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| Sylvia Miles, Stefan Gierasch, Vincent Bagetta. |
NELLIE TOOLE & CO. [Comedy-Drama/Barroom/Mystery] A: Peter Keveson; D: Jeremiah Morris; S: Hal Tine; C: Walter Florell; L: Spencer Mosse; P: Sally Sears and Primavera Productions, Ltd., i/a/w Richard Dulaney; T: Theatre Four (OB); 9/24/73-10/21/73 (32)
An atmospheric thriller, set in a Second Avenue bar, where
Moke (Stefan Gierasch), a seedy, middle-aged man, goes to answer a New York Times want ad. He ends up
working for Nellie Toole (Sylvia Miles), a loud and flashy advertising woman.
Nellie uses Moke to play-act various roles as she reenacts situations she has
experienced with people in her past whom, it is suggested, she may have killed.
The game-playing sequences are often in the vein of camp humor, and there are
references to nostalgic facts regarding Hollywood films and actors of the 40s.
Nellie uses the role-playing device as a sort of self-analytical way of
relieving herself of guilt feelings.
The play, originally done in Cologne, West Germany, was not
appreciated by the press. Clive Barnes enjoyed a few scattered moments and
praised the work of Gierasch and Miles as “mannered but rewarding,” but most
others found nothing at all to their taste. Brendan Gill called it “a miserable
evening,” and John Simon did a violent hatchet job on both the play (“insufferably
pretentious, mindless and inept”) and Miles (“better known as one of New York’s
leading party girls and gate-crashers”).
His comments came back to haunt him when, in one of the most
notorious rebuttals of a critic by one of his victims in New York annals, Miles
rewarded Simon at a party by dumping a plate of food on his head. The Times recalled the event in Simon’s
obituary: “This incident was so welcomed by the
Simon-hating press that the anecdote has been much retold,” Mr. Simon recalled. “She herself has
retold it a thousand times. And this steak tartare has since metamorphosed into
every known dish from lasagna to chop suey. It’s been so many things that you
could feed the starving orphans of India or China with it.”