SCREEN PLAY: Mentioning Casablanca might be bad salesmanship.
|
French Morocco seems a long way from upstate New York, but prolific playwright A.R. Gurney makes the leap. Well, he attempts it. In Screen Play (presented by Nora Theatre Company at Boston Playwrights’ Theatre through November 19), the author of Love Letters re-purposes Casablanca, removing the iconic 1942 film to 2015, when the dismantling of the American economy by idiot oligarchs coupled with the domination of the religious Republican right has liberals queuing up in Buffalo for “letters of transit” to Canada. Those attempting to flee include turncoat Republican and liberal television personality Walter Wellman and his wife, Sally, who finds herself thrown back together with Buffalo bar owner Nick, whom she ditched at an airport following a 2000 Gore campaign romance. Well, here’s looking at you, Paul Henreid, Bergman, and Bogie. But the only thing in this staging of Screen Play that approaches the sophistication of Casablanca is Peter Edmund Haydu’s suave turn as Wellman. The rest of the 75-minute spoof, at least in Richard McElvain’s sloppily exuberant staging for the Nora, is more redolent of Dumb and Dumber.
How do you put a movie on stage? If you’re Gurney, you think back to the rousing success of Love Letters, which tells its tale of star-crossed upper-crust lovers through correspondence read on stage by two actors, and conceive the play as a reading of a supposedly controversial screenplay (“too dangerous to produce”) that we, the audience of 2015, are at some risk to be taking in. Indeed, the best part of the Nora production may be the casual opening, in which the actors show up, banter with one another, josh the audience, and take their places amid the detritus of a rehearsal space: bits and pieces of scenery, folding chairs and script stands, an upright piano at which music director Jeffrey Goldberg tickles out a snatch of “As Time Goes By.” Then the not-so-clever parody and broadside blue-state politicking begin.
State Department couriers have been robbed of documents that show up in the possession of a fired economics professor reduced to smuggling liberals across the border. Naturally, said papers get sequestered in the piano at Nick’s bar, whose African-American chanteuse is Myrna (a smoky Dee Crawford), who specializes in “songs of the Erie Canal.” (The tune that gets Nick and Sally staring soulfully down memory lane, however, is “My Gal Sal.”) Tracking down Wellman and the purloined letters of transit is the job not of a Nazi major but of Deputy Secretary for Homeland Security Abner Patch, an evil evangelical with an effeminate assistant. You can figure out where that one’s going faster than you can say “Ted Haggard.”
Gurney gets in a few good ones: of the still current War on Terror, a character asks, “How do you wage a war against an emotion?” There are some amusing denigrations of easy target Buffalo; there’s some winking at the more sentimental and melodramatic aspects of Casablanca (most of whose most famous lines find their way into the script). And the questionable 2000 defeat of Al Gore does seem in retrospect like the painful moment in which the USA stepped into the hell-bound hand basket. But most of Gurney’s spoof is more sophomoric than pungent, and the lion’s share of the Nora performances are somewhat galumphing — though Stephanie Clayman is a credible Sally. Screen Play got some good notices when it debuted in 2005 at New York’s Flea Theatre. But if you’ve heard it described as anything other than silly, you were misinformed.
ADVERTISEMENT
 |