Beebo Brinker Chronicles

Photo/Dixie Sheridan

"Oh, Laura . . . -- darling -- I just can't do it," cries Beth, turning away from her lover. "I just can't can't. Oh Laura!" Beebo, currently serving as the narrator, looks at the two, Beth and Laura, and calmly continues with the story: "The whistle blew. Laura got up from her bench and walked swiftly toward the exit. Beth ran after her." The two girls share a brief, none too melodramatic look (think of Noel Coward's Still Life if you want the mood set right), and then: "Oh, Laura, Laura, please don't leave like this. Please." I know what you're thinking: it sounds hokey. And you're right, for The Beebo Brinker Chronicles is a stage adaptation by Kate Moira Ryan and Linda S. Chapman that aims to preserve the late 50s flair and fleshy pulp of Ann Bannon's series of lesbian fiction. But that's not a bad thing, for they've taken the clipped rhythm and one-line zingers ("We can't think straight because we always think gay"), and rooted them in a real struggle for happiness. If only the play didn't struggle so much to get its point across.

Beth (Autumn Dornfeld) lies impassively in bed with her husband, Charlie (Bill Dawes), unable to understand why she's no longer into him, and why they fight so much. "Does love have to be immoral or illegal before you can enjoy it?" he asks, and he's right on the money, for Beth has married Charlie out of societal fear, and now lives vicariously in her pulp novels, dreaming of how her life might have gone. And though her scenes are littered with exposition ("It's the 60s, not the 40s" or "We have two happy children" are my favorites), they're also harsh: "I'm not gay because I enjoy it," Beth finally confesses, shortly before traveling to New York to seek out the life she turned her back on nine years earlier.

Meanwhile, Laura (Marin Ireland) finds herself on a double date between her and a new friend, Jack (David Greenspan) and her roommate, Marcie (Carolyn Baeumler), and Marcie's ex, Burr (Dawes) that ends -- for novelty's sake -- at a gay bar in the heart of Greenwich Village. There, under the unabashed glare of Beebo (Jenn Colella), Laura starts to feel the emotions she's been repressing, emotions that Jack -- who turns out to be gay -- wants to help her express: there's no shame, he says, in being animals. (Greenspan is a riot throughout, especially armed with advisory lines like "What, do you think she'll quote a couple of lines of Sappho and she'll be ready to go pearl diving?")

The difference between the two women is striking: whereas Beth comes across as a cold fish who inexplicably hates her life, Laura is a fish out of water who -- although trembly and fragile -- plunges in, swims upstream, and finds herself. The difference between actors is remarkable too: Dornfield, as Beth, hurts her own performance by overplaying the role, and even takes the fish metaphor literally, with a constantly quivering lip that makes her insecurity into a physically repeating joke that needs to be serious, whereas Ireland, refining the high-strung energy that she's brought to roles in Manuscript or Bad Jazz, manages to grow from a comically embarrassed girl into a confident woman.

Such differences in performances wouldn't be such an issue if the show were better about distracting us from them. But this is Leigh Silverman's sparest direction -- the entire set always looks like The Cellar (the gay bar that's the hub of the play) and the lights are static and unappealing -- which means the emphasis is on the actors. (At least Theresa Squire's fantastic costumes -- especially an out-of-place riding coat for obstinate Beebo -- always make them look good.) Most of the time, Beebo Brinker Chronicles is sharp enough to thrill the audience, but that deeper surface rarely comes to light, as it does, for instance, when Beth's pulp-inspired fantasy is pitted against Laura's reality, with Beth excitedly reading a torrid scene aloud as Laura and Beebo turn the text to flesh.

That idea -- text as flesh -- is what's so sorely missing from the show. The swagger is there, the feel of the period is there, but the actual substance often gets caught up in the style. Nowhere is it more apparent than with the miscasting of Jenn Colella as Beebo: Colella does a great job acting, but she's always struggling with the fact that she in no way, shape, or form resembles a husky butch and her overcompensation takes away from the depth of Beebo's character. She grows violent, drunk, and possessive, but only the words take on menace: the flesh is dull. On the other hand, she's often paired up with Mrs. Ireland, who is able to amplify her own frailty so plausibly that Beebo seems tough (by comparison).

When the play is on, it's spot on -- something the comic timing of Carolyn "I'll be in the kitchen getting some chips!" Baeumler and the dry wit of David Greenspan nail down. And for all the struggling, Beebo Brinker Chronicles comes out largely ahead: funny, yes, but with well-crafted moments of sadness beneath that perpetual smirk or unflagging quiver. As an ode to pulp novels, the play succeeds; but as a narrative of sexual awakening, it's a little sleepy.

PLAY: "Bad Jazz"

Photo/Carol Rosegg

"Love? What the fuck is love?" asks Gavin (Rob Campbell), squatting like a sumo-wrestler as he struggles to direct his star, Natasha (Marin Ireland). He thrusts his cock forward, aroused by his own genius, and continues: "She wants to experience something that is made up of sex, and cruelty, and blood, and shit, and not some sentimental wank that has been invented to make us feel okay about ourselves." Now he postures for a moment, his jaw molded with as fierce an imprimatur as the one he is putting onto the play-within-a-play in Robert Farquhar's Bad Jazz, and casts a castrating glance at the clueless co-star, Danny (Ryan O'Nan), before continuing: "She can smell truth. She can't articulate it, but, she knows . . ." Has there ever been a more viscerally staged (and comically directed, courtesy of the exaggeratively minimalist, Trip Cullman) discourse on the artistic endeavor (sorry, Mr. Rapp)?

If that doesn't do it for you, Bad Jazz opens with a neat little argument between Tash and her boyfriend of three years, Ben (Darren Goldstein): "I didn't think that when I read the stage direction 'she performs oral sex' that mean you were actually, actually, going to be performing a, real, fucking blowjob, for real, in a play, on stage, in front of a paying audience." The question at heart is "how much more real do you want it to get?" and the answer, some ninety minutes later, as one of the cast members lies in a puddle of his or her own blood, awkwardly pulling out his or her own intestine for a better look, is pretty damn far. In between, Farquhar looks at the dynamic between director and playwright ("You are not the only author in the rehearsal room"), unleashes a riff on the importance of Theatre (which must "always, always reserve the right to fuck over people's minds), pauses for a moment to riff (as jazz must) on the ethics of what a play can and cannot proclaim ("It's not as if we've got somebody standing up here mouthing off about Islam, have we?"), and watches carefully the bleed between actor and character, an arrestingly well made point by Tash (the phenomenal Ireland), who is so consumed by her prostitute part that she begins to live the lifestyle, too.

The text is rich and deep, and there's very little that doesn't fit, beyond a small diversion between Gavin and a prostitute he hires, named Ewan (Colby Chambers), which really only serves to show Gavin's unusual predilections (he forces Ewan to become a character -- Jacob, from the Andrew Lloyd Weber production -- so that he can fuck him). The text is loaded, and the play grows darker as it gets deeper; at the same time, the play has a weird contrapuntal display of semi-absurd exaggeration to match the heightened intensity. Danny attempts to shoot up with a stage syringe, tying an increasingly desperate knot around his arm, only to keep flinching at the needle. Danielle (Susie Pourfar), Gavin's producer, slips on a strap-on to demonstrate the authenticity of a fake penis (it "pops up" elsewhere, too). And Tash, in a memorably cathartic rehearsal loses herself in the repetition of this sublimely ridiculous speech: "It was a fuck. That's all it was, because me and you, we're just two fucked-up no-hopers who got fucked up on fuck knows what, and we fucked, we fucked, we fucked." (Say that ten times fast.)

For all the foul language that jangles, Farquhar's script is surprisingly buoyant, which fits with the discordant theme of bad jazz that director Cullman has caulked into the seams of the play. There's a clash visually, too: Dane Laffrey's set design starts as the empty theater itself, so as to be a blank canvas for the growing aural chaos, and Ben Stanton's lighting cuts even the harshest of images into elegant pieces, as when the moment before a blowjob is suddenly frozen so as to give us a simultaneous scene between the depressed, pill-popping playwright and her nonchalant director.

Of course, it's not all roses: for all that Bad Jazz is a play about controversy, it often provokes itself away from art and into artifice. While Cullman's direction is sharp enough to cover this with the exaggerative staging (more provoking), the show -- especially its cafe denouement -- often seems put on, not raw, and that gives the audience a morally abnegating remove. Why waste the lines directed toward the audience, let alone the audience plants, if that energy simply becomes a comic device? Small fucking gripe, people: art marches on nonetheless, and you'd be wise to get yourself to the final performances of Bad Jazz while it's still nice and shrill.