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An actress prepares, pace Stanislavski, bourbon flask replaces dangling cigarette. New Haven tryouts for Broadway drama, a leading lady (Gena Rowlands) in upheaval. "A play about aging" is bad news for the diva struggling to keep middle age at bay, the author (Joan Blondell) might be her a couple of decades down the road, her younger self might be the teenage fan run over in a downpour (Laura Johnson). Rehearsing a slap, she drops to the ground and refuses to get up. "Do you expect to be funny in this scene?" Her co-star (John Cassavetes) is a former flame and an "unsympathetic" part, "the audience doesn't like me. I can't afford to be in love with you." The director (Ben Gazzara) laments the sombering of the medium's glamor, the seasoned producer (Paul Stewart) is the long-suffering type. Front and center is the spiraling heroine, raging against the curtain brought down mid-improv, doffing her shades to reveal scars. "I'm in trouble. I'm not acting." The junction of unkempt existence and mutating art, the therapeutic proscenium makes for some of Cassavetes' most unsettled and breathtakingly dense forms. Guises and ruptures of the métier, cf. Cukor's A Double Life, horror and comedy of the process. "A misplaced phenomena" at the séance, the gothic apparition wrestling with naturalistic surfaces begs to differ, "no fucking spirit." Premiere time, the sloshed star stumbles out of the alley and into the dressing room. Gazarra steps out for an intermission scotch in a dab of Brooks' The Producers, meanwhile the classic Hollywood of Blondell and Stewart huddles in the modernist gloom. "Listen, look, let's take this play, let's dump it upside down and see if we can't find something human in it." Pièce de résistance, Rowlands and Cassavetes onstage like the bowery Fontanne and Lunt, the love language of vaudeville shadowboxing bringing it all to a standing ovation. "In some nutty way, it seemed like something real." Bergman in After the Rehearsal returns the compliment to Persona. With Zohra Lampert, Lady Rowlands, John Tuell, Fred Draper, John Finnegan, and Katherine Cassavetes.
--- Fernando F. Croce |