Category: Travel

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Digging the Mole: Language, Memory, and the Dirt of Native Soil

Well, I am back in Wales after a week in the Czech capital. And, as is always the case following such travels, I seem to have left behind some part of me that keeps spinning, endlessly and unclaimed, like a piece of luggage on a carousel forcing it back into view with every turn. Retrieving some of its content piecemeal—and in full view of anyone around me—I am devoting the next few entries in the broadcastellan journal to the grabbing at that stubbornly revolving case and the spreading out of whatever I might snatch from it for all to see.

Traveling to Prague was not simply a matter of going on a trip to me—unless, you might say at the risk of sounding like some hideous pop tune, it was a matter of going on a trip “to me.” It was the closest I have been to walking on what my German passport claims to be home turf in about seventeen years (apart from a subsequent stopover in Amsterdam, during which we took the train into town for a meal and a walk along the grachten).

If that nearness to what I have been trying to get away from weren’t enough to cause anxiety, Prague is full of reminders of the cultural contributions of my forebears, from the writings of Franz Kafka to the attempt at exterminating Jewish culture, impressions to be shared in subsequent entries. I was relieved, amid “collective guilt”-ridden visits of the Jewish Quarter and the angst-fest that is the Kafka Museum, to come across Krtek, the mole. Perhaps it was a matter of closing my eyes and ears for a while (moles, unlike Krtek, being short-sighted and hard of hearing) and of not resurfacing for a while, getting so close to being home-soiled.

I grew up digging Krtek, a cartoon character created by Zdeněk Miler. Former Czechoslovakia was a chief purveyor of children’s television entertainment both in Eastern Europe and Germany during the 1970s. As it turns out, Krtek is celebrating his fiftieth birthday this year, which is why he was prominently on display in the shopwindows of Prague. I could not resist sharing my rediscovery by donning above t-shirt. Never mind that I look like Mr. Magoo avoiding the glare of an otherwise welcome sun.

To me, Krtek will always be “Der Kleine Maulwurf,” which is how I got to know him during my childhood. “Maulwurf”! What a wonderful word. Literally, it means “snout throw” (or “muzzle toss”). The German language is marked by a directness largely lacking in Latin-quartered English, an openness and simplicity I did not come to appreciate until I dug a hole out of the place I chose not to call Heimat and picked up the works of Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle, whose to English ears mannered idiolect (termed “Carlylese”) comes alive in metaphors and loan-translations.

A number of poets and novelists living in Prague in the early 20th century circulated their thoughts in the linguistic isolation cell of German, a marginality so keenly felt by Kafka. Being already in a heap of clay dug up by Krtek, I am currently reading Gustav Meyrink’s Der Golem (1915), the famous legend of the clay-made aider of the Jews, about which and whom I will have more to say in the near future.

Having lived outside Europe for so long, I am sometimes overwhelmed (and not always pleased) by the memories tossed back in my face at the mere sight of something like a little mime of a mole, memories that come to life chiefly in images but, when recalled in words, insist on sticking out my native tongue at me.

I know. It seems as if I were making a mountain out of one of his hills; but watching Krtek in this charming little movie, I am reminded how much he, too, dug the radio, and how this love for foreign sounds brought about his isolation . . .

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The Devil Wears Praha . . . Out

Just where did it go—or go wrong—he wonders, as he passes the could-be-anywhere shopping complex to wend his way back after a Mexican meal and a surprisingly good Long Island Iced Tea to the too embarrassingly froufrou and French-sounding to mention hotel they had booked online and chosen for its stylish if less than regionally authentic interiors? Old Praha, I mean, the Eastern European attracting Western European capital I am currently visiting and liberally dispensing.

Earlier today, the East-West clash played itself out before my eyes—however inflamed after beholding hordes of garishly clad Irish soccer fans in town to cheer on what nationalism defines for them as their team in a game against rather than “with” the Czechs—at the local toy museum, where we stopped on our way from the overcrowded Palace. On display in said cultural depository are the Barbie dolls pictured above, lifting their skeletal arms and wriggling their barren hips opposite more traditional playthings of Bohemian manufacture.

To be sure, military toys were not wanting among those mass-produced goods encouraging youngsters to consume . . . mass-produced goods, even though some history lessons might be required for those at play to determine just which garb makes friend sartorially distinguishable from foe.

Sixty years ago, the aforementioned radio playwright and journalist Norman Corwin visited this town on his One World Flight across the globe in the aftermath of the Second World War to report about conditions in Czechoslovakia.

“From Moscow to Prague is a distance of about twelve hundred miles,” Corwin commenced his audio tour. “The land beneath” him, he remarked, looked

as green and innocent as though it had never heard the names of old wars, nor the rumor of new ones. Yet not long ago, over every inch of the distance we were consuming so quickly and comfortably, armies had fought, blood had mixed in the streams and rivers, villages had been sacked, cities bombed. A dead man for every foot of the way.

Corwin expressed himself

naturally anxious to see what betrayal and occupation, and the trials of reconstruction, had done to Czechoslovakia, whether its people were happy and confident, whether they were still friendly to the United States, the country which had done so much to create their republic; how they felt about Russia; whether they were, as we’ve been told along the way, a bridge between East and West; whether they were in a mood to embrace the concept of One World.

Shortly after Corwin’s reportage, the Czechs had little opportunity to realign themselves with the west. Still, I wonder how much of these acts of “betrayal” and states of “occupation” are being remembered now that Prague has gone so thoroughly (so irrevocably?) west, if only in its out-of-the-way way of attracting foreign currencies to be flung across counters all over town by visitors from Europe and the United States. Is capitalism, which swears by competition, staying world conflicts or encouraging them in a way that sports keep the young strong and aggressive so as to make them fit to waste their bodies in international conflicts?

A new kind of megabomb has been cheered in Russia , the news hit me as I settled down after a day of seeing sights. Is this just another sign of healthy competition? Is competition ever healthy, or is it the corruption of the very body it promises to invigorate?

What might be the price and point of removing oneself from the game, he wonders, recalling his inclination to dress up Barbie while other boys his age got dirty chasing and cursing each other on the soccer field, playing the same game that apparently convinced dozens of Irish fanatics in Leprechaun hats to invade this much and oft beleaguered city . . .

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The King of Clubs

Well, I wonder now. About that golf ball, I mean. Earlier this week, I went on a tour of St. Donats, the Welsh castle that, during the 1920s and ’30s, was being transformed into a getaway for media mogul William Randolph Hearst and his mistress, silent screen and talkies star Marion Davies. A decade after Hearst’s death in 1951, his trustees finally managed to sell this fourteenth-century if thoroughly remodeled castle, something that Hearst had been trying to do since his empire began to crumble in the late 1930s. In 1962, St. Donats became the site of the international Atlantic College and as such no tourist attraction; but, as I mentioned previously, every August and early September, when most of its students are away, it is open to visitors.

Our tour was conducted by one of the students, a girl from New Mexico, who, however charming, smart, and fortunate to land a scholarship to attend this prestigious school, had little to do with or say about the castle and its history, other than sharing a few anecdotes about a ghost, a pirate, and a deadly duel, all part of St. Donats fascinating lore.

However much remains of the old place, its more recent past is now obscured, a fleeting Hollywood romance yielding both to antiquity and utility. Since the castle is now a campus, little is left of its imposed splendor designed to impose, architectural features imported from all over Britain and Europe by Hearst, who had done as much on an even grander scale at San Simeon in California. Assembled from various secular and profane properties, the (pictured) banqueting hall with its English church roof and its fireplace from France, was commissioned by Hearst to accommodate his illustrious guests, however rarely he ultimately got to entertain at St. Donats.

Waiting for our tour to commence, we found a golf ball in a little herb garden on the grounds. I thought little of it at the time; but when I browsed through Enfys McMurry’s slyly titled Hearst’s Other Castle (1999) to satisfy my newly roused curiosity about St. Donats, I came across a reference to . . . Big Broadcast star, USO morale booster, and golf enthusiast Bob Hope.

As those who know me come to dread, I can ride the hobbyhorse of old-time radio to death; but I didn’t expect to drag it back from its pasture quite that quickly in this case, notwithstanding Hearst’s media empire and Davies’s appearances on the Lux Radio Theater. As it turns out, the quintessential radio comedian of the medium’s so-called golden age was indeed staying at St. Donats shortly before Hearst’s death in 1951. Hearst had not been at St. Donats in over a decade; and Hope, of Welsh descent on his mother’s side, was the last major Tinseltownie to occupy this ancient castle. He was in need of a place to flop while attending a golf tournament in the Welsh town of Porthcawl during the spring of that year.

Now, I don’t suppose Bob “Thanks for the Memory” Hope could have planted that ball there among the lavender and fennel, the herb garden being a recent addition; but those moats and towers sure inspire yarns . . .

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A Ramble of Epic Proportions: Wordsworth in Wales

Well, I suppose we have all taken trips that have changed our lives. After all, why else go anywhere! If it had not been for a New York City subway ride and a brisk walk to Rockefeller Center on an afternoon in December, I would never have ended up here in Wales (a virtual tour of which is being attempted in this 1930s radio broadcast). Indeed, I would not have been able to spot Wales on a map, even though I, a student of English literature, believed myself to be familiar with one of the most famous poems to have been inspired by the Welsh countryside: Wordsworth’s “Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey.”

It was on this day, 13 July, back in 1798, that Wordsworth revisited the Wye valley in Monmouthshire, Wales, where Tintern Abbey stands in its Romanticism-inspiring ruins (as shown left, in a more prosaic picture from my first visit there).

Wordsworth had been at the same spot some five summers earlier, together with his sister, Dorothy. He felt himself aged and believed himself matured. It had been a memorable journey; indeed, as he remarked in his notes on the poem, no work of his was “composed under circumstances more pleasant for me to remember.” The memory of the trip and of his “boyish days” were very much on his mind on his return to the scene, a landscape revisited not simply per pedes, but, in a less pedestrian sense, in recollection.

“[H]ow oft,” he recalled in his famous poem, in lines that would change the course of literary history,

In darkness and amid the many shapes
Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart—  
How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee,
O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer through the woods,
How often has my spirit turned to thee!

It was a vision of a landscape that recurred to Wordsworth, “in lonely rooms” and “‘mid the din / Of towns and cities.” A “worshipper of nature,” he had little to say about the Abbey itself, a ruin that inspired many an artist, most notably Turner, Wordsworth’s contemporary. This Sunday, I am going to travel down to Monmouthshire in the knowledge that my days in the Welsh countryside are numbered.

It seems I am moving back into town this fall, after nearly three years in the Welsh countryside. A small town, mind you, but a town nonetheless. It was peaceful here, and pleasant in the sunshine. Yet there has hardly been any sunshine this summer, nor warmth; and the loneliness of our house has at times been a burden to me, and to those having to suffer my presence.

Without this intensely felt isolation I would perhaps not have commenced the broadcastellan journal. Before moving to Wales, I was not aware of how much our surroundings enter our being, of how much a landscape can inhabit or possess, rather than merely surround us. Now, would the Romantic movement have come into being had Wordsworth’s second summer in Wales been as much of a washout as the present season?

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Crude Awakening; or, This Ain’t Show Boat

Unlike the previously discussed play Deuce, this one came highly recommended: Tonys darling Spring Awakening (music by Duncan Sheik; book and lyrics by Steven Sater), with which I caught up during the week leading up to Broadway’s annual awards ceremony. It has been touted as the new Show Boat, the spectacle with a story that revolutionized musical theater back in 1927 (and revived on radio as a musical, a straight play, a musical serial, and a number of burlesques). “Old Man River,” take me now! I realize that I am filing a minority report here; but if this is the new face of Broadway, I just got to slap it.

For starters, that new face is partially obscured by hand-held microphones, props that, along with an audience seated onstage and a blackboard listing the tunes, are meant to suggest, in the by now tiresome postmodern mode of self-reflexivity, that what you see and get is only “Make Believe”—an Epic theatrical in the Brechtian vein designed to be stimulating rather than absorbing. Verfremdung, Broadway style, means to play out whatever is left of a story like a rock concert; that is, by playing to the audience rather than interacting with one’s fellow players.

Spring Awakening is not so much an adaptation of Franz Wedekind’s drama of youth, longing, and disillusionment as it is an assortment of clichés about hormonally-induced teenage Sturm and Drang. This high-Rent production (which won’t break even at the box office any time soon) may well appeal to youngsters who don’t know any better or refuse to listen, and to their parents who assume this noisy spectacle to be happening since it has an energetic and gifted cast that emotes in foul language and jumps up and down a lot, as if out to bring in ‘da punk. In its treatment of sexuality beyond the old boy-impregnates-girl-and-both-pay-for-it formula, however, the show betrays its conservative agenda, acknowledging the reality of alternative stirrings only in the form of comic relief.

Choreographed like an old Britney Spears number and outfitted in costumes left over from a touring production of Ah, Wilderness!, Spring Awakening revels in an identity crisis equal to that suffered by an acne-troubled, media-beleaguered high schooler set to pass out at a Goth concert—and it is just about as cheerful and endearing. “Mis’ry’s Comin’ Aroun’,” showtune lovers.

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Great Match, Ill Served: Angela Lansbury and Marian Seldes in Deuce

Well, I had been given ample warning. About Deuce, I mean, the Terrence McNally play starring American Theater Hall of Famers Angela Lansbury and Marian Seldes. Reviewers and friends uniformly panned it. Not content to take their word for it, I set out to see for myself, only to confirm that Deuce truly is an insipid trifle of a play, a plotless, actionless one-acter whose greatest offense is its squandering of talent: two captivating leads let down by a leaden script and reduced to longshots by an extravagant set on the large stage of Broadway’s Music Box theater.

That set—the impersonal space of a tennis stadium filled with electronically simulated spectators (or spectres)—echoes and amplifies the hollowness of the production, but appears to have been designed (by Peter J. Davison) to give audiences certain to tire something to look at or look out for—as if Lansbury and her accomplished co-star weren’t reason enough to head out for the theater. They aren’t, if onlookers cannot zoom in on and get close to these two, as is warranted and promised by the potentially intriguing premise, the opportunity to eavesdrop on a private exchange between two celebrities dragged out of retirement and forcefully reunited for a belated tribute.

Their talk, however ably delivered, is devoid of anything amounting to revelations. They are long-ignored and finally acknowledged tennis legends who (surprise!) happen to be real women with long personal histories and strong opinions—opinions shared in lines so insipid that the playwright felt obliged to spice them up with profanities in hopes of getting spectators to stir, gasp and guffaw at expressions supposedly too vulgar to escape the mouths of our venerable elders.

You know you are faced with a dramatic dud when you open the Playbill to discover that even leading lady Lansbury struggles to give it to you in a nutshell too rotten to contain much good: “The play is about age—about becoming old and not being in the mainstream in the world of tennis today.” Who is the target audience? Martina Navratilova? Then again, it is also a “metaphor for age and the problem that women have with old age.” Like finding good parts, I suppose.

The gimmick of the play (and it is little more than that) is the juxtaposition of the real women behind the legend with the shallowness and vanity of the television sportscasters prattling overhead like a pair of false gods, a vapid chat (reminiscent of the characters created, to far better effect, by Christopher Guest in mockumentaries like Best in Show and For Your Consideration) in contrast to which the play offers next to nothing.

Deuce might be better served on radio, which is the ideal medium for intimate talk and character studies. Radio plays do not suffer from a lack of action or circular construction, from being anecdotal and fragmentary. Radio theater, which does not lose sight of its actors on enormous sets, is well suited to the conveying of an impression (a sense of dread, say) or the imparting of an idea. On the stage that sort of thing or nothingness is a deucedly bad one.

Now, I don’t care whether I’ll ever get to see another play by Mr. McNally (who’s rather more amusing, if similarly trifling Love! Valour! Compassion!, starring Nathan Lane, I saw back in 1995). I do mind, however, that this might have been my last chance to see Ms. Lansbury on the stage. As a swansong, Deuce is tantamount to Trog.

Some fifty years prior to her nonetheless Tony award nominated performance in Deuce, Lansbury played a retired stage actress on radio’s “outstanding theater of thrills,” Suspense,” in a melodrama titled “A Thing of Beauty” (29 May 1947). A woman willing to kill for a good part or to forge an alliance with someone she does not respect, she ends up having, quite literally, lost face. Now, there’s a metaphor!

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The Confidante Game: Trading on That Old Acquaintance

Well, here’s an acquaintance worth making. Old Acquaintance, that is, the Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival of which is currently in previews at the American Airlines Theatre. Judging from the walkers and hearing aids on display at last Tuesday’s performance—not to mention the gas passed noisily in the lobby—I suspect that quite a few of the folks in attendance that evening got to see John Van Druten’s comedy during its original run back in 1940-41, while some of the friends of Dorothy’s we passed in the aisle were most likely on intimate terms with the 1943 film adaptation starring Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins, two leading ladies on less than friendly terms.

Whether or not you (think you) are familiar with this story of a longtime rivalry redefined as friendship, the Roundabout production is likely to teach you a lesson or two about the nature of that least clearly defined of social compacts and about Hollywood’s (s)elective affinities with Broadway.

I caught up with Vincent Sherman’s soon-to-be-remade melodrama (and one of its radio versions) only after seeing the play, which made me appreciate the stage version’s maturity all the more. Van Druten, who was involved in the screen adaptation of Old Acquaintance, sure learned how to compromise in order to make it in Tinseltown. That he turned his sparkling comedy into an even larger crowd-pleasing sentimental melodrama is all the more remarkable considering that the English playwright’s first drama, Young Woodley (1925), had initially been banned in Britain for its treatment of sexual awakening. Production code conformity in the case of Old Acquaintance—as in most cases—meant turning mature women with careers as well as sex lives into silly girls or stoic old maids.

The silly girl in the Hollywood version is Miriam Hopkins, whose Millie is so envious of the publicity enjoyed her novelist friend Kit that she, however ill equipped for literary fame, turns to the writing of romances. The old maid is Bette Davis, whose romantically luckless Kit is willing to hand down her much younger lover to Millie’s daughter, Deidre, for which sacrifice she is duly rewarded with a cup of human kindness, shared with a remorseful Millie by the fire that warms them when the heat of passion is no longer in the Hallmark cards.

All this bears little resemblance to Van Druten’s original three-act play, a witty, tightly constructed comedy of manners. As one astute online reviewer of the movie points out, it becomes difficult to understand why Kit and Mollie became such old acquaintances once their careers are pushed into the background. In the stage play, it is Millie who, though a trash novelist herself, enjoys Kit’s respect as a keen and candid editor of Kit’s ponderous, overly analytic storytelling. However different in temperament, Kit and Mollie come across as equals, which explains at once their closeness and their rivalry.

On stage, Old Acquaintance echoes La Rochefoucauld’s maxims that friendship is “nothing but a transaction from which the self always means to gain something” and that in the “misfortunes of our friends we always find something that isn’t displeasing to us.” Concurring with the latter, satirist Jonathan Swift remarked about his relationship with fellow authors:

To all my Foes, dear Fortune, send
Thy Gifts, but never to my Friend:
I tamely can endure the first,
But, this with Envy makes me burst.

In the 2007 Broadway revival, Margaret Colin’s Kit is less pathetic than Davis’s, while Harris’s portrayal of Mollie is more sympathetic than that of Hopkins (who reprised her role, opposite miscast Alexis Smith, in the 29 May 1944 Lux Radio Theatre production). If not nearly as assured and brilliant in her comic timing or line reading as Rosalind Russell, with whom in mind the rights to Old Acquaintance were secured by Warner Brothers, Colin is both real and regal. Davis, who was asked to drop her pajamas to expose her less-than-glamorous legs, is matronly by comparison, suggesting that she sacrificed her juvenile beau to play surrogate mother to her best friend’s daughter.

The marvellous Harriet Harris, in turn, hands Millie back her brains. Whereas Hopkins’s character comes across as an impulsive, overgrown schoolgirl, spiteful and pouting, Harris’s Millie is calculating, smart, and rather dangerous (not unlike her Tony Award winning Mrs. Meers, in Thoroughly Modern Millie and her scheming Felicia Tilman in Desperate Housewives). Not content to see her best friend succeed, Millie intends to succeed her in fame and fortune. Her dramatic outbursts are an expression of her frustration when she realizes that the unmarried and childless Kit is not only a better mother to her daughter, but that she might also have been a better, and more desirable wife to her former husband.

If you prefer expensive theatre seats to cheap Hollywood sentiment, the revival of Old Acquaintance is your ticket.

[At the time of writing this I was as yet unaware that, before becoming a playwright, John Van Druten taught in Aberystwyth, the Welsh town to which I relocated from New York City in 2004.]

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"Follow, Follow, Follow, Follow": A Hint from The Fantasticks

Well, “[i]t’s stupid, of course,” and “immensely undignified”; perhaps, “I’ve gone mad.” That is how lovelorn Matt, pining for Luisa, the girl next door, explains his “situation” in The Fantasticks. Earlier this week, I had the good fortune to catch up with the off-Broadway revival of this Mousetrap among the musicals. The current production is staged at the less than enchanting sounding Snapple Theater Center (soon to be renamed after actor Jerry Orbach), a suitably small venue for this intimate play (music by Harvey Schmidt; book and lyrics by Tom Jones, who, nearly fifty years after its conception, still performs in it, night after night, albeit under an assumed name).

I was particularly receptive to the wit and wisdom and whimsy of this literary charmer about love and make-believe, disillusionment and romantic rekindling, to the gentle reminder expressed in “Try to Remember,” the show’s best known tune:

Deep in December it’s nice to remember,
Although you know the snow will follow.
Deep in December it’s nice to remember,
Without a hurt the heart is hollow.
Deep in December it’s nice to remember,
The fire of September that made us mellow.

I had just made up my mind to cancel my flight back home to Wales in order stay in New York City until such time as my one and only would come and fetch me and spend a few days together in the city where we first met. It seems that you can have your Big Apple and eat it, after all.

My appeal to “follow” has not fallen of deaf ears. Like Matt, who’s gone out into the world and left his Luisa behind, I can now look forward to a cheerful reunion and the confidence of we’ll-take-it-from-here. Never mind that I am no longer as agile as former American Idol contestant Anthony Fedorov (who plays Matt) and that my Luisa sings as loudly as he snores and tends to sprout hairs on his back. Still, anyone with a sense of wonder, a penchant for “Metaphor” and a love “[b]etter far than [it]” will not have to stretch or struggle to relate to their story.

“[T]ry to see it,” the Narrator encourages the audience: “Not with your eyes, for they are wise, / But see it with your ears.” It may look “mad” to the world, but my act of folly sure sounds like something to remember once the chill of December comes round. The rest will “follow.”

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Alexander Technique: A Matter of Queer Posture

Well, it’s been a few decades since my first (and only) toga party. Last night, I felt as if I were crashing one. A friend of mine took me to a way-off Broadway production of a play called A Kiss from Alexander (book and lyrics by Stephan de Ghelder; music by Brad Simmons). Billed as a “musical fantasy,” it is essentially a backstage stabbing farce—say, All About Abs—wrapped in romance and sentiment. Its tone is considerably less even than the spray tan on the cast’s collective hide.

Borrowing from the Rita Hayworth vehicle Down to Earth, which it references, this gay Band Wagon rolls along merrily enough, confident in attracting an audience steeped in Hollywood myth, in Broadway lore as well as lingo. “Alexander technique,” for instance, which served as a pun in the play, is a way of learning how to rid the body of tension. Alternative culture has been doing just that by leaning on traditions that produce anxieties, irreverence being the release.

Art not quite sure of its standing tends to be self-conscious. Witnessing the return of Alexander the Great in his mission to sabotage a bawdy, low-fidelity account of his private life (in a production called “Alexander Was Great!”), I was reminded of Norman Corwin’s radio fantasy “A Descent of the Gods.” In it, the god of Trivia recalls how Venus, Mars, and Apollo visited Earth, and how they were embraced and degraded by the media, the least respected and most prominent of which being the one in which poet-journalist Corwin operated.

By now, the god of Trivia has been knocked off his throne by the god of Camp. And while I am not a worshipper of either, it is difficult to deny the force of the latter.

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If Momma Was Buried: The Gypsies of Grey Gardens

Well, I did not sit around for the no doubt excruciatingly drawn out season finale of American Idol, especially not after Tuesday night’s less than scintillating showdown. Instead, I snatched up tickets for Grey Gardens, Broadway’s current musical must-see. Relying on the New York City subway system, I very nearly the opening scenes. A signal problem and the uncertainty of its timely solution convinced me to alight on Fifth Avenue and 59th, giving me a mere twelve minutes to make a dash for it—past the throngs of sailors in town for the 20th annual Fleet Week—all the way to the Walter Kerr Theater, not far from which venue former Idol Fantasia Barrino stares at passers-by from a giant display for The Color Purple.

After assuring those uneasy about the implications of the beads of sweat on my shiny forehead, that I had used Dial, I squeezed into my allotted space, fanning myself with the playbill, just as Grey Gardens opened its gates, rusty and unhinged. What awaited me was the perfect antidote to the excesses of late 20th and early 21st-century Broadway, which is alive but far from well with the sound of Andrew Lloyd Webberish bombast, with the flashy, the vapid, and the utterly pointless (Legally Blonde, the musical, anyone?). The melancholy and darkly funny Gardens defies this trend; neither Christine Ebersole nor Mary Louise Wilson enter the stage in a helicopter, belt out generic power ballads, or give big names a bad one.

Now, there is nothing novel about the play, inspired by the lives of the Camelot-and-went-nowhere Bouviers, aunt and niece of Jacqueline Onassis, who became the subject of a 1975 documentary (which, my paper fan informed me, is now being dramatized for the screen). The titular mansion is filled with echoes of past lives, fictional and otherwise, which is not to say that it is Gardens variety.

The intrigues and conspiracies of eccentric old dears has long been the stuff of dark comedy and melodrama: those Ladies in Retirement come to mind (and was heard on the Lux Radio Theatre, as do Arsenic and Old Lace (adapted for radio’s Screen Guild Theater), Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, and radio dramas assortment of weird “Sisters” (such as Lurene Tuttle and Rosalind Russell in a Suspense thriller bearing that title). In musical terms, Gardens is Rose missing her turn and turning her socialite daughter into a spinster maid. Edith and daughter Edie are two “Peas” gone to pot.

Above all, Gardens is a character study. To say that it is neither “little old lady land” camp nor Miss Havisham Gothic is not to imply that it misses any opportunity to give us the tour of a house build on ambitions shattered into lost chances, a house out touch with the times even at the best of times, from its Republican heyday during the Roosevelt administration to its decline in the ’60s and ’70s. Gardens is also refreshingly post-Postmodern, which is to say that the show is reflective rather than self-reflexive. So, get out there and smell the faded flowers. Just don’t count on the subway to take you there.