Lynn Redgrave’s housekeeper from the film “Gods and Monsters” is recycled as the maid Dunya (Marsha Mason). McNally touts Diaghilev’s genius by reducing most of the characters around him to sounding boards for his intellectual rants. Then again, Cusati-Moyer has the advantage of having much less dialogue than Hodge, plus he’s wearing tights (Doyle’s costume faithfully re-create the originals worn by Nijinsky) or he’s half-naked or he’s completely naked except for a strategically placed towel.Īlso Read: 'Miles for Mary' Theater Review: The Terror of Being Trapped in High School Forever He successfully introduces a Nijinsky who’s more faun than man and maintains that delicately animalistic persona throughout. Hodge plays Diaghilev with great verve, but after a while the character’s verbal dissertations on the transience of ballet, love, art, money and his lover-muse Nijinsky are enough to add the word “psychiatrist” to this legend’s many credits.Ĭusati-Moyer’s performance proves less wearing. Has any character, historic or not, ever been so aware of his exalted place in history even before he lived it? McNally’s Nijinsky and Diaghilev are so conscious of their every intention and motive that their on-stage action is smothered in talk and utterly lacks subtext. Instead of working against the grain of the play, Doyle is very presentational in his approach to “Fire and Air.” Nijinsky doesn’t go mad. Except for the re-creation of the “Faun” debut, McNally uses Nijinsky and other historic figures to reflect on the many crises of Diaghilev’s career as the actors sit on gilded chairs borrowed from some high-end banquet at Cipriani.Īlso Read: 'He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box' Theater Review: Adrienne Kennedy Looks Back in Anger But rest assured, McNally has his characters tell us all about it. Much of this drama takes place during the intermission. The “Faun” episode takes place early in “Fire and Air” and fuels the play almost to the end of the first act, when the Ballets Russes makes its ill-fated trip (for Diaghilev) to South America, where Nijinsky marries Romola de Pulszky, much to the fury of Diaghilev, who immediately experiences a very 21st-century moment of sexual misconduct and fires the dancer. It’s an extended moment that’s beautifully performed by Hodge and Cusati-Moyer under the direction of John Doyle. Much to everyone’s shock, the dancer-choreographer brings an unexpected autoerotic flair to “Faun,” hence la scandale. The ballet impresario who founded the Ballet Russes finds himself carried into a state of ecstasy as he watches the “Faun” premiere only to come crashing down to the floorboards when Nijinsky (James Cusati-Moyer), even more ecstatic, takes the ballet into a sphere outside the master’s fantasy.Īlso Read: 'Cardinal' Theater Review: Anna Chlumsky Struggles to Paint the Town Red In McNally’s new play, “Fire and Air,” which opened Thursday at Off Broadway’s Classic Stage Company, Sergei Diaghilev is often both the artist and the audience.Īt the 1912 world premiere of dancer-choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky’s ballet, “Afternoon of a Faun,” Diaghilev is a spectator but his artistic contributions to the work make him as much a co-artist as Nijinsky and composer Claude Debussy. At his very best, Terrance McNally is able to express on stage the wonderfully uplifting, transportational power of the theater and how it affects the artist (Maria Calas in “Master Class”), as well as the audience (an opera queen in “The Lisbon Traviata”).
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