Theater review by Helen Shaw
If you aren’t familiar with old-timey heartthrobs or Warholiana, you might not know that Paul Swan was an actual person. Even in the documents that survive, he seems unreal; in the 1910s and 1920s, he was billed as “the most beautiful man in the world,” and photographs of this marble-throated, Valentino-eyed sculptor-painter-poet pulse with silver light. Much later, Andy Warhol collected him as one of his eccentrics. In his eighties, Swan was still performing dances in skimpy costumes inspired by Egypt and ancient Greece, but in the 1960s this exotica seemed like the fleshly embodiment of camp—so, of course, Andy’s camera zoomed in close.
There’s more kindness for Swan, though still a breath of mockery, in Paul Swan is Dead and Gone, perhaps because the script is by Swan’s great-grandniece Claire Kiechel. In the Torn Page space—a Chelsea parlor painted emerald green by Andromache Chalfant—Tony Torn plays Swan, swathed in polyester silks and painted with kohl, emerging from a sarcophagus and ready to seduce a final audience. At this limbo-like salon, Swan’s daughters (Alexis Scott and Helen Cespedes) sing musical numbers that Avi A. Amon and Robert M. Johanson have set to his poems, while charm-bomb Johanson also serves as master of ceremonies: an existentially slippery accompanist whose persona metamorphoses between different men who love the dying Swan.
Kiechel’s script tries to move us from seeing Swan as an absurdity (his eyes stare wildly, he brandishes a goofy prop sword, his perfection is meant to seem delusional) to considering him a great man, or at least a highly sympathetic one. Much is made of his talent as an artist, and two of Swan’s actual paintings—capable portraits—hang on the wall. But the play doesn’t quite make the intended turn. Torn excels at seeming defenseless; he’s only inches from the front row, yet you see no artifice or pretense in him. Were the whole production played at this nerve-quivering pitch, the wryness might have resolved into something deeper. Instead, director Steve Cosson has the other three actors perform with vaudevillian flair, which keeps the show’s affect flat and shiny just when it needs to let us past the surface. Still, there are many things to enjoy here, and the cozy, crowded old room encourages you to feel that every good thing in it is a personal discovery. It’s like looking through a junk shop and happening upon a jewel in a drawer. Is it trash? Is it a diamond? Whatever! In the dark, they both feel like a find.
Torn Page (Off Broadway). By Claire Kiechel. Directed by Steve Cosson. With Tony Torn, Robert M. Johanson, Alexis Scott, Helen Cespedes. Running time: 1hr 20mins. No intermission.
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