Secrets, Review
By Arlene McKanic/Greenwich Village Gazette
"Sad sad sad," laments
Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and the same can be
applied to the couples in Gerald Zipper's lacerating play Secrets.
Though it doesn't attain Virginia Woolfish heights, Secrets does
say something about despair and rage, deferred dreams and sexual
hate.
Secrets takes place in 1985, the height of the rapacious Reagan
era, and on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, that piece of real
estate Woody Allen mined for years for existential angst and
humor. The setting is the apartment of Lally and Len, an art
dealer and her stockbroker husband, who are going through some
kind of therapy. The counseling seems not to be working as they
can't even agree on who should answer the doorbell without nearly
teethgrinding fury. But they're hosting a get together that
evening with two other couples, Rhonda and Matt and Dora and Hank.
Another couple was supposed to be there but declined, which upsets
Lally unduly. The get together was really for their benefit, as
the husband is losing his job and the marriage is breaking up. But
the guests who do show have troubles far deeper and nastier.
Hank (the sad-eyed Matt Joseph) is a TV clown who wants respect
but who's never taken seriously by any of the hotshot TV producers
who might help him. His wife Dora (Lissa Moira) is an embittered,
untenured philosophy teacher whose over-privileged students don't
try a yard. Matt (Tom Sminkey) is a lawyer with perennially
thwarted political ambitions and his wife Rhonda (Alyce Mayors-Sminkey)
is a woman whose unfulfilled life is driving her not so quietly
mad. They all seem to have children, but those children don't make
an appearance, and don't even seem to count for very much.
The couples arrive in a bellicose mood and we're led to believe
this is normal for these soirees, but their lashing out at each
other is so poisonous that there are moments when we're sure
somebody's going to end up dead -- it doesn't help that the
brutality is partially fueled, as with George and Martha and their
hapless guests, with impossible amounts of booze. No one dies
during the course of the evening, but the rancor and anguish of
their guests show up Len and Lally's essential innocence. Darren
Lougee and Elena Zazanis are excellent as two people who can't
believe what they're hearing from the mouths of long time friends
-- now and then Zazanis darts about with an hors d'oeurves tray
like an anxious little girl, trying to get the grownups to calm
down. Their costars are just as good in their disappointment,
cynicism and coiling anger and Ted Mornel's direction is, for all
the ferocity, wonderfully understated.
The set design is equally spare but evocative -- though it's
only some chairs and cubes and a rather ratty area rug, we have no
problem imagining an upscale Manhattan apartment with all the
geegaws that implies. Zipper, who's also a poet, writes dialogue
with the sting of a willow switch dipped in vinegar. He's someone
to watch. Secrets, presented by the Alternative Theatre of
Manhattan, is now at the Where Eagles Dare Theatre, 347 West 36th
Street, till April 30.
amckanic@aol.com
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