Having lately come from seeing Eileen Atkins’ one-woman show at the Lamb’s, I can state unequivocally that this stage adaptation (by Patrick Garland) of Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” is something every lively-minded young woman will want to see. This is not to say that other people—men, for example, or older women—wouldn’t enjoy it equally. But there is a kind of girls’-school humor—gentle, low-key irony laced with a pitiless acumen—that characterizes both the Woolf essay and Miss Atkins’ performance of it. The show, which is produced by Arthur Cantor, made me want to call up the headmistresses of Brearley, Spence, and Nightingale and talk to them about group sales.
“A Room of One’s Own” is, as not everyone can be expected to remember, one of Woolf’s meditations on the intellectual status of women. An informal rumination on economics and society, inspired by Woolf’s experiences lecturing at the two women’s colleges at Cambridge, Girton and Newnham, it’s a charming proof of the dictum that the best revenge is writing well; for it is from quiet references to the minor indignities that she suffered at the hands of the university beadle and other male authority figures that she arrives at the observation that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” The essay is also where Woolf put forward her tongue-in-cheek theory about “Shakespeare’s sister”—that “wonderfully gifted” girl who never wrote a word, died young, and lies buries and the crossroads “where the omnibuses now stop, outside the Elephant and Castle.”
Still, why does anyone in 1991 really need to see this dated piece of academic feminism performed—even by Miss Atkins? The answer, I think, has to do with writing itself and the degree to which we (in America, at any rate) have ceased to be a nation of private readers. There are certain kinds of subtle prose which we no longer know how to read to ourselves, because we no longer know how certain utterances should sound inside our heads. It’s for this same reason that the Wednesday-night short-story readings at Symphony Space can be so worthwhile: you hear a phrase and, visualizing the words on the page, realize that you would never have known to come up with just that reading. Listening to the way certain words sound in Miss Atkins’ mouth—“endowed,” say, or “swine”—or to the way she wields irony and understatement, or to the repressed anger and the precision with which she delivers a remark like “And if truth is not to be found among the shelves of the British museum then where is truth?,” you feel the actor-voices in your head being roused and called to arms, not so much in the name of feminism as in the cause of language itself.
Appealing to a somewhat different taste and temperament, though similarly entertaining, is the one-woman show at the Plymouth, “The Big Love,” in which Tracey Ullman impersonates the mother of Errol Flynn’s teen-age lover, Beverly Aadland. Based on Florence Aadland’s 1961 book of the same title, and written by Jay Presson Allen and Brooke Allen, it marks Miss Ullman’s Broadway debut and isn’t quite as dumb as it sounds. Miss Ullman is a performer who is always interesting to watch. She was even interesting as Kate in last summer’s Central Park production of “The Taming of the Shrew,” where she was hamstrung by A.J. Antoon’s infantile direction.
These two one-woman shows pose a bizarre contrast. One is about language, the other about vulgarity. “A Room of One’s Own” is Off-Broadway at its sparest and most economical. Miss Atkins performs on a stage decorated with just enough furniture to suggest an academic context—a lectern, a few chairs, a table littered with books and papers, a coat tree to hang a gown on. “The Big Love” is a Broadway extravaganza requiring a full-scale set and complicated music and projection cues. And while “A Room of One’s Own,” which has been produced for public television, really benefits from being performed in a theatre, where you can see how Miss Atkins captures and holds the audience, the Tracey Ullman show might be as (or more) effective in a television format—like Alan Bennet’s “Talking Heads” series, or Robert Morse’s one-man show “Tru.”
All the same, “The Big Love” is fun, almost from the moment you walk into the theater and catch sight of the garish map of Hollywood on the preset curtain. It’s awfully simple as a character study, and the irony is fairly straightforward: Flo talks without knowing what she his saying. As Miss Ullman walks around her one-room ground-floor apartment, drinking before breakfast, waiting for a call from her daughter, and telling all, the bursts of lush Hollywood music (recorded) and movie stills (projected) make it clear that we’re hearing the story of a woman motivated by snobbery, greed, and celebrity lust, who has lived out her fantasies through her daughter. Florence Aadland is not a very interesting person; but there’s pleasure to be had from Miss Ullman’s performance, which is not without sympathy and not without contempt, and from the play and its contrivances. And while there’s little in “The Big Love” to engage the mind and little that stays with you, there’s nothing phony about it, either. Phony is what the Neil Simon play at the Richard Rodgers is—artificiality without artifice.
I enjoyed the artifices in “The Big Love”: the fact that they’re turning off the phones at noon and we don’t know why; the way we don’t know what day this is or why Flo is so anxious to hear from her daughter; the way our interest in the story is driven by our sense of action going on somewhere offstage. I liked the fine line that Miss Ullman’s performance treads between pity and reproach and between acting and shtick, and the line that the writing treads between being a play and being a riff. I liked the way the light changes outside the window (designed by Ken Billington) contrive to make David Mitchell’s set look shabbier and more depressing the more we learn about Flo’s life. The lighting suggests that there are fine lines between marble and stucco, weather and sunlight, glamor and squalor—like the lines between pimping and protectiveness, shamelessness and dignity, self and child.
Most of all, I liked that, in terms of authorship, this one-woman “Gypsy” is a mother-and-daughter act; for surely the Brooke Allen who co-wrote “The Big Love” is Jay Presson Allen’s daughter.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, March 18, 1991