| F. Scott Fitzgerald died of a heart attack at the age of 44. Zelda Fitzgerald perished in a fire at the age of 48. Ernest Hemingway shot himself at the age of 61. Two of Sarah Murphy’s sons succumbed at an early age. Dorothy Parker lived longer than any of them, but was suicidal and alcoholic for much of her life.This death penumbra darkens all of the characters in the Beggars Group production, The Expatriates. In fact the show takes a perverse glee in reminding us that death was the guest of honor at this Parisian bohemia’s parties from the start. Take the opening: Scott, Dotty, Ernest, Sarah and Zelda all emerge from a single coffin like clowns in some macabre circus. The effect is very funny and, needless to say, rather disturbing. These ghosts are exiled from us by more than distance.
They are also in crisis. Zelda has dared to write a novel, or in the imagery of this production birthed a novel, that uses the lives of the Fitzgeralds’ inner circle as its seminal fluid. Director Elizabeth Maher and her colleagues play fast and loose with the truth around this event—Zelda’s novel, Save Me the Waltz, didn’t come into existence until 1932, after the Fitzgeralds had returned to the U.S.; the play implies that her book was never published, though it in fact was; and it’s doubtful that Dorothy Parker ever visited the couple in Paris. Obviously then Maher is after something other than documentary realism; she is crafting instead a meditation on women’s creativity and their right to claim literary immortality, one of the few antidotes to death’s obliteration.
Zelda’s book splits the group asunder. Parker dismisses it as merely a manifesto. Hemingway takes potshots at her with his rifle in the garden. Sarah, on the other hand, lends support to her friend. At one point everyone literally tears the book to shreds. The women in this world are particularly fascinating for the choices they represent. Sarah, the wife of painter Gerald Murphy, has accepted her role as traditional helpmate/mother/hostess. Parker is the professional writer, but she is careful not to engage the boys on their own territory or make any grandiose claims for her talent. She limits her writing to short stories and what she self-deprecatingly refers to as “verse.” Zelda, on the other hand, refuses either category. She is impetuous, demanding, vain and quite possibly a genius. She is neither helpmate nor afraid to do battle in the arena of the novel with the men. The price for this is her marriage and her sanity; her reward, the continual fascination with her life and work.
Maher’s production is full of wonderful expressionist touches from the costumes to the sound design, and her cast is uniformly solid. However, the high pitch at which much of the action has been staged ultimately grows wearisome. I started to wish for a dash of the restraint that made Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Parker touchstones for their era. |
