Turner Plays Tallulah, Daaaaahling

Remember Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Undercover Blues? Kathleen Turner? Well she's back, this time in the one-woman show Tallulah. After receiving a Golden Globe for Romancing the Stone and an Oscar nomination for Peggy Sue Got Married, Turner faded into relative obscurity. Several less commercially successful films later, she has returned this year to her former standing as an actress. Earlier this year she dared to bare all on the London stage in The Graduate and was lavishly praised for her acting form, as well as for her physical form, apparently still in fine shape at age 45. Turner also appeared in The Virgin Suicides, a Sofia Coppola film, as the mother of five suicidal daughters. This fall Turner can be seen at the Colonial Theatre in Boston in Tallulah, based on the life of one Tallulah Bankhead, an actress from the '30s whose list of flop films was exceeded only by the ranks of her lovers.

Although Bankhead appeared in a few acclaimed films, notably Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat and Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, she is now better known for her personality. Her drawled "Hello, Daaaaahling" and her never ending flow of conversation, punctuated by quick draws on a cigarette, became fixtures in the drawing rooms (and bedrooms) of many a London and New York society home. She once bragged about having had over 5,000 lovers, and she was romantically linked to many public figures in her lifetime, including Winston Churchill, Leonard Bernstein and Greta Garbo.

Kathleen Turner is in many ways the perfect woman for this role. From the opening toilet flush, her sultry voice and seductive manner mesh perfectly with Bankhead's lusty persona. It is unexpectedly easy to forget you're watching Kathleen Turner instead of Tallulah Bankhead. The one-woman show takes the form of an intimate conversation with the audience as Bankhead plans her entrance into the political arena-no easy task for a woman who once described herself as "pure as the driven slush." As Bankhead, Turner confides details of her sex life, knocks back enough liquor to fell a horse and tosses out one-liners actually taken from Bankhead's pithy utterings. She mocks men, acting ("that method shit") and, most of all, herself.

Since the play is set in the later stages of Bankhead's life, author Sandra Ryan Heyward makes Bankhead rail against the fates and begin to dissolve into self-pity. Perhaps this is understandable for a middle-aged actress whose career is going out the window and whose lovers are dwindling, but I am sure that the real Bankhead in the throes of self-pity was not a pleasant sight. Turner's portrayal is no more enjoyable, but just as the play seems to be mired down in whiskey-soaked emotion, Heyward throws out a wise-crack that shows Bankhead has at least not lost her sense of humor.

Nor has Turner herself. Oddly enough, the most engaging part of the opening night performance occured when the sound went out in the first act. When her microphone quit working, Turner did not bat an eyelash. Instead she rolled her eyes and drawled at the audience "Well daaaaaahling, shall we continue?" The ensuing feedback was drowned out by the applause of the enamored audience, and she finished the act without amplification.

TALLULAH

written by

Sandra Ryan Heyward

directed by

Michael Lessac

starring

Kathleen Turner

Through Oct. 22

Colonial Theater

TALLULAH

written by

Sandra Ryan Heyward

directed by

Michael Lessac

starring

Kathleen Turner

Through Oct. 22

Colonial Theater