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And Now From New York
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10831 |
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The Arts
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7 / 1986 |
2,391 Words |
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Sy Syna
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It's a nimble feat for a playwright to create an appealing and personable character and, at the same time, endow that character with beliefs and a life-style which are reprehensible. Shakespeare achieves it magnificently with such characters as the Machiavellian Richard III and that bloated rapscallion Falstaff. While far from being Shakespeare, Wallace Shawn effects a neat turn with both of his title characters in his play, Aunt Dan and Lemon. Aunt Dan is beguiling and Lemon is winsome as a young girl; yet Lemon turns into a Nazi admirer and Aunt Dan puts personal gratification above moral values. Indeed, it's her chief moral value. Her other moral value is to always tell the truth, though it's often akin to a blast of cold sea-spray on a hot day.
Aunt Dan and Lemon, a coproduction between London's Royal Court Theater and the New York Shakespeare Festival, was originally produced in London with author Shawn in the cast. It has now reopened here with an all-American cast, though it has again been directed by Max Stafford-Clark, the Royal Court's artistic director. The American cast seemed ill at ease with British characters' accents, though they managed well enough with the new American characters.
Actually, the entire play is discomfitting. We're drawn to Aunt Dan (Pamela Reed) by her brashness and assurance. But she's a shocker--amoral and venial; sleeping now with a married Oxford don, and then again with a woman who takes her fancy. She dotes on Henry Kissinger and dislikes various other people. That she is corrupt and decidedly eccentric is not particularly jolting. What is so shocking about her is that she pours all this into the eager and naïve ears of Lemon (Kathy Whitton Baker), then a child, later a sickly adult living in London. Because Lemon idolizes Aunt Dan, she can't discriminate between the good of Aunt Dan's honesty and the evil of her personal philosophy, with which she is deluged in a Niagara of anecdote and opinion. Thus Lemon grows up with a warped value system which leads her to embrace fascism.
Where, you might ask, are her parents during all this? Mother (Ellen Parker) and Father (Paul Perri), both at Oxford, are of that breed of supposedly enlightened adult which believes it an article of liberal faith that children should have nothing censored for them. Aunt Dan is a friend of the family and has free access to Lemon's mind.
The result? A woman who sips fruit drinks and reads with admiration books about Hitler's Germany. "We enjoy a certain way of life," she tells us, "because there are other people who are willing to take the job of killing on their backs." Explore the ramifications of that remark and you'll understand why six million Jews were murdered out of ten million killed by Nazis; all done to purify the mythic German race and provide it with lebensraum (living space).
It then follows logically that an individual life can't be worth much to people espousing such a belief. Sure enough, we learn, "no society has ever considered the taking of life an unpardonable crime or even a major tragedy."
Shawn's intent is not to provoke us into refuting Lemon's logic, but to examine the process whereby an impressionable youngster has her values shaped in the first place.
The play's flaw is that
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