How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken (46 page)

 

It is precisely in its utter lack of outrageousness that the new musical version of the film differs from its model. Fear and anger aren't in evidence here so much as a successful showman's desire to take a proven hit and package it with more polish for an already appreciative public; the new
Producers
is to the old one what the new versions of
The Fly
or
Batman
were to their film or television originals: fancier repackagings of a product that has otherwise changed very little—although times have. The new show is “product,” all right, but not in the way that Brooks once thought of his output.

The changes
The Producers
has undergone in its transformation into a musical aren't so much qualitative as quantitative—more songs, more dances, and, most important, a more elaborately imagined
Springtime for Hitler
production number. (But credit should be given where it's due: a lot of the bits that people are raving about—for instance, the beer steins
and pretzels that adorn the outfits of the Ziegfeldesque Nazi showgirls—are taken directly from the film.) The story has remained intact, with a few unimportant modifications. Ulla, the big-busted Swedish secretary, has more brains than she did before; the lead actor, L.S.D., is all but dispensed with (the hippie jokes simply won't work today); and the business about blowing up the theater has been eliminated. In the new version, Max ends up being caught and arrested and Leo flees with Ulla, only to return in time to give a moving speech on Max's behalf at his trial. The latter is the most drastic revision of the original, and serves as a nod, perhaps, to Brooks's original intention to have his story be about the relationship between the big showman and his timid sidekick. (It's a pairing that Brooks, for whatever reason, finds resonant, and has used in everything from
The Twelve Chairs
to
Blazing Saddles
.) And some things that were cut from the movie, apparently to Brooks's chagrin, have been restored in the musical, to no great effect; there's a lot of business about “the Siegfried oath” that the loony Nazi playwright forces Bialystock and Bloom to swear to, which Ralph Rosenblum, the film's editor, wisely told Brooks to cut, to Brooks's fury. (“You're talking about half the fuckin' scene!” he yelled at Rosenblum.)

If the musical version of
The Producers
has gained little substantively in its transition to the stage, it's certainly been brilliantly gussied up. Generally, stage plays become more polished-looking when they become movies; it's a measure of how raw the film version of
The Producers
was that it looks better onstage than it did on the screen. It's every bit as sleek and cleverly choreographed, lighted, designed, and costumed—and as splendidly performed—as the delirious critics have unanimously declared it to be, and it probably deserves its fifteen Tony nominations. There's a hilarious new production number in which Max's old ladies do an elaborate dance with their walkers; just as entertaining is a sequence, more than a little reminiscent of
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying
, that's set in the depressing offices of Whitehall and Marx, the firm where Leo toils away in anonymous drudgery. And here, at last, you get to see just how preposterous Max's glory days really were: the walls of his office are adorned with posters for plays like
When Cousins Marry
and
The Kidney Stone
. There are, too, a great many theatrical in-jokes and arcane allusions, the best of which takes the form of a camp homage to Judy Garland at the Palace.
Roger DeBris sits at the edge of the stage crossing his legs with a certain gamine pluck and mouthing the words “I love you” at the audience, who got the allusion, and loved it.

That may be the problem. The old Mel Brooks liked to push his audience around, see how much they could take. (And not just at the expense of stereotypical Jewish schlemiels and goniffs; you lose count of how many times the word
nigger
crops up in
Blazing Saddles
, produced in 1974.) The new Mel Brooks is in winking complicity with an audience he knows, by this point, he can count on. If the new
Producers
is a hit, it isn't, after all, because it challenges social norms about taste or propriety in any significant way, as the film tried so strenuously to do. Which norms, you wonder, and what propriety? Making jokes about gay theater folk for an audience of New Yorkers comfy enough to giggle at Nathan Lane's in-jokes about his own homosexuality can hardly be considered a feat of artistic or social risk-taking. In any event, it's been impossible to be seriously offended by caricatures of swishy theater queens ever since
La Cage aux Folles
, the 1978 French film that brilliantly coopted those caricatures and which was, coincidentally, the basis for a sentimental 1983 Broadway musical—a musical that in turn spawned an even cuter movie version in which Lane himself, again coincidentally, starred. (Nothing suggests the difference between the film and musical versions of
The Producers
, in fact, than does the difference between the menacingly outsized Mostel and the impish Lane, who even when he's outrageous manages to be adorable.) And in the Viagra era, there's nothing all that outlandish about suggesting that old people have libidos.

As for Nazis—well, in a culture that has given us
Life Is Beautiful
, the Italian concentration camp comedy, and that can rehabilitate Leni Riefenstahl with a glossily admiring coffee-table book of her very own, there's not a great deal of shock value to Holocaust humor or Nazi kitsch.

 

Some of those who have attempted to explain the success of
The Producers
have focused not so much on what you could call the negative angle—the way the show allegedly violates political correctness—as on the “positive” angle. Which is to say, on its rehabilitation of what John
Lahr, in an ecstatic review for
The New Yorker
(whose cover that week depicted a glowering Hitler sitting among delirious theatergoers) called the element of “joy” in American musical theater: “a vivacious theatrical form, which for a generation has been hijacked by the forces of high art and lumbered with more heavy intellectual furniture than it can carry.” In a similar vein, Michael Feingold in
The Village Voice
referred to “decades of musical theatre pundits declaring that musicals have to be solemn, unpleasant and good for you.” Neither critic identified who, exactly, the hijackers and pundits were, and I'm sure that neither would point an accusing finger at Stephen Sondheim, who was sitting across the aisle from me on the night I was lucky enough to get a ticket to
The Producers
, and seemed to be having a very good time. (Few critics, in fact, have written about Sondheim's achievement as incisively as Lahr has.)

Still, as I read their remarks I found it hard not to think of Sondheim and his work, which surely represent the anti-Brooksian extreme, the forces of “high art,” in the American musical theater. By coincidence, Sondheim's great, bitter showbiz classic,
Follies
, first produced barely three years after what we must now refer to as “the film version” of
The Producers
came out, was having a revival just as Brooks's new musical debuted. Superficially, the two works have a lot in common: both examine, with a kind of appalled admiration, the megalomania and delusional fantasies that the theater can inspire in weak people; both parody, with wicked knowingness, the forms and gestures peculiar to musical theater. And yet on a more profound level, no two works could have less in common than Sondheim's and Brooks's respective tributes to Broadway do.
Follies
may be all-singing and all-dancing, but it's
about
something; it uses its songs and dances to comment on how popular culture shapes our emotional lives, and explores, memorably, nostalgia and loss. In contrast to
Follies
—and, perhaps even more tellingly, to its own cinematic model—the musical of
The Producers
risks absolutely nothing; there's nothing at stake anymore. Brooks's new musical has smoothly processed his movie, whose greatest virtue was its anarchic, grotesque energy, into a wholly safe evening. In this respect, the new
Producers
doesn't represent a break from, but is in fact wholly consistent with, the erosion of the musical as an art form—as a vehicle for expressing and exploring something meaningful about the culture (other, that
is, than the culture's ability to cannibalize itself). The Sondheim revival was a small-scale affair, and got mixed reviews; the producers of the megahit
The Producers
are already talking about a fifteen-year run. You have to wonder what kind of culture finds its greatest entertainment in expanded repackagings of preexisting entertainments.

The answer to that query, according to one successful film director of screen comedies, is a culture characterized by sensory deprivation, unable to digest anything but the artistic equivalent of pablum—smooth, flavorless, safe. Great comedy, after all, as much as great tragedy, requires a head-on confrontation with life. “We are all basically antennae,” this director remarked. “If we let ourselves be bombarded by cultural events based on movies, we won't get a taste of what's happening in the world.” Those words seem even more apt today, when musical theater seems incapable of engaging the world except at second or third hand, than they were twenty years ago. Is it a comic or a tragic irony that it was Mel Brooks who spoke them?

—The New York Review of Books,
June 21, 2001

I
n the 1990 Paul Schrader film
The Comfort of Strangers
, a young Englishwoman is forced to witness the murder of her lover. The attractive young couple, Mary and Colin (Natasha Richardson and Rupert Everett), had come to Venice for a restful, sexy change of scenery. One evening, after getting lost while looking for a restaurant, they encounter Robert, a wealthy local who scoops them up and takes them to dinner at his favorite out-of-the-way eatery, where he laughingly plies them with drink and tells them a lot of weirdly inappropriate stories about his private life. Most people, of course, would take the first decent opportunity to flee at the sight of Christopher Walken in a white suit, even if he weren't always repeating lines that, like Robert himself, are ostensibly harmless yet somehow deeply sinister. (“My father was a very
big
man.”) But part of the film's macabre joke is that Mary and Colin are English, and hence diffident and accommodating to the point of self-destructiveness; more important, they're characters in a film written by Harold Pinter, in whose work everyday situations often devolve, with the irreversible momentum of nightmares, into horror. And so the couple get more and more involved with Robert and his equally unsettling, if superficially more sympathetic, wife, Caroline (Helen Mirren),
who moves around their opulent palazzo gingerly clutching various body parts in pain, as if she's just been beaten. She probably has.

The younger couple continue to socialize with their older, worldly counterparts, despite the unwholesome vibes that Robert and Caroline are giving off, and despite certain other incidents, for instance the moment, fairly early on in their joint socializing, when Robert suddenly punches Colin in the gut, viciously but smilingly, as if merely checking to see how the handsome young man would react. Then, just as Mary and Colin begin to pull away from their hosts, the bizarre and yet somehow logical climax: while paying a goodbye visit to Caroline, Mary is given a drug that renders her immobile and speechless, and as she sits in her hostess's sumptuous salon, making inarticulate noises and rolling her eyes in an attempt to warn him, Colin is brought in, like some kind of sacrificial victim, and Robert slashes his throat before her wide and terrified eyes.

Even if the story isn't by Pinter—the film was adapted from a 1981 novel by Ian McEwan—
The Comfort of Strangers
is emblematic of the British playwright's work in a number of ways. The darkness lurking under vacuous everyday exchanges; the oppressive sense of impending disaster haunting a quotidian scene (going to a restaurant, say, or sightseeing); sudden and apparently unmotivated acts of violence; relationships between sadistically bullying men and passive, helpless women; the unsettling feeling that some larger, explanatory narrative has been repressed or stripped away, leaving behind the discrete, apparently unrelated actions and the flatly conventional talk; the way in which that talk can become terribly menacing: all these have characterized Pinter's output, in one way or another, since his first play,
The Room
, was produced in 1957.

That output was celebrated in July during an ambitious festival of Pinter's work, presented by the Lincoln Center Festival 2001 and featuring productions imported from Dublin's Gate Theatre and London's Almeida and Royal Court Theatres. (Concurrent with these productions was a tribute to Pinter the screenwriter, presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center.) Pinter has written twenty-nine plays; the nine presented in New York were enough to remind you of the idiosyncrasies of the playwright's style and, indeed, the almost obsessive
narrowness of his themes. All of Pinter's work is, in some way or another, about violence—whether expressed in the corrosive interactions among family members (
The Homecoming
), the hurtful and confusing silences between couples (
The Room
,
Landscape
,
Ashes to Ashes
,
Betrayal
, many others), or in repressive and cruel actions on the part of the State against individuals (
The Birthday Party
,
One for the Road
,
Mountain Language
,
Party Time
). Over the years, Pinter has won a dedicated audience who have found a curious comfort in his bleak dramatizations of the ways in which our unwillingness or inability to make connections, to communicate meaningfully (here you think of those famous Pinteresque silences and pauses), lead to disasters both private and public.

And yet because it allowed you to absorb a good amount of Pinter in a short amount of time, the festival also reminded you that Pinter has remained within the same narrow artistic topography for much of his career; with one splendid exception (the American première of his latest play), the nine plays presented suggested a playwright who has stuck with the same thematic and stylistic formulae that first made him famous, reusing them in play after play with, it now seems, diminishing intensity of inspiration. The once-stimulating idiosyncrasies—the silences, the pauses, the hesitations—have in too many cases devolved into tics; worse, the showily “disturbing” exteriors of these works too often failed to hide the fact that the plays seem less and less to illuminate, in any profound way, the dark forces that have always interested Pinter. Indeed, the festival suggested that
The Comfort of Strangers
may be emblematic of the playwright's work in more ways than one. For it revealed a playwright who is implicated, one might say, in the aggression and unreason he wants to indict; an author who, like so many of his villains—like Robert—is more interested in making you feel pain than in explaining what the pain might mean.

 

The festival began with a double bill of two short works,
A Kind of Alaska
(1982) and
One for the Road
(1984). This was a canny pairing, for
these plays represent not only Pinter's two basic theatrical modes of expression—small people engaged in quiet, futile conversations that go nowhere, and loud, angry men doing cruel things to helpless victims—but his two main, interrelated themes: the failure of language in its proper role as a vehicle for human connection, and the violent abuse of power.

A Kind of Alaska
, which received a starkly effective production, is based (like the 1990 Robin Williams film
Awakenings
) on Oliver Sacks's book
Awakenings
, which first appeared in 1973. Pinter's play is about a woman, excellently played by Penelope Wilton with just the right mix of anxious humor and desperate pathos, who awakens from a twenty-nine-year-long coma; as she gradually, incredulously realizes what's happened, she tries to reconcile what's inside her mind—a bright, terrified sixteen-year-old girl—and what the world around her has become. “Do you know me?” she asks; and then: “Are you speaking?”; “I sound…out of tune”; “I've been nowhere.” The lines suggest the extent to which Sacks's story is an ideal vehicle for Pinter's obsession with linguistic and emotional alienation, an obsession that also shapes
The Homecoming
,
Landscape
,
Monologue
, and
The Room
.

The other play in the opening double bill was
One for the Road
, a product of the playwright's later, overtly “political” period, which began about twenty years ago, at the onset of the Reagan-Thatcher era. First published in
The New York Review of Books
in 1984, this twenty-minute-long mini-drama is a brief visit with a sadistic, if exaggeratedly civil, torturer in some nameless police state. A man called Victor, wanted for some reason by the State, is brought before the well-dressed, benevolent-seeming Nicolas (played with great relish, in the Lincoln Center Festival performances, by Pinter himself); there follows some chitchat that suggests why Pinter found in McEwan's sinister Robert a kindred spirit. (Like Robert, Nicolas oscillates between arch politesse and sinister inappropriateness: “You're a civilized man and so am I,” he tells the terrified Victor, and then goes on to talk about his penis.) Victor is then dragged offstage, where something terrible is done to his tongue, as is made clear when he reappears onstage, unable to speak clearly. Then his wife appears, and she's interrogated, too, only to be taken off to be used as a sex toy by the police; then their child, Nicky, comes on, is asked a few questions, and he's taken off, too, to be killed. That's pretty much it.
One for the Road
prepared audiences
for the brutalities of Pinter's angry political works, a group that includes
Mountain Language
and
Ashes to Ashes
, which were also performed during the festival.

A perhaps unintended consequence of presenting
A Kind of Alaska
and
One for the Road
together was that audiences could see the extent to which these works are suggestive rather than fully discursive—moody sketches for plays, which provoke unpleasant feelings without being rigorously thought-provoking. This almost semaphoric quality should not come as a surprise. From the start, as he himself has said many times, Pinter has been a playwright who finds inspiration for his dramas in striking or disturbing images he's noticed: in the case of
The Room
, for instance, it was a glimpse, during a party he'd been attending, of a dithering man (it turned out to be Quentin Crisp) talking nonstop as he served eggs to an unresponsive oaf; in that of
The Caretaker
, it was a couple of threatening-looking men he saw in a building he once lived in. As the playwright likes to explain it, these images start him writing; quite often, he acknowledges, he himself doesn't know in advance where an image will lead him. The “formal construction,” he told Mireia Aragay and Ramon Simó at the University of Barcelona during a 1996 interview, “is in the course of the work on the play.”

Pinter has, indeed, always liked to characterize himself as an “intuitive” writer, and he enjoys expressing a kind of bemusement about what he does and, sometimes, a downright incomprehension about how he does it. In a 1957 letter to his former English teacher, Joseph Brearly, a portion of which was reprinted in the Stagebill program for the festival, he wrote, “I have written three plays this year. I don't quite know how, or why, but I have.” And again, in April 1958, in a letter to Peter Wood, who would be directing
The Birthday Party
: “The thing germinated and bred itself. It proceeded according to its own logic. What did I do? I followed the indications, I kept a sharp eye on the clues I found myself dropping.” This emphasis on an odd kind of passivity in the face of his inspiration is something you'd be tempted to write off as youthful diffidence, or pretentiousness, were it not for the fact that Pinter continues today to work in much the same way, and indeed likes to emphasize that he begins with the concrete image and then waits to see what comes next. “I've never written from an abstract idea at all,” he told his Spanish interviewers.

The lack of ideological foundations, the want of a comforting, overarching theory or abstraction to organize the concrete images and words you see and hear onstage, is what lies behind the menacing emptiness you feel in Pinter's plays. At the beginning of his career, the absence of explanations of the conventional variety (psychology, plot) for the unsettling actions and tableaux that Pinter liked to stage was striking, and original. It seemed to be the point. In quasi-political plays like
The Birthday Party
and in domestic dramas (for lack of a better word) like
The Room
and
The Homecoming
, the hermetic quality of the works, the disorienting lack of obvious connection between the concreteness of his surfaces—the action, the dialogue—and any kind of subtext; the plays' famous refusal, or apparent refusal, to be “political”: all this, while angering some critics, seemed to others, and certainly to audiences, an apt theatrical analog for many of the anxieties of the postwar world. (It
was
political, but just not in the obvious way.) The existential dread and moral emptiness that were the by-products of the Cold War at its height, the debasement of serious political discourse by cynical and self-congratulatory democracies that acted tyrannically, the fragility and tentativeness of meaningful human communication—all these seemed to be what Pinter's work was somehow “about,” even if the playwright himself avoided claims to any kind of organizing theory or ideology. In this, he was very much in the tradition of post-Beckettian drama. (Pinter has often and rightly acknowledged his debt to Beckett, and there are indeed many similarities, with one crucial exception: you feel that Beckett likes the human race, whereas Pinter doesn't.)

Yet the selection of works presented during the Lincoln Center Festival suggested that, however original the writer's tone, theatrical gestures, and modes of presentation once were, there's been surprisingly little sign of significant artistic growth or experimentation since those stunningly disorienting early works. (The inclusion of Pinter's adultery drama,
Betrayal
[1978], in more than just its film version, would have helped to dispel this impression, perhaps; it's one of the rare works from what you could call the second half of his creative life that's about emotions more complex than either abjection or rage.) An early work like
The Room
can still unsettle you, as it did in a taut production at Lincoln Center featuring the superb Lindsay Duncan as the harried, desperate,
disoriented Rose (in, as it were, the Quentin Crisp role), whose endless chatter is meant less to be heard than to insulate herself from the terrifying reality of the world around her. But its epigones now seem, at best, exercises in mood rather than meaning (even when it's the meaning of no meaning). This was true of
Monologue
, that one-sided dialogue between a lonely man and an absent friend with whom he may or may not have quarreled over a woman, which, at Lincoln Center, was unfocused and without urgency, as if merely to have staged it was enough; and true, too, of
Landscape
, which in its Lincoln Center incarnation was almost embarrassingly mannered, with its fussily choreographed exchanges and precious,
Masterpiece Theatre
enunciation of the fruitless dialogue between its dreamy female lead and her clunky, earthbound husband—that recurrent Pinteresque duo. He talks about beer while she rhapsodizes about love.