By Cynthia Citron
NORTH HOLLYWOOD, California–What could be more lacerating than a sister’s scorn? Especially if she sits on the board of a prestigious art museum and he is a struggling conceptual artist.
That’s the premise and dilemma of Joshua Ravetch’s new four-part play One November Yankee, now having its world premiere at the NoHo Arts Center in North Hollywood.
Television superstars Loretta Swit and Harry Hamlin are the sister and brother in question, and they start off in the museum gallery where Hamlin’s latest art project has been installed. It is a bright yellow airplane standing upright and balanced on its crashed nose.
To Hamlin, who has recreated an actual plane crash that took place five years earlier, the installation is a metaphor for civilization in ruins. “We’ve gone from Kitty Hawk to this,” he moans.
His sister “doesn’t get it” and is bent on delivering comments to the press on why she doesn’t like it. She is fixated instead on an installation by a major artist that she had rejected in order to mount her brother’s work. The rejected piece, she explains, was a room crammed with white ping pong balls with one bright silver one inserted among them. Hamlin “gets it”: it’s “like a needle in a haystack,” he says.
Swit criticizes an earlier work of Hamlin’s, called “Unmade Bed.” “I found it lazy,” she says, and follows with a plethora of puns at his expense. “The critics are always looking for fresh hamburger,” she tells him.
“Only people who find themselves ordinary have to pun,” he retorts.
This scene is followed by the earlier crash scene in the woods of New Hampshire and this time Swit and Hamlin are the victims of the crash. She is the pilot, traveling with her brother, a novelist, to a family wedding in Florida. (Yes, they liken it to John-John’s crash on the way to Cape Cod.)
“This never happens to people like us,” Hamlin complains.
“Us?” she asks.
“Jewish intellectuals,” he says. And then, unfortunately, he aspires to an on-again off-again Jewish accent and inflection, both dreadful.
She talks of the wedding couple as “Floridian society” and he calls the phrase “a perfect oxymoron.”
She chides him for “having no dirt under his fingernails,” and he describes himself as “a magnet for trivia.”
Next, it is “two days ago, somewhere in New Hampshire,” (representing two days before the first scene in the art gallery), and the wreckage of the crash is being discovered by a brother and sister who have been out hiking in the woods.
And finally, we are back in the art gallery. It is later in the evening of the exhibition and the verdict is in.
I’m not going to reveal the verdict, and I’m not going to tell you who—or what—One November Yankee is.
Suffice it to say, Joshua Ravetch, the former Artistic Director of The Stella Adler Conservatory and Theater has written and directed a play that works well. It becomes a little repetitive at times, but otherwise is a nice addition to the plays he wrote for Carrie Fisher (Wishful Drinking), Dick Van Dyke (Step in Time: A Musical Memoir), and
Stefanie Powers (One From the Hart). Harry Hamlin, especially, displays an acting talent that goes way beyond L.A. Law.
One November Yankee will run Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 3 through January 5th at the NoHo Arts Center, 11136 Magnolia Blvd. (at Lankershim) in North Hollywood. Call 818-508-7101 for tickets.
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“Doesn’t anyone know what a pancreas is?”
That’s not a rhetorical question, it’s a wail of frustration from a woman who’s just been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
Instead of sympathy and concern, however, she got questions like “Can’t they just cut it out, like an appendix?”
“No, they can’t,” Carole Real says. “It’s a vital gland that’s critical in the digestion of food.”
But being a playwright, and a very funny lady to boot, Real made her pancreas the star of her new play, titled, of course, Doesn’t Anyone Know What A Pancreas Is?
Her pancreatic cancer, she hastens to add, was a misdiagnosis, but it changed her life considerably. For one thing, she signed onto three internet dating services, and for 18 months she pursued the hunt for Mr. Right “as if it were my full-time job.”
“There’s nothing like facing your own mortality to make you willing to date,” she says.
It’s a line she gives to Ian Alda, her doppelganger in the play. As he faces his own pancreatic drama and his frantic quest for a partner, he notes solemnly that he’s “dropped all physical requirements.”
Happily, Real met Mr. Right, a former stand-up comic whom she calls her “spouse equivalent.” “I took one look at him and there was that ‘click’ and I knew I was going to be stuck with him for the rest of my life,” she says.
As for Mr. Right, on their third date he acknowledged “I think that marriage is a horrible, despicable, terrible institution, but for you I’d make an exception.”
Who could resist a proposal like that? And so they are now engaged.
But to get back to the play. It’s being directed by the inimitable Jenny O’Hara, who calls Real “one of my favorite playwrights.”
“It’s great to have a director who is an actor,” Real responds. “Especially one who understands the funny.”
This is not their first time working together. O’Hara directed a workshop performance of Real’s one-act We Used to be Fun which ran for eight performances.
Real’s other one-acts include Why the Beach Boys Are Like Opera, Don’t Say Another Word, and The Battle of Bull Run Always Makes Me Cry. “This last is very popular in Asia,” she says, mystified. Inscrutable.
Doesn’t Anyone Know What A Pancreas Is? is Real’s first full production. With only five days to go before it opens, Real calms her director’s jitters by declaring “Five days is eons in theater time.”
Meanwhile, O’Hara is juggling her directing duties with an acting role in a movie called BFF (Best Friends Forever).
“It was written, produced and stars Andrea Grano and Tara Karsian, and it’s hilarious. Once I read the script I knew I had to be in it,” she says.
“It’s about two girlfriends with hopeless love lives who receive a gift of a couples weekend at a spa. There are five couples at this lover’s retreat, and Richard Moll and I are one of the couples,” she explains. “Once the picture is finished it will hit all the festivals.”
O’Hara appeared most recently in L.A. at The Fountain Theatre costarring with her husband, British actor Nick Ullett, in Bakersfield Mist, a smash hit that ran for eight months.
She also appeared with him for two years in New York on the popular soap opera As The World Turns. She was a director trainee, waiting for him to recover from cancer and a bone marrow transplant. Because there was no paycheck involved in the traineeship, the writers wrote her into the script so she could be paid as an actor, and the part became a fixture for two years. When Ullett recovered they also incorporated him into the script and manufactured a love interest between the two of them. In the end, when the couple decided to return home to California, the writers wrote an elopement scene for them, and off they went, never to be seen on the show again.
Back in California they have been active members of the Ensemble Studio Theater/LA at its Atwater Village Theatre home and O’Hara is singing the praises of that theater’s new second space. Called “Speakeasy” it will run two world premiere plays in repertory in a venue equipped with tables and chairs, sofas, a “tasty array” of snacks, and decent wine, she says.
In addition to Pancreas, which will run from November 14th through December 9th, there will be The Fisherman’s Wife, a “brutally hilarious fantasia,” according to its playwright, Steve Yockey, which opened on October 25th and will run through December 13th.
“We’ve had to design our set to comply with the lighting arrangement of The Fisherman’s Wife,” O’Hara says, “because they’re up first and there’s no room for alternate setups. It’s a very small space, so that the audience will feel as if they’re eavesdropping on the conversations. Which is okay, because the message of our play is that everybody struggles, everybody is equally messed up, and you’re not alone.
“The struggle is for comfort, settling in, authenticity…not working for perfection. After all, nothing is perfect, “ she concludes.
“Yes, you’ve got to remember that after 60 or 70, nobody’s hot,” Real adds.
“The play is very well written; there’s no problematic writing,” O’Hara says. “I stand by that.”
“It’s a laugh machine,” Real says. “But it’s the laughter of recognition. Ian, our lead, is worried, eccentric, and lovable. Like a young Dustin Hoffman.”
Also featured in the cast are Annika Marks, currently appearing in The Sessions, Patty Cornell, William Duffy, Will McFadden, Heather Robinson, and Liz Ross.
“Ironically, our play is running in November, which happens to be Pancreatic Cancer Awareness Month,” Real notes.
“Me, I’m waiting for National Hemorrhoid Week,” says O’Hara.
Doesn’t Anyone Know What A Pancreas Is? presented by Ensemble Studio Theatre/LA. Opens Nov.14. Plays Fri and Sat 8 pm; Sun 2 and 7 pm through Dec.9 at 7 pm. Tickets: 18. Atwater Village “Speakeasy” Theatre, 3269 Casitas Ave., Los Angeles. Call 323.644.1929 or www.ensemblestudiotheatrela.org
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Citron is Los Angeles bureau chief for San Diego Jewish World. She may be contacted at cynthia.citron@sdjewishworld.com