last of his many wives, turns out
to have been the prime motivator in bringing the four women together for his
funeral. And it is she who really animates
the entire production with her unbridled enthusiasm.
This
is not a deep or thought-provoking play and you’re unlikely to spend much time pondering
its nuances. But it is nonetheless very
entertaining, due to the exceptional performances of all four of these very
talented actresses as they reminisce on the lives they led.
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