Harry Hamlin and Stephanie Powers are so familiar from movie and television roles that it’s easy to forget they’ve done their fair share of stage acting. So it’s a treat to have them shine their lights on Joshua Ravetch’s One November Yankee, a two-hander sent this way from The Delaware Theatre Company via Los Angeles’ NoHo Arts Center Theatre.
Or is One November Yankee more accurately described as a six-hander? In the course of the 80-minute comedy-drama, which comprises three—well, really four—related sketches plus a brief coda, the handsome Hamlin (People magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive,” circa 1987) and Powers (as striking as she was when adventuring the world with Glenn Ford) each play three roles. And very well, indeed, under playwright Ravetch’s firm direction and with efficient Scott Cocchiaro lighting and Lucas Campbell sound.
The first sketch takes place in a Museum of Modern Art gallery, where curator Maggie Newman is about to open an exhibit of her younger artist brother Ralph’s installation, “Crumpled Plane.” Crumpled as a discarded sheet of paper it is, a life-sized single-engine yellow plane, wrecked at a nose-down, 45-degree angle. Ralph got the itch to create it after reading an article about a New Hampshire mountains crash in which a brother and sister appeared to have been lost.
[Read Melissa Rose Bernardo’s ★★ review here.]
Ralph announces in artsy Artforum banter that he was inspired to see the fatal incident as a metaphor for the collapse of contemporary civilization. For audience members this might seem a stretch. So might the eventual New York Times review, which gets Ralph’s vision in spades—raving of the sort that the Times‘ actual Holland Cotter or Roberta Smith might not have been so inspired to blurt. All the same, beauty is, as we know, in the eye of the beholder.
The opening sketch friction is that Maggie—in Anna-Wintour bob. Anna-Wintour specs and designer-like (Marc Jacobs?) black lace selected by costumer Kate Bergh—has a dim view of the Ralph’s work, and she expresses her sour opinion with unrestrained puns and putdowns. Nonetheless, Maggie is responsible for commissioning “Crumpled Plane,” a title she scoffs at. So she has an obligation to stand behind it, an obligation she resists.
The result is bickering, some of it rather arch. (Too much of it.) As such, the nattering is intended by Ravetch to be typical of brother-sister relationships. As it happens, brother-sister relationships are the playwright’s focus throughout One November Yankee, and it’s a subject dealt with less often nowadays than mother/daughter, father/son, or husband/wife combos. Perhaps someday a dissertation will be written on the subject from a psychologist’s point of view. (In the Ravetch program bio, there’s no mention he has an older sister. Anyone wanna bet he has?)
The second-sketch brother and sister are Margo and Harry Preston. They’re the ones who crashed in the New Hampshire mountains. (Set designer Dana Moran Williams doesn’t change much; the plane retains pride of place.) They’re Jewish siblings who contend with each other over Margo’s failing to fill the tank and thereby causing the unscheduled landing.
Their fate, as the previously mentioned news account suggested, isn’t good. It’s underlined by a (stereotypical?) statement, heard more than once. And more than once it gets laughs: “Jews don’t fly planes.” Incidentally, Hamlin and Powers are better at WASP accent than at Jewish accents. (No dialect coach is credited.)
The third sibs spotted are Ronnie and Mia, who are hiking the same New Hampshire hills when they come upon the previously undiscovered plane. They also find remains and other abandoned belongings. (Harry’s jaw and Margo’s wallet with her airplane license in it are among the detritus.) Of course, Ronnie and Mia bicker, most of their argument centering on Ronnie’s inability to discuss the death 22 years earlier of their brother Danny. The caustic conversation, like the others, is a matter of bonding, unbonding and bonding again.
Not incidentally, Ronnie is a dentist. He’s been mentioned before. Earlier, Maggie says her son is a dentist and “dull.” This, then, has to be—in their hiking gear—two of Maggie’s children from one or maybe two of her three marriages, and again Ravetch is extending his look at brotherly-sisterly love.
He extends it but doesn’t deepen it. Because he’s chosen the relatively quick sketch form, he keeps his writing, uh, sketchy. As writer and director, he is able to maintain an amusing level of insights—with Hamlin and Powers maximizing his intentions—but it does seem as if he’s presenting a series of situations that might benefit from further delving.
It could be said that just as Ralph sees a metaphor in “Crumpled Plane,” Ravetch discerns in the links between the characters from sketch to sketch a metaphor for our universal link to each other—a one-big-universal-family linkage that must not only be faced and endured but also honored. He’s writing in the tradition of the old saw that goes, “Blood is thicker than water.” As the history of humankind has forever demonstrated, there is a good deal of truth to the adage.
One November Yankee opened December 8, 2019, at 59E59 and runs through December 29. Tickets and information: 59e59.org
