Theatre in Review: Music Hall (TUTA Theatre Chicago/59E59)

	Jeffrey Binder. Photo: Anthony La Penna

In Music Hall, three male performers recall their lives on the road with a diva known simply as The Artiste. One of them stands in for The Artiste -- or maybe he has been The Artiste all along; I was never sure. Is the actor Jeffrey Binder playing in drag for our benefit, or he is playing a character who spent his life in drag? It's hard to say, which is strange in a show that aims to wield words with a Descartian precision. Then again, one problem with Music Hall is that so few of playwright Jean-Luc Lagarce's words ever stick in the imagination.

I'm guessing here, but I don't think the problem is with Joseph Long's translation, which, on the face of it, seems eminently speakable. Lagarce -- part of a generation of French playwrights, including Bernard-Marie Koltès and Copi, who died young of AIDS -- seems to have been aiming at something like a cross between Samuel Beckett and every camp diva who ever mounted the stage of a rickety, poorly lighted gay bar in a provincial town to sing about the man that got away. It's a memory piece as The Artiste and her two back-up boys recall the hundred and one humiliations of life on the road: tiny stages, chiseling managers, men who come and go. As the saying goes, her tour-de-force has been forced to tour.

After an amusing couple of minutes featuring Michael Doonan and Darren Hill, silently battling the curtain that bisects Natasha Djukic's set -- for a moment, I thought the entire piece might be in pantomime -- Binder enters, wearing the diva's black high-heeled shoes, speaking of her in the third person: "She, the artiste, would enter upstage, like so/From back there/She'd come on/Walking slowly /From the back of the stage toward the audience/And she'd sit down." Lagarce's script is written in a kind of blank verse, and it is all too typical that he requires 36 more lines before the description of The Artiste's entrance is complete.

Over the new next few minutes, Binder gradually becomes The Artiste, donning a long skirt that oddly mirrors the pattern of the on-stage curtain, adding a pretty little lace collar to his shirt, accessorizing with earrings plus some rather obvious makeup and lipstick. According to the Chicago Tribune theatre reviewer Chris Jones, in other productions the role has been played by women; whether the casting of Binder is closer to the author's intention, I cannot say. I suspect we're in similar territory to Jean Genet's The Maids, a play that in some respects Music Hall resembles. Genet wrote The Maids for three men; most of the time the roles are played by women, and opinions are divided about which approach works best.

Anyway, The Artiste and her two boys recall a life devoted to illusion -- the art of creating "a long, slow smile," her technique for appearing "cool and unconcerned," and her nonchalant way of greeting the audience. ("Don't get up.") The reality is much uglier, a long, slow slog, often on foot, from one troglodyte audience to another, dealing with managements that fail to provide tape recorders for her backup music and proffering unsuitable stools for her on-stage use while rejecting her own personal stool as a flammable health hazard. She ponders each of these miseries in luxuriant fashion, parsing them for the exact degree of disrespect each represents. I can't begin to tell how much time is spent on the issue of the correct stool.

Another question is whether Doonan and Hill represent a single pair of colleagues or if they are standing in for all of the men who shared The Artiste's less-than-glamorous life. At one point, we are told, her two on-stage boys consisted of her husband and her lover, but the latter killed the former and since then the boys have come and gone, sharing her stage, and, in at least in some cases, her bed. As Hill comments, "When I first got here, she was with another guy/Left since/Walked out on her/Or dead, dead in his bed from exhaustion, only logical, or attracted by some other career with more money and less despair." Clearly, the pleasures of the flesh provide little or no distraction on this existential treadmill. At times, The Artiste appears to be performing in the room next to the one occupied by the characters of No Exit; as she says, repeatedly, "When you've been through hell, you don't fear the devil."

As written, Music Hall is an elaborate verbal arabesque, the long speeches frequently doubling back on themselves for more repetitions and subordinate clauses, focusing on tiny details while doing little to create a coherent world. The Artiste's situation, essentially that of a vaudeville performer, seems to belong to another time and place -- say, France in the first half of the twentieth century -- but references to tape recorders and towns such as Beaver Lick, Kentucky, scramble that, effectively placing the action in an all-purpose void. For all its philosophical exactitude, Lagarce's writing is not evocative. The words rush by, signaling squalor, despair, and a kind of ruthless endurance, but they are remarkable more for their velocity and intricate sentence structure than for any inherent power.

That Music Hall remains watchable at all is thanks to the three gifted actors who populate it. Binder, who has appeared on Broadway in The Lieutenant of Inishmore, The Lion King, and Mary Poppins, is remarkable, beginning on a low-key note and gradually transforming himself into a monster of the theatre, his sly, silky smile entirely contradicted by the fury in his eyes. Trailing long feather boas, extending his hand to be kissed by an acolyte, or launching into a tirade that threatens to take the paint off the theatre's walls, he makes The Artiste into a fierce, almost frightening, figure, the kind of personality that has been so shaped by the hatred of others that hostility is all she knows. Binder also impersonates the "smirker-in-chief," a stand-in for all the managers who have exploited The Artiste, as a feral, Gollum-like figure, hunched over with greed. Binder is clearly a striking actor, and if Music Hall does nothing more than act as a calling card for him, it will have been well worth it. The handsome, boyish Doonan and the plump, likable Hill embody their ill-defined roles with notable ease, speaking the text with authority, especially when detailing their collective love/hate relationship with The Artiste.

Djukic's set, a rehearsal room complete with mirrors and ballet barre plus that aforementioned curtain, seems appropriate enough for a theatrical exercise such as this. Her costumes are a little more problematic; Binder's drag feels right, but I wonder why Doonan and Hill spend most of the show in what amount to elaborate harem pants. Keith Parham is one of the more interesting lighting designers working in the theatre today, and it's a bit of a shame that all he does here is a series of stark white washes, especially in a play that calls for a certain fantastical style; still, he works some subtle internal cues into his design. Christian Gero's sound design blends a recording of Josephine Baker singing in French with what sounds like '70s-style funk versions of "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" and other tunes.

Lagarce belongs to a tradition of French playwrights who take a situation and, rather than dramatize it, subject it to ruthless, exacting linguistic analysis. Such works have yet to find a wide audience in America. I suspect that, given the manner in which it weighs each word for its meaning while resolutely refusing to fill in the bigger picture, Music Hall will prove to be a hard sell. More than once, The Artiste cries out, "But where is the story?" I wondered that myself, more than once. -- David Barbour