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It is not often that a local show affords the opportunity to peel back the death shroud of a past society's collective subconscious and see the present skittering about like vermin on rotting flesh, but that's just what happened here in town recently. And not once, but twice. The two shows providing this peek were TWEED Fractured Classicks Series' pummeling of the 1946 Lana Turner-John Garfield "The Postman Always Rings Twice", rechristened "The Mailman Always Comes Twice", which recently closed a successful run at the Chelsea Playhouse, and Raw Impressions Music Theatre's latest Event (#8; billed as a "film noir linear narrative"), "Halfway to Heaven", which had a two-day exploratory run at La Mama E.T.C.in late November. Both shows dealt with the treachery and deceit, the cheating, the lying, the malice aforethought and the deadly mistrust otherwise known as heterosexual relationships, and both chose that quintessential prince of American pop culture darkness, the film noir, to express them. Both shows spread the camp pretty thickly. "Mailman" fairly wallows in it with delirious glee; but really, how could a show starring a six-foot drag queen calling herself Varla Jean Merman really do anything but. And "Heaven", though less exuberantly baroque in its concept and execution, still frames its climax with a lovers' nocturnal shootout in a wanton floozy's shabby, big city apartment. These two shows, playing so separate of one another yet so close together, and both with themes of a social phenomenon Cahiers du Cinema said the last rites over forty-four years ago, got me revisiting my own unhealthy relationship with the genre and wondering, what is with this noir thing? In the pre-cable Southern California of the early 1970s, late-night TV was both much more primitive and much more an adventure. First "The Late Show" on KNXT, Ch. 2 and later, "Movie Greats" on KTTV-11 (once on Saturday and twice on Sunday!) and "Movies 'Til Dawn" on KTLA-5 unspooled a seemingly endless library of 1930s-50s B-flicks framed by the ubiquitous vaudevillian showmanship of used-car guru Cal Worthington. Between midnight and 5AM during these formative years, I went to Hollywood U., majoring in Men & Women 101. It was in these flickering, scratchy lecture halls that the baddest of the bad girls first ignited my petroleum-glazed West Long Beach nights with their irresistible cold fire: Barbara Stanwyck's Phyllis Dietrichson from "Double Indemnity" (1944); Jane Greer's Kathie Moffat from "Out of the Past (1947); Peggy Cummins' Annie Laurie Starr from "Gun Crazy" (1949); and, to a lesser but even more luridly appealing extent, Cloris Leachman's Christina Bailey from "Kiss Me Deadly" (1955), and Ann Savage's vicious, primordial Vera from "Detour" (1945). Of course, no noir-babe hall of fame would be complete without a special shrine to the Ice Queen of all-time in her all-time Ice Queen incarnation, Lana Turner's Cora Smith in "Postman". Of course, these cunning, deadly she-devils were the calculating spawn of the men who created them, who wrote and directed them, who projected the collective male subconscious unease of immediate post-World War II America upon them. While the men were off fighting, the women came out of their homes and into the workplace, threw off their aprons for pants, made money, probably fucked around, and Lord knows what else. In short, they tasted independence, personal freedom. They liked it. And this made them dangerous, threatening, b-a-d. These women needed to be exposed for what they really were, needed to be contained, controlled, destroyed. A quick rundown of the ultimate fates of this babealicious sextet that first rocked my adolescent world underscores the point: Stanwyck's Phyllis is dispatched up close and personal with a shot to the gut by lover-boy Fred ("goodbye, baby") MacMurray; Greer's Kathie is machine-gunned by the cops after similarly whacking lover-boy Robert Mitchum ("dirty double-crossing rat!"); Cummins' Annie Laurie is turned into Swiss cheese by lover-boy John Dall in a fog-bound tule swamp ("I'll kill you! I'll kill you!"); Leachman's Christina is sadistically tortured and dumped from a moving vehicle ("remember me!"); Savage's Vera is "accidentally" strangled with a phone cord by lover-boy Tom Neal's Al Roberts (I don't like you, Roberts!"); Turner's Cora dies in a car wreck with lover-boy Garfield at the wheel. Each of these women is confident, aggressive and sexually intimidating. Each dies violently because of it. But was it all just passing male performance anxiety of a readjustment era, quickly and quietly swept under the twin beds of the Eisenhower '50s? Is noir's continuing appeal strictly retro-camp now, or does it tap into some mutated lineage of the subterranean fears that spawned it more than a half-century ago? TWEED's "Mailman" works both of these ends against the middle, with hilariously effective results. Subtitled, "A Multimedia Musical Satire", "Mailman" takes camp to a whole new, post-modern level. This is not merely drag-show camp, this is camp that comments on its own campiness while caricaturing the furtive relationship between trapped wife Cora and rootless drifter Frank Chambers. "Mailman" takes its parody to such outrageously comical extremes that it transforms the illicit lovers into lurid, lusting icons locked in a dance that is simultaneously a burlesque and an embrace of noir's enduring appeal. TWEED's presentation is a gay-hued wink at that which brings to the surface (and, in one great moment of live theater, lays across the countertop) the guilty, twisted, sick quintessence of the heterosexual noir relationship. "Mailman" director Kevin Malony and writer Stephen Pell have fertile ground for parody in Tay Garnett's clueless 1946 adaptation of James M. Cain's violent, tawdry novel. If nothing else, Garnett's "Postman" is a good example of what happens when noir characters are dragged from their natural, shadowy environment and made to stumble about blinded and dazed in the sunny, sanitized world of Harry Ruskin's prissy adaptation. Other than Turner's rolling tube of lipstick, this first of two "Postman" film adaptations is most notable for its positively perverse casting of veteran cherubic character actor Cecil Kellaway as Cora's husband, Nick. Memorably drawn by Cain as a slovenly, animalistic Greek, Kellaway's twinkly Nick (with the surname of "Smith", to complete the whitewash) is like Santa at home in the off-season. Who could possibly have any sympathy for two sick shits who would crack kindly old Cecil's noggin with a whiskey bottle and push him over a cliff? Sneaky, cheating bastards deserve what they get! "Mailman" not only gives Nick back his ethnicity but, appropriately, takes it to the extreme, giving him -- and Cora -- the impossible surname of Papanakadapoulos. Also sporting a new first name, Gus (as Frank has become Nick, if you follow), Papanakadapoulos is given a deliciously odious presence by Daniel Booth, who belches and farts his way around the café like he owns the place (he does), when he's not falling down drunk on ouzo (though Booth was adept at all three at once). As Gus' bored bombshell of a young wife, Varla Jean literally towers over the men in her life. With her broad shoulders and muscular arms, Varla Jean takes the ideal of the statuesque blonde ice goddess to appropriately ridiculous extremes. Bradford Scobie's Nick Chandler (renamed here in a double homage to Dashiell Hammett -- Nick and Nora -- and Raymond Chandler, for a chunk of "Double Indemnity" lifted verbatim and dropped in near the end) is short and slight, eye level to Varla's back-straining 48DDD cleavage. That he must stand on a milk crate to kiss her offers a perfect visual metaphor for Hollywood's packaging of not only Ms. Turner, but every other unattainable ice queen of the era. This extreme physical mismatch offers a number of opportunities for pure physical comedy, and Malony & Co. mine it to the max, including a variation on the countertop tryst made famous in the 1981 Rafelson/Nicholson/Lange remake I won't even try to describe here, should this "Mailman" find a much-deserved second life at another venue. Suffice it to say that this outrageous, jaw-droppingly carnal pas de deux gives a whole new meaning to the phrase, "consumed by passion." While Varla Jean certainly has moments where she captures Lana Turner's urgent breathiness -- albeit with what sounds like a loose upper plate -- the real standout here is Scobie's bullseye skewering of John Garfield. Scobie's take on Garfield's drifter is so relentlessly, so immaculately dead-on it is more an extension of the original portrayal than the broad parody of the other performances. Taking Garfield's familiar physical and vocal mannerisms out on weirdly twisted tangents while keeping them always firmly grounded in Garfield's persona makes Scobie's performance an astonishing standout amongst an excellent cast. Throw in his occasional, entirely inexplicable tai-chi movements and the result is you may never look at Garfield quite the same again. Certainly you will never be able to watch his furrowed, cringing portrayal of a cuckolding murderer in "Postman" with a straight face again. If there is a feminine equivalent to "cuckold" other than just "done wrong", "Halfway to Heaven"'s Elsa Sinclair is certainly it. Cooked up by Raw Impressions Music Theatre's eight composers and eight writers over the span of ten feverish days from an outline developed by Maeve Fiona Butler and Gwynn MacDonald, this "film noir linear narrative" is set in 1952 and features the earnest Ms. Sinclair (Laurie Ferdman and Christine Ciccione share the role) as a successful Broadway playwright who is also heir to her family's fortune (now there's a writer's fantasy!) After her latest play flops, Elsa flees the Big Apple for her hometown of San Francisco via cross-country train and "accidentally" bumps into Marvin (Matthew Trombetta and Patrick Mellen), the lead in her recently bombed play. Attraction flames into romance, they are quickly married, and then, Marvin begins acting strange..."Heaven" dips its toes in some new noir waters by transposing the genre's traditional femme fatale role onto Marvin, but overall follows the predictable, worn template that retro-noir has become saddled with over the years. Raw Impressions Musical Theatre is apparently committed to producing full-length musical theater under extremely tight, self-imposed deadlines. Why? Well, because RIMT believes in musical theater "being an immediate community experience and a reflection of what's going on around us right now -- not filtered by anyone and not hampered in a lengthy process before the audience receives it." That "lengthy process" is usually known as "rehearsal", and there are generally good reasons for it. Two or three years ago, a spate of "24-hour" plays and various spinoffs swept theaters all over the country like a bad fever. The basic drill called for audiences to drop in at a theater one night in which the play idea was hatched before them, then return the following evening for a full-fledged performance. And, if the end-results were ragged or downright crappy, the response could always be, "yeah, but we only had a day to do it." The point of it all -- beyond a gimmick -- proved elusive if not non-existent, and fortunately this slapdash craze faded as quickly as it had come on, as crazes are wont to do. RIMT's "Heaven", though it did fall back upon easy types and clichés a more "lengthy process" of preparation might have replaced with fresher ideas and characters, was several cuts above slapdash, thanks to the considerable talent of those involved. Watching the end product, one is reminded of how much talent there really is in this city. Scene for scene, the music consistently pummeled the dialogue; it was not until Scene Four (of Eight) that Ben Winters' spunky verbal sparring got the book off the mat and into the characters' faces where it should have been from the beginning. Other standouts included Stephen Sislen's music for Scene Seven, strongly shaped for the ensemble by Butler, and Amy Silverman's Dictaphone. Yes, Ms. Silverman played a Dictaphone, and a damn fine one, too. How any of this reflected what is "going on around us right now" beats the hell out of me, but Silverman's performance was especially virtuoso amongst a strong and charismatic cast. Where did "Heaven"'s writers and composers take us, with their noirish linear narrative? Down a dark road of lust, betrayal, greed and murder, that's where. Only this time it was Marvin and his scheming little chippy of a girlfriend who got whacked and Elsa who went on, sadder but hopefully wiser from her rough education in the ways of male-female love. I suspect there is a little bad seed buried somewhere in our individual and collective subconscious that draws us again and again back to that dark road, the peculiarly American little seed that thrills vicariously to the evil doings of others. Politicians. Clergymen. Stockbrokers. Lust. Betrayal. Sex. Greed. We love to follow the blazing arc of their escapades and peccadilloes as long as, in the end, they are appropriately humiliated and/or destroyed, like those bad girls of noir. Our bad seeds are, after all, planted deeply in unforgiving, Puritanical soil. Or maybe the attraction lies on a simpler, more personal plane. Maybe women just like to watch women dominating and sexually controlling men, and men just like to watch such women destroyed because of it. Or maybe, for the most twisted among us, there is a perverse fascination -- comfort even -- in watching a doomed couple who know they are doomed race inexorably to their inevitable, violent end, so consumed by their unholy passion they will not or cannot try to stop it. "If you're thinking of anyone else, don't," Jane Greer calmly tells Robert Mitchum near the end of "Out of the Past". "It wouldn't work. You're no good for anyone but me. You're no good and neither am I. That's why we deserve each other." -- Brook Stowe Additional essays and observations on the bad babes of noir and more may be found at the "supplement index" link below. Varla Jean
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