The Rice Thresher (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 71, No. 4, Ed. 1 Friday, September 9, 1983 Page: 8 of 16
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Thresher Fine Arts
Stages' Beyond Therapy not above psychiatric satire
Beyond Therapy
By Christopher Durang
Stages, 709 Franklin
Through November 15
Last season Stages presented
Christopher Durang's highly
successful Sister Mary Ignatius
Explains It All For You, a satire
dealing with a stereotypical nun
who teaches in a parochial school.
Currently Stages features the
Houston premiere of Beyond
Therapy by Durang. Although this
play did not receive the widespread
critical acclaim that Sister Mary
did, Beyond Therapy is an
extreijkply enjoyable show that
deserves to be seen.
The story centers on Bruce and
Prudence, a couple who meet in a
dimly-lit restaurant. Prudence has
answered an ad that Bruce has
placed in a personals column. The
evening starts badly as Prudence
stumbles across the restaurant to
sit at Bruce's table. It quickly
worsens when Bruce mentions his
male lover, sings into a spoon, and
later cries.
In the following scenes, the two
visit their therapists and discuss
the disastrous evening. At times it
is difficult to distinguish doctor
and patient. Prudence's therapist.
Dr. Stuart Farmingham, is a slimy,
lecherous sexist who has gotten
Prudence into bed twice and keeps
trying for a third time. During the
session, he ranges between losing
stuffed dog and barks when she is
excited. After urging Bruce to
express his feelings, she writes
another personal ad for him only
to realize that she has confused
him with another patient.
As fate would have it, Prudence
answers Bruce's new ad. Their
his temper and patronizing
Prudence in a comforting voice.
Bruce's therapist, Mrs.
Charlotte Wallace, is not much
better. She often substitutes
words; calling her secretary a
dirigible, she then spends several
minutes calling out words, hoping
to hit on the correct one. She also
carries on dialogues with her
second meeting is more of a
success, and they agree to give each
other another chance. After
several dates, Bruce invites
Prudence to his apartment for
dinner. The evening that ensues is
both frantic and funny.
Larry Arnhold has directed his
cast well; Durang's script is
consistently humorous and
demands that the characters must
be also. Fortunately, all of them
are. Claire Hart-Palumbo's
Prudence is the character that the
audience most identifies with.
Even though she keeps looking for
perfection and teeters on the brink
of sanity at times, she is the only
sane person in the play. Hart-
Palumbo gives a believable and
poignantly funny performance in a
play that is sometimes
unbelievable. Don Barclay's Bruce
is always sincere and "emotionally
open," yet his crying is at times
rather forced. However, his
mediating between his lover Bob
and Prudence is one of the most
hilarious scenes in the show.
The therapists are painted with a
broader brush, and are both acted
well. Marvin Byrkett's Dr.
Farmingham is significantly oily
and over-confident. With his lack
of ethics, professional and
otherwise, and choice of
pornographic reading material, he
is a feminist's nightmare. On the
other hand, Mrs. Wallace reminds
me of a Bette Midler character I
haven't seen yet. Michelle Britton
gives an actively eccentric
portrayal of the sugar-craving,
maternal scatterbrain.
As Bruce's live-in lover, Randy
Dupree is highly amusing as he
tries to deal with his jealousy and
his overprotective mother. Daniel
McNamara gives an interesting
performance as Bruce and
Prudence's waiter, even though he
is only seen for a short time.
The staging of this play also
deserves mention. Beyond
Therapy is set in the round, with no
scene changes during acts. Thus
the restaurant tables, psychiatrists'
desk and Bruce's living room set
are all on stage at the same time.
The couch acts as a centerpiece
most of the time, serving as the
patients' couch and part of Bruce's
furniture. The scenery design by
John Bos is uncluttered, a format
which worked well with Patrick
Higgin's lighting. The music
between scenes was rather bizarre,
ranging from "Abba Dabba
Honeymoon" to "Everything's
Coming Up Roses."
In the final analysis, Beyond
Therapy is a fun, off-the-wall
production. Go see it.
— Karin Murphy
Greenaway breaks Contract through loophole of tedium
The Draughtsman's Contract
Directed by Peter Greenaway
There is a certain artistic
consistency dug deep and
tenaciously into the new British
film, The Draughtsman's Contract,
lending it a strikingly well-formed
structure, a commendably unified
period voice, and a hopelessly
inescapable aura of tedium. It's a
film demanding this and that nod
of critical approval yes, fine,
thanks so much — but offering
very little in the end, if you choose
to wade that far. I did, and just
barely made it.
As far as positive nods go, you
should know that Peter
Greenaway has crafted a
remarkably precise sort of
Restoration Comedy effect,
complete with the intricate forays
of proper manners and the nude
underside of closeted sex. And for
a first film — and one made on a
drastically economized budget at
that — visualizing this sort of
pervasive artificiality is indeed a
complex project. At least, it
requires an unflinching eye for
detail, and great fortitude in the
endless cosmetics of period
movies. At this, Greenaway is a
new master, have no doubt.
The story is, first off, an
imbroglio of sex-starved plottings
centering on Mr. Neville(Anthony
Higgins), a prominent and quite
dashing young sketch artist of the
social upper elite. Simply — and
the actual plot is quite simple
beneath its crust of elaborations —
Neville is contracted by Mrs.
Herbert (Janet Suzman) and her
libidinous daughter, Mrs.
Talmann (Anne Louise Lambert)
to complete a series of estate
drawings for the now out-of-town
estate owner, Mr. Herbert. Clauses
in said contract include exact
instructions as to gardens and
house conditions, times of day for
modeling, and the service of Mr.
Neville's sexual whims, as fully as
Mrs. Herbert's grateful services
would make possible. Fine, polite,
intricate and raw. Soon, the
daughter buys into the deal, and all
have an endlessly confusing time of
drawing, weeping, heavy panting
and bitchy repartee. As if not
roccoco enough already, Mr.
Herbert is soon found murdered,
and Neville discovers certain
infinitesimally detailed clues
concerning that crime somehow
modeled for his professional
consideration. Go from this point,
and imagine the tangle which may
result with this set if the director
were a mischievous nit-picking
anal-retentive sort! Much more
sex, even more machinations and
"stratagems," and oh just so much
detail.
To the idea of Restoration
comedy — one fairly well-realized,
though I wonder why anyone
would even bother — there is
carefully intermixed the element of
random, absurd unreality; of
decidedly improper little stretches
of credibility. This goes some way
in loosening the formal rigidity
which so stifles the film. But even
here — the cartoon-like
appearances of this grotesque
gargoyle gremlin character — the
fun is far too exact, unsponta-
neous, and static. There is no
splash made.
gardens, the sketches.
Greenaway is thorough, at least,
in this respect; he even proposes a
metaphor for the film's effect, and
repeats it again and again. It seems
that he is working for the same sort
Village Cheese Shop
Sines 1976
What there is — and this
throughout is a posed , rigid
mess endlessly decorated by small
elaborations and excesses: the
make-up, the language, the
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of detail and perfected artificiality
which is seen in architectural
renderings of the time, which'is
seen through a framing grid
mechanism much like that used by
surveyors. Neville relies on this
device for his work and through
mathematical exactitude, the film
itself is seen as a clear artifice —
framed and contained within a
contrived concept and precise
control. The movie thus becomes a
study in period eccentricities;
specifically, the fashionable
pretense of exactitude. A nice
project, and worthy thesis I
thought. So allow me to continue
the metaphor:
Through the grid workings of
the sketcher, Greenaway's camera
reveals grounds and houses in
perfectly symmetrical, balanced
place. What ■ is missing, I
discovered later, is any hint of
perspective; the depth axis is
totally erased and the scenes oddly
become as flat as the canvas to
which they will soon be
transferred. This applies to the
film's canvas as well, and the
cinematography — cited by many
as the hallmark of the film —
actually become single-
dimensional, without warmth, and
unconvincingly artificial. Well-
maintained illusion is, of course,
quite wonderful. But tedium is
always a risk in such projects.
Kubrick's Barry Lyndon might
succeed; Greenaway tumbles down
into that very tedium.
In that spectre framework and
through those neat little sketches,
there is a stillness and clenched
muscularity which allows no
movement. Likewise, there is
nothing even hinting at dynamic
camera action; editing is step-by-
step monotone, totally without
intensity transitions; even the
characters are prevented from
developing by the frozen poses into
whirh Greenaway's script forces
them This is the most god-awful',
dead-still evening I've ever spent in
a motion picture theatre.
And what is finally produced
through the technique of the frame
gauge is a consistent, clearly
crafted death view. Houses are
uninhabitable, and any figures
included become mummified. The
Draughtsman's Contract is in the
same sense one long, verbose
epitaph; nothing adds life. Higgins
is passingly charismatic, but loses
any direct immediacy in the fog
and stilted distance which
separates him from the audience.
Landscapes, costumes, makeup
and all the other trappings of
stage-work are hollow and
superficial.
— Harry Wade
The Rice Thresher, September 9, 1983, page 8
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Ekren, Christopher. The Rice Thresher (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 71, No. 4, Ed. 1 Friday, September 9, 1983, newspaper, September 9, 1983; Houston, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth245536/m1/8/: accessed June 22, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; crediting Rice University Woodson Research Center.