Glee

Matthew Morrison (far right) as Will Schuester and
Cory Monteith (second from right) as Finn in Glee

Fox TV’s Glee began its formal run two weeks ago, after attracting a great deal of buzz from its summer premiere teaser. And rightly so. Produced by Ryan Murphy, the creator of the much racier but equally off beat and refreshingly bizarre series Nip/Tuck, Glee’s pleasures come from its characters’ slightly insane quirks and the actors’ fully committed, somehow fully tongue-in-cheek performances. The smart writing creates plausible but slightly skewed situations as, for only one instance, when Mercedes Jones (Amber Riley), the African American diva/belter, (“Effie,” as in Dreamgirls, as a snide subsidiary character calls her) yearns to have a boyfriend and actually thinks she can hook up with Kurt Hummel (Chris Colfer), the obviously gay chorus boy. Their cross-purposed relationship quickly fails, but offers the kids (and Murphy) a chance to underline the series’ “I’m okay/you’re okay and it’s good to be different” message.

Somehow, the relatively obvious and insistently repeated moral of each episode so far doesn’t feel heavy-handed or get stale, in part because it, too, is delivered with just the right satirical touch, as though Murphy is poking open fun at all those movies in which the “believe in yourself and your dreams” motto is dragged out for the inspirational ending. Each episode of Glee trades in these platitudes satirically enough that you’re encouraged to respond both cynically and sincerely. Glee’s fun comes from its willingness to find earnestness endearing and necessary, rather than allowing the forces of skepticism and apathy to win out.

The narrative threads that develop these meanings are predictable, but always just wrong enough to point out how absurd they’ve always been, not just here in Glee but in any film or TV show that continues to want us to invest in the “follow your dreams” kind of truth. For instance, Finn Hudson (Cory Monteith) the hunky but soft and vaguely feminine quarterback who sings like a dream and joins glee club despite his teammates’ fear for his masculinity, might easily remind viewers of the Zac Efron character in the High School Musical films.

Finn, though, is taller and has more bulk, which ironically makes his performances that much more fey. He anchors the club, which consists of a Bad News Bears-style assemblage of mis-matched singers and dancers. Along with the African American diva, Mercedes, and Kurt, the drama queen she thinks she can seduce, glee club includes Artie McAdams (Kevin McHale), a young man in a wheelchair, who rolls and does wheelies while others do their steps; Tina (Jenna Ushkowitz), an Asian-American young woman who stutters; and Rachel Berry (Lea Michele), a serious singer who’s in love with Finn and an outsider to the more popular cheerleader crowd that rules McKinley High where the series is set. Rachel, the character’s on-line bio notes, has two fathers.

In fact, Glee flaunts its incipient queerness quite happily. Stephen Tobolowsky performs in a recurring role as Sandy, a proudly swishy teacher who wears pastels and a sweater constantly tied around his shoulders. In the premiere, Sandy was fired for fraternizing with an under-aged male student, but in a recent episode, he returns to McKinley High, since the restraining order requires only that he stay 50 feet away from students. Sandy’s more flamboyant over-the-top middle-aged gayness contrasts nicely with Kurt’s teenage queer style. Although these two are the only explicitly queer characters, Glee addresses in many ways how masculinity is performed and what it means, and each character, happily, stretches the envelope of normativity.

The series’ tone is colored with wistfulness, since the glee club at McKinley High is lead by the tenacious and idealistic Spanish teacher, Will Schuester (Matthew Morrison), who was the club’s star back in his own high school days. Part of the first three episodes’ comedy come from Will’s insistence that his students replicate his early 80s successes by performing disco numbers. Will is clueless but sweet, and his faith in his ragtag band of performers gives them the courage to, of course, pursue their dreams. Will’s wife, Terri (Jessalyn Gilsig), who was his high school sweetheart, desperately wants a child, and concocts a fake pregnancy to pursue her own dream. Will, meanwhile, has an unarticulated crush on his colleague Emma (Jayma Mays), an OCD-plagued, germ-fearing teacher at McKinley who admires Will from not that afar enough for Terri, who notes their mutual affection and uses the fabricated pregnancy to keep Will close.

These adult relationships play out among those of beleaguered high school students fraught with all the typical hormonally-induced crises; among teachers confined by their routines, hoping for something more to grace their lives; and among administrators who suffer funding cuts and a lack of parent confidence that inspires bizarre conciliatory efforts. The school principal plays Moses in each episode, choosing between the conflicting desires of Will and his glee club and the evil Sue Sylvester (Jane Lynch) and her cheerleading squad, offering resources to whichever teacher seems most likely to endear him to the school’s parents.

Lynch plays one of her best roles outside of the Christopher Guest movies in which she’s a regular, demented ensemble member. As the scheming, megalomaniacal gym teacher, Lynch is costumed in matching Adidas track suits, which change only in color from episode to episode (or scene to scene). She works out on the elliptical machine behind her desk as she instructs her hench-girls—Quinn (Dianna Argon), who’s Finn’s plastic blond girlfriend, and Quinn’s look-alike sidekick—to infiltrate and destroy the glee club on her behalf. But when she climbs down from the machine with a towel thrown jauntily around her neck, it’s clear Sue hasn’t broken a sweat. She doesn’t want to work hard; she just wants herself and her cheering squad to be the center of the school’s attention.

Sue is jealous of any dollar the principal gives to the glee club, and will go to any lengths possible to see the club fail. Lynch’s dry one-liners are hysterical (“I haven’t seen performing that tasteless since I saw an elementary school performance of Hair,” she scoffs after the glee club students perform a sexually explicit dance to “Push It” for a school assembly to encourage more students to join). Lynch is expert at the droll remark, and at making outlandish characters like Sue seem logical and righteous despite their insanity. (That Sue is clearly a big ole dyke goes without saying.)

In last week’s episode, Victor Garber and Debra Monk, two veterans of the American musical theatre, showed up as Will’s loving parents. Garber plays his father as a schleppy would-be lawyer who never pursued his own dreams, and Monk does a perfect comic turn as Will’s sloppy, alcoholic mother. Terri’s pregnancy, which Will and his parents think is real, inspires some heart-to-heart between Will and his dad, as Garber tells Will that being a good dad is what makes a man a man. The two men’s masculinity couldn’t be more dubious, held up against conventional norms—Garber teaches Will about manhood while wearing a red bow tie, and Will embraces his dad fervently before running off to choreograph a number for the boy-group he’s formed. But under the terms of Glee, masculinity includes a love for music, for dancing, for community, and for family. There might be irony in the script and its delivery, but there’s earnestness in the characters’ interactions that’s sincere and even moving.

In last week’s episode, the glee club kids’ impatience with Will’s anachronistic music choices forces them to hire the director of a rival group to choreograph their numbers. Will, dejected, decides to start his own men’s group, which the four guys decide to call “Acafellas.” Turns out that Will, Finn, the gym teacher, and a maintenance man really know how to rock out when they perform their white boys’ hip-hop number for a school assembly. The fun of Glee is that it assumes even the most macho guys want to get up and sing. For instance, Puck (Mark Salling), Finn’s buff, gruff, and pushy teammate, can’t resist putting on a tux and crooning with the other guys. And his singing and dancing only make him sexier (in a hetero way), even when the flamboyant Sandy joins the act and gets the group a chance to open for Josh Groban. It’s as though the canvas of a musical act is capacious enough to let desire manifest itself along a continuum of sexual options.

Sandy botches the gig with Groban, who arrives backstage (playing himself) with his body guard to serve Sandy with still another restraining order. But Glee doesn’t consider Sandy pathetic—just overly romantic in his mis-directed desires. Groban hooks up with Will’s mom, insisting that although people think he’s got a cabal of teenaged girls following him around, Groban actually prefers blowsy middle-aged alcoholics. Monk’s character giggles wetly as they flirt to the episode’s end.

Meanwhile, the glee club kids realize that hiring a hot new director comes with costs too high to finance. The fascist, little-person director is so mean he makes kids at his home high school vomit with fear and dismay during rehearsals. But when he brings his cutting, derogatory style to McKinley’s glee club, the kids resist his derision. The new guy, of course, wants to kick out all the misfits, and doesn’t waste time before he dismisses Mercedes as an Effie-wannabe, Artie as “crippled,” Kurt as queer, and Rachel as needing a nose job.

But as they turn to leave, Rachel realizes that it’s the new director who should be fired instead, as he’ll never replace the liberal, democratic Will in the kids’ affections. Rachel is a Jewish girl—Lea Michele looks a lot like Idina Menzel—who cites Barbra Streisand’s refusal to get a nose job as her own cri de coeur, insisting that her difference is what will make her a star. In fact, she proclaims, the glee kids’ uniqueness comes from their differences, which she embraces as the source of their talent and their pride.

In the face of her rallying cry, all the kids puff out their chests—Artie in his wheelchair, wearing his ubiquitous driving gloves, Mercedes in her radiant, zaftig, belting divadom, Kurt in his queer elaborateness, which only he thinks is a secret, and Finn in his femme-y football hero straightness. They can all get behind being different as their club’s distinctive reason for being. When Will sheepishly but happily returns as their coach, he sets the best earnest example of what it means to ride that difference to your dreams.

Glee’s actors all boast backgrounds in musical theatre, although some have more professional experience than others. Matthew Morrison, who plays Will, performed on Broadway in Hairspray, was nominated for a Tony for his work in Light in the Piazza, and played Lt. Cable in the recent revival of South Pacific. Lea Michele, Glee’s Rachel, received a Drama Desk Award nomination for her performance in Spring Awakening in 2006. Each of the show’s glee clubbers has performed live somewhere, and bring to their roles the authenticity of awkward young people who find themselves electric and at home when they’re on stage.

Glee’s jokes come fast and furious, but always with affection and never truly at a character’s expense. The show is designed in bright, candy colors that underline its satire, and shot at angles that pointedly indicate who’s the good guy and who’s the villain. But often, the villains turn out to be good guys, transformed by the power of singing to find their glowing inner decency.

That’s a moral for a story I can get behind. And the songs are great, too.

The Feminist Spectator

Hung on HBO

Thomas Jane and Jane Adams in Hung.

HBO’s new summer series about a man whose anatomy becomes his professional destiny is not the first place I’d look for feminist television programming. And yet Hung turns out to be a wonderfully smart, funny, and indeed feminist story of a down-on-his-luck middle-class white history teacher-basketball coach whose wife divorces him, whose house burns nearly to the ground because of an electrical short in an overloaded extension chord, and who can’t get his life together, financially, emotionally, or pragmatically.

Ray Decker, played by the handsome, valiant Thomas Jane, is an otherwise ordinary man, beset with all the problems of someone whose best years are well behind him. He was a high school baseball star, who married his high school sweetheart, never left the Detroit suburb where he was raised, and in fact lives in a tent in the backyard of the house he inherited from his parents, which burns in a catastrophic fire in the series opener. He’s an average white guy stuck in his own history, who never progressed beyond his teenage success.

His wife, Jessica, the now-faded cheerleader, played by Anne Heche in parodic high dudgeon, has left him for Ronnie (Eddie Jemison), a high school geek who grew up to be a plastic surgeon (he gives Jessica shots of Botox after their morning coffee). Ronnie is short, blinkered, and socially clueless; it’s clear Jessica is more attracted to his money than to his body. Ironically, mid-way through the season, as the economic downturn hits, Ronnie announces that they aren’t rich anymore, leading Jessica’s busy-body mother (who looks like Dr. Ruth and speaks with an inexplicable Eastern European accent) to ask Jessica if she has to keep “giving him sex.” While Jessica dismisses her mother’s concern, in a later scene, as Ronnie rolls her way to nuzzle her ear in their marital bed, Jessica summarily announces that she’s not in the mood, predicting a lot of bad sexual luck in Ronnie’s future.

In an effort to improve his odds financially, Ray enrolls in a how-to-get-rich-quick seminar led by Floyd Gerber (Steve Hytner), whose large teeth, bad haircut, and empty inspiration reads as big-L loser immediately. In the seminar, Ray reconnects with Tanya (Jane Adams), a goofy poet with writer’s block with whom he had and has again a one-night stand. When their second tryst derails emotionally, Tanya’s accusation that all Ray has going for him is a “big dick” begins an entrepreneurial opportunity for both of them. The unlikely couple embarks on an even more unlikely business venture called “Happiness Consultants,” in which Tanya pimps Ray out to various sexually frustrated (or curious) middle-class suburban housewives.

If Ray is hobbled by his own stasis, Tanya’s earnest ambitions are enough to motivate them both. Although she’s a bohemian writer trying to be a vegetarian, she takes her work as Ray’s pimp very seriously. Part of the series’ comedy comes from watching Tanya navigate in the very unfamiliar waters of sexual capitalism. She’s been unable to write for years and works as a permanent temp as a copy editor in a law firm. But starting this business on the side with Ray let’s her aspire to the personal, intellectual, and especially financial freedom that she hopes will enable her creativity. Tanya’s “alternative” values are never belittled by the show’s writers, but her self-taught cutthroat business sense makes for a comic comparison with her otherwise progressive ethics. Tanya has a nasty mother who dismisses her (played by Rhea Perlman) and isn’t particularly pretty (in fact, in most scenes, Adam’s face is made up with a kind of oily sheen), but she’s vital and lively and cares about things in a way that Ray can’t fathom.

The unlikely affection between Tanya and Ray is utterly appealing as they begin to develop a friendship based on their business partnership. Thomas Jane and Jane Adams have great chemistry and work well off each other. The whole cast, in fact, has a nice bead on the show’s quirky humor, which treads a fine line between satirical and sincere. Heche’s Jessica, for example, who still has feelings for Ray, is surprised but generous when Tanya comes to see him coach a basketball game. Tanya joins the strange family easily, befriending Jessica as she cheers awkwardly (for the wrong team).

Ray’s twin kids, Damon (Charlie Saxton) and Darby (Sianoa Smit-McPhee), are disheveled teenage misfits with weird dyed hair and soft, puffy bodies. But their peculiar relationship to both parents, neither of whom knows exactly what to do with them, gives Ray and Jessica something to bond over. When Charlie pierces his tongue, for example, both parents are horrified. Jessica, maintaining her forced cheerleader cheerfulness, doesn’t understand a thing about her alienated, goth-leaning children, but her attempts to reach them prove funny parodies of the over-sharing, trying-too-hard parent. Saxton and Smit-McPhee do a nice job performing the kids’ incredulity at their parents’ stupidity. The kids’ allegiances shift depending on which parent has more money and the most comfortable place to house them.

Hung seems to be a story about failure, about the losers with whom people associate or who they inadvertently become, but the series’ pleasure comes from the small ways in which the characters succeed in each episode, whether sexually or financially, and the little ways in which their kindness toward one another makes their lives worthwhile.

The series also demonstrates perfectly how people perform what they think others want them to be. Ray’s role as the star of Happiness Consultants isn’t natural to his personality. He might be well endowed, but he needs to be tutored by Tanya in how to play the suave, debonair male prostitute they think their clients expect. The writers regularly prove that no one’s interested in his social performance; only his sexual performance matters, and in that, he always succeeds the way he and Tanya promise.

But in each assignation, Ray learns something about himself and about women. Early in their endeavor, on his first visit to a client, Ray balks at her middle-age, plump body, begging off with a cold. After Tanya scolds him about judging people on their appearances, Ray returns, only to find the woman now skittish about following through. She admits she’s sick of her husband’s inability to please her, but only when Ray shows her the goods is she persuaded (and eagerly excited) to complete the transaction.

In fact, none of the women Ray services are conventionally attractive or behave “normally.” Tanya persuades a sexually frustrated, homely proofreader colleague from work that she’d enjoy employing Ray. Their scene together in a hotel room is a gem, as the woman unmasks their meeting as only a fantasy in which she knows Ray is playing a role, but then happily goes along with it by letting go of her own inhibitions and gleefully repeating, “Let’s fuck” until they do. In all of these instances, Ray is happy to comply, and seems vaguely moved at what he sees in these women.

At the same time, although it’s Ray’s anatomy that provides their income, Ray is the objectified sex worker, a nice role-reversal in the cosmic scheme of conventional prostitution or pornography. Ray is not the agent of his own destiny; it’s Tanya who sets up his meetings, and who scolds him when he tries to arrange dates on his own. Tanya interviews potential clients, assessing their needs and how Ray can meet them. If their business is at all successful, it’s because Tanya understands the emotions that drive their clients’ sexual desires and talks Ray through how to satisfy each customer.

In another neat foiling of presumption, Ray falls in love with Jemma (Natalie Zea), a particularly complicated client with a host of unusual demands. When he tries to date her and begins refusing her payments, she purposefully hurts him. A contrite Tanya realizes too late that Jemma’s game is to construct Ray as the victim in their relationship, to avenge her own victimhood in past relationships. But the scenario upends the assumption that for men, sex is only physical, while for women, it’s emotional, since here the roles are exactly reversed. Ray’s hapless naiveté is partly what makes him so appealing. His masculinity isn’t built to handle the situations in which he’s called on to act. He needs Tanya’s help to navigate the emotional currents of his trick’s needs. But he’s charming in part because he rises to each occasion (literally, of course, and figuratively).

Hung is a really a family drama, with a twist that makes it interesting and a perspective that makes it feminist. No one here is starry-eyed about the American Dream; everyone knows that it’s precarious at best, diseased and desiccated at worse. But the series finds something sweet and poignant, rather than resigned and bitter, about the prevailing state of affairs, drawing the characters’ humanity against the odds. In the last episode, Ray, devastated by Jemma’s betrayal, gets drunk in a bar where he’s recognized by an old rival, a man who pitched against him when he was a senior in a high school and still hasn’t gotten over the fact that Ray, who was a freshman, batted his pitch out of the park. In pouring rain, the men head to a baseball field to relive the moment. The older man throws Ray a duffel bag full of balls one by one, and one at a time, Ray hits them away, saying, “Contact,” after he manages to connect with each pitch. The other man’s middle-aged body is paunchy and sagging as he winds up to throw, the outlines of his mortality palpable against his wet shirt. Ray looks only marginally better as he sways over home plate. The men barely speak, but the scene is a wonderful, soggy illustration of lives stuck in place.

Happily, it’s the proto-feminist Tanya who gives them all hope, who swats away references to her own inferior looks (a constructed claim, since Adams is actually very cute), who glows with newly found confidence, who schemes about ways to increase their business, and who engages her clients with tough pragmatism and no-nonsense business ethics. Adams plays beautifully the blooming power of the underdog who comes into her own. In the last episode, as Ray stumbles back to his tent wet and drunk to find Tanya waiting for him with a wad of cash from Jemma, Adams and Jane perform a sweet scene of friendly intimacy, need, and pleasure that portrays one of the most moving, innovative, insightful relationships on television.

Watch Hung.

The Feminist Spectator

Nurse Jackie Revisited

Jackie (Edie Falco) and her husband, Kevin

Now that the first season of Showtime’s Nurse Jackie has ended, I was happy to find out that the show has officially been renewed. After I last wrote, the series only got better, more complicated, more darkly funny, and occasionally, poignantly, sad.

One of the most interesting things about Edie Falco’s leading character, Jackie, is that she has no real back story. Although we know that she has a husband and two young daughters with whom she lives above the bar they own in Queens, and that she has a pharmacist lover named Eddie with whom she has sexual trysts every day at work, we don’t know why she keeps her two lives so resolutely separate. We also don’t know why she’s a drug addict, aside from the usual stress (and temptation) that plagues some nurses in chaotic, poorly staffed and resourced city hospitals.

Rather than becoming irritating, however, Jackie’s mystery adds to her allure. She’s an enigma not just for her co-workers—who alternately find her brusque and sensitive, present and distracted—but also for viewers accustomed to having characters’ histories laid out with too many dollops of information. Instead of a pat psychological reason for her odd behavior, we’re asked to go on faith that Jackie needs her life the way it is. The reasons don’t matter, only that she’s able to maintain the fine line of keeping her separate worlds far enough apart and her addiction hidden.

Only halfway through the first season does it become clear that even Jackie’s best friend at work—Dr. Eleanor O’Hara (Eve Best), who’s officially her superior—doesn’t know about her drug problem. When Jackie’s nose begins bleeding from all the drugs she’s snorting, O’Hara checks out her nostrils and comments that she doesn’t know what Jackie’s been putting up there, but her sinuses are entirely irritated. Jackie responds with her trademark eye roll and brushes her off.

[Spoiler alert!]

When her lover Eddie is replaced by a computerized machine that dispenses meds, Jackie’s need and desperation become palpable for the first time. With Eddie down the hall happy to ply her with Vicodin and other narcotics that make her sexually pliable, Jackie didn’t have to worry about her next fix. Without him present, she tries to game the machine the way he taught her, but the trick doesn’t work. She winds up punching in her own name and password to retrieve three vials of drugs, which she proceeds to pour down her throat without a chaser.

As the final episode of the season ends, Jackie drifts into a drug-induced haze, hallucinating herself dressed in 1950s white nursing finery, and waving to her husband and kids, who stand in front of a two-dimensional, cartoon-like, suburban-style ranch house wearing 1950s-styled clothing, waving at her robotically. Sprawled on the hospital floor comatose, Jackie can only watch these images play out in front of her as the scene fades to the credits.

The moment, typical of the crises that usually propel a series to the closing moments of a season, is disturbing and compelling. Is Jackie afraid of being trapped by the conventionality of her domestic family life? Is that why she has a secret affair with Eddie, and doesn’t tell any of her coworkers that she’s married and has two kids? Is she smart enough to want to resist the banalities of middle-class white heterosexuality, even as she’s clearly, at an earlier point in her life, decided to acquiesce to it? Does she take drugs because of her back pain (which isn’t mentioned much as the show progresses), or because she needs to take the edge off a life that can’t contain everything she feels herself to be?

Whatever the reason, to see a woman as complicated and wonderfully opaque as Jackie Peyton (shades of the old soap, Peyton Place?) anchor a series on a major cable network feels like something of a triumph. Jackie isn’t a perfect mother—in fact, although she takes her oldest, the troubled Grace, to mother-daughter tap dancing classes, Jackie’s skirmish with an old high school friend embarrasses both of them and they abandon the class. Jackie isn’t the perfect wife—she works nights, which means that she and her husband are passing ships in a domestic sea that’s often barely functional.

Jackie isn’t the perfect nurse—she operates under her own moral code, which means that sometimes, she breaks rules to favor people she decides won’t otherwise get a break. She’s unsympathetic with her trainee (although over the course of the season they’ve developed something approximating a warm understanding) and she’s flip with her superior. She’s a flawed middle-aged woman, a character not often enough seen on television.

Although these days, that’s not entirely true. Jackie Peyton joins the ranks of Brenda Johnson (Kyra Sedgwick) on The Closer; Patty Hewes (Glenn Close), on Damages; Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker) on Weeds; and Grace Hanadarko (Holly Hunter) on Saving Grace, all of whom are middle-aged white women with “issues,” whether drug addiction, dire financial problems, alcohol abuse, or power mania that make them as complicated and imperfect as the male heroes who more typically star in television series.

The surrounding characters on Nurse Jackie help flesh out the quirky environment, and each became more adroitly drawn and magnetic as the season proceeded. Although Mohammed de la Cruz, Jackie’s best friend on the ER floor, remains something of a cipher, his desire for other men has been flaunted happily throughout the season. And instead of being the lone gay man, another of the male nurses—the white guy with sandy hair and a more fey demeanor—is also openly queer. The two often perform scenes together, in which they cruise patients or tell Zoey, Jackie’s bumbling assistant, how she might improve her appearance. Although these characters still trade in stereotypes, at least there are two of them on the show regularly, creating a small but important queer community.

Likewise, Zoey has become sharper in her own zesty, over-sharing, over-caring style. By the season’s end, the character had come to think she knew Jackie, a rather endearing assumption, given all of Jackie’s dark and mysterious layers. Merritt Wever, as Zoey, is ever more fabulous in the role, her comic timing impeccable and her physical humor deft.

The best supporting character, however, is Mrs. Akalaitus, played by Anna Deavere Smith in one of her best scripted acting outings. In the season finale, Akalaitus gets stuck in an elevator, and rather than hurry to rescue her, the nursing staff lets her languish before they call for repairs. To entertain herself (and us), Akalaitus props herself against the stuck doors and pretends she’s being interviewed on the Letterman show.

Smith carries off the brilliant, hysterical bit of business with panache, and reveals the human side of the character. The scene tempers her rule-bound ambition, just as Akalaitis’s attachment to an Asian baby left behind (for weeks, it seemed) in the ER earlier in the season showed her softer side (although the storyline was far-fetched and her failure to call in the authorities completely out of character).

Watching a series as smart and morally, emotionally, and ethically complicated as Nurse Jackie, peopled with so many interesting, unique, and individualized women and gay male characters has been a real treat. That the story proceeds from a flawed woman’s perspective feels like progress indeed.

The Feminist Spectator

The Temperamentals

Michael Urie, Tom Beckett, and Matthew Schneck in a scene from The Temperamentals
(photo © Michael Portantiere)

Gay plays, as they’ve proliferated and mainstreamed over the last 10 years, tend to address relationships between lovers, friends, and family. Plays by and about gay men often delve into sexual conquests and disappointments; the more exploitative ones use nudity to draw audiences and encourage a prurient, if fun, spectatorial pleasure. Plays by lesbians, which thanks to gender discrimination remain relatively fewer than those produced by or about gay men, tend to be more relationally based, dwelling on family dynamics and the domestic sphere.

I’m overstating grossly here to underline how refreshing it is to see a play about gay (or “homophile”) activism in the 1950s as the focus of an evening at the theatre. Written by Jon Marans, The Temperamentals tells the story of Harry Hay, considered by many historians to be the father of the U.S. homophile movement, who doggedly persuaded men to sign the manifesto of what he called The Mattachine Society. The Society was named after a troupe of medieval dancers who only appeared publicly in masks, an apt metaphor for closeted homosexuals of the ‘50s. Hay was the first to publicly call gays and lesbians a “minority” and to argue for homosexual rights along the lines of what would soon become the civil rights movement.

As an event happy to succeed by telling its important story, this production’s one acquiescence to commercial pressure is director Jonathan Silverstein’s casting of Michael Urie (of tv’s Ugly Betty fame) in one of the supporting roles. Although some of his tv character’s flaming gestures and flamboyant sarcasm seeps into his performance as Rudi Gernreich, Harry Hay’s young Viennese-Jewish clothing designer boyfriend, Urie’s acting is subtle, generous, and sincere, bringing depth and intimacy to the complicated exchanges between the two lovers.

In fact, all of the acting dignifies a slightly too earnest script. Marans skillfully describes the difficulties of being the least bit “out” and homosexual in the early 1950s in the situations he sketches. For instance, although he was one of the first gay proselytizers, Hay was married (to a woman) through much of his initial activism. And while he was aggressive about asking famous but closeted men (like film director Vincent Minelli, who makes a campy, sad appearance as a character here) to sign on to his manifesto, Hay’s own paranoia made him reject Rudi’s more public gestures of affection, so terrified was he of inappropriate display. The Temperamentals' perhaps most important contribution is its portrayal of just these contradictions and the social disapprobations from which they rose.

As it traces the beginnings of a language for gay activism (well before the word “gay” was commonly used to name homosexuals), some historical contrasts become amusing and poignant. For example, Hay and his few faithful compatriots—energetically portrayed by Tom Beckett, Matthew Schneck, and Sam Breslin Wright, who impersonate an array of good buys, bad guys, and the occasional woman, lesbian, or mother—discuss whether or not gay men should be allowed to get married . . . to women. One of the few lesbian voices in the play belongs to a radical butch who says she’d never marry, unless it was to a woman. The script deftly highlights historical shifts in its construction of these conversations, as it leads the audience to understand how the course of events and the contours of activist discourse have changed over the last 50-odd years.

Although gay news outlets, bloggers, and commentators have lately expressed disappointment in President Obama’s failure to follow through on his campaign promises about LGBTQ issues, watching The Temperamentals is a happy reminder that progress has indeed been made for gay men in U.S. culture and politics, despite what the movement still needs to accomplish. For example, when Rudi networks his way into an apprentice position with a noted, publicly visible clothing designer, the man tells him in no uncertain terms that Rudi requires a wife by his side, implying that the field’s obvious homosexuality needs to be defended by the normalizing choice of fake marriages. A spectator need only think of the overt queerness of a tv show like Project Runway to note how far gay male visibility and acceptance—in fashion design alone—has come since the early ‘50s.

Throughout the story, Rudi pressures Harry to leave his wife, Anita. Ironically, when Harry finally gathers the courage to tell her that he’s a homosexual, Rudi finds himself marrying a woman coincidentally also named Anita. The moment’s sadness, necessity, and ubiquity resonates as a poignant reminder of what gay men in the 1950s gave up to lead socially and professionally successful lives. Vincent Minnelli, who’s played as a limp-wristed, lisping, utter stereotype of a gay man who couldn’t pass for heterosexual if he tried, explains to Harry and Rudi that his career took off when he married Judy Garland.

Director Silverstein leads the audience to see that while from a contemporary perspective, these men would never be mistaken for straight, the persistence of the closet, and the social contract that enforced a purposeful refusal to see sexuality as anything but heterosexual, required the kind of visible and public declarations for which Hay fought. What queer theorist Eve Sedgwick would by the 1990s call the “open secret” of homosexuality clearly operated in the 1950s as a way to repress progressive public discourse about sexual fluidity and choice. The men Hay approaches to sign his manifesto believe in his work, but they can’t risk their lives and livelihoods by lending it their signatures.

Even hard won declarations of agency were often foiled. In one scene of The Temperamentals, the working class, police officer boyfriend of one of Hay’s friends is entrapped in a public bathroom by another police officer, who cruises him for sex then arrests him. While most men tricked in these situations pled guilty, Harry persuades this man to insist on his innocence. When he does, and the judge decrees him not guilty, the triumphant activist moment is defanged and neutralized when the press refuses to cover it. The moment goes unnoticed, unwritten as history that matters.

Many of Hay’s inner circle are portrayed as racist and anti-Semitic in The Temperamentals, despite their willingness to fight for their own homosexual rights. Maran does a nice job complicating identity politics with such contradictions, as these men fail to find common cause with other oppressed people unless their struggles provide helpful models. That Rudi is Jewish and his family dead at Auschwitz gives Harry a built-in analogy through which to ply a gay rights manifesto. But a general lack of political affiliation with people unlike him seems to weaken Hay’s cause, just as it would decades of subsequent too-white, too-middle-class, and too-assimilationist LGBTQ activism.

Although Marans’ script covers important moments in 1950s homophile activism, the characters mostly appear to be ciphers or stereotypes, mouthpieces for history rather than embodiments of people who are more than cogs in a predetermined wheel of time and social change. And although the script details the impossible contradictions of closeted gay life in this period, Marans lets a preachy didacticism creep into his writing, particularly in the second act. More judicious editing for length and tone would enhance the play, whose potential is signaled by the five actors and Silverstein’s sensitive, fluid direction.

The theatre at the Barrow Group space on 36^th street in which I saw the production (on August 7, 2009) was set up with spectators seated on two sides of the stage facing each other, raked up from the square wooden platform that provided the playing space. The surrounding audience seemed to embody the ever-present hegemony that enclosed Hay and his gay friends. Silverstein moved the actors through various locations using only six wooden chairs and a few props (a telephone, a clarinet, some pieces of clothing), cutting away extraneous visuals and business to focus on their human interactions.

The actors succeeded in finding the humanity of men (and the occasional woman) struggling to make sense of lives few words described in the 1950s. Even if some of the subsidiary characters are caricatured by the script, Beckett, Schneck, and Wright draw them sharply, with respect and care for what they represent in the history told.

As Hay, Thomas Jay Ryan provides a square-jawed performance, finding an arc of emotional growth in a man who begins by protesting (too much) his masculinity, only to begin a second movement 25 or so years later, this one called The Radical Fairies, in which he rejected conventional maleness for the free-flowing garments and gestures of men who refused gender constrictions and embraced spirituality.

Ryan finds generous ways to communicate Hay’s necessary contradictions, as his radicalism and conservatism bump up against each other through the period The Temperamentals covers. With Michael Urie as his sympathetic if bemused, ambitious but frustrated lover Rudi providing a lovely, warm emotional grounding for Hay’s barnstorming, Ryan delivers on the sense of promise in the pioneer’s vision.

Even though its script devolves into platitudes toward the end, The Temperamentals offers a necessary, gentle reminder of how difficult it was for two men to create physical, emotional, sexual, and political spaces in which to be together not so very long ago. For that, it’s worth celebrating—and seeing. It closes in New York on August 23^rd.

The Feminist Spectator

Wendy and Lucy

Kelly Reichardt’s quiet, devastating film is a character study with social resonance that requires very few words to deliver its story and its critique. Little dialogue intrudes as the Reichardt, who directed and edited, notes the most prosaic moments of an ordinary life and somehow turns them into a sad comment on what it means to be poor and female and trying to live with very few choices available to make it all work.

Wendy Carroll (Michelle Williams) sleeps in her car with her dog, Lucy. She’s traveling from Muncie, Indiana, to Ketchikan, Alaska, to look for work at the Northwestern Fisheries cannery that she’s heard pays well and comes with room and board. Wendy is deliberate, calm, and careful. She traces out her route on her wrinkled map with a yellow highlighter and writes down each of her expenses as she accounts for her rapidly diminishing financial reserves. Wendy is also young; flowery doodles illustrate her record-keeping in her spiral notebook.

But the young woman’s admirable resourcefulness is clear. When she encounters groups of other people traveling together, she’s wary and watchful, gleaning information but revealing nothing. She’s steeled herself for this trip, wearing a money belt Velcro-ed around her waist and carrying her belongings in the trunk of her car.

When her old car breaks down, Wendy’s fortunes begin to down shift even further. A gentle, middle-aged night watchman guarding the empty Walgreen’s lot where Wendy parks overnight in a small town in Oregon wakes her to force her to move the car. When she turns the ignition, it won’t start, so she and the guard push it to the curb, where Wendy waits for daylight and for the garage across the street to open.

She finds the last crumbs of dog food stashed in the trunk for Lucy, who laps them up gratefully but clearly wants more. In fact, Wendy’s sense of responsibility for her dog propels her through the film even more than her desire to get where she can find work that will let them both survive. Lucy is her only companion; Wendy’s love for her sustains them both. The mixed-breed dog is valiant and faithful, thrilled to chase the sticks Wendy throws and patient as Wendy goes about her human tasks.

Her determination to care for Lucy gets Wendy into the jam that slowly unravels her precarious mobile stability. As she waits for her car to be fixed, Wendy trolls the aisles at a local market, carefully shoplifting. She pockets a bread roll for herself and later, when she’s busted on her way out of the store by Andy (John Robinson), a sanctimonious young grocery clerk, he pulls two cans of Iams dog food from her bag. Her choice of premium canned food makes the risk she’s taken that much more touching, and her capture that much more pathetic.

When Andy presents Wendy’s theft to his boss, Reichardt stages a scene that demonstrates the sticky complications of being poor and the levels of righteousness that distinguish people’s places on the economic ladder. Andy—who’s young enough to be picked up after work by his station wagon-driving mother—implores his reluctant boss to follow procedure and call the police. Andy insists that anyone who can’t afford dog food shouldn’t own a dog, emphasizing that if they make an exception for Wendy, their shoplifting prohibition is meaningless.

The boss, looking small behind his desk, wavers. He’s clearly embarrassed by the situation but lets Andy bully him into calling the police. As she’s driven off, Wendy explains that her dog is tied up outside the store. The cop doesn’t care. Through the rear-view window, Reichardt frames Lucy waiting on her leash, looking into the grocery store as Wendy is taken away and booked.

Williams’ performance as Wendy is so understated and true that she barely lets her irritation register on her face, even as she withstands the ineptitude of the young officer who books her and has to consult the manual to work the station’s computerized fingerprinting machine. You can see from the clench of Williams’ jaw and her surreptitious glances at the police station clock that she’s anxious to return to Lucy, but Wendy is a woman practiced at hiding her needs and her feelings.

The young white officer and the older African American woman who process her aren’t particularly nasty. Reichardt clarifies in simple strokes that no one individual is responsible for how the law or the economy binds and controls and constrains each of them differently. None of them band together to change anything, but they each suffer how things are from within their own proscribed roles, adhering to the rules of a game none of them have devised. No animosity flows between people in Wendy and Lucy, just a general resignation with the fact that everyone’s doing the best they can.

Only the security guard (Walter Dalton) breaks through proscription to reach out to Wendy. His job requires him to make her leave the Walgreen’s lot, but the guard can’t help but talk to her and try to help her out. He tells her about a nice, clean hotel not far from the store and describes the way to the pound when Lucy is lost. He clearly comes to care about her, even though they know nothing about one another.

In one of the film’s many small, finely wrought and poignant moments, the security guard comes to find Wendy in the lot on his day off, and passes her some money on the quiet, as the woman waiting for him in his car fixes her make-up. “I don’t want her to know about it,” the security guard explains, insisting Wendy not refuse his gift. When he drives away, Wendy looks down at the cash in her hand and counts out a five dollar bill and a few singles. The man has little more than Wendy, but he’s rich with humanity.

After she’s arrested for shoplifting, pays a $50 fine for her misdemeanor that she can’t afford, and is released, Wendy runs back to the grocery store. Lucy isn’t there, and no one knows where the dog has gone. The security guard suggests the pound and Wendy trudges off to look there for Lucy. The clerk at the animal shelter is kind, but Wendy’s sad tour through the kennels doesn’t turn up her dog. Instead, the camera tracks Wendy walking past other caged and desperate creatures, some barking hopefully at the bars of their cages, others retreated into the inner chambers of their small spaces, peering out warily and without hope.

The parallel is clear—at least the dogs get food, water, and a roof over their heads as they wait out their fates, some with hope and determination, and others with sorrowful acceptance. Wendy stays one step ahead of homelessness. She washes herself in a gas station restroom, trying to maintain her dignity in the face of her increasing deprivation. But losing Lucy means doing without her lifeline. Wendy’s car, which proves much more expensive to fix than she can afford, is easier to abandon. But life without her dog is too lonely to bear.

Wendy and Lucy’s script—based on the short story “Train Choir” by Jon Raymond—is never predictable and never sentimental. The film doesn’t ask the spectator to pity the characters, but to see them instead as human beings struggling with whatever limited means they can muster, each in his or her own way. The world Wendy and Lucy paints isn’t easy or kind—it’s lonely, hard, and sad, with little to remediate the economic blight and emotional benightedness the film depicts unremittingly.

But the elegant photography and eloquent editing—and Williams’ impressive, powerful acting—tell a sympathetic story about the people it depicts, not as a mess of psychological trouble and relational woe, but as individuals grinding out the only lives they can, given the poverty of their class and the paucity of possibility provided by the shopworn American dream.

The Feminist Spectator

Les Éphémères

The densely packed circular "chariots" of sets in Les Emphemeres.

Les Éphémères, created collectively by Ariane Mnouchkine’s fabled company Le Théatre du Soleil and performed at the Park Avenue Armory for the Lincoln Center Festival 2009, exemplifies theatre’s importance and its pleasures. Legendary French director Mnouchkine conceived the stunning, two-part, seven-hour long event, and transplanted it to the US with many of the company’s trademark devices intact.

Théatre du Soleil makes its home at the Cartoucherie, a large old factory just outside Paris, where arriving audiences typically watch the actors preparing for their performances, and join them at impromptu meals at intermission and after the show. The communal atmosphere, and the company’s willingness to reveal the apparatus of performance that conventional theatre so insistently hides, immediately invites spectators to participate not just in the play’s reception, but in the production of its ambiance—that is, its warmth and its demonstrations of human connections over time, space, and history.

At the Armory in New York, the cast’s dressing area lined one end of the large hall into which the theatre auditorium was built. With floor-length curtains tied back to frame the buzz of the cast’s pre-show preparations, spectators could observe the actors sitting together at long tables, peering into mirrors lit with bare bulbs, or putting on their make-up, or arranging their props or costumes. Children ran between the tables, although since many of them, too, performed in the production, they were as busy as their adult counterparts (some of whom are their parents; this is a company for whom the public overlaps and intertwines with the private).

Climbing the steps up to the theatre built within the armory, spectators look down onto a playing floor arranged between two banks of steeply raked seating. Each long row of benches was built with a half-wall that butted up against spectators’ knees, onto which some people leaned in to watch the action. Little pen lights dot these walls, so that when you look across the stage into the seats opposite, if the stage lights are dark enough, the other side of the house looks like a night sky specked with unusually orderly stars. That image represents just a smidgen of the magic the company conjured at the Armory.

Mnouchkine watches a rehearsal from the banks of seats that line both sides of the playing area.

Les Éphémères offers a deceptively simple but sumptuously rich day of theatre. The numerous stories told by the large cast of actors, many of whom play several roles, range from brief vignettes that sketch a particularly clarifying moment in otherwise ordinary lives, to longer, interlocking stories that draw on personal memory and national history. The play’s longest tale winds in and out of the present, finally finding its meaning in a family history haunted by the Holocaust and by personal acts of supreme courage and kindness or of the basest cowardice and fear.

Whether or not the stories tie together neatly, they all touch each other with some basic fact about humanity: that people can be good or evil; that love is triumphant until it fails; that the past shadows people; that simple pleasures can be taken without being bought; and that the present is a thin filament of time inexorably linked to the past and the future.

Written and delivered in French (with supertitles projected on either side of the theatre for easy viewing), Les Éphémères’ dialogue is short and simple. No one monologues; their speech clips out, functional and sometimes expressive, but composed of quotidian, idiomatic expressions that sound comfortably familiar. The play underlines how easily people understand one another by juxtaposing times when the characters don’t, or when they withhold information to try to control the present or the future.

For example, in a memory piece that turns out to be surprisingly central to the play toward the end of Part II, Aline, a young French child whose Jewish parents have been deported during the war, is left in the care of Nora, a sympathetic Catholic woman who teaches her the Lord’s Prayer and winds up saving her life. When an oily German officer happens upon Aline playing on a beach, his cajoling, manipulative words aren’t translated, so that the audience (if they can’t understand German) hears him just as Aline does. The pompous, vaguely sinister officer reduces himself to gesturing to make himself understood.

The actor clarifies the difficulty of communicating across languages and yet at the same time, how much can be understood without knowing another vocabulary. The German officer’s intentions are horrifyingly clear—he’s testing Aline’s ethnicity, mistrusting the cross that hangs around her neck, probing her for evidence of Jewishness. Thanks to Nora’s prescient instruction, when the officer insists she say a prayer, Aline rattles off the one she’s been taught, instead of the Jewish brucha she learned as growing up.

Les Éphémères addresses the costs of erasing identity and piecing it back together over time. Although Aline’s story threads through the play most prominently, other vignettes share a similar theme. Gaelle, a young woman proprietor of a café, holds herself just out of reach of those she so generously serves, casting her glance through the café window and seeing her personal history play out just beyond reach of the present. As the scenery of her past is rolled into the playing space, we watch Gaelle as a child, helplessly observing her father beat her mother and then try to apologize.

Later scenes show that eventually, Gaelle’s father kills her mother in a car accident, in which Gaelle is also hurt but survives. Her story connects subtly with another of the play’s vignettes, in which a lonely girl whose mother and sister have also been killed in a car accident forms a friendship with the ostracized transgendered person who lives in her building. The girl’s father bottles up his grief, which poisons their domestic space enough that she wants to stay away from their apartment. Before long , the father, too, visits the transgendered woman, breaking down emotionally as she looks on with quiet compassion.

The domestic violence Les Éphémères depicts is as horrifying as the Nazi’s state violence and just as indelible for those who suffer it. And yet, the production suggests, people soldier on, resisting, reaffirming, triumphing over personal and political trauma in their own quotidian ways. Their prosaic lives prove their victory over forces that would destroy them, be it the ravages of Nazi ideology or the devastation of mercurial, abusive patriarchal power.

Mnouchkine and her cast embody these themes in gorgeous, moving theatrical metaphors. In Les Éphémères’ opening image, the house lights go down and a circular wooden disc perhaps twelve feet across, which the company calls a "chariot," is rolled out from behind a nearly sheer gray curtain at one end of the playing space. Several people busy themselves around the platform, carefully building a set while spectators watch. Someone holds a pen light in their teeth to light their work; someone else drills a half-wall into the chariot’s floor. Others carry on a sofa, a coffee table, a small cabinet; others dress the set with magazines, books, papers, photos, and dozens of other little objects that make a room a place where someone lives.

The spectators watch as these people fill the small set, then laugh as they roll the finished playing space off through a matching curtain at the other end of the space, as though all this meticulous work has been for nothing. But it soon becomes clear that this careful dressing of a small set represents the work the company will do throughout the richly textured and evocative afternoon and evening; they carefully embellish the outlines of lives that other productions draw only faintly. At the end of Part I, the company just as precisely dismantles another set, then rebuilds yet another at the start of Part II. The mirrored tasks speak volumes about what we’ve seen in between.

It turns out that those we might at first think are stagehands are actually part of the cast, as each performer shares the labor of literally moving the production from moment to moment and place to place. The chariots, like the wagons of a pageant play, are rolled through the long, narrow playing area by actors who push them along and around with their arms, their legs extending out behind them to give the sets momentum. Their movements look like dance; some of them drag their toes across the floor with graceful flourishes, and each of them exudes as much electrifying presence as the actors performing on the platforms they control.

The actors moving the chariots watch the actors “on stage” with great empathy and affection. They aren’t performing, per se, but they watch with a heightened sense of presence, creating a bridge between the characters created just above them and the spectators lining either side of the space. One of the day’s many pleasures is seeing people who’ve performed wrenching, touching, or comic moments later dressed in dark, unobtrusive clothing and helping move other scenes along. The cast doesn’t hide its dual roles, but uses them to empathize with both the actors in the scenes and the spectators, as we all experience these vital slices of life.

The chariots each contain their own working world. When the characters wash their dishes, they dip them into water in real sinks. When they cook, the frying pans smoke as the stoves heat the eggs or boil the pasta water. When they sit down to eat, they consume the food they’ve just made. When they watch television, spectators, too, can see the movies or images they refer to on the small screens on the set.

Although the cast creates each scene with ultra-realistic detail, the production revels in its obvious theatricality. The acting style lies somewhere beyond Stanislavsky, closer to post-modern performance art, as the performers venerate the simple tasks of daily life while they play the complexity of emotions that drive them: making tea, cooking pasta, signing papers, putting children to bed, getting dressed, combing the sand on a beach, lighting a fire, giving an ultrasound, eating dinner.

In some of the scenes, the characters never reveal more of themselves than their actions. For instance, in “The Farm Next Door or Deliverance,” a man and woman sit at a table together in silence, eating a meal we’ve seen her prepare. He wears work clothes and she wears an apron; they seem to be from an earlier moment in history, their home rural and isolated.

Suddenly, he stiffens and his body folds at the waist, his weight falling on the table. She watches, startled, and then resumes her meal, suffused with a very subtle sense of relief. Then the moment ends and the chariot that’s encapsulated this small moment of two obliquely drawn lives rolls off. Exposition isn’t necessary to communicate the fraught sadness and gladness of the moment, or to debate who exactly has been delivered by the man’s sudden death. We derive what we need to speculate from how the couple looks away from one another, from how they cut their food, from how they hold their bodies at the table, from how they chew. The text lies in their actions, in the daily movements of everyday life that speak volumes.

If the emotional detail of Les Éphémères comes from a combination of heightened theatricality and very subtle, task-based actions, the chariots on which these stories play out provide their own momentum. The actors moving the wheeled circular platforms push and pull them through the alley-like space, so that the spectators’ perspective changes continually. The characters move as their places are pulled around the stage; the effect is of lives always in motion, whether or not they’re going anywhere.

A long, narrow, two-sided viewing situation that could be frustrating for spectators instead becomes an exhilarating experience of multiple views of the same scene, as the playing areas roll this way and that, on and off, toward and away from each other, as doors join rooms, as living rooms give way to bedrooms and bathrooms and then move back to front doors.

The cumulative effect suggests the continuity of these lives, a fluid, always changing connection between those small, sliced platforms, rather than the static isolation proscenium arches often frame. The production exemplifies Brecht’s materialist view of history, of the present as a moment in a string of time that can affect the future in unpredictable ways, just by looking at the same scene from a different angle.

At the end of Part I, as if to underline the operation of memory and to jog your own, the actors parade the chariots with sets we’ve seen so far in Les Éphémères across the stage, as if to remind us of the lives that have played out before us for the last three hours.

The spoken text does justice to the texture and loveliness of the production’s visuals. Little conflict propels each vignette. Often, a phone will ring that delivers news or information that informs the scene’s emotional tone, sets its narrative in motion, or punctuates its action. And the musical score (by Jean-Jacques Lemetre) that accompanies the play underscores its emotional ambiance with poignant sounds and effects. Lemetre’s music apparently inspired the play’s initial construction and continues to inform its performances.

Throughout the play, he sits on a platform above one end of the playing area, watching the action below. He plays a series of unusual-looking instruments—an angular cello and various stringed instruments that look, to my untrained eye, like modifications of the more typical configurations, somewhat like those in Laurie Anderson's repertoire. An assistant clad in black hands him various instruments as he needs them, while he sits watching the action and adjusting the sound effects. He hovers above the stage, his presence quiet, benevolent, and motivating.

Les Éphémères’ stories begin with a scene called “The Marvelous Garden” (all the scenes are titled in the program), which concerns Jeanne Clément (Delphine Cottu), who’s grieving her mother’s recent death and putting the woman’s effects in order so that she can sell her house. When a man whose wife has just had a baby sees her freshly placed “For Sale” sign hanging on the gate, he enters the house and immediately decides to buy it. The juxtaposition of her sorrow with his joy sets up the play’s emotional fluctuations, as well as how subtly modulated those extremes will appear.

The play’s pieces come together in surprising ways that reveal themselves only gradually over the seven-hour production. In several sweet scenes, for instance, a divorced woman playfully entertains her young daughter with costumes and masks, their pleasure only interrupted by regular calls from a man who we come to realize is the girl’s father. When the father finally enters their home, coming to collect the girl in a scene called “Every Other Saturday,” it’s suddenly clear that the irritating man on the phone in these scenes has been the joyous new father from the play’s opening.

This example of how Les Éphémères moves through time in unexpected but moving ways is repeated in other stories throughout the play. At the beginning of Part II, Jeanne visits an archive with a letter she’s found in her mother’s effects, and learns that her mother’s parents were deported from Paris to a concentration camp during the Holocaust. Jeanne, who didn’t even know her mother was born Jewish, is stunned to learn her history, which subsequent scenes describe in stories that subtly interlock. Jeanne sees her mother’s history pass in front of her eyes, as more circular platforms roll on to encapsulate her secret history. The cast enacts moments of courage and cruelty that cross time, from one woman’s refusal to hide her Jewish friends during the Nazi occupation, to Nora’s fearlessness in the face of a mortal threat.

The connections among characters in the present and the past appear like images developing in liquid in a darkroom. The script never points underlines them obviously. Sometimes, a name hints at a common thread. The doctor/radiologist in one story shares a surname with Nora, the heroine of the World War II drama that grounds Jeanne’s family history.

That one actor—the sublime Juliana Carneiro da Cunha—plays both Dr. Altunian da Silva in the present and Nora Altunian in the past emphasizes these connections across time and across emotional coordinates. The exact relationship between the doctor and Nora is never spelled out. But the connection itself matters most, and the kindness and altruism that informs both characters’ choices.

Dr. Altunian plays out her story in several scenes with Perle (Shaghayegh Beheshti), an ancient, addled woman who arrives for an ultrasound in filthy clothing, her teeth blackened from neglect, with a dirty white cloth flower pinned in her matted gray hair. Dr. Altunian has been warned about Perle’s eccentricities; the woman is difficult, querulous, opinionated, and strong. That Perle comes to trust the doctor, and that Dr. Altunian comes to grow fond of the old woman, tracks one of the play’s most moving trajectories.

Beheshti is marvelous as the curious Perle. The actor is probably in her 30s; the woman she plays is easily on the far side of 80. She twists her body to portray Perle’s arthritic limbs, her fingers wracked with pain, her back bowed, her stomach pained by something she mistakenly believes to be pregnancy, her eyes twitching with suspicion and later, mischief, her mouth opening and closing spasmodically over decayed teeth. Age make-up is obviously drawn on Beheshti’s face—gray lines are penciled over pancake make-up with no attempt to make the effect look realistic.

But knowing that a young actor plays Perle makes her portrayal that much more affecting, since what you observe in the performance is the actor’s love and respect for the character’s humanity, rather than the virtuosity of Beheshti’s acting (although it is that). What could be a caricature instead becomes an eloquently choreographed dance of the indignities of age, the sharpness of character, and the persistent need for human connection as time passes and the body betrays its frailties. Da Cunha’s and Beheshti’s scenes together are lovely, heartbreaking instances of warmth and compassion.

The actors all play multiple roles, especially the principals—da Cunha, Cottu, Serge Nicolai (who plays Alain, the happy then angry father), and Duccio Bellugi-Vannuccini (who plays various key supporting roles). They transform themselves with obvious, fake-looking wigs, make-up, and costumes, but mostly by embodying the physical characteristics of people whose lives are particularized by their circumstances, by what they do, in the present, more than how they got there and what it means.

The effects of each character linger, so that when the same actor embodies each part, you can see the violence of the wife-beater reappear in the upper-class father and the dying sharecropper. The actors become their own inter-texts, layering proximity and touching intimacy simply by relating the last character they played and to the present one. Each person stamps his or her role with an indelible trace of something very real, something recognizable and true even without the back-stories of exposition.

I saw Les Éphémères on one of the Saturdays in its run (7/18/09) when you could see Part I at the matinee and Part II in the evening. The pleasure of consuming the play in one delicious gulp was enhanced that day by other spectators, who happened to include Anne Bogart, Tony Kushner, Wally Shawn, and Suzan-Lori Parks. But even those among us who weren’t theatre luminaries became important to one another. I spoke with the man sitting next to me in Part I and the woman beside me in Part II differently than I typically talk to my fellow spectators. We talked about what we were seeing and what we saw, and how it made us feel.

The long play was a feat of endurance, however pleasurable (and the seating was, frankly, uncomfortable), that also made us turn to one another for support and a kind of care we don’t usually need from strangers. Eating the cookies the cast served and drinking the water we could pour together from the long table the cast rolled out at intermission also brought us that much closer; no one (or perhaps fewer people) ran out to smoke or check their cell phones. The audience walked down to the stage to collect our refreshments, and hung around talking instead of dispersing.

But something else circulated among us that day, something I like to call a “utopian performative,” when the fact of an audience’s being together creates a current of what anthropologist Victor Turner called communitas, or belonging among strangers, that lets us feel elevated together. In those heightened moments, I think we get a sense of what utopia might feel like. Watching Les Éphémères, I felt lucky to be among this particular group of people, those I knew and especially those I didn’t, watching a play that reminded me of theatre’s magic and the affecting beauty of experiencing it with an audience who feels it, too.

The Feminist Spectator