TOSOS Mounts Spirited Lady In Question
with Playwright Busch Present
by Bruce-Michael Gelbert
TOSOS (The Other Side of Silence) II, playwright Doric Wilson and directors Mark Finley and Barry Childs’ theater company, closed its fourth season with spirited staged readings of Charles Busch’s The Lady In Question, presented in association with Spotlight On Productions, downstairs at the Monster on December 5, 6 and 7. Proceeds went toward funding the opening production of the troupe’s fifth season, Constance Congdon’s Dog Opera, late in February 2006. The second of the readings, for which Busch was present, is considered here.
The Lady In Question, which was directed by Jason Bowcutt and Christopher Borg, the latter of whom also starred, proves itself many things. It is at once gripping and riotous, melodramatic play and broad, campy movie parody, and thriller about a wartime rescue mission, featuring strong colorful women, with the central one played by a man.
Borg commendingly portrayed Gertrude Garnet—"that’s gar-né"—an alluring Tosca-like figure—who indeed delivers a twist on one of Puccini and Sardou’s prima donna’s curtain lines, "And before him trembled all of Rome." Borg’s Garnet, a part created by Busch himself, was the consummate great lady, the highbrow classical pianist with a lowbrow, somewhat unsavory past, oblivious to the horrific political situation in Nazi Germany—"land of beer, Wagner and terror"—where she is on a concert tour, and to much of everything beside Gertrude Garnet herself. The actor’s diva, pressured like Floria Tosca, came to reveal a courageous core of steel—the Bette Davis/Barbara Stanwyck hard-boiled dame beneath the grande dame—when, embroiled in a conflict between "love and music" and politics and intrigue, she can no longer close her eyes to the brutality surrounding her and finds her political conscience—and true love—at last. Borg boasted a particularly memorable set piece in Act Two, when frantically improvising the story of an opera she is allegedly writing to distract her Nazi hosts from her love’s ailing mother’s attempted escape.
Matthew Rashid and Christopher Weikel capably contrasted the men in Gertrude’s life. Rashid made a dashing, tough-talking American wise guy, Professor Erik Maxwell, who turned to Jell-o when he thought of his mother in danger. Christopher Weikel was a menacing Baron Wilhelm von Elsner, heir to the 15th century Bavarian schloss—predictably mangled into "schlong" at one point—in which the action is set, becoming a quivering mess himself, quailing before Rebecca Hoodwin, portraying his own mother, the Baroness Augusta, as a Führer-worshipper with an iron will and a hair color—"battleship gray"—to match. As venerable actress Raina Aldric, Erik’s mother, weakened by incarceration for having appeared in an anti-Nazi play, Wynne Anders matched Borg for diva airs and gestures, though in a much shorter part.
Ellen Reilly found the wisecracking Eve Arden in Gertrude’s sidekick and old vaudeville crony, Kitty, now the Countess de Borgia. She was done in by Shay Gines, a blood thirsty snake-in-the-grass in Heidi’s dirndl, as young Lotte, the Baron’s niece. Steven Hauk doubled effectively as a sympathetic Professor Mittelhoffer, "a renowned intellectual," and evil Dr. Maximilian, a ruthless butcher in the mold of Dr. Mengele, on the verge of experimenting on non-consenting human guinea pigs. Jamie Heinlein was Mittelhoffer’s daughter, Heidi, another of the ‘good guys,’ and Ashley Green, her erstwhile love and her father’s pupil, turned goose-stepping Nazi soldier, with an unexpected shred of decency still left in him. Desmond Dutcher completed the cast, narrating, in the persona of a 1940s-style radio announcer, and playing ill-fated conspirator Hugo Hoffman. Pianist Seth Bisen-Hersh provided atmospheric music for the melodrama and realization of la Garnet’s offstage instrumental showpieces. (New York Q News Dec, 2005)