New York Times "Beside Herself" Review
The following article appeared in New York Times News, Thursday 19th October 1989.
Date: Thursday, October 19, 1989
Source: By Frank Rich, New York Times News Service.
Section: NEWS
Dateline: NEW YORK
Memo: OVERNIGHT: Theater.
Copyright Chicago Tribune
EXCELLENT ACTING ISN`T ENOUGH FOR `BESIDE HERSELF`
The image that lingers from Joe Pintauro`s new play, ``Beside Herself,``
is that of four women in white negligees, each representing the same heroine
at a different age, as they comb out their hair and prepare for sleep.
The setting is a cozy house in the woods on an isolated island; the light
is the dim glow of a harvest moon. While there is nothing prurient about the
scene, it recalls the calendar art that was yesteryear`s soft-core
pornography.
The idealized women are golden icons intended to be worshiped from a
distance by an audience of men.
It`s a tableau that can stand for the entire evening. While Pintauro is a
serious writer with a sincere mission, his play apotheosizes women from afar
while pretending to understand them from within.
``Beside Herself`` is a character study that says more about its author
than the woman at center stage. Not even the four excellent actresses in the
Circle Repertory Company`s production can rescue Mary, Pintauro`s middle-aged
poet of the woods, from the fog of sentimental male abstraction.
As befits a play set near a peat bog and inhabited by the ghosts of
Mary`s past selves, waves of dry-ice smoke roll persistently through the
scenery.
The crisis faced by the lonely present-day Mary (Lois Smith) has to do
with a long-ago misbegotten marriage. Betrayed by the man she loved, she had
instead married his lackluster brother. Now both men are dead, and the barren
Mary, unfulfilled as a writer, schoolteacher, mother and wife, must decide
whether life is worth living.
Enter Augie-Jake (William Hurt), a UPS deliveryman much her junior. Mary
thinks the gentleman caller is a double for the man she really loved.
Augie-Jake, whose own troubled history is littered with betrayals, is
looking for the mother he never really had.
The omnipresent trio of younger Marys-pre-teen (Melissa Joan Hart), post-
teen (Calista Flockhart) and pre-middle-age (Susan Bruce)-is exploited mainly
for time-travel jokes (some amusing), expository convenience and open-
and-shut debates about past and present motives.
Though Mary`s corporeal presence is quadrupled, the audience`s knowledge
of her interior life is not. She remains a blurry masculine fantasy of
womanhood.
No blame can be placed on John Bishop`s deft, well-cast staging, which
uses a leaf-strewn John Lee Beatty set and velvety Dennis Parichy lighting to
transport the audience into the dreamy woods of a contemporary fairy tale
(complete with Grimm bear played by the unlucky Edward Seamon).
Hurt, after an absence of seven years, has chosen to return to the Circle
Rep in an assignment far less demanding than even the minor roles of his
apprenticeship.
With his gruff monosyllables and burly demeanor, Hurt meets the modest
requirements of the small-town UPS man perfectly: William Bendix
impersonations don`t get much better than this.
Any comments mail me at eric@ezz.u-net.com
Eric Last 2nd September 1996
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