Stage Review - Love
Crimes
By Jimmy Fowler
The Dallas
Observer
If you happen to be of the opinion that Arthur
Penn's much appraised 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde has not aged well,
you will come away from Inside Bonnie Parker, a one woman show
currently playing at Fort Worth's Circle Theatre, with the joyous
feeling that your dissent has been completely justified. Granted
Penn and actor-writer Dixie Lee Sedgwick have pursued almost
diametrically opposed goals with their productions.
He wanted
to soup up and spin out the early-30s Texas myth of Bonnie and Clyde
as glamorous outlaws, anti heroes of the depression, while she wants
to de-mythologize their exploits by explaining the sad fundamentals
of time and personality behind them. But if you're too much of a
cinephile to be honest with yourself, it's easy to prefer Sedgwick's
edgy, vulnerable, slowly coarsening Bonnie Elizabeth Parker Thorton
to Faye Dunaway's smoldering white-trash gangster goddess. The
performance of Dunaway, who met with Sedgwick while the latter was
in the process of researching this show, never seemed to convey any
depth any greater than the films most infamous publicity shot,
Dunaway posed with Warren Beatty and a rifle beside their getaway
car. This was the photo manque of the real picture of Bonnie and
Clyde, who had begun to cling to their own celebrity as a
consolation for their growing desperation.
Inside Bonnie
Parker was previously staged at the old Deep Ellum Opera Theatre
space last year as Little Blue-Eyed Girl and will be reprised in
January at The Plano Repertory Theatre. I must say, the original
title held more fascination for me, if only because it synopsized
the most un-Dunaway aspect to Bonnie Parker, the one given short
shrift in Penn's movie.
Although the authorities who gunned
down the 23-year old in 1932 conceded that she was no bloodthirsty
killer and that when taken into custody she tended to inspire the
paternal aspects of the police who held her (she was given the
sheriffs oversized work-shirt to wear to make her feel more
comfortable and less criminal while behind bars), there was a
mystifying devolution from the high school poet, speech class star,
and mini celebrity who performed Shirley Temple-like as a warm up
act at the stump speeches of local politicians to the accomplice of
rage-filled Clyde Barrow. Sedgwick's decision to change the name
makes much marketing sense, of course, but the real potency of her
cautionary tale lies in what happened to that little blue-eyed
girl.
As directed by Joe Black, who along with Sedgwick
excepted letters, diaries, and poems by Parker, Inside Bonnie Parker
reveals that the secret to this downward spiral is just as cliched'
as and much more satisfying complex than watching Dunaway gaze
adoringly at Beatty on the big screen. Bonnie Parker screwed up
because she fell in love.
Black and Sedgwick have not
flinched from reviving as stage dialogue the school girl dreaminess,
the dopey True Romance yearnings of Parker.
It is because
Sedgwick's performance possesses such laser-eyed sincerity that
these become almost as chilling as the brilliant valentine-card
narration by Sissy Spacek in Terrance Malick's Badlands, another
tale of a good girl gone bad. Of course, Spacek revealed underlying
layers of sociopathic disregard in her character, while Sedgwick
makes Bonnie Parker sympathetic without apologizing for
her.
Most of us will probably not be drawn into bank robbery
by our desire to love and be loved, but Sedgwick cannily understands
that if we are honest with ourselves the concessions people make for
love, however tiny or extreme, exist on the same continuum. It's
that deadly desire to be engulfed by somebody that presses all the
right buttons that must be guarded against. If that somebody happens
to be a Clyde Barrow or a Charles Starkweather, well are you
absolutely certain that when you were a teenager, you had the
courage to pull out before it was too late?
Alone onstage for
almost two hours, the gamine Dixie Lee Sedgwick as Bonnie Parker has
a trained dancer's grace that prevents her early, restless Parker
from seeming fidgety, whether she's itching to bolt from her first
marriage to philanderer Roy Thorton or holed up in an abandoned
church on a rainy night, anxiously awaiting the arrival of her
outlaw lover. As the play progresses and Parker becomes at once more
frightened and more defiant and, eventually, crippled after she's
pinned beneath Clyde's car in a horrifying wreck, Sedgwick slows
down and becomes graver, heavier, and resigned to a bad end. If she
started out with the hope that her ardor and support would soothe
Barrow's wounded soul and even rehabilitate him, she sticks beside
him through a bond of escalating mutual injury. Rather than being
delivered to the audience, a device often praised as knocking down
the forth wall but sometimes also flattening the drama with a
pedantic pleading quality, Sedgwick words are usually spoken to
unseen characters and, interestingly, they are often women. The fact
that she is usually speaking about Clyde Barrow rather than to him
is the play's psychological trump card. This character will reveal
more about herself when she's rationalizing and justifying her life
choices to another, perhaps judgmental female ear than when she's
drowning in Barrow's long lashed brown eyes. And therein, of course,
lies the only explanation you need as to why the little blue-eyed
girl turned into the bullet-riddled corpse of American criminal
legend. However outrageous the Barrow Gangs antics became, Clyde
continually offered Bonnie a gift that many of us yearn for; a
refuge from thinking about herself, her decisions, her future.
Understanding this, the Bonnie Parker of Sedgwick and Black's play
suddenly become approachable. In Inside Bonnie Parker, she's no
longer the sexy, stylish pinup moll of the 30s tabloids and 60s
Hollywood. She's the articulate young woman who was smart enough to
want something better for herself but tragically dumb enough to sink
that desire in a handsome killers adoring gaze.
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