I have no earthly idea if actor Mark Linn-Baker likes to cook or even knows how to cook. But based on his rhapsodic reading of a recipe for spaghetti alle vongole in Michael Tucker’s Fern Hill—a clam sauce that apparently “attains oneness with the spaghetti”—I would put him up against any Food Network star.
You start with bacon. “Guanciale if you’re in Italy; or pancetta,” diced up in olive oil, explains his character, an aging hippie rocker named Billy who buses around the country with his band, Olly Golly. “Then drop in some onions and sauté—very, very slowly—on the lowest flame—so they don’t get brown—just slowly, slowly melt into the bacon and the oil.” Toss in chopped garlic and hot pepper flakes—“the flame is still very low”—and “when the garlic is juuuust golden, turn up the heat, splash in a glass of white wine with a nice healthy chunk of butter—like half a stick.… And you bubble that all together until it thickens into a slurry.”
Now for the clams: “You dump all the clams in. Give it a shake and wait for the magic.… One by one the clams pop open. It’s adorable; it’s like watching The Muppet Show. Pop, pop, pop! When each one opens, you pick it up with the tongs, drain the clam juice into the slurry and put the clam in a bowl.”
[Read Elysa Gardner’s ★★★ review here.]
By the time he gets to the pasta, which he calls “the moment of glory,” Billy’s wife, Michiko (Jodi Long), his friend Darla (Ellen Parker), his host, Jer (Marc Blum), and Jer’s wife, Sunny (Jill Eikenberry), are completely rapt. They aren’t the only ones. “You boil the spaghetti until it’s half-done—not even close to al dente yet, okay? Five, six minutes, tops. Then you ladle some pasta water into the slurry—turn the heat all the way up—and then toss in the half-done pasta. So—each strand—each individual spaghetto—sucks up into itself the essence of the garlic, the onion, the bacon, the wine, the butter and the juice from the just-opened clams.”
Regrettably, Fern Hill is not about cooking—and nothing in the play ever reaches the excitement level of that recipe recitation.
Fern Hill is the name of Sunny and Jer’s farmhouse, which Sunny wants to turn into something of a commune for them and their four closest friends—Billy and Michiko and Darla and her husband, Vincent (Tony winner John Glover, in very fine form)—as they grow older. “What’s our alternative? Each couple living on their own, getting older and more isolated, until one by one we get shipped off to die with strangers,” Sunny says to Jer, who’s not at all convinced. “This is way more interesting. And way more fun.” It is interesting and fun—The Golden Girls ran for seven seasons, after all.
But before actor-writer Tucker—who’s perhaps best known for his role on L.A. Law, which also starred his real-life wife, Eikenberry—can delve into the ins and outs of the group living situation, he reveals Jer’s affair, and suddenly we’re watching (to pilfer one of the playwright’s own lines) The Sunny and Jer Show. Sunny feels “like one of those little Egyptian mummies in the museum—wrapped up head to toe in all the things we never said to each other”; Jer whines about how Sunny has been withholding and how he “lost track” of himself. At this point, it’s just cruel that Jer isn’t sharing his bourbon.
Perhaps one day Tucker will write that play about six (more or less) 60-somethings forming a modern-day commune in their golden years. In the meantime, we have his clam sauce recipe; helpfully, it’s also printed in the program.
Fern Hill opened Sept. 19, 2019, and runs through Oct. 20 at 59E59. Tickets and information: 59e59.org
