John Logan’s screenwriting work – including his Oscar-nominated screenplays, The Aviator and Hugo, and his win, Gladiator – tends toward expansive stories, wide-ranging in time and setting, with huge casts of characters who have the ability to shift the world on its axis. In his plays, he tries to map that same intensity of emotion and tenor of earthshaking consequence onto a more human scale. I saw the Broadway production of his Red, about the troubled artist Mark Rothko, and its local premier when staged by CATCO, but I hadn’t seen his one-woman take on super-agent Sue Mengers, I’ll Eat You Last, during its limited Broadway run, so I was glad Short North Stage brought this to the intimate confines of its Green Room space.
Not only is I’ll Eat You Last a monologue, it takes place in real time. Over roughly 90 minutes, Mengers (Deb Colvin-Tener) waits for a call from her prize client and one-time maid of honor, Barbra Streisand, who, we are told, fired her yesterday. As Mengers addresses the audience directly, backfill about her past and dark intimations about the future are left to conversational digressions and asides. There are only three times the outside world pierces her bubble as Mengers unspools her tale – two phone calls, one from Sissy Spacek and one from Richard Dreyfus (we only hear her side), and a brief audience participation. It ends with the phone ringing again, then darkness as she leaves to get ready for one of her legendary dinner parties.
Mengers was born in Germany, and her family fled to the United States as Hitler “became stroppy.” This story is a rags-to-riches told by someone who’s seen enough horror (including her father’s suicide) to know the key to being the kind of fearless that powerful people – in her era, almost entirely men – respect is to lead with the feeling that you have nothing to lose. Her easy, flirty telling and her casual back and forth with Hollywood power and glamour soar with the perfect mix of charm and anger, flattery and condescension, that keeps you off balance and pulls you in.
There’s heavy name-dropping, but those names are essential to the verisimilitude – the possibly apocryphal story of her negotiating the signing of Faye Dunaway instead of Jane Fonda for the female lead in Chinatown only works if you have specific stars of that magnitude and a movie that’s not only seen as a classic today but would have been seen as a giant deal to the nebulous “other people” (waiting staff? delivery people?) Mengers addresses in this play during the period in which it’s set. The play, and especially Colvin-Tener’s volcanic performance, does an exquisite job of grounding all this in an absolute certainty that the play knows what it’s talking about and has something to tell the “us” of 2015. Not an easy feat in a world saturated with information about this particular era of Hollywood and celebrity.
The other thing this play does exceptionally well is convincing the audience that Mengers would absolutely draw people of that caliber (what she calls her “twinklies”) and hold their attention. Deb Colvin-Tener never hits an off note, sliding from a soft, gauzy charm to something harder and metallic – cajoling and flattering, with just enough condescension to keep the sweetness from feeling cloying, but somehow never letting you (whoever the “you” is) know she can just as easily rip out your heart. That she does all of this while never leaving the couch at centerstage, and with an absolute minimum of physical gesture – she frequently lights cigarettes and joints, picks them up and puts them down (at least a couple times with one in each hand), swirls the glass in her drink, reaches for the phone – for the entire length of the play without a break is astonishing and riveting to watch. It’s a combination of sex kitten, gum-cracking film noir heroine, and ribald borscht belt comic that adds up to absolute joy.
A key component to her knives-flashing humor is the implacable certainty that the only place the roads ever lead is death, and that all power is precarious. As she says near the end of the play, “The credits roll sooner than you think.” The references to the Holocaust are a big part of this shading, and even bigger – and addressed in a too on-the-nose effort to defuse the cliché – is the Freudian implication that her playboy father’s suicide was seeded by the fact “his life was never going to align with his self-image.” Her intensity and desperation feel like a (successful) effort to make sure no obituary would ever say that about her.
The downside of these weightier themes is that they’re not always well integrated – the frequent references to other people being “pretentious,” spit out like it’s a cardinal sin, feel insecure, like the work is trying to forestall any accusations of pretense lobbied against it, and occasionally the shifts in tone feel too sudden, too sharp. This, along with relying on only one voice and one set, adds up to the play feeling a little exhausting. It’s to the credit of Colvin-Tener and director Jonathan Putnam that that’s kept at bay for as long as it is, but I was definitely experiencing fatigue before it was over.
The technical elements are all well-handled, better than anything else I’ve seen on the Green Room stage thus far. Michael Brewer’s set and especially Tatjana Longerot’s costume are both perfect, and Rob Kuhn’s technical direction keeps light and sound evocative but mostly invisible, exactly what you want in this kind of period-specific, realism-heavy play.
While I had some issues with the piece itself, anyone with an interest in celebrity “dish,” an affection for the period when Hollywood started to crack open and old and new jockeyed for position – anyone who’s read Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls or Robert Evans’ The Kid Stays in the Picture more than once – or a desire to hear the voice of a rare woman who elbowed her way into a man’s world before retiring on top, there are big laughs and a lot of pleasures to be had in this production of I’ll Eat You Last.
I’ll Eat You Last runs through March 1, 2015 with 8:00pm shows Thursday-Saturday and 3:00pm matinées on Sundays. For tickets and more information, visit ShortNorthStage.org.