![]() What is breathtaking about The Dazzle is the language he puts in the brothers' mouths. The same can be said of his poetic approach to the play. In his last play, Everett Beekin, which includes a couple of sets of sisters, one of the women is also a recluse so The Dazzle's theme of idiosyncratic family behavior is in keeping with Greenberg's past concerns. While The Dazzle seems, at first glance, unlike anything he's written before, it marks his continued interest in what happens between and to siblings. There are many mysteries surrounding the Collyer brothers, but it is very clear why Greenberg has been drawn to them. That these three aren't going to be able to do one another any lasting good is clear. As the two of them sink into the final stages of debilitating co-dependence, Milly knocks at their door once again, deathly ill and burdened by a history of abuse and rejection. Homer, who for so long has looked after Langley, is beginning to need round-the-clock care himself. The play's second act unfolds many years later, when Langley is unable to fulfill professional engagements, and then a few years after that. She fails, however, more due to Langley's ambivalence than Homer's tactics. Refusing to make herself scarce despite Homer's open dislike of her, she almost snares Langley. Milly resents her money because she resents the parents to whom it belongs she thinks the way out is to throw herself at Langley, and she doesn't care how obviously she goes about it, right up to and through exposing her breasts to him. On the night we first see them, they've brought to their knick-knacked but presentable home a poor little rich girl named Milly Ashmore (Francie Swift). Devoted but not above carping at one another, Langley (Reg Rogers) and Homer (Peter Frechette) spend their evenings at concert halls where Langley is still able to concertize. The first half of The Dazzle is a look at the two men when they were not yet full-blown weirdos and had only allowed a modest stack of books or newspapers to accumulate in their abode. The novel, long and detailed, follows the focal figures from decade to decade Greenberg's work is short and impressionistic and concentrates only on two, maybe three distinct periods in the brothers' intriguing lives. If he does know the book, he apparently wasn't inclined to lift anything significant from it for his play. That book became a bestseller 56 years before Greenberg got around to his play, but the "almost nothing" Greenberg admits to knowing about the Collyers evidently includes the existence of the Davenport novel. One of those enthralled was novelist Marcia Davenport, who, in 1954, imagined the lives that the eccentric Collyers might have lived in My Brother's Keeper. The discovery of the brothers' bodies in March of 1947 made national headlines, fascinating Americans for whom disposophobia was not exactly a household word. Their folie à deux has a name: disposophobia. He suffocated under the weight of falling junk, condemning the blind and infirm Homer to starve to death. ![]() Apparently, Langley had used his engineering skills to rig trip-wires amidst the walls of bundled newspapers in their rooms and had himself set off one of his traps. Although Langley trained as an engineer and Homer as a lawyer, they didn't pursue their careers but lived as recluses in the family home until 1947, when they perished amid tons of accumulated debris. Born in the 1880s, they were raised at 128th Street and Fifth Avenue by a physician father and socialite mother. ![]() In an author's note he explains that " The Dazzle is based on the lives of the Collyer brothers, about whom I know almost nothing."Īctually, there is much to know and almost nothing to know about the real Langley and Homer Collyer. Simply put, Greenberg's characters and scattered situations don't sustain over the amount of time he takes to deal with them. This tortoise-pace rendition of Chopin's piece, which can usually be recognized instantly, turns out to be a metaphor for the play itself: Something beautiful and compelling in its intricacy and quickness has been attenuated so that, eventually, it loses its shape and its appeal. Another habit is retarding his tempos at one point, he executes the Minute Waltz so lugubriously on the piano that his more practical brother Homer is hard pressed to identify it. One of the ways he goes about this in his turn-of-the-century upper Manhattan mansion is by observing objects for long periods-a hank of hair, a single thread in an antimacassar. Langley Collyer, the piano-playing brother in Richard Greenberg's new play, The Dazzle, is so concerned about time passing that he regularly attempts to slow it down. Reg Rogers and Peter Frechette in The Dazzle ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |