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At Arena Stage, Valerie Harper makes "Looped" a decadent delight Date published: 6/11/2009
By LUCIA ANDERSON FOR THE FREE LANCE-STAR Valerie Harper dazzles as Tallulah Bankhead in "Looped." The look, the voice, the mannerisms--it's hard not to believe the outrageous Tallulah herself is up there on the stage. The Emmy award-winning star of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" and "Rhoda" delivers a brilliant performance. The play is based on a real-life incident in Tallulah's life, when she needed to re-record ("loop") a line from her final film, "Die, Die, My Darling." Apparently it took eight hours for the self-indulgent actress to get the job done satisfactorily, what with the drinking, the cocaine and the pills getting in the way of a coherent performance. Matthew Lombardo has set "Looped" as a confrontation between Tallulah and the film editor, Danny, who has been shanghaied into running the recording session. The interplay between the uptight, resentful Danny, and the brash, uninhibited Tallulah is hilarious. Harper gets the majority of the most uproarious lines, ("I'm hardly afraid of dying--I just don't want to be there when it happens"), but Jay Goede is a wonderful foil for all her fireworks. Not content with giving his audience 90 minutes of comic one-liners, Lombardo opens his characters up as the play progresses so that we begin to see the person behind the mask. How true his portrait of the "real" Tallulah is I am unable to judge, but it makes psychological sense. The fictional Danny's closely held secrets transform the rigid stick into a vulnerable human being. In the end, the two combatants are revealed as people who could become friends. Set designer Adrian Jones' 1960s sound studio dissolves beautifully into New Orleans' French Quarter, while Danny and Tallulah reflect on her disastrous appearance in the 1956 revival of "A Streetcar Named Desire." Costume designer William Ivey Long has given Harper a wonderful off-the-shoulder satin bias-cut dress that just screams Golden Age of Hollywood star. Danny gets a buttoned-up suit. Steve, the sound engineer, ably played by Michael Karl Orenstein, is only a hazy image behind the glass. A word of caution for those with tender sensibilities--Tallulah Bankhead, at least as portrayed in "Looped," was a hedonistic bisexual woman who had no compunctions about expressing herself in the most vulgar terms possible. This one is not for the youngsters. But if blue humor doesn't offend you, there's a lot of fun to be had with "Looped." Lucia Anderson is a freelance writer living in Woodbridge.
Read more stories about Fredericksburg Date published: 6/11/2009
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