<dcljr@stat.tamu.edu>, and thanks go to Jason Jones for pointing Donald to this article.
The central character in ``Beside Herself,'' Mary Candee, is a woman whose life has not turned out the way she'd imagined -- who married a man she didn't love, buried two children, left her husband before his final illness, and now lives alone in a house built too close to a foggy highway on an island off the New England coast. She's forever trying to have something done about animals that keep getting run over on this road: to have their wounds attended to, their bodies removed, the general threat to them noticed by the authorities. (``Lucky for these animals I live here,'' she tells someone, importantly, at one point.) But the authorities don't seem to heed her warnings and reports: the animals suffer or die anyway, and nobody ever comes. Pintauro's heroine is, in short, a representation of Unfulfilled Womanhood, and if she were played by any actress other than Miss Smith or had been conceived by a less subtle, elegant-minded playwright, she would probably be a cliche.
We first see her going through boxes she's brought down from the attic and looking for things to discard. A U.P.S. man (Edward Seamon) arrives, not to deliver anything but to take a sort of leave: they're pulling the plug on his wife soon, and he'll be retiring, so he's making the rounds, saying goodbye to all the people on his route. Miss Smith and the U.P.S. man share a piece of pie, chatting unsentimentally. No sooner has he left than a sort of mist begins to seep onto the stage. Three characters materialize -- apparitions, obviously -- and enter into lively conversation with Miss Smith. There is a little girl, about nine or ten (Melissa Joan Hart); an older girl, in loafers and ankle socks, wearing a high ponytail and carrying a pad (Calista Flockhart); and a young woman in the prime of life, dressed all in violet (Susan Bruce). At what point you realize that these females are not creations of the heroine's imagination but earlier versions of herself is probably a matter of individual psyche, but enough false clues are laid -- in the ways the apparitions speak and relate to the heroine and to one another -- to keep all of us wondering for a time about whether they are ghosts from her past, characters in a book she has read, or simply people she has invented to keep her company. By the same token, when one of the apparitions sights a new U.P.S. man, who looks just like the man the heroine really loved (brother of the man she married), coming down the walk it's anybody's guess whether he will turn out to be yet another apparition or solid flesh and blood.
The new U.P.S. man, Augie-Jake -- played by William Hurt in a handle-bar mustache and with a wrong-side-of-the-tracks accent that make him look and sound a little like the young Rob Reiner -- proves to be very much flesh and blood, but not in a way that either Pintauro's audience or the three apparitions might expect. He's a pathetic rather than an attractive figure (though Hurt gives him a certain coarse charm), and it's this juxtaposition of the romantic and the banal -- like the juxtaposition of ethereal and mundane elements in Lois Smith's persona -- that makes Pintauro's play alternately lovely and piquant rather than appalling.
The dramatic premise of ``Beside Herself'' is not all that different from the premise of most Tennessee Williams plays: lonely older woman, hungering for sex and self-definition, offered a crack at happiness by the arrival of virile young man. In fact, the relationship between Mary and Augie-Jake in ``Beside Herself'' mirrors the relationship between Lady Torrence and Val Xavier, the characters played by Vanessa Redgrave and Kevin Anderson in the current revival of ``Orpheus Descending'' (in which play, by the way, Miss Smith created the role of Carol Cutrere). But Pintauro's Augie-Jake is presented as neither savior nor martyr. He's not a sex symbol or a musician; he doesn't dress like a rock star or lead the picturesque life of a drifter. He's just a shy, awkward man, lonely because he's preoccupied with his health, and probably preoccupied with his health for the same reasons he's awkward and shy.
Pintauro also demands less than Williams of his audience and of his heroine: he never asks us to believe that fate has offered Mary a chance at happiness in the form of Augie-Jake -- only that she's been given in opportunity to change her sense of herself in a small way. It's as though Pintauro had set out to dismantle the older-woman/ blue-collar-stud cliche. And he rings changes on just about every other literary device -- from wounded-animal imagery (Mr. Seamon makes a cameo appearance as a dying bear in a late dream sequence) to the use of flashbacks. Instead of watching a character relive past events (Willy Loman style), we see characters from the past taking an unnatural interest in what is going on in the present. Or else we're watching her younger selves watch the heroine go through the motions of her life. It's funny and poignant, and one of the best uses I've seen of the device of representing the changing or the divided self by more than one actor. Like the ghosts in the graveyard in ``Our Town,'' each of the apparitions knows only her part of what has happened in the world and in the heroine's life. (The little girl doesn't know that the Second World War is over; the young girl doesn't know whom the heroine wound up marrying; the woman in violet doesn't know that the heroine's husband died.) The fact that each can understand only what she could be expectred to furnishes occasions for drama and passion.
There's a generosity toward actors in the way Pintauro has given each of the apparitions a thematic and psychological function: Miss Hart is the child who was too good, too pliant, too eager to please; Miss Flockhart is the self-righteous hothead; and Miss Bruce is the sexual side, with whom the heroine has to ally herself -- relinquishing her childish and morally passionate sides -- in order to make Augie-Jake her friend. No actress is better suited than Miss Smith to the task of playing a character who has to listen to the events of her life and allow emotions to cross her face, but some exquisite direction (from John Bishop) has gone into regulating the performances of the three other actresses, molding their contributions into a single entity that Miss Smith can play. And the staging and the design are at least as important to the production as Mr. Pintauro's words. Sometimes it is the lighting designer (Dennis Parichy) or the costumer (Ann Emonts) who -- casting a moment of morning light between scenes or providing each of the women with a different variety of white shift -- suggests something about how each version of the heroine would greet the night or the day.
As for Mr. Hurt, whose work I have never much admired, he comes into his own here, giving what I think is the only real performance I've ever seen him give onstage: for once, Hurt isn't playing himself. Instead, in addition to creating a specific individual -- utterly unlike the formless mass of suffering he usually projects -- he manages to evoke some of the ways relations between men and women have changed over time. I couldn't say how he does it -- which, I guess, is what makes it art -- but it has something to do with the deployment of passive energy, which is, after all, his characteristic tool as an actor. Only once -- with Augie-Jake expressing anger at the machinations of demanding, possessive women who presume too much on being kissed -- does he allow the beleaguered, put-upon Hurt to briefly rear his head. You can't help thinking about the recent events in Hurt's life that have made headline news, but it's to Hurt's credit that the scene, as played, is comic and about someone besides himself.
-- Mimi Kramer