The Whore of Sheridan Square
nytheatre.com review by Martin Denton
June 23, 2005
It's amazing what smart, talented people can accomplish in 90 minutes.
The Whore of Sheridan Square, the spectacular, timely, and deliciously funny new play written and directed by Michael Baron, manages in that short span of time to: (a) parody—precisely and hilariously—the classic movie Sunset Boulevard; (b) tell the story of and pay tribute to legendary playwright/director/actor Charles Ludlam; and (c) remind us of the necessity of risk, challenge, and subversion in theatre, especially in the quasi-repressive environment that today's artists are living and working in. This is an enormously entertaining work, and also an important one. It's not to be missed.
The Ridiculous aesthetic—which has in many ways become systematized and even routine in this post-everything world of ours—pervades every aspect of The Whore of Sheridan Square, which means that pop culture is gleefully appropriated and misappropriated, gender is blithely crossed and/or ignored, and camp/gay iconography rules the roost. The Ludlam canon is mined, along with key works of his artistic heirs (Kushner's Angels in America, for example, fuels a particularly witty gag). That said, familiarity with the famous Billy Wilder flick about Norma Desmond is probably the only real reference point required for proper enjoyment of this show.
After a scantily clad woman introduces the evening with a series of cheesy cardboard title cards, the play proper begins—as its source does—with a dead body submerged in water. The murdered party turns out to be Joe Glassman, a sometime off-off-Broadway experimental playwright who got in too deep with a Legend named Norma Charles. He climbs out of the bathtub where he was shot dead and begins to narrate his story. Baron hews closely to Wilder's script while spinning a fantastic and fabulous tale of a Ludlam-esque figure who, rather than dying of "artists' plague" in the late '80s as everyone thought, instead lives reclusively in an apartment on the 4th floor of a Greenwich Village walkup, with his "servant" Jane Evers, a man in all-black drag. When Joe first arrives at the Charles residence, quite by accident, he is mistaken for the man who is supposed to bury Norma's just-deceased parrot, which is held out for our inspection like a discarded prop from an old Monty Python sketch.
Hopefully you're already getting the idea of the thing. Norma, who just to be clear is a man in drag, believes that she is going to be one of this year's Kennedy Center Honorees. When she discovers that Joe is not a parrot undertaker but in fact an off-off-Broadway playwright, she decides he is the perfect person to help hone her life story into a manageable tribute for the telecast. (They want three minutes; Joe is able eventually to prune it down to 13 hours.) Joe, having nowhere else to go, takes the job.
All of the complications that you expect from the movie are reproduced here, almost always in delightfully unexpected fashion. Highlights include the visit from Norma's old pals Lolatta Polasky, Honeysuckle Rose, and Methyl Gassenberger (whose names should remind you of famous actual members of the Ridiculous Theatre Company); they team up to do Norma's brand-new 10-minute play, "Salami," which resets the Salome story in the household of a prosperous deli merchant in Gary, Indiana. There's also a train trip from New York to Washington, D.C to the strains of "On the Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe"; a reunion scene with Norma's one-time "NEIA" funder Didi St. Holt; and a subplot in which Joe gets involved with a kinky artist named Dick Schaefer who used to be Robert Mapplethorpe's assistant on a rewrite of his failed script "Antigone Goes to Hell."
It's consistently hilarious and on-target. Whore manages to yearn nostalgically for a more innocent day when subversiveness was easier, sexier, and edgier; and it applauds the courage of every artist then and now who is willing and able to take risks to make the art that matters to them.
The six-person cast is nothing short of brilliant. Led by Eric McNaughton in a bravura turn as Norma, it includes Harris Doran as Joe, Doug Brandt as Dick/Methyl/Others, Ginger Eckart as Lolatta/Didi/Others, Vanessa Hidary as Honeysuckle Rose/Salami/Others, and the scene-stealing Ken Barnett as Jane Evers. Baron's staging is a perfect blend of the Ridiculous with film-noir. The design—an amalgamation of opulence and cheesiness—is terrific; the designers are Erminio Pinque (set), Lora LaVon (costumes), Brian J. Lilienthal (lighting). Joemca provides a dazzlingly appropriate soundtrack, complete with faux sound effects and clips from stage and screen favorites including both versions of Sunset Boulevard itself. Special mention must be made of Norma Charles's costumes, which number perhaps a dozen, and all appear to be more-or-less faithful recreations of the elaborate ensembles donned by Gloria Swanson in the film; they've been created for McNaughton by The Ladies of Chesson Court—brava to them.
At the performance I attended, Ellen Stewart (La MaMa's founder and guiding spirit) introduced the evening with a quick reminiscence: Ludlam himself premiered one of his most famous plays, Bluebeard, in this very same space 34 years before. We are probably more fortunate than we know that his torch is still being carried, by Baron and other adventurous theatre artists, under the auspices of this remarkable pioneer who—like Norma Charles!—has yet to get her own Kennedy Center Honor.
