85. IT HAS TO BE YOU
Many people have had the experience of seeing a widowed,
aging parent, whose assets they one day hoped to inherit, disappoint them by
marrying anew, even perhaps at an age when many others are in their dotage or
suffering from a fatal illness. Usually, such marriages, however they may
affect the financial dreams of the children involved, are between people of
comparable age, so the children, whatever their objections are on other
grounds, can’t make much of a fuss about how old the new partner is.
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| Catherine Butterfield, Adam Ferrara, Peggy J. Scott. Photo: Kim T. Sharp. |
If an elderly father were to marry a much younger woman,
though, there would certainly be suspicions of gold-digging intentions on the
lady’s part, but such situations are common enough not to raise too many
eyebrows, unless the amount of money involved is egregious; remember the
scandal when actress Anna Nicole Smith wed the billionaire J. Howard Marshall,
when Ms. Smith was 26 and Mr. Marshall 89? On the other hand, for a wealthy
woman in her 80s to marry a man younger than half her age is rather rare, which is why the late-life marriage of Oscar-winning actress Celeste
Holm was news. In 2004, when celebrating her 87th birthday at Sardi’s, the still
glamorous Ms. Holm shocked her guests by using the occasion to marry
her 41-year-old, opera singer boyfriend, Frank Basile, whom she had met in 1999. Two
years earlier, her worried sons began seeking ways to protect Ms.
Holm’s $13 million in assets; after she died, in 2012, at 95, the costly legal
battle that had begun between the sons and Mr. Basile centered on the sale of the late actress’s expensive
Central Park West apartment.
Regardless of whether both parties were truly in love, with
Ms. Holm’s money being secondary to Mr. Basile’s happiness, the subject of such
a relationship—elderly woman and prime-of-life man—and its effect on the
woman’s grown children, certainly raises interesting dramatic possibilities.
Catherine Butterfield—the author of IT HAS TO BE YOU, the December-May romantic
comedy at the Dorothy Strelsin Theatre (in the Abingdon Theatre Complex)—says
that Ms. Holm’s story was her inspiration, but that doesn’t mean the play is about the
star. Further, there’s only a 27-year separation between the still
hot-to-trot heroine, who’s a mere septuagenarian, and her gerontophile Romeo.
In the play, Mindy (Ms. Butterfield, the playwright), a
Nyack realtor in her late 40s, and her brother Frank (Adam Ferrara), five years
younger, who runs a failing New Jersey tuxedo shop, rush to the home of Dorothy
(Peggy J. Scott), their well-to-do, well-preserved, 75-year-old, mother, when
they learn from a neighbor that she’s been dancing naked on the balcony of her
lovely Massachusetts home. They’re convinced that Mom is sinking into dementia
and that it’s time to move her into a senior residence; although they love Dorothy,
their concern about her is partly rooted in the selfish hope (based on real
need, especially on Frank’s part) that they’ll share in the sale of her
valuable home. When they arrive they discover the cause of her eccentric
behavior is Burt (Peter Davenport), the good-looking, 48-year old piano tuner,
painter, and gardening maven, with whom she’s been living. They insultingly
call him a “gardener,” just as the Holm offspring dismissed Basile as a
“waiter.”
The result is a lightweight play written with just enough
wisecracking charm to keep you gently engaged during its 90 minutes, but one whose premise is never really convincing and whose
performance doesn’t fully satisfy. Is Burt the gigolo Mindy and Frank accuse
him of being, out to steal Dorothy’s riches from under them? Can he seriously
be in love with Dot, as he calls her? Do Mindy and Frank have the right to
deprive their mother of her happiness?
When Jed (Jeffrey C. Hawkins), Dorothy’s youngest (and
favorite) child, a gay set decorator, arrives from Hollywood, things move in a
new but predictable direction. Before the play ends, however, a broken heart
will be mended and the famous Isham Jones-Gus Kahn tune referenced by the
play’s title will, when sung at the piano, offer pleasantly sentimental solace
to both those on stage and those in the audience.
Ms. Butterfield has a wholly acceptable idea in questioning
the motives of otherwise fond children who can’t find happiness in their own
love lives yet consider it perfectly okay to interfere in what gives their parent
joy on the grounds of what they deem its unseemliness. However, the free-spirited
Dorothy, who’s been making artistic studies of her nude body for years (to her
children’s surprise), and is even now engaged in an art project involving
taking pictures of herself every day at 3:00 p.m., must surely have behaved
unconventionally before this. It’s a bit of a stretch to believe that her kids
are so stunned by her current actions as to think they befit placing her in a
home. be
There are other stretches, including the hokey resolution,
but, let’s face it, you need stronger playwriting elastic—despite the example
of the Holms-Basile affair—if you expect an audience to buy a torrid romance
between a woman nearly three decades years older than her beau, especially one
who’s spent nearly half a century in the closet. Older man, much younger woman?
Fine. We see such stories every day. Older woman, younger man? Of course, as
long as the gap isn't that large. It’s not hard to accept the 33-year-old Ben
Foster being with the 47-year-old Robin Wright, or Hugh Jackman being married
to a woman 13 years older, but the Dorothy and Burt romance doesn’t go down
quite so easily, even with 19 years shaved off the Holm-Basile relationship.
There’s certainly a lot of humorous potential in what goes on between such a
couple in private, but barely anything of the sort makes its way into Ms.
Butterfield’s comedy, which aims to build up sympathy for Dorothy’s late-blooming passion. Anyone who objects is just a geriatric-hating reactionary with no respect for old people’s individuality.
A woman of 75—even one with a youthful sparkle who dyes her
perfectly coiffed hair blond, adds red streaks for highlights, and wears
skintight pants and colorful chiffon ops (costumes are by Sherry Martinez) that
make her look more like a denizen of Boca Raton than upscale Massachusetts—is a hard sell as an overripe cougar. Regardless of how
annoyingly the obnoxious Mindy and the more hapless Frank go about
sticking their nose into the affair, they definitely can be excused
for finding the whole thing icky.
Perhaps the play might work better if it weren’t played so straightforwardly.
The Strelsin Theatre is a tiny room seating 60 around a postage stamp acting
area, here designed on a shoestring by
Ian Paul Guzzone, and lit by Michael Megliolia, to comprise several locales, but mainly Dorothy’s elegant
home. Such an intimate space certainly needs a toned-down approach from director
Stuart Ross, but too low key a performance is bound to dampen the spirited comic mood the piece requires; this, though, is essentially what happens. At the performance I saw, the pacing
tended to drag, the smoothly professional cast (apart from the excellent Ms. Scott) failed to glow, and too many of Ms. Butterfield’s
sprightly zingers were thrown away. I chuckled, but laughs were sparse;
it was champagne without the fizz. Lacking more emphasis on its comedy,
the play couldn’t survive its contrivances. Which is why, when the play ends, with Dorothy and Burt singing “It Had to Be You” to each other, they should be looking deeply into each other’s eyes, wondering if it’s really true.