That Dorothy Parker starring Carol Lempert

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So, it was a mad week of performances, beginning with two successive nights at the Cornelia Street Café and Wednesday night, “That Dorothy Parker,” a one-woman show written and performed by Carol Lempert, who does an amazing job of successfully resurrecting “Mrs. Parker.”

I’m interrupting myself here by covering the events of last week out of order, and, of course, this is not a movie – but it is an incredible performance – supporting my belief that books, plays, movies all exist on a single continuum that tells us things.

In my “sightings” blogs I’m not interested in reviewing things as much as sighting them and recognizing what small or large piece of reality they illuminate. So the performances – whether books, plays, films, or other types of performances – are like shells or pieces of colored glass found during an endless walk along the beach. The more beautiful ones make you stop and pick them up; you hold them up to the light and they reveal some of their secrets.

If I were a practiced reviewer, I would give Carol Lempert (and director Janice Goldberg), the highest praise – the kind of praise I heard from members of the audience in the basement lobby of the theatre after this one-night show. The audience was invited by the actress to a reception after the play, where they reversed roles. She became the audience and they became the performers, coming up, one after the other, expressing themselves to her. Many of them were silver-haired ladies who registered their surprise that such a young woman could so capture someone “from our era.”

This is my sighting. The best art is trans-generational, like so few things in this country. We’re segmented into age brackets. Eighth graders and seventh graders don’t hang out with each other. A compelling performance breaks down those barriers, makes us all one again.

I arrived about 15 minutes before the play, in lower Manhattan at the Soho Playhouse on Van Dam Street. As I sat in my seat looking at the empty stage, I heard the gentleman behind me recounting that he had been to a reading long ago where Dylan Thomas had opened with “Under Milkwood” and Dorothy Parker had followed with her poetry, and so had others. He was there too, at the end, to praise Lempert’s performance.

Looking back, the evening reminded me of a moment one afternoon the only time I have ever been to Savannah, Georgia. I was looking across the river at the trees – a serene, beautiful scene – when I noticed ten feet to my left a woman selling prints of her painting of the same scene. The print was matted and framed in the matting material, but the painting extended beyond where we would usually expect it to be and into the frame – the branches of the tree continued upward – as if the representation was so real that it could not be contained by its frame.

That’s how I felt about this performance for two reasons – first, because Carol Lempert exploded the frame by doing something more than acting; she “embodied” Dorothy Parker, her famous wit, her ambivalence about being famous for her wit, her deep association and eventual disaffection with the Algonquin Round Table, her flirting with suicide, her alcoholism, her disappointments in love, but most of all her yearning. We heard the word “embodied” about Charlize Theron’s portrayal in Monster, and the two portrayals of Truman Capote one by Charles Seymour Hoffman in the film named after its protagonist and the other by Toby Jones in Infamous. It seems as if it would be easier to “embody” these more extreme figures than it would be the subtleties of Mrs. Parker, which Carol Lempert does so well with her words (how she wrote them; how she delivers them) and her movement across the stage.

And secondly, because the performance began for me before the play – with the reminiscences of the audience members – and continued after the play with their endorsements of the portrayal, just like the painting bleeding beyond the frame.

After the applause and before the reception, the actress announced that this one-woman ninety-minute show is waiting in the wings for its next set of engagements. Whoever and whatever the mechanism that makes those kinds of things happen, please take note.