Summer masquerades.

When I arrived, Charlotte Corday and Julius Caesar were smoking pot out in Florian's foyer. I assumed it was Charlotte Corday--she had a Jean-Paul Marat glint in her eyes, and she looked 1792-ish enough. Her cannabis cohort, draped in a toga and crowned with laurel leaves, could have been none other than Caesar himself. Florian Font's invitation to his Bal Masque had clearly suggested everyone come as a character out of A Midsummer Night's Dream, but it was mid-August, not midsummer, and nobody took the suggestion seriously. Perhaps somewhere in the four stories of his house on West 10th Street there'd appear a plucky Puck, a discernible Titiana, an Oberon (if not whole batches of them), but as I broke past the reefer freaks in the foyer, I found nothing Shakespearean in the living room; instead I found Cyrano de Bergerac, a Mickey Mouse, a Marie Antoinette, and (perhaps) a Gertrude Stein. I, for the lack of imagination and money, came as Zorro.

But Fedora? Where was Fedora? Surely she'd left Gramercy Park by now. Usually she wore corduroy trousers, which buttoned up in the front, suspenders, brogues. She strode rather than walked. Would a costume gown inhibit her? Normally she spoke in a sort of Ethel Barrymore baritone. Would her new persona prohibit her?

I scanned the crowd, which was quite dense at the far end of the room, but before I could move on to look for Fedora, I was encountered by a drunken Captain Bly and a chatty Miss Haversham, "Hi," a runty little man said, pulling at my cape. "I'm Peaseblossom."

Peaseblossom? Christ, the man was fifty. He had a belly big as a barrel. With a Zorro smile, I nodded goodbye to the trio and pushed my way deeper into the long living room. Right off, three things I discovered: this was a bal masque for middle-aged folk (I was twenty-four); it was an extravaganza for the well-heeled (my summertime work at the Gazette paid me peanuts); and Fedora, Fedora de Keogh was in trouble--rather awful trouble.

As a makeshift-job, while I awaited a reply from Grover College concerning a possible position there on the faculty as an art historian, I dabbled in a little writing. Fedora, dear Fedora two floors up from Mae Britz at 34 Gramercy Park, took pity on my plight and wangled a spot on the Gazette for me. I would write a profile of her... a tit for tat arrangement. In the course of matters she'd also wangled--she was indeed a great wangler--an invitation for me to attend the midsummer night's affair, by way of explaining to Florian Font, that "for an in-depth article, dear heart, my writer needs to be with me around the clock." (She called everyone "dear heart," with a nicotine croak.) "To catch the flavor, you know." Florian agreed. I wondered. In theory, yes, one needed to know the subject of a profile as well as possible, but after the third day of trailing Fedora around, I suspected she was playing games, enjoying the mystery surrounding her, the smoke screens. (Masks! Masks!) Still, I was no better than she. I was using her to bolster my secret agenda--my list for Eccentric Ladies was now comprised of Mae Browne, Bea Britz, and Winifred Wriothesley. She'd be number four. But God only knew what I'd do with such a list: incorporate the list into some sort of fiction? Add to the list? Chuck the whole notion as a crazy idea once my amour-propre was restored by attaining a position as an art historian?

But Fedora. Some of the basic rumors (I was yet in the midst of exploring, verifying, discarding) were these: she was once an actress, a stage actress of sorts. She was either sixty-three or sixty-eight, or even a generation older than that. She may or may not have understudied Ethel Barrymore in the theater.

Some of the facts (firmly written in my notes) were these: She was directing the difficult and talented Carla Respighi. In a revival of Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. At the Plum Lane Theatre. In the West Village. Out of costume, in real life, Fedora had hectic-scraggly hair--short and silver-black. She had crooked teeth, yellowed from Gauloise cigarettes. She laughed in a Barrymore catarrh. Her friends called her Sapphic; her enemies called her a dyke.

But right now, she was in trouble: it was the business of her gown--a Druid affair. She, who had in recent years little practice in wearing dresses, decided, in her bal masque madness, to appear as Norma, Vincenzo Bellini's priestess of the Druids. "You think anybody'll guess who I'll be?" Fedora had asked me earlier. "That I'll be Norma, I mean?" She spoke to me as she stood in front of the long wall mirror at Sylvie's, at the dress shop she had chosen.

Would anybody care? This silent response was not so much cruel as it was an accurate assessment of the masquerading participants: each would be elaborately disguised, too self-absorbed to ferret out the parody of another's masquerade. "But why Norma?" I did ask, quickly regretting even that logical enquiry. Her sharp glance, a prelude to whatever stinging reply she intended, was dissipated by Sylvie's demand. "Toon-awound, Madum," Sylvie said. Sylvie was French. Sylvie had pins in her mouth. "Shhh-til, seed-doo-pway."

I wanted to ask Fedora why didn't she appear at the masked ball as Vita Sackville-West, but I decided that reference might have been as obscure as Norma, so I held my tongue, and Fedora obeyed Sylvie and stood still as the contours of the gown began to take shape. And regal, and Druidish, indeed she did look. Except...that Tuscany Knot at the shoulder. Folds and folds of the long priestess gown--six feet three inches of it--seemed to depend upon the Tuscany Knot at her left shoulder. A precarious arrangement, surely. No pins there? No hooks? No chains?

I had not been an alarmist at Sylvie's, and I had every reason to question the security of her Tuscany Knot, for no matter how quaint and inventive, too much hinged upon it; yards and yards, amazonian yards. depended upon the security of the Tuscany Knot. But then, why Tuscany, anyway? Was Norma's Pollione Tuscan? And why a knot? What was so Druidish about a knot?

At Florian's at the end of the living room near the canape table, Fedora's Tuscany Knot had not merely come undone as I'd feared; saboteurs were afoot: Marie Antoinette and Marie de Medicis, under cover of the revelers crush, molested Fedora's left shoulder. Then came the awful revelation: a pool of Druiderie fell to Fedora's feet, displaying, above this disaster, inches and inches of an underslip. It was pink, the underslip. It was the pinkness that rankled. It was such a non-Fedora color. And there was so much of it.

Marie Antoinette and Marie de Medicis, royal bloods, giggled. Lucrezia Borgia screamed in delight. Cardinal Wolsey failed to suppress his laughter, his choking sort of bark. Toussaint-Louverture and Phillis Wheatly held on to each other for support.

Fedora stepped out of her pool of Druiderie and, in a shiny pink underslip, pried her way out of the crowd as best she could. I lost her somewhere behind Mae West and Oscar Wilde.

At Fedora's rehearsal the next day, my gestures of sympathy were ignored. She waved a bony, slightly arthritic hand to silence me. She took energetic strides before her assembled group in the Second Avenue rehearsal hall. She was thinking. Planning. The fly of her corduroy trousers had, as usual, come unbottoned. Finally, she said, "Places everybody" and the actors sought their designated spots, transforming canvas chairs and box crates into love seats and divans. I could easily enough pretend I was looking at a salon in Half-Moon Street in Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest; I could adjust my images of blue jeans and T-shirts from The Gap into fabrics of crinoline and silk, but I could not, no matter with what wattage I turned up my liberal impulses, adjust to the diverse, nontraditional casting.

Lady Bracknell: Carla Respighi had been selected. She fooled few people by declaring she'd not yet passed her fiftieth year, but, to her personal credit (and to the play's harm) she looked too young to portray Wilde's crusty old auntie. Although Carla wanted to think of herself as being zaftig, and had, alas, gone a bit beyond that diplomatic designation, she did have creamy-smooth skin and she possessed luxurious black hair. Her acting fame rested largely on her sensational portrayal of Courage in Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage. Gutsy, I thought of her. Luscious, I thought of her. Lady Bracknell--never. Furthermore, Carla Respighi had not an aristocratic bone in her body.

Algernon Moncrieff: Bracknell's nephew was black. Beauregard Nash. He was handsome, tall, lithe, and walked with a faintly sensuous bowed leg. His voice was all right--a little too studied perhaps. In recompense for his duties as handyman and general factotum, he'd received elocution lessons from her (air, fare, pear, heir, there)--"To get the ghetto out of your voice," she'd told him. And indeed, by mid-August he could spin off jet, gin, gist, azure, seizure, and so forth, to beat the band. In addition, Fedora had succeeded in sprucing up his fricatives, his diphthongs, and his labials. Still, the play was far too ethnocentric for interracial casting; Beauregard looked about as much like Algernon Moncrieff as I did Wagner's Alberich--and I'm tall and on the skinny side.

Gwendolen Fairfax: Algernon's love interest was Delphine Siegfried, a young beauty who spoke in hard, New York cut-glass tones and owned an exquisite chin--a chin, I fear, she hoped might cover up for her lack of talent, for why else did she pose with it so often. (I had hot-pants for her, but she would not give me the time of day).

John Worthing: Algernon's buddy was Kai Lee, a Eurasian, a startling combination of the beauties of the East and West, but he appeared not even remotely suited for the proceedings in London W., nor in Manor House, Woolton.

Miss Prism sat in a corner, quietly in repose. Of all the cast, she most fit the bill; she might have been Margaret Rutherford's sister.

"All right, everybody!" Fedora barked.

Kai Lee (alias Jack Worthing): Charming day it has been, Miss Fairfax.

Delphine Siegfried (Gwendolen Fairfax): Pray don't talk to me about the weather, Mr. Worthing. Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else. And that makes me so nervous.

Kai Lee (Jack Worthing): I do mean something else.

Delphine Siegfried (Gwendolen Fairfax): I thought so. In fact, I am never wrong.

Kai Lee (Jack Worthing): And I would like to be allowed to take advantage of Lady Bracknell' s temporary absence-

Here everyone in the room came back to the Second Avenue rehearsal hall by way of terrible laughter. It was the kind of laughter that one painfully tries to suppress but once it has burst the dam, cascades of unpardonable mirth spew forth. It was at Carla Respighi's expense. Her absence was not a thing easily accepted; Kai Lee's line, "Lady Bracknell's temporary absence," came off as a sly mockery, for indeed we all could not help but take in Carla's scent (was it Tabu? Mitsouko?), and we could all readily see her stretching her zaftig thighs in black tights as if in preparation for performing a pirouette or a grand jete. Apparently she believed in limbering up body as well as her mind prior to engaging herself in a role. Nonetheless, were such excessive machinations a prerequisite for her asking, eventually, "Prism, where is that baby?" or declaring with regal authority that "a man who desires to get married should know either everything or nothing."

But Carla, never a back-seater, retaliated. As if she'd not in the least been the subject of her colleagues' mean laughter, she said, with plummy conviction: "No, no, that scene's all wrong, my dears. The inflection. The--the projection--"

She left the window ledge, which she had been using as a barre, and came over to the imaginary London living room, ignoring Fedora, and began an impassioned lecture on aura, on beat, on interaction, on response. She, after all, was the professional, she implied with each bit of instruction, not they, the mere novices; she, with Brecht, Ibsen, Tennesee Williams, et al behind her, knew more of the theatre than Fedora de Keogh, who may or may not have been in a Barrymore play or two--centuries ago.

There might have been some wisdom in Carla Respighi's exegesis, but, I fear it was vitiated by her excess and zeal; we paid more attention to her histrionics than we did the message she showered upon us.

Fedora was livid. She did not like being upstaged, relegated to inferior positions. To boot, she stood on uneasy ground; she'd already been lacerated in the press--mostly by T. Grantly Hunt of the Gazette--for her insistence upon multi-racial, non-traditional casting, and she must have felt that any kind of help should be heeded, even if it came from an unwanted source.

When Carla Respighi finished her spiel, Fedora strode back and forth in front of the frozen cast. Beauregard, Miss Prism (I never got her real name straight), and the others stood or sat in stony expectation. Of what? A Fedora de Keogh explosion? A firing of Carla? In about three weeks the play was to preview in the West Village, at the Plum Lane Theatre. A chunk of money was riding on the production, money, it was rumored, largely from Fedora's private coffers. (In my Fedora Notebook I had two columns, one headed Facts and the other Rumors. Under Facts I knew Fedora's summer estate up in Rycliff, New York, and her bank account came from her late husband, Willard Keogh. (He had had no "de" in his name. At some point after his death, Fedora had inserted it). Under Rumors I'd scribbled "hobby for a bored, rich woman?" In the last week, my quest for the real Fedora had become as elusive as the quest for Corvo, and it dismayed me to see that some of my entries under the Facts side of my Fedora Notebook were begi nning to slide toward Rumors: i.e., was it fact or rumor that Fedora's downstairs friendly enemy Winifred had secretly sent a large sum of money toward the Plum Lane production? And to complicate matters, Fedora had said, emphatically, with spittle spraying from her rubbery lips, "No tape recorder, or cassette or whatever you call those damned things. Okay?" Oh, but now I wished I had a recorder as she strode before her leading lady, in ominous silence, preparing her tirade.

But--and the moment was shocking--she merely pulled Out from her vest pocket a pack of Gauloise Blue and lit one. "That's all for today," she said, in flat tones, in bored tones, managing, as she picked up the Oscar Wilde script, to blow an upward funnel of smoke directly at the No Smoking sign.

Whenever Fedora was depressed--I had not thought this possible--she said she'd go to get a Fragonard Fix.

"A Fragonard Fix? What, for crissake, is that?"

She leaned back in the taxi seat. "You'll see."

Fragonard. Jean-Honore Fragonard. Was it to be some food or drink sensation? Like Peach Melba, or a Caruso Cappuccino? Would there be a Fragonard Frappe? Fedora told the driver to stop at the Frick.

She went straight to Room 11 and stood near the empty fireplace. I heard her sigh, gently, as she stood there to take in the fragrances from the Fragonard canvases...The Meeting...Love Letters...The Lover Crowned. Tree tops melted into summer clouds. Effulgent tree tops. Quiet clouds. And the shoulders! Fragonard was full of shoulders. Shoulders in anticipation. Shoulders of caution. Shoulders of saucy bliss. And the statues in the paintings--they looked down upon lovers-about-to-meet, on lovers-having-met, on lovers-in-opulent-play. Fedora bent her head slightly forward as if she heard music from a later century--the music of Debussy, or maybe Faure Could I hear it, too? Suddenly, as if I'd come under Fragonard's spell or been mesmerized into seeing what Fedora must have been seeing, the clouds shifted, made new formations before my very eyes. The tree leaves shimmered in E Major and in C-Sharp Minor as cherub statues began to blink. An illusive fragrance floated over the urns, over pedestals. Sun and shadow played tag. Bits of Poulenc and Ravel now fell through the shifting clouds and settled upon a patio-garden. Organdy and marble. Tulle and terraces. And there were always the Debussyan tree tops melting into Fragonard's fragrant sky.

I began to be embarrassed as I felt all at sea: I'd not expected this tall, strident, trousered creature to be so beholden to such ephemeral sentiment. I'd actually watched her getting her Fragonard Fix; I'd actually seen her blues being chased away.

Like some twenty-four-year-old school boy, I stood there behind her, shifting from foot to foot, uncertain if by speaking I'd break her spell. But I needn't have worried; the Japanese took care of that: a group of five or six tourists had gathered about Fedora, ignoring the paintings, and stared at her corps d'amazone as if she were a character from a painting from another museum, as if she'd stepped out of a Red Grooms canvas. One tiny man--from Tokyo? Nagasaki?--came right up in front of Fedora and snapped her picture, brazen as hell, and smiled ever so politely, and bowed ever so politely, and said his thanks ever so politely.

"Are cameras allowed inhere?" Fedora spat out, nearly making the photographer topple backwards. Then, in corduroy haste, she strode out of Room 11, out to the street. I ran after her.

As we rode down to Gramercy Park, there was silence. By now she had won me over. After participating in her transcendent elevation amongst the Fragonards and then her brutal descent, I had been pushed across the line: she'd become more than mere fodder for my Eccentric Ladies list, even if she'd not yet become a friend.

For her? Did I matter? Was she still playing a game, holding up a mask to suit her fancy? She had said, as we got into the taxi, "Come on, let's go home," a phrase that included me, pleased me; but now, as there was no conversation in the taxi, I treated the silence as a gift, a gift mutually enjoyed only by friends. Had I made a breakthrough?

Upstairs, in the turreted 1882 building, sundown rays eased through the park's leaves and settled upon Fedora's window panes. She stood there, looking at the Edwin Booth statue in the center of the park--or maybe she was watching bird-play in the cage at the park's southeast corner. Aimlessly I walked around her living room, estimating the space that Bea Britz's Pleyel piano occupied two stories below. Bea Britz. The terrible Mrs. Britz. Had she really "sneaked" some of her money in to back Fedora's production? To make conversation, to break the silence, I asked Fedora where exactly in the building did James Cagney once live. She did not answer. I had learned that Mildred Dunnock had once lived in the building. Exactly where, did she know? Before her time? And Margaret Hamilton of The Wizard of Oz fame? Surely before her time was the residency of the coloratura soprano Emma Thursby, a sort of American Jenny Lind. Thursby, I read, had held both classes and a salon, attended by the likes of Mary Garden, Caruso , and Nellie Melba. Now surely, I prodded her, this folklore had not escaped her; surely she must have heard gossip, tidbits, stories. Not at all?

She'd clammed up. She'd become as impenetrable as her twenty-four-inch interior walls. Finally she left the window and adjusted pillows on her red settee. She pointed to a spot for me to sit in.

She went to make tea.

I'd rather have had scotch.

As I waited, I looked about the room. Huge Moorish furniture. Dark woods, highly polished. English prints. Two settees with red velvet pillows. An exceedingly masculine cat--oatmeal-colored, aloof. I imagined that she would raise her hind leg at a fire hydrant. And soon Fedora appeared in the doorway, teacups in hand, and beckoned me to follow her. She'd kicked off her brogues and removed her corduroys. She now stood in terrifying splendor, in a Gustav Klimt gown. It was a brown-russet affair with geometric designs--semi-circles, triangles--sewn into lush folds of brocade and giddy silk. Egyptian eyes poked out from miniature pyramids, and there was just enough blue (cobalt) to enliven the vast desert expanses. On the way to her back room she explained, in low, almost funereal tones, that she'd had the gown for ages--way back when she was in the theatre. It wasn't hers. A stage costume.

"Whose was it?" I asked. "I mean, for what role?"

She could no longer remember much about the origins, she said.

(Oh, come now, Fedora. Masks! Masks! This was not something one forgot--especially a pants-person. But I held my tongue).

She said she thought it was patterned after a Gustav Klimt portrait in the Osterreichische Galerie in Vienna. And the play? A Molnar? Something by Schnitzler? No matter, no matter, she mumbled.

But it did matter. On which side of the Fedora Notebook would I later make my entry? Under Facts or Rumors?

She led me into her music room. It was a small, ill-lit place, and doubled as an office-den. In stocking feet, in her Klimt gown, in Sitwell regality, she sat at her piano. An upright. The ivory keys were mostly yellow, the ebony ones unstable. On the stand she opened music by Amy Woodforde-Finden. Kashmiri Song. The lyrics came from Lawrence (Violet Nicolson) Hope.

She poked at the folds of her Klimt gown. She sat, shoulders erect. She played. She sang.

Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar
Where are you now? Who lies beneath your spell?
Whom do you lead on Rapture's roadway, far,
Before you agonize them in farewell?

Oh, pale dispensers of my Joys and Pains,
Holding the doors of Heaven and of Hell,
How the hot blood rushed wildly through the veins
Beneath your touch, until you waved farewell

Pale Hands, pink tipped, like Lotus buds that float
On those cool waters where we used to dwell,
I would have rather felt you round my throat,
Crushing out life, than waving me farewell!

The dynamic instructions at the beginning of the song indicated that it should be played and sung moderato assai con molto sentimento. It was sentimento all right, but Fedora found the accompanying chords too difficult for her arthritic hands, which reduced the rendition of the rather bloodthirsty piece to a stumbling adagio.

I wished I might have been a masseur, a healer of her aching hands. I wished I might have played the piano accompaniment for her. But why, why had I been given this glimpse of privacy? I'd been presented a gift of intimacy beyond a profiler's needs. Had her Fragonard Fix been so soured that she needed yet another antidote, needed to indulge in a Musical Medication, despite my presence? And then, at that instance, as if she had heard my unspoken query, and as if she regretted revealing so much of herself, she said, "Go."

"Go?"

"You must go."

"I'll -I'll see you tomorrow, then, huh?"

She stepped into her brogues. She fumbled with the zipper of her Klimt gown. "No. Not tomorrow. Go."

I felt like a rejected lover. I was restless, hurt. What in the hell had I done? And no matter how often I decided that Fedora was loopy, that she was louche, that she was a subject not to be taken seriously, I still could not delineate the elusive anxieties her antics had unhinged within me. I even took to hanging about Gramercy Park, hoping to catch her coming or going. I'd pop into nearby Pete's Tavern to rest my weary feet. I also went down to the Plum Lane Theatre but I was not allowed in. Once, from Miss Prism (dashing down Hudson Street to get a sandwich at the deli) I learned that the play was in hot water, that it had gone kaput, that some of the cast--particularly Carla Respighi--had begun denigrating the production, calling it Oh, Ernie.

August 22nd: A dress rehearsal.

Invitational.

I was not invited.

Instead, I hung around the Gazette's offices, pretending to work. Amidst my funk and self-pity, a wicked thought came to me: I decided by alerting Fedora to T. Grantly Hunt's planned massacre she might somehow side-step and alter the major ills of her production. I knew Hunt made sneak attacks--viewing a show and reviewing it prior to opening night. Oh, he might tone up or down his piece after the opening, but essentially it would have been written.

In the deserted office I began my skullduggery. I knew that Hunt shunned modem technology--he barely tolerated the telephone--and that he would type out his work rather than use a computer. But his desk drawers would be locked; or would they? Maybe he'd--ah, bingo, there it was in plain sight. I copied the venomous hatchet job, with thundering heart, and fled with the feet of a jewel thief. With a stein of beer at the Riviera Cafe at Sheridan Square, I read:

No execrations from the lexicon of Oscar Wilde's Wit & Wisdom, from Rousseau's Observations, nor from the trenchant pen of Madame de Sevigne, could adequately pay assessment to the egregious miscarriage currently cluttering the stage at the Plum Lane Theatre.

Wilde, who was a minor genius back at the end of the last century (and this does not mean he was a second-rate genius), wrote The Importance of Being Earnest in 1895. This play's orchestrated artificiality--as carefully balanced as a Haydn quartet--rings with paradoxical delights, reversals of the expected, perverse verities: its very meaning (for it is a satire of social manners if nothing else) depends upon the exact nuance in the delivery of each line in the script. To say that Fedora de Keogh's thespians club-footed their way through Wilde's fine-tuned orchestrations would be kindness itself. To say that the marauders have mutilated Wilde's delicate rondo capriccioso is too mild a description of the heinous mayhem you will find in the little bijou theatre downtown in the West Village. To say that the repertory vandals are indulging in the Theater of the Absurd, or the Theatre of the Camp, would mislead you, and give you reasonable cause to file a civil suit against me and this publication for our part in abetting your act of wasting time and money.

In my nearly two-dozen years of theatre-going, I have never encountered such sophomoric inanities, such unmitigated hamming, in the venue of the professional theatre--nor, for that matter, in the auditoria of assorted community colleges. Elephantine cadences reign where the rhythm should snap and sparkle; and, alas, the cast members' scabrous inflections befoul the air.

Chief amongst the perpetrators at the scene of the crime is Carla Respighi whose "uncorseted" Lady Bracknell (both literally and figuratively, I dare say) ought to cause comment on anybody's platform. Miss Respighi, who was given deserved praise in Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage, is, I'm sad to report, a lubricious waddler in this production: her every movement seems more suitable for a denizen of a bordello (the madam?) than it does for Lady Augusta Bracknell.

Must the scurrilities of this production lie at the feet of Fedora de Keogh? One must assume so; she is listed on the program as director and producer. An entrepreneur she may be, but directing, I fear, is not her metier.

As for the other actors in this show (which, if you must know, is now being called Oh, Ernie, according to the gossip mongers), their performances might be rated on a scale of zero to 10. With quite valiant attempts, most are able to reach a minus- 1 mark. Except for Beauregard Nash. Mr. Nash is not an actor. In this vehicle he is not even an also-ran. Stage presence and good-looks do not an actor make. (The fact that he is black, that the cast is indeed multi-social-ethnic-or-what-have-you is entirely another matter. If you have not already been sufficiently discouraged, and should you read further, you may see my comments on this below).

Delphine Siegfried exhibits herself. Her chin. Her welt-sheathed hips. And although these attributes are lovely to view, the play in question is not exactly Ziegfeld's Follies--though, God knows, what Fedora de Keogh's intention will be if, as is rumored, she really does change the title of the play to Oh, Ernie. (Quite frankly, my observations here are based upon a late preview, but I trust you will deem them as a valuable reconnoitering service).

Miss Siegfried plays the role of The Hon. Gwendolen Fairfax, but, oh, dear me, she delivers her lines with all the clarity of a clerk at Macy's. Nonetheless, she is shoulders above Kai Lee (in the role of Jack Worthing) who seems to wish he were playing the lead in The King and I. (Wrong play, fella).

Imitative, too, is the actress who plays Miss Prism: she (Amanda Stone) outdoes Margaret Rutherford with her mugging jaw, her "endearing" sputterings. Miss Rutherford, bless her, must be lying in an unquiet grave.

As for the plot of this spectacular bit of incompetence. ...

I waved to the waiter. I ordered a double brandy.

... multi-racial casts are fine and dandy for interactions at First Avenue and 42nd Street, there at the United Nations, but the idea rarely works upon the stage, and in this case, in the Wildean milieu of Half-Moon Street, W. and Manor House at Woolton, it is a disaster. Mrs. De Keogh's Equal Employment Opportunity principles, admirable as they are, ought to be reasonably applied. This particular display of brotherhood and good will is a sad miscalculation.

My biographical dictionary indicates that Vyvyan Holland, one of Oscar Wilde' s sons, died in 1967. Did Mr. Holland leave any heirs? If so, cannot those heirs sue Fedora de Keogh for her flagrant desecrations?

Somewhere in Act Three, Deiphine Siegfried says to her intended, Kai Lee: "If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life."

Fool.

--T. Grantly Hunt

I rushed over to Fedora's. Impatient with the elevator, I bounded up the iron-marble-tile stairs. I showed her Hunt's review.

After reading it, and standing perfectly still for a moment, she then pounded an arthritic fist into her opened hand. "He thinks he'll fuck me up, does he?" Outside it had begun to rain against Fedora's windows, and her cat, Brandenburg, growled his consolations. At the liquor cabinet, I dug out some rum. I'd expected, under the circumstances, that I'd stay and commiserate, scheme, plot; that I'd help her find a way out of the thicket; but instead she planted a rum-wet kiss on my forehead and said, "You've been a big help, Clay, but you must go."

"So you're going to dump me again, huh?"

"Dear Heart, I--I must do this alone." She walked over to the window to look at the rain.

Brandenburg followed. She came back and leaned against the ugly escritoire. Brandenburg stood beside her. "I must do this thing alone--I must-- Oh, Hunt thinks the play is bad, does he?"

"The production," I ventured.

"Bad? He's not seen bad yet, the bastard."

Reluctantly, I prepared to leave. "You're planning to do what, Fedora? What exactly?"

She appeared not to have heard me. She spoke as if solely addressing herself: "Bad? T. Grantly Hunt's not seen bad yet." Her Gauloise lips trembled. "I'll give him bad so bad that it'll be good. Just wait."

I left her staring at the rain. Brandenburg saw me to the door.

September 4th: Despite my second trip to Coventry, I learned of three developments in Fedora's world: (1) Opening Night had been postponed.(2) The production's title had been officially changed to Oh, Ernie. (3) Pirandello had entered the proceedings.

On the first account, no one was surprised; a play in trouble needed time for amendments, doctoring.

On the second account, I wondered had Carla Respighi had her way, or had Fedora's scheme for revisions circled around the theory that badness, exaggerated badness could, perversely, be deemed good, i.e., could produce saleable high camp.

On the third account, I'd play errand boy: upon request, I sent Fedora a copy of Pirandello's Six Characters in Quest of an Author. (Prior to my compliance to this request, I asked her on the phone what she planned to do with the Pirandello play. "Just send it, Clay, don't ask me questions, just send it." Miffed, I sent her (by way of the doorman) Sei Personnagi in Cerca D 'autore, but her silence and my guilt prompted me to leave with her doorman the English translation of the play; I even threw in a critical study of the work to boot).

September 7th: Wilde-thoughts filled my head. Fedora was making a musical out of the play? Would she use a banjo? A piano? Beauregard (Algernon) and Lady Bracknell (Carla Respighi) would perhaps do a tango, a slightly incestuous tango? Miss Prism's plaintive song of remorse would be I Left a Baby in a Handbag?

Would somebody tap dance?

Would the chorus line's reprise be All's Well That Ends Wilde, and then, when the cheering subsided, would the chorus line reappear with All's Wilde That Ends Well?

Damn Fedora.

September 10th: All morning I read Wilde's play. Tightly wrought. Music of a string quartet. I read Pirandello: "security of perception," he says, "is mere illusion."

September 12th: Saturday. Opening Night. I was too nervous to go, too afraid. I drank a lot of coffee, then, in a caffeine stupor, I finally went out to get the Gotham Times. With fumbling fingers I found Frank Armer's review. He said:

Although it would seem an unlikely enterprise--the resurrection of two weather-beaten fossils and welding them again as new--this is exactly what has happened down at the Plum Lane Theatre and I am pleased to report that the result is a happy one. How exactly the director, Fedora de Keogh, has managed to make Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest and Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author into a crafty vehicle for theatrical madness, I am hard put to tell you-it would be far better to simply go and let reason take a back seat to non-stop hilarity. Mind you, there is no important message in this uplifting farce, and stay at home if you require redeeming stuffing to make acceptable what some may consider naught but soft porn.

As a first preparation for visiting this outre, sometimes faltering, but largely brilliant work, one must forget the drawing room wit of Wilde; one must forget the investigation of the real and the non-real of Pirandello; the hybrid piece you will find when you see the de Keogh concoction will offer you only distilled laughter--silly laughter perhaps, but it is nearly non-stop. When one does pause for reflection, it is apparent that we are being offered a sly spoof of theatrical conventions, of the avantgarde; and portentous theories, of whatever ilk, are left smashed in the wake of the work's ferocious satire.

A major portion of the play's success must be attributed to the dynamic performance of Carla Respighi, an actress recently acclaimed for the portrait of Courage in Brecht's Mother Courage.

I shall not even attempt to give you a synopsis of the convoluted plot; its course is devious and treacherous; and in any case the story line serves only for the "improvised" machinations of the brilliant cast. I say "improvised"--and in so doing I give the group and the director my highest praise. Indeed the variations on the Wilde and Pirandello play are as intricate as a Swiss watch; the actors exhibit skill at its pinnacle as they recite highly orchestrated lines, as if the lines were just that moment thought of. And it is Miss Respighi who is most adept at giving the impression of improvisation as she changes from the personage of Lady Augusta Bracknell--starch, hauteur, accent, all of it--into an earthy, near-slatternly actress who fights with the other actors over her lines, fights with the director, screams bloody hell about the pacing, the lighting.

It is a tribute to Fedora de Keogh that we forget that it is she who has devised these "improvised" lines for Miss Respighi to utter. And utter them she does with the insinuation of a Mae West and the passion of an Anna Magnani. An incongruous combination? Quite. But Miss Respighi, by some theatrical magic, makes it work.

Oh, Ernie, will continue its run at the Plum Lane on into the new year, until mid-January, but I daresay it'll be around much longer.

--Frank Armer

The elevator ride up to Fedora's apartment seemed to take longer than usual. Inch by inch as I rode upward, I thought of Pirandello: security of perception, he says, is mere illusion. But how precisely, I burned to know, had Fedora paid homage to the playwright's theorem, exacting thereby such a bountiful blessing from Frank Armer in the Gotham Times. And, too, had she found some way to use Pirandello as she'd used the Fragonard paintings at the Frick, as she'd used the WoodfordFinden song while costumed in her Klimt gown? Would the face she'd present at the door be the true Fedora, or would it be a Fedora even less true than the one behind her masks, her myriad ploys? Security of perception is mere illusion.... Still, there would be one certainty: Sunday morning sunlight would be racing through the park leaves to reach her window panes. Brandenburg would be gazing into this same sunlight, blinking smugly with some arcane knowledge. There would be the faint aroma of almond-polish from the Moorish monstrositie s in her living room. And tea, no doubt, would be in the making.

At the doorway she said, "Ah, dear heart." As soon as she spied my Fedora Notebook, she took it from my hand and placed it--dumped it-- atop the hall table as if it were an unneeded umbrella on a sunlit day. Then, smiling with Gauloise teeth, she strode with a Scaramouchian swagger across her Moroccan rug to fetch some rum and Darjeeling tea.

Henry Van Dyke's published works include Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes, Lunacy and Caprice, and Dead Piano. The piece included here will be part of a short-story collection titled 34 Gramercy Park. His work last appeared in our pages in fall 1992.