The New York Times-20080127-Living Life-s Dreams- Only Faster- -Review-

Return to: The_New_York_Times-20080127

Living Life's Dreams, Only Faster; [Review]

Full Text (731  words)

You know from the beginning of Oscar and the Pink Lady that Oscar is dead. He was a 10-year-old with cancer, and now his hospital bed has been stripped down to the mattress. Only a few belongings, waiting to be packed and removed, lie there. And any rational audience thinks, well, here comes an evening of predictable sentimentality.

But in the gentle, surprising production at the George Street Playhouse, the audience gets more. Primarily it gets Rosemary Harris, 80, conquering a demanding two-act, one-woman play.

Ms. Harris makes her entrance with a cardboard box (for packing) on her head, wearing a pink smock, plaid pants, dark socks, white sneakers and a baseball cap. Here is the grand lady of the stage, costumed as a hospital volunteer of an advanced age and a certain style (apparently, a pink lady is a really old candy striper), and she still radiates an effortless grandeur.

This is Ms. Harris's sixth decade in the theater; she made her Broadway debut in 1952 in The Climate of Eden, a Moss Hart drama for which she won the Theater World Award. She received a Tony Award for playing Eleanor of Aquitaine in The Lion in Winter, opposite Robert Preston, in 1966. Over the years she picked up a batch of Drama Desk Awards and seven more Tony nominations, including one in 1996 for Edward Albee's drama A Delicate Balance.

She received an Emmy Award for portraying George Sand in a British mini-series in 1974 and an Oscar nomination for playing T. S. Eliot's mother-in-law in Tom and Viv (1994). Most recently she was Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke's ill-fated mother in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead. Fans of action films think of her primarily as the superhero's Aunt May in the Spider-Man movies. And now here she is on a tiny stage, doing the voice of a 10-year-old boy.

It helps that the plot of Oscar and the Pink Lady involves potent metaphor. The playwright, Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, whose father was a physician, knows children's hospitals and has created a convincing alternate universe there. In this world of fragile young people, there are ghosts at night. The children give one another cruel but fact-facing nicknames like Einstein for the boy with an oversized head and Peggy Blue for the girl with discolored skin.

In this world, doctors don't like patients who aren't responding to treatment; it makes them feel like failures. And as Oscar says, through Granny Pink (Ms. Harris), If you say the word 'die' in the hospital, nobody hears you.

Oscar's parents refuse to admit that their son is near death, and Oscar takes their attitude as rejection, because his disease and its terminal nature are part of him. Only Granny Pink faces reality with the boy, offering a hard-nosed tenderness, some phony stories about her past as a professional wrestler and a couple of odd suggestions. One is that he write letters to God about his ordeal. The second is that he play a game, pretending to age one decade every day. Nobody's going to cheat him out of living a full life.

The letters and the exchanges that Granny Pink reads and recalls, along with the game itself, create valid excuses for discussing the nature of God and of human existence and suffering. Very little comes of it, with the exception of one thought worth reflection: the characters' conclusion that yes, life is precious, but it should be regarded as a loan rather than a gift.

As Oscar's decade-a-day life progresses, he zips through adolescence, pretends to marry Peggy and eventually grows very tired in his old age. It is a tribute to Ms. Harris and to her esteemed director, Frank Dunlop, that when Oscar expresses concern that Peggy might have a baby because of the way he kissed her, the observation is endearing, rather than idiotic.

It would be interesting to see Oscar and the Pink Lady with a lesser actress than Ms. Harris, just to peek behind the curtain of her theatrical magic. But she is absolutely charming, and so the evening is, too.

Oscar and the Pink Lady is at the George Street Playhouse, 9 Livingston Avenue, New Brunswick, through Feb. 10. Information: (732) 246-7717 or www.gsponline.org.

[Illustration]PHOTO: STAR: Rosemary Harris, 80, Aunt May to Spider-Man in film, performs in Oscar and the Pink Lady. (PHOTOGRAPH BY T. CHARLES ERICKSON)