By Samuel L. Leiter
Last Call, an appealing but problematic new play by Peter Danish (“author, playwright, filmmaker and composer,” says his bio), belongs to that niche category of works that dramatize actual encounters between famous people, imagining what they might have said to each other at key moments in their careers. (Another niche imagines what would have been said between historical persons who never actually met.) This season already has presented Kowalski, in which Marlon Brando meets Tennessee Williams to audition for A Streetcar Named Desire.
In Last Call, set in 1988, we watch American composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) engage with Austrian conductor Herbert von Karajan (1908-1989) in the Blue Bar of Vienna’s Hotel Sacher. These handsome, silver-haired, magnetically charismatic men—von Karajan the older by 10 years—who had been the international titans of conducting for much of the last century, had met at other times since the mid-1950s. When Danish learned of their 1988 get-together from the bartender who served them, however, he was instantly inspired to craft this play. In it, the maestros unburden themselves of the smoldering, complicated feelings each held about the other, not all of them complimentary.
Unexpectedly, and not without raising questions, both men are played by women, Helen Schneider as Bernstein, German actress Lucca Züchner as von Karajan. Before the three-character play (actually, four, as I’ll explain) began at the preview I attended, its German director, Gil Mehmert, with an impressive résumé in his homeland, introduced it (as I assume he’ll continue to do). He explained his gender-bending concept as intending to avoid preoccupations with such things as male actors’ physical proximity to these roles, thereby assuming it would turn our attention to the heart of what they’re saying.
This may work for others, but, for me, seeing two actresses—who, let me say at once, are quite impressive—in male drag and wearing obvious wigs play these icons was even more distracting than seeing men whose resemblance to the originals might not have been ideal. However excellent their acting, you admire it not so much for drawing you into the play, which it eventually does, but for its tour-de-force achievement. I advise taking a trip to YouTube to see the striking resemblance Bernstein and von Karajan bore to one another, not mentioned in the play.
There’s much to savor in the give and take between the dashing American and the autocratic Austrian, set in the hotel’s famous cocktail lounge, designed by Chris Barreca and sensitively lit by Michael Grundner. The bar—illuminated with a blue neon strip along its counter—is at our left, the remaining space being filled with cocktail tables on which sit tiny lamps. When needed, the bar is manually swung around to reveal a men’s room, urinal in place. In one scene, we even watch Züchner’s Herbert, her/his back to us, not only peeing but, in a display of histrionic attention to detail, shaking every drop free when the deed is done. Tour de force indeed!
Lenny’s in Vienna to accept some award he can barely identify, while Herbert is going over the score for Brahms’s “Symphony Number One,” which he’s preparing to conduct, although already having done so over 160 times. Lenny, chain-smoking (albeit too artificially), charming, and relaxed, is casually dressed in a light beige sports jacket and purple turtleneck (costumes by René Neumann), and wearing a fluffy, white wig, perhaps meant to suggest Bernstein’s flamboyance. The temperamental Herbert, well-known as a fashion plate, wears a black tunic-like jacket with brass buttons over a beige turtleneck. Herbert’s salt-and-pepper wig is more close-cropped and severe, befitting his rigid personality.
Their conversation, of course, includes much that music lovers will find fascinating about the men’s different views of music, including Lenny’s fondness for Broadway musical theatre and Herbert’s disdain for it; of course, there’s a healthy dose of dialogue concerning their views of a few classics. Audiences familiar with such work will be more enthralled at these effusions than will musically limited clods like me. Lindsay Jones’s sound design provides considerable chunks of appropriate music as background atmosphere.
Like so much else here, the play, which squeezes a great deal of biographical exposition into its uninterrupted 100 minutes, is more educational than dramatic, at least in the sense of a play that develops conventionally, with a modicum of suspense, toward a specific conclusion. Here the drama is in the emotions aroused by the love-hate relationship between two towering artists as it might have been articulated in a meeting near the end of their brilliant careers (von Karajan died a year later, Bernstein the year after that).
Danish contrives to have the artists seesaw between sniping and praising each other, the issues including their physical ailments (Lenny’s prostate, Herbert’s stroke, etc.), their conducting styles (Lenny’s physicality, Herbert’s closed eyes), Lenny’s creativity vs. Herbert’s focus on conducting, Lenny’s homosexuality and Jewishness, and, most explosively, Herbert’s acquiescence with the Nazis (he joined the National Socialist Party twice), etc. There’s plenty to unpack, and Danish arranges things so that the men quarrel, sometimes loudly, settle down, then quarrel once again, keeping the ball in the air whenever it threatens to hit the ground. If 15 to 20 minutes were shaved from the exercise it might prevent the ennui into which it eventually descends.
While a few laughs break through the conductors’ repartee, we get even more comic respite from Victor Petersen, the fine German actor who plays Michael, a version of the bartender whose memories led to the play’s creation. Michael often converses with Herbert in German, the translation being projected on the upstage wall. And, at one memorable point created by director Mehmert (it’s not in the script), he transforms into drag before our eyes as Maria Callas (the fourth character I mentioned), singing one of her arias in his own, highly trained voice.
Both Schneider and Züchner give exemplary performances, each possessed of vocal power and subtextual insight, reading their lines with color, vigor, and imagination. They keep us engaged, even when they play a bit to the rafters. Züchner is especially arresting, with her tart, authoritative, German-accented English, and her mimicking of the conductor’s stroke-affected gesticulations.
If Kowalski appealed largely to theater lovers who relished seeing actors playing historical stage figures, then Last Call should do the same for those who idolize the play’s musical geniuses. I wonder, though, what I’d have thought of Kowalski if Williams and Brando had been played by women.
New World Stages, 340 W. 50th Street, NYC, Through May 4
Photos: Maria Baranova.