Ladies' Night

Jesus, am I not lucky to live in New York?

Tonight I went to First Lady Suite in a tiny little theater on the Lower East Side, a place normally only used for rehearsals and readings. Maybe 150 seats. Tickets were $15; Jon kindly sprang for my seat to help forestall my bankruptcy.

Featured in the all-Equity cast were Mary Testa, Julia Murney, Mary Beth Peil, Donna Lynn Champlin, James Hindman and Diane Sutherland. They were the ones I'd heard of previously--Cheryl Stern, Sherry D. Boone, Robyn Hussa and Ruth Gottschall were every bit as good (which is to say tremendous). Talent that should be playing for thousands of people at a hundred dollars a head is now playing for tiny audiences for a pittance. It's sad and it's glorious.

Mostly glorious. Michael John LaChiusa's most accessible piece, it puts each of four First Ladies in a scenario depicting (among other things) the pain of being next to power without holding it, of being in the spotlight with no story of your own to tell.

My favorite of the four stories, "Over Texas," features Champlin and Sutherland as the secretaries of Jackie and Jack Kennedy on Air Force One, approaching Dallas on November 22nd, 1963. Sutherland is sweet and serene as Evelyn Lincoln, but Champlin here provides the evening's first acting tour de force as the insecure Mary Gallagher, struggling to reconcile her pride in her high-profile job with the mundane and demeaning demands of the First Lady. She sings LaChiusa's fragmented, often dissonant music as a direct reflection of her state of mind, winning loud laughter and great sympathy. Hussa appears as Jackie in a heartbreaking dream sequence in which she tells her side of the story and envisions disaster to follow. (Gottschall makes a hysterical cameo as Lady Bird Johnson, otherwise not a part of the show.)

"Where's Mamie?" has Stern's Mamie Eisenhower and Boone's Marian Anderson in the roles of Lucy and Ethel, traveling through time and space and taking on disguises to retrieve Ike (Hindman) from the arms of his mistress and convince him to intercede in Little Rock. This piece is so bizarrely contrived that it works (despite some slackness in the pacing), daffy and exquisitely beautiful at the same time. Stern's comic acting is a delight, and Boone summons the spirit of Anderson gloriously.

The third section, "Olio," is a curiosity--the briefest part of the show by far, it's the only piece that has neither insight into nor sympathy with its First Lady (Bess Truman, played amusingly by Hindman in drag), and it abandons the otherwise pervasive theme of flight. It might easily be dropped (as it was for the PS Classics recording) but for (a) the need to bridge the gap between Mamie Eisenhower and Eleanor Roosevelt, and (b) the fact that it's the funniest scene by far, a delightful few minutes of physical comedy that allow the audience to settle in for the more serious final segment.

That segment, "Eleanor Slept Here," uses Amelia Earhart's plane as a backdrop to address journalist Lorena Hickok (Testa), her quiet love for Eleanor, and her sad resignation to watching the once-shy woman grow to the point that she no longer needs the encouragement of her companion. The earliest piece chronologically, it paradoxically features the three most modern women of the show in Earhart (Murney, thrilling in a too-brief appearance), Roosevelt (Peil, regal and lovely) and Hickok. Testa's performance is the evening's other masterpiece, blending her signature acerbic delivery and excellent comic timing with a sense of real pathos; she too rarely gets the chance to play such fully realized characters.

The bare-bones production omits some bits of staging that would have been helpful in clarifying the action (though money seems to have at least been spent on lovely period costumes and white gowns for the finale), but it doesn't matter with this cast. One wishes that these had been the women chosen to create the recording two years ago...though I find that their voices still ring loudly enough in my mind.