'The Third Story'
An MCC Theater presentation, by special arrangement with the Lucille Lortel Foundation, of a play in two acts by Charles Busch. Directed by Carl Andress.
Drew, Steve Bartlett - Jonathan Walker
Peg, Dr. Rutenspitz - Kathleen Turner
Queenie Bartlett, Baba Yaga - Charles Busch
Verna, Princess Vasalisa - Sarah Rafferty
Dr. Constance Hudson - Jennifer Van Dyck
Zygote - Scott Parkinson
A production headlining Kathleen Turner opposite peerless drag performer and Hollywood parodist Charles Busch might appear to offer the tantalizing promise of dueling divas in the tradition of "Hush ... Hush, Sweet Charlotte" or "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?" In Busch's structurally ambitious but muddled "The Third Story," however, the two stars barely collide or even seem to be in the same play, despite the carefully mirrored themes of its elaborate triple plot. It's always a treat to watch Busch in one of his wisecracking glamourpuss turns, but this overreaching effort is a watery cocktail trying to pass for a more potent dirty martini.
The three interlocking tales all delve into the confused identities of twins, the vulnerability of women achievers and, primarily, overbearing mothers reluctant to cut the cord that binds them to their children. While it's all constructed as a comic fable in the customary Busch style of an arch 1940s screen sendup, there are intermittent detours into Russian folklore and a framing device that sits uncomfortably between low-camp and naturalistic drama.
"What were you thinking of?" asks Turner's boozy screenwriter Peg of her son Drew (Jonathan Walker). "You ain't O'Neill." That observation might be Busch making fun of himself for attempting to expand beyond another of his celluloid spoofs -- as always, by way of the Greeks and Freud -- into more textured, robustly dramatic territory. But in Carl Andress' lumpy, oddly tentative production, the play's multiple strands never come together into a unifying tone.
It's 1949 and Peg, a veteran of the silent screen years who has hit a dry patch, has followed her son to Omaha where he's trying to shrink into the life of a humble mailman like his father. Peg wants Drew's collaboration on a screenplay, though why she so desperately needs him is unclear, beyond the vague threat of being investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Together they build a story around Queenie Bartlett (Busch), a hard-boiled Mob empress dying of cancer. Leaping from gangster noir turf into sci-fi B movies, the writers introduce chilly scientist Dr. Constance Hudson (Jennifer Van Dyck) and her zombie creation Zygote (Scott Parkinson), who steals morphine from the lab to sell to Queenie. When the underworld boss learns Dr. Hudson is working on a cloning formula, she hatches a plan to spawn a twin who can continue to protect her son Steve (Walker again) from the Feds and his trashy fiancee, Verna (Sarah Rafferty).
Interwoven throughout is the childhood fairy tale retold by Peg to Drew about shy Princess Vasalisa (Rafferty), who enlists forest crone Baba Yaga (Busch, in high pantomime mode) to help her win a prince. The witch whips up a more romantically capable twin for the princess, but like rogue doppelganger Queenie No. 2, she causes complications.
While it's conceivable an audience could get lost in the steadily unraveling mess of plot twists and parallel stories, lack of clarity is not the problem. The big stumbling block is that the feeble tales are neither interesting nor particularly funny.
The laughs come from Busch doing his inimitable shtick -- spitting out barbs from behind a jaw set in stone, sneering out of the corner of his mouth or lurching into hilariously frozen overreactions, underscored by Lewis Finn's precise pastiche of '40s melodrama music cues. Busch is Joan Crawford and Eve Arden in one glamorous package (Gregory Gale's gowns are right out of vintage Vogue), seasoned with a little Bette Davis, Susan Hayward and Mae West. But while he's at his best writing zingers for himself and lampooning the fussy affectations of bygone screen queens, the vehicle here is an inferior one.
The Peg-Drew thread may have been expanded to justify Turner's casting (her first New York stage role since Martha in the Broadway revival of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"). But the screenwriter scenes stop the show dead every time, aiming for complexity in their mother-son tug-of-love but coming across flat and unconvincing. Short of breath and frequently flubbing her lines, Turner seems uncomfortable in the part. And in her second role, as a Germanic-accented, possibly envious older colleague of Dr. Hudson's, she's about as funny as Chlamydia.
Other cast members fare better. Walker does a decent job of delineating stubborn self-exile Drew from tough-guy mama's boy Steve; Rafferty is amusing enough as the gangster doxy and the sweet princess; and Parkinson creates a truly crazed, gnarled caricature as Constance's fast-decaying Frankenstein monster.
But best is Van Dyck as the doc herself, her clipped delivery and angular body language placing her closest to Busch's wavelength. She's the only one who successfully registers some kind of inner conflict -- playing an automaton unexpectedly touched by maternal feeling.
"I apologize for the length of this anecdote," says Dr. Hudson, landing the show's biggest laugh during a reflective monologue. "I'm not accustomed to telling stories." In a play of slender substance running two hours-plus, Busch might have benefited from similar self-awareness.
Sets, David Gallo; costumes, Gregory Gale; lighting, David Weiner; sound, Chris Luessmann; hair and wigs, Tom Watson; dialect coach, Charlotte Fleck; fight direction, Steve Rankin; production stage manager, Lisa Porter. Opened Feb. 2, 2009. Reviewed Jan. 29. Running time: 2 HOURS, 15 MIN.
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Date in print: Tue., Feb. 3, 2009