GENE & GILDA
by Cary Gitter
Directed by Joe Brancato
Starring Jonathan Randall Silver and Jordan Kai Bernett
59E59
Reviewed by David Spencer
I’m not so sure about Gene & Gilda. A celebrity bio play by Cary Gitter, it posits Gene Wilder (Jonathan Randall Silver) being interviewed for television by a late-night host (voice of Dick Cavett). The interview is supposed to be about his career, but inevitably, almost immediately, the host asks about Wilder’s relationship with his late wife, comedienne Gilda Radner (Jordan Kai Burnett). Too soon, too personal, Gene insists, but the host persists; and then, conjured from the beyond, Gilda appears to help him out.
There’s lots of precedent for the trope: the survivor unable to fulfill himself or his goals without the help and guidance of the deceased. who return as ghosts that only he (and the audience) can see. They range from fuddy-duddy bank president Cosmo Topper having his life complicated by chic, mischievous George and Marion Kerby following a skiing accident (per the TV series) … or Due South’s Sergeant Benton Frasier of the Royal Canadian Mounties, displaced in Chicago, receiving guidance from his late father Robert, also an RCMP Sergeant, shot and killed in the wilderness by the fugitive from justice he was pursuing … Private investigator Marty Hopkirk, back to help living partner Jeff Randall solve his murder, and more (Randall and Hopkirk [Deceased] aka My Partner the Ghost).
As that might imply, it’s a trope of which I’ve been a fan. But it takes a certain panache to keep that ball in the air. And I think a subtly haphazard delivery of the device may be at the heart of my ambivalence where Gene & Gilda is concerned.
There’s something common to all the above examples: the ghosts are entering their charges’ real lives and helping them through real crises (well, real in that they pass the test of verisimilitude). There’s a concrete thing to be accomplished in each episode, but even if we more fairly limit the survey to the pilot that sets things in motion, that still obtains. And it defines the rules of the game.
Okay, we start with the talk show. Bit of a contrivance (it doesn’t help that you can hear the age in Cavett’s voice, which can pull you out of the era), but in fact, the real-life Wilder did deflect questions about his private life with Radner. The host, as I say, keeps pressing—a bit insensitively, it seemed to me, but, okay, it makes Gene more adamant and that triggers Gilda’s appearance.
Here’s where it gets tricky. Gilda’s kind of there to help herself. She wants her story told. As the play moves along, it seems like what really makes Gene reluctant is remembering his own nutty pathology. (Whereas she revels in her own nutty pathology.) By the end, she hasn’t really helped him realize anything she hadn’t helped him realize during their life together. She’s just cajoled-forced him into talking about it. And she narrates at least as much as he does.
Which brings up the fact that once the re-enacted history gets going, the talk show frame becomes superfluous, even an intrusion when it reappears. Almost as if to validate Gene’s reluctance, the “relived” scenes seem not to belong in the TV studio black box setting. (That’s another thing; the set conflates the notion of a TV studio with black box theatre presentation. The playing environment becomes neither one thing nor the other.)
And then there’s the movie quote. I don’t know the Wilder-Radner films near well enough to know if there was more than one, but Gitter has lifted the “I’m hysterical” exchange-with-business from The Producers, and interpolated it into an early confrontation within the private-life Gene-and-Gilda story. This completely shatters verisimilitude for several minutes. Are we to believe that, in essence, Gene Wilder WAS a kind of Leo Bloom? Is Gitter implying that film performances become indelible because somewhere the character and the actor are inextricable? And what are we to make of the fact that the iconic scene in the iconic movie was shot many years before Wilder and Radner even met? Yeah-yeah, poetic license in the service of a relationship comedy. But what makes comedy of this sort funny is a sense of truth behind it. How would Gilda and Gene not be consciously aware of replicating the Mel Brooks authored scene? The moment that sequence begins, you can actually hear the audience vocalize recognition. Signaling that for that moment, at least, they’ve been pulled out of the story and made aware of actors at work. A laugh gotten cheaply or falsely is a laugh you pay for.
(A sidebar story I can’t resist, from Lewis J. Stadlen’s terrific and essential theatre autobiography Acting Foolish. He was out of town with The Sunshine Boys, creating the role of the beleaguered agent-nephew, and Neil Simon had jammed jokes into a particular scene that were ruining its core humanity. It’s important to note here that Stadlen can make anything funny. He has that sharp an ear and sense of timing. He raised his concerns with the director, Alan Arkin. Arkin replied, “You have my permission to subvert the material.” Not quite sure he’d heard correctly, Stadlen asked him to repeat it. Again: permission to subvert the material. At the next performance, Stadlen deliberately delivered the lines so the jokes would fall flat. Simon subsequently took them out.)
And given all this, the end is kind of odd too. I won’t describe it per se (it wouldn’t be much of a spoiler even if I did), but it leaves us with Gene and Gilda in a flashback. It’s presented as a kind of postscript, an “Oh one more thing I forgot.” But it comes off as a retreat into the past. Gene in the present is therefore never truly resolved.
Big question: How much does all this matter?
Gauging from the audience reaction, not a helluva lot.
The flip side of everything I’ve said is that Gene & Gilda simply isn’t all that deep. Meant to be charming, it charms. It’s ably directed by Joe Brancato, and while Mr. Bennett and Ms. Silver don’t exactly channel the essences, they are, as sidemen say, close enough for jazz, personable and mostly adorable. Which seems to be all the audience wants. Which is why Gene & Gilda will probably do very well in regional, stock and amateur venues. Cary Gitter seems very attuned to that (as he was with his play, and subsequent musical of, The Sabbath Girl), and I envy him the knack.
So by all means, have fun at Gene & Gilda.
But if you’re not having quite as much fun as those around you, perhaps this review will help you figure out why.