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| 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.
