Theatre in Review: I'll Eat You Last (Booth Theatre)

	Bette Midler Photo by: Richard Termine

Warning to all attending I'll East You Last: Prisoners are not being taken at the Booth Theatre. John Logan has decided that what we all need is a little chat with the late superagent Sue Mengers -- chat being a relative term, since she is going to do all the talking. And, let's face it, Logan was right: Especially at this awards-addled time of year, when everyone in the theatre travels in a cloud of misty goodwill, praising their costars, directors, playwrights, the ushers at their theatres, and, as often as not, God Himself, I'll Eat You Last is the blast of scalding common sense that we need to bring us all back to reality.

When we meet Sue, she's in the middle of a bad day, having been fired earlier by her top client, Barbra Streisand, or, more accurately, "her microstate of serious Jews" to whom she pays a legal retainer. Perched on her couch --"I'm not getting up," she warns us, a promise that she makes good on -- she declines to show us her house (a real stunner in Scott Pask's set design, drawing on the style of the Hollywood architect John Woolf), pointing vaguely in the direction of stage left and saying, "The pool is over there somewhere; I don't know." (Sue is not one for exercise: as she says, she has learned to embrace her inner zaftig.)

Anyway, she has time to kill while waiting for La Streisand --"She of the nails and the voice and the perm, which we will not discuss" -- to make a promised follow-up call, so Sue shares her views about a variety of things. Describing her first car phone, she says it was "the size of a dismembered baby's torso. It took out all the fun out of trying to run over Faye Dunaway." Categorizing her marriage, she says, "On a good night, we're Nick and Nora Charles; on a bad night, we're Nick and Nora Charles Manson." She recalls Vanessa Redgrave "downing glass after glass of my best Veuve Clicquot like a good socialist." Of course, she is a pro and will take a phone call when necessary -- in a particularly uproarious sequence she attempts to poach Sissy Spacek from a rival agency, doing her terrifying damnedest to convince the actress that she is rapidly facing a decline that can be reversed only by starring in Brian DePalma's Scarface. (If that casting idea doesn't make your head spin, you may be too young to see I'll Eat You Last.)

Of course, all of this is catnip to Bette Midler, who, enrobed by Ann Roth in a sky-blue caftan big enough to envelope Beverly Hills, her face framed in sumptuous blonde tresses, positively luxuriates in the role, which calls on her distinctive and devastating comic style. She can take a passing remark ("For Barbra, time has always been elastic and elliptical.") and turn it into a little aria of satire, verbally caressing each adjective to reveal the depth of her scorn. Playing both herself and the producer Robert Evans -- his pet name for her was Mengele -- she reenacts the negotiation that led to the casting of Dunaway in Chinatown, both sides frantically lying to each other in the struggle for the upper hand; she finally collapses in a fit of laughter at their mutual duplicity.

For all the acid fun, there are other, darker tones in Logan's portrait. Born in Germany, Mengers' family got out just before Hitler shut the exit door permanently. In the US, her family was mired in poverty, her father ultimately committing suicide. ("He died of broken dreams," she says, revealing a surprising vein of sorrow.) Determined to fit in, she schooled herself in the ways of Americans by going obsessively to the movies: "That's why I still talk like a gum-cracking Warner's second lead," she notes. An aspiring actress, she quickly realizes she doesn't have the looks, so she goes to work at a talent agency, working harder and longer than anyone else, befriending anyone remotely worth knowing, until she stands atop the Hollywood hill.

And despite the professional respect (nobody doesn't take her calls), the dinner parties filled with "twinklies" (Hackman, McGraw, Huston, et al), and her ability to play hardball with unholy gusto, underneath it all is the simple childhood terror of not being wanted. In the evening's most poignant passage, she describes a lunch with Julie Harris, an early and treasured client, where Mengers had to break that news that the actress had been turned down for the role of Mary Todd Lincoln in a television film. Speaking directly to us, she notes bitterly that the producers wanted someone younger and sexier. "You all remember that famous sex kitten, Mary Todd Lincoln," she says, witheringly, killing our laughter with a cry from the heart: "They didn't want her!" For Mengers, this is a death sentence; if you aren't in the game, you aren't anything at all.

This is the fear that Mengers wrestles with -- probably why she keeps a cigarette in one hand and a joint in the other, putting one of them down only to take a drink -- as she confesses her clients are being siphoned off one by one by the machine-like Creative Artists Agency, run by Mike Ovitz, whom she refers to as Stalin. The firing by Streisand, following the box-office disaster of a film starring Barbra and directed by Mengers' husband, Jean-Claude Tramont -- was in fact the coup de grâce; we are seeing Mengers at the moment it becomes clear the future is downhill.

Logan has supplied a surprisingly dimensional portrait, and Midler reminds us why the word "divine" has been attached to her since 1971.Joe Mantello's direction is invisible, which, in this case, is to say it is perfect; it can't have been easy for Midler, returning to the legitimate stage after decades of concert touring and films, to take on this project, but thanks to solid direction, it looks as easy as breathing. In addition to the fine work of Pask and Roth, Hugh Vanstone's lighting takes us through a series of late-afternoon looks, letting the shadows crawl in as Mengers comes to terms with the unpalatable facts of life. Fitz Patton's sound design includes an amusing opening montage of celebrities trying to reach Mengers on the phone and, for the curtain call, Streisand singing "Stoney End."

Most of all, I'll Eat You Last is a crash course in self-invention, taught by someone with a Ph.D. in the subject. Handing out advice to us all, she says, "You want to be a thing? Make yourself that thing!" It may be the fiercest line reading of the evening, because for Mengers it was the most authentic truth of all.--David Barbour