Diane Arbus knew from freaks. But the photographer was never derogatory toward her subjects—all those circus performers, overdone drag queens, and angry young men she framed with such affectionate ardor. As Arbus famously noted during a lecture she gave toward the end of her life—she died in 1971, at the age of forty-eight—“Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They’ve already passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats.” Arbus’s presentation of the facts of difference was not literary—she was not telling a story but observing the source. Still, her photographs have a definite tone—a nonjudgmental, trusting calm.
While Arbus never, to my knowledge, photographed the late Charles Ludlam, whose 1984 play, “The Mystery of Irma Vep,” is now in revival at the Lucille Lortel (directed by his former partner, Everett Quinton), nor anyone resembling the outsiders who make up the world of John Steinbeck’s 1937 play, “Of Mice and Men” (at the Longacre, directed by Anna D. Shapiro), I thought of her during both shows, and of how much both of these displays of difference could have benefitted from the unsentimental clarity Arbus worked so diligently to produce in her images.
“The Mystery of Irma Vep” was Ludlam’s twenty-fifth play. Born in Floral Park, New York, in 1943, Ludlam was a theatrical prodigy, and was inspired as much by the revolutionary performance artist Jack Smith as by Gilbert and Sullivan. In 1967, he founded the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, and without the example of Ludlam’s twenty-nine plays, many of which he directed and starred in, so much of American comedy—the “Young Frankenstein”-era Mel Brooks, for instance—would have been far less interesting. (Ludlam died, of AIDS, in 1987.) As a child, Ludlam mainlined movies, eventually remaking those fantasies in his own image. His “ridiculous” aesthetic was binary, and open to male and female sexuality, while his plays were a kind of stage-bound outsider art, with a dash of campiness. That’s distinct from camp, where eyebrows are raised in disbelief and love around a particular genre—the gun moll in a forties detective story, say. Campiness is about underlining delight in a parodic moment without making the show a complete parody of life or culture. “Irma Vep” is an unintentionally creaky operetta, or overlong show tune, where the crowing is about Ludlam’s love of movies like “Rebecca,” “Frankenstein,” and “Wuthering Heights.”
Two actors, Robert Sella and Arnie Burton, both physically game, play all seven roles, with many costume changes (while sometimes wearing wigs with the netting showing), in this story of Lady Enid Hillcrest (Burton), a naïve young lady living in nineteenth-century England with Lord Edgar Hillcrest (Sella), a stately bore who owns a grand house which was once ruled by Irma Vep, his first wife. Now Irma is only an oil painting over the fireplace—she sees all, like Laura, in Otto Preminger’s masterpiece—but Irma’s maid, Jane Twisden (Sella), continues to love her mistress with an unseemly passion; she keeps Irma’s secrets locked in her heart. Even so, passion is just another MacGuffin in Ludlam’s masquerade, which is ultimately a celebration of story-telling, a Grand Guignol giggle about werewolf movies and castles on a hill.
The central problem with putting on “Irma Vep” today is that it has lost its cultural relevance—and its power to shock and amuse. Television and movies have stolen so much from Ludlam, even what he borrowed from to make his sui generis work. And yet the boredom we feel watching the show is now, unfortunately, Ludlam’s own. The plays are the faded flowers of his legacy. He’s been left behind by his more successful imitators, and his bones have been stripped of their once very original queerness.
Presumably, when a play gets as far as an actual production, there’s been some thought given beforehand to the script’s intrinsic value, and to what the story might mean to a contemporary audience. I have no idea why the producers behind this revival of John Steinbeck’s popular work wasted their capital and our time putting this drama up, but there it is for all to see. At nearly two and a half hours long, it’s yet another example of the ever trendy and ultimately dispiriting belief that if you throw any number of stars on a stage something will stick, the receipts will be fat and healthy, and, beyond that, who cares? It’s an ultimately cynical way to make theatre, and since there is nothing in the director Anna D. Shapiro’s rendition of “Of Mice and Men,” Steinbeck’s stage version of the second book in his dust-bowl trilogy (1939’s larger-scale “The Grapes of Wrath” was the third) to disabuse us of this notion, we taste the show’s strychnine in Steinbeck’s saccharin.
George (James Franco) and Lennie (Chris O’Dowd) are in their late twenties, or maybe older—they’re buddies who’ve never spent much time apart. Consequently, they’ve developed the complications and dependencies found in a family. We do not know why they are together; they just are, as families just are. It’s the nineteen-thirties, and we’re in California’s Salinas Valley, near Soledad. The sky is deep blue; a stream runs downstage center. Steinbeck describes the slim George and the man trailing after him, the large, lumbering Lennie, this way: “The first man was small and quick, dark of face, with restless eyes and sharp, strong features. Every part of him was defined. . . . [The] huge man . . . walked heavily, dragging his feet a little, the way a bear drags his paws. His arms did not swing at his sides, but hung loosely.” Steinbeck’s famous, and famously criticized, naturalism lite focussed on fairly standard externals as a way of establishing “character” (mean guys have beady eyes—that sort of thing). Steinbeck was the anti-Virginia Woolf; his books weren’t shaped by a transcendent sensibility. But, like many modernist authors, Steinbeck was interested in what society would deem freaks, or the freakish.
George and Lennie are not only physically different, they’re also unalike mentally: George has a fleet, crafty mind, intent on survival, while Lennie is slow, a lover of soft things like mice and rabbits and girls, who unintentionally destroys what he touches—he has no understanding of his own physical power. Indeed, when we meet the guys, they’re on the lam; they had to split from their work as itinerant laborers, because of some trouble Lennie got into with a woman. Now they’re starting again, on a ranch that’s being overseen by a short, angry man named Curley (Alex Morf). Curley wears a black glove to protect a Vaselined hand; he wants to keep it soft for his wife (the pretty and pretty hopeless Leighton Meester), who wants nothing so much as to hang around the guys, in their bunkhouse.
Settling in, Lennie tries to stick to what he promised George: that he won’t volunteer any information about himself or their lives. But Lennie is never allowed his—and, by extension, George’s—privacy. The guys in the bunkhouse single Lennie out because he has the soft heart of an innocent, and it’s a softness that repels them as much as it draws them to him. Yet the various irritations that George also feels in Lennie’s company evoke his sympathy. George’s heart is caught between a desire for acceptance and an acceptance of his own weirdness; he gripes about how normal his life would be if he were on his own—he’d have a girl and everything—yet Lennie is his life. But what does that feel like?
I don’t know if it’s the poverty of the actors’ respective imaginations, or of Shapiro’s standard, literal-minded direction. (She’s far more interesting when she works on smaller productions; here she doesn’t invent or add a hint of subtlety, she just moves traffic.) Or maybe it’s Steinbeck’s script. But this production of “Of Mice and Men” doesn’t convey the sense that the characters ask themselves these kinds of questions, let alone that the actors do. In fact, the show demeans the art of acting, with a cast that demonstrates no relationship to what authentic make-believe can do to a script or to an audience. (The only performer who emerges from this wreck with a character and his dignity intact is James McMenamin, who plays Whit, another of the ranchmen, with a winning combination of matinée-idol star quality and actorly interiority.)
Chief among the offenders is James Franco: he’s painful to watch, let alone listen to. His voice, like his performance, is on one level—grating. His handsome face is set in a sort of permanent sneer of distrust—he cannot love the world because it cannot love him—and yet we have no idea why George feels that way; it’s beyond Franco’s skills, certainly in this production, to let us know. He’s just grumpy. O’Dowd’s Lennie, too, is a series of external signs, in the semiotic sense, that tell us he’s different. (He holds his hands like paws, thus bringing to mind the animals he kills unintentionally.) But that’s just the point: Franco’s and O’Dowd’s characterizations are all on the outside; none of what they do grows out of the intimacy we look for in acting—those shared moments bordering on the indecent that let us know the player is turning himself inside out, scouring his own experience, to make the playwright’s invented lives real.
We end in sadness and violence. One day, Lennie’s sitting in the barn, comfy in a clump of hay, petting a puppy he’s killed by accident—he hadn’t handled it with the tenderness he intended—when he spies Curley’s Wife secreting away a suitcase. Curley’s Wife, on spotting Lennie, slithers up next to him; she wants to seduce him into keeping her secret, which is that she’s leaving Curley for the larger world beyond this place. Smoothing her dark brown hair, Lennie gets too excited, and, in an effort to quiet her, accidentally breaks her neck. The world will be different for Lennie and George—again. When George discovers what has happened, instead of running off with Lennie, as before, he shoots his beloved friend, drawing veils of sorrow between the love he once knew and the grief he will never get over.
Clearly, Steinbeck thought that the ramifications of not being part of the status quo were very real—crippling, in fact. The story of how the soul becomes twisted—that’s stage material for sure, but what does it mean when it’s all reduced to a series of signifiers, like Curley’s black-gloved hand, Lennie’s paws, and Curley’s Wife’s tarnished beauty? All of Steinbeck’s characters are freaks, but, without an Arbus-like intelligence behind this production to show us both who they are and where they stand in the world, Shapiro has left us with no understanding of what makes us, each and every one, unpredictable, emotional, and unique—freaks who upset the natural order of things. ♦
