As the program for Caryl Churchill’s “Ice Cream with Hot Fudge” clearly states, the first ten scenes of “Ice Cream” are set “in the UK during a summer in the late eighties,” and the second ten “in the US the following year.” Whether or not you would be wise to read the program depends on whether you’re the kind of person who carries around a pen and likes ticking things off or the kind of person who’s driven mad by the knowledge that there are seventeen or eighteen more scenes to get through like the one you’re sitting through now.
“Ice Cream with Hot Fudge,” which opened May 3rd, is made up of two Caryl Churchill plays currently being produced at the Public Theater. The curtain-raiser, “Hot Fudge”—so called because some of the characters in the play talk about stealing and some of the characters lie and talk about “fudging the truth”—is a bit of a cheat. It’s one of those plays which can be made to sound clever or ingenious in a review—either because reading about them requires less effort than watching them or because description grants them a semblance of economy which they do not in fact possess. (It comes to the same thing.) Churchill’s ostensible point is that, while all the people in the play are thieves, the ones we meet in the first scene—who are planning a sort of white-collar bank heist but speak an authentic Cockney idiom—represent a nobler and better class of thief than the global managers and real-estate types we meet in the third scene, who talk about “growth areas” and “interpersonal skills” and say “Let’s do lunch.” Actually, though, the whole play is an elaborate excuse for an exchange between a young woman (Margaret Whitton) who claims to run a travel agency (it’s her family in the first scene who are planning to rip off the banks) and a young man (John Pankow) who is in information management (it’s his friends in the third scene who are ripping off the world): he says, “You’re lucky in your chosen field, because everything in the world is a potential commodity,” and she allows that the same could be said of him, and he observes, “So the point of the existence of everything in the world is us.” The rhetoric—like the rhetoric of municipal signs (“Littering is filthy and selfish so don’t do it!”)—is pungent, but the message is fairly lightweight; one feels harangued for something that wasn’t one’s fault to begin with.
The second play, “Ice Cream”—so called because Churchill wants “thirty-one flavors” to serve as a microcosm for the trade-off between pluralism and commercialism which is essentially what’s wrong with American (one character actually makes this speech)—is about a couple of American tourists who have come to England to look up distant relatives. It hails from the aren’t-Americans-funny-the-things-they-say-and-do school of theater and does indeed weigh in at twenty scenes. Most of them are quite long, and those that aren’t make up in portentousness what they lack in duration. The play is half an attempt (inept) to imitate the style of Pinter and half a sophomoric exercise in Yank-bashing. The American tourists, Lance and Vera (James Rebhorn and Jane Kaczmarek), who descend on Lance’s young English cousins Phil and Jaq (Robert Knepper and Julianne Moore), are intended to appear oafish, grasping, and ridiculous particularly in their eagerness to get in touch with Lance’s British roots. The first six scenes or so seem meant to establish this. (Nothing much else happens in them.) Then, in the seventh or eighth scene (I lost count), Phil shoots and kills an intruder, and the play takes a decidedly Pinteresque and melodramatic turn for the worse as Lance and Vera—for reasons that remain obscure—allow themselves to be drawn into the situation as accomplices.
The stateside second half boasts two more deaths. Phil and Jaq descend on Lance and Vera, but Phil gets knocked down by a car and killed, whereupon Jaq steals Lance and Vera’s car. She picks up a hitchhiker—an episode that gives Churchill a chance to share with us her picture of redneck America (it’s a little incoherent)—and she has an encounter with a rapist professor and kills him in self-defense. None of the scenes seem to have anything much to do with one another, and none of them are very interesting—through one, surprisingly, ends with a man saying, “Take off your shirt, bitch, let’s see what you got!” Toward the end of the evening, Jaq bullies Lance and Vera into buying her a plane ticket home. When we leave her, she seems to be embarking on an affair with a South American woman she has met at the airport.
Les Waters, the Royal Court Theater director who staged “Ice Cream with Hot Fudge,” seems either to have been baffled by his American cast or else to have allowed himself insufficient rehearsal time: characters’ accents change from scene to scene, sometimes from speech to speech. Annie Smart’s set makes a mockery of the concept of front-cloth staging: its sliding panels actually draw attention to the fact that they serve no purpose. Why Joe Papp decided to mount this play in a season that has given us “Some Americans Abroad,” Richard Nelson’s witty and perceptive rumination on the same subject at Lincoln Center, is beyond me. I would have thought that the sort of people who frequent the Public Theater got tired of lampooning people who say “growth areas,” “interpersonal skills,” and “Let’s do lunch” ten or fifteen years ago. But perhaps it’s the other way around: maybe people who ten or fifteen years ago gave up laughing at global management types and the language of psychobabble also gave up going to the Public.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, May 21, 1990