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Someone has finally written a play that tackles head-on that
thoroughly modern dilemma of serious, intelligent adults who
have a passion for mindless pop music. The hero of Tom
Stoppard's The Real Thing is a playwright named Henry
(played by Jeremy Irons) who is successful, forbiddingly
articulate, and proudly intellectual, not unlike Stoppard
himself. As the play begins, Henry is in something of a panic
because he's been asked to go on the radio and play the
records he'd most like to be stranded on a desert island with,
and he can't quite bring himself to admit that the music he
plays while working is stuff like "Da Doo Ron Ron"
by the Crystals and Herman's Hermits singing "Can't You
Hear My Heartbeat?" He's tearing through his record
collection trying to find some acceptable classical choices,
but the truth is that he hates classical music. He "went
to hear this Callas person in a sort of foreign musical
without dancing," and came away thinking it didn't hold a
candle to the Righteous Brothers' "You've Lost That Lovin'
Feeling." And he grumbles that it's permissible for elite
artists to say they listen to Pink Floyd -- even Irene Worth
does that -- but Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders is
another matter altogether. When the time comes, he does get up
the nerve to reveal his guilty pleasures and is not barred
from society, but his new (second) wife Annie (played by Glenn
Close) launches a campaign to educate him on classical music.
He has a breakthrough of sorts when he recognizes a familiar
tune in a Bach piece -- as he plays "the original,"
laughter of recognition ripples selectively through the
audience (among those who recognize the opening notes of
Procol Harum's A Whiter Shade of Pale").
Such a moment in the theater is deeply satisfying to those of
us who like to think we can hold our own in a conversation
about Heiner Muller yet are moved to tears by the moment when
the slow intro breaks into the uptempo theme on Irene Cara's
"Flashdance -- What a Feeling." How is it possible
for the same person to appreciate and refer knowingly to
Cynthia Ozick and Roland Barthes and yet spend hours
hypnotized by voices singing "Spread yourself/Over me
like/Peanut butter" or "Last night a DJ saved my
life/Last night a DJ saved my life/Yeah"? I used to think
it was an unresolvable right-brain/left-brain split, and the
fact that the theater -- our most highly articulate art form
-- remained for the most part immune to rock music only
confirmed the feeling that for thinking people, liking such
junk culture just wouldn't do. Playwright Harry Kondoleon once
wrote a scene in which a woman idly sang "There's Got to
Be a Morning After" while taking a bath. When the
director told the actress to croon another tune, the
playwright timidly pointed out that it was important she sing
"The Morning After" because it was the theme song to
The Poseidon Adventure, to which the director replied:
"Your mind is full of trash." (Undaunted,
Kondoleon went on to write a play, The Vampires, which
prominently features Screamin' Jay Hawkins's original version
of "I Put a Spell on You.")
Because rock music so rarely infiltrates the theater (which
may be why young people stay away), the occasional use carries
an almost taboo thrill. For the most part, it doesn't happen
at musicals, either, not even so-called rock musicals, which
always sound more like other musicals than like rock. At best,
there's a good song you'd like to hear sung by someone else.
Maltby and Shire's Baby, for instance, has an
R&B-flavored tune called "Two People in love"
that works okay onstage but would be even better done by Patti
Austin and James Ingram. The thing I've always thought kept
Sam Shepard's Tooth of Crime from being the great play
it could be is that the music Shepard wrote is terrible -- bad
blues-rock incongruent with the spiky images projected by the
various characters. One of the few plays with rock music that
really worked was an off-Broadway production of David Hare's Teeth
'n' Smiles, which featured a real rock band onstage who
knocked you back in your seat with their volume and energy.
And of course a phenomenal performer like Jennifer Holliday
could make you forget you're watching a play, at least while
singing her big number from Dreamgirls.
Usually rock enters through the soundtrack, though. Dancers
have often used pop records effectively, most notably Twyla
Tharp (Supertramp never sounded better than in her Short
Stories), and experimental theaters are often good for a
potent taste of rock: remember the importance of "Hubba
Hubba" to Mabou Mines' Dead End Kids, "Little
Bitty Pretty One" to the Wooster Group's Route 1 &
9, and the snippets of Romeo Void and Laurie Anderson in
Richard Foreman's Egyptology? Ntozake Shange's pieces
memorably treated pop-soul hits as readymades ("We Are
Family" in Spell #7, Stevie Wonder's "All I
Do" in mouths). And performance artists can
exploit the anything-is- material mandate of the form to
borrow all sorts of pop debris. Peter Rose made Evelyn King's
"Love Come Down" sound divine in his Berlin Zoo,
Barry Davison located the contemporary punk energy lurking
within Buddy Holly in his Oh Boy!, Italy's Falso
Movimento basically just played their favorite records and
danced in front of flashing slides for their Tango Glaciale,
and part of Ann Magnuson's magic is her hilarious adaptation
of cheesy pop songs for evangelical purposes in performances
like After Dante, her magnum opus to date.
Incorporating rock into the drama is another matter
altogether, and one of the few people who does that is British
playwright Barrie Keefe, several of whose plays seems
specifically constructed to make dramatic use of a classic
rock song. An unemployed West Indian being interrogated by
brutal English detectives in Sus recites Bob Marley's
"No Woman No Cry" to heartbreaking effect, and the
female rock bandleader in Bastard Angel makes Ben E.
King's "Stand by Me" a chilling cry of despair.
Unfortunately, Keefe's plays generally get rank-amateur
productions in New York, with the exception of Gimme
Shelter, directed at BAM in 1978 by Des Mc Anuff, a young
director who makes sensational use of rock music both on
soundtrack (it was delightful to hear "Every Breath You
Take" in his production of Keefe's A Mad World, My
Masters at the La Jolla Playhouse last summer) and with
live musicians (in the rock musical Sleak, though not
in his own Death of von Richtofen). What McAnuff and
other enterprising directors attempt and sometimes succeed in
accomplishing is to snap theatergoers out of their habitual
worshipful state and into the alert, participatory feeling
that is a rock concert's primitive lure. Lee Breuer has used
music as one of many ingredients in his production of Lulu at
Harvard and Gospel at Colonus at BAM to obliterate that
invisible wall between the stage and the audience.
Something of the same feeling came across in Lenny and the
Heartbreakers, the awful, fascinating, ultimately baffling
musical -- excuse me, opera by Kenneth Robins recently
produced at the Public Theater. This was clearly Joseph Papp's
reaction to the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Harvey
Lichtenstein; the main character, who was either Leonard da
Vinci transported to the computer age or a boy named Lenny who
thought he was da Vinci (depending on which mode you were,
like, wired into), kept singing, "I am the next
wave!" Papp's response to seeing Laurie Anderson at BAM
was that he couldn't figure out what the work was about,
what it meant. There's no such problem with Lenny.
It's about an avant-garde artist who gets a commission from a
cigar-smoking Mr. de Medici whose initials are J.P. (get it?)
but who gets so wrapped up in his inventions that his
girlfriend Angela, his "Soho madonna," leaves him
for his rich benefactor. Wouldn't you rather have a story like
that performed in Xhosa so you wouldn't have to know how
utterly trite it was? One watched in horror and disbelief as
Lenny spouted lines like "I did it, I made the climb/I'm
the renaissance wonderboy of our time!" and a quartet of
Angels incessantly dropped art-world names (everything from
Warhol's Monroe to Schnabel's plates, and Mary Boone to boot)
on a set that looked uncannily like the Missing Persons' video
on MTV.
Still, I must say I've never seen or heard anything quite like
Lenny and the Heartbreakers, with its crypto-poetic
computer jargon, surreally brilliant lighting, high-tech
video, and an orchestra consisting of Vocoder, Linn drum
machine, two Prophet and two Jupiter synthesizers, and I've
got to give Papp credit for going with something this crazy
and undefinable. Granted, a lot of the techniques are directly
stolen from other avant-garde artists: the closed-circuit
camera from Twyla Tharp's Bad Smells, a
red-light-white-circle motif from Laurie Anderson, comically
inept dancing from Richard Foreman. The amazing thing is that Lenny
seems to be a deliberate attempt to popularize a bunch of
avant-garde theater techniques by blatantly trashing them up
-- not in itself a ridiculous idea and in some respects a
logical response to those who criticize theater and opera for
being stuck in 19th century conventions. You're certainly not
going to see an all-synthesizer orchestra at the met anytime
soon, or anything remotely resembling MTV at the Vivian
Beaumont. Then again, for all the money (supposedly $400,000)
and care lavished on Lenny, it's too bad all that
technology and thievery wasn't attached to a story with mythic
resonance rather than a parade of jumpsuited dolls babbling,
"Is it art? Is it art?"
At first I had thought the crucial flaw in Lenny and the
Heartbreakers was that it was about an artist, and that
real people could care less about the creative anxiety of an
artist because that's something that can't be shown or acted.
However, The Real Thing is about a playwright and no
less fascinating for it. But then Tom Stoppard is one of the
few playwrights who can get away with anything. As you must
have guessed, The Real Thing is not just about whether
a writer can live with himself after admitting in public that
he prefers Neil Sedaka to Strauss. But it's also not just
about an intellectual who learns to love for the first time,
which you might think from reading most reviews. Henry knows
how to love, all right, but he thinks it's like spelling, that
there's only one correct way, and that is Romantic Love,
faithful monogamy lethally sundered by a single sexual
infidelity. That's well and good for romantic comedies and
pop-song lyrics, but adult love -- the real thing -- is
something more complicated, sometimes more painful, ultimately
better, which Henry only learns from his wife Annie's wisdom
and forbearance when she has an affair yet refuses to let it
destroy their marriage. Stoppard gives Henry brilliant arias
defending his side of the argument, so it's not hard for
Jeremy Irons to shine (though he's still great -- a
performance you feel privileged to witness in person). But the
burden of conveying Annie's winning argument falls mostly to
the actress playing a perilously underwritten role, and Glenn
Close does it with deceptive ease, maneuvering among the men
in her life with a mysterious, one-step-ahead knowingness that
is partly maternal and partly sexual, a very appealing
combination. Good performances, too, from Christine Baranski,
Kenneth Walsh, Cynthia Nixon, Peter Gallagher, and Vyto
Ruginis, who plays a pseudo-political prisoner named Brodie in
a nasal accent suspiciously reminiscent of Ringo Starr in the
Beatles's movies.
New York Beat, January 1984
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