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It’s great fun to see famous Broadway and Hollywood actors on a Denver stage–it seems to bring out the “golly gee” in all of us. Wendy Wasserstein’s slick, sophisticated and tepid comedy The Sisters Rosensweig, passing through Denver via the Auditorium Theatre’s “renovated” stage, boasts a fine professional cast–all established presences on stage, screen and television. And though the sound in the Auditorium is still so bad that the actors sound like they’re talking through tubes, the show boasts a terrific, ultra-real set that is entertaining in itself.
Famous professionals and a fabulous set can take you only so far, however; ultimately the material has to fly on its own. And Wasserstein has so many heavy messages weighing down the cargo, she can’t get this baby airborne. Sisters offers some insights about relationships and middle age, a few hearty chuckles and, for a light comedy, way too much idle chatter.
Mariette Hartley, who once won an Emmy for a guest appearance on The Incredible Hulk, stars as the eldest of the three sisters, who are highly successful in their different ways. Sara (Hartley) is an international banker. The second sister, with the unlikely name Gorgeous (Caroline Aaron), chose a career in domestic engineering (housewife/mother) and eventually branched out to become a radio personality dispensing advice to Boston’s troubled thousands. The baby of the family, having changed her name from “Penny” to “Pfeni” (Joan McMurtrey), is a childless journalist who has eased her way out of hard news features and into travel writing because she is too sensitive to endure the suffering real news entails.
The sisters gather at Sara’s London home to celebrate her 54th birthday with Sara’s daughter Tess and her boyfriend, Pfeni’s bisexual lover Geoffrey and Geoffrey’s tenacious heterosexual friend Merv. Despite outright rudeness from hostess Sara, Merv falls for her and tries to remind Sara of her roots as a Jewish American woman. Sara has done her best to forget who she is (and to make her own daughter forget), and her amnesia has led her to take up with an upper-crust anti-Semite named Nicholas Pym.
The interaction among the sisters, while predictable after the first thirty minutes of the show, is the best thing about it. Between examining the great problems of the mother-daughter relationship, the possibility of love and sexual fulfillment in middle age, the struggle for ethnic identity in a melting-pot society and the still obnoxious presence of anti-Semitism in that society, Hartley, McMurtrey and Aaron construct a fervid intimacy, an illusion of sibling affection that appears to grow out of a shared history.
Hartley’s Sara is real enough, and most of the time interesting. A brilliant woman who fails to conduct her personal life intelligently is a more or less ordinary phenomenon, but Hartley projects both intelligence and secret frailties with grace. Having denied her cultural heritage, Sara has grown a little too hard and a little too demanding, mocking her sweet, goofy sister Gorgeous without bothering to understand who Gorgeous really is. Hartley sheathes Sara in a thin layer of ice–easily cracked, but sharp and cold just the same.
McMurtrey is lovely, bright and witty as Pfeni, though she has the least complex role of the three. Aaron’s Gorgeous is funny, sweet, a little brash and ultimately wise. We’ve seen this character a zillion times in the movies and on TV, yet Aaron manages to give her an endearingly rich emotional center.
So why does Sisters feel like a three-hour sitcom? Part of the problem is Merv. It isn’t Charles Cioffi’s fault; he’s a good enough actor. But Wasserstein gives Merv so many politically correct points to make that he never gets to be a human being–and the relationship between Sara and Merv is never for an instant believable.
The biggest problem, though, lies in Wasserstein’s great jumble of Issues. Television characteristically attacks issues like this–lots of speeches, contrived moments of self-revelation, radical changes of feeling once a character has seen the light, absurd solutions to painfully complicated problems. And everyone is rich, brilliant and beautiful.
Only on TV, the problems would be solved a lot sooner. Three hours? Good heavens. The references to Chekhov’s Three Sisters notwithstanding, Sisters Rosensweig is hardly a revelation of either the human heart or the American soul. Sister Wasserstein needs a good editor.