Fire and Air
Written by Terrence McNally
Directed and designed by John Doyle
Performances through February 25, 2018
Classic Stage Company, 136 East 13th Street, New York, NY
classicstage.orgMarsha Mason, John Glover, Douglas Hodge and Marin Mazzie in Fire and Air (photo: Joan Marcus) |
One of Terrence McNally’s most popular
plays, Master Class, had opera’s
great diva Maria Callas at its center. Now McNally turns to ballet for Fire
and Air, about fabled Russian impresario Serge Diaghilev, who formed
the groundbreaking troupe Ballets Russes in the early 20th century,
and his volatile personal and professional relationships, including those with his
favorite dancers: Vaslav Nijinsky, his first muse and erstwhile lover, and Léonide
Massine, who took over after Nijinsky’s spot after he ran off and got married.
McNally’s play mainly chronicles
Diaghilev’s time in Paris, when he took the dance world by storm with his stagings
of Debussy’s The Afternoon of a Faun
and Stravinsky’s historic The Rite of
Spring—which caused a riot at its 1913 premiere. There are also glimpses of
Diaghilev’s life away from stage rehearsals, as he alternately relies on and
pushes away his oldest friend/cousin/first lover Dima, childhood nanny Dunya—who,
improbably, is still taking care of him—and a Russian countess, Misia, whose husband
finances Diaghilev’s art.
McNally, who has done his research,
combines factual detail with imaginative flights of fancy. But Fire and Air (a nicely evocative title, from
Diaghilev’s self-description) ends up an unsatisfying jumble of biography and fictional
re-imaging; John Doyle’s typically stripped-down production (consisting of a
few chairs and two large mirrors) cleverly visualizes these scenes of an
artist’s life from, as it were, different angles.
As the dancers, James Cusati-Moyer
(Nijinsky) and Jay Armstrong Johnson (Massine) are lithe and athletic, their
toned bodies speaking more eloquently than their acting. The cast’s veterans are
Marsha Mason (an amusingly doddering Dunya), Marin Mazzie (a crisply elegant
Misia) and John Glover (a believably Russian Dima).
As Diaghilev, British actor Douglas
Hodge gives a broad but good-humored portrayal that at times reminded me,
unaccountably, of both Nathan Lane and Dom DeLuise. But Hodge does make Diaghilev
relatable as more than a self-pitying genius, which gives Fire and Air its intermittent vigor.
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