URBAN AMUSEMENTS

Serious Interiors City Rhapsody • A New Brain • Requiem for a Dream by Marty & Martha Roth

Theatre We must have been good citizens during this impossible election season because last month the local theater scene gave us both City Rhapsody, from In the Heart of the Beast, and A New Brain, a vest-pocket musical that packed Bryant-Lake Bowl for an all-too-short run. Rhapsody showed Heart of the Beast at its inventive best, with a cast of six talented actor-puppeteers, three musicians playing instruments never seen or dreamed before, including a bass-jo, and the eloquent words of performance poet Thien-bao Phi (spoken, the night we saw it, by Doug Kearney). Based on the notebooks of HOTB designer Duane Tougas, Rhapsody consisted of images without a full narrative behind them: immigrants come to the city and make it their own, dealing with construction, traffic, squirrels, police, cyclists, and other urban pests. Buildings fall in love; people in buildings fall in love. The intermission featured cameo performances in HOTB’s wall alcoves. The live music made a perfect accompaniment to all of this, and Mark “Markie Baby” Rossow, Crystalline, and Kari Kjome made a perfect trio. On weekends the company opened the stage afterward to an audience-participation cabaret. We had a terrific time during this fast-paced show, and we hope they’ll revive it. Minneapolis Musical Theater presented William Finn’s A New Brain for only a few weekends in November; we wish this tiny company would extend their runs so that reviewers can urge people to go, because Kevin Hansen and Steven J. Meerdink, the core of MMT, sparkle as performers and directors. Never heard of William Finn? He wrote a bunch of shows with Falsettos in the title and he collaborates with James Lapine, who also worked with Stephen Sondheim. A fine composer in his own right, Finn thus continues the only vital line of American musical theater and the only available alternative to Andrew Lloyd Weber’s brain-dead compositions. Finn’s advantage over Sondheim, as one of our friends said, is that he’s completely out. He also picks unlikely subjects for musical comedy, in this case life-threatening brain abnormality, with homelessness, gambling addiction, and eating disorders thrown in. The dauntless cast gamboled about the tiny stage with perfect timing, and most of them know all there is to know about putting over a song. MMT was responsible for the elegant production of Sweeney Todd that played last year at BLB, and we do urge you to watch for their next show. Herculina, a new play by Kira Obolensky, is based loosely on the published diary of Herculine Barbin, a nineteenth-century person who was raised as a girl but turned out to have — in the sexologists’ phrase — ambiguous genitalia; that is, she was a true hermaphrodite who could as easily have been reared as a boy. This is fascinating stuff but Obolensky leaves most of it untouched, and Frank Theater’s production, directed by Wendy Knox, simply didn’t offer enough to keep us attentive. Part of the problem may have been Jennifer Paige as Herculina. Perhaps taking her cue from Hilary Swank’s Brandon Teena in Boys Don’t Cry, she pasted a broad and largely irrelevant smile on her attractive face, shutting off any sense of the heroine’s own bewilderment and pain. Or perhaps the script is at fault; unlike Obolensky’s more successful Lobster Alice, Herculina proceeds by means of small, tight, two- and three-person scenes which seem bitten-off, often ending before anything of interest might happen.     The first half of the play takes place during the heroine’s childhood at a religious boarding school and ends with her examination by a doctor; the livelier second half traces her life as an adult and her pursuit of the school friend who awakened her to love. Frank’s usual meticulous production values made Herculina easy on the eyes, but unlike the ostensibly fluffier performances at HOTB and BLB, it just didn’t rise to the occasion. Now about those Vagina Monologues: In the first place, they’re vulva monologues. They’re about the whole impressive spread of women’s sexual anatomy, from reproductive to purely pleasure-producing, and, among its many imprecisions, the script makes a big deal about how nobody talks about it. The alternation between raucous humor and horror — a speech about genital mutilation, another about the rapes of Bosnian women — felt forced. The cast we saw, however, with a glorious Sharon Gless ably supported by Starla Benford and Sherri Parker Lee, made us glad to be there. VM claims it’s based on interviews with hundreds of women. Surely it will turn up on TV sooner or later, so that everyone in American can learn the word “coochie-snorcher.” Film The U Film Society yielded rich rewards last month, in both old and newish films. One of the centerpieces of its brief Cuban film festival, Martha writes, was Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s lyrical 1968 Memories of Underdevelopment. In its loosely-plotted narrative Sergio (Sergio Corrieri), a bourgeois intellectual, remains in Havana after the revolution even though his parents and his wife fly to Miami. Alone in the chic apartment he owns Sergo tries to make sense of Cuba, the revolution, and his own life. He has the expectations and responses of an upper-class man, and as Cuban society becomes increasingly egalitarian he finds unexpected frustrations and rewards. This was one of the first films we can remember that takes politics seriously and weaves a human drama out of the process of social change. The other treat was Raoul Ruiz’s widely praised film of Marcel Proust’s masterpiece In Search of Lost Time. The film, called Time Regained, concentrates on the last parts of Proust’s mammoth work, when the spoiled rich folk find their world literally crumbling as France careens into the First World War. But Ruiz carefully structures his story to recap much of what has gone before, from the tea-soaked madeleine that sparked the narrator’s reminiscence to the idyllic seaside summers of his childhood. Marcello Mazzarella, an actor with a spooky resemblance to Proust, becomes the sympathetic voyeur of others’ lives. His own life is his book. All the performances are good; John Malkovich appears to speak passable French as the Baron de Charlus; Catherine Deneuve and Emmanuelle Béart play mother and daughter; Pascal Greggory is touching as the doomed Saint-Loup. The film is stuffed with delicious tidbits, clothes and furniture, paintings and statues, but its grandeur comes from its respect for Proust’s narrative style: Ruiz’s sound stages open out one from another, so the film like the novel is constantly unfolding. Time Regained supposedly will be released in early 2001, and whether or not you care about Proust, we urge you not to miss it.. Now for something noisy and ridiculous: Whose idea was it to make a movie out of Charlie’s Angels? Even if the idea’s not that bad, who let Drew Barrymore get her paws on it? We never watched the TV show, but we gather the fun of it, B.X. (Before Xena), was in watching tough girls who could run, fight and get over on the boys. That’s still fun in the movie, but Cameron Diaz and Lucy Liu are a lot more entertaining than Barrymore, who produced it and gets far too much screen time. Unfortunately, the script is water-thin and much of the action stinks. Not recommended except for hardcore CA addicts. “Addicts” sounds like a forced segue into Requiem for a Dream, Darren Aronofsky’s second film after Pi, with a cast of terminal junkies (Ellen Burstyn, Jared Leto, Jennifer Connolly, and Marlon Wayans) hooked on heroin, cocaine, crack, and diet pills. Aronofsky’s work is formally innovative, but at times it feels tricky or cartoonish. He uses videotape, slow and fast motion, computer-generated effects, and fisheye lenses, among other techniques, and the dozenth time a junkie shoots up and the screen shows a rapid sequence of anatomical and physiological effects that struck us pink the first eight or nine times, we wanted to holler “Enough already!” Requiem is taken from a novel by Hubert Selby, Jr., who collaborated on the screenplay, and behind Aronofsky’s expressionistic verve always lurks the dead-end voice of Selby. A bad combination. Leto, Connolly, and Wayans do nice work as a trio of kids whose habits send them down from petty thievery to whoredom, mutilation, and a chain gang, but Ellen Burstyn’s overpraised performance as Leto’s Brooklyn mother goes right over the top and left us cringing a little. Louise Lasser, as one of her yenta pals, is far more controlled and effective. Those of you who are looking for a reason not to snort coke, shoot smack, or pop diet pills, plus those who are deeply interested in the career development of this promising but still callow director, should rush right down to see Requiem. For everyone else, it’s a bit of a bummer. Bounce, which we were both looking forward to, satisfied Marty and pretty much bored Martha. He thinks it’s a good-enough romantic comedy, with Ben Affleck as a recovering drunk and Gwyneth Paltrow (made down to look unglamorous, at least until the last few minutes) as the widow of a man he switched tickets with on a plane that crashed. She thinks the high contrivance factor dooms the movie’s fragile charm. Written and directed by Don Roos, who made last year’s surprisingly funny Opposite of Sex, we both thought Bounce should be better than it is. A word about Joe Morton: this wonderful actor plays Ben Affleck’s partner in a maverick advertising agency, but he is given almost nothing to do except look handsome and black. This reminded us that Courtney B. Vance, another wonderful actor, stood around looking black and cute in Clint Eastwood’s Space Cowboys. For a rackety, misshapen, genius-touched and fatally flawed rundown of cinematic racism, see Bamboozled, Spike Lee’s new film. Here again your faithful reviewers split: Marty thought it was hysterical, and Martha sticks by her intro line. Damon Wayans plays an Ivy League network executive named Pierre Delacroix, “Peerless” to his mama and “Dela” to his dishy assistant Sloan (Jada Pinkett) whose black nationalist brother belongs to a malt liquor-swilling rap group called the MauMaus. Dela knows he’s a token at the network, and when a white executive (Michael Rapaport) taunts him with proposing trite material, he comes up with an idea so outrageous that he’s sure it will get him fired so he won’t have to quit. His idea is for a “Millennial Minstrel Show” that will star a couple of gifted homeless performers (Savion Glover and Tommy Davidson) whom he re-christens “ManTan” and “Sleep’n Eat.” Set on a plantation, with a band called the Alabama Porch Monkeys and a regular cast of stock black players, from a raggedy little boy to a buxom, kerchiefed mammy, the show will take place in blackface because African American complexions are too various for the vicious stereotyping that Dela aims for. When Rapoport loves the idea and green-lights the project, Dela convinces himself and Sloan that it will mobilize a wave of protests and blow the lid off racism in TV. On the contrary; the show becomes a hit, and blackface sweeps the country. Martha thought the minstrel show itself was brilliant, and Glover and Donaldson superb as the bewildered talent. The scenes of them “blacking up” and then performing ancient, racist comedy routines, songs, and dances are thrillingly transgressive and reminded her of how good Spike Lee can be. The story doesn’t hold together, however, and the messy violence of its protracted ending reminds us that he often can’t come up to his own standard. Marty thinks it’s a disaster (the next stage in the melt-down of a great cinematic career); Martha thinks it’s an important film and should be seen.