Annette Bening Sparkles in Ruth Draper’s Monologues (April-May 2014)
Annette Bening had me at the film, “The Grifters.” Whether in movies, on stage or during interviews, she always delivers. And shines currently in the one-woman show, Ruth Draper’s Monologues at the Geffen Playhouse. .
Bening, the radiant, intelligent, engaging actress and four-time Academy Award nominee, is on stage for an hour and a half without an intermission with only a few props in the large theatre. And she connects intimately with her audience every minute of the evening.
Bening’s effortless performance is as flawless as it is flowing as she introduces various Manhattan female characters in Doctors and Diets, The Italian Lesson, A Debutante at a Dance and A Class in Greek Poise. She had no trouble fulfilling her goal of “breathing life into the characters.”
Ms. Bening is a hostess of a group of ladies at a restaurant luncheon in The Doctors and Diets. Startling, crazy and funny it is astonishing that this almost century old riff on diets is as contemporary as today. You half expect this hostess to wave at Katherine Helmond in the film, Brazil, at the next table. The only thing missing was her shoe hat. And you also feel that our hostess was in a room full of people.
It is appropriate that Draper has written, “I never tried to point morals in my monologues; yet I believe the material has got to be something more than a mere characterization.” The point is subtle and we get it while we laugh – or chuckle to ourselves. This too was the author’s intention. She wrote, “as often as not the humor of the situation is something the audience finds for itself.… the people who come here have to use their own imaginations to get the effect, and they appreciate that.”
Although Ms. Bening is equally adept in the other sketches, they were all similar in her portrayals of Manhattan socialites, as she becomes the unintentionally entertaining harried society woman with small children in The Italian Lesson. She is a young girl as the somewhat ditzy debutante in the shorter, A Debutante at a Dance and “ instructress of poise in A Class in Greek Poise. Here the instructress brings to mind a more stilted and dated Roz Russell on a horse in the deep south in Mame.
Bening has explained how much she admired Draper’s sketch work, apparently well known in the entertainment world. She has been the inspiration of Lily Tomlin, John Lithgow, Tom Waits and Charles Nelson Reilly. (Lily Tomlin would be more than enough, to be sure, though Tomlin can reduce a laughing audience to tears.)
Born into a wealthy New York family in 1884, Ruth Draper displayed a gift early on for imaginatively portraying persons that she had known or observed and broke social barriers acting them out on the professional stage, becoming first the toast of New York, then the whole country and Europe. We are indebted to Bening for drawing attention to this “new” star, the stuff of Isak Dinesen and Beryl Markham that still makes the pages of Vanity Fair. Chic, strikingly beautiful, Draper would sizzle in any VF article being a wealthy philanthropist, international socialite and entertainer who fell madly in love with an Italian writer and entertained (and raised money for) the troops during World War I.
The evening gives us a glimpse of why Draper has been described as, “the greatest individual performer that America has ever given us.” True even though we did not get to see Draper’s uncanny ability, while alone on stage, to shift between many characters for which she became as famous.
It would be wonderful for Bening to do more Draper monologues in the future with these in mind. Let’s start with the old Jewish woman from “Three Generations in a Court of Domestic Relations.”
www.Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Avenue, Los Angeles, CA, Los Angeles, CA 90024 (310) 208-5454