If the moral message of a play were enough to make or break it as an experience, Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks would be up in the dramatic heavens with Barefoot in the Park and On Golden Pond. After all, Six Dance Lesson's implications are morally impeccable: We must try to love one another, we must be tolerant of gays and the elderly, we must be kind, we must see the way past our differences. These are sentiments with which any thinking person can agree, and when we come upon them in Six Dance Lessons, we nod our heads in instant acknowledgment.
But the fact is, moral rectitude isn't enough to make great art; if it were, The Andy Griffith Show would stand out as humankind's highest achievement. Real art has intellectual and emotional depth, originality of insight, sometimes originality of form; it reaches for truths that can't be summed up in a TV Guide synopsis, truths that are too difficult and unfamiliar for easy enunciation. If you look at just a few great plays of the last century — say, Three Sisters, Pygmalion, Mother Courage, Waiting for Godot, and Angels in America, Part I — you find that a correct moral attitude is assumed in them, almost in passing; that the centrality of kindness, compassion, etc. is taken for granted even before the curtain rises.
Chekhov doesn't take four acts to teach that people should respect one another — he teaches it in four lines, then moves on to limn a wider vision. And when Beckett teaches kindness, he does it in a moment's gesture, in the way that Vladimir tries to find a carrot for hungry Estragon; why should anything more be devoted to the obvious?
I make these points in order to explain why Six Dance Lessons, a play that has wowed 'em from Tokyo to Tel Aviv, strikes me as nothing more than a pleasant but shallow affirmation of the self-evident. This story of a gay dance instructor who's hired by an elderly pastor's wife is well meaning, heart-warming, skillfully constructed and oh-so-formulaic.
We know when it starts that these two opposites will finally attract, and that what begins in division will end in some sort of union. And we're touched. It's a nice, nice play, but it tells us next to nothing that we didn't already know, and it takes two hours to reach an affirmation that we would have assented to after 15 minutes.
Further, we've seen this thing before (with slight changes): It's been called Driving Miss Daisy, Visiting Mr. Green and Educating Rita. In each case, two very different people are thrown into each other's presence. At first, their differences dominate, but in time they learn to respect and even love one another. Human beings, it turns out, are really rather agreeable if given a chance.
Most of history has been unnecessary; if the Romans and the Huns had just spent a few social hours together, they could have worked out all their differences. If Hitler and Churchill had just shared a cup of java, they would have discovered that they were both really OK.
And that's the story of Six Dance Lessons: Minister's wife Lily Harrison has hired Michael Minetti to come to her St. Pete Beach condo and give her dancing lessons. Each scene represents a different visit, and each visit comes with a dance: the foxtrot, the tango, the cha-cha, etc. But Michael is an acerbic bigmouth who nearly gets himself fired during the first lesson, and Lily is not exactly the happily married woman that she claims to be.
As the lessons proceed — and the play is at its best when the characters are dancing — they learn the truth about each other, the fears, worries, hopes that make each one human. And they bond. And they argue. And they bond and argue again. You know where this is going.
Most of the virtues of the play have to do with Lily's condition. Author Richard Alfieri (who grew up in Tampa and went to Plant High School) demonstrates an admirable sympathy for this elderly woman, and sharpest when having Lily speak of her growing invisibility as a senior citizen. But Alfieri's talent for dialogue works for Michael as well, and though we may not find Six Dance Lessons intellectually challenging, it's seldom less than entertaining.
As for the actors who play these parts, Hersha Parady and Larry Buzzeo turn in likable if limited performances. What a simple play like this needs are performers who can add complexities that the writing lacks; but neither Parady nor Buzzeo supplies anything outside of, or between, the lines as given.
Jim Wise's direction is smooth and straightforward, though, and Lino Toyos' set, of Lily's living room and kitchenette, looks like the interior of every condo from Hillsborough Bay to the Gulf of Mexico. Finally, Adrin E. Puente's costumes are often witty expressions of the dance that Michael is teaching — he wears all black for the tango, for example — or the way that Lily's feeling, from colorfully energetic to tired and ill.
And then there's the treatment of Michael's homosexuality. Alfieri mitigates the potential problem Lily might have with it by making her a rather tolerant person from the start. This isn't very dramatic — the play would be much more interesting if Lily had a strong prejudice to overcome. Michael meanwhile turns out to be so sweet beneath his sarcasm that he's more or less destined to bring out the mothering instinct in his aging student.
But if Six Dance Lessons is hardly on the razor's edge of gay drama, it's still out enough to upset bigots and maybe educate a few fence-sitters. So maybe there is an ideal audience for the play: People who still have some doubts about the full humanness of gay humanity. A more savvy audience might well find the play superfluous. A very savvy audience will find it a waste of time.
In sum: We've all got to try to respect and even love one another. That's the message of Six Dance Lessons, and of course it's a good one.
But excuse me for asking: What else is new?
This article appears in May 24-30, 2006.