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Stage Review: Kathleen Turner is radiantly expressive in one-woman 'Tallulah'
Wednesday, October 25, 2000 By Christopher Rawson, Post-Gazette Drama Critic
We love our stars. That's why we create them, shaping them as repositories of fascination, as heightened mirrors of ourselves, either in ascension or decline. Shiny new supernova or imploding giant sun, both mesmerize.
Stars can also touch us deeply, but that rarely comes from stardom alone. In the theater, I'd say, stardom sinks deep into our hearts and minds only when put in the service of art. Stardom alone is charisma and craft, a momentary buzz, a flash of brilliance. It needs its accompanying art (Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams) to give it ballast, thrust and soul.
There are two undisputed stars on stage at the Byham this week and next: Tallulah Bankhead (1902-68) and Kathleen Turner (don't ask, it isn't relevant). Together they generate an undeniable sizzle of light, though not lasting heat. Primarily there's the potent attraction of Turner, prowling the stage, working the audience, her ample charms lit by inner fires. Fascination, yes; but true sustenance or epiphany, I think not.
I'd guess it's Tallulah that's the problem. Though she had legitimate stage triumphs in "The Little Foxes" and "The Skin of Our Teeth," those are ironic roles, more attitude than soul. Tallulah was always celebrated more for herself than for her art. Christopher Plummer doing Barrymore could also do Hamlet; Julie Harris's Belle of Amherst had those astonishing poems. But when Turner does Tallulah, there is only Tallulah to do -- such is playwright Sandra Ryan Heyward's decision. And while Tallulah is outspoken, outlandish and outtasight, she's also too close to out of mind; most of us don't know her well enough to care deeply.
Not that she isn't an immensely entertaining figure, generator of many a famous bitter-funny aphorism on sex, liquor, acting and stardom.
Heyward has gathered more of these than you've ever heard, perhaps even adding her own -- if so, very successfully, because her Tallulah seems as much of one piece as such a self-dramatizing, self-consuming torrent can be. Heyward's text is adult, laced with bracing wit.
We meet Tallulah in her spacious boudoir, her large bed high on a platform like the performance space it must have been. It's a night in July 1948, as she prepares for a triumphant party, the New York A-list summoned to pay homage to Harry Truman and to hear of her intention to run for the U.S. Senate seat from Alabama that had been her family's birthright for generations.
That's almost plausible; Tallulah was indeed that kind of a figure. So she sparkles through a 40-minute first act of delicious opinion and self-display, confiding in the audience like old friends. She gripes about the young Brando, who's out-acting her in her current play; agonizes over taking on a radio job; deals with servants and friends by phone; and happily shocks us with frank talk about sexual variation and drugs.
But the party goes badly, as we know it must -- Otherwise, where's the drama? -- and the political announcement turns into farce. So the slightly shorter Act 2, set at the hour of despair just before dawn, shows Tallulah facing up to her own decline, pulling herself together for another burst of bourbon-soaked assertion.
That's a dramatic shape of a kind. This is no simple linear bio-doc. Heyward's best device is to tie Tallulah in with Tennessee Williams by phone, exploiting the natural parallel between these two splendidly showy but deeply wounded southerners. But except for a few probing thoughts on our eager consumption of stardom, I think we end up pretty much where we started. Tallulah has no real tragedy to move us.
Still, it's Turner we'll all go to see, and she sure comes across. What a vital, blowsy force she is, registering as a star come down to earth, living in real time, subject to its vicissitudes just like the rest of us. She seems heavier than I remember, and every ounce glows with inner energy.
It's as though a spotlight were pouring through her face, lighting us with her attention. Dressed in silk pajamas and iridescent robe in Act 2, she shows an ample expanse of breast. She might be Mother Nature giving us an intimate tour behind the scenes.
And there's her splendid voice, husky and chewy. But I did miss some crucial words in the rich rumble -- I kept wanting to turn up the treble button for definition.
Still, when she teases out a few simple songs, you do briefly touch the pathos that stars and Mother Nature must feel.
"I am not a drunk," she insists. "I am a star. That's what I do."
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Where: Mellon Pittsburgh Broadway Series at Byham Theater, Downtown