259. TALES FROM RED VIENNA
The knowledge that Nina Arianda, so brilliant in VENUS IN
FURS (which I saw) and BORN YESTERDAY (which I missed), was starring in David
Grimm’s new play, TALES FROM RED VIENNA, at the Manhattan Theatre Club’s City
Center Stage 1, was made even more exciting by the show’s alluring publicity
photo of her in a widow’s veil. Unfortunately, the photo is far more glamorous
than the role she plays in this disappointing drama set in 1920 Vienna, where
Ms. Arianda’s character, Heléna Altman, an aristocrat whose husband, Karl
Hupka, was reported killed at Ypres during World War II, is forced to turn to
prostitution to survive. The wordless first scene of the play, which takes
place behind a sheer, dark curtain in the threadbare apartment she’s been
forced to move to with her elderly, commonsense housekeeper, Edda Schmidt
(Kathleen Chalfant), shows her clearly reluctant encounter on a tabletop with a
bearded client. This gent will turn out to be Béla Hoyos (Michael Esper), a young Hungarian
journalist and acquaintance of a more fortunate aristocratic woman, the snooty gossip
Mutzi von Fessendorf (Tina Benko), who is herself in an unhappy marriage. Later, when Béla learns who Heléna is,
he becomes her conflicted suitor (one who, because of the social rot he partly
represents, gives her a snort of cocaine). Béla, a committed Marxist socialist,
also represents the contemporary political regime, which was briefly under the
control of the social democrats, thus giving the play the color in its title,
and which deprived aristocrats like Mutzi of their former status. It's too bad that the political background of the play remains just that, background.
TALES
FROM RED VIENNA, flatly staged by Kate Whoriskey, appears at first to be an historical
drama exposing the social corruption in Austria’s postwar society, when
numerous newly impoverished women, many from the middle and upper classes,
found themselves in Heléna’s predicament; it isn’t long before it goes off
track and becomes conventional romantic wiener schnitzel, with a dramatic twist at
the end of Act Two signaled by the arrival of the mysterious Karl Hupka (Lucas
Hall). This ultimately turns the three-act play (remember them?) into a
variation on A DOLL’S HOUSE, except that it’s not the woman who walks out the
door at the end.
Some
topicality--the theme of anti-Semitism--is introduced by Rudy Zuckermayer (overacted by Michael Goldsmith), a Jewish boy
infatuated with Heléna, while an attempt at
comedy is provided by Edda, the wise old housekeeper, some of whose would-be laughs
stem from her fondness for a nip or two, others from anachronistic cracks like,
“Now you’ve given him a stiffy.” Ms. Chalfant, normally one of New York’s most
dependable character actresses, is unable to make a real person out of the role; for one thing,
she wears even more makeup than Ms. Arianda.
Very little rings true, either
in the acting (Ms. Benko comes closest), the dialogue, or the characters, and the old-fashioned plot
development that justifies Act Three is highly questionable. The sense of period
authenticity is limited to the snatches of Viennese waltzes we hear (courtesy
of sound designers Rob Milburn and Michael Bodeen), Anita Yavich’s lovely costumes
(although the impoverished Helena and Edda wear clothes that are far too neat and fine looking), and John
Lee Beatty’s two sets, one showing Heléna’s living room, and one the cemetery
where, implausibly, Heléna spends Act Two, near the grave of her husband. Neither
is up to Mr. Beatty’s usual standard (as is, for example, his just-opened
MOTHERS AND SONS).
By the time the play has run
its course after two and a half hours, so has our patience with TALES FROM RED VIENNA, a stale piece of strudel from playwright Grimm.
