the
confession
by Douglas Messerli
Bruce Jay Friedman (teleplay, based on his play), Burt Brinckerhoff (director) Steambath / 1973 (PBS television broadcast)
With the recent death of novelist
and playwright Bruce Jay Friedman, I determined to watch his 1971 play Steambath.
The version I saw was the 1973 PBS production, broadcast at time on only 41
outlets. Since then, the play has been revived numerous times.
If the play was originally filled with obscenities,
uttered mostly by God, in this case a Puerto Rican who cleans and cares for a
steambath; in the television version many of these works were excised, the play
tamed down a bit—although still showing a woman, Meredith calmly strolling
into this men’s den to take a shower, and the two gay men of this work who do a
kind of strip-tease to “Let Me Entertain You.”
In this production Bill Bixby plays the
central figure Tandy, and Valerie Perrine the bubbleheaded Meredith—whose major
activities include shopping at Bloomingdale’s, getting a new hairdo, and paying
her Bloomingdale’s bill.
In the early scenes he and Meredith are
just a little confounded in how they have come to be in the steambath with such
bizarre figures, an older man who seems to have experienced everything in life,
including erotic adventures and a good thorough sweat, an unclean man who expectorates and eats oranges, spitting out the pits on the floor, and who watches television
loudly. And then there are the two gay men who we later learn hung themselves
over their love of a handsome dancer in Zorba, the kind of flippant assessment of gay life we find constantly in cinema and in theater before the 1990s.
At first, however, Tandy and Meredith do
not perceive that they are dead, until speaking with one another they realize
that they had simply been going about their daily lives, Tandy eating at a
Chinese restaurant and Meredith, as always, shopping when they suddenly
themselves in the steambath, and in recounting that realize, as strange as
it seems, they must be dead. Friedman has recounted the fact he had a “bad
experience with food at a Chinese restaurant” that had led him to contemplate
mortality.
When he finally does show up, he is a
foul-mouth Puerto Rican who, with the help of a machine, orders terrible deaths
and a few good deeds in succession. When the Puerto Rican (José Perez) describes
himself as God, Tandy refuses to believe it, locked in his bigotries and incapability
of imagining God as a kind of janitor (“I find it relaxing,” he insists, given
all his other duties).
But Tandy will not believe. You cannot be
God, he insists.
To prove his godhead, the Puerto Rican
does stage-bound card tricks, and pulls a large group of colored scarves from
his pants, Tandy taunting him for his mere magician’s tricks.
Bit by bit, however the Puerto Rican goes
further and further to counter Tandy’s taunts, eventually drinking a six-foot
high glass of alcohol in a few sips, and, finally, serving up a kind of
multi-media mural of glorification, to which all kneel, even if Tandy only
bends one knee.
Yet even this non-believer is somewhat
overcome with awe, and has to admit the possibility that the Puerto Rican is
something more than his surface projection.
Soon after, another man joins their
group, projecting the daily stock market results upon the wall. As he laments,
he has bet only on sure and safe stock instead of chancy ones. Yet his have all
gone down, while the chancy ones have continued rise. He too must have been a
suicide.
God finally orders all of them to
enter the door which will take them to the void—which they one by one enter. All except Tandy who tries again to
argue his way of death, explaining his divorce, his new writing and companion,
and closer relationship with his daughter.
A new group is about to enter.
Yet, even God listens to this man’s heartfelt
confession, and suggests he may keep him on for while as his assistant.
The play ends, however, with a spotlight on
Tandy, as he sits alone suffering the repercussions of what he has come to
realize.
Friedman’s play is fiercely funny, yet dramatically
serious in its metaphysical implications. In the original Tony Perkins
played Tandy. And I’d like to see someone of that stature perform it on
film, if there were ever to be another production.
Los Angeles, June 14, 2020
Reprinted from USTheater,
Opera and Performance (June 2020).
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