Yasmina Reza’s Life (x) 3
at Circle in the Square
David Ives’s Polish Joke
at Manhattan Theater Club
I picked up a copy of Yasmina Reza’s Life (x) 3 a couple of days after seeing the play at Circle in the Square and was flabbergasted to discover that the opening scene between John Turturro and Helen Hunt is actually funny. Sonia and Henry are arguing about how to deal with their recalcitrant six-year-old.
HENRY: He wants a biscuit.
SONIA: He’s just cleaned his teeth.
HENRY: He’s asking for a biscuit.
SONIA: He knows very well there’s no biscuits in bed.
HENRY: You tell him.
SONIA: Why didn’t you?
HENRY: Because I didn’t know there were no biscuits in bed.
Sonia goes offstage to lay down the law. The child begins to cry and is still wailing when she re-enters. Henry suggests bringing him a slice of apple, but Sonia puts the kibosh on that, too. Henry goes offstage and comes back a moment later.
HENRY: He’s agreed to the slice of apple.
SONIA: He’s not having any apple, he’s not having anything, you don’t eat in bed, the subject is closed.
HENRY: You tell him.…I said yes to the apple, I thought the apple was a possibility. If you’re saying no, go and tell him yourself.
SONIA: Take him a slice of apple and tell him you’re doing it behind my back. Tell him I said no and you’re only doing it because you said yes, but that I mustn’t find out because I’m radically opposed to any kind of food in bed.
I’m not going to make any noises about not needing to have small children to find this funny. I am going to suggest that it doesn’t take Donald Sinden and Maggie Smith to make it play. It probably could use Brit actors, though, and they’d probably have to be performing Christopher Hampton’s translation from the French as written, not an Americanized version of the thing.
Problems of style, idiom, and cultural context tend to rear their heads when you decide that a West End hit will be best served by a cast of American movie stars and a dumbed-down script that Americanizes everything. Take the biscuit-cookie dichotomy, for instance. “Biscuit,” which appears in Hampton’s script, is a light-comedy word. It’s neutral. It allows us to get where the dialogue is going and focus on the politics of the situation. “Cookie,” the word that’s substituted in the production at Circle, isn’t neutral. It’s a joke word, almost a punchline in and of itself. Turturro is cute saying it—anyone would be. We’re derailed by the cuteness, and it doesn’t really matter what comes after.
Or take the subject of the conversation itself. Americans discussing questions of how to negotiate with their children isn’t satire, it’s sitcom. All Americans negotiate with their children, and all Americans argue about it. We take child-rearing seriously. Europeans don’t make such an issue out of it—that is, only a certain class of pseudo-sophisticated European does, probably in emulation of Americans. Spoken in American accents, the opening scene tells us nothing about Sonia and Henry. Spoken in Estuary accents, it would give us a hint about who they are.
Actually, though, the main thing you’d need in order for the opening of Life (x) 3 to be funny would be not to have Ms. Hunt anywhere in the equation. A limited actress to begin with, Ms. Hunt has taken to allowing the persona that made her America’s sweetheart (unaccountably, I think) to obtrude on every role she performs. It’s hard to believe that her mannerisms—the squint she levels at fellow actors, the whiny, strained, prosaically uninflected voice—ever seemed refreshing or even benign. She wields them now like weapons, encased in an impenetrable air of moral righteousness.
The actress playing the mother in the opening scene of Reza’s play should be able to forgo moral ascendancy. Within moments, she will be yelling for the child to “Shut the fuck up” and irrationally baiting him with visions of dessert delicacies. But Ms. Hunt brings the same emotional freight and crusading spirit to Life (x) 3 that she brought to the role of the doting mother in As Good as It Gets. It’s the same performance, for Pete’s sake, and it’s tiresome beyond belief.
In order to find anything witty or interesting in Reza’s play, you kind of have to redirect it in your head. Life (x) 3 is a slight, unassuming comedy—part gentle farce, part moth-like speculation on human behavior—that shows us the same disastrous dinner party three times in three different ways. Sonia and Henry and their guests, Hubert and Inez, are no more or less two-dimensional than the characters in a Noel Coward play. Like the foursome in Private Lives, like the theatrical family in Hay Fever and their pompous, conventional guests, Reza’s characters exist pretty much to be rude to each other. The fun lies in watching well-dressed, over-educated people misbehave. There really isn’t much more to it than that.
This is fragile stuff. Even the justification for the life-in-triplicate gimmick is gossamer-thin. Henry and Hubert are both astrophysicists, a circumstance that allows for passing references to cosmology and metaphysics (the phrase “modification of a presumed reality” comes up). But there’s no attempt to delineate a process of behavioral causality. The characters’ characters just change from scene to scene. Thus, one version of Henry is high-strung and self-dramatizing. Another is modest and self-assured. One version of Sonia is overtly hostile to Hubert, who is more successful than Henry and might help him to advance his career. In another version, Sonia and Hubert are contemplating a weekday tryst.
One of the things that’s been said about the play is that the variations are in the wrong order, and certainly the conceit seems haphazard in this production. Reading Life (x) 3, though, you realize that there may in fact be a progression. In each scene, the characters seem to become less simplistic, less oriented toward the exigencies of a specific genre. They lose their formulaic edge and take on, instead, a tinge of idiosyncrasy.
My guess is that each of the four actors in the play is effectively supposed to become three completely different people, and that our pleasure and fascination should derive from the artistry with which they do so. Reza is herself an actress (she played Inez in the original Paris production), and I suspect that Life (x) 3 is fundamentally a play about theater, just as Art was. People were wrong-headed in dismissing that first play because it seemed to raise long-settled controversies about painting.
The purpose of the white-on-white canvas—the reason why it had to be that and not anything else—was so that we would spend the evening watching actors pretending to respond to something when it looked to us like nothing was there at all. The white-on-white canvas meant that the actors in Art were doing the opposite of what actors in a play normally do. Instead of pretending to respond to a nothing that looks like something, they were responding to a something that looked like nothing. It was all a metaphor for theater—or for the metaphor that theater is itself. The closing speech in which images of whiteness vanish into nothingness—the clouds, the snow, the solitary skier who becomes “a man who moves across a space and disappears”—was a picture of the stage.
Subtext is, unfortunately, not an option with three-fourths of the New York cast of Life (x) 3. (The exception is Linda Emond, whom one could watch for hours.) As a result, the play becomes less and less interesting as the evening wears on. John Turturro is a god. I adore him, but light social comedy isn’t his key, and Brent Spiner has nowhere near the requisite edge of menace to bring off the role of Hubert. Matthew Warchus, who staged the production at London’s National Theater (where he had Mark Rylance, Harriet Walter and Imelda Staunton to work with, forsooth) must simply have thrown up his hands.
The guy you want playing the unpleasant but overwritten Hubert in Life (x) 3 is probably Walter Bobbie, the subtle, urbane, versatile actor who is appearing just now in David Ives’s Polish Joke to the great delight of Manhattan Theater Club audiences. Mr. Bobbie, I recall, did an elegant turn in a minor role in a minor Shaw play some years ago, then played Nicely-Nicely Johnson in the Jerry Zaks revival of Guys and Dolls, and spent the next ten years as artistic director of the Encores! concert series at City Center—too long, I feel, as it seems to have kept him off the stage. Mr. Bobbie is rare among American stage actors in his ability to project intellectual feeling without playing it as an abstraction (he’s like Kevin Spacey in this regard), and he finds nuance in the most intriguing and unexpected places, wild comic cameos and archetypal characters, more like a novelist than an actor. He’s at his best in Ives’ extremely funny if frustrating play.
It concerns a young man of Polish descent (Malcolm Gets) named Jasiu (pronounced “Yashoo”), who goes through life pretending to be an Irishman—or who already has gone through life doing that; it’s not really clear. The play begins with a lovely, wry monologue in which Mr. Gets—memory-play-style—proposes a vision of two kinds of ethnic doom, real and perceived. The speech gives way to a flashback in which we witness the childhood conversation from which he apparently derived all philosophy, a backyard chat with his beer-guzzling Uncle Roman (Richard Ziman) in which the latter had laid out for him the practical and existential pitfalls of being Polish.
The beauty of the writing in this opening sequence—and it’s one of the funniest set-pieces being done on a New York stage just now—suggests that the rest of the play will show us the consequences of this discussion. In fact, though, Ives falls into telling-not-showing mode, and from there until a poignant final scene, the play consists of Mr. Gets narrating things we’d like to see performed, while a succession of surreal, Christopher Durang–like nightmare episodes illustrate the same joke over and over again. It’s not that the scenes aren’t funny, but the excellent ensemble cast—which includes Nancy Opel and Nancy Bell, in addition to Mr. Ziman and Mr. Bobbie—are only allowed to become embodiments of ideas we’ve already heard expressed.
The director, John Rando, has orchestrated the whole thing joyously before a wonderfully inventive Loy Arcenas set that symbolically captures the image of the world as the hero sees it. But it’s tough to stay funny at the pitch of frenetic wackiness that Ives has striven for, and the longueurs begin to outweigh the pleasure of the witty one-liners. The joke version of Daniel Deronda you thought you saw coming never materializes. Instead, there’s a tiresome thread about a tiresome girl whom Gets leaves in his search for an identity, and he ultimately discovers (imagine!) the nobility of being Polish.
Mr. Gets is as endearing and piquant as ever, and Nancy Opel is, as usual, amazingly funny. And Mr. Ziman has one or two delightful moments toward the end of the play when Jasiu comes to see Roman, now dying, and discovers that his uncle doesn’t even remember the conversation in which he imparted the precepts the boy went on to live by.
There’s a truth there, but Ives skirts around it, giving us instead an ersatz moral—that all people everywhere are really the same. It seems a missed opportunity. Surely the point here is something more complicated—almost ineffable—about the haphazard way in which our childhood selves receive and interpret information, giving them a construction or importance that the grownups perhaps never intended.
New York Press, April 16, 2003