Imagine a fairy-tale romance: A prince meets a princess, and they fall in love. He's handsome, brave, and eloquent; she's beautiful, gracious, and equally polished in speech and manner. After many weeks of waiting, he one night invites her to his palace. While a small orchestra plays, they dine on venison and drink vintage wine. After dinner, they waltz around the spacious throne room floor like two halves of a puzzle finally reunited. At dance's end, they, for the first time, kiss; and so we leave them, embracing, lips touching, souls merging. They will live happily ever after.
Now imagine this modern version: An ex-con short-order cook asks a low-self-image waitress out to a movie. He's balding, shorter than her, and not stupid, but ignorant. She's no great beauty either, finds big words intimidating, has already given up her ambition to become an actress and is thinking about school teaching. The movie bores them. After the film, she invites him up to her place, where they fuck. Post-coitus, she wants him out, but he protests that he loves her. She says, not unreasonably, "You don't know me," and orders him out again. But he's manic and a motor mouth and tries to convince her that their low-rent sex-first-ask-questions-later romance is a keeper. She unleashes a barrage of four-letter words that would reduce any real Prince Charming to tears. But he's adamant and as tough as she is. And he's got a secret: He wants a blowjob.
Which story is closer to reality here in the jaded, done-it-all, hypersexualized contemporary world? You got it — and so does Terrence McNally, who in Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune wants to puncture every myth about romantic procedure, while asserting that love, even in a junkyard, is still possible. Instead of perfect, gentle lovers, McNally gives us damaged, callous sex partners; instead of aristocrats and champions, he gives us losers and stragglers who can't even believe in their own dreams. And if his play is short on plot, it still asks us to remember that we're in a world of Frankies and Johnnys, and that they should interest us more than all the storybook kings and queens who we resemble not at all. This bell tolls for us: If beauty is still attainable, even under the Sign of the Greasy Spoon, than it's attainable for us, too. If the spirits of F&J can find each other through a swamp of bodily fluids, then our spirits, too, still have a chance.
In the fine, beautifully acted version of the play currently being offered by Jobsite Theater, these implications — and others besides — are mightily clear. I've seen two other productions of Frankie and Johnny and each bored me and lost me after only a few minutes; this one held my attention from first to last, and finally lived up to what I take to be McNally's intention.
The key element here is acting: Paul J. Potenza as Johnny turns in a brilliant performance, perhaps his best ever in any play; and Ami Sallee Corley as Frankie is so completely persuasive, you can't help but feel that McNally wrote the drama with her in mind. On Brian Smallheer's attractive set, of a small one-room New York apartment — with the kitchenette just a few steps from the bed — Potenza and Corley enact an awkward dance in a foggy labyrinth, banging into the walls with every wrong move, risking hostility and misunderstanding each time they miss a key turn or find themselves moving backwards when they meant to advance.
Potenza is surely the sort of Johnny that the play calls for: pushy but tender-hearted, profane but conscious that there's loveliness in the world, a loveliness that even an aging low-income cook can have a piece of. As he physicalizes his deepest feelings, jumps on beds, bursts inexplicably into laughter, you can almost see the hyperactive child he must have been 40 years ago.
Meanwhile Corley, as Frankie, is one of those sad, pragmatic souls who have lost all their illusions and bristle at the thought of gaining, and inevitably losing, new ones. Corley's Frankie is committed to small, thinkable pleasures: a few minutes of sex, the taste of a Western omelet, anything manageable and sensible and unlikely to turn into despair. This is the unmovable object to which Johnny applies pressure; and the suspense of the play — its only suspense — is in the question, can he breach the walls? All he's got working for him is his stubbornness and a skeptical deejay at a classical radio station. Ranged against him is Frankie's memory of other men, other promises, every busted affair that began with flights of angels, every abusive ex-lover who first promised he'd never hurt her. Corley's Frankie may look intact, but she's been scarred, and scarred deeply. As Johnny early on admits, his work is cut out for him.
So if the production is superb, is the script equally important? Not really: Its main ideas are too limited to be deeply satisfying, and even its assault on old notions of romance only goes so far. Further, Act Two hardly makes any advance on Act One: a few new obstacles, a few new revelations, and we're more or less where we were in the first hour of the drama. On the other hand, that second act gives us 45 more minutes in which to watch Potenza and Corley, and that's reason enough to sit gladly at the Shimberg Playhouse.
Frankie and Johnny may not be an ideal play, but this is an ideal production: wonderfully acted, directed (by David M. Jenkins) and designed (that includes Erin Dunlap's costumes). I walked into the theater expecting very little; I walked out happier and wiser. This production fully lives up to its potential.
In fact, this may just be the best version of the drama local audiences can hope to see.
I personally can't imagine anyone else doing it better.
This article appears in Oct 12-18, 2005.