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ii. in—i.
Dr* Jeffrey
A Review Of Robert Patrick'*
“The Haonted Host.”
For one month each year,
the New Theatre in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, located inside
Harvard’s prestigious Hasty
Pudding Club, is the scene of the
world’s most expensive and
exdusive transvestite show. In
inarch, a bevy of winsome un
dergraduates -- preppies and
fops — cavort in extravagant
costumes through shows
composed of execrable puns,
sophisticated lyrics and catchy
tunes (Alan Jay Lemer was
launched in the Pudding’s or
chestra pit) and a kick-line
featuring the hairy legs and
muscular bodies of some of
Harvard’s best and beefiest.
To inaugurate theTestivities
each year, well-known
celebrities submit to being,
paraded through the streets of
Cambridge accompanied by the
gaily bedecked and bedaubed
cast and by the raucous Harvard
Band. In 1974, John Wayne
arrived on a tank, pelted by
snowballs thrown by belligerent
admirers; last year, television’s
Valerie Harper was selected to
receive the Pudding’s Bean Pot
accolade as well as the inevitable
bouquet of giant, rhododendrons
Until recently, the site of
these well-publicized antics sat
vacant for the rest of the year,
redolent of memories of past
triumphs (and some notable
turkeys) and mustiness. Then
someone had the bright idea of
capitalizing on foe feme of the
boards and renting out the
theatre for the remainder of foe
year. .
Crusty old grads (who
gather in the upstairs bar after
either the Yale or Dartmouth
game - whichever is at home -
to drink heavily and reminisce
about their own roles m past
•shows) grumbled, of course, and
muttered about “tradition”, and
in speeches of often eloquent
pomposity invoked the names of
the five American Presidents
who have been members of the
Club. What would the Adamses,
foe Roosevelts, and John F.
Kennedy say, they asked? Since
no one knew, these eminent
personages could not impede foe
establishment of the theatre
which was duly opened on a
year-round basis. And this is
how Robert Patrick’s play “The
Haunted Host” comes to be
produced in such an unlikely
place as foe exclusive HPC.
Partick’s is a name
which people are beginning to
recognize; he’s the latest
American playwright to break
out of obscurity, in his case via a
circuitous route leading through
London’s West End, where his
plays (particularly the deser
vedly well-received “Kennedy’s
Children”) played to rave
reviews and considerable
audience aedaim long before
they Were at all accepted in
America. Now in his late thirties,
the craggy-faced, amiable
Patrick, a native of rural Kilgore,
Texas, is plainly enjoying his
newly-acquired celebrity status,
which indudes as one of its
perqs a string of hangers-on,
who might well have stepped out
of a typical Patrick 0ay about
human debris, a subject which
fascinates him and which is a
major theme of “The Haunted
Host.”
“The Haunted Host,”
which is actually Patrick’s first
play, written in the mid-sixties
and previously produced in
England, is now being in
troduced to American audiences
to take advantage of the
playwright’s rise to public
visibility and incipient fame.
Except for such notice, it would
not otherwise be produced,
since, asv a play, it is dated,
overlong (a common Patrick
filing: “Kennedy’s Children”
had to be cut folly ninetv
minutes or more between it’s
Boston and New York runs) and
irritatin gly un believable.
Indeed, though Patrick has
a reputation for hard-hitting
realism (and there are moments
of it even in this play), “The
Haurited Host” is really nothing
more than a dreamy fantasy,
perhaps written to bouy up foe
depressed playwright (who is
quite clearly “Jay Astor,” foe
leading character of the two man
{day) through one of fo$ many
bleak periods which existed
before he attracted any popular
recognition.
The play takes place in one
cluttered room of Jay Astor’s
cold water flat in Greenwich
Village in about 1965. The only
notable object in a room strewn
with the disordered remains of a
life in progress is an arresting
pastel portrait of a blond youth
This is Ed who has committed
suicide before foe play begins for.
unrequited love of a Jay who
would have responded had he
only known. He lingers on,
however, as a ghostly presence
represented by throaty laughs,
foe whistling of “Hi-Ho, Hi-
Ho,” and patches of bluish light
in odd places at unexpected
times. Almost insignificant ini
foe development of the play, foe
presence of ghostly Ed does help
to set up some of the situation
comedy on which the action
largely depends.
Much of foe first scene
(which takes place after Jay, an
aspiring though as yet un
produced playwright, is asked to
lodge Frank, a straight boy from
Iowa who also cherishes hopes of
a writing career) is comprised of
drawn-out situation comedy.
Harvey Fierstein, who began his
acting career as a transvesite for
Andy Warhol and who plays foe
effeminate Jay, prances and
minces about the stage, ban
tering with Ed, soliloquizing .in
his deep, raspy voice about lifej
in New York, and laboriously
squeezing laughs from foe,
audience by showing the holes in
his socks, fighting to open a 1
cigarette carton,' following foe
cord to locate a ringing
telephone at the bottom of a
drawer foil of trash, killing a
cockroach with a hot water bottle
(does anybody really use hot
water bottles anymore?) and
sniffing Raid Not even his
posing in a pretty lavender
baseball cap askew on his head
saves these early minutes from
being dull. Things only slightly
improve when Frank arrives,
although Patrick’s contrivance is '
too glaring to enable one to
approve foe change.
When an unsu specting Jay
opens foe door to let Frank in, he
immediately slams it in his face
and proceeds to become
hysterical. As he places the
picture of Ed in foe closet and
runs about the room recreating
foe chaos he has just been at
tempting to put down, we may
i begin to Jpj^latjk as ||j||jjhy
♦i, transformation is occurring.
■‘When at last an unruffled Frank,
evidently used to having doors
slammed in his face and in no
way affronted by Jay’s rather
curious behavior, walks in and
reveals himself to be the spitting
image of Ed, we wonder no
longer. It is obvious that Frank
has come to exercize foe
haunting spirit.
He has, however, no easy
time in doing so. Deeply ill at
ease, provacatively defensive,
comfortable in his designation to
being alone, Jay pops pills and
lashes out with rude, vindicative,
and tormenting lines to which a
pathetic Frank, heavily out
matched in this contest of
seeming wit and intelligence,
can only respond, “I think that
people and homosexuals should
try to understand one another.”
Less apparent beside this abuse
is Jay’s growing infatuation with
Frank, though as it grows his
attacks become more vehement
and crude Love, no matter how
transient or how superficial,
threatens him :
How any truly stsaight man
would have handled this
situation is not hard to imatine:
he would have walked out,
leaving Jay to his bitter
memories and his even more
bitter future. But, of course, the
delicious and naive country boy
with a heart even more golden
than his hair is not straight -- or
at least can be straight no
longer. Jay’s ranting tirades,
egotism, venom and acidity have
proven an irreversible
aphrodisiac. Though he runs
away for a few hours, he comes
back just as Jay says he would
and not only to pick up the
suitcase he has left behind.
Returning, he flings himself into
Jay’s arms and confesses that he
needs him to help with his
writing career but more im
portantly because he loves him.
At this unlikely turn of events,
there was an audible gtoan from
foe audience and quite rightly.
Jay, however, does not.
return foe embrace and let foe
Curtain drop on such a sac
charine happy-ever-after scene.
Instead, he freezes, unable to
respond and actually forces a by
now very confused Frank to
leave. Why? “I recoil from
affection,” he says. To remain in
control, he must be the one to
give love but. cannot accept it.
This is why his isolation is so
complete. As the curtain finally
falls, a triumphant Jay, now
utterly alone, throws Ed’s
picture out the door and again
strides about foe stage wise
cracking, strutting and posing,
having never paused a moment
to shudder or wonder at what he
has done or what a thoroughly
depraved individual he has
become.
Yet despite foe jarring
moments of often desperate
reality and tragic insight (as, for
example, when Jay tells Frank,
“I never wanted to buy you; I
wanted to be you.”), foe play
remains little more than one of
Patrick’s daydreams now staged.
Its signigicant proposition is that
all men are gay men and that
each one is vulnerable to foe
deadly games played without
remorse by fast-talking would-be
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their fading chances for fame.
Only in. fantasy would anyone so
healthy and sane as foe boy-
next-door Frank throw him self at •
the feet of anyone sooffendvng
and brutalized as Jay. In actual
life, it is foe other way around.
Except as an example of foe
homosexual wish-fulfillment
genre, this play is best forgot.
Though Harvey Fierstein as Jay
and the. attractive Perrin Ferris
as Frank play their roles wel’
enough (though there is little in
Frank’s part to spark much
’interest), they cannot redeem a
play so flawed and artificial.
'Jeffrey L. Lant holds a Ph.D.
in History from Harvard, where
he is often to be found in the
confines of the HPC.
ii
PAGE 15
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