TALES FROM HOLLYWOOD
The more I talked, the more elitist I sounded, and the less convinced I became of my position. Don’t artists want to be popular, too? Can’t commercial producers operate out of a genuine love for theater? By the time I finished, I had almost convinced myself that serious theater artists are also pandering–they just appeal to a more educated segment of the market.
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Then I went to see Tales From Hollywood. This delightfully literate play by Christopher Hampton is a sad, funny story about European writers–most of them German speaking–who, having fled the Nazis during the 1930s, have ended up plying their craft in what seems like a plausible place–Hollywood. Of course they discover that truth and beauty have no place in the land of fantasy and glitz. Those who maintain their artistic aspirations are ignored and discarded, while those who pander to popular taste and prevailing political prejudices do just fine.
Horvath slams into this difference shortly after arriving in Los Angeles, when he agrees to write a screenplay about Edward II based on Christopher Marlowe’s play. Because of his weak grasp of English, he is able to complete the assignment only by relying heavily on Marlowe’s Elizabethan dialogue, but what really antagonizes the agent who gave him the assignment is when Horvath presents Edward as a homosexual. “But this is historic true,” says Horvath in broken English. “So what?” screams the agent, whose name is Mr. Money. “For all I know Robin Hood liked to do it with sheep; you think anyone wants to see that?”
The Commons Theatre production of Tales From Hollywood displays plenty of craftsmanship, despite a meager budget and an inexperienced cast. Director James Bohnen has coaxed some perceptive performances out of the actors. As Odon von Horvath, Calvin MacLean is onstage for most of the play, either as narrator or participant. It is a difficult, two-sided role, but MacLean achieves an admirable consistency, allowing sarcasm to show through the humble immigrant writer and humility to show through the sarcastic intellectual. Judith Easton reveals Heinrich’s wife Nelly to be a pathetic waif totally lost in the rarefied intellectual atmosphere her husband draws around himself. Larry Baldacci is sublime as Heinrich, a frail old man who still has more backbone than any other character in the play. As Helen Schwartz, the Jewish scriptwriter who becomes Horvath’s lover, Ellyn Duncan projects both sex appeal and intellectual intensity. Unfortunately Ken Kaden, although he has an amazing physical resemblance to Bertolt Brecht, still tends to lapse into buffoonery, his specialty as an actor.
