CHANGING NIGHTLY
The three plays are all about speech and its relation to thought and emotion. Stanley Elkin’s novella The Making of Ashenden is performed in a story-theater adaptation, with the author’s prose largely preserved in the hero’s first-person narrative. Denis Diderot’s philosophical dialogue Rameau’s Nephew, adapted by Andrei Belgrader and Shelley Berc, is delivered pretty much as it was written in the 18th century: one man asking questions, another responding. David Greenspan’s Jack, the only script here that was originally conceived as a play, features three women talking–to each other, at each other–about a dead friend; juxtaposed with their conversation is a long monologue by the man they’re speaking of. Ashenden constitutes one evening’s entertainment; Rameau and Jack are combined to make the second.
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Heightening the reliance of these plays on language is a minimalist production aesthetic shared by the three directors–one presumably dictated in significant part by Remains’ interest in keeping prices and budget down. The plays are performed on a mostly bare stage, with only very few set pieces (by designer Steve Pickering), carefully chosen and created costumes (by Frances Maggio), and extremely subtle lighting (by Kevin Snow) to accent the stories and settings.
Like Souter, Ashenden is among the most eligible of bachelors. When he decides it’s time to do his duty and procreate heirs, he goes in search of a perfect, pure woman, despite his own promiscuous past (“It’s different for a man”). His friend Buffy Surface refers him to one Jane Loes Lipton, a sort of cross between Eleanor Roosevelt and Baby Jane Holzer and about as perfect a woman as Ashenden could hope to find. But he’s startled to discover that his inamorata has high standards similar to his own–she won’t marry him if he’s not a virgin. And since he’s not a virgin, he must find a way to become one once again.
In such company, Neel Keller’s staging of Rameau’s Nephew is exceptionally disappointing. A conversation between a slightly stuffy pedant (a satiric self-portrait by Diderot) and a rascally young man, Rameau’s Nephew has in common with The Making of Ashenden the theme of a man’s innate innocence corrupted by false values. “I,” as the Diderot character is called, is fascinated by “He,” the mediocre nephew of the brilliant musical composer and theorist Jean-Philippe Rameau; I seeks to make He admit that despite his scurrilous behavior He is a good man. But He will have none of it; by his own definition, He’s a “lazy, servile, and crooked” fellow whose flaws, He insists, are in his nature, not his breeding. The more I tries to coax goodness out of He, the worse He gets, until He blithely recounts a story of such dehumanized depravity that even I gives up hope.
