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About Steve :: Writer ::
Plays
The Underpants
Steve
adapted and transformed the Sternheim play of 1911 called "Die Hose."
He gave it a modern sensibility and enhanced the woman's place in the
household as a sexual being.
Since its
New York premiere, it has been produced all over the world.
< 1 2 3 > |
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Daily Variety
June 14, 2001
NEWS; Pg. 55
Martin dons Classic laffer 'Underpants'
ROBERT HOFLER
NEW YORK --- Steve Martin returns to the theater with an adaptation of Carl
Sternheim's 1911 dark comedy "The Underpants" (Die Hose), commissioned by
Gotham's Classic Stage Company in New York.
The actor-writer's previous legit works include "Picasso at the Lapin Agile"
in 1993 and 1997's "WASP and Other Plays."
"Sternheim is absurdly witty, and his work reminded me very much of Steve,"
said CSC artistic director Edelstein, who called "WASP" a "much darker work"
than "Picasso." "I asked him to take a crack at Sternheim."
Originally staged by Max Reinhardt, "Underpants" was the first in a
Sternheim trilogy that charts a bourgeois family's decline. In the play, a
civil servant's wife accidentally drops her underwear during the Kaiser's
parade. Subsequently, a series of men proposition her under the guise of
renting a room in the apartment she shares with her husband.
Edelstein recalled a staging of the play 10 years ago in London but no U.S.
productions. "Sternheim's general obscurity is due to the fact that the
English translations are lousy," said the artistic director. "I knew there
was a funny play in there, but these translations weren't doing it."
CSC hired an academic to provide Martin with a literal translation of
"Underpants," and the writer has completed a draft of his adaptation. "What
Steve has done is breathe fresh life into this comedy, and made the jokes
work," Edelstein said.
"Underpants" will go into workshop this summer at CSC and possibly be ready
for the company's 2001-02 season.
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http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/playbill/20010815/en/ob_s_csc_will_see_bogart_
s_room_and_martin_s_underpants_in_2001-02_1.html
Playbill On-Line
Wednesday August 15 03:21 PM EDT
OB's CSC Will See Bogart's 'Room' and Martin's 'Underpants' in 2001-02
David Lefkowitz
After a season of almost unrelenting darkness, from the bleakness of
Beckett's Texts for Nothing to the Holocaust-era Race and I Will Bear
Witness to the current operatic adaptation of Kafka's nightmarish In the
Penal Colony, Off-Broadway's Classic Stage Company (CSC) will lighten up a
bit in the season to come. The biggest name in the mix is
writer-actor-comedian Steve Martin, who is adapting Carl Sternheim's edgy,
door-slamming farce The Underpants. Martin, who made it big as a comedian
with the album "Let's Get Small" and has been a movie star since "The Jerk"
(followed by such pics as "The Man with Two Brains," "Planes, Trains and
Automobiles," "Father of the Bride" and "Pennies From Heaven") made
theatrical waves in the 1990s with his comedy Picasso at the Lapin Agile,
some one acts. The past couple of years have seen him return to Hollywood
and concentrate on films, his art collection and numerous comic essays for
the New Yorker, as well as a novella, "Shopgirl."
Playwright Sternheim was born in 1878 in Leipzig. After studying philosophy
he co-founded "Hyperion" literary magazine and went on to write such plays
as The Cassette and The Snob. After encountering moral outrage over some of
his writing, Sternheim moved to Brussels and lived there until his death in
1942.
Though Martin's adaptation of Sternheim's best-known comedy is titled "The
Underpants," more delicate translations have called it "Knickers" and "The
Trousers." The play tells of a man who's mortally embarrassed when his
wife's undies fall down during the procession of the King. Two gentlemen
notice her predicament < and become immediately smitten with her. CSC
artistic director Barry Edelstein will direct The Underpants, running March
20-April 28 at CSC (officially opening April 4).
Moving from private parts to severed parts, Neal Bell has adapted Mary
Shelley's horror classic, "Frankenstein," into Monster. Rent director
Michael Greif stages this world-premiere adaptation of a scientist who
creates a human monstrosity and then can't control its actions. This version
begins at sea, with Victor Frankenstein discovered on an ice floe. Monster
opens the CSC season, beginning previews Jan. 15, opening Jan. 27 and
running through Feb. 17, 2002.
In a quieter vein, director Anne Bogart is busy adapting the writings of
Virginia Woolf into Room, with Bogart's SITI Company working on the piece at
CSC. Ellen Lauren would star in the piece, no doubt focusing on "A Room of
One's Own," which has already served as a solo vehicle for Eileen Atkins.
Bogart's other projects have included bobrauschenbergamerica by Charles L.
Mee, staged at this-past season's Humana Festival in Louisville, KY.
Speaking of Mee, his Humana hit the previous year, Big Love, was also under
consideration but will not be part of the CSC season. According to a
spokesperson at The Publicity Office, the season will have only three plays
and not start until January 2002, though the space will be sublet for an
outside production, Love.
For tickets and information on shows at CSC, 136 East 13th Street, call
(212) 677-4210 or check out their website, www.classicstage.org.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/24/arts/theater/24KALB.html
New York Times
March 24, 2002, Sunday, Late Edition - Final
Section 2; Page 7; Column 1; Arts and Leisure Desk
THEATER; Making Crazy With a 91-Year-Old German Comedy
JONATHAN KALB; Jonathan Kalb is the chair of the Hunter College theater
department and the author of "The Theater of Heiner Muller," which has been
reissued as a revised and enlarged paperback by Limelight Editions.
It went like this.
"I have a play that I think you'd be good at adapting." "What is it?"
" 'The Underpants.' "
"I like the title."
Thus begins the tale, in Steve Martin's words, of how he first got the wild
and crazy idea of adapting a 91-year-old German comedy for a small theater
in the East Village. From the moment the theater's artistic director, Barry
Edelstein, sent it to him, this all but forgotten play by Carl Sternheim
seems to have struck Mr. Martin as a perfect fit. It tickled something
elemental in the deepest recesses of both his overdeveloped funny bone and
his underappreciated egghead.
"It's a great set-up -- just say the plot succinctly," Mr. Martin suggested,
during a break in rehearsals for the play, now in previews at the Classic
Stage Company, where it opens on April 4. "You have a woman whose underpants
fall down in public, and then two guys come in who both saw her, and both
want her because of it. I just liked that. There was room to do things, and
it had these strange little language tics that I couldn't even begin to
translate."
The humor, he said, seemed to give him "license to be a little crazy."
Mr. Martin's peculiar brand of craziness has in recent years proved
remarkably amenable to the classics. In 1987 he transformed "Cyrano de
Bergerac" into "Roxanne," and in 1994 he adapted "Silas Marner" into "A
Simple Twist of Fate." He also starred in both films.
Mr. Edelstein sent him "The Underpants" in early 2000, eager to find a
vehicle with which to work with Mr. Martin again after directing a program
of his one-acts at the Joseph Papp Public Theater in 1995. "It reminded me
of his comic voice," Mr. Edelstein said of the play. "Of the way he relishes
unexpected juxtapositions and puts words and ideas into completely bizarre
contexts."
The new adaptation -- directed by Mr. Edelstein with a six-member cast and
based on a literal translation commissioned by the theater -- follows
Sternheim's story and adopts his sharp satirical attitude. But it's also
very much the creation of Mr. Martin, who is not appearing in the
production. The cast includes Byron Jennings as the husband, Cheryl Lynn
Bowers as the wife, Kristine Nielsen as her neighbor and Christian Camargo
and Lee Wilkof as the two men.
An old theater saw has it that "German comedy" is something of a joke in
itself. There is no question that Germans have had their share of great
comic actors and clowns. Germany has also long had the dubious distinction
of being a favorite butt of comedy -- from "The Adventures of Baron
Munchausen" and "The Great Dictator" to "Hogan's Heroes" and "The
Producers." Truly classic comic dramas, however, have been rarer than bagels
in Baden-Baden.
The single great exception in the 20th century was Sternheim (1878-1942),
whose six-play cycle "Comedies From the Heroic Life of the Middle Class,"
written from 1911 to 1925, earned him comparisons in his own time with
Moliere and Feydeau, and later with Noel Coward. These merciless, tightly
plotted satires -- which anticipate Brecht and Expressionism and paint a
devastating portrait of the smug, petty, morally tone-deaf classes that
smoothed the way for Hitler -- were banned by both the Imperial and Nazi
authorities. They eventually found their public through scandal and
persistence.
Though Sternheim isn't exactly unknown in the United States, he has suffered
from a paucity of English translations strong and funny enough to make the
case for him. Now, he may have a friend at court, though, because Mr. Martin
-- blockbuster comedian turned serious actor, playwright, screenwriter,
novelist and essayist -- has directed his talents to the first play of
Sternheim's "Heroic Life" cycle.
This is the third New York stage project for Mr. Martin: in addition to the
program of one-acts, his full-length "Picasso at the Lapin Agile" played Off
Broadway in 1995. "I like the theater because of the writing," he said over
mediocre pasta "but excellent iced tea" during the break. "There's a certain
freedom as a writer to be tangential. A great passage in a play can be
literate, can be beautiful, can be off-topic, can be so many things. A great
line in a movie is usually, 'Come on, let's go.' "
At the same time, the experience of adaptation "cuts two ways," he said. "I
had this thought about what it's like to adapt somebody. It's like the
process of a bad marriage. At first it's fidelity, then it's transgression,
and then self-preservation. First you start out with the intention to be
completely faithful. Then you sort of fudge it. And suddenly, at some point,
you're fighting for yourself and your ideas."
Set in 1910 Berlin, "The Underpants" is about what happens after the pretty,
sex-starved wife of a boorish, self-satisfied civil servant "accidentally"
drops her underpants in public. Sternheim's joke is that despite a golden
opportunity, the eager-to-stray wife never manages any hanky-panky with
either of the two men who saw her "accident" and who show up to rent a room
in the couple's apartment; the bureaucratic clod of a husband ends up
triumphing.
In 1911 Germany, this upending of the conventional farce of infidelity --
which began as a reworking of Moliere's cuckold-comedy "George Dandin" --
was as disturbing as it was funny. Its title had to be changed to "Der Riese"
("The Giant"), a wry reference to the husband, to clear the Berlin censor,
and its impertinent satire, frosted with not-quite-nonsensical blather about
Nietzsche and Darwin, seemed to lift the veneer of virtuous respectability
off the entire, furiously rising middle class. (The family name in the play
is Maske, meaning mask.) One critic marveled after the premiere that the
play was "at one and the same time like water vapor and like red-hot iron."
Mr. Martin has taken this dormant incendiary material and kneaded it into a
very different sort of explosive. He said he discovered while writing that
he "didn't care to make a statement about the bourgeoisie."
"I kept being informed that that's what the play was about," he said, "but I
don't see the bourgeoisie as a threat. That's like something we did in the
60's, to be critical of 'the squares.' " Here and now, the 56-year-old Mr.
Martin added, "the bourgeoisie is us -- it's both left and right."
His "Underpants" is thus a deliberately nonhistorical reconstruction,
following the time-honored Hollywood practice of applying Americanized
language to a foreign setting retained for its comic value and exoticism.
The difference in this case is that the idiom is that of one of America's
most recognizable and intelligent comic voices. Mr. Martin has tailored most
of the jokes and gags to his peculiar brand of quicksilver lunacy, with some
extended to the point of silly digressions that turn out to be (after you
think them over) oddly pertinent.
One renter, for instance, is a nebbishy, hypochondriacal barber named Cohen,
who introduces himself to the other renter by announcing, "I, sir, am your
prophylactic." The other is an egomaniacal, insufferably sensitive poet
named Versati, who tells Louise, the wife, to think of her husband "as a
necessary part of the triangle: you are the flint, I am the fire, and he is
the wet piece of wood." Later, Versati and Cohen proceed from a squabble
over Louise to an absurd spat over whether Richard Wagner dyed his hair.
That seemingly trivial spat (which brackets the loftiest artistic ambition
with the shabbiest domestic dysfunction) is a good example of the way Mr.
Martin has used his trademark brand of deflating humor to shift the play's
political center. He has made numerous cuts and altered the emphasis of
certain themes in an effort (as he writes in a program note) "to uncork the
genie that Sternheim had placed in the bottle -- the genie that makes the
play relevant to our age."
The new political center in Mr. Martin's play is gender politics, along with
a nod to what he reluctantly calls "the 15 minutes of fame issue."
Sternheim's Louise ends up poignantly resigned to her awful destiny -- a
slavish marriage to the Teutonic equivalent of Ralph Kramden -- but Mr.
Martin's Louise does not. Having been disappointed by a bogus romantic dream
and burned by a small, pre-mass media taste of instant fame, she learns from
her experiences. Mr. Martin said she becomes "empowered by her sexuality,
and that's not the highest thing to be empowered by, but at least in terms
of this play, she ends up in charge of the situation; she will decide what
will happen."
Her newly raised consciousness is primarily seen in the play's new ending --
two additional scenes invented by Mr. Martin, which can't be described in
detail without giving away a surprise. They recall both the arrival of the
mysterious "messenger" near the end of "Picasso at the Lapin Agile" and (in
a topsy-turvy manner) the famous deus ex machina at the end of Moliere's
"Tartuffe."
Which again brings up the issue of Mr. Martin's fidelity to Sternheim.
Sternheim revered Moliere. In fact, he was immodestly devoted enough to
think of himself as "the German Moliere." ("Who's Moliere?" Mr. Martin said
in a stage whisper during the first rehearsal, when Mr. Edelstein happened
to mention him.)
Deliberately bypassing German theatrical heroes for this French one,
Sternheim found his distinctive comic voice in the process of imitating
Moliere's technique of building characters around a single dominant
attribute. If his own work weren't involved, he might well have savored the
way Mr. Martin resolved his own character-impasse in "The Underpants" with a
coup of pure plotting. In other words, despite what Mr. Martin says about
"fudging" and fighting for his independence, his work is in some ways more
in tune with his source material than he may know.
The Underpants
Classic Stage Company, 136 East 13th Street. Opening April 4.
When Underpants Fall
Here is an excerpt from Steve Martin's adaptation of "The Underpants," a
play by Carl Sternheim.
THEO -- This did not happen. It could not happen, yet it did!
LOUISE -- No one even noticed.
THEO -- In front of the neighbors, in front of strangers, and at the King's
parade, for God's sake? The King himself could have seen you.
LOUISE -- No one saw me.
THEO -- So the story just spread itself.
LOUISE -- It was nothing.
THEO -- It was nothing? It was nothing? Tell me if this is nothing. In broad
daylight, on a city street, you are standing out in public and your
underpants fall down. I can't believe this happened to me!
LOUISE -- It didn't happen to you.
THEO -- But they will blame me. They will blame me for having a wife who . .
. can't even tie a tiny knot in two slender cords. . . . You know how I hate
attention. A little attention and the next thing you know, I am out of a
job. I am a government clerk. I blend in. You know why I never buy you a
pretty dress, or hat, or new coat?
LOUISE -- Remind me.
THEO -- Because you are much too attractive for a man in my position. Your
breasts, your legs, they draw the eyes. My job and your appearance do not go
together. Everyone notices you. And it's your fault.
LOUISE -- My fault?
THEO -- The woman's fault, always.
LOUISE -- Here we go again.
THEO -- What are breasts? Harmless, utilitarian, lumps of flesh. But you
squeeze them into a sweater and mountains move.
LOUISE -- I don't promote myself.
THEO -- You don't have to. Flesh speaks to men from under coats, under
caftans, under furs, from igloos. There's always a small voice calling: I am
here.
http://www.nytimes.com
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http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/05/arts/theater/05UNDE.html
New York Times
The New York Times
April 5, 2002, Friday, Late Edition - Final
SECTION: Section E; Part 1; Page 3; Column 1; Movies, Performing
Arts/Weekend Desk
THEATER REVIEW | 'THE UNDERPANTS'
Knickers in a Twist, or Panties With a Mind of Their Own
By BRUCE WEBER
Dying may or may not be easy, as Edmund Kean claimed _ who knows? _ but
comedy is definitely hard. Thankfully we have practitioners like Steve
Martin, who is pursuing the intelligent laugh across the narrative arts with
ardor and seriousness and a good deal of skill.
Mr. Martin has stretched his gifts assiduously, and his work as a sketch
comedian, actor, screenwriter, playwright, essayist and novelist have all
received serious critical attention. And his newest venture is something
else again, an adaptation of a German farce from 1910, "The Underpants" by
Carl Sternheim.
The play, written as a wicked satire on the middle class, has become in Mr.
Martin's hands an ambitious amalgam of comic book and social commentary,
made out of sex jokes, slamming doors and sophisticated repartee. And under
the feverish, stylized direction of Barry Edelstein, its premiere
production, which opened yesterday at the Classic Stage Company in the East
Village, is valiantly, if not always brilliantly, eccentric.
The peculiarity of the show stems partly from the fortuitous pairing of the
adapter and his material. "The Underpants" is the story of Louise Maske, a
bureaucrat's pretty but sexually neglected young wife who was attending the
king's parade when her bloomers unaccountably slipped to her ankles. The
event has caused Theo, her meat-headed boor of a husband, great
consternation; already unnerved by his wife's good looks _ "You are much too
attractive for a man in my position" _ he is petrified not only of scandal
but also of any circumstance that would single him out as anything other
than a good German.
The panties incident does have its consequences, however, in the form of two
strange men _ a poet and a barber _ who witnessed it and were rendered as
twitchy as adolescents with Playboys secreted under their mattresses. Both
of them show up to rent a spare room in the Maske home, and their lascivious
attentions awaken Louise to her buried desires, which are additionally
fanned by her upstairs neighbor, Gertrude, a voyeuristic busybody.
On its own, independent-minded lingerie is a Martinesque idea, as anyone who
has seen him perform with an arrow through his head will understand. But the
match has a deeper weave than that; Mr. Martin shares the time-honored
belief in the seriousness of silliness.
Sternheim was a subversive in a Germany with a burgeoning bourgeoisie, a
bureaucracy and a growing population of factory workers congealing into a
massive middle class; his works were banned by the Nazis. And he used "The
Underpants" to tweak the monolithic and unimaginative society that would
eventually promote the rise of Hitler.
Mr. Martin aims equally high, the way, say, Chaplin did. (I kept thinking of
"The Great Dictator.") There is always something abrasive in the funny
business of his script. But his subversiveness is cultural rather than
political; besides, as he has pointed out himself, the bourgeoisie doesn't
exactly cast ominous shadows these days.
What he has on his mind here is much more pertinent to contemporary life:
the persistent tug of lust, the allure of fame and their impact on gender
relations. That may sound overly pompous; after all, the gathering of randy
forces in the Maskes' small apartment could be the situational setup for a
sketch on "Saturday Night Live." Mr. Martin is on familiar turf.
In fact, Mr. Martin's script takes its distinctive tone from its combination
of narrative literature and sketch comedy. It's a bold aspiration _ literary
slapstick _ and it will appeal most to theatergoers with a broad taste in
humor. Proudly short on subtlety (a difficult attitude to pull off for long
without an Off Broadway audience losing patience), the show is uncautiously
thick with jokes that range from potty humor to snickery schoolboy
irreverence to agile, even erudite wordplay. And both Mr. Martin and Mr.
Edelstein appear to be completely unafraid of clinkers; the show rolls right
over them. In any case, in spite of the misses, "The Underpants" is often
laugh-out-loud funny.
Mr. Edelstein's production, which begins with a lovely, deft visual joke, is
otherwise eager to prove that the hyperbolic style of sketch comedy is
sustainable throughout an entire play. He may be right; the actors here give
it a terrific shot, and if there are dead spots in the performances, they
have to do with repetitiousness of expression and gesture.
The techniques of high parody stage acting aren't often called for these
days; thus the imaginations of actors aren't exercised much in that
direction. And the performers here do run out of ideas. Of the main players,
only Kristine Nielsen as Gertrude brings a full plate of invention to her
lavishly overheated portrayal. She's a delight.
As Theo, Byron Jennings, his hair plastered down, his body constrained in a
snug three-piece suit, makes some delicious expostulations. (His sputtery
discourse on breasts is very funny.) But comedy connoisseurs will recognize
in his mannered officiousness the physical cadences of John Cleese and Mr.
Martin himself.
Cheryl Lynn Bowers, as Louise, carries herself with pert and sexy aplomb,
but she isn't quirky; her range of facial expressions seems to be limited,
and there are only so many laughs to be had with wide eyes and a clownish,
open-mouthed moue. Whether it's her will or mere exertion, she does actually
flush when a moment turns bawdy.
Lee Wilkof is aptly cast as Cohen, the irritating, self-pitying barber who
is motivated mainly by jealousy; still, toward the end, the character's
idiosyncrasies _ the whiny speech, the defensive anger, the reflexive
patting down of his remaining hair _ seem to disappear into familiarity.
Christian Camargo, as Versati, the unbearably self-absorbed poet who can't
quite complete his seduction of Louise even though she's eager for it, is
engagingly, preposterously ardent at first, but the fierceness of his
artificial romanticism is wearing.
It needs to be said that these are small cavils. To their infinite credit,
all the creative participants here are gamely exploring a comedic terrain
that is cobwebbed with disuse and full of pitfalls. "The Underpants" is
unlike anything else in New York.
THE UNDERPANTS
By Carl Sternheim, a new version by Steve Martin; directed by Barry
Edelstein; sets by Scott Pask; costumes by Angela Wendt; lighting by Russell
H. Champa; sound by Elizabeth Rhodes; production stage manager, Gay Merwin;
general manager, Rachel M. Tischler; production manager, Ian Tresselt;
producing director, Anne Tanaka. Presented by the Classic Stage Company, Mr.
Edelstein, artistic director. At 136 East 13th Street, East Village.
WITH: Byron Jennings (Theo Maske), Cheryl Lynn Bowers (Louise), Kristine
Nielsen (Gertrude), Christian Camargo (Versati), William Duell (Klinglehoff),
Lee Wilkof (Cohen) and Patrick Boll (A Late Arrival).
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New York Post
April 27, 2002, Saturday
All Editions; Pg. 026
SLIP SERVICE
Libby Callaway & Megan Turner
The Bar Belles have a soft spot for mixologists who take inspiration from
the world around them - no matter how kooky that world may be.
When Steve Martin's delightfully silly new play, "The Underpants," recently
opened at the Classic Stage Company in the East Village, the head bartender
at Cafe Deville, the French brasserie next door, was moved to commemorate
the event with a cocktail. At the opening-night party, Fernando Pena created
The Pink Slip, a rosy concoction of vodka, cherry brandy, Triple Sec and
cranberry juice that's sweet yet sultry - and tasteful too.
We don't even want to think about what a less refined establishment would
decide to name a drink honoring a play about a woman who loses her knickers.
Cafe Deville, 103 Third Ave., at 13th Street; (212) 477-4500.
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The New Yorker
April 15, 2002
THE THEATRE; Pg. 86
FAMILY VALUES; Bad behavior in Russia's ruling class.
NANCY FRANKLIN
****
Has there ever been a more promising title for a play than "The Underpants"?
After all, no other garment is so close to the facts and the concomitant
follies of life. Our expectation that truth will be revealed and silliness
displayed is rewarded to some extent in the Classic Stage Company's
production of Carl Sternheim's satirical 1911 play (its German title is "Die
Hose"), which deals with the consequences of an embarrassing event: a
woman's underpants fall down in public during a royal parade. "The
Underpants," performed here in a version by Steve Martin, suffers somewhat
from the oppressively noisy direction of Barry Edelstein, the C.S.C.'s
artistic director, who commissioned Martin to adapt the piece. Brevity is
the soul of lingerie, as Dorothy Parker once wrote, and the play duly clocks
in at ninety minutes, but the minutes do not fly as they should.
Theo Maske (Byron Jennings), a respectable government clerk, is mortified by
what he sees as his wife's indiscretion. "I can't believe this happened to
me!" he bellows, undeterred in his self-absorption even when his wife,
Louise (Cheryl Lynn Bowers), points out that it didn't happen to him. When
she adds that the whole event lasted only two seconds, Theo, in a classic
Martinism, retorts, "Haven't you heard? Time is relative." Louise's mishap
has given her a certain fame, and two men who saw it happen show up at the
Maskes' apartment wanting to rent a room. One, Versati (Christian Camargo),
is a pretentious, idiotic poet-"unpublished, I am proud to say"-and the
other is a barber named Cohen (the amusing Lee Wilkof), who tells the
anti-Semitic Theo, "That's Cohen with a K." Later on, a third prospective
tenant appears, a sour, fussy old coot (William Duell), who crankily
inquires, "Any tubas in the building? Sewing machines, parrots? Banjos?"
Then there is the love-starved upstairs neighbor, Gertrude (Kristine Neilsen),
who lives vicariously through Louise, and who rolls her eyes, Groucho-like,
at the merest hint of sex.
Martin was an inspired choice for this play. He brings out its middle-class
absurdities (speaking of absurdities, kudos to Scott Pask for his nuttily
underwear-festooned set), and imbues it with just the slightest whiff of
sadness. In his version, it's clear that everyone is isolated in his or her
own fantasy world, and that in the pursuit of love we inevitably end up
chasing our own tail. This is the sadness not of a cynic but of a true
romantic.
****
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