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Kansas City's Online Journal of the Performing Arts

America, like most other nations, can lay claim to a long tradition of kooks, oddballs and three-dollar bills. The British, with their foppish aristocrats, made it sound fun. Francis Henry Egerton, eighth earl of Bridgewater, preferred his twelve dogs to people and each pet had its own servant.

Americans, with their puritanical beliefs that anyone who is unlike them must be trouble, tend to view eccentrics in a saturnine light. The late J.D. Salinger's five-decade self-exile, neither publishing nor even acknowledging that he had ever been an author, mystifies and infuriates even his fans.

E.L. Doctorow's recent novel, Homer & Langley, retells the story of the Collyer brothers of Central Park, whose "manse" in Homer's fictional narration was first their sanctuary, but over the decades became their retreat from the outside world and ultimately their prison, where they both died. Doctorow gives a lyrical voice to these troubled brothers without trying to psychologically explain them in the contemporary American therapeutic manner of confessional memoirs.

The same sympathetic imagination is proffered in the Doug Wright, Scott Frankel and Michael Korie musical Grey Gardens, based on the infamous lives of the aunt and cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy, which premièred at The Unicorn Theatre on January 29. This version - like the Broadway musical of 2006, the recent HBO movie, and the original 1975 Maysles brothers documentary - presents Edith and her daughter "Little" Edie as two-of-a-kind misfits.

Grey Gardens refers to the East Hampton, Long Island, estate of the wealthy Bouvier Beales. It is a world populated by the Dustin Hoffman-Tom Cruise relationship in Rain Man and the preoccupied Wonderland of Russell Crowe's mathematician John Nash in A Beautiful Mind. The ease with which the stage collaborators made the Beales into caricatures is restrained throughout this intimate production.

The musical is in two parts. The first covers an afternoon in 1941, when young Edie (played to perfection by Cathy Barnett) is preparing for her engagement party to Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. (played by Brandon Sollenberger). With the Kennedys en route and her father expected soon, Edie gradually discovers her mother's (Kathleen Warfel) intentions. Edith, with her homosexual "friend" George Gould Strong (Seth Golay), has been rehearsing a group of songs. Believing she is a singer with potential, Edith works on arias and shameless folk tunes. Like a mother who cannot stand to be usurped by her daughter, Edith alternately preens and screams at her daughter. Doug Wright's script may evince memories of Joan Crawford and Douglas Sirk's high-costume dramas; but working with real people, he keeps the outrageous lines to a minimum. The audience never feels it is a voyeur's companion.

The second half opens in 1973 as Grey Gardens (the house) has slipped into the Twilight Zone. The outside looks rundown (nicely, before the show begins and throughout intermission there are recorded meows of cats; evidently, the Beales collected more than fifty); the interior revolves from Edith's messy bedroom to stairways leading to nowhere, and most differently from the first half, both mother and daughter speak directly to the audience. We have slipped into the characters' consciousnesses. Wright performed this trick in his masterful monologue I Am My Own Wife, in which he took a similarly eccentric real individual (a German transvestite during World War II) and made a character out an enigma and back again.

The songs begin to stack up, and magically the audience is drawn further into Big and Little Edie's finely constructed lives, in which the past (Edith's singing, Edie's courtships) is interwoven with their present circumstances (they eat tuna from cans and live filthily). The conceit of the characters, primarily Little Edie, speaking to the audience is never commented upon; and the smooth way in which characters from their past drift in and out for musical numbers is one more way Wright and his collaborators make the true-life Beales' topsy-turvy world appear human. Though the Beales would be reality-TV fodder these days, a sense of formal nostalgia wafts through the musical, softening the documentary, without forgetting the strange circumstances that Jackie Kennedy's own family allowed these women to exist in their own urine. A radio broadcast at the beginning supposedly quotes the former first lady, when the women's existence was revealed, as saying "it is a private family matter."

The two lead actresses play their roles with relish, without ever tipping their hands. Breaking into song, muttering, reminiscing, possibly hallucinating, both Edith and Edie are the sorts of characters that Hollywood stars dig into with Oscar expectations. Yet, Warfel and Barnett seem less to act than inhabit their characters. Their goal is to convey the mystery and the sadness of these women who are stuck in an entangled past together, even when, quite movingly at the end, Little Edie attempts to break away and restart her own life.

The Unicorn's version, directed by Nedra Dixon, communicates the sadness and the strangeness of Edith and Edie Beale's years together, with the understanding that it need not be thoroughly dispiriting if one can sing about it. We can all use a bit more singing in our lives.

REVIEW
The Unicorn Theatre
Grey Gardens
Runs January 29 to February 28 (reviewed January 29, 2010)
The Unicorn Theatre
3828 Main Street, Kansas City MO
For tickets call 816-531-7529 or online at www.UnicornTheatre.org

Top photo: Cathy Barnett as "Little" Edie Beale. Photo by Cynthia Levin

By Steve Shapiro

Theatre Contributor (Past writer)
Steve Shapiro has been writing about the arts for over twenty-five years. He wrote and broadcast a weekly radio book review on KCUR-FM for ten years, and has contributed to NPR's Morning Edition book segment.

As a contributor to local publications such as KCMetropolis.org, KC Tribune.com, The Kansas City Star, Review, The Pitch, and Helicon 9, he has published essays and criticism on art, books, cinema, theater and the cultural Zeitgeist.

A chapter on the museum architects Frank Lloyd Wright and Steven Holl was published in the anthology, The Sixth Surface: Steven Holl Lights the Nelson-Atkins Museum (2007). On the side, he juggles Dachshunds and is available to moderate book groups.