Resurrecting an Artist’s Greatest Creation: Herself
By BEN BRANTLEY
Published: June 6, 2008
Louise Nevelson hasn’t let death go to her head. As reincarnated with disarming casualness and unimpeachable conviction by Mercedes Ruehl in “Edward Albee’s Occupant,” this imposingly flamboyant, Russian-born New York sculptor returns to the land of the living without a wisp of the oracular mysticism you might expect from someone who has spent two decades on the Other Side.
On the contrary, in the two-character play that opened Thursday night at the Peter Norton Space of the Signature Theater Company, Ms. Nevelson seems as down-to-earth as a ghost could possibly be and quite a bit more so than most artists accustomed to being lionized.
“You’re nervous, dear?” she asks the man holding a portfolio filled with biographical questions. “A little,” answers her questioner (Larry Bryggman), who, this being an Albee play, is known merely as the Man. “I’ve never interviewed someone who is dead before.”
Ms. Nevelson says, “Yeah? Well, I haven’t been interviewed since I’m dead.” She adds: “We’re both nervous. We’ll get through it.”
And so begins Mr. Albee’s touchingly modest tribute to one of the most important American sculptors of the 20th century and a woman who was for many years his friend. Despite their protestations of nervousness, neither Ms. Nevelson nor her interviewer seems conscious that anything less than natural is going on.
That, after all, would take away from the truly supernatural phenomenon under discussion: the uncanny and ultimately inexplicable self-determination that propelled the slow and unlikely ascent of Louise Nevelson (1899-1988) into the upper (and predominantly male) regions of the New York art world. “Occupant” bows its head in awe and gratitude before the mysterious force of will that allows great artists to be.
The official New York premiere of “Occupant” has been a long-time aborning. It was originally to have starred Anne Bancroft in a Signature production directed by Anthony Page in 2002 but was never opened to critics. (It was canceled after Ms. Bancroft came down with pneumonia.)
Now “Occupant” arrives to coincide with a season filled with productions of works by Mr. Albee, who turned 80 in March. On the surface this is not your typically cryptic and tense Albee play. Instead it’s a rather literal-minded, biographical Q. and A. with an Eminent Person that might take place in a 92nd Street Y of the afterlife.
But the play also touches on themes that echo throughout Mr. Albee’s work: the unreliability of memory, the chimerical nature of language and particularly the alchemical brew of “truth and illusion” (to borrow a much-used pair of words from “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”) by which people define themselves.
Ms. Nevelson, like many people who demand the focus of the public eye, was a great self-mythologizer. But so, it might be said, are most of Mr. Albee’s characters, people for whom fictional embroidery has greater relevance than the plain cloth of fact. “True, if interesting,” says Ms. Nevelson’s interlocutor on several occasions.
But what most concerns Mr. Albee in bringing his friend back to life is the issue of what allows an artist — unavoidably an outsider — to persevere until she becomes what she always, on some level, intended to be. This necessarily lonely process of self-fulfillment is what gives “Occupant” an emotional heft beyond that of a mere biographical sketch.
For the first few minutes I had my doubts. Would I learn anything I couldn’t learn from Ms. Nevelson’s memoirs and biographies, or for that matter, from the full obituaries that appeared when she died? Most of the questions posed by the Man cover Ms. Nevelson’s life, starting with her birth in a shtetl in the Ukraine and immigration as a child to the United States, according to conventional chronology, with occasional skeptical asides.
But as directed by Pam MacKinnon (who did a nice job with Mr. Albee’s “Peter and Jerry” earlier this season), the production takes on a conversational flow that quickly carries you past fears of being trapped in a lecture hall. And what puts you at ease even more is the seductive humility of Ms. Ruehl’s performance.
I don’t mean that Ms. Ruehl is presenting Ms. Nevelson as a humble person. How could she, when the character she’s playing wears two pairs of sable eyelashes and outfits that might have been borrowed from a production of “Turandot”?
But Ms. Ruehl avoids the great-lady stateliness — that grand luminosity that seems hellbent on planting in our minds the caption, “What becomes a legend most?” — that so often feels caked in the makeup of Dead Celebrity Theater. She wears her furry eyelashes as if they were no more exotic than a pair of rimless spectacles. Her Louise is unflinchingly matter-of-fact even in the midst of fabrications and evasions.
Much of Ms. Nevelson’s dialogue would appear to have been culled from things she actually said, to Mr. Albee and to others. So don’t expect post-mortem revelations. This Louise remains determinedly ambiguous about her fabled love affairs (including one with Louis-Ferdinand Céline) and the miseries of her early unhappy marriage to a New York businessman
