Theatre in Review: Buyer and Cellar (Rattlestick Theatre)

	Michael Urie. Photo: Sandra Coudert

It's easy to imagine Barbra Streisand -- not known for her sense of humor, especially when it comes to herself -- preparing a cease-and-desist order once she gets wind of Buyer and Cellar, but really, she needn't bother. What starts out as a gleeful act of character assassination quickly becomes a remarkable act of sympathetic imagination. You think being the greatest star is easy? Jonathan Tolins' frequently uproarious portrait of the diva's discontents -- especially her servant problem -- is, in its own cockeyed way, an act of homage. Only a fan would lavish this much attention on her.

Tolins -- who provides himself with ample cover by subtitling Buyer and Cellar "a totally fictional one-man show" -- has noticed that in Streisand's 2010 coffee table tome, My Passion for Design -- on page 44, to be exact -- she details how, inspired by an exhibit at Winterthur, she installed a collection of turn-of-the-century stores in the faux-19th-century mill on her Malibu estate. "She built a shopping mall in her basement," says Alex, Tolins' hero and narrator. "Remember, this is the part that's real."

Alex is one of the millions of out-of-work actors getting by in Los Angeles, combining menial jobs with roles in Equity-waiver productions, "which," he adds, "is exactly as tragic as it sounds." His account of starring in a gay-son-comes-out drama, Accepting Steven, co-starring Dee Wallace Stone, is a fine example of Tolins' wicked eye for the details of life in the lower circles of show business hell. (Adding insult to injury, we learn Stone was hired as a replacement for Doris Roberts, who left "because she read the script.") After an ugly incident in a Roger Rabbit costume gets him permanently dropped as a cast member at Disneyland, Alex ends up in an interview with a notably unpleasant estate manager -- "Picture Cloris Leachman right after she found out Phyllis was cancelled" -- for a job in the house of an unnamed star. All he is told is, "The lady of the house needs someone to work in her basement."

As it happens, she is that lady, and Alex is to work in that basement, playing the role of a store clerk. At first, the job is an invitation to boredom, as he whiles away the days, staring at one of Streisand's Funny Girl costumes. Then Barbra shows up, browsing. "You have nice things here," she says, following up with a question about the provenance of a doll on display. Alex is only momentarily blindsided. "Thank God I took that improv class at the Groundlings," he says, as he spins a saga, worthy of a Douglas Sirk film, about a family broken up by the Nazis. This leads to an extended, multi-day haggle over the price of the doll, an epic, passive-aggressive battle that ends only when Streisand dresses down Alex at length for not having the right change.

Despite -- or perhaps because of -- this bizarre episode, Alex becomes Barbra's confidante. (Confirming Alex's sexuality, she mutters that gays may take up 10% of the general population, but in her life, it "feels more like 70.") And as Alex finds himself falling under her spell, Tolins ingeniously gives him a boyfriend, Barry, a struggling screenwriter who monitors the situation with the skeptical eye of a true Streisand fanatic. When Alex repeats Barbra's pained accounts of her childhood, Barry snorts that she behaves like Veda, the ungrateful daughter in Mildred Pierce. And when Alex plants in Barbra's mind the idea of starring in a film of Gypsy, Barry snaps, "There will have to be adjustments made to help explain a few things, like how a 70-year-old woman is the mother of a five-year-old." He then proposes a rewrite in which Mama Rose becomes the Margaret Sanger of in vitro fertilization. Among the many treats in Buyer and Cellar is Barry's merciless takedown of that ultimate Streisand vanity vehicle, The Mirror Has Two Faces. "She didn't write the screenplay," he comments. "She only stars, produces, directs, and takes credit for the love theme."

In a script that also finds time for barbed comments on Oprah Winfrey, Arthur Laurents, and the making of the Judy Garland film Summer Stock, Buyer and Cellar never loses its essentially warm and likeable nature, even as it portrays a Hollywood icon and her henchman heedlessly falling into a folie à deux. As Alex takes on extra duties, including serving as Barbra's acting coach, he becomes blinded to the power imbalance between them. For all her demands, Tolins' Streisand has an appealingly lost quality. "I just want you to care as much as I do," she tells Alex, while remaining sadly aware that this is a near impossibility. And when things fall apart, as they inevitably must, it is Alex, not Barbra, who pulls the trigger.

All of the characters -- Alex, Barbra, Barry, Sharon, the estate's gimlet-eyed manager, and, in a sharply amusing cameo, James Brolin -- are played by Michael Urie with a winning combination of warmth, goodwill, and ruthless hilarity. Under Stephen Brackett's generally fine direction, Urie comes across as a little uncertain at first, rushing his lines and stepping on a few laughs, especially when delivering the script's lengthy list of disclaimers, but once the characters take over, he finds his groove, retaining an enormous likability while offering up needle-sharp observations about the tenderness of Hollywood egos.

It all unfolds on Andrew Boyce's all-white set, furnished only with a table and chair; thanks to Tolins' words and the subtle changes of Eric Southern's lighting, we fully imagine every aspect of life on Streisand's estate. Under the circumstances, Alex Koch's projections -- a handful of cleverly cartooned interior looks and some crawls spelling out the locations of certain scenes -- don't feel terribly necessary. Stowe Nelson's sound design provides amusing examples of movie underscoring as well as such unmistakable Barbra hits as "What Did I Have That I Don't Have?" and "The Way We Were."

All in all, it's quite a coup for Tolins, who takes a premise that could have easily run out of steam after the first ten minutes and skillfully spins it into a full-length entertainment that leaves you terribly glad not to be one of the most famous people in the world. It's a bit of a high-wire act, spoofing and sympathizing with Streisand all at once, but Tolins pulls it off with apparent ease. His Streisand is a fully dimensional character; for all the protests that it is only fiction, and for all its laughter, Buyer and Cellar feels like an authentic field guide to The Way She Is.-David Barbour