AN AP ARTS REVIEW: Lusty and literate, `Aunt Dan and Lemon' has returned to off-Broadway
NEW YORK (AP) — "Aunt Dan and Lemon" by Wallace Shawn is one of the most peculiar plays of the last two decades. Infuriating. Entertaining. Funny but sad. And determined to provoke its audience.
It did just that in 1985 at the Public Theater in a hotly debated production that starred Linda Hunt as the adventurous Aunt Dan and Kathryn Pogson as a grave, childlike Leonora, nicknamed Lemon.
Now it's back, in a much more overtly sexual production, and controversy should strike again. This lusty, literate New Group revival, on view at the Clurman on Theatre Row, manages to negotiate Shawn's long, disturbing monologues with ease. It has more trouble with the play's larger scenes, although the evening's big moment of sexual ecstasy is handled with surprising skill.
Director Scott Elliott has cast the title roles with care even if their English accents tend to slip now and then.
As the frail Lemon, Lili Taylor is a marvel. When ticket holders enter the theater, the actress already is on stage. Taylor sits in almost spooky contentment, silently watching the crowd file in and then she begins to address them: "Hello, dear audience. ... If everyone were just like you, perhaps the world would be nice again, perhaps we all would be happy again."
Not likely, particularly after Lemon expresses her admiration for the Nazis. Well, at least for what she calls their "refreshing" lack of hypocrisy. Efficiency is all, it seems.
Aunt Dan, also known as Danielle, is not Lemon's real aunt. She's her mother's best friend. And to Lemon, Dan is a mentor, a woman who fills the child's head with tales of her sexual adventures in the 1960s and her godlike admiration for Henry Kissinger.
The statuesque Kristen Johnston, who has a throaty, sensuous voice, delivers a ripe, ready Aunt Dan. You believe her tales of carnal experimentation. It's a gleeful performance, and one made all the more unnerving by the rhetoric she unleashes.
Shawn's title characters get away with saying quite a lot of horrific things, although they never actually do the things they espouse. They leave that to others.
Take Dan's good friend Mindy, a prostitute. Mindy is not even above murder if the price is right. This working girl is portrayed with chilly efficiency by Brooke Sunny Moriber and her naked victim by Carlos Leon, best known as the father of Madonna's first child.
Melissa Errico is believable as Lemon's do-good, liberal mother and Bill Sage has a few effective moments as her angry American father. The rest of the cast, which sits on stage during much of the action, is not quite up to their level of expertise.
Yet it's Shawn's chilling dialogue that is the real star of "Aunt Dan and Lemon." It doesn't cut the audience much slack. It badgers and bites but always remains thought-provokingly theatrical.