Down memory lane. Sounds rather cozy, when you put it like that. The kind of trip an afternoon with an old photo album on your lap can afford. But that is not the lap I have been taking, the road I just went down and took back. Not even a road, really, and certainly no one-way street.
I am talking real, physical travel by plane, train and automobile to meet with real people that, over the years, have become almost imaginary to me, so distant is the past I spent in their presence and so unreliable my recall of them by way of ephemera—a smattering of snapshots rather too random, selective and pixellated to seem true-to-life. You know, recollections turned into collectibles, keepsakes of what is lost—an ersatz of essence that leaves you with a sketchy, shifting narrative and a suspicion that the storytelling is being botched by an unreliable curator remiss in handling the responsibility of keeping and making sense of a life encoded in delicate objects that are imbued with an arcane knowledge lodged in the personal reminiscences of more than one person.
Quite a spaghetti junction, that fabled memory lane. Prosaically speaking, although that has never been my chosen mode of articulation, I recently returned from a visit to my native Germany—or the Bundesland of North Rhine-Westphalia, to be precise. As on my previous trip the year before, I caught up with family and friends, some of whom I had not seen in over forty years.
So as not to overshadow the momentousness of that rare occasion, I did not get to witness the once-in-what’s-left-of-my-lifetime solar eclipse, the spectacle of which we let pass us by while the three of us were ensconced indoors engaged in an exchange of memories. No ill-fitting goggles or colanders required.
Just as fittingly, the coincidence of that celestial event occurring on the eve of our remarkable reunion has been commemorated as a new beginning by one of my friends, who set up a WhatsApp group titled “Sonnenfinsternis 26,” “Sonnenfinsternis” being German for solar eclipse. We did not miss a thing—just each other and the opportunity to make new memories, until now.
I even spent a night—the first in thirty-nine years—in my former bedroom at my mother’s house, a 1970s bungalow I first revisited, albeit briefly, in 2022. During that reencounter, I set foot once more in the shared bathroom, virtually unchanged, where, for about a year, from May 1985 to June 1986, I photographed myself—or my body, at any rate—to image and imagine my queer identity.
A time capsule of 1970s interior design, demolished not long after my 2022 reencounter with it, the bathroom, and the poignancy of my experience of which, led me to conceive The Return of/to the Boy in the Avocado Bathtub, a narrative art project of which my current project, Enveloped, is a prequel of sorts.
I have been asked, at some point during the run of my exhibition at Gallery Gwyn, to give a talk. I requested that the event be announced as ‘an evening with.’ Asphalt Expressionism was intended to be inclusive and interactive, and the scheduled get-together, likewise, should promote exchange. A conversazione, perhaps, but not a lecture.
Given that the smartphone is my primary means of creating the images huddled under the fanciful umbrella of Asphalt Expressionism—a series of digital photographs of New York City sidewalks—reference to the ubiquitous technology strikes me as an effective way of connecting with those who, phone no doubt in hand, might be joining me that evening.
“Notice anything different since your last visit?” asked a friend of mine—himself a former New Yorker now living in the wasteland of discarded values that is the Sunshine State of emergency known as Florida. We were chatting on the phone some time after my arrival in the estival Big Apple, a stew seasoned with the smoke of Canadian wildfires.
Yorkville, 9 July 2023
I had not been in town for about eight months, so I was bound to spot some change beyond the odd coin left in my wallet. My bank account was taking a sustained beating while I was trying to enjoy a few drinks with friends at my favorite watering holes. But that was to be expected.
West Village, 12 July 2023
Apart from air pollution, price hikes and the relentless bulldozing of neighborhood community, continuity and character wrought by the wrecking of the architecture for a glimpse of which we will soon have to refer to painting by Edward Hopper—nothing new there, either—what struck me most was an outbreak different from but related to the pandemic that, in the form of COVID-19 testing tents on Manhattan street corners, still dominated the sidewalks in the autumn of 2022. At one of them, I had tested positive for the first time.
Chalk drawing on the pavement at Union Square. Not that I need an invitation.
Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. I must try that some time without using a brown paper bag. Just kidding – but only just. It’s been a breathless few weeks. Now that I am coming up for air, I’d like to say, if it were not such a hackneyed phrase, that I have returned from my long and long-delayed New York trip with a suitcase full of memories. Not that I care to be reminded about my luggage, given that, owing to an absent-mindedness brought on by physical exhaustion and an acute state of all-over-the-placeness, my carry-on case continued its journey by rail without me.
Argh. Among other things, the valise gone astray contained a rare copy of Mr. Fortune Finds a Pig (1943), a curiosity of a mystery about which, had I not, through my negligence, forfeited the opportunity of its perusal, I would have liked to say considerably more here, especially given that its story is set in Wales, whereto its English author, H. C. Bailey (1878–1961) retired at the end of his career.
My copy of the novel, before it got lost in transit.
While in New York, I did a bit of research at the New York Public Library’s Billy Rose Theatre Division on lost recordings of Bailey’s “Mr. Fortune” stories, nineteen of which were adapted for US radio in the mid-1930s and are extant as scripts. More about that, and the pig, some other time, the lost-and-found department of Transport for Wales permitting. Never mind flying. Pigs might travel by rail.
Pardon the rustling of mental notes; but as recounted here previously, fortune did not exactly smile on me during my stay in New York, entirely overshadowed as it was, at least initially, by my former partner’s heart attack and my bout of Covid, which barred me from the ICU and turned my legs to lead as I dragged myself from one testing site to another.
Rasp. Not that my sojourns in the metropolis are ever an unalloyed joy, tinged as they invariably are with a sense of loss and estrangement. Each year, the city I knew most closely when I lived there from 1990 to 2004, is becoming less familiar, less recognizable, and generally less worth revisiting, especially since what was particular and once characteristic is gradually being replaced by the generic and corporate.
The pandemic has speeded up this process, with many of the remaining one-of-a-kind sites going under in a sump of sameness. A few years ago, when I researched the career of the English printmaker Stanley Anderson for a catalogue raisonné and a series of exhibitions, I was struck by the sense of dislocation some of his etchings communicate. A kindred spirit, I am alive to Anderson’s visual commentaries on a world that was vanishing – or was made to disappear – before his very eyes.
Edward Hopper, The Lonely House (1920)
I was reminded of Anderson’s alternative views of 1920s London – of construction sites and demolitions – when I came across the etching The Lonely House (1920) in the exhibition Edward Hopper’s New York at the Whitney. New York City, as the show’s curators put it with platitudinous generality, “underwent tremendous development” during Hopper’s lifetime; and instead of focussing his attention on landmarks that are more likely to stay in place than the architecturally commonplace – an assumption proven false decades later by the pulverization of the World Trade Center, an act of religious fanaticism bringing home that iconoclasm on any scale demands the iconic – Hopper “turned his attention” to “unsung utilitarian structures” and was “drawn to the collisions of the new and old” that “captured the paradoxes of the changing city.”
However, it is not visuals alone that vanish or material culture only that is subject to erasure. Sounds, too, face neglect and extinction. Unless they are voices or musical compositions, aural environments are largely unheard of in most records of our experiences, public or private. Sounds may survive as a backing track to our home videos, but rarely do they become the main event, the real thing of our conscious engagement with sensed reality.
Well, it ain’t over ‘til the proverbial — and stereotypically plus-sized — diva, binary or otherwise, puts down her lozenges to launch a final attack on the lorgnette-clutching, socially-distanced crowds. In as plain a variety of English as I can bring myself to adopt: we haven’t heard the last of COVID-19. Done as we might think we are with the pandemic the US President declared over, the virus continues to catch us unawares and mess with our lives.
It sure is messing with mine right now, in a number of ways. Almost immediately on arrival in New York City two weeks ago, I caught some resilient variant of the bug I had managed to steer clear of for so long. And it caught up with me despite all vaccinations and boosters, having taken advantage of the first opportunity to have my last antiviral top-up just two days before my departure.
Imperative mood
This is my first return visit to my old Manhattan neighborhood in three years … but clearly things did not go as planned or hoped for. What makes matters worse is that I had intended to be of some use to an old friend and former domestic partner, who, just days prior to my arrival, suffered a massive heart attack and has been in intensive care ever since. Here I am, stuck in his apartment, just a 20-minute walk away from the hospital that is now off limits. No doubt, millions of New Yorkers felt like that during lockdown — when everything and everyone close by was suddenly out of reach.
I started college in the spring of 1991. I had been visiting New York City since April the previous year, returning only once to my native Germany to avoid exceeding the six consecutive months I could legally stay in the US on a tourist visa. The few weeks I spent in the recently reunited Vaterland that October had been difficult to endure, and for years I had nightmares about not getting back to the place I thought of as my elective home, the realities of the recession, the AIDS crisis, Gulf War jingoism and anti-liberal politics notwithstanding.
The cover of my 1991 journal, with an image collage borrowed from a copy of Entertainment Weekly
I was determined not to repeat the experience of that involuntary hiatus once the next six-month period would come to an end. A close friend, who worked at Lehman College in the Bronx, suggested that I become a student and generously offered to pay my tuition for the first year. We decided that, instead of entering a four-year college such as Lehman, I should first enroll in classes at Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC), an option that would cut those “foreign” tuition fees in half.
Having gotten by thus far on my better than rudimentary German high school English, I had doubts nonetheless about my fitness for college. My first English instructor, Ms. Padol, was both exacting and reassuring. She worked hard to make her students try harder. Not only did she give us bi-weekly essay assignments, and the chance to revise them, but also made us keep a journal, which she would collect at random during the semester.
“This requirement for my English class comes almost as a relief,” I started my first entry, titled “A journal!” That it was only “almost: a relief was, as I wrote, owing to the fact that, whatever my attitudes toward my birthplace, I felt “so much more comfortable in my native language.” Back then, I still kept my diary in German.
What I missed more than the ability of putting thoughts into words was the joy of wordplay. “My English vocabulary does not really allow such extravaganzas,” I explained, “and even though the message comes through – in case there is any – the product itself seems to be dull and boring to read.” This reflects my thoughts on writing to this day. To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, I write to entertain myself and strangers.
In the days of the lockdown – which were also a time of heightened introspection – I scanned the old journal to remind myself what I chose to entertain notions of back in 1991. Many entries now require footnotes, if indeed they are worthy of them: who now recalls the stir caused by Kitty Kelley’s Nancy Reagan biography? Not that I had actually read the book. “Nobody will use this book in a history class,” I declared. Being “a compilation of anecdotes” it had “no value as a biography.” Autobiography, being predicated on the personal, cannot be similarly invalidated, as I would later argue after taking a graduate course in ‘self life writing’ with Nancy K. Miller at Lehman. What I knew even in 1991 was that a journal was not a diary.
Unlike the diary, the journal provided me with a chance to develop a writerly persona. I was playing the stranger, and what my reader, Ms. Padol, may have perceived to be my outsider perspective on what, in one entry, I called the “American waste of life” was in part my rehearsal of the part I thought my reader had reason to expect from me. However motivated or contrived, that performance tells me more about myself than any posed photograph could.
In an entry dated 3 May and titled “O tempora! O mores!” I shared my experience watching Donahue, a popular talk show at the time, named after its host. The broadcast in question was “People Who Change Their Sex to Have Sex with the Same Sex,” the sensationalism of which offering served as an opportunity to air my queer views as well as the closet of a journal that, for all its queerness, opened by lexically straightening my life by declaring my partner to be a “roommate.”
After expressing my initial confusion about the title and my indignation about the “exploitation” of the subject, I considered my complicity as a spectator and confronted the narrow-mindedness of my binary thinking:
Like the audience in the studio I asked myself why anybody would go through such a procedure only to have a lesbian relationship.
But then I realized that this is really a very shallow, stupid and yet typical question that shows how narrow-minded people are.
It also reflects ongoing intolerance in this society.
The woman in question made it clear that there is a difference between sexual identity and sexual preference. When a man feels that he is really a woman most people think that he consequently must be a homosexual.
I refer to myself in the journal as gay. What I did not say was how difficult it had been for me to define that identity, that, as a pre-teen boy I had identified as female and that, as a teenager, I had suffered the cruelty of the nickname “battle of the sexes,” in part due to what I know know (but had to look up again just now) as “gynecomastia”: the development of breast tissue I was at such pains to conceal that the advent of swimming classes, locker rooms and summer holidays alike filled me with dread. I had been a boy who feared being sexually attractive to the same sex by being perceived as being of the opposite sex.
Reading my journal and reading myself writing it thirty years later, I realise how green – and how Marjorie Taylor Green – we can be, whether in our lack of understanding or our surfeit of self-absorption, when it comes to reflecting on the long way we have supposedly come, at what cost and at whose expense. We have returned to the Identity Politics of the early 1990s, which I did not know by that term back then but which now teach in an art history context; and we are once again coming face to face with the specter of othering and the challenge of responding constructively to difference. I hope that some of those struggling now have teachers like Ms. Padol who make them keep a journal that encourage them to create a persona that does not hide the self we must constantly negotiate for ourselves.
There is no record online of a Ms. Padol having worked at BMCC. Then again, there is no record of my adjunct teaching at Lehman College from around 1994 to 2001, or at Hunter College and CUNY Graduate Center thereafter. The work of adjuncts, and of teachers in general, lives on mostly in the minds and memory of the students they shaped.
I was more surprised at not finding any references online to that particular Donahue broadcast, except for a few mentions in television listings – two, to be exact. The immediate pre-internet years, that age of transition from analog to digital culture, are a time within living memory to the access of which a minor record such as my English 101 journal can serve as an aide-memoire. Whatever the evidentiary or argumentative shortcomings of anecdotes, by which I do not mean the Kitty Kelleyian hearsay I dismissed as being “of no value,” historically speaking, they can be antidotes to histories that repeat themselves due to our lack of self-reflexiveness.
Those of us who have been there, and who feel that they are there all over again – in that age in which the literalness of political correctness was pitted against the pettiness of illiberal thinking – can draw on our recollections and our collective sense of déjà vu to turn our frustration at the sight of sameness into opportunities for making some small difference: we are returning so that those who are there for the first time may find ways of moving on. Instead of repeating the question in exasperation, we need answers to “What were we thinking?”
Theater ought to make for good theater. Noises Off. A Chorus of Disapproval. Stuff like that. Sometimes, though, it doesn’t. And it doesn’t because it doesn’t quite become stuff. And when it ain’t stuff, it fails to matter. The Lincoln Center production of Act One drives that home. And what a slow drive it is. You just sit there, or I did, thinking: when will it stop? Incredulous, I kept checking my watch to see whether time had stood still and I was stuck in the mind of a playwright who hadn’t quite stopped revising, who hadn’t quite figured out just where to go and how to end. And the end, when it came at last, couldn’t have been less of one. You could have spelled it out in six letters. THE END. It’d be quicker that way. But that doesn’t make an ending feel like any conclusion to draw from.
Granted, the question of how and where to finish is always a tough one when it comes to autobiography, a life unfolding and not wrapped up retrospectively. If only Moss Hart had done the adapting of his 1959 autobiography, the play might have had, if not necessarily a structure but at least an urgency, a currency that this nostalgic exercise in pointlessness woefully lacks. Instead, we end up with an adaptation that, in its second act, is mostly about the act of adapting.
That’s just the problem with the second half of James Lapine’s reworking of Hart’s book. It tells – rather than compellingly dramatizes – the story of how Hart and Kaufman collaborated on Once in a Lifetime (1930). Watching two guys sitting around drafting a play isn’t nearly as riveting as experiencing that play or the evolution of it. And, to me, at least, it didn’t help matters that, several years ago, I saw a lifeless National Theatre production of Once in a Lifetime, starring David Suchet. What should have been sheer madcap felt drowsily close to one nightcap too many.
“The theatre is not so much a profession as a disease, and my first look at Broadway was the beginning of a lifelong infection,” Hart wrote. It’s a line from Act One, the book, that makes it into Act One, the play, and it makes you aware how little blood there is in the latter. It is altogether too glossy to make us believe in the curative potency of make-believe, felt by someone brought up in “unrelieved poverty,” as Hart put it. Such urgency could turn theater-crazy Aunt Kate, charmingly though she is played by Andrea Martin, into someone akin to Blanche DuBois.
If the play, in this production, at least, isn’t quite a cure for drama dependency, that may be because it isn’t sufficiently catching to be an antidote to theater madness. It has a cuteness about it that is merely subcutaneous. It doesn’t prick you, or hook you, or infuse you with the passion of which it can only speak in borrowed words.
Filming of Sesame Street in Carl-Schurz Park, Manhattan
The sight was monstrous. There was shouting. They were shooting. Someone stood guard to keep strollers from trespassing while the action went on undisturbed. Few folks seemed to care, though, so familiar had such sights become in New York City. One could always catch up with it later, on television. Besides, this wasn’t a crime scene. It sure wasn’t Needle Park or Fort Apache, The Bronx. This was the peaceful, upmarket Upper East Side, for crying out not too loudly, and the wildly gesticulating savage in furs was of the Cookie Monster sort. Sesame Street was being filmed on location—and the location, on that May day, was Carl-Schurz Park in my old neighborhood of Yorkville.
Peter Pan sculpture, Carl-Schurz Park
It seemed fitting that the beloved children’s television series should be shot here, right in front of Peter Pan, the bronze statue that, some fifteen years earlier—when the park had gone to seed other than Sesame—was violently uprooted and tossed into the nearby East River like an innocent bystander who, some thugs decided, had seen too much. It seemed fitting because Carl-Schurz Park is a tribute to German-American relations—and, in a long and roundabout way, I came to New York City from Germany by way of Sesame Street.
As a prepubescent, I spent a great deal of time in front of the television, a shortage of viewing choices notwithstanding. My parents were both working and I turned to the tube for company, comfort and the kind of guidance that didn’t come in the form of a command or a slap. West German television had only three channels until well into the 1980s, and the third one, back in the early 1970s, was still experimental, reserved mainly for educational programs aired at odd hours. Odd hours would have been anything before mid-afternoon, when regular programming commenced on weekdays.
So, there was literally nothing else on when I pushed the knob of our black-and-white set (a stylishly futuristic Wega) to come across Ernie, Bert, Oscar and the Cookie Monster—and they all spoke, growled or squeaked English. That is how I heard them first and how, several years before I was taught English at school, I got my first lessons in a foreign language.
I had just gotten through the alphabet and the numbers from one to ten when, without “Warnung,” Sesame Street turned into Sesamstrasse and the felty, fluffy foreigners became German, even though they changed neither looks nor scenery. Being beyond pre-schooling, I now tuned in chiefly for the puppetry and the antics of the Krümelmonster. That is the way the Cookie Monster crumbled. “Krümel” literally means “crumb,” suggestive of the state to which something solid could be reduced in the process of translation.
Educationally, the early dubbed version of Sesame Street was dubious, to say the least. Spoken and written words and images did not always match. Sure, “A” is for “apple” as well as “Apfel,” and “B” for “banana” and, well, “Banana.” But there was little use for “C,” since few words in the German language begin with that letter; at least they didn’t during those days before Computers. I remember watching a lesson on “A” that ended in “Alles am Arsch,” an expression only a tad short of the exclamation summed up in the last three letters of “snafu.” For once, even my parents took note.
Never mind, I remained loyal to Ernie and Bert, whose odd coupling I envied; and once the magazine accompanying the series was launched, with images of the puppets as centerfolds, the pair became my first pinups. If only Sesame Street (a pun that, too, is lost in German translation) had remained on the air in its original language. By the time high school started, and with it lessons in English—British, if you please—I had all but lost the enthusiasm; for the next nine years, I learned reluctantly and none too well, being that we were forced to go through joyless Grammar drills to arrive at the point of meaningful self-expression.
As a child, I never associated Sesame Street with any real place, let alone New York City, the seedy ways of which, back then, conjured scenes of violence and decay: the turf of gangs, the marketplace for drugs, and the inspiration for nothing except TV cop shows. It was just as difficult to get that image out of my head as it had been to get English into it.
Indeed, my first exposure to the Big Apfel demonstrated that image to be truer than the pictures of it in glossy travel brochures; no doubt, I had spent too much time eyeing the Carringtons of Denver, Colorado. That I fell in love with old, crime-ridden Gotham all the same had more to do with hormones than with anything we traditionally understand to be “tourist attractions.”
Since the mid-1990s, Manhattan has cleaned up its act, even though it wiped out much of the city’s character along with the crime—so successfully, in fact, that I once was slapped with a fine for dozing off on a bench opposite Peter Pan because I felt safe enough to rest my eyes.
Sesamstrasse, Carl-Schurz Park, and the old Wega set (images of which I had to google to remind myself): the neighborhood of memory sure gets crowded as you travel ever further down the road . . .
I had walked past this place many an evening on the way to Ty’s, my favorite Greenwich Village watering hole. This time, though, it was mid-afternoon and I turned left, leaving Christopher for Gay Street. I had come here specially to take a picture of number 14, the former residence of two sisters who, for about a quarter of a century or so, were household names across America. Ruth and Eileen McKenney had been on my mind ever since I saw that production of Wonderful Town on a visit to Manchester, England—and the gals, whose misadventures are tunefully related in said musical, seemed determined to stay there. On my mind, that is, not up in the Salford docklands; though, judging from their experience way down here on Gay Street, they might not have minded the docks.
A few days earlier, I had happened upon a copy of Ruth McKenney’s All About Eileen (1952) in the basement of the Argosy, one of my favorite antiquarian bookstores in town. I hadn’t even been looking for it at the time. In fact, I had been unaware that such an anthology of McKenney’s New Yorkerstories existed.
Eileen was lying there all the same—prominently if carelessly displayed, draped in a flashy, tantalizingly torn jacket that stood out among the drab, worn-out linen coats of a great number of unassuming second-hand Roses about to be put in their place—waiting to be picked up. I don’t flatter myself. My company was of no consequence to Eileen. If I was being lured, it was no doubt owing to an itch Eileen had to get out of yet another basement.
Thinking of the case I had to lug to the airport before long—and the less than commodious accommodations that would await Eileen in my study—I had hesitated and walked out alone; but I soon changed my mind, returned to the Argosy, and, to my relief, found Eileen still there, though shifted a little as if to say “I’m not that easy” and to make me suffer for waffling.
And here I was now, a week later. 14 Gay Street. It’s an unassuming walk-up, next to a scaffolded shell of a building that, a friend told me, had been on fire a while ago. Walk-up! More like a step-down for Ruth and Eileen. The two had been naïve enough to rent barely-fit-for-living quarters below street level, unaware that the construction of a new subway line was going to rattle their nerves and rob them of what one of their first visitors, a burglar, could not readily bag: their sleep.
“[W]e lived in mortal terror falling into the Christopher Street subway station,” Ruth recalled, making light of her darksome days in their damp “little cave.” And “[e]very time a train roared by, some three feet under our wooden floor, all our dishes rattled, vases swayed gently, and startled guests dropped drinks.”
From the outside, at least, 14 Gay Street looked perfectly serene on that quiet, sunny afternoon. I was not the only one stopping by, though. I walked up to what I assumed to be a fellow admirer of Eileen’s; as it turned out, he was oblivious that the very spot had given rise to such lore as was retold on page, screen and stage. He only had eyes for the wisteria that had taken its chances—and its time—to sidle up to and ravage a neighboring property.
Imposing as that looked, I had my heart set on those small dark windows peering from behind the pavement like a pair of Kilroy peepers. Eileen was here, I thought, and was glad to have seen what seemed too little to look at. Indifference, after all, is in the passerby’s eye.
I wonder now: How many sites of the city—fabled but forsaken—are daily escaping the sightseer’s gaze?
The prosaically named American Airlines Theatre on Broadway has about as much intimacy and sex appeal as a departure lounge. The long entrance hallway, which barely opens up to a space resembling the lobby of a two-star hotel, makes you feel that, once your ticket has been scanned, you are a mere hour’s worth of taxiing away from takeoff. That said, it wasn’t the venue that made the Roundabout Theatre Company’s production of Don’t Dress for Dinner such a terminal bore.
Farces are all about frustrated desires, about wanting to take it off and waiting to get it on, about fooling around the longest way round and never quite getting around to it. In this case, though, the exasperation I sensed was all mine. As the characters got together for their scheduled assignations, the actors seemed to be heading off in different directions. Watching them move around on the stage was about as scintillating as staring at other folk’s suitcases circling the baggage carousel, which aroused in me nothing but the suspicion that this was going to be a wearisome cat-and-spouse game indeed.
Not since Tony Randall’s 1991 production of The Crucible had I witnessed such a spilled ragbag of irreconcilable acting styles. Their task being merrily to prolong the unwanted dinner party at the expense of hoped-for dessert spooning—and to make all this falling apart come together for us—the assembled cast members were in desperate need of a round table, not a dinner table, and a director, not a waiter, giving orders rather than taking them.
To be sure, Marc Camoletti play is no Noises Off; and the fact that I had seen Michael Frayn’s farce-to-end-all-farce only a few weeks earlier made Don’t Dress seem like a morning after. Camoletti, best known for Boeing-Boeing was ill served by a translator whose lines are so threadbare (yes, cooker does rhyme with hooker) as to deserve nothing more than booing, booing.
The male leads, Ben Daniels as Robert and Adam James as Bernard came dressed for office, not play. A third male—make that macho—role was so indifferently cast that the ending, in which alone the character featured, fell as flat as postage stamp on a card reading “Wish I were anywhere but here.”
The ladies were livelier by far; but whereas classy Patricia Kalember as Jacqueline seemed to have expected a Noel Coward soiree, brassy Jennifer Tilly as Suzanne was fitted out for a Vegas dinner theater . . . or a romp with Chucky. Meanwhile, the energetic Spencer Kayden as Suzette—who reminded me of Elizabeth Berridge and her role as the maid in the glorious if short-lived ‘90s sitcom satire The Powers That Be—brought to the proceedings a verve and a timing well suited to the inspired slapstick that Don’t Dress so desperately lacked. Alas, you can’t have good comic timing all by yourself.
What you can have by yourself is the last laugh, scoffing at what elicited nary a chuckle in the first place.
