Sometimes "interesting failures" are still just failures . . .

The crazy kids of Assassins

Ah, the "interesting failure."  Every major theatrical artist has one, even Shakespeare - and Stephen Sondheim has a couple - among which Assassins, from 1990, has always been particularly prominent.  I think there's just something so outré about the concept of this revue (I guess it's a revue) that it has exerted a kind of siren call over the musical theatre even though - well, by now we know it really doesn't work.  I mean a musical about assassins?? That's got to be interesting, right?  Well, it failed interestingly at its premiere, and then it failed a little less interestingly in a New York revival, too.  It likewise failed - perhaps even less interestingly - in several regional productions.  And now it has failed again, exuding only a mild level of interest, in a production by the BU School of Theatre, under the direction of Jim Petosa, which closed last weekend.  (I know, another post-mortem - but I'm almost caught up.)

Not that Petosa didn't work hard - he discarded the original "Step right up and shoot the President!" staging, opting instead for a hopeless, breadline-in-the-Great-Recession mise en en scène that relied on a bullet-riddled American flag out of Jasper Johns (or maybe Nashville), and hinted that the show's assassins were being drawn right up out of the audience (i.e., the Masses).  These were good ideas, but they didn't, finally, do much good; I think at this point we can safely say that Assassins is, indeed, a failure, and it's pretty obvious why: its concept may be "interesting," but it only works as an excuse for Stephen Sondheim to stretch out in a number of savage parodies (Marvin Hamlisch is neatly skewered in "Everybody's Got the Right," for instance).  But this invitation to misanthropic indulgence only yields maybe two numbers that can stand up to the rest of the Sondheim canon, and in the meantime, dramatically - whoo-boy, is Assassins ever a mess.

There are so many things wrong with it, in fact, that it's hard for a critic to decide where to begin; which mistake is the central one?  The show is like a sprawling network of dramaturgical error.  But what leaps out at you from the history books, of course, is that America's assassins simply share no connecting thread; they don't have a communal "history," much less a "concept;" so when they speak to each other across the historical ether, as they constantly do in Assassins, there isn't really that much for them to talk about.  John Wilkes Booth, for instance, was a successful, famous actor who led a racist conspiracy.  But Squeaky Fromme was a pathetic lowlife who managed to consistently skirt a laundry list of crimes of really appalling sadism and squalor.  Other killers were loners deranged by obvious mental, or even physical, demons, and a few could be loosely grouped as avatars of the downtrodden immigrants of the late nineteenth century.  And of course Lee Harvey Oswald was a self-destructive cipher who may - or may not - have been the patsy of a kind of coup, but who certainly never communed with Booth on any assassins' astral plane, as posited here.

Although frankly, if librettist John Weidman's concept is a mess, then Petosa's is also a little murky.  We get the vague idea that the whole production is intended to help us "understand" the potential assassins now obviously lurking in the Tea Party.  But sorry, I'm still unsympathetic;  I'm just not the type to confuse patronization with fellow feeling. And frankly, I don't even think the nutty Tea Partiers are desperately seeking celebrity; theirs is simply an evil mix of racism and ignorance, with little of the need for personal validation which is the closest Sondheim & Co. ever come to a psychological explanation for their singing shooting gallery.

This is all too bad, really, because the kids at BU did give these killers their, um, best shot, and a few scenes, particularly those between the gonzo Melissa Carter and Casey Tucker (as Sara Jane Moore and Squeaky Fromme) kind of worked.  Elsewhere the singing is stronger than the acting, but things never really bog down, they just never come together, either.  Evan Gambardella does throw off a weird kind of pseudo-innocent energy as both the "Balladeer" and Lee Harvey Oswald, and John Zdrojeski, as John Hinckley, hints at dramatic potential the role doesn't allow him to access.  The rest of the cast is more scattershot, although everyone hits the bulls-eye here and there.  Still, is that enough to float another production of Assassins?  I talked briefly with director Jim Petosa about this after the show, and he argued that academic resources are better spent re-evaluating intriguingly troubled shows than in simply mounting sparkling new productions of the tried-and-true.  Well - maybe.  You might answer that with the observation that until a student triumphs in a true classic, he or she has no yardstick of actual success. Of course there's surely room for both options in any curriculum, I think - but in the meantime, can we please put a bullet in Assassins for good?

Lost on the Camino Real with Beau Jest.

But alas, the BU Theatre Department hasn't been the only local troupe sipping the "interesting failure" Kool-Aid of late. Across town, at the indomitable Charlestown Working Theater, the widely-respected Beau Jest is currently (no, this is not a post-mortem, it runs through next weekend) attempting to revive Ten Blocks on the Camino Real, the one-act source of perhaps Tennessee Williams' most legendary Broadway bomb, Camino Real.

Beau Jest had a hit last year with another Williams one-act, the much-later Remarkable Rooming House of Madame LeMonde; but this time around, I'm afraid they only manage to confirm that Ten Blocks is an artistic traffic jam of truly epic proportions. And I mean truly EPIC proportions; this thing makes Assassins look coherent.

The scuttlebutt on the full-length version's Broadway failure has always been that director Elia Kazan forced Williams' fantasia into a naturalistic straitjacket. Having now sat through the (abbreviated) first version, I can only say I kind of admire Kazan for at least trying to wrestle this embarrassment into some kind of shape (Beau Jest just lets the pieces fall where they may). It's essentially a pretentious pastiche in which Williams' usual hobbyhorses - the stud vs. the seductress, the wisdom of the fallen queen, and of course "life" vs. "death"- all meet in a kind of car crash on some cosmic Latin highway. There are a few poetic stretches, to be sure, along with a tone of amusingly deadpan political horror. There's atmospheric Day-of-the-Dead accompaniment from a live trio that sometimes helps paste things together.  But I'm afraid even when something works, it doesn't work for very long.

The Beau Jest version, directed by Davis Robinson, is nevertheless funkily likable, even though it doesn't come close to getting the dramatic job done. The basic problem is that these folks are essentially very smart comedians - so they nail the droll asides that Williams often wickedly slips into, but can't really convey at all the "wild and moving" sense of dramatic freedom the playwright thought he was unleashing. Gypsies re-growing their maidenheads as they dance wildly in the moonlight, death as a form of orgasm - sorry, much as I love 'em, this just ain't Beau Jest; imagine the Flight of the Conchords trying to do Blood Wedding and you've got roughly the situation here. As expected, the comic scenes - particularly an amusing shakedown by the local fortune teller - worked best; the orgasmic flights toward inevitable Death, less so. And then there were the ridiculous interpolations from Cervantes, Proust, and others (Don Quixote AND the Baron de Charlus both wander through!); Beau Jest offered a weak smile here at the playwright's own pretensions (Williams is hardly on a par with either writer), but couldn't make much more of these interludes.

Oh, well. I suppose I'm glad that I've seen this rarity, but I can't honestly say I'd willingly sit through it again. And perhaps it's time we began to formulate a critical approach - or even a mode of intervention - toward the temptations of the "interesting failure." A first precept might be to resist the illusion that audiences of the past were necessarily philistines (and at any rate, let's face it, even philistines sometimes have a point). The second might be to question the true "interest"of a failure that only rehashes, or just plain hashes, elements which reach obvious fruition - or at least balance - in an artist's other, successful works (as is the case with Ten Blocks). I mean, is it so "interesting" to discover that a particular gambit works in one way, but not another? Perhaps to an academic  - but rarely to an audience.

The remarkable production of Madame LeMonde

Rarely do you see a posthumous world premiere from Tennessee Williams.

Even more rarely do you see a remarkable production of such a premiere.

But those happy circumstances swung together in Beau Jest's recent mounting of The Remarkable Rooming House of Madame LeMonde, a twisted, sexually explicit sketch the great playwright penned in his final years. The show took two bows at the Charlestown Working Theater last Friday and Saturday, and will re-appear out in P-Town at the Tennessee Williams Festival this weekend. Hopefully, for those who can't make ferry-fare, CWT or some other local venue will bring this macabre one-act back for an encore.

But a word of warning: LeMonde may not be "appropriate" for many Williams fans (gay and straight), at least not those who are unprepared to have the scales fall from their eyes. For in it, the once-closeted playwright drops a whole lotta aesthetic and emotional baggage with a resounding thud. Right up front, the female "beards" of Blanche and Maggie and Laura and his other crippled heroines have all been shaved away; Williams's avatar in LeMonde is "Mint," a stunted gay man (his tiny legs are paralyzed) who has been reduced to swinging from hook to hook (above left) in the eerie attic of the eponymous rooming house. Needless to say, the hooks in question are meat hooks, and Mint is indeed, a piece of meat to his many visitors, particularly the Brando-esque son of his brutal landlord, who periodically breaks in (an obvious boner pushing at his fly) for a bit of the old in-out with his helpless prey (acts which are staged as shadow-play that's more squirm-inducing than anything I've seen on a Boston stage).

Creepier still, Mint seems to half-long for his own rape - and at any rate, he's not treated much better by his other guest, a sadistic school chum who drops by for tea. Yep, that's right - after the rough trade, it's time for tea and cake in this bourgeois abattoir; sounds like fun, doesn't it. Well, it isn't for Mint, who begs for crumbs as his buddy "Hall," who's a kind of seedy avatar for "the Establishment," scarfs up every single one, all while subjecting Mint to a sewer-stream of dirty stories mixed with contemptuous jibes. Enter the formidable Madame LeMonde - red in tooth and claw, as well as perm and petticoat, who quickly makes damn sure their revels now are ended (she even offs her own son with the swipe of a single paw), then briefly ponders the heartlessness of her domain (not for nothing that symbolic surname!) before settling down to future business. "The world is accident-prone," she mutters grimly, "and the loss of one fool makes room for another." How true.

And how very Absurd. For this frigid, Ionesco-like dénouement caps a vaudeville that constantly echoes that famous Theatre, and it's fascinating to watch Williams find his way into a new aesthetic and set up shop there (indeed, the real shock is how well his familiar tropes, freed from his once-lyric naturalism, fit into the new neighborhood). More intriguing still, here Williams seems both more openly brutal and yet more exquisitely poetic than the rest of his new crowd. The trouble with LeMonde, however, is that it runs a bit long, given that its politics feel borrowed, and it doesn't even have as much plot as your average Beckett or Pinter; Williams sets out his perennial themes in a startling new frame, but doesn't actually advance them an inch.


Jordan Harrison and Larry Coen do high tea in The Remarkable Rooming House of Madame LeMonde.

Still, the play is a valuable addition to the Williams canon, and probably provides a more harrowing window into his tortured soul than any of his other works (barring, that is, whatever other "Grand Guignol"-style pieces he wrote to accompany it). What's more, Beau Jest Moving Theatre and director Davis Robinson have devised a premiere production that gets almost everything right. The always-game Jordan Harrison (who's been equipped with a body puppet, above, to enable all that swinging) makes Mint both pathetic and slightly revolting, and Larry Coen likewise brings a disgustingly haute delicacy to Hall (as in "Music-Hall?"), the public-school twit who torments him over tea. (My only quibble with the resourceful Coen is that perhaps the sadistic lowness of his Hall is made a bit too clear a bit too quickly.) Meanwhile Nick Ronan was just about any sado-masochistic bottom's midsummer night's dream (although shouldn't he be in torn blue jeans, à la Brando and Dean?), and Lisa Tucker dispatched her minions to the great beyond with convincingly cruel panache. Special praise must go to costume designer Rafael Jean, whose costumes were thematically appropriate and, indeed, to die for.

All in all, this was a remarkable night for small theatre in Boston - precisely the kind of evening our academic theatres should be providing, but which they really wouldn't be caught dead doing. Thank God we've got Beau Jest, the Charlestown Working Theater, and the Tennessee Williams Theatre Festival to take us where our would-be teachers fear to tread.