Review: 'Chasing Manet' shows indignities of aging

[April 10, 2009]  NEW YORK (AP) -- If you think a dementia patient can be cheerfully ditsy and if you can laugh at the sight of an angry, nearly blind woman plotting to use her wheelchair-bound roommate as a tool for escape from their nursing home, then Tina Howe's latest play, "Chasing Manet" is a pill you can easily swallow.

Howe, author of "Painting Churches" and other works, has applied her considerable writing talents to this dark comedy. Its off-Broadway premiere by Primary Stages is at times disturbing and uneven, yet often very funny.

Tony Award-winner Jane Alexander is formidable as the sarcastic, depressed Catherine Sargent, once an artist of international renown. Now legally blind, Catherine is still intellectually intact, which intensifies her isolation from her fellow residents at the Mount Airy Nursing Home.

Her mopey son Royal (Jack Gilpin) moved her there, away from her own Boston home and friends, to be near him in the Bronx. But his visits have become increasingly rare, and Catherine spends most of her days in bed, despising her surroundings.

She stirs herself only to rail against her fellow patients, or to spitefully disrupt their activities. She refers to a just-deceased resident as "the old crybaby," while repeating her own hopeless refrain, "Out! Out! I want out!" to anyone who comes near.

Lynn Cohen has the much more likable role of adorable, cheerful Rennie Waltzer, suffering from increasing dementia since the death five years earlier of her beloved husband, Herschel. Newly ensconced as Catherine's roommate, the peppy Rennie has a warm extended family and a loving daughter, Rita (warmly played by Julie Halston). Rita visits often and regularly takes her mother on outings. Most of the time, Rennie happily believes that she's in a four-star hotel, with Herschel somewhere nearby.

Under Michael Wilson's smooth direction, the two excellent leads have a field day wringing laughs out of their lines. Alexander also does a terrific job of pretending to be blind, and both women convey the pathos of their circumstances beneath the humor. Several fine actors play multiple supporting roles as staff, family members or other patients, including Vanessa Aspillaga, Rob Riley and David Margulies.

The intent of the play becomes confusing when a group of actors playing mentally disabled, incoherent but not elderly people are repeatedly wheeled around the stage, and unaccountably used for laughs. Their display as figures of fun during their group therapy classes, for instance, seems irrelevant to the escape plot that Catherine is determined to carry out.

The play has boisterous moments, and witty dialogue, although the first act, which ends with some characters weeping inconsolably, is also frank and darkly realistic as to the limits of Catherine and Rennie's capabilities.

Then Act 2 inexplicably becomes an often-farcical sequence of improbable events. It's hard to reconcile the two parts.

Howe's concept may be unclear, but the wit of her writing, strong performances and the persistence of the human spirit are all admirably on display here. "Chasing Manet" plays at 59E59 Theatres through May 2.

[Associated Press; By JENNIFER FARRAR]

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