Bing Ringling
never wanted to be "the world's oldest living
promising young playwright." The hopeful writer
at the center of John Guare's surreal comedy
Rich and Famous, now on the main stage at
San Francisco's American Conservatory Theatre, is
sure that his new play, number 844, will be his
breakthrough to success. He's wrong. Blame it on
magical cuff links (the letters R and F
for "rich and famous") or dismal acting
from his queeny lead actor or a legendary producer desperate
for her first failure, but Ringling's first
produced play falls as flat as the newspaper bundles
announcing the flop. "This isn't a
review," reads one notice, "it's
an obituary."
As usual, ACT has
assembled an imaginative and boundlessly energetic cast
for its production. Tony-nominated Brooks Ashmanskas
(Martin Short: Fame Becomes Me) plays only Bing,
but his three fellow actors take on multiple roles in a
series of skit-like, increasingly fantastic episodes,
punctuated by musical numbers also written by Guare.
There is no standout among these excellent actors, who
manage to become more believable as their characters become
weirder.
Mary Birdsong
(Martin Short: Fame Becomes Me) veers
between love and psychosis as Bing's obsessive stage
mother and pulls off a Katharine Hepburn impression as
Bing's failure-hungry producer. Stephen DeRosa
(who played Wilbur Turnblad on Broadway and in the
first national tour of Hairspray) shines as the
wild-eyed composer Anatol Torah and as Bing's
childhood friend Tybalt Dunleavy, now a movie actor of
such renown that Norman Mailer has bought the rights
to his planned suicide. ACT core acting company member
Gregory Wallace, last seen here in 'Tis Pity
She's a Whore, struts his stuff in hot pants
and feathers as Aphro, a rarely hired actor who can
usually be found plying his other trade at the mouth
of the Lincoln Tunnel.
Guare (best known
for TheHouse of Blue Leaves and Six Degrees of
Separation) wrote Rich and Famous in three
days in 1974, refracting his own experiences in
theatre through a lens of absurdity that is not as far
from reality as audiences may think. As he explains in
the program notes, "It's a landmark in my life
of where I was 35 years ago."
Like Bing, Guare
once received an opening night telegram (in his case,
from Steven Sondheim) reading, "Have a wonderful
opening. Your entire future depends on it." The
predatory washed-up composer in Rich and Famous is a
composite portrait of "three sacred
monsters" Guare worked with early in his career:
Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, and Joe Papp.
ACT's
production, under the spirited direction of John Rando,
revives the fashions and psychedelic coloring of the
1970s. It also benefits from Guare's
substantial reworking of the script. His pet themes of
celebrity and identity remain, but he has punched up
the jokes and emphasized the autobiographical elements
of the play -- perhaps because his three sacred
monsters, very much alive when the play was first produced
at Joseph Papp's Public Theater in 1974, are in
the land beyond lawsuits and hurt feelings.