It's a curious sensation that I get watching talented actors do their utmost in an insignificant play. Of course, I understand that paying acting jobs are at a premium in this area, and that therefore many performers are willing to play in just about anything so long as it's reasonably respectable and allows them to exercise their craft. And I recognize too that when stars of the quality of Alan Alda and George Segal, Barbra Streisand and Diana Sands have been involved with a project, it has the tendency of making the it look momentous, regardless of the facts.
Still, I have to admit that when I watch skillful actors giving their all to a piece of meaningless fluff, I feel myself wanting to cry out: "Why are you doing this silly show?! You're too good for this bauble, you deserve better, you deserve a solid script with a plot that matters, with powerful writing and emotional depth!"
And then I imagine the infinitely noble actors doing that thing I've seen so many times, pointing out supposed virtues in the play with the same sincerity as a protective parent defending a wayward child. And at that point in the (imagined) exchange, I just stop, I protest no further, because who wants to prove to these honest guardians that their beloved infant is a badly behaved moron. It's a lose-lose situation and best for everyone if we never get that far.
Which brings me to Bill Manhoff's The Owl and the Pussycat, currently showing at Ybor City's Italian Club in a production by a relatively new company called Yo Soy Irini. It's a formulaic play about a neurotic pseudo-intellectual and the hooker with a heart of gold whom he comes to love, and it's played with admirable (if finally pointless) urgency by Jessica Alexander and Billy Martinez. Alexander is particularly superb in this production, as Doris W. (she keeps changing her last name) she shows us a wide range of emotions from adult sexual aggressiveness to childlike distress, and she's so good you can't help but wish she were in a different play.
Martinez is almost as effective, playing would-be writer Felix Sherman as an excitable nebbish who doesn't know his own hormones and who has a tendency to verbally abuse in the morning the same hooker he was abundantly enjoying on the previous evening. Together on stage for two-and-a-half hours, these two fine actors prove that even laudable acting can't lend weight to a mediocre script — and that yesterday's "Wow!" (more about this later) is tomorrow's "So what?" This is a trivial play and beyond redemption.
The story it tells is simple and often redundant. Felix Sherman is a bookshop clerk who imagines himself "a man of intellect," and who writes oft-rejected fiction on the side. One day, he's peering at neighbor Doris W. through his binoculars, and he sees her accept cash for sexual services. He complains to his landlord, and she's thrown out of her apartment. Angry and nearly penniless, she comes to Felix's apartment and demands a place to stay. After some reluctance, he offers her a couch — but she's unable to sleep. At first she just asks him to read to her, but eventually she decides that she's falling in love with him and tries to seduce him. She succeeds. End of Act One — and of virtually all the novelty that the play has to offer.
Because what follows in the following two acts are mostly variations on the themes we've already witnessed. Felix, we learn, has a tendency to be angry at Doris when he's not feeling amorous. Doris, we hear, is genuinely in love with him but has a tendency to fall in love "three or four times a week." Felix tells Doris to go away; she does, then comes back. Doris goes away as if for good, but Felix asks her to return. Now she's there, now she's not. Now he's angry, now he's horny. Now he decides to educate her and she goes along. Now it turns out she was only pretending to go along. And so on and so forth, with no possible conclusion except the one that takes place, and no revelation deeper than the discovery that Felix's real name is "Fred." And let's not forget the long stretches of Act Three, when we're supposed to believe, against all logic, that Felix is seriously considering suicide.
But of all the problems that the script has, it's biggest is simply that it's outdated. This must not have seemed a likely prospect in 1964, when Owl had its original Broadway incarnation. Thirty-eight years ago, the big news was that producer Philip Rose had the courage to cast African-American Diana Sands with Alan Alda in the play, making Owl another step forward in the Civil Rights debate that permeated the whole country.
Biracial casting and a script that addressed sexual matters with relative directness must have seemed amazingly innovative in 1964, and there was still that sexual edge in 1971, when the movie was made with Streisand and Segal — and with a script much rewritten by Buck Henry. But as everyone knows, the last 30 years have seen an enormous increase in explicit sexuality in theater and film, and we're not likely to remember Owl because of the use of the word "poon-tang." As for biracial casting, well, the present production doesn't go that way. It's unlikely that, had it done so, it would have made much of a difference.
The show does have a few more good points. Deborah Barone's direction keeps the action moving swiftly, and the set, uncredited in my program, is a credibly messy living-room-with-kitchenette. (The Royal typewriter looks older than 1960s, though). Doris' miniskirts are another nice touch, as are the pajamas that the two lovers share on one of their first morning-afters.
But a word to the wise, Yo Soy Irini: You've taken a nice step in finding a space for theater at the Italian Club. Now earn our respect by staging important plays, not tired dinner theater fare. Even with a minor boom in small Tampa theater companies, there's still a lot of contemporary drama that's not getting done here.
Thanks for bringing theater back to Seventh Avenue.
Next: Become indispensable.
Contact Mark E. Leib at mark.leib@ weeklyplanet.com or call 813-248-8888, ext. 305.
The Owl and the PussycatThe Italian Club
1731 E. Seventh Ave.
Ybor City
813-719-2019
Through July 7
8 p.m. Fri. and Sat., 6 p.m. Sun.
$15 at door, $12 in advance
This article appears in Jul 3-9, 2002.