The writer Walker Percy’s foreword to “A Confederacy of Dunces” is only a couple of pages long, but in it he gets across the dramatic essentials of the novel’s tortuous path to publication: that the much-rejected manuscript was orphaned when its author, John Kennedy Toole, killed himself in 1969; that Toole’s mother, Thelma, was tenacious in pressing Percy to read it; that when at last he did, he discovered a “gargantuan tumultuous human tragicomedy” that he helped usher into the wider world.
Because the book, a New Orleans picaresque, became a Pulitzer Prize-winning classic, the play “Mr. Toole” — a fictionalized recollection of the novelist written by Vivian Neuwirth, a student of his in the 1960s — elicits a glimmer of curiosity based on its concept alone.
Casting the Off Broadway stalwart Ryan Spahn in the title role, opposite Linda Purl as Thelma, amps the allure. Yet, as admirably as they acquit themselves in Cat Parker’s Articulate Theater Company production at 59E59 Theaters, there is the dispiriting sense of watching talented actors trapped in a show that they cannot save.
Ostensibly, “Mr. Toole” is a memory play. Its narrator, Lisette (Julia Randall), is an undergraduate in a poetry class that Toole teaches in New Orleans. She has a raging crush on him, which might be why, after his memorial service, she goes to his parents’ house and tells a devastated Thelma that she wants her paper on “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” by T.S. Eliot, back. Priorities, right?
Lisette never knew her teacher well, which limits the quantity and insight of her memories. Neuwirth does show us Toole lecturing on “Prufrock,” in scenes meant to probe for signs of frustration and despair in his dissection of Eliot lines like “Do I dare disturb the universe?” But the play is more banal biography than firsthand reminiscence. You could get much the same understanding from Wikipedia.
At the core of the play is the relationship between Toole and Thelma. If they are less colorful cousins to Ignatius J. Reilly — the grandiose hero of “A Confederacy of Dunces”— and his hovering, put-upon mother, there is also quite a bit of Tennessee Williams’s Tom and Amanda Wingfield to their dynamic.
Spahn and Purl consistently outperform the material, his Toole as restrained as her Thelma is relentless. There is only so much that actors can do to bring depth to superficial storytelling, but they have built characters with palpable interior lives that we only wish the play would let us in on.
Neuwirth, in the script, does offer guidance about how to stage “Mr. Toole” that Parker would have been wise to heed. The production lacks Neuwirth’s suggested “dreamlike quality,” because the set (by George Allison) depends on projected digital photos whose 21st-century crispness whisks us right out of Toole’s time, however much the period costumes (by Angela Harner) try to root us there.
And of the few objects that Neuwirth suggests be realistic, Toole’s hulking manuscript is bafflingly off. Inside its manila envelope, it never looks more than about 30 pages long.
The main trouble with “Mr. Toole,” though, is that it tries to force a tenuous connection.
Visiting Thelma once again, Lisette stalks her around the room, demanding to know the contents of Toole’s suicide note — as if that would provide her an answer that she requires, or has a right to.
“You’re forgetting your manners,” says Thelma, who always maintained that professional rejection killed her son. “I might just have to ask you to leave.”
That would be for the best. Narrator or not, she has no significant place in this sad story.
Mr. Toole
Through March 15 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 646-892-7999, 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes.
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
