Meeting Nostalgia Halfway

NOSTALGIA can be very pleasant--as a condiment that adds texture, coating, and muting to the surface of events. That The Curse of an Aching Heart, William Alfred's new Broadway play, is so uncritically nostalgic--not even his characters' pain seems to dampen the affection of the playwright summoning up Irish Brooklyn and the 1930s--should not be enough to warrant the unfavorable critical reaction the play has drawn. Sure, the effect on audiences is anything but the slick, lively finish that spells success for so many current musicals; nor does Alfred go in for the angst-packed, Freud-packed soul-searching that makes "serious" drama like Equus or Children of a Lesser God powerful. His tools are different.

In Aching Heart, the stage is neither abstractly bare and flexible nor ornately realistic in an attempt at complete geographical and temporal illusion. Instead, Alfred and his designers lovingly construct elements and vignettes. A trolley glides and creaks between disconcertingly realistic rails and wires--under a tastefully schematic tenement-surrounded lot whose metal underpinnings glow coppery in the retrospective glow of the lighting. Every so often a speech, or an unguarded exchange of glances, or a single character, leaps into relief, silhouetted against Alfred's loving gaze. Nostalgia and a craftsman's close attention gild each piece.

Conceived as a series of crucial moments in a woman's life. Aching Heart chronicles the coming-of-age of Fran Duffy Walsh, an Irish Brooklyn urchin who breaks off relations with her childhood guardians after her uncle, Jo-Jo forgets himself enough to kins her far too heatedly, on the night of her first date. Years later, after loneliness and marriage to a handsome neighborhood Romeo-turned-alcoholic, Fran, played by Faye Dunaway, finally 1masters the courage to face the past and reestablish contact with Jo-Jo (Bernie McInerney) in time of trouble. Music and flashback link the five vignetts, some of which are emotional, others farcical in their evocation of the intervals of misery, joy and boredom in Fran's life.

But therein, alas, lies the difficulty--for the segments of Fran's life that unroll before us are only that, intervals between the events that have shaped here sorrows. Alfred's elliptical structure is deliberate, its patterns regular enough for the viewer to eventually catch on. Realizing he is supposed to be seeing the result of each crisis for Fran, he can reconstruct from there--but the job is difficult and distracting, and finally irritating. The very loving care and vividity lavished on these scenes have a subversive effect on the audience. Like it or not the scenes have a subversive effect on the audience. Like it or not the scenes acted onstage have an immediacy that only a leap of imagination can put into their needed perspective.

Most frustrating of all is the absence, in the scenes shown, of any elements that would seem to warrant such loving attention. We can see too clearly that the social encounters of Fran's single life are empty and boring: the chitchat, as the incredible trolley slides across the stage, is just that. We are convinced of the rightness of Alfred's choice of farce as a device when Fran's unacceptable, unsympathetic beaux parade through her living room and her crazy German neighbors scream from upstairs; these scenes and characters compose the essentials of farce, so much so that they end by being wholly unbelievable.

PERHAPS THE PLAY suffered from the weakening of its original concept as a string of disparate moments. Since Curse's first, highly successful opening in Chicago two years ago, Alfred has added a few long scenes and written in the only direct confrontations the script contains--Fran and Jo-Jo's single explosive moment and, later, her meeting with her aunt, which sparks a long talk over old times. But rather than fleshing out the story, the additions sit uneasily and discontinuities are all too evident. What pleasure, nostalgic or dramatic, can we glean from Fran and Aunt Gert's ecstatic recapitulation of childhood rituals we never saw--when, indeed, this is Gert's first appearance on stage? What use that Gert, played by Beverley May, is as plump and wonderful and all-forgiving as society's collective grandmother, her perfect Brooklyn accent wrapping itself around the traditional phrases with a naturalness Faye Dunaway's inflections never even approach? What use, even, to give us the moment of Fran and Jo-Jo's traumatic kiss, if we are to learn two acts afterward that the final break between them came later, when she returned from the date in the wee hours and he raged at her till she hit and wounded him with a brass ornament?

Throughout the play's five acts, performed without intermission, the note most often sounded is that of the homey cliche. Childhood ("Friday Night Dreams Come True") is two little girls on roller skates, singing and giggling over love-notes. Lonely young adulthood ("The Curse of an Aching Heart") is a parade of idiosyncratic young men and irate foreign neighbors, and the ups and downs of a love affair with a smooth young Irishman named Lugs (Terrance O'Quinn), whom Fran eventually marries. Continuity is a hard-boiled, comical best friend. "The trauma of growing up" is Jo-Jo, but the intervening years thus stylized, far from framing the slow growth of a conflict, become a string of unrelated heartaches. Fran occasionally mentions Jo-Jo's name, but between Act II's kiss and Act V's final reconciliation, Alfred seems almost to forget about him.

So all the waranth and sensitivity and kindness of remain disembodied to the end, and confronting and nearly palpable mist that ultimately disperses to nothingness for want of somewhere to settle. Without sustained tension or a cohesive enough plot, Fran's love and courage, however deeply feld, however hardly come by, remain abstractions. Like the exquisitely wrought texture of cultural nostalgia and theatrical illusion that form the basis of Alfred's style, they ache, desperately, for a more visible framework to gild.