Take a minute right now and Google up images for Paul Swan. You will see vintage black and white photos of a classically handsome young man, perhaps several of him in his ravaged old age, and also a number of dramatically colored portraits of other people.
These images of Swan and some of his works as a painter are helpful to appreciating Paul Swan is Dead and Gone, an offbeat new bio-drama by Clare Kiechel. It is written and performed in an unconventional manner that befits Swan (1883-1972), a visual artist, dancer, and poet once widely known as “the most beautiful man in the world.”
Back in his heyday, Swan was regarded seriously by cultivated people as a multi-talented stunner of an artiste. His paintings still sell for tidy sums today. But Swan outlived his good looks and celebrity. In his later decades, Swan became an eccentric figure who gave showings of Isadora Duncan-style dances for small audiences in Manhattan.
Paul Swan is Dead and Gone offers a fleeting impression of the artist performing one of these recitals during his last years.
Presented by The Civilians, the play is staged at Torn Page, a small performance space in a venerable brownstone townhouse in Chelsea where Geraldine Page and Rip Torn once lived. Theatergoers ascend a curving staircase to a modest upstairs parlor, where seating for only 30 viewers flank one wall. A plastic cup of wine comes with the price of admission.
Designer Andromache Chalfant paints the room an oppressive shade of green under a white ceiling. Above a gilded fire screen and mantel hangs a sepia tapestry of a youth in a suppliant pose beneath a full moon. The rest of the décor consists of a spinet piano, a wooden folding screen, and half a dozen murky paintings. The windows and doorway are heavily draped.
It lacks only the cloying aroma of incense to suggest the shabby drawing room of a frayed culture vulture who might have hosted one of Swan’s soirees.
Although Kiechel has a dandy concept for her play, and these fusty atmospherics are conducive for it, neither the writing nor the performances fulfill the work’s promise.
The not especially illuminating peripheral characters are Bellamy (Robert M. Johanson), Swan’s accompanist and ex-lover, a schizophrenic who toggles between nice or nasty personas; and Paula (Alexis Scott) and Flora (Helen Cespedes), dancers who strike Delsartian attitudes while awkwardly intoning verse and who later briefly pop up as writers James Purdy and Susan Sontag to comment acidly upon the camp nature of Swan’s performance. The women also are revealed to be Swan’s daughters.
Following some introductory fiddle-faddle by Bellamy and the dancers, at last Swan steps out of a mummy case and into view.
Oh, dear: Portrayed by Tony Torn, Swan is an elderly, pear-shaped gentleman who affects an embarrassing maquillage and eventually disrobes down to an all-too-revealing tunic. Epicene and effete, Swan floridly chats about his career and times, swoons unsteadily through a symbolic dance or two, bickers with the others, and pines for the lost love of his life.
Gradually suspecting that Swan is an unreliable narrator of his own doings—claiming to have missed the last voyage of the Lusitania in 1915, he’s got the ill-fated liner sailing in the wrong direction—one doubts the man’s pretensions to artistry, let alone fame.
It is obvious that the playwright—whose great-great uncle was Swan—aspires to present a sympathetic portrait of an aging artist who remains transfixed, Norma Desmond-like, in the amber of a long-gone, glorious past. Unfortunately, Kiechel’s terribly sketchy 75-minute play, which incorporates poetry composed by Swan, fails to make a case for this presumably gifted, fascinating individual as anybody more than a tiresome old poseur.
Torn’s performance as the preening Swan charitably can be described as brave.
Directed by Steve Cosson, best known for staging Gone Missing and Mr. Burns, a post-electric play, and the artistic director of The Civilians, this show perhaps is presented in circumstances too intimate for its own good. To be a truly immersive experience, the front-of-house staff needs to be dressed and performing their tasks with some sense of period (the year for Swan’s recital here is undetermined), and the audience should be seated on little gilt chairs rather than modern furniture.
But such details are relatively minor when this ambitious biographical study, however lovingly intended, does not nearly measure up to the exotic individual it tries to represent.
