Does being a “fan” always mean that in some sense you are intrinsically a “fanatic”? There is ample, and shocking evidence at this point in the twenty-first century to suggest that there is, well, to some degree, a measure of being “touched” in our adoration of public and performing figures, aka “celebrities”. Some performers, of course, have a more invasive reach than others, and in this regard Judy Garland emerges as singular in her ability to stir the more extreme emotions of her devotees. Mark it down to a singularity of presence and performative intensity in her case – in so many ways a relentlessly raw nerve of emotion projecting powerfully beyond the simple melodic lyrics she could sing. Several generations have been passing the torch for Judy now, and in the gay male community she has been deified many times over. “Friends of Dorothy” have given way to worshippers of the later Garland – the obviously wounded, out-of-control spitfire who could turn it on at performance and Deliver.  So when a gay male performer undertakes a role invoking Miss Judy Garland, there is an immediate and heavy-breathing audience that can be relied upon. But beware, there’s a lot of it out there so you’d better be good. And really, at this point, there better be a reason.

John Fleck, in his self-authored performance, Mad Women, playing at La MaMa, never stops to explain why he is tying Garland in with this autobiographical tale of a modestly successful performer with some national notoriety  - he was one of the original NEA-4 back in 1990, Jesse Helms and all that – making his way on the boards and the screen over the last 30+ years. It’s just a given that she should be a touchstone of talent, and a cultural icon of special, coded appeal to any gay man of his generation – he was 18 years old when she died. And it’s a given, that as a gay man, he is permitted to get down and dirty with the “facts” in Garland’s life – Judy gave great head, and at least two of her three children exhibit signs of fetal alcohol syndrome – yadda, yadda, yadda. More pointed is the unaddressed question of why he is specifically focused on one of Garland’s late performances, at L.A.’s Coconut Grove in 1967, when she is wretchedly drink and drug-addled, forgetful, rambling and volcanically angry. He treats us to original recorded excerpts from this low point in her career, content merely to embody her with minimal wardrobe props, a loose physical impersonation, and the lip-synching of her public performative meltdown (one of several, it should be admitted). He is positively gleeful as he shares the details of her pill and liquor regimen at the time.

At one point he is transformed into young Joey Luft, Judy’s youngest child, who witnessed this exhibition at the age of nine. Abandoned in the Grove following his mother’s triumphant exit born aloft by her fans, Joey approaches the microphone and sings to an empty auditorium, an aria from Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana. Fleck’s falsetto is accomplished and affecting, but he has Joey sing it to his mother’s discarded wig, a clumsy, slightly twisted visual. Then he has Joey put on the wig and his mother’s show jacket before storming off stage. Suddenly we are presented with film footage of Fleck’s elderly mother during her battle with Alzheimer’s. Segue to the story of young John Fleck’s first performance in public at the local veteran’s meet at the Legion Hall, where the unwary boy performed Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland in a simpering, coquettish style that brought the curtain down on him before he had finished. Young Fleck is entirely in the dark as to the nature of his offense, and is in turn shunned by the Legion Hall patrons, and snarled at by his mortified father – “Freakin’ fag. I’m gonna kill you when I get home.” As a formative episode it has all the hallmarks of a classic, prompting him to cling to his sympathetic, protecting mother, and flee his alcohol-fueled, abusive father. More film footage follows of his bed-ridden mother fulminating about alcoholism and her husband, and there’s a long, meandering monologue about Fleck’s turn in the HBO series, Carnivale, as Gecko, a carny freak. Snatches of Judy’s audio are inter played, and there are allusions to drug dependency on Fleck’s part. “I’m not an addict!” he snaps petulantly, and more than once. A confused and worked-up recounting of a dream forces everything towards a lurching, melodramatic climax, caustically overplayed with Garland sounding out the Battle Hymn of the Republic, some more sentimental home movie footage, and a horribly flat, would-be up-beat ending – “A big hand for my mother, Josephine. Wasn’t she something?” “My dad was hot, wasn’t he?” The piece seems to have slipped from Fleck’s control, morphed into an angry, narcissistic, runaway car that’s jumped the tracks and hurtling toward a smash up – one that never really arrives.

But Fleck likes things out of control: Judy; his ailing mother; the danger of drug enhanced experience; perhaps even (gasp!) his father. Inexplicably (and disastrously during the show I attended), he invites the hazards of audience participation (shudder) not once, not twice, but three times. Is he playing with form, playing with fire, or does he know what he’s doing? He’s bored by the tight leash, and he definitely slips it in this wired, sweat-drenched performance. But in the end he offers no insight. Looking for the silver lining is for him a lovely lyric but, realistically, a complete waste of time. Perspective it seems is not in his vocabulary, unless it’s the agreed adoptive perspective of being at the bottom looking up. This is a bitter little pill taking you nowhere, unless it’s to a mirthless laugh of hopeless scorn. It’s too bad; he is magnetic and can be clever and funny. To arrive at a convincing conclusion perhaps, would require him to get over that most massive of obstacles that looms in every performer’s life; himself.

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There is a delightful episode in Chris Phillips’s play Elysian Fields, which was presented at the Kraine Theatre during this year’s New York Fringe Festival, when the characters Maggie (“the cat”) and Skipper, from Tennessee Williams‘s play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, are talking. Skipper is recounting to Maggie the early years of his friendship with her husband, Brick Pollitt, and making a veiled confession about the tenacity of his attachment to Brick. He describes a hot southern afternoon as he watches an old tabby cat patiently riding out the uncomfortable afternoon heat on a rooftop, awaiting a patch of shadow to alleviate its situation. He is struck by the cat’s stoic forbearance. He has it in mind to be just like that cat in life, patiently staying put, expectant that what he desires will one day fall to him. This image is more famously invoked by Maggie in Williams’s celebrated play, when following Skipper’s death, she pleads for her grieving husband’s attention and affection. It’s a clever piece of writing, respectfully returning us to the allusive power of Williams’s theatrical storytelling.

The pleasures of Phillips’s play, and they are many, are watching well known characters from the works of Williams acting in freshly contrived scenes. He releases the characters from their celebrated, somewhat tragical cages, to breathe and talk again in earlier phases of their stories. Most especially he is resurrecting the ghosts of three deceased characters, figures whose tragic demise worked as triggers for Williams’ plays, A Streetcar Named Desire, Suddenly Last Summer, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Allan, Sebastian, and Skipper never make appearances in these three plays, but their ghosts pervade the stories, propelling the action. They are all coded as homosexual and as such are emblematic of Williams’s relationship with his own sexuality and its configuration in dramatic works that  powerfully addressed the social taboos of his time. Phillips, in large part, is respectful of the mores that prevailed during the period of rapid social evolution these theatre works spanned, from WWII through the dawn of the sixties counter cultural revolution. He is sensible too of the cultural status some of the characters have attained today. So he can throw us delicious treats with scenes in which a youthful Blanche DuBois succumbs to her own carnal appetite; Sebastian rubbishes his poetry and yearns to run through his mother’s garden setting the plantings on fire; and Brick and Skipper go at it in a chair as Maggie sleeps in the room next door. Whether or not Williams might approve such liberties is not so much the point as whether they hold up in context of the original plays. In a rush of desire the young Blanche might well have lost her affected little head, but did the playwright envision the spit-lubricated attachment we are presented with here between Skipper and Brick? The times were the times, and frustrated desire is most pointedly Williams’s theme, not clandestine liaisons. His dramas are filled with allusions to castration and lobotomy. Sex, for the principal characters, is an agent of destruction and chaos, rarely ecstatic release.

But perhaps that’s a quibble. Before the shadow of tragedy overtakes each tale, there is much to enjoy. Suicide and murderous vengeance take their toll on all our resurrected phantoms. Asking why Williams insisted on these endings for these characters is a bit like asking why Iphigenia had to be sacrificed at the beginning of the Trojan War. These are the original blood sacrifices that offend justice, that precipitate the action, that sow potential ruin for all in proximity. It’s one thing to play at revisionism in works like L. Frank Baum‘s “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz”, but something else to tangle with the complex psychological, elaborately theatricalized characters of Williams the playwright. Acts of redemption are nice, but can Phillips really have these characters ask their original author why they had to die thus? As affecting as this is, it is a contemporary sensibility addressing that of another era. If you begin that process, there is no likelihood it could ever end. And perhaps there’s something willfully anachronistic about it. Which is perhaps why in the final act we are left with a fantasy realm, with neither recourse to Williams’s world, or our own. Here at least, the three fated figures can arrange themselves into a somewhat classical tableau of heroic brotherhood, no longer alone, rinsed temporarily of the tragedy that hangs over them. Fanciful and affecting sure, but you can’t file down all of the sharp corners of life, in the real world or the fictional one; not if you want anything to be worthy of the term tragedy.

The production, by Revolve Productions, glides seamlessly from opening to end, figured with a minimum of props, some well-used lighting, and just five actors. Amanda Kruger, as the only female cast member, has the unenviable task of filling some major iconic pumps in the parts of Blanche, Catherine, and Maggie, and she does very nicely. Muscular performances are turned in by all the men, Scott Hinson (Sebastian), Aaron Hartzler (Skipper), and Daniel Marks (Brick), with the stand-out Miles Cooper (winner of a Fringe 2011 acting honor) as young Allan, disarmingly vulnerable as he approaches his shrouded desire nature. With his co-director, John Michael Beck, Phillips pulls out all of the drama written in to this accomplished new play, and New York can only hope that this production, so cruelly cut short by the onslaught of Irene, will rise again for a longer run. It should not be short of a captivated audience.

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Elysian Fields ran until August 26, 2011 as part of the New York International Fringe Festival.
 

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