DO ME AND THY STAGE
SHALT ILLUMINATE

Rana Bose

[Rana Bose has written and directed 10 plays. His most recent play, Black Skirt, was performed in 1998]. Ed.

* * * * * * * *

I have been sparring with my inner demons to write or not to write this review.

I decided to see Illuminata because John Turturro projects that fiendish intelligence that propels one towards cinema of a certain 'non-mainstream' variety. (I emphasize 'non-mainstream' because today there are so many layers of undergroundism and repertoriness that the word 'cinema parallele' has lost its significance -- now that it is housed and sponsored by that chrome and glass neuro-tech temple called Ex-centris in Montreal.) The Main has changed and so has this world. And in that changing world, Turturro revives some interest in the complexity of theater emotions as a challenge to the facile and cosmetic common sens-isms of the 'globalized' world that today is being retailed everywhere in an arguably nonsensical manner.

Turturro's Fink-ish demeanor conveys mischief not unlike Kevin Spacey, another favorite of mine of the recent surprise hit American Beauty. Each, in his own way, is able to sustain mischievous suspense with a suspect smile, and although poles apart in their respective styles, they succeed in breathing life into their cinematic efforts through what they leave unstated or implicit. Pulp enfantilism is passé, and must collapse into its inanity. Turturro provides the mature alternative to Tarrantino with his intelligent classicism.

As a theatre person, I am amused by the notion that theater can be lensed. And yet it has; by Turturro, himself, along with the artful performances of other theater aficionados like Susan Sarandon and Ben Gazzara. Perhaps, unknown to me, the entire crew of Illuminata has a strong theater background.

What is it all about? Lies in life and in theater, imperfect love between the scenes and between lives, about a desperate diva in her twilight years, about the many facets of fornication, hysteria and ribaldry, about the slanderous nature of theater critics who allow their sexuality to molest the art of criticism. And finally, it's about a world (our world) where acted and real emotions blend in and out, go back and forth using the slender curtain as the dividing line.

Such is Illuminata. Stark honesty and dark deceit converge on a theater stage, but under the sure lens of John Turturro's masterfully directed movie of theater life in New York in the early part of this century, it throws into stark relief the intricacies and travails of staging a play when up against formidable emotional, egotistical and commercial barriers. The playwright succeeds, as a fencer would, because he has been relentlessly vigilant with near mechanical brilliance.

Here are some of the (p)layers.

TUCCIO: [the young playwright, played by Turturro himself].
"The day we met, everything I said was true. I started lying on the second day at dawn." Riding a black horse, with white shirt sleeves billowing in the wind, Turturro ends the movie by galloping through a glen towards the camera, with his quasi French-cut beard barely concealing his mischievous melting smile that continuously makes his chin tilt to his right. His play is staged. The multi-layered conspiracy works. That is why he smiles.

CELIMENE: [ the diva, played by the wistfully sexy Susan Sarandon].
"When I am telling my mother, I love her, I am lying . . . Acting is lying. I love acting so much, that I could die for it. Theater is worth dying for . . . " Celimene will play the lead in his new play, Illuminata, but only if Tuccio sleeps with her. As she lifts her dress up, with her back to the audience, she looks down and says: "And all this can be yours . . . " Prior to that, she waits for him in her boudoir, in a nightgown that barely conceals her sagging breasts. When he expresses disinterest, she firmly places her hand on his crotch and attempts to masturbate him, while talking business. When he explodes in anger (while pleasure seeps up his loins) with the sudden realization that he is verging on intellectual compromise and betrayal of his true love, she agrees to work for him, because she also realizes that as a diva her days are digital, running on low battery power. As a last resort, she says vaingloriously, "Look how many ugly people there are in the world. No wonder they pay us so much money."

RACHEL: [the prima donna].
"You're the worst kind of liar, because your lies always have the ring of truth." Played by Katherine Borowitz, Rachel drifts in and out of her lines on stage and in the wings. During her tender moments with Tuccio, lines from their parts unavoidably creep in, blurring the distinction between real life and acting. The theater scrim (the slender curtain), as metaphor, pre-figures the two time realms the characters move in and out and off and on stage and/or the world stage.

DOMINIQUE: [the leading man, played by Rufus Sewell ].
"I once fashioned you a dog yelping at my heels and so I stopped to kick you; now, like dust, you settle and are ignored." Cocky, arrogant, self-assured, ambitious but unattractive? Yes. But, played out with consummate accuracy by Sewell, a character type with which I am very familiar because the theater industry is replete with them: careerist and driven, but intellectually incapable of rising to the occasion; busy and obsessed with being in demand but unconcentrated on the project at hand. Paris gleams in his eyes as the ultimate mecca of theater.

SIMONE: [the ingenue, played by Georgina Cates].
"Sometimes when you write . . . I press my forehead against your door as hard as I can to give you inspiration."

TUCCIO: "You should press harder."
Simone is ordinary. Her acting (in theater) is pedestrian. So it follows that her life is equally so. How can you shine, if you cannot lie/act? So her lover, another ordinary actor/ordinary life dies unceremoniously of a repeated fainting illness. Predictable, again. Fainting is a sign of overall weakness. No?

BEEPO: [ the clown, a stellar performance by the indomitable Ben Gazzara.]
"A clown laughs at death". Yes, always the master stroke. There is nothing to live for, but to live for the success of the company, if you are but a clown. The lives of the ordinary are peripheral, but must be lived with riotous abandon. And that is exactly what Gazzara attains in his role as Beepo.

BEVALACQUA: [The theater critic played by Christopher Walken].
Now here is someone played masterfully by the sordidly dressed Walken. In a hairpiece caricaturizing Oscar the Wilde, Bevalacqua sits in his little box up in the opera house, while being fed nuts by his concubines (who also double as his stenos, while the show is going on) carefully eyeing every male body for future possibilities. Criticism be damned. It's bodies that he is after and if his perception is clouded by his sexual proclivities, so be it for the city's theater audience. They have to grin and bear it because he is the city's only theater critic! And he is, after all, not particularly enamoured by heterosexual love. So at the après-play, he extols the 'acting' abilities of the one whom he has identified as the one with "possibilities. An absolutely inane role player with a face of a pantomime character.

So there you have it. All thespian intrigues and conspiracies must converge on stage in multi-layered fornication. Divas must be gratified. Sponsors must have their tear-jerky, artless eyes smothered by the bovine breasts of the actress (carefully co-conspired and executed); the clown must get his fill of food and sex, and the homosexual critic must be allowed a half-assed attempt at a lay! And thus the play gets staged.

TUCCIO says: "Our lives wind themselves out. When they wind together that is something fine and rare . When they unravel, I leave it to others to diagnose the cause."

So, as I started out by explaining that my conflict in reviewing this play/movie revolves around the shared pain of trying to develop roles in the theater world and bringing it all together in a successful production, while at the same time being all too cognizant of the fact that we, in theater, are all at the mercy of the film critic whose judgment may be impaired by his 'subjectivities.' And now I find myself in that same role, (rest assured that all 'personal preferences' are in-command), and declare that Turturro wins the day with his superb Illuminata by very simply smiling at the lens in his inimitable fashion. Rating: * * *

Cast includes:

John Turturro .................Tuccio
Katherine Borowitz.............Rachel
Christopher Walken...........Bevalacqua
Susan Sarandon..............Celimene
Bill Irwin......................Marco
Rufus Sewell..................Dominique
Georgina Cates...................Simone
Ben Gazzara.................Flavio

Script and Dialogue : Brandon Cole, John Turturro
Director of Photography : Harris Savides
Art Director: Robin Standefer
Music: William Bolcom
Editor: Michael Berenbaum

THE END

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